Faithful in their labors among them were the Jesuit Fathers. They were men who were ready to suffer torture and death in the propagation of their faith, as several of them did. The conflict of those heroes of the Cross in the valley of the Mohawk, inaugurated by the capture and martyrdom of Father Jogues and his companion, Rene Goupil, in 1646, did not deter them; the wars of the nation with the French aided them. So successful were they that many of the nation were drawn off to Canada and became zealous partisans of the French and a scourge to English settlements, especially emphasized in the massacre at Schenectady in February, 1689-90. Those who remained true to the English became no longer "barbarians" in the full sense of that word, but "Praying Maquas." The subsequent story of the nation may be gleaned from the pages of history. At the close of the Revolution the integrity of the Six Nations had been effectually broken, and the castles of the Mohawks swept from the valley proper. The history, of the latter nation especially, needs to be studied, not in the wild glamour of fiction, but in the realm of fact, as that of an original people, native to the soil of the New World, clasping hands with the era of the origin of man; a people who, when they were first met, had borrowed nothing, absolutely nothing, from the civilizations or the languages of the Old World--the _Ougwe-howe,_ the "real men" of the Mohawk Valley. The locations of the castles or principal towns of the nation, as noted in Van Curler's Journal, has given rise to considerable discussion, particularly in regard to the location of the first of the series and its identity under the different names by which it was called. Van Curler was not an "ignorant Hollander wandering around in the woods," as one writer states; on the contrary, he was an educated man and one of the best equipped men then in the country for the trip he had undertaken, and instead of "wandering around in the woods," he was conducted by Mohawk guides. He wrote that he left Fort Orange in company with Jeronimus la Crock, William Thomasson, and five Mohawks as guides and bearers, "between nine and ten o'clock in the morning," December 12, 1634, and after walking "mostly northwest about eight miles" (Dutch), stopped "at half-past twelve in the evening" (p. m.) "at a little hunters' cabin near the stream that runs into their land, of the name of Vyoge." His hours' travel and his miles' travel to this point were either loosely stated in his manuscript or were misread by the translator. [FN-7] A Dutch mile is one and one-quarter hours' walk and the equivalent of three and one-half English miles and a fraction over. Van Curler no doubt estimated his miles by this standard and not as correct measurements of rough Indian paths. He certainly did not walk eight Dutch miles in three hours. Twenty-four English miles would have taken him to a point northwest of the later Schenectady stockade, which,