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484 been said, be that of the formation of the Iroquois confederacy. This date was fixed by the estimates severally made at different times by my friend the Hon. L. H. Morgan and myself, in accordance with the testimony of the leading Iroquois chiefs, at about the middle of the fifteenth century, or, more precisely, about the year 1459. Other investigators, whose views are entitled to respectful consideration, including the Rev. Dr. Beauchamp and Mr. J. N. B. Hewitt, have been inclined to place the formation of the league at a later time. But their conclusions differ considerably, and fail to account for many important facts. I am therefore compelled to adhere to my original estimate. I fully accept Mr. Hewitt's identification of the "Trudamani" or "Toudamani," of whom Jacques Cartier heard from the Hurons in 1535, with the well-known "Tsonnontowanen" of later writers. These "great mountain people," or Senecas, were the most powerful of the Iroquois nations, and their name was commonly used by the Hurons or Wyandots from ancient times as the general name of all the Iroquois confederates. This we learn from the little book entitled Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandots, published at Toronto in 1870 by Peter Dooyentate Clarke, a half-breed Wyandot, and giving much important information concerning the traditions of his people. He speaks particularly of the war which occurred "in the first quarter of the sixteenth century," between the Hurons and the Senecas (or Iroquois), who had previously lived on friendly terms, though in separate villages, on the St. Lawrence River, near what is now Montreal, but was then the site of the Huron capital town of Hochelaga. The result was that the Hurons, later in the same century, broke up their villages near Montreal, and journeyed westward, and afterward northward, until they reached Lake Huron. Meanwhile the warfare between the two leading branches of the Huron-Iroquois stock continued through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All this is simply historical, and accords in the main with the narratives of the French explorers, from Cartier to Champlain and Charlevoix, and with the traditions of both branches of the Huron-Iroquois family.

Between the year 1459 and that of Cartier's arrival at Hochelaga, in 1535, there was ample time for the Hurons to become familiar with the new art of making wampum belts. In fact, we learn from Cartier's narrative that they were then proficient in it. When he kidnapped Donnaconna, the chief of Stadaconé (now Quebec), to carry him to France, the terrified people, in the hope of redeeming him, presented to the captain no less than twenty-four "collars of porcelain," or wampum belts, which, the writer tells us, "is the greatest treasure they have in the world, for they prize it above gold and silver."