Their country was eight hundred or nine hundred miles away from Quebec, around Lake Huron. "Roughly speaking," says the Rev. T. J. Campbell in his "Pioneer Priests of North America," "the territory of the Hurons was at the head of Georgian Bay, with Lake Simcoe on the east, the Severn River and Matchedash Bay on the north, Nottawasaga Bay on the west, and was separated from the Neutrals on the south by what would now be a line drawn from the present town of Collingwood over to Hawkstone on Lake Simcoe. The train for Toronto, north of Midland and Penetanguishena, runs through the old habitat of the Hurons."
Many of the clergy who served Montreal had laboured among them. In the beginning the Hurons would not listen to any allusion to Christianity. Success only began in 1639, and lasted but for ten years, for before the end of 1650 as a distinct people they had vanished, being exterminated by their implacable foe, the Iroquois.
The Algonquins are said to derive their name from the word Algonquin, "the place where they spear the fish," i. e., the front of the canoe.
They were once a great race. Indeed today they number 95,000 of which 35,000 are in the United States and the rest in Canada. Their hereditary enemy, the Iroquois, were not so numerous, and thus we find Champlain allying himself with the Algonquins against the scanty sixteen or seventeen thousand Iroquois who lived in the New York territory. But herein lay Champlain's mistake. The Algonquins were wanderers and not warriors. They were a simple, stupid people, who neither cultivated the ground nor learned any textile arts and had no settled habitations. They were all worshipers of the Manitou, shameless in their immoralities and just as cruel to their captives, as were the Iroquois. They were, owing to their nomadic life, a prey to the latter and a difficulty to the few missionaries to Christianize them adequately, for every group would have necessitated a priest to follow them in the hunt for game or fish, as they wandered from place to place.
Yet, portions of them, being less fierce than other tribes of their race, welcomed the missionaries, who sympathized with them in their poverty and wretchedness. Thus at Montreal, as at Three Rivers and Quebec, these were the basis of the Indian converts.