The only memorials now in Canada of a once powerful people, that numbered at least twenty thousand souls before the time of their ruin and { 145} dispersion, are a remnant still retaining the language of their tribe on the banks of the Detroit; a larger settlement on the banks of the St. Charles, but without the distinguishing characteristics of their ancestors who came there from Isle St. Joseph; the foundations of the old mission house of Ste. Marie, and the remarkable graves and ossuaries which interest the student and antiquary as they wander in the summer-time through the picturesque country where the nation was once supreme.
[1] It was so called in 1753, after the reigning sovereign of England by an ambitions and politic Irishman, Sir William Johnson, whose name is constantly occurring in the history of the wars between England and France.
YEARS OF GLOOM--THE KING COMES TO THE RESCUE OF CANADA--THE IROQUOIS HUMBLED.
It was noon on the 20th May, 1656, when the residents of Quebec were startled by the remarkable spectacle of a long line of bark canoes drawn up on the river immediately in front of the town. They could hear the shouts of the Mohawk warriors making boast of the murder and capture of unhappy Hurons, whom they had surprised on the Isle of Orleans close by. The voices of Huron girls--"the very flower of the tribe," says the Jesuit narrator--were raised in plaintive chants at the rude command of their savage captors, who even forced them to dance in sight of the French, on whose protection they had relied. The governor, M. de Lauzon, a weak, incapable man, only noted for his greed, was perfectly paralysed at a scene without example, even in those days of terror, when the Iroquois were virtually masters of the St. Lawrence valley from Huron to Gaspé.
At this very time a number of Frenchmen--probably fifty in all--were in the power of the Iroquois, and the governor had no nerve to make even an effort to save the Hurons from their fate. To understand the situation of affairs, it is necessary to go back for a few years. After the dispersion of the Hurons, the Iroquois, principally the Mohawks, became bolder than ever on the St. Lawrence. M. du Plessis-Bochat, the governor of Three Rivers, lost his life in a courageous but ill-advised attempt to chastise a band of warriors that were in ambush not far from the fort. Father Buteux was killed on his way to his mission of the Attikamegs or White Fish tribe, at the headwaters of the St. Maurice. In 1653, Father Poucet was carried off to a Mohawk village, where he was tortured in the usual fashion, and then sent back to Canada with offers of peace. The Senecas and Cayugas were then busily engaged in exterminating the Eries, who had burned one of their most famous chiefs, whose last words at the stake were prophetic: "Eries, you burn in me an entire nation!"