These tribes became popular and increased their numbers by adopting members of other nations, so that in later years the Huron family became one of the most powerful and redoubtable in North America.  The identity of language was a great factor in the accomplishment of this marvellous result.  The Andastes, of Virginia, were therefore speaking the Huron language.  The Tionnontates became so identified with their neighbours that they were named the Hurons of the Petun.  The savages of the Neutral Nation had also adopted the Huron idiom.  This uniformity of language formed a league between these nations which would have been broken with the utmost difficulty.

Father de Brebeuf calculated that, in his time, there were scattered over the whole continent of North America about three hundred thousand Indians who understood the Huron dialect.  This was exaggerated, for the aborigines covering the territory known to the Hurons from whom the father had collected this information did not number three hundred thousand persons.  How could he rely upon these people, to whom a thousand men represented simply an amazing number?  How could the Hurons make a census of an unsedentary people, wandering here and there according to circumstances of war or other reasons, and recruiting themselves with prisoners or with the remnants of conquered nations?

To give only one example of these strange recruitings, let us examine the composition of the great family of the Iroquois in Champlain’s time.  It was a collection of disbanded tribes, who had belonged to the Hurons, to the Tionnontates, to the Neutral, to the Eries and du Feu tribes.  The Iroquois had separated themselves from the Hurons to form a branch which acquired with time more vivacity than the tree from which it had sprung.  The Hurons were called the good Iroquois in order to distinguish them from the wicked Iroquois who were reputed to be barbarous.  They fought against all the nations living in Canada, and their name was a subject of general apprehension.

Returning to the Hurons, we find that the Attignaouantans, or the tribe de l’Ours, was the most populous, forming half of the whole Huron family, namely about fifteen thousand souls.  They were considered, erroneously, as the most perfidious of all.  Father de Brebeuf, who knew them well, says that they were mild, charitable, polite and courteous.  Some years later, the tribe de l’Ours occupied fourteen villages, with thirteen missions under the charge of the Jesuits.  The whole mission, called Immaculate Conception, had its principal seat at Ossossane, which had replaced Carhagouha, mentioned by Champlain.  The French called it La Rochelle.  Ossossane was the nearest village of the Iroquois territory.  Father du Creux’ map places it on the western coast of the Huron peninsula.