. When Cartier
discovered the St Lawrence and made his way to the island of Montreal,
Huron Indians inhabited all that part of the country. When Champlain
came, two generations later, they had vanished from that region, but
they still occupied a part of Ontario around Lake Simcoe and south and
east of Georgian Bay. We always connect the name Iroquois with that
part of the stock which included the allied Five Nations--the Mohawks,
Onondagas, Senecas, Oneidas, and Cayugas,--and which occupied the
country between the Hudson river and Lake Ontario. This proved to be
the strongest strategical position in North America. It lies in the gap
or break of the Alleghany ridge, the one place south of the St Lawrence
where an easy and ready access is afforded from the sea-coast to the
interior of the continent. Any one who casts a glance at the map of the
present Eastern states will realize this, and will see why it is that
New York, at the mouth of the Hudson, has become the greatest city of
North America. Now, the same reason which has created New York gave to
the position of the Five Nations its great importance in Canadian
history. But in reality the racial stock of the Iroquois extended much
farther than this, both west and south. It took in the well-known tribe
of the Eries, and also the Indians of Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac.
It included even the Tuscaroras of the Roanoke in North Carolina, who
afterwards moved north and changed the five nations into six.

The Iroquois were originally natives of the plain, connected very
probably with the Dakotas of the west. But they moved eastwards from
the Mississippi valley towards Niagara, conquering as they went. No
other tribe could compare with them in either bravery or ferocity. They
possessed in a high degree both the virtues and the vices of Indian
character--the unflinching courage and the diabolical cruelty which
have made the Indian an object of mingled admiration and contempt. In
bodily strength and physical endurance they were unsurpassed. Even in
modern days the enervating influence of civilization has not entirely
removed the original vigour of the strain. During the American Civil
War of fifty years ago the five companies of Iroquois Indians recruited
in Canada and in the state of New York were superior in height and
measurement to any other body of five hundred men in the northern
armies.

When the Iroquoian Family migrated, the Hurons settled in the western
peninsula