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In 1535 Jacques Cartier, a French explorer, sailed up the St. Lawrence River as far as Montreal, took possession of the watershed of the Great Lakes in the name of his sovereign and gave it the name of New France. In 1603 the celebrated French mariner, Champlain, made a permanent settlement at Quebec and established a trade route via the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers to Lake Huron. French trading posts, to which the Indians could bring peltries, were placed at the mouths of many rivers giving easy access thereto to the Indians by canoe, but wars between the Iroquois of New York and the Algonquins and Hurons of Canada interfered with traffic around the Cataracts until at a convocation of the tribes a neutral Indian nation was established to operate the portage with their settlement on the site of this village, which became known as "St. Louis." Unquestioned records show that the French trader, Stephen Brule, spent part of the winter of 1615 at the Neuter village of St. Louis arranging for the transport of his peltries over the portage; and it is interesting to note that a white man was here five years before the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, Father Dallion, a Jesuit priest, visited the Neuter village in 1626 and later reported its location to Champlain, so that the village, rapids and portage of St. Louis all appear upon the Map of New France published by Champlain in Paris in 1632. Fathers Brebeuf and Chammonot spent four months with the Neuters in 1640, saying the first masses on the Niagara Frontier, before going on as missionaries to the Hurons. These three priests suffered martyrdom under the Hurons; and at least two of them were canonized by the Pope about 1930 and are now among the Saints of the Roman Catholic Church. Few villages on this Continent can claim so great an honor. On his second voyage of discovery LaSalle entered the Niagara River on December 6, 1678 and the following day landed his brigantine at the gully at the foot of Ferry Street in this village. In his party were Henri de Tonti, son of Lorenzo de Tonti to whom the world is indebted for the Tontine system of life insurance, and Father Louis Hennepin, to whom the historians of the Niagara region are indebted for his detailed story of doings of the LaSalle voyagers on the Niagara Frontier and Upper Lakes. On their arrival they learned that the Neuter nation had been wiped out by the Senecas who were operating the portage, for "History repeats itself" and a neutral nation ultimately is over- PHOTO: On this spot, General Winfield Scott, October 13th, 1812, stationed a battery of United States Artillery at the opening of the Battle of Queenston, the first conflict on the Niagara Frontier in the War of 1812. PHOTO: Erected June, 1903, and presented to the Niagara Frontier Landmarks Association by Kate Barton Wheeler, a descendant of Major Benjamin Barton, U. S. A.