1909] The Ottawa Naturalist 



103 



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hundred of them took the route of the Ottawa to join their 

 kindred who had preceded them. Other scattered bands follow- 

 ed, from time to time, of which we appear to have no definite 

 record. By this time the wdiole Ottawa River had been swept bv 

 the tornado of Iroquois ferocity and its shores had become a 

 solitude. 



Now for our conjecture. Cases are not infrequent in which 

 Indian communities have been forced to abandon their homes, 

 through stress of war, but have again returned to them after 

 some years, when the war cloud had given place to the sunlight 

 of peace. Doubtless, in their wanderings on the northern 

 tributaries of the Ottawa, Algonkin and Huron had alike eaten 

 the bread of adversity and drunk the water of affliction and were 

 ready for any asylum that would afford them a brief period of 

 rest. Now, while the time of the Iroquois was fully occupied 

 in the terrible wars already enumerated, may it not have been 

 possible that some of the fugitive remnants of the Hurons, on 

 their way to Quebec, stopped and settled on the Ottawa, to- 

 gether with similar bands of Algonkins, who had returned to 

 their old camping grounds? 



A serious objection, of course, to the theory of Huron occup- 

 ation of the Ottawa Valley, in the latter half of the seventeenth 

 century, is the presence of Huron pottery in the ash-beds at Hull 

 and Casselman, as the Indians are supposed to have discarded 

 their native earthenware for the brass or copper kettles of the 

 v/hite trader, soon after the advent of Europeans, still, how- 

 ever, it should be borne in mind that the craggan, (see 

 Annual Archaeological Report 1906 ("Toronto 1907) pp. 16-18), 

 an earthen vessel of domestic manufacture, made from unrefined 

 clay and similar in design and finish to the very crudest forms 

 of our Indian pottery, was made and used imtil quite recently 

 if it is not used, even, to-day in the kitchens of several of the 

 Scottish Islands, and that these vessels were preferred, for many 

 purposes, to the more costlv and highlv finished j)roducts of 

 modern ceramic art. These craggans were made by housewives 

 to serve, among others, the purposes of drinking vessels and pots 

 for boiling; so that if such prehistoric pottery could have survived 

 among the Scottish Islanders, to a time within the memory 

 of the living in competition with domestic innovations 

 of centuries of civilization, whv should not the Hurons 

 of the Ottawa have retained, for a few years at least, 

 the earthenware of their ancestors, under somewhat similar 

 conditions? Finallv, William M. Beauchamp'' refers to a 



"Earthenware of the New York Aborigines. Bulletin of the New 

 York State Museum, Vol. S, No. 22, October, 1898, p 80. 



