Quebec was settled in 1608. In 1615 Champlain reached Lake Huron by way of Ottawa River. On his return he crossed the lower end of Ontario, and met in battle the Iroquois. His allies, the Hurons, wished him to wait for five hundred men from the Eries, the tribe from which our lake took its name. His interpreter, Brulé, visited them and descended the Susquehanna to salt water, and is supposed to have visited the lake; I doubt it. He did not need to cross it to return to the French, and he could hardly have stood on the lake and seen its broad expanse. He reported to Champlain, who, in 1632 made the first map of the lakes. Lake Erie, unnamed, is little but a wide irregular river from Lake Huron, (_Mer Douce_) to Ontario (_Lac St. Louis_). Champlain’s ideas of Erie were more likely derived from the north, where Long Point and islands make it look narrower than it does from the south. The maps of other nations for a long time after show no practical knowledge of the interior, being quite constant differences in grossest blunders. But in the meantime the French—“shut up,” says the English geographer, Heylin, “in a few weak forts on the north of Canada,”—were really by missionaries and teachers, pushing far into the interior. The Jesuit map of Lake Superior, of 1671, is wonderful. In a map published by the Royal Geographer Sanson, in Paris in 1669, Lake Erie is not far from its true shape, and lake Chautauqua appears with a small stream—meant, I think, for a little of the Ohio, known from Indian report. It is worth while to stop for a moment to glance at the then position of our State. Between it and the east are the Alleghanies, in those days a great natural barrier, and not inaptly called “Endless Mountains.” It was to be nearly one hundred years before the whites were to cross them, proposing to drive away the French, but really to meet the most disastrous defeat of Braddock’s field. At the south was a broad river separating from Kentucky, and not until still later and many a “dark and bloody” fight was Virginia to assert its empire over an unknown northwest by calling it “Illinois county.” Nor was New York to discover Ohio. All along through Western New York, and controlling the easiest avenues, were the Iroquois, the “Romans of the new world,” the conquerors of Ohio, who submitted to neither the English nor the French, and who long asserted an equality with either. The French were more sociable with Indians, but the introduction of the Iroquois to civilization was a battle with Champlain in 1608, which made the Hurons friends of the French, but lost them the conquerors of the Hurons.