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 THE FALL OF HOCHELAQA. : 
 
 A STUDY OF POPULAR TRADITION. 
 
 BY 
 
 HORATIO HALE, M.A. (Harvard.), F.R.S. Canada, 
 
 LATE PRESIDBNT OF THE AMERICAN FOLK-LORE SOCIETY. 
 
 From the Journal op American Folk-Lore, 
 
 (^AMBRinoE, Mass. 
 
 1H9 + . 
 
 \j ^ . ) ^ 
 
 ; V- ■ 
 
V. 
 
THE JOURNAL OF 
 
 AMERICAN FOLK-LORE. 
 
 Vol. VII. — JANUARY-MARCH, 1894. — No. XXIV. 
 
 THE FALL OF HOCHELAGA: 
 
 A STUDY OF POPULAR TRADITION. 
 
 When, in the early autumn of 1535, the intrepid explorer, Jacques 
 Cartier, with his l.'ttle flotilla, recalling in number and dimensions 
 the caravels of Columbus, made his doubtful and hazardous way up 
 the great stream which his native guides knew as the River of 
 Hochelaga, but which he renamed the St. Lawrence, he found the 
 lands through which he passed occupied by tribes belonging to two 
 distinct ethnic groups. These have been commonly known as the 
 Algonkin (or Algonquin) and the Huron-Iroquois families. The 
 latest scientific nomenclature makes them the Algonquian and Iro- 
 quoian stocks. But, for the purpose of the present paper, it seems 
 advisable to retain the older designations. 
 
 From his guides, who were two Indians of the Huron-Iroquois 
 race, that had accompanied him to France from an earlier voyage to 
 the St. Lawrence Gulf, he learned that the regions along the river, 
 on both sides, from its mouth as far inland apparently as their know- 
 ledge extended, belonged, according to the native notions, to three 
 separate provinces or ''lands" {terres). Nearest the gulf was the 
 lanji of Saguenay, deriving its name from the great tributary stream 
 which unites with the St. Lawrence about a hundred miles below 
 Quebec. This territory was occupied, then as subsequently, by 
 scattered bands of the Algonkin stock. Next came the province of 
 '• Canada " proper, that is to say, the land of the " Town," for such 
 is the well-known meaning of Canada in the Iroquoian language and 
 all the allied idioms. This town was Stadacon^ a native village 
 which stood near the site of what is now Quebec. It was the capi- 
 tal or chief abode of Donnacona, the Great Lord {Agouhana) of the 
 province. He himself, as his title indicates, was of the Huron-Iro- 
 quois stock, though his people seem to have been in part of the 
 Algonkin family. But he and they were alike subject to a much 
 
2 y otirnal of American Folk-Lore. 
 
 mightier ruler, the great King and Lord {Roy ct Seigneur) of Hoche- 
 
 LAGA. 
 
 This densely peopled and strongly fortified town, which occupied 
 the site of what is now Montreal, was visited by Cartier, who has 
 left us a vivid description of the place and its inhabitants. The 
 path by which he approached it from the river led through a beau- 
 tiful plain, shaded at first by a forest of stately oaks, to which suc- 
 ceeded large and well-cultivated fields of maize. In the midst of 
 these plains, rising near the foot of a lofty eminence which Cartier 
 named the " Royal Mount " {Mont Royal, now abridged to Montreal), 
 the civic fortress presented the towering and formidable front which 
 caused the early settlers of northern New York to give to the sim- 
 ilar strongholds of their Iroquoian neighbors the name of " castles." 
 The inclosing wall was composed of a triple row of tree-trunks, 
 shaped and planted as palisades, and rising to the height of two 
 lances' length. The middle row was upright ; the inner and outer 
 rows, inclining to this, were crossed at the top, and braced by hori- 
 zontal beams, thus forming galleries, whence missiles could be 
 showered upon an assailing force. Within the inclosure were fifty 
 spacious houses, or rather barracks, some of them fifty yards long by 
 fifteen in width, framed of wood, and covered with sheets of bark. 
 Each house, divided into compartments, was the abode of several 
 families ; and the whole population probably comprised between two 
 and three thousand persons. But this number did not really indi- 
 cate the defensive force which its ruler had at his command. The 
 occupants of the fortress were merely a local garrison, which in 
 case of need could soon be largely recruited from the neighboring 
 country. For Hochelaga, as we learn from Cartier, was the capital 
 of a considerable empire, embracing, besides the " Canadians " of 
 Stadacon^, "eight or nine other peoples along the great river." 
 
 In 1543, France, disturbed by civil commotions, withdrew from 
 North America, and all efforts at exploration were intermitted. For 
 nearly sixty years the names of those strange northern chiefdoms 
 which Cartier had disclosed to the world remained unmentioned. It 
 was not until 1598 that the Marquis de la Roche, a nobleman of 
 Brittany, at length obtained from Henry IV. authority to resume 
 the colonization of New France, and received with this authority 
 the grandiloquent title of " Lieutenant-General of Canada, Hoche- 
 laga, Newfoundland, Labrador, and the countries adjacent." But 
 five years later, when Champlain, who was to be the actual founder, 
 made his way up the St. Lawrence to the seat of his future colony, 
 he found, to his surprise, that Hochelaga, along with Stadacone and 
 its other subject towns, had disappeared entirely, leaving no trace 
 of their existence. A few wandering Algonkins occupied, but 
 
The Fall of Hochclaga, 3 
 
 hardly pretended to possess, the country which had been the seat of 
 this lost err )ire. They and their Huron allies from the Georgian 
 Bay lived in a state of constant warfare with the confederate Iro- 
 quoian nations, who held nearly the whole southern shore of the 
 St, Lawrence and Lake Ontario, and kept the tribes along the 
 northern coast of that river and lake in perpetual alarm. It is nat- 
 ural to inquire what had become of the great Hochelagan domin- 
 ion, which had so strangely vanished, and had been replaced, as it 
 seemed, by a still more formidable power on the southern side of 
 the dividing waters. 
 
 This is a question with which many historians, from Charlevoix 
 to Parkman, have dealt, but to which no decisive answer has thus 
 far been returned. It is evidently a question of no small impor- 
 tance, historical as well as ethnological ; for it concerns the leading 
 cause of the failure or success of French and British colonization 
 in America. If, after the lapse of more than three centuries, we 
 can succeed in answering it, there may be good hope of solving 
 hereafter some other still more interesting and perplexing problems, 
 such, for example, as the origin and fate of the Mound-builders and 
 Cliff-dwellers, and the source and development of Mexican and 
 Mayan civilization. 
 
 In the present case the problem, it must be admitted, is compara- 
 tively simple. Unless we make the very unlikely supposition that 
 not only were Hochelaga and its subject towns totally destroyed, 
 but their populations were completely exterminated, there are only 
 two directions in which we can reasonably look for the offspring of 
 these populations. The survivors either withdrew to the south side 
 of their great river, and there united with, or, as some suppose, 
 actually became, the Iroquois nations, or else they retired to the west 
 and there joined, or, as some think, wholly composed, the Huron 
 tribes whom Champlain found near the Georgian Bay. The ques- 
 tion is thus narrowed down to two points : firstly, to which of these 
 ancient divisions of the Huron- Iroquois family are the Hochelagan 
 people to be traced ; and secondly, by what hostile power was the 
 overthrow of their state accomplished } 
 
 It might seem that the evidence of language alone should be suf- 
 ficient to settle the first of these points. We have two vocabularies 
 left us by Cartier, containing many of the common words by which 
 the affiliations of language are determined. But unfortunately all 
 that they enable us to prove is that the people of Cartier's " Land 
 and Kingdom of Hochelaga and Canada" spoke a dialect of the 
 Huron-Iroquois stock. Every attempt to find a specially close con- 
 nection between this dialect and that of any other known branch of 
 the stock has thus far proved a failure. The imperfections of Car- 
 
4 yournal of American Folk-Lore, 
 
 tier's orthography and the changes of time are quite sufficient to 
 account for this result. 
 
 In the absence of other evidence, we have to fall back upon that 
 of tradition. It is only of late years, and especially since folk-lore 
 has become a science, and is studied as such in connection with its 
 sister science of comparative philology, that the value of this evi- 
 dence has been fully understood. In the present case it has been 
 found decisive. Several years ago, while engaged in studying the 
 languages and history of the Canadian tribes, I visited the Wyan- 
 dots of Anderdon, on the Detroit River, the last feeble remnant of 
 the only tribe which retained in Canada the speech of the once 
 famous and powerful Huron people. This ill-fated people, crushed 
 by the Iroquois in the desperate struggle of which Parkman, in his 
 volume on "The Jesuits in North America," has given us a narra- 
 tive of singular interest, fled at first to the far west, and took refuge 
 for a time among their Algonkin friends, the Ojibways, on the 
 shores and islands of Lakes Michigan and Superior. After a time, 
 returning gradually eastward, they made their principal abode for a 
 term on the island of Michilimackinac. Thence, at a later day, de- 
 scending through Lakes Huron and St. Clair, they took possession 
 of the fertile plains on both sides of the Detroit River, where the 
 guns of Fort Pontchartrain and the presence of friendly Algonkin 
 bands — Oj ibways, Ottawas, and others — gave them hope of secu- 
 rity against their persistent Iroquois enemies. The same distin- 
 guished historian, in his "Conspiracy of Pontiac," has described the 
 remarkable predominance which the intellectual superiority of this 
 people, even in their reduced condition, enabled them to maintain 
 over the surrounding tribes. 
 
 Finally, about the middle of the present century, the majority of 
 the Wyandots, on both sides of the Detroit River, decided to remove 
 to the southwest, under the auspices of the American government. 
 There in the Indian Territory, and, singularly enough, on a tract 
 directly adjoining the abode of an emigrant band of their ancient 
 enemies, the Senecas, they have found what they may well hope to 
 be a final refuge. It is interesting to know, as an evidence of their 
 strongly conservative character, that, after so many wanderings and 
 vicissitudes, they retain their ancient civic polity with so much vigor 
 that Major Powell has been enabled, in a " Study of Wyandot Gov- 
 ernment," to reveal fully this remarkable system, and to clear up 
 many mysteries which the intelligent and well-educated Franciscan 
 and Jesuit missionaries, living in the Huron towns nearly three 
 centuries ago, did not fully comprehend. 
 
 A small number of the Wyandots, not exceeding seventy, but 
 including a few persons of superior capacity, clung to their Canadian 
 
The Fall of Hochelaga. 5 
 
 homes, and remained on what was known as the Anderdon Reserve. 
 From them, and especially from their chief, an elderly man of noble 
 presence and marked intelligence, much information concerning the 
 history, customs, and beliefs of the people and their ancestors was 
 obtained. The chief bore in English the name of Joseph White, 
 and in his own language the somewhat singular appellation of Man- 
 dorong, or " Unwilling." The name, which he owed to the fancy of 
 his parents, did not by any means indicate his disposition, which 
 was peculiarly frank and genial. He assured me that the traditions 
 of his people represented them as having dwelt originally in the 
 east, near Quebec. He had once journeyed as far as that city, and 
 had then visited the remnant of the Hurons at Lorette. These had 
 ceased to make use of their ancient language in their ordinary 
 speech, but they had not entirely forgotten it ; and they still retained 
 the primitive traditions of their race. They took him, he said, to a 
 mountain, and showed him the opening in its side from which the 
 progenitors of their people emerged, when they first " came out of 
 the ground." This notion, which prevails in many countries, is 
 commonly held to be a childish myth, born of a metaphor, through 
 which, as in the case of the ancient Athenians, a people proclaim 
 themselves to be the autochthones of a country. Further inquiry, 
 however, has led to the opinion that the expression, with the result- 
 ing myth, has had in many cases another and more intelligible origin. 
 It indicated in the first instance simply that the people believed their 
 ancestors to have come "from below," that is, "from down-stream," 
 or, in the case of an oceanic tribe, "from the leeward." In the pres- 
 ent case it probably showed that the Hurons of Quebec believed 
 their progenitors to have ascended the St. Lawrence from an earlier 
 abode nearer the Atlantic Ocean. 
 
 Among other informants whom I consulted in my successive visits 
 to Anderdon were two aged men, of considerable ability and some 
 literary attainments, Alexander Clarke, the government interpreter, 
 and his brother, Peter Dooyentate Clarke. They were sons of an 
 English officer by an Indian mother, and had both received some 
 schooling ; but they had spent their lives among the Indians, with 
 whose ideas, customs, and legends they were thoroughly familiar. 
 From Peter I received a small printed book, of which he claimed to 
 be the author, and doubtless with truth, though he had evidently 
 had the occasional aid of a more practised hand. It was published 
 in 1870, by Hunter, Rose & Co., of Toronto, and bore the title of 
 "Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandots, and Sketches 
 of Other Indian Tribes of North America." A careful perusal and 
 some conversation with the author left no doubt that he had done 
 his best to give a fair and correct report of the beliefs which pre- 
 
6 Journal of American Folk-Lore. 
 
 vailed among his people respecting the events of their troubled his- 
 tory. 
 
 To make these clear it should be explained that the people to 
 whom the French colonists gave, in their dialect, the nickname of 
 Hurons, or " Shock-heads," from their mode of dressing their hair, 
 were known among themselves, and to other tribes of the same race, 
 as the " Wandat," a word which means simply "of one speech." 
 This name was corrupted by the English to Wyandot, and has now, 
 except in literature and as a geographical expression, superseded 
 the more euphonious French term. The modern Wyandots are 
 mostly descended from a single Huron tribe, the only one which re- 
 tained its organization when the confederacy was broken up by the 
 Iroquois. This tribe, which originally dwelt apart from the others, 
 in the hilly region about Nottawassaga Bay, was known to its allies 
 and to the French as the Tionontates, or "People beyond the Moun- 
 tains," and more commonly to the traders as " the Tobacco Nation " 
 {Nation du Pclnn), from a choice variety of tobacco which they cul- 
 tivated and sold. They had still another name, as will be hereafter 
 mentioned. In various respects these Tionontates bore to the other 
 Huron tribes the same relation which the Caniengas (who are com- 
 monly known by the nickname of Mohawks) bore to their fellow 
 " nations " of the Iroquois confederacy. They were deemed the 
 oldest in lineage and the highest in civil rank. Their head-chief 
 surpassed in dignity all other chiefs. Their dialect was the source 
 from which the dialects of all the other tribes of their branch were 
 derived. This linguistic paternity and preeminence of the Mohawk 
 speech among the Iroquois dialects had been already made clear to 
 me by a careful comparison of vocabularies and grammars. My 
 inquiries on the Anderdon Reserve brought out equally convincing 
 evidence of the fact that the speech of the Tionontates was the old- 
 est in form, not only of the Huron dialects, but of all the Huron- 
 Iroquois languages. It alone, with the doubtful exception of the 
 Cherokee (which bears marks of being a " mixed language "), has 
 retained a labial articulation, the w, which, with all other labials, the 
 remaining idioms of that stock have lost. 
 
 Of the persistence of ancient names and beliefs in this Huron 
 sept I found remarkable evidence in a story related to me by Chief 
 Mandorong, and confirmed in a singular and unexpected manner 
 from various other quarters. This stoiy, which may be entitled 
 " The Legend of King Sastaretsi," is given in my note-book as fol- 
 lows : — 
 
 " In very ancient times the Hurons (or Wandat) had a great king 
 or head-chief, named Sastaretsi. They were then living in the far east, 
 near Quebec, where their forefathers first came out of the ground. 
 
The Fall of Hochelaga, 7 
 
 The king told them that they must go to the west, in a certain direc- 
 tion, which he pointed out. He warned them, moreover, that this 
 would not be the end of their wanderings. He instructed them that 
 when he died they should make an oa!en image resembling him, 
 should clothe it in his attire, and place it upright at the head of his 
 grave, looking toward the sunrise. When the sunlight should fall 
 upon it, they would see the image turn and look in the direction in 
 which they wore to go. 
 
 " King Sastarctsi went with his people in their westward journey 
 as far as Lake Huron, and died there. But he had time before his 
 death to draw, on a strip of birch bark, by way of further guidance, 
 an outline of the course which they were to pursue, to reach the 
 country in which they were finally to dwell. They were to pass 
 southward down Lake Huron, and were to continue on until they 
 came to a place where the water narrowed to a river, and this river 
 then turned and entered another great lake. 
 
 " When he died they fulfilled his commands. They made an im- 
 age of oak, exactly resembling their dead king, clothed it in his dress 
 of deerskin, adorned the head with plumes, and painted the face like 
 the face of a chief. They set up this image at the head of the grave, 
 planting it firmly between two strong pieces of timber, its face 
 turned to the east. All the people then stood silently around it in 
 the early dawn. When the rays of the rising sun shone upon it, 
 they saw the image turn with such power that the strong timbers 
 between which it was planted groaned and trembled as it moved. It 
 stayed at length, with its face looking to the south, in the precise 
 direction in which the chief had instructed them to go. Thus his 
 word was fulfilled, and any hesitation which the people had felt 
 about following his injunctions was removed. 
 
 " A chosen party, comprising about a dozen of their best warriors, 
 was first sent out in canoes, with the birch-bark map, to follow its 
 tracings and examine the country. They pursued their course down 
 Lake Huron, and through the River and Lake St. Clair, till they 
 came to where the stream narrowed, at what is now Detroit ; then 
 advancing further they came, after a brief course, to the broad ex- 
 panse of Lake Erie. Returning to the narrow stream at Detroit, 
 they said : ' This is the place which King Sastaretsi meant to be 
 the home of our nation.' Then they went back to their people, 
 who, on hearing their report, all embarked together in their canoes 
 and passed southward down the lake, and finally took up their abode 
 in the country about Detroit, which they were to possess as long as 
 they remained a nation. The image of King Sastaretsi was left 
 standing by his grave in the far north, and perhaps it is there to this 
 day." 
 
■1 ■■ 
 
 8 yournal of American Folk-Lore, 
 
 It will be observed that in this narrative " Kin£ astaretsi " is de- 
 scribed as leading tue Hurons in their migration irom the east, and 
 IS dying just before their return from the northwest to the vicinity 
 of Lake Erie. The time which elapsed between these two events 
 cannot have been less than a century. This portion of the legend, 
 at first perplexing, is explained in a singular and unexpected manner 
 by a passage in the well-known work ("New Voyages to North 
 America") of the French traveller. Baron La Ronton, whose de- 
 scriptions of New France in the period between the years 1683 and 
 1694 contain the results of much inquiry and acute observation. 
 " The leader of the nation of Hurons," he tells us, " is called Sas- 
 taretsi. The name," he adds, "has been kept up by descent for 
 seven or eight bund ed years, and is likely to continue to future 
 ages." This practice of keeping up the name of a chief by succes- 
 sion seems to have been common among the tribes of the Huion- 
 Iroquois stock. The names of the fifty chiefs who formed the Iro- 
 quois league have been thus presented for more than four hundred 
 years. The Sastaretsi who led his people from the St. Lawrence to 
 Lake Huron was the predecessor of his namesake whose dying 
 injunctions induced them, after <"heir overthrow and expulsion by 
 the Iroquois, to take refuge about the French forts at Detroit and 
 in northern Ohio. 
 
 It is a curious and noticeable fact, however, that neither the Iro- 
 quois nor the French are mentioned in this story, nor is any reason 
 given either for the departure of the Hurons from their original 
 home near Quebec, nor for their return from the northwest to the 
 neighborhood of Detroit. The pride of the Indian character refused 
 to admit that their wanderings were determined by any power be- 
 yond their own will and the influence of their chief. 
 
 The story of the image is probably true in its main incidents, 
 though tradition has added some marvellous details. It was natural 
 that the French, after they had established their forts in Michigan 
 and Ohio, should desire to have the aid of their Indian allies in 
 defending them against the Iroquois and the English. This project 
 would involve the removal of the Hurons from their asylum in the 
 far north to the perilous vicinity of their powerful and dreaded foes. 
 While the leaders might be persuaded, by the arguments and solici- 
 tations of their French friends, to take this risk, the majority of the 
 people may have been unwilling to abandon their secure retreat and 
 their cultivated fields. To overcome this hesitation, it would be nat- 
 ural also for the chiefs to employ some artifice. Of this species of 
 management, to which the leading men among the Hurons and Iro- 
 quois were wont to resort in dealing with their self-willed but credu- 
 lous people, many curious and amusing examples are related by the 
 
The Fall of Hochelaga, 9 
 
 early missionaries. In the present instance, it would seem that an 
 appeal was made to the reverence with which the memory of their 
 deceased head-chief was regarded. A rude image of him was set 
 up with much formality, and a report was circulated of a death-bed 
 prediction made by him concerning it. Early in the morning after 
 its erection the image was found to have preternaturally changed its 
 position, and to be gazing in the direction in which the great chief, 
 in his lifetime, had desired that his people should go. This moni- 
 tion from the dead was effectual, and the emigration at once took 
 place. The legend, as told in after times, assumed naturally a more 
 lively and striking cast ; but in its leading outlines it is intelligible 
 and credible enough. Its chief interest, however, resides in the fact 
 that it proves beyond question the existence of a belief among the 
 Wyandots of the present day that their ancestors came to the west, 
 at no very distant period, from the vicinity of Quebec. 
 
 The casual references which are made to this subject in the Jesuit 
 "Relations" deserve to be noticed. In general the missionaries, 
 while describing with much particularity the customs and religious 
 rites of the Indians, and in fact every matter which seemed to have 
 any bearing on the work of their conversion, took no pains to record 
 any facts relating to the early history of the tribes. Only a casual 
 allusion apprises us that the former residence of the Hurons near 
 the coast was spoken of among them as a well-known fact. The 
 " Relations " for 1636 contain a full and detailed account of the 
 Huron nation by Brebeuf, — an admirable work, from which our 
 knowledge of that people in their primitive state is chiefly drawn. 
 In speaking of their festivities, he ascribes the origin of some of 
 their dances to the teaching of a certain being, " rather a giant than 
 a man," whom the people encountered at the time when they lived 
 by the seaside {lors qicils habitoient sur le bord de la mcr). 
 
 The other allusion seems, at the first glance, to bear a different 
 interpretation. It has been quoted by Gallatin and others as afford- 
 ing evidence that the people whom Cartier encountered on the St. 
 Lawrence were Iroquois ; but a careful consideration of the facts, 
 in the light of recent information, shows that this inference cannot 
 properly be drawn from it. Father Le Jeune writes from the vicin- 
 ity of Quebec in 1636 : " I have often sailed from Quebec to Three 
 Rivers. The country is fine and very attractive. The Indians 
 showed me some places where the Iroquois formerly cultivated the 
 land." These Indians were of the Algonkin race, and their state- 
 ment, which we need not question, merely shows that their immediate 
 predecessors in that locality were Iroquois. If, as the traditions of 
 the Hurons aflfirm, the flight of their ancestors from their eastern 
 abode was caused by the attacks of the Iroquois, we may be certain 
 
lo Journal of American Folk-Lore. 
 
 It these conquerors did not leave the deserted country vacant. 
 Their first proceeding would be to assume possession of it, and to 
 plant colonies at favorable points. This was their custom in all 
 their conquests. An Iroquois colony was thus established at Sha- 
 mokin, now Sunbury, in Pennsylvania, after the Delawarcs were sub- 
 dued ; and other settlements secured the territories which the con- 
 federacy acquired in northern Ohio. Thus it would seem probable 
 that, after the flight of the Hurons, the Iroquois held their lands 
 along the northern bank of the St. Lawrence for a considerable 
 time. At length, however, the annoyance and loss from the inces- 
 sant at^"^cks of the surrounding Algonkins became so intolerable as 
 to make these distant outposts not worth keeping. Their abandon- 
 ment apparently did not long precede the arrival of Champlain, who, 
 as is well known, found the Hurons and the Algonkins united in 
 strict alliance, and engaged in a deadly warfare with the Iroquois. 
 
 On another occasion. Chief Mandorong gave me an account of the 
 origin of the war between the Hurons and the Iroquois, which caused 
 his people to leave their eastern abode. The two communities were 
 living near each other, beside the mountain from which their ances- 
 tors had issued. They dwelt on opposite sides of the mountain, and 
 apparently of the river, though the latter point was left in some 
 obscurity in the narrative. To prevent dififerences, the chiefs had 
 forbidden the people of the two tribes to intermarry. An Iroquois 
 warrior at length transgressed this interdict, and married a Huron 
 woman She Incurred his anger by some misconduct, and was killed 
 by him. The chiefs of the two tribes held a conference, and agreed 
 that, as she seemed to have merited her fate, her husband should go 
 unpunished. This decision, however, did not satisfy her kinsmen. 
 One of them went secretly into the country of the Iroquois, and killed 
 a man of that people. Thereupon a war arose between the two 
 nations. Many conflicts took place, in which the Hurons generally 
 had the best. At last, however, by an act of treachery, the Iroquois 
 got possession of the Huron town during a truce, when the men 
 were absent from it, holding a council elsewhere, and killed all the 
 women and children. When the Huron warriors returned and found 
 their wives and children massacred, their grief and wrath knew no 
 bounds. They pursued and overtook the murderers (as the chief 
 affirmed) and slew them to the last man. They then quitted the 
 mountain near Quebec, and scattered themselves over the country. 
 This statement may be taken as sufficient evidence that what tliey 
 had suffered was really an overwhelming defeat. That this was the 
 belief of the chief was evident from what he immediately added, — 
 that there were some families which had not been included in the 
 massacre, having been in the woods, hunting or otherwise engaged, 
 
The Fall of Hochelaga, 1 1 
 
 at the time, and from them all the Wyandots are descended. He 
 further said that the missionaries were in the country at the time 
 of the final dispersion, though not at the beginning of the war. It 
 was evident that he looked upon the war as a secular strife, which 
 began in early times in the far east, and was fought out through 
 many years and successive stages of westward flight and pursuit, 
 until it culminated near Lake Huron in the terrible conflicts wit- 
 nessed and recorded by the Jesuit missionaries, several of whom 
 perished in its final agonies. If we wish to picture to ourselves the 
 incident" which, at the outset of the war, preceded, accompanied, 
 and followed the fall of Hochelaga, we have only to turn to the 
 pages in which Parkman, in his work already referred to, has related 
 the closing scenes of the same contest. 
 
 The traditions preserved by Peter Clarke in his book accord in 
 general with those related to me by Chief Joseph White, di^ering 
 just enough to show that the two narratives are the independent tes- 
 timonies of honest reporters. " P'rom traditional accounts," writes 
 Clarke, "the Wyandots once inhabited a country northeastward 
 from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, or somewhere along the gulf 
 coast, before they ever met with the French or any European adven- 
 turers." At a later period, "during the first quarter of the sixteenth 
 century," as he thinks, — though his chronology must be mainly 
 conjectural, — a rupture took place between the Wyandots and the 
 Iroquois (whom Clarke generally designates by the name of their 
 largest tribe, the Senecas), "while they were peaceably sojourning 
 together, in separate villages, within the vicinity of what is now Mon- 
 treal." " At this time," he adds, " and back to an unknown period, 
 the Iroquois and Wyandots had always dwelt in the same region, 
 where their abodes and hunting-grounds were conterminous." There 
 are, he says, conflicting accounts of the cause which led to the quar- 
 rel. " Some say that it commenced about a Seneca maiden and a 
 chief's son." The wrongs of the maiden led to the assassination of 
 a Seneca chief by a Wyandot warrior. It is a curious fact, and a 
 strong evidence of the truthfulness of the narrative, or at least of the 
 narrators, that both Clarke and White admitted that their own people 
 were in fault at the beginning of the war. The result is told alike 
 in both narratives, but with more particularity by Clarke. The 
 Wyandots " broke up their villages and journeyed westward," until 
 they reached Niagara. Here they remained a considerable time, 
 and then " migrated northward to where the city of Toronto now 
 stands." Thence after a time, in fear of the Iroquois, they retreated 
 still further to the north, until they reached Lake Huron. Here 
 they found game abundant, and abode for many years. And here 
 they were joined by a band of their own people, who had remained 
 
1 2 journal of American Folk-Lore. 
 
 on the Ottawa River. These doubtless composed that branch of 
 the Huron nation which had separated from the Tionontates on the 
 overthrow of the Hochelagan dominion, and had retreated from 
 Montreal up the Ottawa River. It was along this river that Cham- 
 plain and the French missionaries followed the traces of these fu'^i- 
 tives early in the seventeenth century. From this northern refuge 
 on the Georgian Bay, Champlain, with a party of his soldiers, led a 
 Huron army into the region south of Lake Ontario, on an expedi- 
 tion against the Iroquois, which ended disastrously. Had the result 
 been otherwise and the Iroquois been crushed, as the assailants ex- 
 pected, the course of North American history would undoubtedly 
 have been widely deflected. The attack of Champlain and his red- 
 skin allies was soon terribly avenged by the Iroquois warriors, whose 
 raids broke up the Huron towns., and kept back the French settle- 
 ments for more than a century, while the English colonies were 
 gathering strength. 
 
 The flight of the Tionontatds, first to Michilimackinac and thence 
 to the neighborhood of Detroit, is narrated by Clarke at some length. 
 In connection with the latter movement is mentioned " the last of 
 the ancient line of head-chiefs or kings of pure Wyandot blood, 
 named Suts-tau-ra-tse." He is spoken of as living about the middle 
 of the eighteenth century, and is said to have died at a g''e'^c age in 
 its last decade. He was probably the grandson of the King Sasta- 
 retsi of my friend Mandorong's legend ; and there can be little doubt 
 that he was the person who was seen in his boyhood by Charlevoix, 
 when that historian visited Detroit as the guest of the commandant, 
 Tonti, in 1721. He describes a great meeting of the neighboring 
 tribes, Huron and Algonkin, which was called by the commandant to 
 receive a message from the governor. " Sastaretsi," writes Charle- 
 voix, "whom our Frenchmen call the king of the Hurons (and who 
 is in fact the hereditary chief of the Tionontates, who are the true 
 Hurons), was present. But as he is still a minor, he came merely 
 for the form. His uncle, who governs for him and who is styled the 
 Regent, spoke in his stead, in the quality of the orator of the nation. 
 When a council is held, the honor of speaking for all the tribes is 
 commonly conferred upon the Hurons." 
 
 On another occasion this noted name turned up unexpectedly. In 
 obtaining from my Iroquois friends a list of the Indian tribes with 
 which they were acquainted, I received from them two names for 
 the Tionontates, in addition to the latter name, which was merely a 
 local designation. One of the names was Wanat, the Iroquois form 
 of Wandat ; the other was Sastaretsi. It is not uncommon for an 
 Indian tribe, of the Huron-Iroquois stock, to be named from its 
 principal hereditary chief. A common name of the Mohawks was 
 the plural form of the title of their leading chief, Tckarihoken. 
 
The Fall of Hockelaga, 
 
 13 
 
 An important confirmation of the tradition received from the 
 Anderdon Wyandots is furnished by a high authority. That accom- 
 plished ethnologist and careful investigator, the late Sir Daniel 
 Wilson, contributed to the transactions of the Royal Society of 
 Canada for 1884 an admirable paper, entitled "The Huron-Iroquois, 
 — a Typical Race." This paper is reprinted in his latest volume, 
 " The Lost Atlantis and other Ethnographic Studies," and should 
 be consulted by every student of this interesting subject. He had 
 visited the Hurons of Lorette, near Quebec, already referred to, — a 
 small band of some three hundrc^ half-castes, descended from Huron 
 refugees who found an asylum in that quarter after the destruction 
 of their towns in the west by the Iroquois. In referring to the 
 story told me by the Anderdon chief, Joseph White, Sir Daniel 
 Wilson, adds: "The late Huron chief, Tahourenche, or Francois 
 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 cer- 
 tain ancient events in the history of his people as having occurred 
 when they lived beside the big sea." 
 
 All these facts, taken together, seem to lead to conclusions of 
 great importance with regard to the value of traditional evidence. 
 It is plain that until recently this evidence has been seriously under- 
 valued. Our students of history have been too generally a book- 
 worshipping race, unwilling to accept any testimony with regard to 
 ancient events which is not found in some contemporary page, either 
 written or printed. It is not half a century since a distinguished 
 English author, eminent both as a statesman and as a philologist, 
 pronounced the opinion that no tradition can be trusted which is 
 more than a hundred years old. At the time when this opinion was 
 put forth by Sir George C. Lewis, many voyagers and missionaries 
 in the Pacificf Islands were accumulating traditional testimony of 
 vast extent and varied origin, which is now admitted on all hands to 
 prove the occurrence of events that must have taken place at suc- 
 cessive periods extending over the last two thousand years. The 
 " Brief History of the Hawaiian People," by Prof. W. D. Alexander 
 of Honolulu, published in 1891 "by order of the Board of Education 
 of the Hawaiian Kingdom," recounts as unquestionable facts many 
 voyages, migrations, battles, royal and priestly accessions, marriages, 
 and deaths which have occurred in the Sandwich Islands and other 
 groups, from the eleventh century to our own time. At the other 
 extremity of the great ocean, the " Polynesian Society," established 
 
14 journal of American Folk-Lore. 
 
 at Wellington, New Zealand, has published in its excellent quarterly 
 journal communications from able contributors relating to various 
 island histories, and carrying these back, with the aid of numerous 
 mutually confirmatory genealogies, for many centuries, with unhesi- 
 tating belief in their general truth. In this way the history of the 
 peopling of the vast Polynesian region, extending over a space 
 larger than North America, and covering at least twenty centuries, 
 is gradually becoming known to us as surely, if not as minutely, as 
 that of the countries of Europe during the same period. 
 
 The question naturally arises whether we may not hope to recover 
 the history of aboriginal America for at least the same length of 
 time. The facts now recorded will show that the few dispersed 
 members of the Huron-Iroquois stock retain to this day, after many 
 wanderings, clear traditions of a time, which cannot have been less 
 than four centuries ago, when their ancestors dwelt on the northern 
 coast of the St. Lawrence Gulf. The historical traditions of the 
 Delawares, retained in memory by their famous Picture Record, 
 styled the Walam Oltim, or Red Score, which has been carefully 
 published and admirably elucidated by Dr. Brinton in his volume, 
 " The Lenapd and their Legends," seem to go back for more than 
 thrice that period. And the conclusions derived from these sources 
 have been lately confirmed and enlarged by a series of important 
 investigations relating to almost every branch of the fifty-eight abo- 
 riginal stocks vvhiv.h have been found to exist between Mexico and 
 the Arctic Ocean. In these studies, in which, besides the names 
 already mentioned, those of many members of the Bureau of Eth- 
 nology, the Peabody Mu:^eura,the Hemenway Expedition, the Royal 
 Society of Canada, and its affiliated Associations, the American Anti- 
 quarian Society, the American Foil: Lore Society, and several histori- 
 cal societies, have been honorably conspicuous, we have the gratifying 
 earnest of large future gains to historical and ethnological science 
 which are to be expected from this soarce. We have every reason 
 to feel assured that in the three hundrea Indian reservations and 
 recognized bands of the United States and Canada, with populations 
 varying from less than a hundred to more than twenty thousand, 
 and comprising now many men and women of good education and 
 superior intelligence, there are mines of tradition d lore, ready to 
 yield returns of inestimable value to well-qualified and sympathetic 
 explorers. 
 
 Horatio Hale. 
 
 Note. — This paper was prepared for the World's Congress of Anthropology, 
 held at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, in August and September, 
 1893, and will appear in the volume of Proceeding^ of the Congress.