CANADA, A TYPKJAL EACE OF AMERICAN ABOEIGINES. 59 



tuated with circumstantial minuteness in the traditions of the Iroquois, are assignable 

 apparently to the earlier half of the fifteenth century. The older event of the over- 

 throw of the Alligéwi, in the Ohio valley, of which independent traditional records 

 have been handed down by the Lenni Lenape, or Delawares, and by the Iroc^uois, 

 is believed to be correctly assignable to a date nearly contemporaneous with the 

 assumption of the authority of bretwalda of the Heptarchy by Egbert of "Wessex, — that 

 memorable step in the fusion of "nations" hot greatly more important than those 

 of the Iroquois league, until their divisions in speech and polity were effaced in the 

 unity of the English people. As to "the fanciful tale of a supernatural origin from the 

 heart of a mountain," it is simjîly a literal rendering of the old Greek metaphor of the 

 autochthones, or children of the soil, symbolized by the Athenians wearing the grasshopper 

 in their hair ; and is by no means peculiar to the Iroquois. Mr. Horatio Hale derived from 

 Manderoug, an old "Wyandot chief, the story, as narrated to him by the Hurons of 

 Lorette. They took him, he said, to a mountain, and showed him the opening in its side 

 from whence the i^rogenitors of the people emerged, when they " first came out of the 

 ground." ' The late Huron chief, Tahourenche, or Francois Xavier Picard, communicated 

 to me the same legendary tradition of the indigenous origin of his people ; telling me, 

 though with a smile, that they came out of the side of a mountain between Quebec and 

 the great sea. My informant connected this fact with other incidents, all pointing to a 

 traditional belief that the northern shores of the lower St. Lawrence were the original 

 home of the race ; and he spoke of certain ancient events in the history of his people 

 as having occurred when they lived beside the big sea. The earliest authentic reference 

 to this tradition occurs in the " Eclations " for 1G36, where Brebeuf, after a brief allusion 

 to certain of their magical songs and dances, says : " The origin of all such mysteries is 

 assigned by them to a being of superhuman stature, who was wounded in the forehead 

 bv one of their nation, at the time when they lived near the sea." The reference to a 

 migi'ation from the sea-board obviously points to one of those incidents in the life of the 

 nation which marked for them an epoch like the Hegira of the Arabs. When Champlain 

 followed Cartier nearly seventy years later he found only a few Algonkins in their 

 birch-bark wigwams, where the palisaded towns of the Huron-Iroquois had stood. 

 But no Algonkin legend claims this as their earlv home. The invariable tradition of the 

 Ojibways points to the Lake Superior region and the country stretching towards Hudson 

 Bay, as the ancestral home of the Algonkin tribes. 



Such information as can thiis be gleaned from many independent sources, as from 

 the somewhat confused yet trustworthy narrative of David Cusick, the Tuscarora his- 

 torian, and from Peter Dooyentate, the "Wyandot historian, all leads to the same 

 conclusion. From remote and altogether pre-Columbian centuries, the Hurons and 

 other allied tribes — the occupants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of 

 various detached portions of the coirutry north of the St. Lawrence and eastward of the 

 Greorgian Bay, — appear to have been in possession of the whole region to which their oldest 

 traditions pointed as the cradle of the race ; while nations of the Algonkin stock lay 

 beyond them to the north-west. The great river and the lakes from whence it flows into 

 the lower valley formed a well-defined southern boundary for aiiiliated tribes ; but the 

 first Dutch and English ex]jlorers of the Hudson, and of the tract of country which now 



' Magazine of American History, vol. x., p. 479. 



