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.'

The Iroquois were in some respects superior to most of
the Indians of the continent. Though they had a limited
agriculture, and though they made hardly any use of
metals, they had advanced further in other directions
than most savages. They built of logs, houses long enough
to be divided into several compartments, with a family
in each compartment. By setting a group of houses together,
and surrounding them with a palisade of stakes and trees
set on end, the settlement was turned into a kind of
fort, and could bid defiance to the limited means of
attack possessed by their enemies. Inside their houses
they kept a good store of corn, pumpkins and dried meat,
which belonged not to each man singly but to the whole
group in common. This was the type of settlement seen at
Quebec and at Hochelaga, and, later on, among the Five
Nations. Indeed, the Five Nations gave to themselves the