Hochelaga

Hochelaga was a village of the St. Lawrence Iroquoians on the island below Mount Royal. Fields of maize, beans and squash surrounded its palisades, while families lived together in longhouses built of timber and bark. The people supplemented their crops by hunting, fishing and gathering, and the river connected them with other communities. Their village was one of several Iroquoian settlements in the St. Lawrence Valley.

In 1535 Jacques Cartier travelled upriver to Hochelaga, where its inhabitants welcomed him. He described a fortified settlement containing about fifty longhouses and climbed the nearby mountain, which he named Mount Royal. When Samuel de Champlain returned to the island in 1603, the village and the St. Lawrence Iroquoian community Cartier had encountered were no longer there. Their disappearance remains a subject of historical debate.