n for its selection as
such; its central location and its accessibility from all points were
other reasons.

No tribe which feared the fierce Iroquois--and that embraced almost
every known tribe--would have dared to go to a "trading place," when in
order to reach it they had to cross the country of the Iroquois. But
they could get to Niagara from all sides without touching that Iroquois
territory. There they could meet and barter with tribes otherwise
almost impossible for them to reach.

The tribes of the southeast, and those of the northeast, could there
meet in safety.

Again, it was in the Country of the Neutrals, whose territory lay
between that of the Iroquois and the Hurons. And Indian law
decreed--and it was observed--that in the cabins of the Neutrals even
those bitter foes, Iroquois and Hurons, met in peace.

Champlain was certainly the first white man to mention the Falls of
Niagara in Literature; Brule was probably Niagara's first white
visitor; and equally probable, he was the first white man ever to
"trade" there. One would like well to know the particulars of that
"trade"--what he got and what he gave.

EARLY REFERENCES

Champlain and Brule are two names of surpassing interest in their
relation to Niagara. The first unquestionably heads the long list of
Authors who have ever written about our Waterfall; the other probably
heads the infinitely longer list--comprising many millions--of those
pale-faces who have ever visited our Cataract.

[Illustration: PETER KALM'S VIEW OF NIAGARA--1751.]

That first reference to Niagara in all Literature is found in that of
France, in 1603, when Samuel de Champlain, the subsequent founder of
Quebec, the first Governor-General of New France,--and still the most
picturesque figure in all Canadian history,--narrated, in his now
excessively rare pamphlet, "Des Sauvages" (of which only about
half-a-dozen copies are known to exist), what the Indians on the St.
Lawrence River told him about this waterfall (for he himself never saw
Niagara), in these words:

"Then they come to a lake [Ontario] some eighty leagues long, with
a great many Islands [the Thousand Islands], the water at its
extremity being fresh and the winter mild. At the end of this lake
they pass a fall [Niagara] somewhat high, where there is quite a
little water which falls down. There they carry their canoes
overland for about a quarter of a league, in order to pass