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The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century

F >> Francis Parkman >> The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century




Their feasts and dances were of various character, social, medical,
and mystical or religious. Some of their feasts were on a scale of
extravagant profusion. A vain or ambitious host threw all his substance
into one entertainment, inviting the whole village, and perhaps several
neighboring villages also. In the winter of 1635 there was a feast at
the village of Contarrea, where thirty kettles were on the fires, and
twenty deer and four bears were served up. [ Brébeuf, Relation des
Hurons, 1636, 111. ] The invitation was simple. The messenger addressed
the desired guest with the concise summons, "Come and eat"; and to refuse
was a grave offence. He took his dish and spoon, and repaired to the
scene of festivity. Each, as he entered, greeted his host with the
guttural ejaculation, Ho! and ranged himself with the rest, squatted on
the earthen floor or on the platform along the sides of the house.
The kettles were slung over the fires in the midst. First, there was a
long prelude of lugubrious singing. Then the host, who took no share in
the feast, proclaimed in a loud voice the contents of each kettle in turn,
and at each announcement the company responded in unison, Ho! The
attendant squaws filled with their ladles the bowls of all the guests.
There was talking, laughing, jesting, singing, and smoking; and at times
the entertainment was protracted through the day.

When the feast had a medical or mystic character, it was indispensable
that each guest should devour the whole of the portion given him, however
enormous. Should he fail, the host would be outraged, the community
shocked, and the spirits roused to vengeance. Disaster would befall the
nation,--death, perhaps, the individual. In some cases, the imagined
efficacy of the feast was proportioned to the rapidity with which the
viands were despatched. Prizes of tobacco were offered to the most rapid
feeder; and the spectacle then became truly porcine. [ This superstition
was not confined to the Hurons, but extended to many other tribes,
including, probably, all the Algonquins, with some of which it holds in
full force to this day. A feaster, unable to do his full part, might,
if he could, hire another to aid him; otherwise, he must remain in his
place till the work was done. ] These _festins à manger tout_ were much
dreaded by many of the Hurons, who, however, were never known to decline
them.

Invitation to a dance was no less concise than to a feast. Sometimes a
crier proclaimed the approaching festivity through the village. The
house was crowded. Old men, old women, and children thronged the
platforms, or clung to the poles which supported the sides and roof.
Fires were raked out, and the earthen floor cleared. Two chiefs sang at
the top of their voices, keeping time to their song with tortoise-shell
rattles. [ 1 ] The men danced with great violence and gesticulation;
the women, with a much more measured action. The former were nearly
divested of clothing,--in mystical dances, sometimes wholly so; and,
from a superstitious motive, this was now and then the case with the women.
Both, however, were abundantly decorated with paint, oil, beads, wampum,
trinkets, and feathers.

[ 1 Sagard gives specimens of their songs. In both dances and feasts
there was no little variety. These were sometimes combined. It is
impossible, in brief space, to indicate more than their general features.
In the famous "war-dance,"--which was frequently danced, as it still is,
for amusement,--speeches, exhortations, jests, personal satire, and
repartee were commonly introduced as a part of the performance, sometimes
by way of patriotic stimulus, sometimes for amusement. The music in this
case was the drum and the war-song. Some of the other dances were also
interspersed with speeches and sharp witticisms, always taken in good
part, though Lafitau says that he has seen the victim so pitilessly
bantered that he was forced to hide his head in his blanket. ]

Religious festivals, councils, the entertainment of an envoy, the
inauguration of a chief, were all occasions of festivity, in which social
pleasure was joined with matter of grave import, and which at times
gathered nearly all the nation into one great and harmonious concourse.
Warlike expeditions, too, were always preceded by feasting, at which the
warriors vaunted the fame of their ancestors, and their own past and
prospective exploits. A hideous scene of feasting followed the torture
of a prisoner. Like the torture itself, it was, among the Hurons,
partly an act of vengeance, and partly a religious rite. If the victim
had shown courage, the heart was first roasted, cut into small pieces,
and given to the young men and boys, who devoured it to increase their
own courage. The body was then divided, thrown into the kettles, and
eaten by the assembly, the head being the portion of the chief. Many of
the Hurons joined in the feast with reluctance and horror, while others
took pleasure in it. [ 1 ] This was the only form of cannibalism among
them, since, unlike the wandering Algonquins, they were rarely under the
desperation of extreme famine.

[ 1 "Il y en a qui en mangent auec plaisir."--Brébeuf, Relation des
Hurons, 1636, 121.--Le Mercier gives a description of one of these scenes,
at which he was present. (Ibid., 1637, 118.) The same horrible practice
prevailed to a greater extent among the Iroquois. One of the most
remarkable instances of Indian cannibalism is that furnished by a Western
tribe, the Miamis, among whom there was a clan, or family, whose
hereditary duty and privilege it was to devour the bodies of prisoners
burned to death. The act had somewhat of a religious character, was
attended with ceremonial observances, and was restricted to the family in
question.--See Hon. Lewis Cass, in the appendix to Colonel Whiting's poem,
"Ontwa." ]

A great knowledge of simples for the cure of disease is popularly
ascribed to the Indian. Here, however, as elsewhere, his knowledge is in
fact scanty. He rarely reasons from cause to effect, or from effect to
cause. Disease, in his belief, is the result of sorcery, the agency of
spirits or supernatural influences, undefined and indefinable. The
Indian doctor was a conjurer, and his remedies were to the last degree
preposterous, ridiculous, or revolting. The well-known Indian sweating-
bath is the most prominent of the few means of cure based on agencies
simply physical; and this, with all the other natural remedies, was
applied, not by the professed doctor, but by the sufferer himself,
or his friends.

[ The Indians had many simple applications for wounds, said to have been
very efficacious; but the purity of their blood, owing to the absence
from their diet of condiments and stimulants, as well as to their active
habits, aided the remedy. In general, they were remarkably exempt from
disease or deformity, though often seriously injured by alternations of
hunger and excess. The Hurons sometimes died from the effects of their
_festins à manger tout_. ]

The Indian doctor beat, shook, and pinched his patient, howled, whooped,
rattled a tortoise-shell at his ear to expel the evil spirit, bit him
till blood flowed, and then displayed in triumph a small piece of wood,
bone, or iron, which he had hidden in his mouth, and which he affirmed
was the source of the disease, now happily removed. [ 1 ] Sometimes he
prescribed a dance, feast, or game; and the whole village bestirred
themselves to fulfil the injunction to the letter. They gambled away
their all; they gorged themselves like vultures; they danced or played
ball naked among the snow-drifts from morning till night. At a medical
feast, some strange or unusual act was commonly enjoined as vital to the
patient's cure: as, for example, the departing guest, in place of the
customary monosyllable of thanks, was required to greet his host with an
ugly grimace. Sometimes, by prescription, half the village would throng
into the house where the patient lay, led by old women disguised with the
heads and skins of bears, and beating with sticks on sheets of dry bark.
Here the assembly danced and whooped for hours together, with a din to
which a civilized patient would promptly have succumbed. Sometimes the
doctor wrought himself into a prophetic fury, raving through the length
and breadth of the dwelling, snatching firebrands and flinging them about
him, to the terror of the squaws, with whom, in their combustible
tenements, fire was a constant bugbear.

[ 1 The Hurons believed that the chief cause of disease and death was a
monstrous serpent, that lived under the earth. By touching a tuft of
hair, a feather, or a fragment of bone, with a portion of his flesh or
fat, the sorcerer imparted power to it of entering the body of his victim,
and gradually killing him. It was an important part of the doctor's
function to extract these charms from the vitals of his patient.--
Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 75. ]

Among the Hurons and kindred tribes, disease was frequently ascribed to
some hidden wish ungratified. Hence the patient was overwhelmed with
gifts, in the hope, that, in their multiplicity, the desideratum might be
supplied. Kettles, skins, awls, pipes, wampum, fish-hooks, weapons,
objects of every conceivable variety, were piled before him by a host of
charitable contributors and if, as often happened, a dream, the Indian
oracle, had revealed to the sick man the secret of his cure, his demands
were never refused, however extravagant, idle, nauseous, or abominable.
[ 1 ] Hence it is no matter of wonder that sudden illness and sudden
cures were frequent among the Hurons. The patient reaped profit,
and the doctor both profit and honor.

[ 1 "Dans le pays de nos Hurons, il se faict aussi des assemblées de
toutes les filles d'vn bourg auprés d'vne malade, tant à sa priere,
suyuant la resuerie ou le songe qu'elle en aura euë, que par l'ordonnance
de Loki (the doctor), pour sa santé et guerison. Les filles ainsi
assemblées, on leur demande à toutes, les vnes apres les autres, celuy
qu'elles veulent des ieunes hommes du bourg pour dormir auec elles la
nuict prochaine: elles en nomment chacune vn, qui sont aussi-tost
aduertis par les Maistres de la ceremonie, lesquels viennent tous au soir
en la presence de la malade dormir chacun auec celle qui l'a choysi,
d'vn bout à l'autre de la Cabane et passent ainsi toute la nuict, pendant
que deux Capitaines aux deux bouts du logis chantent et sonnent de leur
Tortuë du soir au lendemain matin, que la ceremonie cesse. Dieu vueille
abolir vne si damnable et malheureuse ceremonie."--Sagard, Voyage des
Hurons, 158.--This unique mode of cure, which was called Andacwandet,
is also described by Lalemant, who saw it. (Relation des Hurons, 1639,
84.) It was one of the recognized remedies.

For the medical practices of the Hurons, see also Champlain, Brébeuf,
Lafitau, Charlevoix, and other early writers. Those of the Algonquins
were in some points different. The doctor often consulted the spirits,
to learn the cause and cure of the disease, by a method peculiar to that
family of tribes. He shut himself in a small conical lodge, and the
spirits here visited him, manifesting their presence by a violent shaking
of the whole structure. This superstition will be described in another
connection. ]


THE HURON-IROQUOIS FAMILY.

And now, before entering upon the very curious subject of Indian social
and tribal organization, it may be well briefly to observe the position
and prominent distinctive features of the various communities speaking
dialects of the generic tongue of the Iroquois. In this remarkable
family of tribes occur the fullest developments of Indian character,
and the most conspicuous examples of Indian intelligence. If the higher
traits popularly ascribed to the race are not to be found here, they are
to be found nowhere. A palpable proof of the superiority of this stock
is afforded in the size of the Iroquois and Huron brains. In average
internal capacity of the cranium, they surpass, with few and doubtful
exceptions, all other aborigines of North and South America, not
excepting the civilized races of Mexico and Peru.

[ "On comparing five Iroquois heads, I find that they give an average
internal capacity of eighty-eight cubic inches, which is within two
inches of the Caucasian mean."--Morton, Crania Americana, 195.--It is
remarkable that the internal capacity of the skulls of the barbarous
American tribes is greater than that of either the Mexicans or the
Peruvians. "The difference in volume is chiefly confined to the
occipital and basal portions,"--in other words, to the region of the
animal propensities; and hence, it is argued, the ferocious, brutal,
and uncivilizable character of the wild tribes.--See J. S. Phillips,
Admeasurements of Crania of the Principal Groups of Indians in the United
States. ]

In the woody valleys of the Blue Mountains, south of the Nottawassaga Bay
of Lake Huron, and two days' journey west of the frontier Huron towns,
lay the nine villages of the Tobacco Nation, or Tionnontates.
[ Synonymes: Tionnontates, Etionontates, Tuinontatek, Dionondadies,
Khionontaterrhonons, Petuneux or Nation du Petun (Tobacco). ] In manners,
as in language, they closely resembled the Hurons. Of old they were
their enemies, but were now at peace with them, and about the year 1640
became their close confederates. Indeed, in the ruin which befell that
hapless people, the Tionnontates alone retained a tribal organization;
and their descendants, with a trifling exception, are to this day the
sole inheritors of the Huron or Wyandot name. Expatriated and wandering,
they held for generations a paramount influence among the Western tribes.
[ "L'ame de tous les Conseils."--Charlevoix, Voyage, 199.--In 1763 they
were Pontiac's best warriors. ] In their original seats among the Blue
Mountains, they offered an example extremely rare among Indians, of a
tribe raising a crop for the market; for they traded in tobacco largely
with other tribes. Their Huron confederates, keen traders, would not
suffer them to pass through their country to traffic with the French,
preferring to secure for themselves the advantage of bartering with them
in French goods at an enormous profit.

[ On the Tionnontates, see Le Mercier, Relation, 1637, 163; Lalemant,
Relation, 1641, 69; Ragueneau, Relation, 1648, 61. An excellent summary
of their character and history, by Mr. Shea, will be found in Hist. Mag.,
V. 262. ]

Journeying southward five days from the Tionnontate towns, the forest
traveller reached the border villages of the Attiwandarons, or Neutral
Nation. [ Attiwandarons, Attiwendaronk, Atirhagenrenrets, Rhagenratka
(Jesuit Relations), Attionidarons (Sagard). They, and not the Eries,
were the Kahkwas of Seneca tradition. ] As early as 1626, they were
visited by the Franciscan friar, La Roche Dallion, who reports a numerous
population in twenty-eight towns, besides many small hamlets. Their
country, about forty leagues in extent, embraced wide and fertile
districts on the north shore of Lake Erie, and their frontier extended
eastward across the Niagara, where they had three or four outlying towns.
[ Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1641, 71.--The Niagara was then called
the River of the Neutrals, or the Onguiaahra. Lalemant estimates the
Neutral population, in 1640, at twelve thousand, in forty villages. ]
Their name of Neutrals was due to their neutrality in the war between the
Hurons and the Iroquois proper. The hostile warriors, meeting in a
Neutral cabin, were forced to keep the peace, though, once in the open
air, the truce was at an end. Yet this people were abundantly ferocious,
and, while holding a pacific attitude betwixt their warring kindred,
waged deadly strife with the Mascoutins, an Algonquin horde beyond Lake
Michigan. Indeed, it was but recently that they had been at blows with
seventeen Algonquin tribes. [ Lettre du Père La Roche Dallion, 8 Juillet,
1627, in Le Clerc, Établissement de la Foy, I. 346. ] They burned female
prisoners, a practice unknown to the Hurons. [ Women were often burned
by the Iroquois: witness the case of Catherine Mercier in 1661, and many
cases of Indian women mentioned by the early writers. ] Their country
was full of game and they were bold and active hunters. In form and
stature they surpassed even the Hurons, whom they resembled in their mode
of life, and from whose language their own, though radically similar,
was dialectically distinct. Their licentiousness was even more open and
shameless; and they stood alone in the extravagance of some of their
usages. They kept their dead in their houses till they became
insupportable; then scraped the flesh from the bones, and displayed them
in rows along the walls, there to remain till the periodical Feast of the
Dead, or general burial. In summer, the men wore no clothing whatever,
but were usually tattooed from head to foot with powdered charcoal.

The sagacious Hurons refused them a passage through their country to the
French; and the Neutrals apparently had not sense or reflection enough to
take the easy and direct route of Lake Ontario, which was probably open
to them, though closed against the Hurons by Iroquois enmity. Thus the
former made excellent profit by exchanging French goods at high rates for
the valuable furs of the Neutrals.

[ The Hurons became very jealous, when La Roche Dallion visited the
Neutrals, lest a direct trade should be opened between the latter and the
French, against whom they at once put in circulation a variety of
slanders: that they were a people who lived on snakes and venom; that
they were furnished with tails; and that French women, though having but
one breast, bore six children at a birth. The missionary nearly lost his
life in consequence, the Neutrals conceiving the idea that he would
infect their country with a pestilence.--La Roche Dallion, in Le Clerc,
I. 346. ]

Southward and eastward of Lake Erie dwelt a kindred people, the Eries,
or Nation of the Cat. Little besides their existence is known of them.
They seem to have occupied Southwestern New York as far east as the
Genesee, the frontier of the Senecas, and in habits and language to have
resembled the Hurons. [ Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 46. ]
They were noted warriors, fought with poisoned arrows, and were long a
terror to the neighboring Iroquois.

[ Le Mercier, Relation, 1654, 10.--"Nous les appellons la Nation Chat,
à cause qu'il y a dans leur pais vne quantité prodigieuse de Chats
sauuages."--Ibid.--The Iroquois are said to have given the same name,
Jegosasa, Cat Nation, to the Neutrals.--Morgan, League of the Iroquois,
41.

Synonymes: Eriés, Erigas, Eriehronon, Riguehronon. The Jesuits never
had a mission among them, though they seem to have been visited by
Champlain's adventurous interpreter, Étienne Brulé, in the summer of
1615.--They are probably the Carantoüans of Champlain. ]

On the Lower Susquehanna dwelt the formidable tribe called by the French
Andastes. Little is known of them, beyond their general resemblance to
their kindred, in language, habits, and character. Fierce and resolute
warriors, they long made head against the Iroquois of New York, and were
vanquished at last more by disease than by the tomahawk.

[ Gallatin erroneously places the Andastes on the Alleghany, Bancroft and
others adopting the error. The research of Mr. Shea has shown their
identity with the Susquehannocks of the English, and the Minquas of the
Dutch.--See Hist. Mag., II. 294.

Synonymes: Andastes, Andastracronnons, Andastaeronnons, Andastaguez,
Antastoui (French), Susquehannocks (English), Mengwe, Minquas (Dutch),
Conestogas, Conessetagoes (English). ]

In Central New York, stretching east and west from the Hudson to the
Genesee, lay that redoubted people who have lent their name to the tribal
family of the Iroquois, and stamped it indelibly on the early pages of
American history. Among all the barbarous nations of the continent,
the Iroquois of New York stand paramount. Elements which among other
tribes were crude, confused, and embryotic, were among them systematized
and concreted into an established polity. The Iroquois was the Indian of
Indians. A thorough savage, yet a finished and developed savage, he is
perhaps an example of the highest elevation which man can reach without
emerging from his primitive condition of the hunter. A geographical
position, commanding on one hand the portal of the Great Lakes, and on
the other the sources of the streams flowing both to the Atlantic and the
Mississippi, gave the ambitious and aggressive confederates advantages
which they perfectly understood, and by which they profited to the
utmost. Patient and politic as they were ferocious, they were not only
conquerors of their own race, but the powerful allies and the dreaded
foes of the French and English colonies, flattered and caressed by both,
yet too sagacious to give themselves without reserve to either. Their
organization and their history evince their intrinsic superiority.
Even their traditionary lore, amid its wild puerilities, shows at times
the stamp of an energy and force in striking contrast with the flimsy
creations of Algonquin fancy. That the Iroquois, left under their
institutions to work out their destiny undisturbed, would ever have
developed a civilization of their own, I do not believe. These
institutions, however, are sufficiently characteristic and curious,
and we shall soon have occasion to observe them.

[ The name Iroquois is French. Charlevoix says: "Il a été formé du terme
Hiro, ou Hero, qui signifie J'ai dit, et par lequel ces sauvages
finissent tous leur discours, comme les Latins faisoient autrefois par
leur Dixi; et de Koué, qui est un cri tantôt de tristesse, lorsqu'on le
prononce en traînant, et tantôt de joye, quand on le prononce plus
court."--Hist. de la N. F., I. 271.--Their true name is Hodenosaunee,
or People of the Long House, because their confederacy of five distinct
nations, ranged in a line along Central New York, was likened to one of
the long bark houses already described, with five fires and five
families. The name Agonnonsionni, or Aquanuscioni, ascribed to them by
Lafitau and Charlevoix, who translated it "House-Makers," Faiseurs de
Cabannes, may be a conversion of the true name with an erroneous
rendering. The following are the true names of the five nations
severally, with their French and English synonymes. For other synonymes,
see "History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac," 8, note.

English. French.
Ganeagaono, Mohawk, Agnier.
Onayotekaono, Oneida, Onneyut.
Onundagaono, Onondaga, Onnontagué.
Gweugwehono, Cayuga, Goyogouin.
Nundawaono, Seneca, Tsonnontouans.

The Iroquois termination in ono--or onon, as the French write it--simply
means people. ]


SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION.

In Indian social organization, a problem at once suggests itself.
In these communities, comparatively populous, how could spirits so fierce,
and in many respects so ungoverned, live together in peace, without law
and without enforced authority? Yet there were towns where savages lived
together in thousands with a harmony which civilization might envy.
This was in good measure due to peculiarities of Indian character and
habits. This intractable race were, in certain external respects,
the most pliant and complaisant of mankind. The early missionaries were
charmed by the docile acquiescence with which their dogmas were received;
but they soon discovered that their facile auditors neither believed nor
understood that to which they had so promptly assented. They assented
from a kind of courtesy, which, while it vexed the priests, tended
greatly to keep the Indians in mutual accord. That well-known self-
control, which, originating in a form of pride, covered the savage nature
of the man with a veil, opaque, though thin, contributed not a little to
the same end. Though vain, arrogant, boastful, and vindictive, the
Indian bore abuse and sarcasm with an astonishing patience. Though
greedy and grasping, he was lavish without stint, and would give away his
all to soothe the manes of a departed relative, gain influence and
applause, or ingratiate himself with his neighbors. In his dread of
public opinion, he rivalled some of his civilized successors.

All Indians, and especially these populous and stationary tribes, had
their code of courtesy, whose requirements were rigid and exact; nor
might any infringe it without the ban of public censure. Indian nature,
inflexible and unmalleable, was peculiarly under the control of custom.
Established usage took the place of law,--was, in fact, a sort of common
law, with no tribunal to expound or enforce it. In these wild
democracies,--democracies in spirit, though not in form,--a respect for
native superiority, and a willingness to yield to it, were always
conspicuous. All were prompt to aid each other in distress, and a
neighborly spirit was often exhibited among them. When a young woman was
permanently married, the other women of the village supplied her with
firewood for the year, each contributing an armful. When one or more
families were without shelter, the men of the village joined in building
them a house. In return, the recipients of the favor gave a feast,
if they could; if not, their thanks were sufficient. [ The following
testimony concerning Indian charity and hospitality is from Ragueneau:
"As often as we have seen tribes broken up, towns destroyed, and their
people driven to flight, we have seen them, to the number of seven or
eight hundred persons, received with open arms by charitable hosts,
who gladly gave them aid, and even distributed among them a part of the
lands already planted, that they might have the means of living."--
Relation, 1650, 28. ] Among the Iroquois and Hurons--and doubtless among
the kindred tribes--there were marked distinctions of noble and base,
prosperous and poor; yet, while there was food in the village, the
meanest and the poorest need not suffer want. He had but to enter the
nearest house, and seat himself by the fire, when, without a word on
either side, food was placed before him by the women.

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