Note 71 — NIAGARA AND THE POETS.

For the knowledge that the first mention of Niagara Falls is in Champlain's "Des Sauvages," we are indebted to the Hon. Peter A. Porter of Niagara Falls, who recently discovered, by comparison of early texts, that the allusions to the falls in Marc Lescarbot's "Histoire de la Nouvelle France" (1609), heretofore attributed to Jacques Cartier, are really quotations from "Des Sauvages," published some five years before. There is, apparently, no warrant for the oft-repeated statement that Cartier, in 1535, was the first white man to hear of the falls. That distinction passes to Champlain, who heard of them in 1603, and whose first book, printed at the end of that year or early in 1604, gave to the world its first knowledge of the great cataract.—See "Champlain not Cartier," by Peter A. Porter, Niagara Falls, N. Y., 1899.