by Champlain on a relatively level piece of ground, now occupied by a
market-house and close to a famous old church erected in the days of
Frontenac, in commemoration of the victorious repulse of the New England
expedition led by Phipps. For twenty-seven years Champlain struggled
against constantly accumulating difficulties to establish a colony on
the St. Lawrence. He won the confidence of the Algonquin and Huron tubes
of Canada, who then lived on the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, and in
the vicinity of Georgian Bay. Recognizing the necessity of an alliance
with the Canadian Indians, who controlled all the principal avenues to
the great fur-bearing regions, he led two expeditions, composed of
Frenchmen, Hurons, and Algonquins, against the Iroquois or Confederacy
of the Five Nations[2]--the Mohawks, the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas,
and Senecas--who inhabited the fertile country stretching from the
Genesee to the Hudson River in the present state of New York. Champlain
consequently excited against his own people the inveterate hostility of
the bravest, cruellest and ablest Indians with whom Europeans have ever
come in contact in America. Champlain probably had no other alternative
open to him than to become the active ally of the Canadian Indians, on
whose goodwill and friendship he was forced to rely; but it is also
quite probable that he altogether underrated the ability and bravery of
the Iroquois who, in later years, so often threatened the security of
Canada, and more than once brought the infant colony to the very verge
of ruin.

[2: In 1715 the confederacy was joined by the Tuscaroras, a southern
branch of the same family, and was then called more properly the Six
Nations.]

It was during Champlain's administration of affairs that the Company of
the Hundred Associates was formed under the auspices of Cardinal