During the American Civil War of fifty years ago
the five companies of Iroquois Indians recruited in Canada
and in the state of New York were superior in height and
measurement to any other body of five hundred men in the
northern armies.
When the Iroquoian Family migrated, the Hurons settled
in the western peninsula of Ontario. The name of Lake
Huron still recalls their abode. But a part of the race
kept moving eastward. Before the coming of the whites,
they had fought their way almost to the sea. But they
were able to hold their new settlements only by hard
fighting. The great stockade which Cartier saw at Hochelaga,
with its palisades and fighting platforms, bore witness
to the ferocity of the struggle. At that place Cartier
and his companions were entertained with gruesome tales
of Indian fighting and of wholesale massacres. Seventy
years later, in Champlain's time, the Hochelaga stockade
had vanished, and the Hurons had been driven back into
the interior. But for nearly two centuries after Champlain
the Iroquois retained their hold on the territory from
Lake Ontario to the Hudson. The conquests and wars of
extermination of these savages, and the terror which they
inspired, have been summed up by General Francis Walker
in the saying: 'They were the scourge of God upon the
aborigines of the continent.
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