sons altogether,
felt they could no longer safely remain in their isolated position when
the Hurons had left the country. They removed all their goods to the
Isle of St. Joseph, now one of the Christian Islands, near the entrance
of Matchedash Bay, where they erected a fortified post for the
protection of several thousand Hurons who had sought refuge here.
Before many months passed, the Hurons believed that their position
would be untenable when the Iroquois renewed their attacks, and
determined to leave the island. Some ventured {144} even among the
Iroquois and were formally received into the Senecas and other tribes.
A remnant remained a few months longer on the island, but they soon
left for Quebec after killing some thirty of the bravest Iroquois
warriors, who had attempted to obtain possession of the fort by a base
act of treachery. A number belonging to the Tobacco Nation eventually
reached the upper waters of the Mississippi where they met the Sioux,
or Dacotahs, a fierce nation belonging to a family quite distinct from
the Algonquins and Iroquois, and generally found wandering between the
head-waters of Lake Superior and the Falls of St. Anthony. After
various vicissitudes these Hurons scattered, but some found their rest
by the side of the Detroit River, where they have been always known as
Wyandots. Some three hundred Hurons, old and young, left St. Joseph
for Quebec, where they were most kindly received and given homes on the
western end of the Isle of Orleans, where the Jesuits built a fort for
their security; but even here, as we shall see, the Iroquois followed
them, and they were eventually forced to hide themselves under the guns
of Quebec. War and disease soon thinned them out, while not a few cast
in their lot with the Iroquois who were at last themselves seeking
recruits. The Huron remnant finally found a resting-place at Lorette
on the banks of the St. Charles, a few miles from the heights of the
Capital.

The only memorials now in Canada of a once powerful people, that
numbered at least twenty thousand souls before the time of their ruin
and {145} dispersion, are a remnant still retaining the language of
their tribe on the banks of the Detroit; a larger settlement on the
banks of the St. Charles, but without the distinguishing
characteristics of their ancestors who came there from Isle St. Joseph;
the foundations of the old mission house of Ste. Marie, and the
remarkable graves and ossuarie