themselves, together with the Rapids for a short distance above them, and for a long distance below them, were an insuperable obstacle to water—that is, canoe—navigation; that here they were obliged to make a long "portage." It was the only break in an otherwise uninterrupted water travel of hundreds of miles; which, going westward, extended from a point on the St. Lawrence, many miles east of the outlet of Lake Ontario, clear to the farthest end of Lake Superior; and which, coming eastward, extended nearly 1,500 miles, from where the City of Duluth now stands even until it reached the bitter waters of the Atlantic Ocean in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence.

In the same volume, "Des Sauvages," appeared a poem by one "La Franchise," addressed to Champlain, in which mention is made of the "Saults Mocosans" or Mocosan Falls, "which shock the eyes of those who dare to look upon that unparalleled downpour."

Mocosa was the name of that territory vaguely called Virginia, and which seems to have embraced everything from New York to Florida, extending indefinitely to the west and northwest. The allusion is generally considered to refer to Niagara; thus making Niagara's appearance in Poetry cotemporaneous with its appearance in prose.

In 1609, Lescarbot published his "Histoire de la Nouvelle France," wherein he quotes extensively (including the references to Niagara) from Champlain; the work being reissued in several editions in subsequent years. And in 1610, Lescarbot, who was a great admirer of Champlain (he may himself have been "La Franchise"), produced a poem, wherein he speaks of the "great falls" which the Indians encounter in going up the St. Lawrence, from below the present site of Montreal, "jusqu'au voisinage de la Virginia"; which, under the above-noted boundaries of Virginia, has been stretched in imagination to include Niagara, but more likely meant the Rapids of the St. Lawrence.

Champlain, in the map which he made in 1612, notes a "waterfall," but places it at the Lake Ontario end of the river; still it is clearly meant for Niagara.

Early references to this Niagara Region—which up to about the middle of the 17th Century was owned and occupied by the Neuters, and after that time by their conquerors and annihilators, the Senecas—are to be found in that wonderful series of Reports made by the Catholic Missionaries in Canada to their Superiors in France, during a large part of the 17th Century, and known as the "Jesuit Relations."

From them we learn that Father Daillon was among the Neutrals, and "on the Iroquois Frontier" (which was east of the Niagara River, somewhere about midway between that and the Genesee River), in 1626.

In a letter, dated at Tonachin, a Huron village, 18th July, 1627, Father Daillon told of his visit to the Neuters the year before. In it he wrote:

The above quotation, which was given in Sagard, 1636, was omitted from Daillon's letter by Le Clercq in his "Premier Établissement de la Foi," 1691. In his translation of the latter work, John Gilmary Shea, in a note concerning this very passage, says:

That omission was doubtless at the instance of the French Government, whose permission was then a necessity before any book could be published. That Government knew the importance and the advantages of Niagara, both as a strategic point and as a Center of Trade. Only four years before Le Clercq's book appeared a French army, under De Denonville, had built a fort there; but the hostility of the Iroquois (incited by British agents) had forced its abandonment a year later. Anxious to again possess it, planning now to do so by diplomacy rather than by arms, the French Government would naturally have objected to any published allusion to the locality as a point of Trade,—which could in no way have aided its designs, but by further calling Britain's attention to Niagara's importance, would naturally cause her agents to be still further vigilant toward frustrating any move of France for the control thereof.

In the same letter Daillon says:

Yroquet, who was Champlain's friend, as before mentioned, being a close ally of the Hurons, evidently had no desire for a Frenchman to open trade directly with the Iroquois—the sworn foes of the Hurons—and thus to divert any of the trade which he carried on with the French in the Huron Country.

So the first white man known to have been on the Niagara River (in 1626) wrote about it as a "trading place." It clearly was regarded in that light, at that time, both by the Neutrals and by the Hurons; those being the only two tribes which Father Daillon had visited. And if it was so known to the tribes on the west and northwest, there was no reason why it should not have been so known—and it no doubt was so known—to the tribes to the south, to the east, and to the west.

On his map, in 1632, Champlain continues his location of the Cataract at the point where the river enters Lake Ontario; and marks it, "Falls at the extremity of Lake St. Louis [Ontario] very high, where many fish come down and are stunned."

Niagara in 1759, by Thomas Davies.

In 1640, Fathers Brebeuf and Chaumonot, on their famous Mission to the Neutrals, crossed the Niagara River at Onguiaahra, a village of that Nation, which stood on the site of the present Lewiston. They probably never saw the Falls; their visit being filled with danger, hunger, and threats of their destruction by the very savages whose souls they were trying to save. Father L'Allement, their Superior, in his account of their Mission, in the Jesuit Relation of 1642, speaks merely of "the village Onguiaahra, of the same name as the river."

Another passage in his letter says,—

And in all probability some of those Frenchmen had reached the Niagara River, in their trade with the Neutrals, before Father Daillon crossed its stream.

Niagara was then, as it is now, the geographical center of the eastern one-third of North America; it was the center of population among the many and widely distributed Indian Tribes; it was the most accessible, the most easily reached place, from all directions, in America.