The Mohawk historian Darren Bonaparte has summarized what is known. After a disastrous war in 1667 when the French attacked Mohawk villages in present-day New York, some Mohawk converted to Christianity and began to relocate to Kahnawake ("near the rapids") on the Saint Lawrence River opposite the small village of Montreal. By its name and location by a rapids, Kahnawake recalled the village Caughnawaga (in a variant spelling) in the Mohawk homeland. The first village faded as most of its people moved north. The relation between the Mohawk who stayed in New York and those who migrated was, in Bonaparte's words, "as ambiguous as when they were together", in part because they became differentiated by religious practices.