It was characteristic of Frenchmen, however, to meet and mingle with the Indians as the English seldom did; it was not wholly out of the common, indeed, for them to adopt Indian dress and customs and be, in turn, adopted into some Indian tribe. Through the fortunate influence exerted by one of these adopted sons of the wilderness was New France now able to refortify the strategic Niagara region, temporarily besting England in the contest for the supremacy here. Chabert Joncaire, taken prisoner by the Senecas and adopted into their tribe, married an Indian woman and became an important factor among the warriors and war councils of the western end of the Long House. In the year 1700 Joncaire became a missionary for the French political cause, and he seems to have managed affairs so diplomatically that he in no wise lost caste among the Iroquois, for six years later they suggested to him "to establish himself among them, granting him liberty to select on their territory the place most acceptable to himself for the purpose of living and in peace, even to remove their villages to the neighbourhood of his residence in order to protect him."[24] In the next decade France made considerable headway in undoing the miserable work of De Nonville by disarming the hostility of the Iroquois, especially with the Senecas who held the Niagara frontier, through Joncaire, who in 1719 was sent to "try the minds of the Seneca nation and ascertain if it would permit the building of a French house in their country." As a result, in 1720, Joncaire built a bark cabin at Lewiston which he called "Magazine Royal." In November of that year, according to English report, which was undoubtedly exaggerated through prejudice, the "cabin" is described as a blockhouse forty feet in length and thirty in width, enclosed with palisades, musket-proof and provided with port-holes. The location of this post signifies of itself alone the larger strategic nature of Niagara geographically, for it was not at the mouth of the river but at the beginning of the portage around the Rapids and Falls, at Lewiston, just where La Salle's storehouse, built in 1679, had stood. It is believed that the former building had disappeared by this time. Charlevoix, who came here the next year, 1721, confounds the sites of De Nonville's fort and the "Magazine Royal." Mr. Porter brings out well the office of Joncaire's cabin, in which, by the way, a few soldiers were maintained as "traders" by saying: