Although the French applied to them the name of "neuter" [writes Marshall, the historian of the Niagara frontier], it was always an allusion to their neutrality between the Hurons and the Iroquois. These contending nations traversed the territories of the Neutral Nation in their wars against each other, and if, by chance, they met in the wigwams or villages of this people, they were forced to restrain their animosity and to separate in peace. Notwithstanding this neutrality, they waged cruel wars with other nations, toward whom they exercised cruelties even more inhuman than those charged upon their savage neighbours. The early missionaries describe their customs as similar to those of the Hurons, their land as producing Indian corn, beans, and squashes in abundance, their rivers as abounding in fish of endless variety, and their forests as filled with animals yielding the richest furs. They exceeded the Hurons in stature, strength, and symmetry of form, and wore their dress with a superior grace, and regarded their dead with peculiar affection; hence arose a custom which is worthy of notice, and explains the origin of the numerous burial mounds which are scattered over this vicinity. Instead of burying the bodies of their deceased friends, they deposited them in houses or on scaffolds erected for the purpose. They collected the skeletons from time to time and arranged them in their dwellings, in anticipation of the feast of the dead, which occurred once in ten or twelve years. On this occasion the whole nation repaired to an appointed place, each family, with the greatest apparent affection, bringing the bones of their deceased relatives enveloped in the choicest furs. The final disruption between Neuters and Senecas came, it would seem, in 1648, in the shape of a challenge sent by the latter and accepted; the war raged until 1651, when two whole villages of Neuters were destroyed, the largest containing more than sixteen hundred men. Father Fremin in 1669 found Neuters still living in captivity in Gannogarae, a Seneca town east of the Genesee. Some two years later, seemingly by accident, a rupture between Senecas and Eries, farther to the westward, took place, resulting in a similar Seneca victory; thus the Iroquois came to be the masters of the Niagara country.