From the moment when he entered the first Huron village Champlain recognized that this was an Indian community different from any that he had heretofore seen. He had come upon one of the most remarkable savage settlements on the continent. The people lived in permanent villages protected by palisades of crossed and intersecting trunks of trees. Not only was the land naturally fertile, but in the clearings between the stretches of heavy forests were cultivated fields of maize and pumpkins, and gay patches of sunflowers from the seeds of which the Indians made oil for their hair. To Champlain coming from the roving Algonquins of the St. Lawrence and the barren country along the Ottawa, where the Indian population lived by hunting and fishing, the social advancement of this group of tribes seemed very great. The Hurons welcomed him with eager hospitality and took him from village to village, entertaining him with lavish feasting and celebration, for he was the champion who was to lead them to victory against their hated foe the Iroquois. At the principal Huron village Carhagouha, a settlement of two hundred bark lodges enclosed in a palisade thirty-five feet high, Champlain found Father Le Caron. The priest had feared that his leader would not follow the Hurons, or that if he did he would be captured by the Iroquois. When he looked up one morning and saw Champlain standing in the doorway of his dwelling his joy knew no bounds. He showed him the bark wigwam which the Indians, to prove the joy that they felt at his coming, were building for him. They had offered at first to lodge him in one of their common cabins, but Father Le Caron had remonstrated with them, representing that “to negotiate with God affairs so important, involving the salvation of their whole nation,” he needed a place where he could be alone, far from the tumult of their families. So they had brought poles and bark and erected this lodge at the edge of the forest. Here he had raised an altar, and here on the 12th of August was celebrated the first mass ever held in the country of the Hurons. Curious Indians crowded about as the priest stood before his rude altar and led the devotions of the kneeling band of Frenchmen with Champlain at their head. For the first time the solemn chant of the “Te Deum Laudamus” rang out on the listening air, and a volley of muskets proclaimed the planting of a cross outside the priest’s lodge. The symbol of Christianity had been raised in the country of the heathen!