seventeenth century nothing is known from direct observation. Before
Champlain had an opportunity of visiting it, the whole region westward
to Lake Huron had been depopulated and reduced to a desert. The fact
that the few natives found by Champlain occupying the once populous
region of the Hochelaga Indians were Algonkins, has been the chief
ground for the assumption that the expulsion of that old Wyandot stock
was due to their hostility. But such an idea is irreconcilable with the
fact that the latter, instead of retreating southward to their
Huron-Iroquois kinsmen, took refuge among Algonkin tribes. According to
the narrative of their own Wyandot historian, Peter Dooyentate,
gathered, as he tells us, from traditions that lived in the memory of a
few among the older members of his tribe, the island of Montreal was
occupied in the sixteenth century by Wyandots or Hurons, and Senecas,
sojourning peaceably in separate villages. The tradition is vague which
traces the cause of their hostility to the wrath of a Seneca maiden, who
had been wronged by the object of her affections, and gave her hand to a
young Wyandot warrior on the condition of his slaying the Seneca chief,
to whose influence she ascribed the desertion of her former lover.
Whatever probability may attach to this romance of the Indian lovers,
the tradition that the Hurons were driven from their ancient homes on
the St. Lawrence by their Seneca kinsmen is consistent with ascertained
facts, as well as with the later history of the Senecas, who are found
playing the same part to the Eries under a somewhat similar incentive to
revenge, and appear to have taken the lead in the destruction of the
Attiwendaronks. The native tradition is of value in so far as it shows
that the fatal enmity of the Iroquois to the Hurons was not originally
due to the alliance of the latter with the French; but Senecas and
Hurons had alike disappeared before Champlain visited the scene of
Cartier’s earlier exploration. The Attiwendaronks, who dwelt to the
south of the later home of the Hurons, on the shores of Lakes Ontario
and Erie, may have formed another of the nations of the Wyandot stock
expelled from the valley of the St. Lawrence. Situated as they were in
their later home, midway between the Hurons and Iroquois, they strove in
vain to maintain a friendly neutrality. Charlevoix assigns the year 1635
as the date of their destruction by the latter. Certain it is that
between that date and the middle of the century their towns were utterly
destroyed; and such of the survivors as lingered in the vicinity were
incorporated into the nation of the Senecas, who lay nearest to them.
The Eries were another Huron-Iroquois nation who appear to have
persistently held aloof from the league. They were seemingly a fiercer
and more warlike people than the Attiwendaronks; they fought with
poisoned arrows, and were esteemed or dreaded as warriors. Their numbers
must have been considerable, since they were an object of apprehension
to the nations of the league whose western frontiers marched with their
own. They are affirmed by the native historian, Cusick, to have sprung
from the Senecas; but, if so, their separation was probably of remote
date, as they were both numerous and powerful. The country which they
occupied was noted among the French _coureurs des bois_ for its lynx
furs; and they gave accordingly to its people the name of “La Nation du
Chat.” Their ancient home is still indicated in the name of the great
lake beside which they dwelt. But, for some unknown reason, they refused
all alliance with the Senecas and the league of their Iroquois kin, and
perished by their violence within seven years after the Huron country
was laid waste. “To the Eries, and to the Neuter nation,” or
Attiwendaronks, says Schoolcraft, “according to tradition, the Iroquois
offered the alternative of admission into the league or extermination;
and the strangeness of this proposition will disappear, when it is
remembered that an Indian nation regards itself as at war with all
others not in actual alliance.”[135] Peace, he adds, was the ultimate
aim of the founders of the Iroquois oligarchy; and, for lovers of peace
on such terms of supremacy, the _casus belli_ would not be more
difficult to find than it has proved to be among the most Christian of
kings. In the case of the Eries, as of the elder Wyandots of Hochelaga,
the final rupture is ascribed to a woman’s implacable wrath.
Father Le Moyne, while on a mission to the Onondagas in 1654, learned
that the Iroquois confederacy were excited to fury against the Eries. A
captive Onondaga chief is said to have been burnt at the stake after he
had been offered, according to Indian custom, to one of the Erie women,
to take the place of her brother who had been murdered while on a visit
to the Senecas. It is a characteristic illustration of how the feuds of
ages were perpetuated. The traditions of the Iroquois preserved little
more than the fact that the Eries had perished by their fury. But a
story told to Mr. Parkman by a Cayuga Indian, only too aptly illustrates
the hideous ferocity of their assailants. It represented that the night
after the great battle in which the Eries suffered their final defeat,
the forest was lighted up with more than a thousand fires, at each of
which an Erie was being tortured at the stake.[136] The number is
probably exaggerated. But it is only thus, as it were in the lurid glare
of its torturing fires, that we catch a glimpse of this old nation as it
vanished from the scene. Of the survivors, the greater number were
adopted, according to Indian fashion, into the Seneca nation.
Some of the earthworks met with to the south of Lake Erie show proofs of
greater constructive labour than anything found in Canada. Still more
interesting are the primitive hieroglyphics of an inscription on
Cunningham’s Island, ascribed to the Eries, and which Schoolcraft
describes as by far the most elaborate work of its class hitherto found
on the continent.[137] But the rock inscription, though highly
interesting as an example of native symbolism and pictographic writing,
throws no light on the history of its carvers; and of their language no
memorial is recoverable, for they had ceased to exist before the great
lake which perpetuates their name was known to the French.
More accurate information has been preserved in reference to the Hurons,
among whom the Jesuit Fathers laboured with self-denying zeal, from time
to time reporting the results in their _Relations_ to the Provincial of
the Order at Paris. One of the most characteristic religious ceremonies
of the Hurons was the great “Feast of the Dead,” celebrated apparently
at intervals of twelve years, when the remains of their dead were
gathered from scaffolded biers, or remote graves, and deposited amid
general mourning in the great cemetery of the tribe. Valuable robes and
furs, pottery, copper kettles and others of their choicest possessions,
including the pyrulæ, or large tropical shells brought from the Gulf of
Mexico, with wampum, prized implements, and personal ornaments, were all
thrown into the great trench, which was then solemnly covered over. By
the exploration of those Huron ossuaries, the sites of the palisaded
villages of the Hurons of the seventeenth century have been identified
in recent years; and there are now preserved in the Laval University at
Quebec upwards of eighty skulls recovered from cemeteries at St. Ignace,
St. Joachin, Ste. Marie, St. Michael, and other villages, the scenes of
self-denying labour, and in some cases of the cruel torturings, of the
French missionaries by whom they were thus designated. Other examples of
skulls from the same ossuaries, I may add, are now in the Museums of the
University of Toronto, the London Anthropological Society, and the
Jardin des Plantes at Paris. The skulls recovered from those ossuaries
have a special value from the fact that the last survivors were driven
out of the country by their Iroquois foes in 1649; and hence the crania
recovered from them may be relied upon as fairly illustrating the
physical characteristics of the race before they had been affected by
intercourse with Europeans. The Huron skull is of a well-defined
dolichocephalic type, with, in many cases, an unusual prominence of the
occipital region; the parietal bones meet more or less at an angle at
the sagittal suture; the forehead is flat and receding; the superciliary
ridges in the male skulls are strongly developed; the malar bones are
broad and flat, and the profile is orthognathic. Careful measurements of
thirty-nine male skulls yield a mean longitudinal diameter of 7.39 to a
parietal diameter of 5.50; and of eighteen female skulls, a longitudinal
diameter of 7.07 to a parietal diameter of 5.22.[138]
Who were the people found by Cartier in 1535, seemingly long-settled and
prosperous, occupying the fortified towns of Stadaconé and Hochelaga,
and lower points on the St. Lawrence? The question is not without a
special interest to Canadians. According to the native Wyandot
historian, they were Wyandots or Hurons, and Senecas. That they were
Huron-Iroquois, at any rate, and not Algonkins, is readily determined.
We owe to Cartier two brief vocabularies of their language, which,
though obscured probably in their original transcription, and corrupted
by false transliterations in their transference to the press, leave no
doubt that the people spoke a Huron-Iroquois dialect. To which of the
divisions it belonged is not so obvious. The languages, in the various
dialects, differ only slightly in most of the words which Cartier gives.
Sometimes they agree with Huron, and sometimes with Iroquois
equivalents. The name of Hochelaga, “at the beaver-dam,” is Huron, and
the agreement as a whole preponderates in favour of a Huron rather than
an Iroquois dialect. But there was probably less difference between the
two then, than at the more recent dates of their comparison. In dealing
with this important branch of philological evidence, I have been
indebted to the kindness of my friend, Mr. Horatio Hale, for a
comparative analysis of the vocabulary supplied by Cartier, embodying
the results of long and careful study. He has familiarised himself with
the Huron language by personal intercourse with members of a little band
of civilised Wyandots, settled on their reserve at Anderdon, in Western
Ontario. The language thus preserved by them, after long separation from
other members of the widely scattered race, probably presents the
nearest approximation to the original forms of the native tongue, as
spoken on the Island of Montreal and the lower St. Lawrence. In
comparing them allowance has to be made for varieties of dialect among
the old occupants of the lower valley of the St. Lawrence, and also for
the changes wrought on the Huron language in the lapse of three and a
half centuries, not simply by time, but also as the result of
intercourse and intermixture with other peoples. The habit of recruiting
their numbers by the adoption of prisoners and broken tribes could not
fail to exercise some influence on the common tongue. The _k_ or hard
_g_ of Cartier is, in the Wyandot, frequently softened to a _y_; and on
the other hand, the _n_ is strengthened by a _d_ sound, as in Cartier’s
pregnant term _Canada_, the old Hochelaga word for a town, which has
become in the Wyandot _Yandata_; and so in other instances.
The revolution which, at the critical period of the advent of the Trench
in the valley of the St. Lawrence, in the interval of sixty-eight years
between the visits of Cartier and Champlain, displaced the fortified and
populous Indian capital of Hochelaga and left the surrounding regions a
desolate wilderness, is a mysterious event. Had Champlain been curious
to learn the facts of an occurrence then so recent there could have been
little difficulty in recovering the history of the exodus of the
Hochelagans. But it had no interest for the French adventurers of that
day. The well-fortified Wyandot towns had given place to a few ephemeral
birch-bark wigwams belonging to another race; and the readiest solution
of the mystery has been to ascribe the expulsion of the Wyandots, or
Hurons, from their ancient home in Eastern Canada, to the Algonkins.
This, as already shown, is irreconcilable with the fact that Champlain
found them in friendly alliance with the latter against their common
foe, the Iroquois. If, however, the Wyandot tradition of the expulsion
of the Hurons from the island of Montreal by the Senecas be accepted, it
is in no degree inconsistent with the circumstances subsequently
reported by Champlain; but rather serves to account for some of them, if
it is assumed that the Senecas were, in their turn, driven out by the
Algonkins, and then finally withdrew beyond the St. Lawrence.
But there is another kind of evidence bearing on the question of the
affinities of the people first met with by Cartier in 1535, which also
has its value here. The descriptions of the palisaded towns of the
Hurons on the Georgian Bay very accurately reproduce that which Cartier
gives of Hochelaga. Ephemeral as such fortifications necessarily were,
the construction of a rampart formed of a triple row of trunks of trees,
surmounted with galleries, from whence to hurl stones and other missiles
on their assailants, was a formidable undertaking for builders provided
with no better tools than stone hatchets, and with no other means of
transport than their united labour supplied. But the design had the
advantage of furnishing a self-supporting wall, and so of saving the
greater labour of digging a trench, with such inadequate tools, in soil
penetrated everywhere with the roots of forest trees. It was the
Huron-Iroquois system of military engineering, in which they contrasted
favourably with the Algonkins, among whom the absence of such evidence
of settled habits as those secure defences supplied, was characteristic
of these ruder nomads. But such urban fortifications no less strikingly
contrast with the elaborate and enduring military earthworks to the
south of the great lakes. The pottery and implements found on the site
of Hochelaga are of the same character as many examples recovered from
the Huron ossuaries. On the other hand the peculiar rites, of which
those ossuaries are the enduring memorials, appear to have distinguished
the western Hurons from the older settlers on the St. Lawrence. The
great Feast of the Dead, with its recurrent solemnities, when after the
lapse of years the remains of their dead were exhumed, or removed from
their scaffold biers, was the most characteristic religious ceremonial
of the Hurons; and was practised with still more revolting rites by the
kindred Attiwendaronks. Festering dead bodies were kept in their
dwellings, preparatory to scraping the flesh from their bones; and the
decaying remains of recently buried corpses were exhumed for reinterment
in the great trench, which was prepared with enormous labour, and
furnished with the most lavish expenditure of prized furs, wampum, and
other possessions.
In all ages and states of society unavailing sorrow has tempted the
survivors to extravagant excesses in the effort to do honour to the
loved dead; and sumptuary laws have been repeatedly enacted to restrain
such demonstrations within reasonable bounds. _The Book of Rites_
suffices to suggest that the ancient funeral rites of the Iroquois were
of the same revolting and wasteful character, until their mythic
reformer, Hiawatha, superseded them with a simpler symbolical funeral
service. “I have spoken of the solemn event which has befallen you,” are
the introductory words to the thirteenth paragraph of “The Condoling
Council,” and it thus proceeds: “Every day you are losing your great
men. They are being borne into the earth; also the warriors, and also
your women, and also your grandchildren; so that in the midst of blood
you are sitting.” It is therefore enacted, in the twenty-seventh
paragraph, evidently in lieu of older practices: “This shall be done. We
will suspend a pouch upon a pole, and will place in it some mourning
wampum, some short strings, to be taken to the place where the loss was
suffered. The bearer will enter, and will stand by the hearth, and will
speak a few words to comfort those who will be mourning; and then they
will be comforted, and will conform to the great law.”
A string of black wampum sent round the settlement is still, among the
Indians of the Six Nations, the notice of the death of a chief, as a
belt of black wampum was a declaration of war. It seems not improbable
that the people of Stadaconé and Hochelaga had submitted to the wise
social and religious reforms by which the ancient rites of their dead
were superseded by the symbolism of the mourning wampum, and hence the
absence of ossuaries throughout the island of Montreal and the whole
region to the east. But when the fugitive Wyandots fled into the
wilderness, and reared new homes around Lake Simcoe and in the western
peninsula, they may have revived traditional usages of their fathers,
and resumed rites which had been reluctantly abandoned. Among the
civilised Indians of the Six Nations some memorials of their ancestral
rites of the dead still survive. A visitor to the reserve at the time of
the death of a late highly esteemed chief told me that on the event
being known it was immediately responded to by all within hearing by the
prolonged utterance, in a mournful tone, of the cry _Kwé_, and this,
passing from station to station, spread the news of their loss
throughout the reserve. Nearly the same sound, uttered in a quicker
note, _Quaig!_ is the salutation among the Hurons of Lorette.
The later history of the Hurons and Iroquois is not without its special
interest. One little band, the Hurons of Lorette, the representatives of
the refugees from the massacre of 1648, has lingered till our own day in
too close proximity to the French _habitants_ of Quebec to preserve in
purity the blood of the old race. But great as are the alterations which
time and intermixture with the white race have effected, they still
retain many intellectual as well as physical traits of their original
stock after an interval of two hundred and thirty-six years, during
which intimate intercourse, and latterly frequent intermarriage with
those of European blood, have wrought inevitable change on the
race.[139] Other more vigorous representatives of the old Huron stock
occupy a small reservation in the Township of Anderdon, in Western
Ontario, from whom the vocabulary was derived which furnished a test of
the language of the Hochelagans in the sixteenth century. But the Hurons
of Lorette have also preserved their native tongue; and an ample
vocabulary[140] of the older form of their language survives. A third
modification of the ancient tongue no doubt exists; for the larger
remnant of the survivors of the Hurons, after repeated wanderings, is
now settled, far from the native home of the race, on reserves conceded
to them by the American Government in Kansas.
The Hurons have thus, for the most part, disappeared from Canada; but it
is not without interest to note that the revolution which, upwards of a
century ago, severed the connection of the old colonies to the south of
the St. Lawrence with the region to the north, restored to Canada its
ancient Iroquois. This race of savage warriors acquired the mastery of a
region equal in extent to Central Europe; and by a system of warfare,
not, after all, more inherently barbarous or recklessly bloody than that
of Europe’s Grand Monarch, reconstructed the social and political map of
the continent east of the Mississippi. Their influence acquired a novel
importance when, in the seemingly insignificant rivalries of French and
English fur-traders, they practically determined the balance of power
between the two foremost nations of Europe on this continent. Their
indomitable pertinacity proved more than a match alike for European
diplomacy and military skill; and, as they maintained an uncompromising
hostility to the French at a time when the rival colonists were nearly
equally balanced, the failure of the magnificent schemes of Louis XIV.
and his successors to establish in North America such a supremacy as
Charles V. and Philip II. had held in Mexico and Peru, is largely
traceable to them. It is natural that the Anglo-American student of
history should estimate highly the polity of savage warriors who thus
foiled the schemes of one of the most powerful monarchies of Europe for
the mastery of this continent. The late Hon. L. H. Morgan thus writes of
them: “They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil
organisation, and acquired a higher degree of influence, than any other
race of Indian lineage except those of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of
European colonisation they stood, for nearly two centuries, with an
unshaken front against the devastations of war, the blighting influence
of foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of a
restless and advancing border population. Under their federal system the
Iroquois flourished in independence, and capable of self-protection,
long after the New England and Virginia races had surrendered their
jurisdictions, and fallen into the condition of dependent nations; and
they now stand forth upon the canvas of Indian history, prominent alike
for the wisdom of their civil institutions, their sagacity in the
administration of the league, and their courage in its defence.”[141]
But in this their historian applies to the Iroquois a European standard,
similar to that by which Prescott unconsciously magnified Mexican
barbarism into a rivalry with the contemporary civilisation of Spain.
The romance attached to the Hodenosauneega, or Kononsionni, the famous
league of the Long House or United Households, more truly derives its
chief interest and value from the fact that its originators remained to
the last savages. It is, at any rate, important to keep this fact in
view, and to interpret the significance of the league in that light.
When the treaty which initiated it was entered into by the Caniengas and
the Oneidas, they were both in that primitive stage of unsophisticated
barbarism to which the term “Stone Period” has been applied. In the
absence of all knowledge of metallurgy, their implements and weapons
were alike simple and rude. Agriculture, under such conditions, must
have been equally primitive; and as for their wars, when they were not
defensive, they appear to have had no higher aim than revenge. Gallatin,
no unappreciative witness, says of them: “The history of the Five
Nations is calculated to give a favourable opinion of the intelligence
of the Red Man. But they may be ranked among the worst of conquerors.
They conquered only in order to destroy, and, it would seem, solely for
the purpose of gratifying their thirst for blood. Towards the south and
the west they made a perfect desert of the whole country within 500
miles of their seats. A much greater number of those Indians, who since
the commencement of the seventeenth century have perished by the sword
in Canada and the United States, have been destroyed by that single
nation than in all their wars with the Europeans.”[142]
To characterise the combination effected among such tribes as one
presenting elements of wise civil institutions; or indeed to introduce
such terms as league and federal system, in the sense in which they have
been repeatedly employed, as though they referred to a confederation
akin to those of the ancient Achæans or Ætolians, is to suggest
associations altogether misleading. Though an interesting phase of
American savage life, to which its long duration gives a marked
significance, the Iroquois league was by no means unique; though it was
the oldest, and may have been the model on which others were framed. The
Creek confederacy embraced numerous tribes between the Mobile, Alabama,
and Savannah rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico. At the head of it were the
Muskhogees, a numerous and powerful, but wholly savage race of hunters.
Like the Oneidas, Onandagas, and the still older Wyandots, they and the
Choctaws claimed to be autochthones. The Muskhogees appealed to a
tradition of their ancestors that they issued from a cave near the
Alabama river; while the Choctaws pointed to the frontier region between
them and the Chickasaws, where, as they affirmed, they suddenly emerged
from a hole in the earth, a numerous and mighty people. The system of
government amongst the members of this southern confederacy seems to
have borne considerable resemblance to that of the Iroquois; if it was
not borrowed from it. Every village was the centre of an independent
tribe or nation, with its own chief; and the restraints imposed on the
individual members, except when co-operating in some special enterprise
or religious ceremonial, appear to have been slight.