Canada in Distress

The state of Canada was deplorable, and the position of its governor as mortifying as it was painful.

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

Previously in Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV. Continuing Chapter 9.

Denonville was sorely perplexed. He was hard pressed, and eager for peace with the Iroquois at any price; but Dongan was using every means to prevent their treating of peace with the French governor until he had complied with all the English demands. In this extremity, Denonville sent Father Vaillant to Albany, in the hope of bringing his intractable rival to conditions less humiliating. The Jesuit played his part with ability, and proved more than a match for his adversary in dialectics; but Dongan held fast to all his demands. Vaillant tried to temporize, and asked for a truce, with a view to a final settlement by reference to the two kings. [1] Dongan referred the question to a meeting of Iroquois chiefs, who declared in reply that they would make neither peace nor truce till Fort Niagara was demolished and all the prisoners restored. Dongan, well pleased, commended their spirit, and assured them that King James, “who is the greatest man the sunn shines uppon, and never told a ly in his life, has given you his Royall word to protect you.” [2] Vaillant returned from his bootless errand; and a stormy correspondence followed between the two governors. Dongan renewed his demands, then protested his wish for peace, extolled King James for his pious zeal, and declared that he was sending over missionaries of his own to convert the Iroquois. [3] What Denonville wanted was not their conversion by Englishmen, but their conversion by Frenchmen, and the presence in their towns of those most useful political agents, the Jesuits. [4] He replied angrily, charging Dongan with preventing the conversion of the Iroquois by driving off the French missionaries, and accusing him, farther, of instigating the tribes of New York to attack Canada.[5] Suddenly there was a change in the temper of his letters. He wrote to his rival in terms of studied civility; declared that he wished he could meet him, and consult with him on the best means of advancing the cause of true religion; begged that he would not refuse him his friendship; and thanked him in warm terms for befriending some French prisoners whom he had saved from the Iroquois, and treated with great kindness. [6]

[1: The papers of this discussion will be found in N. Y. Col. Docs., III.]

[2: Dongan’s Reply to the Five Nations, Ibid., III. 535.]

[3: Dongan to Denonville, 17 Feb., 1688, Ibid., III. 519.]

[4] “II y a une nécessité indispensable pour les intérais de la Religion et de la Colonie de restablir les missionaires Jésuites dans tous les villages Iroquois: si vous ne trouvés moyen de faire retourner ces Pères dans leurs anciennes missions, vous devés en attendre beaucoup de malheur pour cette Colonie; car je dois vous dire que jusqu’icy c’est leur habilité qui a soutenu les affaires du pays par leur sçavoir-faire à gouverner les esprits de ces barbares, qui ne sont Sauvages que de nom.” Denonville, Mémoire adressé au Ministre, 9 Nov., 1688.]

[5: Denonville à Dongan, 24 Avril, 1688; Ibid., 12 Mai, 1688. Whether the charge is true is questionable. Dongan had just written that, if the Iroquois did harm to the French, he was ordered to offer satisfaction, and had already done so.]

[6: Denonville à Dongan, 18 Juin, 1688; Ibid., 5 Juillet, 1688; Ibid., 20 Aug., 1688. “Je n’ai donc qu’à vous asseurer que toute la Colonie a une très-parfaite reconnoissance des bons offices que ces pauvres malheureux ont reçu de vous et de vos peuples.”]

This change was due to dispatches from Versailles, in which Denonville was informed that the matters in dispute would soon be amicably settled by the commissioners; that he was to keep on good terms with the English commanders, and, what pleased him still more, that the king of England was about to recall Dongan. [7] In fact, James II. had resolved on remodeling his American colonies. New York, New Jersey, and New England had been formed into one government under Sir Edmund Andros; and Dongan was summoned home, where a regiment was given him, with the rank of major-general of artillery. Denonville says that, in his efforts to extend English trade to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, his late rival had been influenced by motives of personal gain. Be this as it may, he was a bold and vigorous defender of the claims of the British crown.

[7: Mémoire pour servir d’Instruction au Sr. Marquis de Denonville, 8 Mars, 1688; Le Roy à Denonville, même date; Seignelay à Denonville, même date. Louis XIV. had demanded Dongan’s recall. How far this had influenced the action of James II. it is difficult to say.]

Sir Edmund Andros now reigned over New York; and, by the terms of his commission, his rule stretched westward to the Pacific. The usual official courtesies passed between him and Denonville; but Andros renewed all the demands of his predecessor, claimed the Iroquois as subjects, and forbade the French to attack them. [8] The new governor was worse than the old. Denonville wrote to the minister:

I send you copies of his letters, by which you will see that the spirit of Dongan has entered into the heart of his successor, who may be less passionate and less interested, but who is, to say the least, quite as much opposed to us, and perhaps more dangerous by his suppleness and smoothness than the other was by his violence. What he has just done among the Iroquois, whom he pretends to be under his government, and whom he prevents from coming to meet me, is a certain proof that neither he nor the other English governors, nor their people, will refrain from doing this colony all the harm they can.” [9]

[8: Andros to Denonville, 21 Aug., 1688; Ibid., 29 Sept., 1688.]

[9: Mémoire de l’Estat Présent des Affaires de ce Pays depuis le 10me Aoust, 1688, jusq’au dernier Octobre de la mesme année. He declares that the English are always “itching for the western trade,” that their favorite plan is to establish a post on the Ohio, and that they have made the attempt three times already.]

While these things were passing, the state of Canada was deplorable, and the position of its governor as mortifying as it was painful. He thought with good reason that the maintenance of the new fort at Niagara was of great importance to the colony, and he had repeatedly refused the demands of Dongan and the Iroquois for its demolition. But a power greater than sachems and governors presently intervened. The provisions left at Niagara, though abundant, were atrociously bad. Scurvy and other malignant diseases soon broke out among the soldiers. The Senecas prowled about the place, and no man dared venture out for hunting, fishing, or firewood. [10] The fort was first a prison, then a hospital, then a charnel-house, till before spring the garrison of a hundred men was reduced to ten or twelve. In this condition, they were found towards the end of April by a large war-party of friendly Miamis, who entered the place and held it till a French detachment at length arrived for its relief. [11] The garrison of Fort Frontenac had suffered from the same causes, though not to the same degree. Denonville feared that he should be forced to abandon them both. The way was so long and so dangerous, and the governor had grown of late so cautious, that he dreaded the risk of maintaining such remote communications. On second thought, he resolved to keep Frontenac and sacrifice Niagara. He promised Dongan that he would demolish it, and he kept his word. [12]

[10] Denonville, Mémoire du 10 Aoust, 1688.]

[11] Recueil de ce qui s’est passé en Canada depuis l’année 1682. The writer was an officer of the detachment, and describes what he saw. Compare La Potherie, II. 210; and La Hontan, I. 131 (1709).]

[12: Denonville à Dongan, 20 Aoust, 1688; Procès-verbal of the Condition of Fort Niagara, 1688; N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 386. The palisades were torn down by Denonville’s order on the 15th of September. The rude dwellings and storehouses which they enclosed, together with a large wooden cross, were left standing. The commandant De Troyes had died, and Captain Desbergères had been sent to succeed him.]

He was forced to another and a deeper humiliation. At the imperious demand of Dongan and the Iroquois, he begged the king to send back the prisoners entrapped at Fort Frontenac, and he wrote to the minister:

Be pleased, Monseigneur, to remember that I had the honor to tell you that, in order to attain the peace necessary to the country, I was obliged to promise that I would beg you to send back to us the prisoners I sent you last year. I know you gave orders that they should be well treated, but I am informed that, though they were well enough treated at first, your orders were not afterwards executed with the same fidelity. If ill treatment has caused them all to die, — for they are people who easily fall into dejection, and who die of it, — and if none of them come back, I do not know at all whether we can persuade these barbarians not to attack us again.”

[13: Denonville, Mémoire de 10 Aoust, 1688.]

What had brought the marquis to this pass? Famine, destitution, disease, and the Iroquois were making Canada their prey. The fur trade had been stopped for two years; and the people, bereft of their only means of subsistence, could contribute nothing to their own defense. Above Three Rivers, the whole population was imprisoned in stockade forts hastily built in every seigniory. [14] Here they were safe, provided that they never ventured out; but their fields were left untilled, and the governor was already compelled to feed many of them at the expense of the king. The Iroquois roamed among the deserted settlements or prowled like lynxes about the forts, waylaying convoys and killing or capturing stragglers. Their war-parties were usually small; but their movements were so mysterious and their attacks so sudden, that they spread a universal panic through the upper half of the colony. They were the wasps which Denonville had failed to kill.

[14: In the Dépot des Cartes de la Marine, there is a contemporary manuscript map, on which all these forts are laid down.]

“We should succumb,” wrote the distressed governor,

if our cause were not the cause of God. Your Majesty’s zeal for religion, and the great things you have done for the destruction of heresy, encourage me to hope that you will be the bulwark of the Faith in the new world as you are in the old. I cannot give you a truer idea of the war we have to wage with the Iroquois than by comparing them to a great number of wolves or other ferocious beasts, issuing out of a vast forest to ravage the neighboring settlements. The people gather to hunt them down; but nobody can find their lair, for they are always in motion. An abler man than I would be greatly at a loss to manage the affairs of this country. It is for the interest of the colony to have peace at any cost whatever. For the glory of the king and the good of religion, we should be glad to have it an advantageous one; and so it would have been, but for the malice of the English and the protection they have given our enemies.”

[Denonville au Roy, 1688; Ibid., Mémoire du 10 Aoust, 1688; Ibid., Mémoire du 9 Nov., 1688.]

And yet he had, one would think, a reasonable force at his disposal. His thirty-two companies of regulars were reduced by this time to about fourteen hundred men, but he had also three or four hundred Indian converts, besides the militia of the colony, of whom he had stationed a large body under Vaudreuil at the head of the Island of Montreal. All told, they were several times more numerous than the agile warriors who held the colony in terror. He asked for eight hundred more regulars. The king sent him three hundred. Affairs grew worse, and he grew desperate. Rightly judging that the best means of defense was to take the offensive, he conceived the plan of a double attack on the Iroquois, one army to assail the Onondagas and Cayugas, another the Mohawks and Oneidas. [15] Since to reach the Mohawks as he proposed, by the way of Lake Champlain, he must pass through territory indisputably British, the attempt would be a flagrant violation of the treaty of neutrality. Nevertheless, he implored the king to send him four thousand soldiers to accomplish it. [16] His fast friend, the bishop, warmly seconded his appeal. “The glory of God is involved,” wrote the head of the church, “for the Iroquois are the only tribe who oppose the progress of the gospel. The glory of the king is involved, for they are the only tribe who refuse to recognize his grandeur and his might. They hold the French in the deepest contempt; and, unless they are completely humbled within two years, his Majesty will have no colony left in Canada.” [17] And the prelate proceeds to tell the minister how, in his opinion, the war ought to be conducted. The appeal was vain. “His Majesty agrees with you,” wrote Seignelay, “that three or four thousand men would be the best means of making peace, but he cannot spare them now. If the enemy breaks out again, raise the inhabitants, and fight as well as you can till his Majesty is prepared to send you troops.” [18]

[15: Plan for the Termination of the Iroquois War, N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 375.]

[16: Denonville, Mémoire du 8 Août, 1688.]

[17: Saint-Vallier, Mémoire sur les Affaires du Canada pour Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay.]

[18: Mémoire du Ministre adressé à Denonville, 1 Mai, 1689.]

– Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV, Chapter 9 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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