one of the most powerful and redoubtable in North America. The identity
of language was a great factor in the accomplishment of this marvellous
result. The Andastes, of Virginia, were therefore speaking the Huron
language. The Tionnontatés became so identified with their neighbours
that they were named the Hurons of the Petun. The savages of the Neutral
Nation had also adopted the Huron idiom. This uniformity of language
formed a league between these nations which would have been broken with
the utmost difficulty.

Father de Brébeuf calculated that, in his time, there were scattered
over the whole continent of North America about three hundred thousand
Indians who understood the Huron dialect. This was exaggerated, for the
aborigines covering the territory known to the Hurons from whom the
father had collected this information did not number three hundred
thousand persons. How could he rely upon these people, to whom a
thousand men represented simply an amazing number? How could the Hurons
make a census of an unsedentary people, wandering here and there
according to circumstances of war or other reasons, and recruiting
themselves with prisoners or with the remnants of conquered nations?

To give only one example of these strange recruitings, let us examine
the composition of the great family of the Iroquois in Champlain's time.
It was a collection of disbanded tribes, who had belonged to the Hurons,
to the Tionnontatés, to the Neutral, to the Eries and du Feu tribes. The
Iroquois had separated themselves from the Hurons to form a branch which
acquired with time more vivacity than the tree from which it had sprung.
The Hurons were called the good Iroquois in order to distinguish them
from the wicked Iroquois who were reputed to be barbarous. They fought
against all the nations living in Canada, and their name was a subject
of general apprehension.