Yet De Nonville had done something for which to be remembered beyond raiding the Long House and fortifying the river of the Neuters; he had left it a name that should live as he had, first of white men, so far as we know, written it. The orthography of the name Niagara seems to have now been established--1687. Champlain did not use any name in 1613, though on his map we find the following words attached to the stream connecting Lakes Erie and Ontario, _chute d'eau_, giving us our first genuine record of Niagara Falls. We have seen that L'Allemant spelled the name _Onguiaahra_ in 1640. In 1657 it appears on Sanson's map as _Ongiara_, and is applied to the Falls; in 1660 Ducreux's map shows us "_Ongiara_ Cataractes." In 1687 De Nonville gives us our present Niagara. Of the name Mr. Marshall has left this authoritative opinion: Onguiaahra and Ongiara are evidently identical, and present the same elements as Niagara. They are undoubtedly compounds of words expressive of some meaning, as is usual with aboriginal terms, but which meaning is now lost. The "o" which occurs in both the French and English orthography is probably a neuter prefix, similar to what is used by the Senecas and Mohawks. One writer contends that Niagara is derived from Nyah´-gaah´, or as he writes it, "Ne-ah´-gah," said to be the name of a Seneca village which formerly existed on the Niagara River below Lewiston, and now applied by the Senecas to Lake Ontario. This derivation, however, cannot be correct, for Onguiaahra, and its counterpart Ongiara, were in use as names of the river and falls long before the Seneca village in question was in existence. The Neutral Nation, from whose language the words were taken, lived on _both_ borders of the Niagara until they were exterminated by the Senecas in 1643. It is far more probable the Nyah´-gaah´ is a reappearance of Ongiara in the Seneca dialect, and this view is strengthened by the fact that the former, unlike most Iroquois names, is without meaning, and as the aborigines do not confer arbitrary names, it is an evidence that it has been borrowed or derived from a foreign language. The conclusion then is, that the French derived Niagara from Ongiara, and the Senecas, when they took possession of the territories of the Neutral Nation, adopted the name Ongiara, as near as the idiom of their language would allow, and hence their name Nyah´-gaah´. [Footnote 20: _Discovery of the West_, pp. 115-16.]