Canada, Sir John George Bourinot [best time to read books .TXT] 📗

sufferings and rewards, allotted to bad and good. Father Le Jeune tells us that "such holy pictures are most useful object-lessons for the Indians." On one occasion he made a special request for "three, four, or five devils, tormenting a soul with a variety of punishments--one using fire, another serpents, and another pincers." The mission house was also constantly full of Indians, not simply enjoying these pictures, but participating also in the generous hospitality of the Fathers.

It was in 1648 that the first blow descended on this unhappy people who were in three years' time to be blotted out as a warlike, united nation in {142} America. In that year the Iroquois attacked the mission of St. Joseph (Teanaustaye), fifteen miles from Ste. Marie, where in 1638 a famous Iroquois, Ononkwaya, had been tortured. All the people had been massacred or taken prisoners in the absence of the warriors who were mostly in pursuit of a band of Iroquois. Father Daniel, arrayed in the vestments of his vocation, was among the first to fall a victim to the furious savages, who instantly cast his body into the flames of his burning chapel,--a fitting pyre for the brave soldier of the Cross. St. Ignace, St. Louis, and other missions were attacked early in the following year. Fathers Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were tortured and murdered at St. Ignace. From village after village the shrieks of helpless women and men and children, tied to stakes in burning houses, ascended to a seemingly pitiless Heaven. Many persons were tortured on the spot, but as many or more reserved for the sport of the Iroquois villages. Father Brebeuf was bound to a stake, and around his neck was thrown a necklace of red-hot tomahawks. They cut off his lower lip, and thrust a heated iron rod down his throat. It was doubtless their delight to force a groan or complaint from this stalwart priest, whose towering and noble figure had always been the admiration of the Canadian Indians, but both he and Lalemant, a relatively feeble man, showed themselves as brave as the most courageous Indian warriors under similar conditions.

When a party from Ste. Marie came a few days later to the ruins of St. Ignace, they found the {143} tortured bodies of the dead missionaries on the ground, and carried them to the mission house, where they were buried in sacred earth. The skull of the generous, whole-souled Brebeuf is still to be seen within a silver bust in the Hotel Dieu of Quebec. Father Gamier was killed at the mission of St. Jean (Etarita), in the raids which the Iroquois made at a later time on the Tobacco Nation, the kindred of the Hurons. Father Chabanel, who was on his way from St. Jean to Ste. Marie, was never heard of, and it is generally believed that he was treacherously killed and robbed by a Huron.

The Hurons were still numerous despite the losses they had suffered--counting even then more families than the Five Nations--but as they looked on the smoking ruins of their villages and thought of the undying hatred which had followed them for so many years they lost all courage and decided to scatter and seek new homes elsewhere. Father Ragueneau, the superior of the Jesuits, after consultation with the Fathers and Frenchmen at Ste. Marie, some fifty persons altogether, felt they could no longer safely remain in their isolated position when the Hurons had left the country. They removed all their goods to the Isle of St. Joseph, now one of the Christian Islands, near the entrance of Matchedash Bay, where they erected a fortified post for the protection of several thousand Hurons who had sought refuge here. Before many months passed, the Hurons believed that their position would be untenable when the Iroquois renewed their attacks, and determined to leave the island. Some ventured {144} even among the Iroquois and were formally received into the Senecas and other tribes. A remnant remained a few months longer on the island, but they soon left for Quebec after killing some thirty of the bravest Iroquois warriors, who had attempted to obtain possession of the fort by a base act of treachery. A number belonging to the Tobacco Nation eventually reached the upper waters of the Mississippi where they met the Sioux, or Dacotahs, a fierce nation belonging to a family quite distinct from the Algonquins and Iroquois, and generally found wandering between the head-waters of Lake Superior and the Falls of St. Anthony. After various vicissitudes these Hurons scattered, but some found their rest by the side of the Detroit River, where they have been always known as Wyandots. Some three hundred Hurons, old and young, left St. Joseph for Quebec, where they were most kindly received and given homes on the western end of the Isle of Orleans, where the Jesuits built a fort for their security; but even here, as we shall see, the Iroquois followed them, and they were eventually forced to hide themselves under the guns of Quebec. War and disease soon thinned them out, while not a few cast in their lot with the Iroquois who were at last themselves seeking recruits. The Huron remnant finally found a resting-place at Lorette on the banks of the St. Charles, a few miles from the heights of the Capital.

The only memorials now in Canada of a once powerful people, that numbered at least twenty thousand souls before the time of their ruin and {145} dispersion, are a remnant still retaining the language of their tribe on the banks of the Detroit; a larger settlement on the banks of the St. Charles, but without the distinguishing characteristics of their ancestors who came there from Isle St. Joseph; the foundations of the old mission house of Ste. Marie, and the remarkable graves and ossuaries which interest the student and antiquary as they wander in the summer-time through the picturesque country where the nation was once supreme.



[1] It was so called in 1753, after the reigning sovereign of England by an ambitions and politic Irishman, Sir William Johnson, whose name is constantly occurring in the history of the wars between England and France.



X.


YEARS OF GLOOM--THE KING COMES TO THE RESCUE OF CANADA--THE IROQUOIS HUMBLED.

(1652-1667.)

It was noon on the 20th May, 1656, when the residents of Quebec were startled by the remarkable spectacle of a long line of bark canoes drawn up on the river immediately in front of the town. They could hear the shouts of the Mohawk warriors making boast of the murder and capture of unhappy Hurons, whom they had surprised on the Isle of Orleans close by. The voices of Huron girls--"the very flower of the tribe," says the Jesuit narrator--were raised in plaintive chants at the rude command of their savage captors, who even forced them to dance in sight of the French, on whose protection they had relied. The governor, M. de Lauzon, a weak, incapable man, only noted for his greed, was perfectly paralysed at a scene without example, even in those days of terror, when the Iroquois were virtually masters of the St. Lawrence valley from Huron to Gaspe.

At this very time a number of Frenchmen--probably fifty in all--were in the power of the Iroquois, and the governor had no nerve to make even an effort to save the Hurons from their fate. To understand the situation of affairs, it is necessary to go back for a few years. After the dispersion of the Hurons, the Iroquois, principally the Mohawks, became bolder than ever on the St. Lawrence. M. du Plessis-Bochat, the governor of Three Rivers, lost his life in a courageous but ill-advised attempt to chastise a band of warriors that were in ambush not far from the fort. Father Buteux was killed on his way to his mission of the Attikamegs or White Fish tribe, at the headwaters of the St. Maurice. In 1653, Father Poucet was carried off to a Mohawk village, where he was tortured in the usual fashion, and then sent back to Canada with offers of peace. The Senecas and Cayugas were then busily engaged in exterminating the Eries, who had burned one of their most famous chiefs, whose last words at the stake were prophetic: "Eries, you burn in me an entire nation!"

A peace, or rather a truce, was declared formally in the fall of 1653. Then, at the request of the Onondagas, Father Simon le Moyne, a missionary of great tact and courage, who was the first Frenchman to ascend the St. Lawrence as far as the Thousand Isles, ventured into the Iroquois country, where he soon became a favourite. As a result of the negotiations which followed this mission, Governor de Lauzon was persuaded to send a colony to the villages of the Onondagas. This colony was composed {148} of Captain Dupuy, an officer of the garrison, ten soldiers, and between thirty and forty volunteers. Father Dablon, who had previously gone with Father Chaumonot among the Onondagas, and had brought back the request for a colony, accompanied the expedition, which left Quebec in the month of June, 1656. On the way up the river the Onondagas were attacked by a band of Mohawks, when the boats carrying the French had gone ahead and were not within sight. Some of the Onondagas were killed and wounded, and then the Mohawks found out that they had surprised and injured warriors belonging to a tribe of their own confederacy. They endeavoured to explain this very serious act of hostility against their own friends and allies by the excuse that they had mistaken them for Hurons, whom they were on the way to attack. There is little doubt that they well understood the character of the expedition, and attacked it through envy of the success of the Onondagas in obtaining the settlement of Frenchmen in their villages.

When the Mohawks had made their explanations, they allowed the angry Onondagas to proceed on their journey, while they themselves went on to Quebec where, as we have already seen, they showed their contempt of the French by assailing the Hurons under the very guns of the fort of St. Louis. As soon as the French colony arrived at the Onondaga villages, they took possession of the country in the name of Jesus. On an eminence overlooking the lake they erected the mission of St. Mary of Gannentaha, the correct Iroquois name for Onondaga, {149} in the vicinity of the present city of Syracuse. The Onondagas generally appeared delighted at the presence of the French, though at this very time the Mohawks continued to paddle up and down the St. Lawrence to the consternation of the French and Canadian Indians alike. The Jesuit priest Garreau was killed in one of these excursions while accompanying a party of Ottawas to Lake Superior.

The colonists at Gannentaha at last found that their own lives were threatened by a conspiracy to destroy them, but they succeeded in deceiving the Indians and in escaping to Canada in the month of March, after living only two years among the Onondagas. Whilst the Indians were sleeping away the effects of one of those mystic feasts, at which they invariably stuffed themselves to repletion, the Frenchmen escaped at night and reached the Oswego River, which they successfully descended by the aid of flat-boats which they had secretly constructed after the discovery of the plot. The party reached the French settlement with the loss of three men, drowned in the descent of the rapids