Unlike Quebec and Trois Rivières, which had both evolved from commercial outposts into towns, Ville Marie owed its origins to evangelical zeal. At about the same time as Noël Brûlart de Sillery was agreeing to fund the Jesuit misson at Kamiskouaouangachit, another set of wealthy and pious patrons back in France had banded together as the lay Société de Notre Dame de Montréal. With the utopian purpose of establishing on the Island of Montreal a town devoted to the conversion of Indigenous peoples and the edification of colonists, they secured the title to it. Two members of the society, Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, and Jeanne Mance, would direct the effort on site. In 1641, the pair arrived at Quebec with settlers and supplies and, notwithstanding the opposition of Governor Montmagny and the reservations of Jesuits who thought them foolhardy to make themselves so vulnerable to the Iroquois, the following year they built their outpost of Ville Marie on the Island of Montreal.77
Although this new colonial settlement in these early years amounted to little more than a fort, it quickly became a site of occasional refuge for the Algonquin family bands that came and went through the region, as well as a convenient rallying point for war parties on their way to or from Mohawk country. Towards the end of February 1643, Tessouat’s nephew, Oumastikouei, arrived at Ville Marie after having spent part of the winter along the Richelieu River. The Jesuits François du Perron and Joseph-Antoine Poncet, who had wintered at the new outpost, found him more receptive to missionary entreaties than he had been in recent years. He displayed “a special liking for that place” and, upon promises that a field of his own choosing would be given to him and that two French field hands would be placed at his disposal for a year, he declared his interest in receiving religious instruction and settling down. Arriving from Trois Rivières shortly thereafter and informed of the liberal terms that had been offered to his nephew, Tessouat in turn promised to settle there with his people and finally embrace the faith – yet threatening that if he was not welcomed here he would go to Wendat country, where missionaries would surely instruct him as he pleased. Thrilled at the prospect of converting and sedentarizing a prominent leader who had until then seemed so opposed to their work, the Jesuits hastily instructed and baptized him, and solemnized his marriage. That Tessouat received after the latter ceremony a “fine arquebus” from de Maisonneuve, “with the articles necessary for its use,” is a reminder of the military stakes of conversion.78
In March of 1643, within weeks of Tessouat’s baptism, a dozen warriors showed up at Ville Marie to report the death of Pieskaret – the Kichesipirini who in these years had emerged as the leader of the neophyte community at Trois Rivières, and who had led these men and eight others on the warpath against the Iroquois. Included among these individuals in the skirmish were some of Tessouat’s relatives. No doubt preoccupied with their immediate security, these warriors stated their desire to settle near the French town and asked for baptism. The French at Ville Marie, however, could only offer security of a relative sort. The area’s great vulnerability and consequent inadequacy as a potential site of settlement was made apparent when both Tessouat and Pieskaret – for reports of the latter’s death had been premature – informed de Maisonneuve that their people had now resolved to instead spend the summer at Trois Rivières with other bands to mourn together the loss of their men, deliberate on the course of action, and seek assistance against the common enemy.79 Notwithstanding his expressions of interest in Ville Marie in the spring, Tessouat was still at Trois Rivières in mid-December; the next year, his presence was noted at Quebec.80 As long as the Montreal region remained an exposed frontier in the war against the Iroquois, the formation of a stable Algonquian mission community there would be impossible.
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An encounter which occurred on 18 May 1645, when Pieskaret brought two Mohawk captives to Governor Montmagny “and to the Christian Sauvages, his friends,” at Kamiskouaouangachit, is revealing of the distinctive status and identity of the young community. Etinechkawat greeted the arriving canoes by proclaiming that the prisoners would not be mistreated: “You know well that we now proceed in a different fashion than we formerly did. We have overturned all our old customs. That is why we receive you quietly, without harming the prisoners, without striking or injuring them in any way.” During the discussions that ensued, Pieskaret highlighted the extent to which the neophyte community seemed to have aligned its interests with those of the French: “It is to you that I address my words,” Pieskaret began, “you who are but one and the same thing, you who have but one secret, you who whisper into each other’s ears. It is to the Captain of the French, and to you who in the past three years have become French, – to you, Negabamat; to you, Etinechkaouat – to whom I address my voice; you are but one council. Listen to me.”81 Of course, profound differences persisted between the Algonquian residents of Kamiskouaouangachit and their French neighbours, which would have made clear to all that neither of the two men had lost their distinctive identities. Nevertheless, Pieskaret’s language points to the extent to which the community which had coalesced around the mission settlement under the leadership of Negabamat alias Tekouerimat and Etinechkawat was recognized by other Algonquians as distinct and intimately aligned with the French. It is also an indication that no such coalescence had occurred among the neophytes of La Conception.
In an attempt to open a dialogue with the Mohawks, with the aim of freeing the flow of pelts towards the colony, Montmagny allowed the two captives a measure of freedom. Shortly thereafter, he released a third captive who had been taken the previous year so that he might carry an offer of “universal peace” to the enemy.82 The Mohawks, who were around this time on tense terms with their Dutch neighbours and trading partners, responded positively to the overture by sending an embassy to Trois Rivières. Algonquins, Innu, Attikameks, and Wendats were present during the peace conference. Before the official Franco-Mohawk proceedings began in the courtyard of the French fort at Trois Rivières on 12 July 1645, Algonquins and Innu invited the Iroquois visitors “to their feasts, and they gradually accustomed themselves to converse together.” During the closing council which occurred two days later, following Montmagny’s remarks, Pieskaret and Tekouerimat in turn addressed the Mohawks, offering pelts and elk skins to condole the deaths of the enemies killed in battle and to allay the grief of their relatives and friends. Tekouerimat declared on that occasion that, “as he and his people at Sillery had the same heart as their elder brother Monsieur the Governor, they offered but one present with his.” At the conference convened for the ratification of the peace agreement that September, the “principal captains of three or four Algonquin nations” (including the Kichesipirini and Onontchataronon, the others unspecified in the published account), who had been absent at the earlier meeting, confirmed the peace.83
Though it seemed that the French were willing to stand as mediators and guarantors of a universal peace, the public proceedings were paralleled by secret negotiations tending towards a more limited arrangement. During his stay at Trois Rivières in July, the Mohawk ambassador had two private meetings with Governor Montmagny at which he revealed, contrary to what he had stated during the public proceedings, that his people had no intention of making peace with the Algonquins. Offering a substantial present to the governor, he advised him that, “if he desired peace for both himself and the Hurons, he should abandon the Algonquins without shelter.” Reportedly, the governor initially refused to accept the gift and to relinquish his support for his allies. However, during the second meeting he qualified his objections, declaring “that there were two kinds of Algonquins: one like ourselves, recognized as Christians; the other, unlike us. Without the former, it is certain, we do not make a peace; as for the latter, they themselves are the masters of their own actions, nor are they united with us like the others.”84 The broader context suggests that by Christians the governor actually meant settled, excluding those who, like Tessouat (and perhaps also Pieskaret), had accepted baptism but failed to re
define themselves as Christians and fully align their interests with those of the French. Unbeknownst to them, the governor was willing to abandon some of his allies.
That fall of 1645 the Algonquians of the Saint Lawrence were given cause to think that the peace would be short-lived. A hunting band composed of Algonquins and Innu from Kamiskouaouangachit was attacked: three persons from the community were killed, and three others were wounded (including a son of the late François-Xavier Nenaskoumat, that early pillar of the mission community, whose wound proved fatal). Though the Mohawks were initially suspected, the survivors revealed that the attackers spoke a different tongue. It was eventually learned that they were Sokokis, Western Wabanakispeaking inhabitants of the upper Connecticut valley; during the winter that followed, these Sokokis presented the scalps of their victims to the Mohawks in a bid to reignite the war.85 In January 1646, the peace was further jeopardized when the Saint Lawrence Algonquians learnt with astonishment, from a visiting Wendat, that the Mohawks were plotting to exclude them from the peace agreement. The French were forced to deny the rumour that the governor had agreed to this. Angered, the residents of Kamiskouaouangachit considered striking first by falling upon the Mohawk hostages whom Montmagny was about to release. Upon hearing that they were planning to “play an evil trick” on those men during their return, the governor thought best to delay the hostages’ departure.86
It was most likely due to fear of enemy raiders that towards the beginning of April the approximately twenty-two persons who had stayed behind at the mission while the rest of their people had gone out hunting decided to abandon their cabins and encamp closer to Quebec. Only when the rest of the community returned from the hunt, shortly after Easter, did this group feel comfortable returning home.87 Still, the Mohawks persisted in their outward signs of goodwill. During a third Franco-Mohawk conference held at Trois Rivières on 7 May, the visiting ambassador offered condolence presents to the relatives and friends of the persons killed the previous fall, assuring them that the attack had been carried out by isolated warriors, and that “they had had no knowledge of it until after the act was done, and that all the captains of the country had condemned this outrage.” The people of Kamiskouaouangachit’s reaction to these assurances that the Algonquins would not be excluded from the peace agreement was not recorded. Tessouat was for his part adamant, proclaiming that though he remained exceedingly distrustful of the Mohawks, neither he nor his followers would be the ones to first breach the peace, reminding the governor that “he should not walk all alone in safety within the roads which he had levelled and broken, but that this happiness should also be common to the Algonquins and to the Hurons.”88
As the peace was short-lived, the French willingness to exclude unconverted Algonquins from their negotiations would not be tested. The Mohawks had not succeeded in convincing the other nations of the Iroquois Confederacy to accept the conditions of this universal peace, and the killing in October of 1645 of Isaac Jogues, the Jesuit who was attempting to extend the mission field to Mohawk country, extinguished what remained of French goodwill.89 Tessouat and his Kichesipirini followers, who had once again displayed an intention of wintering near Ville Marie and of planting corn there in the spring, were persuaded by the rumours of Mohawk disingenuousness to instead remain in the vicinity of Trois Rivières. The Onontchataronon leader Tawiskaron and the Matoueskarini leader Makatewanakisitch, expressing their resolve to “recover […] as their country” the Island of Montreal which their “ancestors [had] formerly inhabited,” held out a little longer through an anxious season.90 The threat of enemy raids was becoming tangible, not only here but downriver as far as Quebec. In the early days of March 1647, Mohawk war parties ambushed several Algonquin bands in the vicinity of Trois Rivières, killing among others Pieskaret and Tawiskaron. That April, Tekouerimat and Etinechkawat returned to Kamiskouaouangachit from their hunt earlier than expected, having been pressed by “the fear of the Iroquois.”91
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The choice, in 1647, of the archangel Saint Michael as patron of the stone church at Kamiskouaouangachit is telling. Whereas the mission had initially been dedicated to the fatherly Saint Joseph, growing danger called for the consecration of the ritual centre at its core to the heavenly figure who led God’s armies against those of Satan – conveniently, it was also the name of Michel de Marillac, a royal counsellor whose heirs had offered funds for the construction of the church.92 Indeed, that year marked the beginning of an intensive, decade-and-a-half-long Iroquois offensive against the inhabitants – Algonquian, French, and soon Wendat – of the Saint Lawrence valley. Iroquois aggression had serious ramifications for the people of Kamiskouaouangachit who, besides arming themselves spiritually, took part in defensive operations with their allies, rebuilt their wooden palisade that lay in a state of disrepair, and asked Governor Montmagny to erect a stone fort. In 1648, a stone windmill was built on the bluff nearby which could not only mill the grain produced at the mission but also serve as an observation tower and a stronghold in case of attack.93 As fortifications could only go so far in protecting the neophyte community, the state of war heightened the already considerable fluidity of movement. Jesuit Father Jérôme Lalemant, writing in the year’s Relation, accordingly made no effort to distinguish the neophytes of Kamiskouaouangachit from those of Trois Rivières. In one passage, he explained that “their enemies pursue them so closely that, like frightened pigeons, they fly to the first and safest dovecote that they find.”94 Passing through Kamiskouaouangachit once more in an effort to find refuge and coordinate a broader Algonquian response to the threat posed by the enemy, Tessouat was exhorted by Tekouerimat, as on many occasions before, to embrace the faith.“I will have no one near me who does not firmly believe in God,” he warned.95 It was in response to such explicit and implicit pressures that the Algonquins who had continued to orbit around Trois Rivières held a council, in late 1648, at which they publicly professed their interest in the Christian faith, raised once again the possibility of establishing a more sedentary settlement there, and resolved that apostates or hardened traditionalists “shall not find shelter within the French fort.” They named Charles Pachirini, an Algonquin chief of Weskarini origin who over the previous decade had periodically returned to Trois Rivières and Kamiskouaouangachit, and who was judged to be one of the most fervent Christians among them, to coordinate the settlement. By granting a small lot within the town’s walls to Pachirini, Governor Montmagny formalized the arrangement by which some families sought safety there.96
At Kamiskouaouangachit, work on the stone enclosure planned two years earlier was begun in 1649. By 1651, the community finally found itself with a “good and strong wall, which is flanked at the four corners and can withstand the assaults of the Iroquois.” As a result, people apparently regrouped themselves at Kamiskouaouangachit “all the more willingly.” Tekouerimat, who remained at the head of the community in Etinechkawat’s old age, gave these newcomers “clearly to understand that the walls which had been built there were not for the purpose of sheltering vice, but of preventing it from entering.”97 In a parallel effort to bolster the defences of the Saint Lawrence’s inhabitants, Tekouerimat and the Jesuit Gabriel Druillettes travelled up the Chaudière and down the Kennebec Rivers to ask both the Wabanaki residents of the region and, less successfully, the authorities of northern New England for “assistance against the Iroquois.” At the same time, the pair undertook efforts to broaden the alliance from the familiar Eastern Wabanakis of the Kennebec to the more distant and less familiar Western Wabanakis, including the Sokokis who in previous years had caused trouble.98
Figure 2.3 Archaeological fieldwork on the site of the mission at Kamiskouaouangachit (Sillery) has revealed an abundance of artefacts, and animal and human remains. Devotional objects – crosses and rings – such as those presented above were distributed widely to neophytes. (Photo: Ville de Québec)
Tekouerimat also begged for assistance from the French. “We see ourselves dyi
ng and being exterminated every day,” he lamented in a letter dictated, in 1651, for his good friend Father Le Jeune who had gone back to France. “The Iroquois are weak, but you are strong; the Iroquois are few in number, but you are very numerous. If you wish to destroy our enemy utterly, you will do it, and give us life once more.” In a subsequent letter he was equally insistent: “Make haste to come, and to bring us many sword-bearers, in order to drive away the Iroquois from our heads. We shall soon be departed souls; do not wait until we are in the grave before coming to see us. […] Speak to the great Captain of France, and tell him that the Dutch of these coasts are causing our destruction, by furnishing firearms in abundance, and at a low price, to the Iroquois, our enemies. Tell him to give aid to those who are baptized. That is all I have to say.”99
Tekouerimat’s rhetoric of despair reflected a new, dire state of affairs. The phase during which Algonquians regrouped themselves “all the more willingly” at Kamiskouaouangachit to benefit from its heavily fortified state proved rather short-lived. Quebec and nearby Kamiskouaouangachit, the heart of the French colony, had been sufficiently distant from Iroquoia and was well buffered by Trois Rivières so as to remain protected through the intermittent warfare of the 1640s. As the Iroquois demonstrated, by the end of the decade and through the 1650s, their ability to strike with impunity at this very heart, the mission settlement and its vicinity began to lose the appeal that it had possessed as a site of safety and subsistence. Algonquians increasingly turned away from the mission settlement, recentering their lives around hunting territories and gathering sites further north including along the Saguenay River, Lake Saint Jean, the upper Saint Maurice River, and their innumerable tributaries. While colonial observers blamed this shift on the ravages of epidemic diseases and brandy, and while some historians have in more recent years added that it may have been prompted by a desire to resist the sort of cultural change that missionaries expected, it becomes more tempting to view the intensification of the Iroquois offensive as its root cause.100
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