Canada: the Empire of the North

A >> Agnes C. Laut >> Canada: the Empire of the North

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[Illustration: BREBEUF]

Before day dawn had tipped the branches of the leafless trees with
shafted sunlight, the enemy were hacking furiously at the palisades.
Trapped and cornered, the most timid of animals will fight. With such
fury, reckless from desperation, cherishing no hope, the Hurons now
fought, but they were handicapped by lack of guns and balls. Thirty
Iroquois had been slain, a hundred wounded, and the assailants drew off
for breath. It was only the lull between two thunderclaps. A moment
later they were on St. Louis' walls and had hacked through a dozen
places. At these spots the fiercest fighting occurred, and those
Iroquois who had not already bathed their faces in the gore of victims
at St. Ignace were soon enough dyed in their own blood. Here, there,
everywhere, were Brebeuf and Lalemant, fighting, administering last
rites, exhorting the Hurons to perish valiantly. Then the rolling
clouds of flame and smoke told the Hurons that their village was on
fire. Some dashed back to die inside the burning wigwams. Others
fought desperately to escape through the broken walls. A few, in the
confusion and smoke, succeeded in reaching the woods, whence they ran
to warn Ste. Marie on the Wye. Brebeuf and Lalemant had been knocked
down, stripped, bound, and were now {90} half driven, half dragged,
with the other captives to be tortured at Ignace. Not a sign of fear
did either priest betray.

One would fain pass over the next pages of the Jesuit records. It is
inconceivable how human nature, even savage nature, so often stoops
beneath the most repellent cruelties of the brute world. It is
inconceivable unless one acknowledge an influence fiendish; but let us
not judge the Indians too harshly. When the Iroquois warriors were
torturing the Hurons and their missionaries, the populace of civilized
European cities was outdoing the savages on victims whose sins were
political.

While the Jesuits of Ste. Marie were praying all day and night before
the lighted altar for heavenly intervention to rescue Brebeuf and
Lalemant, the two captured priests stood bound to the torture stakes,
the gapingstock of a thousand fiends. When the Iroquois singed Brebeuf
from head to foot with burning birch bark, he threatened them in tones
of thunder with everlasting damnation for persecuting the servants of
God. The Iroquois shrieked with laughter. Such spirit in a man was to
their liking. Then, to stop his voice, they cut away his lips and
rammed a red-hot iron into his mouth. Not once did the giant priest
flinch or writhe at the torture stake. Then they brought out Lalemant,
that Brebeuf might suffer the agony of seeing a weaker spirit flinch.
Poor Lalemant fell at his superior's feet, sobbing out a verse of
Scripture. Then they wreathed Lalemant in oiled bark and set fire to
it.

"We baptize you," they yelled, throwing hot water on the dying man.
Then they railed out blasphemies, obscenities unspeakable, against the
Jesuits' religion. Brebeuf had not winced, but his frame was relaxing.
He sank to his knees, a dying man. With the yells of devils jealous of
losing their prey, they ripped off his scalp while he was still alive,
tore his heart from his breast, and drank the warm lifeblood of the
priest. Brebeuf died at four in the afternoon. Strange to relate,
Lalemant, of the weaker body, survived the tortures till daybreak,
when, weary of the sport, the Indians desisted from their mad night
orgies and put an end to his sufferings by braining him.

{91} Over at Ste. Marie, Ragueneau and the other priests momentarily
awaited the attack; but at Ste. Marie were forty French soldiers and
ample supply of muskets. The Iroquois was bravest as the wolf is
bravest--when attacking a lamb. Three hundred Hurons lay in ambush
along the forest trail. These ran from the Iroquois like sheep; but
when three hundred more sallied from the fort, led by the French, it
was the Iroquois' turn to run, and they fled back behind the palisades
of St. Louis. The Hurons followed, entered by the selfsame breaches
the Iroquois had made, and drove the invaders out. More Iroquois
rushed from Ignace to the rescue. A hundred Iroquois fell in the day's
fight, and when they finally recaptured St. Louis, only twenty Hurons
remained of the three hundred. The victory had been bought at too
great cost. Tying their prisoners to stakes at St. Ignace, they heaped
the courtyard with inflammable wood, set fire to all, and retreated,
taking only enough prisoners to carry their plunder.

[Illustration: REMNANTS OF WALLS OF FORT ST. MARY ON CHRISTIAN ISLAND
IN 1891]

Ste. Marie for the time was safe. The invaders had gone; but the blow
had crushed forever the prowess of the Huron nation. The remaining
towns had thought for nothing but flight. {92} Town after town was
forsaken and burned in the summer of 1649, the corn harvest left
standing in the fields, while the panic-stricken people put out in
their canoes to take refuge on the islands of Georgian Bay. Ste. Marie
on the Wye alone remained, and the reason for its existence was
vanishing like winter snow before summer sun, for its people fled . . .
fled . . . fled . . . daily fled to the pink granite islands of the
lake. The Hurons begged the Jesuits to accompany them, and there was
nothing else for Ragueneau to do. Ste. Marie was stripped, the stock
slain for food. Then the buildings were set on fire. June 14, just as
the sunset bathed water and sky in seas of gold, the priest led his
homeless people down to the lake as Moses of old led the children of
Israel. Oars and sweeps, Georgian Bay calm as glass, they rafted
slowly out to the Christian Islands,--Faith, Hope, and Charity,--which
tourists can still see from passing steamers, a long wooded line beyond
the white water-fret of the wind-swept reefs. The island known on the
map as Charity, or St. Joseph, was heavily wooded. Here the refugees
found their haven, and the French soldiers cleared the ground {93} for
a stone fort of walled masonry,--the islands offering little else than
stone and timber, though the fishing has not failed to this day.

[Illustration: MAP OF THE GREAT LAKES Showing the territory of the
Jesuit Huron missions]

By autumn the walled fort was complete, but some eight thousand
refugees had gathered to the island. Such numbers could not subsist on
Georgian Bay in summer. In winter their presence meant starvation, and
before the spring of 1650 half had perished. Of the survivors, many
had fed on the bodies of the dead. No help had come from Quebec for
almost three years. The clothing of the priests had long since worn to
shreds. Ragueneau and his helpers were now dressed in skins like the
Indians, and reduced to a diet of nuts and smoked fish.

With warm weather came sickness. And also came bands of raiding
Iroquois striking terror to the Tobacco Indians. Among them, too,
perished Jesuit priests, martyrs to the faith. Did some of the Hurons
venture from the Christian Islands across to the mainland to hunt, they
were beset by scalping parties and came back to the fort with tales
that crazed Ragueneau's Indians with terror. The Hurons decided to
abandon Georgian Bay. Some scattered to Lake Superior, to Green Bay,
to Detroit. Others found refuge on Manitoulin Island. A remnant of a
few hundreds followed Ragueneau and the French down the Ottawa to take
shelter at Quebec. Their descendants may be found to this day at the
mission of Lorette.

To-day, as tourists drive through Quebec, marveling at the massive
buildings and power and wealth of Catholic orders, do they pause to
consider that the foundation stones of that power were dyed in the
blood of these early martyrs? Or, as the pleasure seekers glide among
the islands of Georgian Bay, do they ever ponder that this fair world
of blue waters and pink granite islands once witnessed the most bloody
tragedy of brute force, triumphant over the blasted hopes of religious
zeal?

{94}

CHAPTER VI

FROM 1650 TO 1672

Radisson captured by Iroquois--Radisson escapes--At Onandaga--How the
French were saved--Word of the western land--Westward bound--Dollard's
Heroes--The fight at the Long Sault--To seek the north sea--Discovers
Hudson Bay--Origin of the great fur company

Having destroyed the Hurons, who were under French protection, it is
not surprising that the Iroquois now set themselves to destroy the
French. From Montreal to Tadoussac the St. Lawrence swarmed with war
canoes. No sooner had the river ice broken up and the birds begun
winging north than the Iroquois flocked down the current of the
Richelieu, across Lake St. Peter to Three Rivers, down the St. Lawrence
to Quebec, up the St. Lawrence to Montreal. And the snows of midwinter
afforded no truce to the raids, for the Iroquois cached their canoes in
the forest, and roamed the woods on snowshoes. Settlers fled terrified
from their farms to the towns; farmers dared not work in their fields
without a sentry standing guard; Montreal became a prison; Three Rivers
lay blockaded; and at Quebec the war canoes passed defiantly below the
cannon of Cape Diamond, paddles beating defiance against the gun'els,
or prows flaunting the scalps of victims within cannon fire of Castle
St. Louis. Rich and poor, priests and parishioners, governors and
habitants, all alike trembled before the lurking treachery. Father
Jogues had been captured on his way from the Huron mission; Pere Poncet
was likewise kidnapped at Quebec and carried to the tortures of the
Mohawk towns; and a nephew of the Governor of Quebec was a few years
later attacked while hunting near Lake Champlain.

The outraged people of New France realized that fear was only
increasing the boldness of the Iroquois. A Mohawk-chief fell into
their hands. By way of warning, they bound him to a stake and burned
him to death. The Indian revenge fell swift and sure. In 1653 the
Governor of Three Rivers and twelve leading citizens were murdered a
short distance from the fort gates. {95} One night in May of 1652 a
tall, slim, swarthy lad about sixteen years of age was seen winding his
way home to Three Rivers from a day's shooting in the marshes. He had
set out at day dawn with some friends, but fear of the Iroquois had
driven his comrades back. Now at nightfall, within sight of Three
Rivers, when the sunset glittered from the chapel spire, he unslung his
bag of game and sat down to reload his musket. Then he noticed that
the pistols in his belt had been water-soaked from the day's wading,
and he reloaded them too.

Any one who is used to life in the open knows how at sundown wild birds
foregather for a last conclave. Ducks were winging in myriads and
settling on the lake with noisy flacker. Unable to resist the
temptation of one last shot, the boy was gliding noiselessly forward
through the rushes, when suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the
ground, with hands thrown up and eyes bulging from his head. At his
feet lay the corpses of his morning comrades,--scalped, stripped,
hacked almost piecemeal! Then the instinct of the hunted thing, of
flight, of self-protection, eclipsed momentary terror, and the boy was
ducking into the rushes to hide when, with a crash of musketry from the
woods, the Iroquois were upon him.

When he regained consciousness, he was pegged out on the sand amid a
flotilla of beached canoes, where Iroquois warriors were having an
evening meal. So began the captivity, the love of the wilds, the wide
wanderings of one of the most intrepid explorers in New France,--Pierre
Esprit Radisson.

His youth and the fact that he would make a good warrior were in his
favor. When he was carried back to the Mohawk town and with other
prisoners compelled to run the gauntlet between two lines of
tormentors, Radisson ran so fast and dodged so dexterously that he was
not once hit. The feat was greeted with shrieks of delight by the
Iroquois; and the high-spirited boy was given in adoption to a captive
Huron woman.

Things would have gone well had he not bungled an attempt to escape;
but one night, while in camp with three Iroquois hunters, an Algonquin
captive entered. While the Iroquois {96} slept with guns stacked
against the trees, the sleepless Algonquin captive rose noiselessly
where he lay by the fire, seized the Mohawk warriors' guns, threw one
tomahawk across to Radisson, and with the other brained two of the
sleepers. The French boy aimed a blow at the third sleeper, and the
two captives escaped. But they might have saved themselves the
trouble. They were pursued and overtaken on Lake St. Peter, within
sight of Three Rivers. This time Radisson had to endure all the
_diableries_ of Mohawk torture. For two days he was kept bound to the
torture stake. The nails were torn from his fingers, the flesh burnt
from the soles of his feet, a hundred other barbarous freaks of impish
Indian children wreaked on the French boy. Arrows with flaming points
were shot at his naked body. His mutilated finger ends were ground
between stones, or thrust into the smoking bowl of a pipe full of
coals, or bitten by fiendish youngsters being trained up the way a
Mohawk warrior should go.

[Illustration: A CANADIAN IN SNOWSHOES (After La Potherie)]

Radisson's youth, his courage, his very dare-devil rashness, together
with presents of wampum belts from his Indian parents, {97} saved his
life for a second time, and a year of wild wanderings with Mohawk
warriors finally brought him to Albany on the Hudson, where the Dutch
would have ransomed him as they had ransomed the two Jesuits, Jogues
and Poncet; but the boy disliked to break faith a second time with his
loyal Indian friends. Still, the glimpse of white man's life caused a
terrible upheaval of revulsion from the barbarities, the filth, the
vice, of the Mohawk camp. He could endure Indian life no longer. One
morning, in the fall of 1653, he stole out from the Mohawk lodges,
while the mist of day dawn still shadowed the forest, and broke at a
run down the trail of the Mohawk valley for Albany. All day he ran,
pursued by the phantom fright of his own imagination, fancying
everything that crunched beneath his moccasined tread some Mohawk
warrior, seeing in the branches that reeled as he passed the arms of
pursuers stretched out to stop him;--on . . . and on . . . and on, he
ran, pausing neither to eat nor rest; here dashing into the bed of a
stream and running along the pebbled bottom to throw pursuers off the
trail; there breaking through a thicket of brushwood away from the
trail, only to come back to it breathless farther on, when some alarm
of the wind in the trees or deer on the move had proved false. Only
muscles of iron strength, lithe as elastic, could have endured the
strain. Nightfall at last came, hiding him from pursuers; but still he
sped on at a run, following the trail by the light of the stars and the
rush of the river. By sunrise of the second day he was staggering; for
the rocks were slippery with frost and his moccasins worn to tatters.
It was four in the afternoon before he reached the first outlying cabin
of the Dutch settlers. For three days he lay hidden in Albany behind
sacks of wheat in a thin-boarded attic, through the cracks of which he
could see the Mohawks searching everywhere. The Jesuit Poncet gave him
passage money to take ship to Europe by way of New York. New York was
then a village of a few hundred houses, thatch-roofed, with stone fort,
stone church, stone barracks. Central Park was a rocky wilderness.
What is now Wall Street was the stamping ground of pigs and goats.
January of 1654 Radisson {98} reached Europe, no longer a boy, but a
man inured to danger and hardships and daring, though not yet eighteen.

When Radisson came back to Three Rivers in May he found changes had
taken place in New France. Among the men murdered with the Governor of
Three Rivers by the Mohawks the preceding year had been his sister's
husband, and the widow had married one Medard Chouart de Groseillers,
who had served in the Huron country as a lay helper with the martyred
Jesuits. Also a truce had been patched up between the Iroquois and the
French. The Iroquois were warring against the Eries and wanted arms
from the French. A still more treacherous motive underlay the
Iroquois' peace. They wanted a French settlement in their country as a
guarantee of non-intervention when they continued to raid the refugee
Hurons. Such duplicity was unsuspected by New France. The Jesuits
looked upon the peace as designed by Providence to enable them to
establish missions among the Iroquois. Father Le Moyne went from
village to village preaching the gospel and receiving belts of wampum
as tokens of peace--one belt containing as many as seven thousand
beads. When the Onondagas asked for a French colony, Lauzon, the
French Governor, readily consented if the Jesuits would pay the cost,
estimated at about $10,000; and in 1656 Major Dupuis had led fifty
Frenchmen and four Jesuits up the St. Lawrence in long boats through
the wilderness to a little hill on Lake Onondaga, where a palisaded
fort was built, and the lilies of France, embroidered on a white silk
flag by the Ursuline nuns, flung from the breeze above the Iroquois
land. The colony was hardly established before three hundred Mohawks
fell on the Hurons encamped under shelter of Quebec, butchered without
mercy, and departed with shouts of laughter that echoed below the guns
at Cape Diamond, scalps waving from the prow of each Iroquois canoe.
Quebec was thunderstruck, numb with fright. The French dared not
retaliate, or the Iroquois would fall on the colony at Onondaga.
Perhaps people who keep their vision too constantly fixed on heaven
lose {99} sight of the practical duties of earth; but when eighty
Onondagas came again in 1657, inviting a hundred Hurons to join the
Iroquois Confederacy, the Jesuits again suspected no treachery in the
invitation, but saw only a providential opportunity to spread one
hundred Huron converts among the Iroquois pagans. Father Ragueneau,
who had led the poor refugees down from the Christian Islands on
Georgian Bay, now with another priest offered to accompany the Hurons
to the Iroquois nation. An interpreter was needed. Young Radisson,
now twenty-one years of age, offered to go as a lay helper, and the
party of two hundred and twenty French, eighty Iroquois, one hundred
Hurons, departed from the gates of Montreal, July 26.

[Illustration: SAUSON'S MAP, 1656]

Hardly were they beyond recall, before scouts brought word that twelve
hundred Iroquois had gone on the warpath against Canada, and three
Frenchmen of Montreal had been scalped. At last the Governor of Quebec
bestirred himself: he caused twelve Iroquois to be seized and held as
hostages for the safety of the French.

The Onondagas had set out from Montreal carrying the Frenchmen's
baggage. Beyond the first portage they flung the packs on the ground,
hurried the Hurons into canoes so that no two Hurons were in one boat,
and paddled over the {100} water with loud laughter, leaving the French
in the lurch. Father Ragueneau and Radisson quickly read the ominous
signs. Telling the other French to gather up the baggage, they armed
themselves and paddled in swift pursuit. That night Ragueneau's party
and the Onondagas camped together. Nothing was said or done to evince
treachery. Friends and enemies, Onondagas and Hurons and white men,
paddled and camped together for another week; but when, on August 3,
four Huron warriors and two women forcibly seized a canoe and headed
back for Montreal, the Onondagas would delay no longer. That afternoon
as the Indians paddled inshore to camp on one of the Thousand Islands,
some Onondaga braves rushed into the woods as if to hunt. As the
canoes grated the pebbled shore a secret signal was given. The Huron
men with their eyes bent on the beach, intent on landing, never knew
that they had been struck. Onondaga hatchets, clubs, spears, were
plied from the water side, and from the hunters ambushed on shore
crashed musketry that mowed down those who would have fled to the woods.

By night time only a few Huron women and the French had survived the
massacre. Such was the baptism of blood that inaugurated the French
colony at Onondaga. Luckily the fort built on the crest of the hill
above Lake Onondaga was large enough to house stock and provisions.
Outside the palisades there daily gathered more Iroquois warriors, who
no longer dissembled a hunger for Jesuits' preaching. Among the
warriors were Radisson's old friends of the Mohawks, and his foster
father confessed to him frankly that the Confederacy were only delaying
the massacre of the French till they could somehow obtain the freedom
of the twelve Iroquois hostages held at Quebec.

Daily more warriors gathered; nightly the war drum pounded; week after
week the beleaguered and imprisoned French heard their stealthy enemy
closing nearer and nearer on them, and the painted foliage of autumn
frosts gave place to the leafless trees and the drifting snows of
midwinter. The French were hemmed in completely as if on a desert
isle, and no help could come from Quebec, where New France was
literally under Iroquois siege.

{101} The question was, what to do? Messengers had been secretly sent
to Quebec, but the Mohawks had caught the scouts bringing back answers,
and there was no safe escape from the colony through ambushed woods in
midwinter. The Iroquois could afford to bide their time for victims
who could not escape. All winter the whites secretly built boats in
the lofts of the fort, but when the timbers were put together the boats
had to be brought downstairs, and a Huron convert spread a terrifying
report of a second deluge for which the white men were preparing a
second Noah's Ark. Mohawk warriors at once scented an attempt to
escape when the ice broke up in spring, and placed their braves in
ambush along the portages. Also they sent a deputation to see if that
story of the boats were true. Forewarned by Radisson, the whites built
a floor over the boats, heaped canoes above the floor, and invited the
Mohawk spies in. The Mohawks smiled grimly and were reassured. Canoes
would be ripped into shingles if they ran the ice jam of spring. The
Iroquois felt doubly certain of their victims; but Radisson, free to go
among the warriors as one of themselves, learned that they were
plotting to murder half the colony and hold the other half as hostages
for the safety of the twelve Indians in the dungeon at Quebec. The
whites could delay no longer. Something must be done, but what?
Radisson, knowing the Indian customs, proposed a way out.

No normally built savage could refuse an invitation to a sumptuous
feast. According to Indian custom, no feaster dare leave uneaten food
on his plate. Waste to the Indian is crime. In the words of the
Scotch proverb, "Better burst than waste." And all Indians have
implicit faith in dreams. Radisson dreamed--so he told the
Indians--that the white men were to give them a marvelous banquet. No
sooner dreamed than done! The Iroquois probably thought it a chance to
obtain possession inside the fort; but the whites had taken good care
to set the banquet between inner and outer walls.

Such a repast no savage had ever enjoyed in the memory of the race.
All the ambushed spies flocked in from the portages. {102} The painted
warriors washed off their grease, donned their best buckskin, and
rallied to the banquet as to battle. All the stock but one solitary
pig, a few chickens and dogs, had been slaughtered for the kettle.
Such an odor of luscious meat steamed up from the fort for days as
whetted the warriors' hunger to the appetite of ravenous wolves.
Finally, one night, the trumpets blew a blare that almost burst
eardrums. Fifes shrilled, and the rub-a-dub-dub of a dozen drums set
the air in a tremor. A great fire had been kindled between the inner
and outer walls that set shadows dancing in the forest. Then the gates
were thrown open, and in trooped the feasters. All the French acting
as waiters, the whites carried in the kettles--kettles of wild fowl,
kettles of oxen, kettles of dogs, kettles of porridge and potatoes and
corn and what not? That is it--what not? Were the kettles drugged?
Who knows? The feasters ate till their eyes were rolling lugubriously;
and still the kettles came round. The Indians ate till they were
torpid as swollen corpses, and still came the white men with more
kettles, while the mischievous French lad, Radisson, danced a mad jig,
shouting, yelling, "Eat! eat! Beat the drum! Awake! awake! Cheer up!
Eat! eat!"

By midnight every soul of the feast had tumbled over sound asleep, and
at the rear gates were the French, stepping noiselessly, speaking in
whispers, launching their boats loaded with provisions and ammunition.
The soldiers were for going back and butchering every warrior, but the
Jesuits forbade such treachery. Then Radisson, light-spirited as if
the refugees had been setting out on a holiday, perpetrated yet a last
trick on the warriors. To the bell rope of the main gate he fastened a
pig, so when the Indians would pull the rope for admission, they would
hear the tramp of a sentry inside. Then he stuffed effigies of men on
guard round the windows of the fort.

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