CHAPTER XXXII. 



1650-1866. 

 THE LAST OF THE HURONS. 



Fate of the Vanquished. — The Refugees of St. Jean Baptistb 

 AND St. Michel. — The Tobacco Nation and its Wanderings. 

 — The Modern Wtandots. — The Biter Bit. — The Hurons 

 AT Quebec. — Notre-Dame de Lorette. 



Iroquois bullets^ and tomahawks had killed the 

 Hurons by hundreds, but famine and disease had 

 killed incomparably more. The miseries of the 

 starving crowd on Isle St. Joseph had been shared 

 in an equal degree by smaller bands, who had 

 wintered m remote and secret retreats of the wil- 

 derness. Of those who survived that season of 

 death, many were so weakened that they could not 

 endure the hardships of a wandering life, which was 

 new to them. The Hiu'ons lived by agriculture * 

 their fields and crops were destroyed, and they 

 were so hunted from place to place that they 

 could rarely till the soil. Game was very scarce ; 

 and, without agriculture, the country could support 

 only a scanty and scattered population like that 

 which maintained a struggling existence in the wil- 

 derness of the lower St. Lawrence. The mortality 

 among the exiles was prodigious. 



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