Parkman Vol. 5, Chapter 11

He formed three war-parties of picked men, one at Montreal, one at Three Rivers, and one at Quebec; the first to strike at Albany, the second at the border settlements of New Hampshire, and the third at those of Maine.

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Previously in Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV. Beginning Chapter 11.

Here was a point gained for the French, but the danger was not passed. The Ottawas could disavow the killing of the Iroquois; and, in fact, though there was a great division of opinion among them, they were preparing at this very time to send a secret embassy to the Seneca country to ratify the fatal treaty. The French commanders called a council of all the tribes. It met at the house of the Jesuits. Presents in abundance were distributed. The message of Frontenac was reinforced by persuasion and threats; and the assembly was told that the five tribes of the Iroquois were like five nests of muskrats in a marsh, which the French would drain dry, and then burn with all its inhabitants. Perrot took the disaffected chiefs aside, and with his usual bold adroitness diverted them for the moment from their purpose. The projected embassy was stopped, but any day might revive it. There was no safety for the French, and the ground of Michillimackinac was hollow under their feet. Everything depended on the success of their arms. A few victories would confirm their wavering allies; but the breath of another defeat would blow the fickle crew over to the enemy like a drift of dry leaves.

Chapter 11

While striving to reclaim his allies, Frontenac had not forgotten his enemies. It was of the last necessity to revive the dashed spirits of the Canadians and the troops; and action, prompt and bold, was the only means of doing so. He resolved, therefore, to take the offensive, not against the Iroquois, who seemed invulnerable as ghosts, but against the English; and by striking a few sharp and rapid blows to teach both friends and foes that Onontio was still alive. The effect of his return had already begun to appear, and the energy and fire of the undaunted veteran had shot new life into the dejected population. He formed three war-parties of picked men, one at Montreal, one at Three Rivers, and one at Quebec; the first to strike at Albany, the second at the border settlements of New Hampshire, and the third at those of Maine. That of Montreal was ready first. It consisted of two hundred and ten men, of whom ninety-six were Indian converts, chiefly from the two mission villages of Saut St. Louis and the Mountain of Montreal. They were Christian Iroquois whom the priests had persuaded to leave their homes and settle in Canada, to the great indignation of their heathen countrymen, and the great annoyance of the English colonists, to whom they were a constant menace. When Denonville attacked the Senecas, they had joined him; but of late they had shown reluctance to fight their heathen kinsmen, with whom the French even suspected them of collusion. Against the English, however, they willingly took up the hatchet. The French of the party were for the most part coureurs de bois. As the sea is the sailor’s element, so the forest was theirs. Their merits were hardihood and skill in woodcraft; their chief faults were insubordination and lawlessness. They had shared the general demoralization that followed the inroad of the Iroquois, and under Denonville had proved mutinous and unmanageable. In the best times, it was a hard task to command them, and one that needed, not bravery alone, but tact, address, and experience. Under a chief of such a stamp, they were admirable bush fighters, and such were those now chosen to lead them. D’Aillebout de Mantet and Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène, the brave son of Charles Le Moyne, had the chief command, supported by the brothers Le Moyne d’Iberville and Le Moyne de Bienville, with Repentigny de Montesson, Le Ber du Chesne, and others of the sturdy Canadian noblesse, nerved by adventure and trained in Indian warfare.

[Relation de Monseignat, 1689-90. There is a translation of this valuable paper in N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 462. The party, according to three of their number, consisted at first of 160 French and 140 Christian Indians, but was reduced by sickness and desertion to 250 in all. Examination of three French prisoners taken by ye. Maquas (Mohawks), and brought to Skinnectady, who were examined by Peter Schuyler, Mayor of Albany, Domine Godevridus Dellius, and some of ye. Gentlen. that went from Albany a purpose.]

It was the depth of winter when they began their march, striding on snowshoes over the vast white field of the frozen St. Lawrence, each with the hood of his blanket coat drawn over his head, a gun in his mittened hand, a knife, a hatchet, a tobacco pouch, and a bullet pouch at his belt, a pack on his shoulders, and his inseparable pipe hung at his neck in a leather case. They dragged their blankets and provisions over the snow on Indian sledges. Crossing the forest to Chambly, they advanced four or five days up the frozen Richelieu and the frozen Lake Champlain, and then stopped to hold a council. Frontenac had left the precise point of attack at the discretion of the leaders, and thus far the men had been ignorant of their destination. The Indians demanded to know it. Mantet and Sainte-Hélène replied that they were going to Albany. The Indians demurred. “How long is it,” asked one of them, “since the French grew so bold?” The commanders answered that, to regain the honor of which their late misfortunes had robbed them, the French would take Albany or die in the attempt. The Indians listened sullenly; the decision was postponed, and the party moved forward again. When after eight days they reached the Hudson, and found the place where two paths diverged, the one for Albany and the other for Schenectady, they all without farther words took the latter. Indeed, to attempt Albany would have been an act of desperation. The march was horrible. There was a partial thaw, and they waded knee-deep through the half-melted snow, and the mingled ice, mud, and water of the gloomy swamps. So painful and so slow was their progress, that it was nine days more before they reached a point two leagues from Schenectady. The weather had changed again, and a cold, gusty snowstorm pelted them. It was one of those days when the trees stand white as specters in the sheltered hollows of the forest, and bare and gray on the wind-swept ridges. The men were half dead with cold, fatigue, and hunger. It was four in the afternoon of the eighth of February. The scouts found an Indian hut, and in it were four Iroquois squaws, whom they captured. There was a fire in the wigwam; and the shivering Canadians crowded about it, stamping their chilled feet and warming their benumbed hands over the blaze. The Christian chief of the Saut St. Louis, known as Le Grand Agnié, or the Great Mohawk, by the French, and by the Dutch called Kryn, harangued his followers, and exhorted them to wash out their wrongs in blood. Then they all advanced again, and about dark reached the river Mohawk, a little above the village. A Canadian named Gignières, who had gone with nine Indians to reconnoiter, now returned to say that he had been within sight of Schenectady and had seen nobody. Their purpose had been to postpone the attack till two o’clock in the morning; but the situation was intolerable, and the limit of human endurance was reached. They could not make fires, and they must move on or perish. Guided by the frightened squaws, they crossed the Mohawk on the ice, toiling through the drifts amid the whirling snow that swept down the valley of the darkened stream, till about eleven o’clock they descried through the storm the snow-beplastered palisades of the devoted village. Such was their plight that some of them afterwards declared that they would all have surrendered if an enemy had appeared to summon them.

[Colden, 114 (ed. 1747).]

Schenectady was the farthest outpost of the colony of New York. Westward lay the Mohawk forests; and Orange, or Albany, was fifteen miles or more towards the south-east. The village was oblong in form, and enclosed by a palisade which had two gates, one towards Albany and the other towards the Mohawks. There was a blockhouse near the eastern gate, occupied by eight or nine Connecticut militia men under Lieutenant Talmage. There were also about thirty friendly Mohawks in the place, on a visit. The inhabitants, who were all Dutch, were in a state of discord and confusion. The revolution in England had produced a revolution in New York. The demagogue Jacob Leisler had got possession of Fort William and was endeavoring to master the whole colony. Albany was in the hands of the anti-Leisler or conservative party, represented by a convention of which Peter Schuyler was the chief. The Dutch of Schenectady for the most part favored Leisler, whose emissaries had been busily at work among them; but their chief magistrate, John Sander Glen, a man of courage and worth, stood fast for the Albany convention, and in consequence the villagers had threatened to kill him. Talmage and his Connecticut militia were under orders from Albany; and therefore, like Glen, they were under the popular ban. In vain the magistrate and the officer entreated the people to stand on their guard. They turned the advice to ridicule, laughed at the idea of danger, left both their gates wide open, and placed there, it is said, two snow images as mock sentinels. A French account declares that the village contained eighty houses, which is certainly an exaggeration. There had been some festivity during the evening, but it was now over; and the primitive villagers, fathers, mothers, children, and infants, lay buried in unconscious sleep. They were simple peasants and rude woodsmen, but with human affections and capable of human woe.

The French and Indians stood before the open gate, with its blind and dumb warder, the mock sentinel of snow. Iberville went with a detachment to find the Albany gate, and bar it against the escape of fugitives; but he missed it in the gloom and hastened back. The assailants were now formed into two bands, Sainte-Hélène leading the one and Mantet the other. They passed through the gate together in dead silence: one turned to the right and the other to the left, and they filed around the village between the palisades and the houses till the two leaders met at the farther end. Thus, the place was completely surrounded. The signal was then given: they all screeched the war-whoop together, burst in the doors with hatchets, and fell to their work. Roused by the infernal din, the villagers leaped from their beds. For some it was but a momentary nightmare of fright and horror, ended by the blow of the tomahawk. Others were less fortunate. Neither women nor children were spared. “No pen can write, and no tongue express,” wrote Schuyler, “the cruelties that were committed.” [1] There was little resistance, except at the blockhouse, where Talmage and his men made a stubborn fight; but the doors were at length forced open, the defenders killed or taken, and the building set on fire. Adam Vrooman, one of the villagers, saw his wife shot and his child brained against the door-post; but he fought so desperately that the assailants promised him his life. Orders had been given to spare Peter Tassemaker, the domine or minister, from whom it was thought that valuable information might be obtained; but he was hacked to pieces, and his house burned. Some, more agile or more fortunate than the rest, escaped at the eastern gate, and fled through the storm to seek shelter at Albany or at houses along the way. Sixty persons were killed outright, of whom thirty-eight were men and boys, ten were women, and twelve were children. [2] The number captured appears to have been between eighty and ninety. The thirty Mohawks in the town were treated with studied kindness by the victors, who declared that they had no quarrel with them, but only with the Dutch and English.

[1: “The women bigg with Childe rip’d up, and the Children alive throwne into the flames, and their heads dashed to pieces against the Doors and windows.” Schuyler to the Council of Connecticut, 15 Feb., 1690. Similar statements are made by Leisler. See Doc. Hist. N. Y., I. 307, 310.]

[2: List of ye. People kild and destroyed by ye. French of Canida and there Indians at Skinnechtady, in Doc. Hist. N. Y., I. 304.]

From Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV, Chapter 11 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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