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.
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 the fall; afterwards entering another lake [Erie] some sixty leagues long and containing very good water."
In the same volume Champlain records that another savage told him,--
"That the water at the western end of the lake [Ontario] was perfectly salt; that there was a fall about a league wide, where a very large mass of water falls into said lake."
It was not the wonders nor the beauty of the Cataract that impressed itself upon the minds of those savages, and that led them to furnish to Champlain--and so to the white man's world--the very first knowledge of the existence of Niagara. No! What most impressed the Cataract upon the minds of those Aborigines was the fact that at this point, the Falls themselves, together with the Rapids for a short distance above them, and for a long distance below them, were an insuperable obstacle to water--that is, canoe--navigation; that here they were obliged to make a long "portage." It was the only break in an otherwise uninterrupted water travel of hundreds of miles; which, going westward, extended from a point on the St. Lawrence, many miles east of the outlet of Lake Ontario, clear to the farthest end of Lake Superior; and which, coming eastward, extended nearly 1,500 miles, from where the City of Duluth now stands even until it reached the bitter waters of the Atlantic Ocean in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence.