A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century

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




In the course of the summer, the French at Three Rivers became aware that
a band of Iroquois was prowling in the neighborhood, and sixty men went
out to meet them. Far from retreating, the Iroquois, who were about
twenty-five in number, got out of their canoes, and took post, waist-deep
in mud and water, among the tall rushes at the margin of the river.
Here they fought stubbornly, and kept all the Frenchmen at bay. At
length, finding themselves hard pressed, they entered their canoes again,
and paddled off. The French rowed after them, and soon became separated
in the chase; whereupon the Iroquois turned, and made desperate fight
with the foremost, retreating again as soon as the others came up.
This they repeated several times, and then made their escape, after
killing a number of the best French soldiers. Their leader in this
affair was a famous half-breed, known as the Flemish Bastard, who is
styled by Ragueneau "an abomination of sin, and a monster produced
between a heretic Dutch father and a pagan mother."

In the forests far north of Three Rivers dwelt the tribe called the
Atticamegues, or Nation of the White Fish. From their remote position,
and the difficult nature of the intervening country, they thought
themselves safe; but a band of Iroquois, marching on snow-shoes a
distance of twenty days' journey northward from the St. Lawrence, fell
upon one of their camps in the winter, and made a general butchery of the
inmates. The tribe, however, still held its ground for a time, and,
being all good Catholics, gave their missionary, Father Buteux, an urgent
invitation to visit them in their own country. Buteux, who had long been
stationed at Three Rivers, was in ill health, and for years had rarely
been free from some form of bodily suffering. Nevertheless, he acceded
to their request, and, before the opening of spring, made a remarkable
journey on snow-shoes into the depths of this frozen wilderness.
[ Iournal du Pere Iacques Buteux du Voyage qu'il a fait pour la Mission
des Attikamegues. See Relation, 1651, 15. ] In the year following,
he repeated the undertaking. With him were a large party of Atticamegues,
and several Frenchmen. Game was exceedingly scarce, and they were forced
by hunger to separate, a Huron convert and a Frenchman named Fontarabie
remaining with the missionary. The snows had melted, and all the streams
were swollen. The three travellers, in a small birch canoe, pushed their
way up a turbulent river, where falls and rapids were so numerous,
that many times daily they were forced to carry their bark vessel and
their baggage through forests and thickets and over rocks and precipices.
On the tenth of May, they made two such portages, and soon after,
reaching a third fall, again lifted their canoe from the water. They
toiled through the naked forest, among the wet, black trees, over tangled
roots, green, spongy mosses, mouldering leaves, and rotten, prostrate
trunks, while the cataract foamed amidst the rocks hard by. The Indian
led the way with the canoe on his head, while Buteux and the other
Frenchman followed with the baggage. Suddenly they were set upon by a
troop of Iroquois, who had crouched behind thickets, rocks, and fallen
trees, to waylay them. The Huron was captured before he had time to fly.
Buteux and the Frenchman tried to escape, but were instantly shot down,
the Jesuit receiving two balls in the breast. The Iroquois rushed upon
them, mangled their bodies with tomahawks and swords, stripped them,
and then flung them into the torrent. [ Ragueneau, Relation, 1652, 2,
3. ]




CHAPTER XXXII.

1650-1866.

THE LAST OF THE HURONS.


FATE OF THE VANQUISHED.--
THE REFUGEES OF ST. JEAN BAPTISTE AND ST. MICHEL.--
THE TOBACCO NATION AND ITS WANDERINGS.--THE MODERN WYANDOTS.--
THE BITER BIT.--THE HURONS AT QUEBEC.--NOTRE-DAME DE LORETTE.


Iroquois bullets and tomahawks had killed the Hurons by hundreds, but
famine and disease had killed incomparably more. The miseries of the
starving crowd on Isle St. Joseph had been shared in an equal degree by
smaller bands, who had wintered in remote and secret retreats of the
wilderness. Of those who survived that season of death, many were so
weakened that they could not endure the hardships of a wandering life,
which was new to them. The Hurons lived by agriculture; their fields and
crops were destroyed, and they were so hunted from place to place that
they could rarely till the soil. Game was very scarce; and, without
agriculture, the country could support only a scanty and scattered
population like that which maintained a struggling existence in the
wilderness of the lower St. Lawrence. The mortality among the exiles was
prodigious.

It is a matter of some interest to trace the fortunes of the shattered
fragments of a nation once prosperous, and, in its own eyes and those of
its neighbors, powerful and great. None were left alive within their
ancient domain. Some had sought refuge among the Neutrals and the Eries,
and shared the disasters which soon overwhelmed those tribes; others
succeeded in reaching the Andastes; while the inhabitants of two towns,
St. Michel and St. Jean Baptiste, had recourse to an expedient which
seems equally strange and desperate, but which was in accordance with
Indian practices. They contrived to open a communication with the Seneca
Nation of the Iroquois, and promised to change their nationality and turn
Senecas as the price of their lives. The victors accepted the proposal;
and the inhabitants of these two towns, joined by a few other Hurons,
migrated in a body to the Seneca country. They were not distributed
among different villages, but were allowed to form a town by themselves,
where they were afterwards joined by some prisoners of the Neutral
Nation. They identified themselves with the Iroquois in all but
religion,--holding so fast to their faith, that, eighteen years after,
a Jesuit missionary found that many of them were still good Catholics.

[ Compare Relation, 1651, 4; 1660, 14, 28; and 1670, 69. The Huron town
among the Senecas was called Gandougaraé. Father Fremin was here in 1668,
and gives an account of his visit in the Relation of 1670. ]

The division of the Hurons called the Tobacco Nation, favored by their
isolated position among mountains, had held their ground longer than the
rest; but at length they, too, were compelled to fly, together with such
other Hurons as had taken refuge with them. They made their way
northward, and settled on the Island of Michilimackinac, where they were
joined by the Ottawas, who, with other Algonquins, had been driven by
fear of the Iroquois from the western shores of Lake Huron and the banks
of the River Ottawa. At Michilimackinac the Hurons and their allies were
again attacked by the Iroquois, and, after remaining several years,
they made another remove, and took possession of the islands at the mouth
of the Green Bay of Lake Michigan. Even here their old enemy did not
leave them in peace; whereupon they fortified themselves on the main-land,
and afterwards migrated southward and westward. This brought them in
contact with the Illinois, an Algonquin people, at that time very
numerous, but who, like many other tribes at this epoch, were doomed to a
rapid diminution from wars with other savage nations. Continuing their
migration westward, the Hurons and Ottawas reached the Mississippi,
where they fell in with the Sioux. They soon quarrelled with those
fierce children of the prairie, who drove them from their country.
They retreated to the south-western extremity of Lake Superior, and
settled on Point Saint Esprit, or Shagwamigon Point, near the Islands of
the Twelve Apostles. As the Sioux continued to harass them, they left
this place about the year 1671, and returned to Michilimackinac, where
they settled, not on the island, but on the neighboring Point St. Ignace,
now Graham's Point, on the north side of the strait. The greater part of
them afterwards removed thence to Detroit and Sandusky, where they lived
under the name of Wyandots until within the present century, maintaining
a marked influence over the surrounding Algonquins. They bore an active
part, on the side of the French, in the war which ended in the reduction
of Canada; and they were the most formidable enemies of the English in
the Indian war under Pontiac. [ See "History of the Conspiracy of
Pontiac." ] The government of the United States at length removed them
to reserves on the western frontier, where a remnant of them may still be
found. Thus it appears that the Wyandots, whose name is so conspicuous
in the history of our border wars, are descendants of the ancient Hurons,
and chiefly of that portion of them called the Tobacco Nation.

[ The migrations of this band of the Hurons may be traced by detached
passages and incidental remarks in the Relations of 1654, 1660, 1667,
1670, 1671, and 1672. Nicolas Perrot, in his chapter, Deffaitte et
Füitte des Hurons chassés de leur Pays, and in the chapter following,
gives a long and rather confused account of their movements and
adventures. See also La Poterie, Histoire de l'Amérique Septentrionale,
II. 51-56. According to the Relation of 1670, the Hurons, when living at
Shagwamigon Point, numbered about fifteen hundred souls. ]

When Ragueneau and his party left Isle St. Joseph for Quebec, the greater
number of the Hurons chose to remain. They took possession of the stone
fort which the French had abandoned, and where, with reasonable vigilance,
they could maintain themselves against attack. In the succeeding autumn
a small Iroquois war-party had the audacity to cross over to the island,
and build a fort of felled trees in the woods. The Hurons attacked them;
but the invaders made so fierce a defence, that they kept their
assailants at bay, and at length retreated with little or no loss.
Soon after, a much larger band of Onondaga Iroquois, approaching
undiscovered, built a fort on the main-land, opposite the island, but
concealed from sight in the forest. Here they waited to waylay any party
of Hurons who might venture ashore. A Huron war chief, named Étienne
Annaotaha, whose life is described as a succession of conflicts and
adventures, and who is said to have been always in luck, landed with a
few companions, and fell into an ambuscade of the Iroquois. He prepared
to defend himself, when they called out to him, that they came not as
enemies, but as friends, and that they brought wampum-belts and presents
to persuade the Hurons to forget the past, go back with them to their
country, become their adopted countrymen, and live with them as one
nation. Étienne suspected treachery, but concealed his distrust, and
advanced towards the Iroquois with an air of the utmost confidence.
They received him with open arms, and pressed him to accept their
invitation; but he replied, that there were older and wiser men among the
Hurons, whose counsels all the people followed, and that they ought to
lay the proposal before them. He proceeded to advise them to keep him as
a hostage, and send over his companions, with some of their chiefs,
to open the negotiation. His apparent frankness completely deceived
them; and they insisted that he himself should go to the Huron village,
while his companions remained as hostages. He set out accordingly with
three of the principal Iroquois.

When he reached the village, he gave the whoop of one who brings good
tidings, and proclaimed with a loud voice that the hearts of their
enemies had changed, that the Iroquois would become their countrymen and
brothers, and that they should exchange their miseries for a life of
peace and plenty in a fertile and prosperous land. The whole Huron
population, full of joyful excitement, crowded about him and the three
envoys, who were conducted to the principal lodge, and feasted on the
best that the village could supply. Étienne seized the opportunity to
take aside four or five of the principal chiefs, and secretly tell them
his suspicions that the Iroquois were plotting to compass their
destruction under cover of overtures of peace; and he proposed that they
should meet treachery with treachery. He then explained his plan,
which was highly approved by his auditors, who begged him to charge
himself with the execution of it. Étienne now caused criers to proclaim
through the village that every one should get ready to emigrate in a few
days to the country of their new friends. The squaws began their
preparations at once, and all was bustle and alacrity; for the Hurons
themselves were no less deceived than were the Iroquois envoys.

During one or two succeeding days, many messages and visits passed
between the Hurons and the Iroquois, whose confidence was such, that
thirty-seven of their best warriors at length came over in a body to the
Huron village. Étienne's time had come. He and the chiefs who were in
the secret gave the word to the Huron warriors, who, at a signal, raised
the war-whoop, rushed upon their visitors, and cut them to pieces.
One of them, who lingered for a time, owned before he died that Étienne's
suspicions were just, and that they had designed nothing less than the
massacre or capture of all the Hurons. Three of the Iroquois,
immediately before the slaughter began, had received from Étienne a
warning of their danger in time to make their escape. The year before,
he had been captured, with Brébeuf and Lalemant, at the town of St. Louis,
and had owed his life to these three warriors, to whom he now paid back
the debt of gratitude. They carried tidings of what had befallen to
their countrymen on the main-land, who, aghast at the catastrophe,
fled homeward in a panic.

[ Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1651, 5, 6. Le Mercier, in the
Relation of 1654, preserves the speech of a Huron chief, in which he
speaks of this affair, and adds some particulars not mentioned by
Ragueneau. He gives thirty-four as the number killed. ]

Here was a sweet morsel of vengeance. The miseries of the Hurons were
lighted up with a brief gleam of joy; but it behooved them to make a
timely retreat from their island before the Iroquois came to exact a
bloody retribution. Towards spring, while the lake was still frozen,
many of them escaped on the ice, while another party afterwards followed
in canoes. A few, who had neither strength to walk nor canoes to
transport them, perforce remained behind, and were soon massacred by the
Iroquois. The fugitives directed their course to the Grand Manitoulin
Island, where they remained for a short time, and then, to the number of
about four hundred, descended the Ottawa, and rejoined their countrymen
who had gone to Quebec the year before.

These united parties, joined from time to time by a few other fugitives,
formed a settlement on land belonging to the Jesuits, near the south-
western extremity of the Isle of Orleans, immediately below Quebec.
Here the Jesuits built a fort, like that on Isle St. Joseph, with a
chapel, and a small house for the missionaries, while the bark dwellings
of the Hurons were clustered around the protecting ramparts. [ 1 ]
Tools and seeds were given them, and they were encouraged to cultivate
the soil. Gradually they rallied from their dejection, and the mission
settlement was beginning to wear an appearance of thrift, when, in 1656,
the Iroquois made a descent upon them, and carried off a large number of
captives, under the very cannon of Quebec; the French not daring to fire
upon the invaders, lest they should take revenge upon the Jesuits who
were at that time in their country. This calamity was, four years after,
followed by another, when the best of the Huron warriors, including their
leader, the crafty and valiant Étienne Annaotaha, were slain, fighting
side by side with the French, in the desperate conflict of the Long
Sault. [ Relation, 1660 (anonymous), 14. ]

[ 1 The site of the fort was the estate now known as "La Terre du Fort,"
near the landing of the steam ferry. In 1856, Mr. N. H. Bowen, a
resident near the spot, in making some excavations, found a solid stone
wall five feet thick, which, there can be little doubt, was that of the
work in question. This wall was originally crowned with palisades.
See Bowen, Historical Sketch of the Isle of Orleans, 25. ]

The attenuated colony, replenished by some straggling bands of the same
nation, and still numbering several hundred persons, was removed to
Quebec after the inroad in 1656, and lodged in a square inclosure of
palisades close to the fort. [ In a plan of Quebec of 1660, the "Fort
des Hurons" is laid down on a spot adjoining the north side of the
present Place d'Armes. ] Here they remained about ten years, when,
the danger of the times having diminished, they were again removed to a
place called Notre-Dame de Foy, now Ste. Foi, three or four miles west of
Quebec. Six years after, when the soil was impoverished and the wood in
the neighborhood exhausted, they again changed their abode, and, under
the auspices of the Jesuits, who owned the land, settled at Old Lorette,
nine miles from Quebec.

Chaumonot was at this time their missionary. It may be remembered that
he had professed special devotion to Our Lady of Loretto, who, in his
boyhood, had cured him, as he believed, of a distressing malady. [ See
ante, chapter 9 (p. 102). ] He had always cherished the idea of building
a chapel in honor of her in Canada, after the model of the Holy House of
Loretto,--which, as all the world knows, is the house wherein Saint
Joseph dwelt with his virgin spouse, and which angels bore through the
air from the Holy Land to Italy, where it remains an object of pilgrimage
to this day. Chaumonot opened his plan to his brother Jesuits, who were
delighted with it, and the chapel was begun at once, not without the
intervention of miracle to aid in raising the necessary funds. It was
built of brick, like its original, of which it was an exact facsimile;
and it stood in the centre of a quadrangle, the four sides of which were
formed by the bark dwellings of the Hurons, ranged with perfect order in
straight lines. Hither came many pilgrims from Quebec and more distant
settlements, and here Our Lady granted to her suppliants, says Chaumonot,
many miraculous favors, insomuch that "it would require an entire book to
describe them all."

[ "Les grâces qu'on y obtient par l'entremise de la Mère de Dieu vont
jusqu'au miracle. Comme il faudroit composer un livre entier pour
décrire toutes ces faveurs extraordinaires, je n'en rapporterai que deux,
ayant été témoin oculaire de l'une et propre sujet de l'autre."--Vie, 95.

The removal from Notre-Dame de Foy took place at the end of 1673, and the
chapel was finished in the following year. Compare Vie de Chaumonot with
Dablon, Relation, 1672-73, p. 21; and Ibid., Relation 1673-79, p. 259. ]

But the Hurons were not destined to remain permanently even here; for,
before the end of the century, they removed to a place four miles distant,
now called New Lorette, or Indian Lorette. It was a wild spot, covered
with the primitive forest, and seamed by a deep and tortuous ravine,
where the St. Charles foams, white as a snow-drift, over the black ledges,
and where the sunlight struggles through matted boughs of the pine and
fir, to bask for brief moments on the mossy rocks or flash on the
hurrying waters. On a plateau beside the torrent, another chapel was
built to Our Lady, and another Huron town sprang up; and here, to this
day, the tourist finds the remnant of a lost people, harmless weavers of
baskets and sewers of moccasins, the Huron blood fast bleaching out of
them, as, with every generation, they mingle and fade away in the French
population around.

[ An interesting account of a visit to Indian Lorette in 1721 will be
found in the Journal Historique of Charlevoix. Kalm, in his Travels in
North America, describes its condition in 1749. See also Le Beau,
Aventures, I. 103; who, however, can hardly be regarded as an authority. ]




CHAPTER XXXIII.

1650-1670.

THE DESTROYERS.


IROQUOIS AMBITION.--ITS VICTIMS.--THE FATE OF THE NEUTRALS.--
THE FATE OF THE ERIES.--THE WAR WITH THE ANDASTES.--
SUPREMACY OF THE IROQUOIS.


It was well for the European colonies, above all for those of England,
that the wisdom of the Iroquois was but the wisdom of savages. Their
sagacity is past denying; it showed itself in many ways; but it was not
equal to a comprehension of their own situation and that of their race.
Could they have read their destiny, and curbed their mad ambition,
they might have leagued with themselves four great communities of kindred
lineage, to resist the encroachments of civilization, and oppose a
barrier of fire to the spread of the young colonies of the East. But
their organization and their intelligence were merely the instruments of
a blind frenzy, which impelled them to destroy those whom they might have
made their allies in a common cause.

Of the four kindred communities, two at least, the Hurons and the
Neutrals, were probably superior in numbers to the Iroquois. Either one
of these, with union and leadership, could have held its ground against
them, and the two united could easily have crippled them beyond the power
of doing mischief. But these so-called nations were mere aggregations of
villages and families, with nothing that deserved to be called a
government. They were very liable to panics, because the part attacked
by an enemy could never rely with confidence on prompt succor from the
rest; and when once broken, they could not be rallied, because they had
no centre around which to gather. The Iroquois, on the other hand,
had an organization with which the ideas and habits of several
generations were interwoven, and they had also sagacious leaders for
peace and war. They discussed all questions of policy with the coolest
deliberation, and knew how to turn to profit even imperfections in their
plan of government which seemed to promise only weakness and discord.
Thus, any nation, or any large town, of their confederacy, could make a
separate war or a separate peace with a foreign nation, or any part of
it. Some member of the league, as, for example, the Cayugas, would make
a covenant of friendship with the enemy, and, while the infatuated
victims were thus lulled into a delusive security, the war-parties of the
other nations, often joined by the Cayuga warriors, would overwhelm them
by a sudden onset. But it was not by their craft, nor by their
organization,--which for military purposes was wretchedly feeble,--that
this handful of savages gained a bloody supremacy. They carried all
before them, because they were animated throughout, as one man, by the
same audacious pride and insatiable rage for conquest. Like other
Indians, they waged war on a plan altogether democratic,--that is,
each man fought or not, as he saw fit; and they owed their unity and
vigor of action to the homicidal frenzy that urged them all alike.

The Neutral Nation had taken no part, on either side, in the war of
extermination against the Hurons; and their towns were sanctuaries where
either of the contending parties might take asylum. On the other hand,
they made fierce war on their western neighbors, and, a few years before,
destroyed, with atrocious cruelties, a large fortified town of the Nation
of Fire. [ 1 ] Their turn was now come, and their victims found fit
avengers; for no sooner were the Hurons broken up and dispersed, than the
Iroquois, without waiting to take breath, turned their fury on the
Neutrals. At the end of the autumn of 1650, they assaulted and took one
of their chief towns, said to have contained at the time more than
sixteen hundred men, besides women and children; and early in the
following spring, they took another town. The slaughter was prodigious,
and the victors drove back troops of captives for butchery or adoption.
It was the death-blow of the Neutrals. They abandoned their corn-fields
and villages in the wildest terror, and dispersed themselves abroad in
forests, which could not yield sustenance to such a multitude. They
perished by thousands, and from that time forth the nation ceased to
exist. [ 2 ]

[ 1 "Last summer," writes Lalemant in 1643, "two thousand warriors of
the Neutral Nation attacked a town of the Nation of Fire, well fortified
with a palisade, and defended by nine hundred warriors. They took it
after a siege of ten days; killed many on the spot; and made eight
hundred prisoners, men, women, and children. After burning seventy of
the best warriors, they put out the eyes of the old men, and cut away
their lips, and then left them to drag out a miserable existence.
Behold the scourge that is depopulating all this country!"--Relation des
Hurons, 1644, 98.

The Assistaeronnons, Atsistaehonnons, Mascoutins, or Nation of Fire (more
correctly, perhaps, Nation of the Prairie), were a very numerous
Algonquin people of the West, speaking the same language as the Sacs and
Foxes. In the map of Sanson, they are placed in the southern part of
Michigan; and according to the Relation of 1658, they had thirty towns.
They were a stationary, and in some measure an agricultural people.
They fled before their enemies to the neighborhood of Fox River in
Wisconsin, where they long remained. Frequent mention of them will be
found in the later Relations, and in contemporary documents. They are
now extinct as a tribe. ]

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