1651-54.] THE EEIE WAR. 437 



were the Hurons broken up and dispersed, than 

 the Iroquois, without waiting to take breath, 

 turned their fury on the Neutrals. At the end of 

 the autumn of 1650, they assaulted and took one 

 of theu' chief towns, said to have contained at 

 the time more than sixteen hundred men, besides 

 women and children ; and early in the following 

 spring, they took another town. The slaughter 

 was prodigious, and the victors drove back troops 

 of captives for butchery or adoption. It was the 

 death-blow of the Neutrals. They abandoned 

 their corn-fields and villages in the wildest terror, 

 and dispersed themselves abroad in forests, which 

 could not yield sustenance to such a multitude. 

 They perished by thousands, and from that time 

 forth the nation ceased to exist. ^ 



During two or three succeeding years, the Iro- 

 quois contented themselves with harassing the 

 French and Algonquins ; but in 1653 they made 

 treaties of peace, each of the five nations for itself, 

 and the colonists and their red allies had an interval 

 of rest. In the following May, an Onondaga ora- 

 tor, on a peace visit to Montreal, said, in a speech 



i Ragueneau, Relation, 1651, 4. In the unpublished journal kept by 

 the Superior of the Jesuits at Quebec, it is said, under date of April, 

 1651, that news had just come from Montreal, that, in the preceding 

 autumn, fifteen hundred Iroquois had taken a Neutral town ; that the 

 Neutrals had afterwards attacked them, and killed two hundred of their 

 warriors ; and that twelve hundred Iroquois had again invaded the Neu- 

 tral country to take their revenge. Lafitau, Moeurs des Sauvages, II. 176, 

 gives, on the authority of Father Julien Garnier, a singular and improb- 

 able account of the origin of the war. 



An old chief, named Kenjockety, who claimed descent from an 

 adopted prisoner of the Neutral Nation, was recently living among the 

 Senecas of Western New York. 



37* 



