JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 53 
hills, behind the valley of the bay, and by hard measurement, bottom 
is not struck until a depth of nearly eighty feet. Ali around the lake 
basin is a marsh or bog land, so soft in places that in spring time a 
pole may be thrust down into it to almost any depth. Lake Medad 
and its immediate vicinity was in a past age of the world’s history 
one of the great gathering places for Indian peoples of Ontario, they 
loved the spot, and not only loved and lived, but buried their dead 
there. : 
At the first council which the queen held after the Genese en- 
gagement, the Eries decided to employ their time of truce in training 
their youth in every possible warlike exercise, in order to make them- 
selves ready when the opportunity offered to retrieve their lost posi- 
tion with the Iroquois. Still confident in their superiority over any 
one of the tribes inhabiting countries within the bounds of their 
knowledge, they trusted in what they believed to be their own 
inherent greatness, to re-assert themselves eventually with the Five 
Nations. No protest was therefore made when deputies sent 
from Onondaga requested “right of way” over her possessions 
when the Iroquois set out. to revenge the Mascoutin butcheries. 
Gegosasa still nursed her projects for the future, and present 
peace must be had at all hazards. There also remained little doubt 
in her mind of the results of an encounter between the warriors of 
the Great League of the United Households, and her own undiscip- 
lined, debased old Covenanters. Better far that those who had once 
called her “‘mother,” should meet their deserved punishment from 
the flail of the Iroquois, than that she should be forced to enter 
into matricidal war. 
The overwhelming success of the Iroquois campaign, taught the 
Eries that this new confederation of tribes, any one of which might 
be almost an equal match for her people and of whose personal 
prowess they had witnessed on the Chinisseo, a prowess and fame 
heightened by the masterful manner in which the rebellious Neutrals 
had been swept out of existence, inspired Gegosasa, her councillors 
and warriors with most anxious forebodings. To cope collectively 
with them, seemed to be now an impossible feat. The only hope 
of the Eries, therefore, lay in being able, by a series of subtle stra- 
tegic surprises, to destroy the Five Nations in detail. 
It was the year of 1655, that the Eries sent a friendly message 
