The White and the Gold

by Thomas B. Costain

  The episode had one result: it provided Jeanne Mance with her first patients.

  The Indians remained in the woods throughout the whole course of the winter. Sometimes at night the baying of the faithful Pilot would be heard and the members of the watch would hurry to their posts. Here they would remain, straining their eyes for any sign of a rush of fleet copper figures across the white of the snow. The women would dress and sit in the darkness in anxious prayer.

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  It must not be assumed that the hands on the clocks stood still while the Iroquois besieged the French settlements like the goblins to whom they were compared by Father Jerome Lalemant in one of his letters. Somehow business went on and native canoes, in lesser quantity than ever, reached Three Rivers and Quebec with furs for barter. The fall fleet departed for France on October 24; “laden,” said the Relations, “with 20,000 pounds weight of beaver skins for the habitants, and 10,000 for the general company, at a pistole, or ten or eleven francs, a pound.” This statement makes it evident that plenty of private trading was carried on in spite of the efforts of the company to suppress it.

  Nor did the Iroquois invariably have things their own way. The Hurons, who sprang from the same racial stock as the indomitable warriors of the Long House, fought bravely enough when danger faced them. The Algonquins were a fierce and cruel race who in the past had bested the Mohawks, the most relentless among the Five Nations. To the Algonquins, moreover, belongs the credit of producing the greatest individual warrior of that day, whose name was Piskiart.

  Piskiart lived in the Ottawa country and had become a Christian; almost certainly, it was said, with an eye to receiving the musket which the French sometimes felt safe in confiding into the hands of converts. If the great Piskiart had taken the vows with an ulterior motive in the first place, he made up for it later by becoming thoroughly devout in his declining years; and certainly he made good use of the musket. He was a tall fellow with the agility of a panther and the face of an eagle; a lone wolf, moreover, for he preferred to fight alone. His greatest feat was when he stole down into the enemy country, a war party of one. Reaching a Mohawk village after night had fallen, he located a huge pile of wood at the edge of the nearby forest and made for himself a hiding place under it. Then he stole into the village and killed all the occupants of one lodge, men, women, and children, never using more than a single blow to split open a skull. In his secret and convenient niche under the woodpile he heard the commotion next morning when the catastrophe was discovered: the lamentations, the shouts of rage, the departure of parties to track him down, the return of the discomfited avengers empty-handed.

  The second night, believing that the killer would not dare to return, the village sank again into heavy slumbers, and Piskiart repeated his sanguinary feat by slaughtering the occupants of another lodge. The second day was a repetition of the first, but when the insatiable and confident Piskiart emerged from his woodpile the third night, he discovered that a string of sentries had been set about the village. Having to be content with killing one of them, he raised a wild cry of triumph and departed. The Iroquois sent a party after him. This time he made no effort to conceal himself but boldly set out for his own country. All through the day the chase went on. The pursuing braves followed the usual plan of taking turns at setting the pace, so that he was forced to travel at high speed through most of the day. Among his other accomplishments Piskiart seems to have been the fleetest of runners. At any rate, he showed his heels to the lot of them. The pursuing party finally gave up and settled down to a night’s sleep in a state of complete exhaustion, upon which the bold Algonquin slipped back and brained them all with his well-reddened tomahawk.

  None of the paladins of European legend, the heroes of chivalrous annals, performed greater deeds than copper-skinned Piskiart. It is unfortunate that more is not known about him.

  It came about, therefore, that the men of the Five Nations, who were as shrewd as they were brave, decided to give themselves a space of time for recuperation from a war which had been exhausting and, up to this point, not too rewarding. They announced their intention of offering peace to the French, using as a pretext the magnanimity of Montmagny in saving the lives of two Iroquois braves who had fallen into the hands of the Algonquins; another feat of the great Piskiart. In July of the year 1645 a party of Iroquois leaders arrived at Three Rivers to begin negotiations. The spokesman was an arrogant chief named Kiotsaton, who came ashore swathed in wampum (“completely covered with porcelain beads,” was Father Lalemant’s phrase), and haughtily announced his intention to discuss terms. He addressed the Sieur de Montmagny by the name which the Iroquois people, who had a gift for poetic imagery, had selected to designate the leader of the French—“Onontio,” meaning Great Mountain.

  “Onontio, give ear,” he orated with graceful gestures. “I am the mouth of all my nation. When you listen to me, you listen to all the Iroquois. There is no evil in my heart. My song is a song of peace.”

  Kiotsaton was playing a part. In his heart there was nothing but double-dealing. Nevertheless, he worked out a basis of peace with the French and their allies, the Hurons, the Algonquins, the Montagnais, and the Men of the White Fish. He produced seventeen collars of wampum and handed them over one at a time, with a burst of oratory to describe the clause in the proposed treaty which each of them symbolized. The collars, which were very handsomely decorated, were then strung on a line between two poles so that they could be seen by everyone.

  It was all very dramatic and convincing. The French were happy to see a period of rest from the fierce aggression of their terrible foes stretching ahead of them. The Indian allies cried, “Ho! Ho!” in heartfelt assent.

  Piskiart had been selected to make a gift of furs to Kiotsaton and his fellow envoys. When the arrogant voice of the Iroquois spokesman had fallen into silence, the mighty warrior of the Algonquins stepped forward. He was wearing leggings of new buckskin and moccasins which were handsomely beaded. There was a tuft of plumes rising above his shaved poll. His eyes swept the peace party with a gleam which told them he had not forgotten the one-man raid he had carried out at their expense. Perhaps also there was in his mind a shrewd estimate of how little reliance could be placed in the high-sounding phrases of the Mohawk orator. He proceeded then to demonstrate that he was a spellbinder in his own right.

  “O Kiotsaton!” he said. “Consider these gifts as a tombstone that I place above the graves of those who died in our last meeting. May their bones be no longer disturbed. May revenge be though of no longer.”

  The Iroquois departed then in a final outburst of oratory. Kiotsaton turned to the French. “Farewell, brothers!” he cried. For the Indian allies he had a somewhat contemptuous admonition. “Obey Onontio and the French. Their hearts and their thoughts are good.”

  In the following year, having given themselves a chance to rest and restore their strength, the Iroquois went out on the warpath again. Forgotten were the seventeen belts of wampum which had been exchanged as the symbols of peace; most particularly the eighth, which was designed to bind together as one man and for all time the Iroquois, the French, and their Indian allies. They were acting on a plan which had been shrewdly debated over secret council fires. It was their purpose, as a first step in the destruction of all their enemies, to concentrate on the Hurons and exterminate them so completely that not even the ashes of a hunting party would be left to tell where that ancient tribe had lived.

  CHAPTER XV

  The Destruction of the Huron Nation—The Jesuit Martyrs

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  THE Jesuit missions had been making remarkable headway in the Huron country. Of all Indian tribes, the Hurons seemed to respond most readily to Christian teachings, and in each of the four tribal families into which they were divided, the Bear, the Rock, the Cord, and the Deer, the number of converts had been rising in a steady tide. The pagans were still in a majority, but counts made in the forties varied from Father Bressani’s estimate of eight thousand to a m
ore conservative figure of thirteen hundred baptisms. The mission of La Conception, which was in the teeming village of Ossossané, where Point Varwood protrudes out into Nottawasaga Bay, had been almost one hundred per cent successful in its labors. At the time when the Five Nations decided on their campaign of extermination the hope was high in priestly minds that the whole nation would soon be united in the Faith.

  This reduced the effectiveness of the Hurons as war allies. The converts, accepting the teachings of Christ with the wholeheartedness depicted in the Relations, had ceased to respond to the urge for war. They became gentle and asked nothing better than to hunt and fish and tend their maize and pumpkin patches and to follow the injunctions of their spiritual fathers. As a further handicap, few of them had firearms. By this time the Iroquois were well supplied with guns and had acquired skill in the use of them. It followed that the men of the northern tribe were no longer capable of withstanding the attacks of the Hotinonsionni, as they called the Five Nations. When the latter laid their plans to devastate the Huron country, the result was a foregone conclusion.

  The Jesuits had established twelve missions in this beautiful country. It was a small corner of Ontario, somewhat less than forty miles deep and twenty miles wide, a land of rolling hills and many rivers (there were five emptying into Matchedash Bay), with a maze of villages around which the land had been cleared. An attempt had been made to beautify the chapels because the natives responded quickly to anything that pleased the eye. Each mission had a bell or as a substitute a kettle or any other utensil of metal from which sounds could be produced. Sometimes, through lack of towers, the bells had been suspended on the limbs of trees, but they were always effective in attracting large congregations. Crosses had been raised in forest glades and at junction points of the trails so that the eyes of the natives would be continuously filled with reminders of the Faith which held out its arms to them.

  The main mission, which served the double purpose of an administrative center and a retreat for the priests, was that of Ste. Marie. It stood near the mouth of the Wye River where it empties into Gloucester Bay, a group of buildings of impressive size.

  There has been enough interest in Ste. Marie to attract many archaeological parties to its site during the past century. Chiefly as a result of exceptional and exhaustive efforts carried out by Mr. Wilfrid Jury of the University of Western Ontario and his associates, it has been found that this Jesuit center was a quite amazing accomplishment. Although supplies and tools had to be brought in by canoe over many hundred miles of water, the engineers and their mission helpers not only erected and fortified a cluster of substantial buildings but supplied them with ingenious defense measures, the most astonishing of these being an underground passage in which canoes could be kept without being seen. The construction of this passage has created much speculation.

  The water entered under the northern curtain of the walls from the aqueduct and into the center of the compound, behind the screen of the stone walls. As the fort stood well above the level of the river, the water had to be raised by a series of three small locks. The water channel in which it was raised and lowered was securely boxed in with a wooden casing.

  The canal lock, which was invented in the latter part of the fifteenth century (Leonardo da Vinci is named as one of the earliest users of the principle), was not supposed to have been introduced into North America until the close of the eighteenth century. Here, however, is belated proof of an astonishing fact, that far out in the wilderness a miniature lock system was constructed and used in the first half of the seventeenth.

  The clump of frame buildings on stone foundations which made up the chief part of Ste. Marie was surrounded by a series of walls and bastions of considerable strength. Behind these walls the European compound was divided from the Indian by the water channel rising through the medium of the locks, as already explained. A gate in the wall connecting the eastern bastions served as the main entrance. It will be recognized at once that this was a far cry from the wood palisades which had been the main feature of fortifications up to this time. Everything, in fact, had been carried out in accordance with European practice, and it was believed that the mission could be held against any Indian attack.

  Within the walls were two main buildings, the larger being a two-story structure which undoubtedly was used as living quarters for the priests. It had a main chimney twenty-eight feet high which provided the fathers with a hearth of such size that all members of the staff could sit within comfortable range of the fire on cold evenings. In front of this main hearth was a pit two feet deep. This had been used as a storage place for books and documents, the Indians being so intensely inquisitive that such measures were necessary.

  The other main building was the chapel, which was sufficiently impressive to make it, in the eyes of the natives, the first wonder of the world. There were also sundry structures of lesser size, kitchens and service buildings including carpenter and blacksmith shops.

  This was only the inner core of the mission. The outer portions, which provided adequate quarters for the natives, were enclosed by a double wooden palisade of irregular construction. Four buildings stood inside the palisades, including an Indian long house where the dusky visitors slept, a hospital of European construction with a large stone fireplace, and a chapel with a high peaked roof which accommodated large congregations. In this enclosure the hospitable fathers had looked after as many as seven hundred Christian Indians in a two-week period, feeding them three bountiful meals a day as well as serving their spiritual needs. It was the desire to be tended in illness and buried in death which brought most of them to Ste. Marie. There was a large and well-tended cemetery within the high palisades.

  The mission, over which Father Ragueneau presided as Superior, had a rather considerable European population. The highest number recorded was in 1645, when the total reached fifty-eight, which included twenty-two soldiers. In addition to the priests, who numbered eighteen and were absent generally at their posts throughout the country, there was a full complement of lay members. Robert le Coq was the business manager, although no title of the kind was applied to him. It was one of his duties to make yearly trips to Quebec to arrange for the necessary yearly supplies. Charles Boivin was the master builder and carpenter, Joseph Molère the apothecary, Ambrose Brouet the cook, Louis Gauber the blacksmith, Pierre Masson the tailor, and Christophe Regnaut the bootmaker. These men were either donnés or engagés. The former were lay members who received no pay but were supplied with food, shelter, and clothing. It was promised the donnés that they would be supported by the Society in their old age. The engagés were volunteers who served without pay but were permitted to engage in the fur trade while working for the Society.

  Around Ste. Marie were great stretches of tilled land where crops of grain and vegetables were raised and fruit trees of all kinds. In the fields the white workers were assisted by converts, and the agricultural branch was so well handled that in the spring of 1649, when the threat of Iroquois aggression obscured the sky like a dark cloud, a surplus of food was reported sufficient for three years.

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  It was to this active center of missionary effort that alarming rumors came during the winter of 1647–48. The Iroquois had broken the peace. A war party of unprecedented size—the Huron scouts said it numbered twelve hundred braves—had ascended the Ottawa and was wintering in the country around Lake Nipissing. This could mean one thing only, that the main attack was to be directed against the Huron people.

  This intelligence inspired so much terror that free communication with the French settlements in the East came to an abrupt stop. The fur fleets, with their noisy show, did not go down the Ottawa as usual. However, the Huron hunters used up their supplies so quickly that they were dependent on the French for their metal weapons and utensils (they believed that the King of France held his rank because he made the largest kettles). It became necessary to reach Quebec, and in the early summer an effort was made to get in to
uch with the East. So great was the fear inspired by the Iroquois that an escort of two hundred and fifty warriors was provided. The departure of this large body of fighting men, which was a serious mistake on the part of the Hurons, served as a signal to the enemy to begin operations. They came silently down the river, traveling by night, their fierce eyes turned to the west where the nation lived which they had sworn to destroy.

  The most vulnerable of the Huron villages was St. Joseph, or Teanostaiae, because it lay on the extreme south border and could not obtain assistance quickly. Normally it was the largest, having two thousand inhabitants, but at this tragic moment many of its able-bodied men were with the party going by way of the Ottawa to Ville Marie. The mission at St. Joseph was a large one, with a highly devout priest, Father Antoine Daniel, in charge.

  On July 4 Father Daniel was celebrating early Mass, and an unusually large gathering filled the chapel. It promised to be a warm day, and already a strong sun was flooding through the windows and lighting the interior. Suddenly the resonant voice of the priest was interrupted by a cry from the palisades, “The Hotinonsionni! The Hotinonsionni!”

  Father Daniel raised his hand as a signal that the service could not be continued and then hurried to the door of the chapel. To his dismay he saw that the Iroquois had already made a breach in the palisade and were pouring into the town. Naked warriors, armed with guns and mad with blood lust, were pouring through the breach. The din was unearthly, horrible, indescribable.