A Different Race Had Succeeded Them.

Though it opens a wide field to conjecture, recent investigations seem to indicate that it was the Huron-Iroquois nation who, in 1535, were the enfants du sol at both places, and that in the interim the Algonquins had, after bloody wars, dispersed and expelled the Huron-Iroquois.

The savages with whom the early French settlers held intercourse can be comprised under two specific heads - the Algonquins and the Huron-Iroquois - the language of each differing as much, observes the learned Abbe Faillon, as French does from Chinese.

It would take us beyond the limit of this sketch to recapitulate the series of massacres which reduced these warlike savages, the Hurons, from their high estate to that of a dispersed, nomadic tribe, and placed the Iroquois or Mohawks, at one time nearly destroyed by the Hurons, in the ascendant.

Their final overthrow may be said to date back to the great Indian massacres of 1648-9, at their towns, or missions, on the shores of Lakes Simcoe, the first mission being founded in 1615 by the Friar LeCaron, accompanied by twelve soldiers sent by Champlain in advance of his own party. The Jesuit mission was attacked by the Iroquois in 1648; St. Louis, St. Joseph [311], St. Ignace [312], Ste. Marie [313], St. Jean [314], successively fell, or were threatened; all the inmates who escaped sought safety in flight; the protracted sufferings of the missionaries Breboeuf and Gabriel Lallemant have furnished one of the brightest pages of Christian heroism in New France. Breboeuf expired on the 16th March and Lallemant on 17th March, 1649. A party of Hurons sought Manitoulin Island, then called Ekaentoton, a few fled to Virginia; others succeeded in obtaining protection on the south shore of Lake Erie, from the Erie tribe, only to share, later on, the dire fate of the nation who had dared to incorporate them in its sparse ranks.

Father P. Ragueneau (the first writer, by the by, who makes mention of Niagara Falls - Relations de 1648,) escorted three or four hundred of these terror-stricken people to Quebec on the 26th July, 1650, and lodged them in the Island of Orleans, at a spot since called L'Anse du Fort, where they were joined, in 1651, by a party of Hurons, who in 1649, on hearing of the massacre of their western brethren, had asked to winter at Quebec. For ten years past a group of Algonquins, Montagnais and Hurons, amidst incessant alarms, had been located in the picturesque parish of Sillery; they, too, were in quest of a more secure asylum. Negotiations were soon entered into between them and their persecuted friends of the West; a plan was put forth to combine. On the 29th March, 1651, the Sillery Indians, many of whom were Hurons united with the western brethren, sought a shelter, though a very insecure one, in a fortified nook, adjoining their missionary's house, on the land of Eleonore de Grandmaison, purchased for them at l'Anse du Fort, in the Island of Orleans, on the south side of the point opposite Quebec. Here they set to tilling the soil with some success, cultivating chiefly Indian corn, their numbers being occasionally increased during the year 1650, by their fugitive brethren of the West, until they counted above 600 souls.

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