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:

"I have always seen them constant in their resolution to go with at
least four canoes to the trade, if I would guide them, the whole
difficulty being that we did not know the way. Yroquet, an Indian
known in those countries, who had come there with twenty of his men
hunting for beaver, and who took fully five hundred, would never
give us any mark to know the mouth of the river. He and several
Hurons assured us well that it was only ten days journey [from the
Huron Country] to the trading place; but we were afraid of taking
one river for another and losing our way, or dying of hunger on the
land."

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

"This was evidently the Niagara River and the route through Lake
Ontario," and he adds: "The omission of the passage by Le Clercq
was evidently caused by the allusion to trade."

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 Tra