Of the condition of the region to the west of the Ottawa prior to the seventeenth century nothing is known from direct observation. Before Champlain had an opportunity of visiting it, the whole region westward to Lake Huron had been depopulated and reduced to a desert. The fact that the few natives found by Champlain occupying the once populous region of the Hochelaga Indians were Algonkins, has been the chief ground for the assumption that the expulsion of that old Wyandot stock was due to their hostility. But such an idea is irreconcilable with the fact that the latter, instead of retreating southward to their Huron-Iroquois kinsmen, took refuge among Algonkin tribes. According to the narrative of their own Wyandot historian, Peter Dooyentate, gathered, as he tells us, from traditions that lived in the memory of a few among the older members of his tribe, the island of Montreal was occupied in the sixteenth century by Wyandots or Hurons, and Senecas, sojourning peaceably in separate villages. The tradition is vague which traces the cause of their hostility to the wrath of a Seneca maiden, who had been wronged by the object of her affections, and gave her hand to a young Wyandot warrior on the condition of his slaying the Seneca chief, to whose influence she ascribed the desertion of her former lover. Whatever probability may attach to this romance of the Indian lovers, the tradition that the Hurons were driven from their ancient homes on the St. Lawrence by their Seneca kinsmen is consistent with ascertained facts, as well as with the later history of the Senecas, who are found playing the same part to the Eries under a somewhat similar incentive to revenge, and appear to have taken the lead in the destruction of the Attiwendaronks. The native tradition is of value in so far as it shows that the fatal enmity of the Iroquois to the Hurons was not originally due to the alliance of the latter with the French; but Senecas and Hurons had alike disappeared before Champlain visited the scene of Cartier’s earlier exploration. The Attiwendaronks, who dwelt to the south of the later home of the Hurons, on the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, may have formed another of the nations of the Wyandot stock expelled from the valley of the St. Lawrence. Situated as they were in their later home, midway between the Hurons and Iroquois, they strove in vain to maintain a friendly neutrality. Charlevoix assigns the year 1635 as the date of their destruction by the latter. Certain it is that between that date and the middle of the century their towns were utterly destroyed; and such of the survivors as lingered in the vicinity were incorporated into the nation of the Senecas, who lay nearest to them.