and once more struggling vainly to swim to land, it was received with marked incredulity. This story was substantiated by several trustworthy witnesses. It seems incredible that an animal could go through the upper rapids, over the Falls, through the Gorge, through the Whirlpool Rapids, and into the whirlpool itself, a distance of several miles, and still be alive. The poor animal perished in the whirlpool. In various instances dogs have been sent over the Falls and survived the plunge. As early as November, 1836, a troublesome female bull-terrier was put in a coffee sack by a couple of men who had determined to get rid of her, and thrown off from the middle of Goat Island Bridge. In the following spring she was found alive and well about sixty rods below the Ferry, having lived through the winter on a deceased cow that was thrown over the bank the previous fall. In 1858, another dog, a male of the same breed, was thrown into the Rapids, also near the middle of the bridge. In less than an hour he came up the Ferry stairs, very wet and not at all gay. He was ever after a sadder, if not a better dog. [Footnote 15: Vol. lvi., p. 106, seq.] Chapter VII The Old Niagara Frontier What has been loosely called the "Niagara Frontier" embraces all the beautiful stretch of territory south of Lakes Ontario and Erie, extending westward quite to Cleveland, the Forest City on the latter lake. It would be difficult to point to a tract of country in all America the history of which is of more inherent interest than this far-flung old-time frontier of which the Niagara River was the strategic key. The beautiful cities now standing here, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Toronto, as well as the ancient Falls, forever new and wonderful, bring to this fair country, in large volume, the modern note that would drown the memory of the long ago; but here, as elsewhere, and particularly here, the Indian left his names upon the rivers and the shores of the lakes, beautiful names that will neither die nor permit the days of Iroquois, Eries, and Hurons to pass forgotten. Historically, the Niagara frontier is memorable, firstly, because it embraced in part the homes and hunting-grounds of the Six Nations, the pre-eminent Indian confederacy of the continent. The French name for the confederacy was Iroquois; their own, "Ho-de-no-sote," or the "Long House," which extended from the Hudson to Lake Erie and from the St. Lawrence to the valleys of the Delaware, Susquehanna, and Allegheny. This domain was divided between the several nations by well-defined boundary lines, called "lines of property." The famous Senecas were on the Niagara frontier. [Illustration: Colonel Römer's Map of the Country of the Iroquois, 1700.]