THE NEUTRAL NATION. >vlv 



holding a pacific attitude betwixt their warring kindred, 

 waged deadly strife with the Mascoutins, an Algonquin 

 horde beyond Lake Michigan. Indeed, it was but recently 

 that they had been at blows with seventeen Algonquin 

 tribes.^ Tiiey burned female prisoners, a practice un- 

 known to the Hurons.2 Their country was full of game, 

 and they were bold and active hunters. In form and 

 stature! they surpassed even the Hurons, whom they re- 

 sembled in their mode of life, and from whose language 

 their own, though radically similar, was dialectically dis- 

 tinct. Their licentiousness was even more open and 

 shameless ; and they stood alone in the extravagance of 

 some of their usages. They kept their dead in their 

 houses till they became insupportable ; then scraped the 

 flesh from the bones, and displayed them in rows along 

 the walls, there to remain till the periodical Feast of the 

 Dead, or general burial. In summer, the men wore no 

 clothing whatever, but were usually tattooed from head to 

 foot with powdered charcoal. 



The sagacious Hurons refused them a passage through 

 their country to the French ; and the Neutrals apparently 

 had not sense or reflection enough to take the easy and 

 direct route of Lake Ontario, which was probably open 

 to them, though closed against the Hurons by Iroquois 

 enmity. Thus the former made excellent profit by ex- 

 changing French goods at high rates for the valuable furs 

 of the Neutrals.^ 



1 Lettre die Pere La Roche Dallion, 8 Juillet, 1627, in Le Clerc, 

 Etablissement de la Foy, I. 346. 



2 Women were often burned by the Iroquois : witness the case of 

 Catherine Mercier in 1651, and many cases of Indian women mentioned 

 by the early writers. 



3 The Hurons became very jealous, when La Roche Dallion visited 

 the Neutrals, lest a direct trade should be opened between the latter and 

 the French, against whom they at once put in circulation a variety of 



