Of The Powerful Tribes Of The Aborigines Who, In Remote Periods, Infested
The Forests, Lakes And Streams Of Canada, None By Their Prowess In War,
Wisdom In Council, Success As Tillers Of The Soil, Intelligent And Lofty
Bearing, Surpassed The Wyandats, Or Hurons.
[309] They numbered 15,000
souls, according to the historian Ferland, 40,000 according to Bouchette,
and chiefly inhabited
The country bordering on Lake Huron and Simcoe; they
might, says Sagard, have been styled the "nobles" among savages in
contradistinction to that other powerful confederacy, more democratic in
their ways, also speaking the Huron language, and known as the Five
Nations (Mohawks,[310] Oneydoes, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas), styled
by the French the Iroquois, or Hiroquois, from the habit of their orators
of closing their orations with the word "Hiro" - I have said.
'Tis a curious fact that the aborigines whom Jacques Cartier had found
masters of the soil, at Hochelaga (Montreal,) and Stadacona (Quebec,) in
1535, sixty-eight years later on, in 1603, when Champlain visited these
Indian towns, had disappeared: 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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 644 of 864
Words from 176207 to 176475
of 236821
