[lighthall] HOCHELAGANS AND MOHAWKS 211 



fused peoples, down into Lake Champlain. When, after more than fifty 

 years of the struggle, Chamj)lain goes down to that Lake in 1609, he finds 

 there the clearings from which they have been driven, and marks their 

 cabins on his map of the southeast shore. This testimony is confirmed 

 by that of archaeology showing their movement at the same period into 

 the Mohawk Valley. Doubtless their grandchildren among the Iroquois, 

 like their grandchildren among the Algonquins, remembered perfectly 

 well the fact of their Huron and Algonquin wrongs, and led many a war 

 party back to scenes known to them through tradition, and which it was 

 their ambition to recover. It seems then to be the fact that the Mohawks 

 proper, or some of their villages, while perhaps not exactly Hochelagans, 

 were part of the kindred peoples recently sprung from and dominated by 

 them and were driven out at the same time. The two peoples— Mohawks 

 and Iroquets — had no great time before, if not at the time of Cartier's 

 arrival — been one race living together in the St. Lawrence valley : In 

 the territory just west of the Mohawk valley, they found the " Senecas" 

 as the Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas together were at first called, and 

 soon, through the genius of the Mohawk Hiawatha, they formed with 

 them the famous League, in the face of the common enemy. By that 

 time the Oneidas had become separated from the Mohawks. These indica- 

 tions place the 'date of the League very near 1600. The studies of Dr. 

 Kellogg of Plattsburgh on the New York side of Lake Champlain and of 

 others on the Vermont shore, who have discovered several Mohawk sites 

 on that side of the lake may be expected to supply a link of much 

 interest on the whole question, from the comparison of pottery and j-ipcs. 

 On the whole the Hochelagan facts throw much light both forward on 

 the history of the Iroquois and backwards on that of the Huron stock. 

 Intei'preted as above, they afford a meagre but connected story through 

 a period hitherto lost in darkness, and perhaps a ray by which further 

 links may still be discovered through continued archaeological investiga- 

 tion. 



Note. Like the numbers of the Hochelagan race, the question how long they 

 had been in the St. Lawrence valley must be problematical. Sir William Dawson 

 describes the site of Hochelaga as indicating a residence of several generations. 

 Their own statements regarding the Huron country — that they "had never been 

 there", and that they gathered their knowledge of it from the Ottawa Algonquins, 

 permits some deductions. If the Hochelagans — including their old men — had never 

 been westward among their kindred, it is plain that the migration must have taken 

 place more than the period of an old man's life_ previous— that is to say more than 

 say eighty years. If to this we add that the old men appear not even to have derived 

 such knowledge as they possessed from their parents but from strangers, then the 

 average full life of aged parents should be added, or say sixty years more, making a 

 total of at least one hundred and forty years since the immigration. Something 

 might, it is true, be allowed for a sojourn at intermediate points : and the scantiness 

 of the remarks is also to be remembered. But there remSius to account for the con- 

 siderable population which had grown up in the land from apparently one centre. If 

 the original intruders were four hundred, for example, then in doubling every twenty 

 years, they would number 12,HU0 in a century. But this rate is higher than their 

 state of " Middle Barbarism " is likely to have permitted and a hundred and fifty 

 years would seem to be as fast as they could be expected to attain the population 

 they possessed in Cartier's time. 



