[ Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1641, 71.--The Niagara was then called
the River of the Neutrals, or the Onguiaahra. Lalemant estimates the
Neutral population, in 1640, at twelve thousand, in forty villages. ]
Their name of Neutrals was due to their neutrality in the war between the
Hurons and the Iroquois proper. The hostile warriors, meeting in a
Neutral cabin, were forced to keep the peace, though, once in the open
air, the truce was at an end. Yet this people were abundantly ferocious,
and, while holding a pacific attitude betwixt their warring kindred,
waged deadly strife with the Mascoutins, an Algonquin horde beyond Lake
Michigan. Indeed, it was but recently that they had been at blows with
seventeen Algonquin tribes. [ Lettre du Pere La Roche Dallion, 8 Juillet,
1627, in Le Clerc, Etablissement de la Foy, I. 346. ] They burned female
prisoners, a practice unknown to the Hurons. [ Women were often burned
by the Iroquois: witness the case of Catherine Mercier in 1661, and many
cases of Indian women mentioned by the early writers. ] Their country
was full of game and they were bold and active hunters. In form and
stature they surpassed even the Hurons, whom they resembled in their mode
of life, and from whose language their own, though radically similar,
was dialectically distinct. Their licentiousness was even more open and
shameless; and they stood alone in the extravagance of some of their
usages. They kept their dead in their houses till they became
insupportable; then scraped the flesh from the bones, and displayed them
in rows along the walls, there to remain till the periodical Feast of the
Dead, or general burial. In summer, the men wore no clothing whatever,
but were usually tattooed from head to foot with powdered charcoal.

The sagacious Hurons refused them a passage through their country to the
French; and the Neutrals apparently had not sense or reflection enough to
take the easy and direct route of Lake Ontario, which was probably open
to them, though closed against the Hurons by Iroquois enmity. Thus the