the Indians of Hochelaga as
superior beings, endowed with supernatural powers. Cartier was called
upon to touch the lame, blind, and wounded, and treat all the ailments
with which the Indians were afflicted, "as if they thought that God had
sent him to cure them."

Cartier's narrative describes the town as circular, inclosed by three
rows of palisades arranged like a pyramid, crossed at the top, with the
middle stakes standing perpendicular, and the others at an angle on
each side, all being well joined and fastened after the Indian fashion.
The inclosing wall was of the height of two lances, or about twenty
feet, and there was only one entrance through a door generally kept
barred. At several points within the inclosure there were platforms or
stages reached by ladders, for the purpose of protecting the town with
arrows, and rocks, piles of which were close at hand. The town
contained fifty houses, each about one hundred feet in length and
twenty-five or thirty in width, and constructed of wood, covered with
bark and strips of board. These "long houses" were divided into
several apartments, belonging to each family, but all of them assembled
and ate in common. Storehouses for their grain and food were provided.
They dried and smoked their fish, of which they had large quantities.
They pounded the grain between flat stones and made it into dough which
they cooked also on hot rocks. This tribe lived, Cartier tells us, "by
ploughing and fishing alone," and were "not nomadic like the natives of
Canada and the Saguenay."

{41}

Cartier and several of his companions were taken by the Indians to the
mountain near the town of Hochelaga, and were the first Europeans to
look on that noble panorama of river and forest which stretched then
without a break over the whole continent, except where the Indian
nations had made, as at Hochelaga, their villages and settlements.
From that day to this the mountain, as well as the great city which it
now overlooks in place of a humble Indian town, has borne the name
which Cartier gave as a tribute to its unrivalled beauty. As we look
from the royal mountain on the beautiful elms and maples rising in the
meadows and gardens of an island, bathed by the waters of two noble
rivers--the green of the St. Lawrence mingling with the blue of the
Ottawa--on the many domes and towers of churches, convents, and
colleges, on the stately mansions of the rich, on the tall chimneys of
huge factor