436 THE DESTROYERS. [1650-61. 



that this handful of savages gained a bloody su- 

 premacy. They carried all before them, because 

 they were animated throughout, as one man, by 

 the same audacious pride and insatiable rage for 

 conquest. Like other Indians, they waged war on 

 a plan altogether democratic, — that is, each man 

 fought or not, as he saw fit ; and they owed their 

 unity and vigor of action to the homicidal frenzy 

 that urged them all alike. 



The Neutral Nation had taken no part, on either 

 side, in the war of extermination against the Hu- 

 rons ; and their towns were sanctuaries where either 

 of the contending parties might take asylum. On 

 the other hand, they made fierce war on their west- 

 ern neighbors, and, a few years before, destroyed, 

 with atrocious cruelties, a large fortified town of 

 the Nation of Fire.^ Their turn was now come, 

 and their victims found fit avengers ; for no sooner 



1 " Last summer," writes Lalemant in 1643, " two thousand warriors 

 of the Neutral Nation attacked a town of the Nation of Fire, well forti- 

 fied with a palisade, and defended by nine hundred warriors. They took 

 it after a siege of ten days ; killed many on the spot ; and made eight 

 hundred prisoners, men, women, and children. After burning seventy of 

 the best warriors, they put out the eyes of tlie old men, and cut away 

 their lips, and then left them to drag out a miserable existence. Behold 

 the scourge that is depopulating all this country ! " — Relation des Hurons, 

 1644, 98. 



The Assistaeronnons, Atsistaehonnons, Mascoutins, or Nation of Fire 

 (more correctly, perhaps. Nation of the Prairie), were a very numerous 

 Algonquin people of the West, speaking the same language as the Sacs 

 and Foxes. In the map of Sanson, they are placed in the southern part 

 of Michigan; and according to the Relation of 1658, they had tliirty 

 towns. They were a stationary, and in some measure an agricultural 

 people. They fled before their enemies to the neighborhood of Fox 

 River in Wisconsin, where they long remained. Frequent mention of 

 them will be found in the later Relations, and in contemporary documents. 

 They are now extinct as a tribe. 



