74 DANIEL WILSON ON THE HURON-IROQUOIS OP 



Creeks, and many others. This seems to point to snch a ronvergonce, of two distinct 

 ethnical lines of migration from opposite centres, as I think is borne out by much other 

 evidence. In noting this aspect of the question anew, the further significant fact may 

 also be once more repeated, that the Eskimo cranium, along with certain specialties of its 

 own, is preeminently distinctive as the northern tj^^e. 



Among what may be accepted as typical Canadian skulls, those recovered from the 

 old site of Hochelaga, and from the Huron ossuaries around Lake Simcoe, have a special 

 value. They represent the native race which, under various names, extended from the 

 Lower St. Lawrence westward to Lake St. Clair. The peoijle encountered by Cartier and 

 the first French explorers of 1535, and those whom Champlain found settled aroirnd the 

 Georgian Bay sixty-eight years later, appear to haA^e been of the same stock. Such primi- 

 tive local names, as Stadaconé and Hochelaga, are not Algonkin, but Huron-Iroquois. 

 Native traditions, as well as the allusions of the earliest French writers, confirm this 

 idea of the occupation by a Huron-Iroquois or Wyandot population of the " region north- 

 eastward from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, at or somewhere along the Gulf coast, before 

 they ever met with the French, or any European adventurers," as reaffirmed in the 

 narrative of their own native historian, Peter Dooyentate Clarke.' But whatever confirma- 

 tion may be found for this native tradition, it is certain that the European adventurers 

 bore no part in their expulsion from their ancient home. The aborigines, whom Jacqiies 

 Cartier found a prosperous people, safe in the shelter of their palisaded towns, had all 

 vanished before the return of the French under Champlain ; and they were found by him 

 in new settlements, which they had formed far to the westward on Lake Simcoe and the 

 Georgian Bay. 



Questions of considerable interest are involved in the consideration of this migra- 

 tion of the Hurons ; and the circumstances under which they deserted their earlier home. 

 They were visited by Champlain in 1615, and subsequently by the missionary Fathers, 

 who, in 1639, found them occupying thirty-two palisaded villages, fortified in the same 

 fashion as those described by the first French explorers at Stadaconé and Hochelaga. 

 Their numbers are A'ariously estimated. Brebeuf reckoned them at thirty thousand ; and 

 described them as living together in towns sometimes of fifty, sixtj', or a hirndred dwel- 

 lings, — that is, of three or four hundred householders, — and diligently cultivating their 

 fields, from -which they derived food for the whole year. Whatever higher qualities dis- 

 tinguished the Iroquois from Algonkin or other native races, were fully shared in by the 

 Hurons ; and they are even spoken of with a natural partiality by their French allies, 

 like Sagard, as a patrician order of savages, in comparison with those of the Five Nations. 

 When first visited by French explorers, after their protracted journey through the desolate 

 forests between the Ottawa and Lake Huron, their palisaded towns and cultivated fields 

 must have seemed like an oasis in the desert. " To the eye of Champlain," says Mr. 

 Parkman, " accustomed to the desolation he had left behind, it seemed a laud of beauty 

 and abundance. There was a broad opening in the forest, fields of maize with pumpkins 

 ripening in the sun, patches of siin-flowers", from the seeds of which the Indians made 

 hair-oil, and in the midst the Huron town of OtoUacha. In all essential points it resem- 

 bled that which Cartier, eighty years before, had seen at Montreal ; the same triple 



' Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandotts, p. 4. 



