102 The Ottawa Naturalist [August 



truth is we are yet in the dark regarding the philosoph}^ of 

 aboriginal burials, and, perhaps will ever remain so." So that 

 in the absence of evidence we can indulge only in conjecture. 



It will be remembered that, after the four nations of the 

 Huron Confederacy went down in red ruin beneath the merciless 

 tomahawks of the Iroquois, theconquerors turned their victorious 

 arms against the Neutrals or Attiwanderons ; stormed and took 

 their palisaded towns, together with hundreds of prisoners, 

 whom they burnt or adopted, and left a trail of fire and blood 

 along the northern shores of Lake Erie . Then they wheeled in 

 their tracks and rushed, like a pack of famished wolves, upon 

 the Eries or. Cats, a kindred tribe to the south of Lake Erie, 

 whom they destroyed utterly in one of the fiercest Indian battles 

 recorded in history. Meanwhile, on the eastern frontiers of the 

 Iroquois Confederacy, the Mohawks were at war with their 

 Algonkin neighbors, the Mohicans, and with their own Iroquoian 

 kinsmen, the Andastes or Conestogas. During a decade of conflict 

 with these opposing forces, a series of bloody reverses had hum- 

 bled the Mohawk arrogance, when the other four nations of the 

 Iroquois league took up the strife, in the Andaste war. For 

 fifteen years the Iroquois' war-parties traversed the forests 

 towards the Susquehanna before the heroic Andastes were 

 wasted away by the attrition of superior numbers and finally 

 overcome by the Senecas, about the year 1675. Thus, in a 

 period of twenty-five years, from the downfall of the Hurons to 

 the conquest of the Andastes, the Iroquois had triumphed over 

 all the neighboring nations and peace reigned, for a time, over 

 the blood stained wilderness. But, during all these wars, the 

 Confederates were able to send war-parties on the trail to Canada, 

 that kept New France in a turmoil, by cutting off her outposts 

 and wasting her outlying settlements. It is not likely, however, 

 that any of these expeditions went out of their way to attack 

 Algonkin or Huron stragglers on the Ottawa, and these fugitive 

 bands may have remained unmolested for a few years, until 

 their final destruction or dispersion could be made an incident 

 in some more important enterprise of the Iroquois. 



Let us now return to the Hurons. In the year 1650, after a 

 terrible winter made horrible by famine, death and the Iroquois, 

 the Jesuits abandoned their last mission fort of Ste. Marie on 

 Ahoendoe St. Joseph's or Christian Island and led some three 

 hundred of these unfortunate people to Quebec, by way of the 

 Ottawa. A much larger number, however, who were left behind, 

 were forced by the Iroquois to abandon their fort and retire to 

 Manitoulin Island and the northern forests. But the Iroquois 

 were on their trail; so, finally, loading their canoes, about four 



