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Updated: June 23, 2025
The points which Champlain names are there indicated, in each case with as careful identification of the locality as we are ever likely to get. For those who are not specialists in the topography of Huronia it may suffice that Champlain left Matchedash Bay not far from Penetanguishene, and thence went to Carmaron at the very north of the peninsula.
This enforced residence of Champlain among the Hurons during the winter of 1615-16 has given us an excellent description of Indian customs. It was also the means of composing a dangerous quarrel between the Hurons and the Algonquins. Once committed to spending the winter among the Indians, Champlain planned to make Huronia a point of departure for still further explorations to the westward.
On the south-east frontier of Huronia, about four miles from Orillia, stood a town of the clan of the Rock, Contarea, a 'main bulwark of the country. The inhabitants were pagans who had resisted the missionaries, and refused them permission to build a chapel, not even deigning to listen to their appeals.
The next missionary to reach the Iroquois country was Father Joseph Bressani, an Italian priest who had been attracted to the Canadian mission-field through reading the Relations of the missionaries to Huronia. On April 27, 1644, with six Hurons and a French boy twelve years old, he set out from Three Rivers.
It was, they thought, within their sphere of duty even to tame these human tigers. They well knew that such an attempt would involve dangers vastly greater than those encountered in Huronia; but the greater the danger and suffering the greater the glory. And yet for a time it seemed impossible to make a beginning of missionary work among the Iroquois.
On the one hand was the certainty that war would break out again in all its fury; on the other the equal certainty that the fate which had befallen the Hurons in Huronia would almost inevitably overtake the poor remnant of Christian Hurons whom it was his duty to protect.
The commencement of religious endeavour in Huronia is thus marked by an event that was to intensify the hatred of the ferocious Iroquois against both the Hurons and the French. Le Caron spent the remainder of the year 1615 among the Hurons, studying the people, learning the language, and compiling a dictionary.
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