All this was the work of Indians. The Spaniards, indeed, wasted and destroyed with no less merciless indiscrimination. Not only nations perished, but a singularly interesting phase of native civilisation was abruptly arrested in Mexico, Central America, and Peru. The intrusion of French, Dutch, and English colonists was, no doubt, fatal to the aborigines whom they supplanted. Nevertheless their record is not one of indiscriminate massacre. The relations of the French, especially with the tribes with whom they were brought into immediate contact, were on the whole kindly and protective. But as we recover the history of the native tribes whose lands are now occupied by the representatives of those old colonists, we find the Indians everywhere engaged in the same exterminating warfare; and whether we look at the earlier maps, or attempt to reconstruct the traditionary history of older tribes, we learn only the same tale of aimless strife and extinction. When Cartier first explored the St. Lawrence in 1535 he found large Indian settlements at Quebec and on the island of Montreal; but on the return of the French under Champlain, little more than half a century later, there were none left to dispute their settlement. At the later date, and throughout the entire period of French occupation, the country to the south of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario was occupied by the Iroquois, or Six Nation Indians, as they were latterly called. Westward of the river Ottawa the whole region was deserted until near the shores of the Georgian Bay; though its early explorers found everywhere the traces of recent occupation by the Wyandot or other tribes, who had withdrawn to the shores of Lake Huron to escape the fury of their implacable foes.