of Ontario. The name of Lake Huron still recalls their abode.
But a part of the race kept moving eastward. Before the coming of the
whites, they had fought their way almost to the sea. But they were able
to hold their new settlements only by hard fighting. The great stockade
which Cartier saw at Hochelaga, with its palisades and fighting
platforms, bore witness to the ferocity of the struggle. At that place
Cartier and his companions were entertained with gruesome tales of
Indian fighting and of wholesale massacres. Seventy years later, in
Champlain's time, the Hochelaga stockade had vanished, and the Hurons
had been driven back into the interior. But for nearly two centuries
after Champlain the Iroquois retained their hold on the territory from
Lake Ontario to the Hudson. The conquests and wars of extermination of
these savages, and the terror which they inspired, have been summed up
by General Francis Walker in the saying: 'They were the scourge of God
upon the aborigines of the continent.'

The Iroquois were in some respects superior to most of the Indians of
the continent. Though they had a limited agriculture, and though they
made hardly any use of metals, they had advanced further in other
directions than most savages. They built of logs, houses long enough to
be divided into several compartments, with a family in each
compartment. By setting a group of houses together, and surrounding
them with a palisade of stakes and trees set on end, the settlement was
turned into a kind of fort, and could bid defiance to the limited means
of attack possessed by their enemies. Inside their houses they kept a
good store of corn, pumpkins and dried meat, which belonged not to each
man singly but to the whole group in common. This was the type of
settlement seen at Quebec and at Hochelaga, and, later on, among the
Five Nations. Indeed, the Five Nations gave to themselves the
picturesque name of the Long House, for their confederation resembled,
as it were, the long wooden houses that held the families together.

All this shows that the superiority of the Iroquois over their enemies
lay in organization. In this they were superior even to their kinsmen
the Hurons. All Indian tribes kept women in a condition which we should
think degrading. The Indian women were drudges; they carried the
burdens, and did the rude manual toil of the tribe. Among the Iroquois,
however, women were not wholly despised; sometimes, if of forceful
charact