Hochelaga – Saint Lawrence Boulevard Below Prince Arthur, Montréal, Québec

This mural seems to be a romanticized tribute to the First Nations people who lived in Montreal prior to the arrival of the Europeans.

Hochelaga meaning "beaver dam" or "beaver lake" was a St. Lawrence Iroquoian 16th century fortified village at the heart of, or in the immediate vicinity of Mount Royal in present-day Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Jacques Cartier arrived by boat on October 2, 1535; he visited the village on the following day. He was greeted well by the Iroquians, and named the mountain he saw nearby, Mount Royal.

The town, surrounded by a wooden palisade, had around fifty houses made of wood and bark, mostly long-houses, rectangular and rounded; the population is estimated to have been approximately 3,000 inhabitants. It was doubtlessly destroyed afterwards, because it was not mentioned by Jacques Cartier on his return visit to the island in 1541. The inhabitants’ disappearance has spawned several theories, including devastating wars with the Iroquois tribes to the South or with the Hurons to the West, the impact of Old World diseases, or their migration Westward toward the shores of the Great Lakes. However, according to Archéobec, villages that were regularly abandoned, following a cycle of land exhaustion, would be the main reason. At the time of Samuel de Champlain’s arrival, both Algonquins and Mohawks hunted in the Saint Lawrence Valley and conducted raids, but neither had any permanent settlements.

A stone marker recalling the former village was placed in 1925 on land adjacent to McGill University, believed to be in the vicinity of the location of the village visited by Cartier in 1535. The site of the marker is designated a National Historic Site of Canada.