Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/134

124 westward and southward, from their central town of La Pointe.

Aided by the French, Ottawas, Potawatumies, and Wyandots, they succeeded in checking the harassing incursions of the war-like Iroquois, and as they became equally possessed of the fire-arm, instead of being pressed westward, as they had been for centuries before, they retraced the eastern track of their ancestors' former emigration, and rejoined the remnants of their race who had been for many years cut off from them by the intervening Iroquois, and who had first greeted the French strangers who landed in the river St. Lawrence, and who termed them Algonquins.

From this period, the communication between the eastern section or rear of the Algic tribes, occupying the lower waters of the River St. Lawrence, and the great western van who occupied the area of Lake Superior, became comparatively free and open, for villages of the Algic tribes lined the shores of the great chain of Lakes and also the banks of the great river which forms the outlet into the "salt water."

In one of their traditions it is stated that "when the white man first came in sight of the 'Great Turtle' island of Mackinaw, they beheld walking on the pebbly shores, a crane and a bear who received them kindly, invited them to their wigwams, and placed food before them." This allegory denotes that Ojibways of the Crane and Bear Totem families first received the white strangers, and extended to them the hand of friendship and rites of hospitality, and in remembrance of this occurrence they are said to have been the favorite clans with the old French discoverers.