Warnings of Destruction

France and the Faith were entrenched on the Lake of Onondaga but how long would they remain there?

Continuing chapter 1. Previously in The Old Regime In Canada

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Such, in brief, was the pith of the father’s exhortation. As he spoke Indian like a native, and as his voice and gestures answered to his words, we may believe what Le Mercier tells us, that his hearers listened with mingled wonder, admiration, and terror. The work was well begun. The Jesuits struck while the iron was hot, built a small chapel for the mass, installed themselves in the town, and preached and catechised from morning till night.

The Frenchmen at the lake were not idle. The chosen site of their settlement was the crown of a hill commanding a broad view of waters and forests. The axemen fell to their work, and a ghastly wound soon gaped in the green bosom of the woodland. Here, among the stumps and prostrate trees of the unsightly clearing, the blacksmith built his forge, saw and hammer plied their trade; palisades were shaped and beams squared, in spite of heat, mosquitoes, and fever. At one time twenty men were ill, and lay gasping under a wretched shed of bark; but they all recovered, and the work went on till at length a capacious house, large enough to hold the whole colony, rose above the ruin of the forest. A palisade was set around it, and the Mission of Saint Mary of Gannentaa [1] was begun.

[1: Gannentaa or Ganuntaah is still the Iroquois name for Lake Onondaga. According to Morgan, it means “Material for Council Fire.”]

France and the Faith were entrenched on the Lake of Onondaga. How long would they remain there? The future alone could tell. The mission, it must not be forgotten, had a double scope, half ecclesiastical, half political. The Jesuits had essayed a fearful task, — to convert the Iroquois to God and to the king, thwart the Dutch heretics of the Hudson, save souls from hell, avert ruin from Canada, and thus raise their order to a place of honor and influence both hard earned and well earned. The mission at Lake Onondaga was but a base of operations. Long before they were lodged and fortified here, Chaumonot and Ménard set out for the Cayugas, whence the former proceeded to the Senecas, the most numerous, and powerful of the five confederate nations; and in the following spring another mission was begun among the Oneidas. Their reception was not unfriendly; but such was the reticence and dissimulation of these inscrutable savages, that it was impossible to foretell results. The women proved, as might be expected, far more impressible than the men; and in them the fathers placed great hope; since in this, the most savage people of the continent, women held a degree of political influence never perhaps equaled in any civilized nation.

[Women, among the Iroquois, had a council of their own, which, according to Lafitau, who knew this people well, had the initiative in discussion, subjects presented by them being settled in the council of chiefs and elders. In this latter council the women had an orator, often of their own sex, to represent them. The matrons had a leading voice in determining the succession of chiefs. There were also female chiefs, one of whom, with her attendants, came to Quebec with an embassy in 1655 (Marie de l’Incarnation). In the torture of prisoners, great deference was paid to the judgment of the women, who, says Champlain, were thought more skillful and subtle than the men.

The learned Lafitau, whose book appeared in 1724, dwells at length on the resemblance of the Iroquois to the ancient Lycians, among whom, according to Grecian writers, women were in the ascendant. “Gynecocracy, or the rule of women,” continues Lafitau, “which was the foundation of the Lycian government, was probably common in early times to nearly all the barbarous people of Greece” Mœurs des Sauvages, I. 460.]

But while infants were baptized and squaws converted, the crosses of the mission were many and great. The devil bestirred himself with more than his ordinary activity; “for,” as one of the fathers writes, “when in sundry nations of the earth men are rising up in strife against us (the Jesuits), then how much more the demons, on whom we continually wage war!” It was these infernal sprites, as the priests believed, who engendered suspicions and calumnies in the dark and superstitious minds of the Iroquois, and prompted them in dreams to destroy the apostles of the faith. Whether the foe was of earth or hell, the Jesuits were like those who tread the lava-crust that palpitates with the throes of the coming eruption, while the molten death beneath their feet glares white-hot through a thousand crevices. Yet, with a sublime enthusiasm and a glorious constancy, they toiled and they hoped, though the skies around were black with portent.

In the year in which the colony at Onondaga was begun, the Mohawks murdered the Jesuit Garreau, on his way up the Ottawa. In the following spring, a hundred Mohawk warriors came to Quebec, to carry more of the Hurons into slavery, though the remnant of that unhappy people, since the catastrophe of the last year, had sought safety in a palisaded camp within the limits of the French town, and immediately under the ramparts of Fort St. Louis. Here, one might think, they would have been safe; but Charny, son and successor of Lauson, seems to have been even more imbecile than his father, and listened meekly to the threats of the insolent strangers who told him that unless he abandoned the Hurons to their mercy, both they and the French should feel the weight of Mohawk tomahawks. They demanded further, that the French should give them boats to carry their prisoners; but, as there were none at hand, this last humiliation was spared. The Mohawks were forced to make canoes, in which they carried off as many as possible of their victims.

When the Onondagas learned this last exploit of their rivals, their jealousy knew no bounds, and a troop of them descended to Quebec to claim their share in the human plunder. Deserted by the French, the despairing Hurons abandoned themselves to their fate, and about fifty of those whom the Mohawks had left obeyed the behest of their tyrants and embarked for Onondaga. They reached Montreal in July, and thence proceeded towards their destination in company with the Onondaga warriors. The Jesuit Ragueneau, bound also for Onondaga, joined them. Five leagues above Montreal, the warriors left him behind; but he found an old canoe on the bank, in which, after abandoning most of his baggage, he contrived to follow with two or three Frenchmen who were with him. There was a rumor that a hundred Mohawk warriors were lying in wait among the Thousand Islands, to plunder the Onondagas of their Huron prisoners. It proved a false report. A speedier catastrophe awaited these unfortunates.

Towards evening on the 3rd of August, after the party had landed to encamp, an Onondaga chief made advances to a Christian Huron girl, as he had already done at every encampment since leaving Montreal. Being repulsed for the fourth time, he split her head with his tomahawk. It was the beginning of a massacre. The Onondagas rose upon their prisoners, killed seven men, all Christians, before the eyes of the horrified Jesuit, and plundered the rest of all they had. When Ragueneau protested, they told him with insolent mockery that they were acting by direction of the governor and the superior of the Jesuits, The priest himself was secretly warned that he was to be killed during the night; and he was surprised in the morning to find himself alive. [2] On reaching Onondaga, some of the Christian captives were burned, including several women and their infant children. [3]

[2: Lettre de Ragueneau au R. P. Provincial, 9 Août, 1657 (Rel., 1657).]

[3: Ibid., 21 Août, 1658 (Rel., 1658).]

The confederacy was a hornet’s nest, buzzing with preparation, and fast pouring out its wrathful swarms. The indomitable Le Moyne had gone again to the Mohawks, whence he wrote that two hundred of them had taken the war-path against the Algonquins of Canada; and, a little later, that all were gone but women, children, and old men. A great war-party of twelve hundred Iroquois from all the five cantons was to advance into Canada in the direction of the Ottawa. The settlements on the St. Lawrence were infested with prowling warriors, who killed the Indian allies of the French, and plundered the French themselves, whom they treated with an insufferable insolence; for they felt themselves masters of the situation, and knew that the Onondaga colony was in their power. Near Montreal they killed three Frenchmen. “They approach like foxes,” writes a Jesuit, “attack like lions, and disappear like birds.” Charny, fortunately, had resigned the government in despair, in order to turn priest, and the brave soldier Aillebout had taken his place. He caused twelve of the Iroquois to be seized and held as hostages. This seemed to increase their fury. An embassy came to Quebec and demanded the release of the hostages, but were met with a sharp reproof and a flat refusal.

At the mission on Lake Onondaga the crisis was drawing near. The unbridled young warriors, whose capricious lawlessness often set at naught the monitions of their crafty elders, killed wantonly at various times thirteen Christian Hurons, captives at Onondaga. Ominous reports reached the ears of the colonists. They heard of a secret council at which their death was decreed. Again, they heard that they were to be surprised and captured, that the Iroquois in force were then to descend upon Canada, lay waste the outlying settlements, and torture them, the colonists, in sight of their countrymen, by which they hoped to extort what terms they pleased. At length, a dying Onondaga, recently converted and baptized, confirmed the rumors, and revealed the whole plot.

It was to take effect before the spring opened; but the hostages in the hands of Aillebout embarrassed the conspirators and caused delay. Messengers were sent in haste to call in the priests from the detached missions, and all the colonists, fifty-three in number, were soon gathered at their fortified house on the lake. Their situation was frightful. Fate hung over them by a hair, and escape seemed hopeless. Of Du Puys’s ten soldiers, nine wished to desert, but the attempt would have been fatal. A throng of Onondaga warriors were day and night on the watch, bivouacked around the house. Some of them had built their huts of bark before the gate, and here, with calm, impassive faces, they lounged and smoked their pipes; or, wrapped in their blankets, strolled about the yards and outhouses, attentive to all that passed. Their behavior was very friendly. The Jesuits, themselves adepts in dissimulation, were amazed at the depth of their duplicity; for the conviction had been forced upon them that some of the chiefs had nursed their treachery from the first. In this extremity Du Puys and the Jesuits showed an admirable coolness, and among them devised a plan of escape, critical and full of doubt, but not devoid of hope.

First, they must provide means of transportation; next, they must contrive to use them undis covered. They had eight canoes, all of which combined would not hold half their company. Over the mission-house was a large loft or garret, and here the carpenters were secretly set at work to construct two large and light flat-boats, each capable of carrying fifteen men. The task was soon finished. The most difficult part of their plan remained.

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 1 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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