It Would Take Us Beyond The Limit Of This Sketch To Recapitulate The
Series Of Massacres Which Reduced These Warlike Savages, The Hurons, From
Their High Estate To That Of A Dispersed, Nomadic Tribe, And Placed The
Iroquois Or Mohawks, At One Time Nearly Destroyed By The Hurons, In The
Ascendant.
Their final overthrow may be said to date back to the great Indian
massacres of 1648-9, at their
Towns, or missions, on the shores of Lakes
Simcoe, the first mission being founded in 1615 by the Friar LeCaron,
accompanied by twelve soldiers sent by Champlain in advance of his own
party. The Jesuit mission was attacked by the Iroquois in 1648; St. Louis,
St. Joseph [311], St. Ignace [312], Ste. Marie [313], St. Jean [314],
successively fell, or were threatened; all the inmates who escaped sought
safety in flight; the protracted sufferings of the missionaries Breboeuf
and Gabriel Lallemant have furnished one of the brightest pages of
Christian heroism in New France. Breboeuf expired on the 16th March and
Lallemant on 17th March, 1649. A party of Hurons sought Manitoulin Island,
then called Ekaentoton, a few fled to Virginia; others succeeded in
obtaining protection on the south shore of Lake Erie, from the Erie tribe,
only to share, later on, the dire fate of the nation who had dared to
incorporate them in its sparse ranks.
Father P. Ragueneau (the first writer, by the by, who makes mention of
Niagara Falls - Relations de 1648,) escorted three or four hundred
of these terror-stricken people to Quebec on the 26th July, 1650, and
lodged them in the Island of Orleans, at a spot since called L'Anse du
Fort, where they were joined, in 1651, by a party of Hurons, who in
1649, on hearing of the massacre of their western brethren, had asked to
winter at Quebec.
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