"That the water at the western end of the lake [Ontario] was
perfectly salt; that there was a fall about a league wide, where a
very large mass of water falls into said lake."
It was not the wonders nor the beauty of the Cataract that impressed
itself upon the minds of those savages, and that led them to furnish to
Champlain--and so to the white man's world--the very first knowledge of
the existence of Niagara. No! What most impressed the Cataract upon the
minds of those Aborigines was the fact that at this point, the Falls
themselves, together with the Rapids for a short distance above them,
and for a long distance below them, were an insuperable obstacle to
water--that is, canoe--navigation; that here they were obliged to make
a long "portage." It was the only break in an otherwise uninterrupted
water travel of hundreds of miles; which, going westward, extended from
a point on the St. Lawrence, many miles east of the outlet of Lake
Ontario, clear to the farthest end of Lake Superior; and which, coming
eastward, extended nearly 1,500 miles, from where the City of Duluth
now stands even until it reached the bitter waters of the Atlantic
Ocean in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence.
In the same volume, "Des Sauvages," appeared a poem by one "La
Franchise," addressed to Champlain, in which mention is made of the
"Saults Mocosans" or Mocosan Falls, "which shock the eyes of those who
dare to look upon that unparalleled downpour."
Mocosa was the name of that territory vaguely called Virginia, and
which seems to have embraced everything from New York to Florida,
extending indefinitely to the west and northwest. The allusion is
generally considered to refer to Niagara; thus making Niagara's
appearance in Poetry cotemporaneous with its appearance in prose.
In 1609, Lescarbot published his "Histoire de la Nouvelle France,"
wherein he quotes extensively (including the references to Niagara)
from Champlain; the work being reissued in several editions in
subsequent years. And in 1610, Lescarbot, who was a great admirer of
Champlain (he may himself have been "La Franchise"), produced a poem,
wherein he speaks of the "great falls" which the Indians encounter in
going up the St. Lawrence, from below the present site of Montreal,
"jusqu'au voisinage de la Virginia"; which, under the above-noted
boundaries of Virginia, has been stretched in imagination to include
Niagara, but more likely meant the Rapids of the St. Lawrence.
Champlain, in the map which he made in 1612, notes a "waterfall," but
places it at the Lake Ontario end of the river; still it is clearly
meant for Niagara.
Early references to this Niagara Region--which up to about the middle
of the 17th Century was owned and occupied by the Neuters, and after
that time by their conquerors and annihilators, the Senecas--are to be
found in that wonderful series of Reports made by the Catholic
Missionaries in Canada to their Superiors in France, during a large
part of the 17th Century, and known as the "Jesuit Relations."
From them we learn that Father Daillon was among the Neutrals, and "on
the Iroquois Frontier" (which was east of the Niagara River, somewhere
about midway between that and the Genesee River), in 1626.
In a letter, dated at Tonachin, a Huron village, 18th July, 1627,
Father Daillon told of his visit to the Neuters the year before. In it
he wrote:
"I have always seen them constant in their resolution to go with at
least four canoes to the trade, if I would guide them, the whole
difficulty being that we did not know the way. Yroquet, an Indian
known in those countries, who had come there with twenty of his men
hunting for beaver, and who took fully five hundred, would never
give us any mark to know the mouth of the river. He and several
Hurons assured us well that it was only ten days journey [from the
Huron Country] to the trading place; but we were afraid of taking
one river for another and losing our way, or dying of hunger on the
land."
The above quotation, which was given in Sagard, 1636, was omitted from
Daillon's letter by Le Clercq in his "Premier Etablissement de la Foi,"
1691. In his translation of the latter work, John Gilmary Shea, in a
note concerning this very passage, says:
"This was evidently the Niagara River and the route through Lake
Ontario," and he adds: "The omission of the passage by Le Clercq
was evidently caused by the allusion to trade."
That omission was doubtless at the instance of the French Government,
whose permission was then a necessity before any book could be
published. That Government knew the importance and the advantages of
Niagara, both as a strategic point and as a Center of Trade. Only four
years before Le Clercq's book appeared a French army, under De
Denonville, had built a fort there; but the hostility of the Iroquois
(incited by British agents) had forced its abandonment a year later.
Anxious to again possess it, planning now to do so by diplomacy rather
than by arms, the French Government would naturally have objected to
any published allusion to the locality as a point of Trade,--which
could in no way have aided its designs, but by further calling
Britain's attention to Niagara's importance, would naturally cause her
agents to be still further vigilant toward frustrating any move of
France for the control thereof.
In the same letter Daillon says:
"But the Hurons having discovered that I talked of leading them
[the Neutrals] to the trade, he [Yroquet] spread in all the
villages when he passed, very bad reports about me * * * in a word,
the Hurons told them so much evil of us [the French] to prevent
their going to trade * * * adding a thousand other absurdities to
make us hated by them, and prevent their trading with us; so that
they might have the trade with these nations themselves
exclusively, which is very profitable to them."
Yroquet, who was Champlain's friend, as before mentioned, being a close
ally of the Hurons, evidently had no desire for a Frenchman to open
trade directly with the Iroquois--the sworn foes of the Hurons--and
thus to divert any of the trade which he carried on with the French in
the Huron Country.
So the first white man known to have been on the Niagara River (in
1626) wrote about it as a "trading place." It clearly was regarded in
that light, at that time, both by the Neutrals and by the Hurons; those
being the only two tribes which Father Daillon had visited. And if it
was so known to the tribes on the west and northwest, there was no
reason why it should not have been so known--and it no doubt was so
known--to the tribes to the south, to the east, and to the west.
On his map, in 1632, Champlain continues his location of the Cataract
at the point where the river enters Lake Ontario; and marks it, "Falls
at the extremity of Lake St. Louis [Ontario] very high, where many fish
come down and are stunned."
[Illustration: NIAGARA IN 1759, BY THOMAS DAVIES.]
In 1640, Fathers Brebeuf and Chaumonot, on their famous Mission to the
Neutrals, crossed the Niagara River at Onguiaahra, a village of that
Nation, which stood on the site of the present Lewiston. They probably
never saw the Falls; their visit being filled with danger, hunger, and
threats of their destruction by the very savages whose souls they were
trying to save. Father L'Allement, their Superior, in his account of
their Mission, in the Jesuit Relation of 1642, speaks merely of "the
village Onguiaahra, of the same name as the river."