82 DANIEL WILSON ON THE HUEON-IEOQUOIS OF 



which has befallen yon," are the iutrodiictory words to the thirteenth paragraph of "the 

 Condoling Council," and it thus proceeds : " Every day you are losing your great men. 

 They are being borne into the earth ; also the warriors, and also your women, and also your 

 grandchildren ; so that in the midst of blood you are sitting." It is therefore enacted, in 

 the twenty-seventh paragraph, evidently in lieu of older practices: "This shall be done. 

 We will suspend a pouch iipon a pole, and will place in it some mourning wampum, some 

 short strings, to be taken to the place where the loss was suffered. The bearer will enter, 

 and will stand by the hearth, and will speak a few words to comfort those who will be 

 mourning; and then they will be comforted, and w^ill conform to the great law." 



A string of black wampum sent round the settlement, is still, among the Indians of 

 the Six Nations, the notice of the death of a chief ; as a belt of black wampum was a 

 declaration of war. It seems to me not improbable that the people of Stadaconé and 

 Hochelaga had submitted to the wise social and religious reforms by which the ancient 

 rites of their dead were superseded by the symbolism of the mourning wampum ; and 

 hence the absence of ossuaries throughout the island of Montreal, and the whole region 

 to the east. But when the fugitive Wyandots fled into the wilderness, and reared 

 new homes around Lake Simcoe and in the western peninsula, they may have rcA'ived 

 traditional usages of their fathers, and resumed the revolting rites which had been 

 reluctantly abandoned. Among the civilized Indians of the Six Nations, some memo- 

 rials of ancient rites of the dead still survive. A visitor to the reserve at the time of 

 the death of the late highly esteemed chief, G-eorge Johnson, told me that on the event 

 being known it was immediately responded to by all within hearing by the prolonged 

 utterance, in a mournful tone, of the cry lùcé, and this, passing from station to station 

 soon spread the news of their loss throughout the reserve. Nearly the same sound, tittered 

 in a qiiicker note, Quaig ! is the friendly salutation among the Hurons of Lorette. 



The Huron ossuaries do unc[uestionably constitute a distinctive diversity from ancient 

 Hochelagan customs. Nevertheless, while the evidence appears, on the whole, to justify 

 the assumption that the Five Nations were a distinct people from the Wyandots to the 

 north of the St. Lawrence, before the arrival of Cartier ; it seems most probable that the 

 same Iroc^uois, who at a later date pursued the Hurons with such relentless fury, were 

 the devastators of the region westward to the head of Lake Ontario, which Champlain 

 found a desert. 



The later history of the Hurons and Iroc[uois is not without its special interest. One 

 little band, the Hurons of Lorette, the representatives of the refugees from the massacre of 

 1648, has lingered till our own day, in too close proximity to the French habitants of 

 Quebec to preserve in purity the blood of the old race. But great as are the alterations 

 which time and intermixture with the white race have effected, they still retain 

 many intellectual as well as physical traits of their original stock, after an interval of 

 two hundred and thirty-six years, during which, intimate intercourse, and latterly frec[uent 

 intermarriage with those of European blood, have wrought inevitable change on the 

 race.' Other more vigorous representatives of the old Huron stock occupy a small reserv- 

 ation in the Township of Anderdon, in Western Ontario ; and from them the vocabulary 



' " Some American Illustrations of the Evolution of new Varieties of Man." Journal of Anthropology. May, 

 1879. 



