64 DR. DANIEL WILSON ON 
former claimed the name of Kanienga, or “People of the Flint.” They were, as they 
remained to the last, but in their stone period. Their arts were of the rudest character, and 
their wars had no higher aim than the gratification of an inextinguishable hatred. All 
that we know of them only serves to illustrate a condition of life such as may have sufficed 
through countless generations to perpetuate the barbarism which every where reveals itself 
in the traces of man throughout the northern continent. One nation after another perished 
in the fury of this race, powerful only to destroy. The Susquehannocks, whose name still 
clings to the beautiful river on the banks of which they once dwelt, are believed to have 
been of the same lineage as the Alleghans; but they incurred the wrath of the Iroquois, 
and perished. At a later date the Delawares provoked a like vengeance; and the remnant 
of that nation quitted for ever the shores of the river which perpetuates their name. Such 
in like manner was the fate of the Shawnees, Nanticokes, Unamis, Minsi, and Illinois. All 
alike were vanquished, reduced to the condition of serfs, or driven out and exterminated. 
The tribes that lived to the west of the Mississippi appear to have been for the most 
part more strictly nomad. The open character of the country, with its vast tracts of 
prairie, and its herds of buffalo and other game, no doubt helped to encourage a wandering 
life. The Crees, the Blackfeet, the Sioux, Cheyennes, Comanches, and Apaches are all of 
this class ; and with their interminable feuds and perpetual migrations, rendered all settled 
life impossible. The Mandans, the most civilised among the tribes of the Northwest, 
abandoned village after village under the continual attacks of the Sioux, until they disap- 
peared as a nation ; and the little handful of survivors found shelter with another tribe. 
All this was the work of Indians. The Spaniards, indeed, wasted and destroyed with 
no less merciless indiscrimination. Not only nations perished, but asingularly interesting 
phase of native civilisation was abruptly arrested in Mexico, Central America, and Peru. 
The intrusion of French, Dutch, and English colonists was, no doubt, fatal to the aborigines 
whom they supplanted. Nevertheless their record is not one of indiscriminate massacre. 
The relations of the French, especially, with the tribes with whom they were brought into 
immediate contact were on the whole, kindly and protective. But, as we recover the 
history of the native tribes whose lands are now occupied by the representatives of those 
old colonists, we find the Indians everywhere engaged in the same exterminating warfare ; 
and whether \ve look at the earlier maps, or attempt to reconstruct the traditionary history 
of older tribes, we learn only the same tale of aimless strife and extinction. When 
Cartier first explored the St. Lawrence, in 1535, he found large Indian settlements at Quebec 
and on the Island of Montreal; but on the return of the French, under Champlain, little 
more than half a century later, there were none left to dispute their settlement. At the 
later date, and throughout the entire period of French occupation, the country to the south 
of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario was occupied by the Iroquois, or Six Nation Indians, 
as they were latterly called. Westward of the river Ottawa the whole region was deserted 
until near the shores of the Georgian Bay; though its early explorers found every where 
the traces of recent occupation by the Wyandot, or other tribes, who had withdrawn to 
the shores of Lake Huron, to escape the fury of their implacable foes. 
At the period when the Hurons were first brought under the notice of the French 
Jesuit Missionaries in the seventeenth century, they were established along the Georgian 
Bay, and around Lake Simcoe; and in so far as the wild virtues of the savage warrior are 
concerned, they fully equalled the Iroquois by whom they were at length driven out and 
