History and native traditions alike confirm the idea that the valley of the St. Lawrence was the habitat of the Huron-Iroquois stock as far back as evidence can be appealed to. The Huron traditions tell of a time when the Province of Quebec was the home of the race eastward to the sea; while those of three at least of the members of the Iroquois confederacy in legendary fashion claimed their birth from the soil south of the great river. When the French explorers, under the leadership of Jacques Cartier, first entered the St. Lawrence, in 1535, they found at Stadaconé and Hochelaga—the old native sites now occupied by the cities of Quebec and Montreal,—a population apparently of the Huron-Iroquois stock; and, in so far as reliance may be placed on their traditions, Canada was then populous throughout the whole valley of the St. Lawrence with industrious native tribes, the representatives of a race that had occupied the same region for unnumbered centuries. “Some fanciful tales of a supernatural origin from the heart of a mountain; of a migration to the eastern seaboard; and of a subsequent return to the country of the lakes and rivers, where they finally settled, comprise,” says Brownell,[113] “most that is noticeable in the native traditions of the Six Nations prior to the grand confederation.” But the value of such traditionary transmission of national history among unlettered tribes has received repeated confirmation; and incidents in the history of their famous league, perpetuated with circumstantial minuteness in the traditions of the Iroquois, are assignable apparently to the fifteenth century. The older event of the overthrow of the Alligéwi, in the Ohio valley, of which independent traditional records have been handed down by the Lenni-Lenape, or Delawares, and by the Iroquois, is now believed to be correctly assignable to a date nearly contemporaneous with the assumption of the authority of Bretwalda of the Heptarchy by Egbert of Wessex,—that memorable step in the fusion of “nations” not greatly more important than those of the Iroquois league, until their divisions in speech and polity were effaced in the unity of the English people. As to “the fanciful tale of a supernatural origin from the heart of a mountain,” it is simply a literal rendering of the old Greek metaphor of the autochthones, or children of the soil, symbolised by the Athenians wearing the grasshopper in their hair; and is by no means peculiar to the Iroquois. Mr. Horatio Hale derived from Manderong, an old Wyandot chief, the story, as narrated to him by the Hurons of Lorette. They took him, he said, to a mountain, and showed him the opening in its side from whence the progenitors of the people emerged, when they “first came out of the ground.”[114] The late Huron chief, Tahourenché, or François-Xavier Picard, communicated to me the same legendary tradition of the indigenous origin of his people; telling me, though with a smile, that they came out of the side of a mountain between Quebec and the great sea. He connected this with other incidents, all pointing to a traditional belief that the northern shores of the lower St. Lawrence were the original home of the race; and he spoke of certain ancient events in the history of his people as having occurred when they lived beside the big sea. The earliest authentic reference to this tradition occurs in the _Relations_ for 1636, where Brebeuf, after a brief allusion to certain of their magical songs and dances, says: “The origin of all such mysteries is assigned by them to a being of superhuman stature, who was wounded in the forehead by one of their nation, at the time when they lived near the sea.” The references to a migration from the seaboard obviously point to one of those incidents in the life of the nation which marked for them an epoch like the Hegira of the Arabs. When Champlain followed Cartier nearly seventy years later he found only a few Algonkins in their birch-bark wigwams, where the palisaded towns of the Huron-Iroquois had stood. But no Algonkin legend claims this as their early home. The invariable tradition of the Ojibways points to the Lake Superior region and the country stretching towards Hudson Bay as the ancestral home of the Algonkin tribes.