The name Oneida is a corruption of the name Oneyotka-ono or "people of Stone," in allusion to the Oneida stone, a granite boulder near Oneida Castle which was held sacred by this tribe of the Iroquois. An early traveler who visited the castle in 1677 wrote that the "Onyades have but one town, doubly stockaded, of about one hundred houses." The rest of the tribe lived around Oneida Lake, in the region southward to the Susquehanna. They were not loyal to the Iroquois League's policy of friendliness to the English, but inclined towards the French, and were practically the only Iroquois who fought for the Americans in the War of Independence. As a consequence they were attacked by others of the Iroquois under Joseph Brant and took refuge within the American settlements till the war ended, when the majority returned to their former home, while some migrated to the Thames River district, Ontario. Early in the 19th century they sold their lands, and most of them settled on a reservation at Green Bay, Wis., some few remaining in N.Y. State. The tribe now numbers more than 3,000, of whom about two-thirds are in Wisconsin, a few hundred in N.Y. State and about 800 in Ontario. They are civilized and prosperous. [Illustration: Samuel de Champlain Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635), born at the little port Brouage in the Bay of Biscay, made his first trip to Canada in 1603, and five years later established the first white settlement at Quebec. In the spring he joined a war party of Algonquins and Hurons, discovered the great lake that bears his name, and with his arquebus took an important part in the victory which his savage friends obtained over the Iroquois. In 1615, with another expedition of Indians, he crossed the eastern ends of Lakes Huron and Ontario and made a fierce but unsuccessful attack on an Onondaga town near Lake Oneida. Parkman says: "In Champlain alone was the life of New France. By instinct and temperament he was more impelled to the adventurous toils of exploration than to the duller task of building colonies. The profits of trade had value in his eyes only as a means to these ends, and settlements were important chiefly as a base of discovery. Two great objects eclipsed all others--to find a route to the Indies and to bring the heathen tribes into the embrace of the Church, since, while he cared little for their bodies, his solicitude for their souls knew no bounds."]