***
The French were convinced that the raid on Lachine had been incited by the English. Frontenac, who returned to the colony two months after the event to replace Denonville, began plotting a series of major strikes against the neighbouring colonies.85 In parallel, various parties made tentative steps towards reconciliation with the Five Nations. During the general council of eighty chiefs of the Five Nations that opened at Onondaga on 1 February 1690, Ateriata – who was described in the reports that reached Albany as “chief Sachem of the praying Indians,” misleadingly so in light of his tricky relationship to the missions – presented a wampum belt and advised his interlocutors “to meet the Governor of Canada as he desires. Agree to this if you would live.” Ateriata presented two other belts, one on behalf of one prominent Iroquois who remained captive in the colony, and the other on behalf of the Jesuit missionary Jean de Lamberville and officers and fur traders Jacques Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène and Joseph-François Hertel de la Fresnière, all of whom also advised the Five Nations that “it will be for your advantage” to send delegates to Cataraqui in the spring. Unconvinced, the council resolved to send no one to meet with Onontio and declared that it would not consider peace until the all prisoners remaining in French custody had been released.86
During these discussions, a three-pronged winter attack was under way, in which war parties departing from Montreal, Trois Rivières, and Quebec aimed to carry out raids along the frontiers of New York and New England. At Montreal, 80 Christian Iroquois warriors (mainly from Kahnawake) under Togouirout’s leadership joined 16 Algonquins and about 110 soldiers and militiamen under the command of Lieutenants Nicolas d’Ailleboust de Manthet and Jacques Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène.87 Almost invariably, period accounts of such intercultural military endeavours depict colonial officers as commanding French and Indigenous men alike. Yet their position was not so much that of commanders as that of negotiators. Men like Manthet and Sainte-Hélène enjoyed no coercive authority over the warriors whom they accompanied; at the most, they could hope to earn the respect and deference given to war chiefs through demonstrations of bravery, ability, and generosity. Only through inspiration, persuasion, and negotiation could they shape the course of an expedition and ensure that the parallel objectives of the people of the mission settlements and of the colonial authorities continued to overlap.88
The party set out from Montreal in late January 1690 with orders to proceed opportunistically down the Hudson and to strike against whatever enemy position could be destroyed with minimal risk. While the campaign had been one of Frontenac’s initiatives, the course of the expedition leaves no doubt as to where the leadership resided. During a war council held towards the southern end of Lake George, the warriors “rejected heartily” Manthet and Sainte-Hélène’s proposal that they attack Albany. Much more familiar than the French with the region, the Christian Iroquois understood the difficulty of attacking such a populous, well-garrisoned, and fortified town. Instead they proposed an offensive against the hamlet of Schenectady. Hoping to sway their allies, the officers proposed to defer the decision until the party reached a fork in the path. By that time, however, it was Manthet and Sainte-Hélène who had made up their minds and abandoned the hope of changing that of their allies.89
As the raiders neared Schenectady in the afternoon of 8 February, it was Togouirout who “urged on all to perform their duty, and to forget their past fatigue, in the hope of taking ample revenge for the injuries they had received from the Iroquois at the solicitation of the English, and of washing them out in the blood of those traitors.”90 Pleased to discover that Schenectady’s stockades were unmanned, the raiders launched a surprise assault around midnight. Over the course of about two hours, sixty colonists were killed and twenty-seven more were taken prisoner. Meanwhile, to make the point that the French and their allies held the English responsible for the attack on Lachine, some thirty Mohawks who had been in the village were spared (even if Manthet and Saint-Hélène had wished to harm them, it is unlikely that Togouirout and his men would have allowed it).91 Consequently, it was only with great difficulty that the officials at Albany finally persuaded the warriors of the two easternmost Mohawk villages – led by the familiar Onnonragewas, as it happens – to join a force of militiamen and allied Mahicans in vain pursuit of the raiders.92
The resounding success of the raid on Schenectady, coupled with that of the attacks against Salmon Falls by Frenchmen and Algonquins who had left Trois Rivières, and against Casco by soldiers and Wabanakis who had left Quebec, sent shock waves through the English colonies.93 For the Christian Iroquois, who had grown convinced that the New Yorkers were ultimately responsible for jeopardizing their relationship with their relatives and friends in Iroquoia, the triumph was tempered by tragedy. Buoyed by the success of the raid on Schenectady, Togouirout raised a party of Kahnawakes and Kanehsatakes, who were joined by a handful of Frenchmen, to venture towards the Hudson in May of 1690. Somewhere to the south of Lake Champlain they surprised two bands of unidentified enemy hunters, Mahicans it is likely, taking forty-two prisoners in all. Tragically, the triumphant party was attacked during the return journey by French-allied Algonquins and Wabanakis from the vicinity of Trois Rivières, who mistook them for League Iroquois and Englishmen. Several were killed and wounded on both sides – Togouirout numbering among the former – before the misunderstanding could be cleared up. The Great Mohawk was mourned by Kahnawakes and French alike, the latter of whom generally acknowledged this to be an “irreparable” loss.94
Togouirout’s death coincided with the end of a first phase in the conflict which, during the last two decades of the seventeenth century, pitted Iroquois against Iroquois. By now, Mohawks were taking up arms against Mohawks, Oneidas against Oneidas, and Onondagas against Onondagas. To wage war against the Senecas or the English was one thing for the people of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake, but to do so against relatives was quite another. As Jesuit missionary Bruyas observed during the months following the death of the man who had most defined his community’s politics during the previous decade and half, the “most reasonable men at the Sault” had as a result grown disgusted with the war.95 Yet the conflict would reach new levels of intensity before it could be resolved. In the meanwhile, another evolving reality of settlement and alliance in the Saint Lawrence valley was that old Mohawk and Wabanaki foes were increasingly drawn into coexistence with each other – something which the circumstances surrounding Togouirout’s death brings into view.
7
In Their Place
Wabanaki Alliances and Migrations, 1675–1700
During the final quarter of the eighteenth century, the Wendats and Iroquois who had established a lasting presence in the mission settlements of the Saint Lawrence valley were joined by yet another population, this one coming from Wabanaki – the Dawn Land, or the Sunrise Country – corresponding to what is today northern New England. The French invariably placed these Peoples of the Dawn Land under the headings of “Abenakis” and “Sokokis,” and recognized their kinship with those whom they called “Loups.” Yet such labels hid a great diversity of identities and relationships, as had those of “Montagnais” and “Algonquins” earlier in the century. These peoples belonged to the Eastern Algonquian cultural continuum, among which anthropologists distinguish Eastern Wabanakis/Abenakis and Western Wabanakis/Abenakis, principally on the basis of linguistic difference. Broadly, Eastern Wabanaki dialects were spoken in what is today Maine, an area to which the French referred, along with what is today New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, as Acadie or Acadia. Western Wabanaki dialects were meanwhile spoken in New Hampshire, Vermont, and northern Massachusetts. Further dialectal subdivisions paralleled political subdivisions, which often corresponded to specific river watersheds.
The distinction between “Abenakis” and “Sokokis,” as the French used the terms, broadly mapped onto these Eastern and Western divisions, with the first of these two names being the most capacious. The Western Wabanaki
s who reached the Saint Lawrence valley included Sokokis proper from the Connecticut River, but also Pocumtucks from further down that river, Pennacooks from the Merrimac River, and Pigwackets from the Saco and Pisquataqua Rivers. Mixed in among them were a small number from other Algonquians from further south – the presence of Nipmucks and at least one Narragansett is attested. The French referred to these diverse Algonquians as “Loups” (Wolves), the same name which they normally used for the Mahicans, who inhabited the upper Hudson valley immediately to the west of Wabanaki country. From the headwaters of the Connecticut it was possible to follow Lake Champlain and the Richelieu or Saint François Rivers, or smaller tributaries, to reach the Saint Lawrence. Eastern Wabanakis meanwhile followed the Kennebec, Penobscot, and Androscoggin Rivers to reach, by way of portages, the Chaudière River whose mouth merged with the Saint Lawrence just a few kilometers upstream from Quebec, almost facing Kamiskouaouangachit.1 The French occasionally used the term “Canibas” (Kennebecs) to refer to the people whom the English distinguished more finely as Kennebecs and Penobscots, but more often than not they were merely folded under the generic “Abénaquis.”2
Through the middle decades of the seventeenth century, the Wabanakis cultivated their alliance with the inhabitants of the Saint Lawrence valley, both Algonquian and French, by trading and mounting joint military efforts. They occasionally intermarried with the Innu and Algonquins. Then, in 1675, there occurred an event that sparked a process of large-scale migration. Over the summer and fall of that year, Indigenous resistance against English encroachments sparked by the Wampanoags of Plymouth Colony spread, first to neighbouring groups such as the Nipmucks of central Massachusetts and the Pocumtucks of the Connecticut valley, and then further on to the Wabanaki inhabitants of the Merrimac, Saco, Androscoggin, and Kennebec Rivers. The ensuing conflict, most familiarly known as King Philip’s or Metacomet’s War, but which in its northern theatre might more accurately be conceptualized as the First Anglo-Wabanaki War, brought about the beginning of what scholars have variously described as an “Algonquian diaspora” or “Abenaki diaspora.”3 During the first winter of the war, Indigenous populations deserted their vulnerable villages on the coast and along major waterways. They scattered in small hunting bands throughout their home territories, in keeping with traditional subsistence patterns and in a way that made it harder for the enemy to find them. However, some bands drifted farther into the interior than usual as an additional precaution. Of the latter, a number journeyed westward, towards the Hudson, the Mohawk River, and the villages of Iroquoia. Others travelled northward, to the headwaters of the rivers they knew well, and in some cases on to Canada where they formed the core of new mission communities. The two major river networks which linked Wabanaki country to the Saint Lawrence valley dictated patterns of movement and settlement: Eastern Wabanakis gravitated towards Kamiskouaouangachit, while Western Wabanakis were instead drawn to the region between Montreal and Trois Rivières where in the short term they largely escaped missionary attention.4 A first band of some thirty refugees reached Kamiskouaouangachit in about the month of May 1676, “after suffering during the winter from so unusual a famine that many of them died.” By October of that year, the Jesuit missionary Jean Enjalran could report that 150 Wabanakis had reached the mission, and that an uncounted number of primarily Sokoki refugees had assembled near Trois Rivières.5
In the decades that followed, the continual advance of English settlement up the coast and into the interior of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, and Vermont, and the intertwining of local and imperial conflicts forced the abandonment of villages, agricultural zones, fishing sites, and hunting territories. Hundreds of displaced Wabanakis and neighbouring Algonquians sought temporary or long-term refuge in the Saint Lawrence valley, both within and outside of the mission settlements. To accommodate the influx of newcomers, “Abenaki” mission settlements were formed and transformed: the mission at Kamiskouaouangachit was given a second life. Whereas it was “the country of the Algonquins that had previously made a very flourishing mission” there, as Bishop Saint-Vallier explained to a French readership in the mid-1680s, “God has substituted a few years since the Abnakis in their place.”6 During this decade, the mission located on the Chaudière River, on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence not far from Kamiskouaouangachit, took on the name of Saint François de Sales, while among its inhabitants it became known as Msakkikkan and subsequently Néssawakamighé. The mutually reinforcing processes outlined in previous chapters – alliance building, evangelization, patterns of kinship and migration, defence – were central to the emergence and development of this new community.
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The broad application of the names “Abenaki” and “Sokoki” in seventeenth-century sources to Indigenous peoples from northern New England, while obscuring more precise identifications and betraying the inadequacy of colonial observations, is nonetheless a powerful reflection of the common characteristics of these populations and the flexibility of relations among them. Indeed, in addition to related languages and dialects, the Wabanakis shared broadly similar social, cultural, and political patterns. The basic unit of subsistence was the band, consisting of several nuclear families linked by blood or marriage, amounting to ten to thirty individuals. Although leadership was male and kinship was patrilineal, residence patterns were not strictly patrilocal. Through the spring and summer, and often in the coldest days of midwinter, bands related through common experience, contiguity of territory, and intermarriage gathered together as village communities. Hunting, fishing, and gathering were the primary means of subsistence, but Wabanaki communities living in the milder climates to the west of what is today Maine engaged in intensive corn agriculture, of a sort reminiscent of their Iroquoian neighbours. This allowed them to achieve a greater density and degree of stability than other Algonquian peoples to the north of the Saint Lawrence. Such villages shifted location every decade or so to accommodate the clearing of new fields. Those tribal entities differentiated by English observers and upon which historians have since relied – the Penobscots, Kennebecs, Amariscoggins, Pigwackets, Pennacooks, Cowasucks, and Sokokis being the most prominent – tended to be centered on one such village community or to correspond to a few related ones. Many of these villages were palisaded, though houses were often spread out along the water and near fields, rather than packed into the core. The prevailing form of dwelling was the conical bark wigwam, but in the denser agricultural villages to the south and west long rectangular structures with arched roofs and lodging one to four related nuclear families were also common.7
As noted in chapter 2, the Wabanakis’ network of allies extended to the Algonquians of the Saint Lawrence valley. Some scholars, following Frank Speck’s early twentieth-century forays into the subject, have spoken of a “Wabanaki Confederacy” to describe the relationship that existed among the Wabanakis and their Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) and Mi’kmaq neighbours to the east, but the term is a misnomer when used in reference to the seventeenth century, suggesting as it does the existence of relatively rigid structures at a time when alliances of a far more fluid sort prevailed. There is no question, however, that owing to their shared social structures and cultures, closely related languages, intermarriage, and trade, there existed a general feeling of unity among the Wabanakis – and this even though tensions and violence occasionally erupted, particularly between the Sokokis and other nations. Common antagonism against the Mahicans further west, against the Iroquois, and increasingly against the English, tended to strengthen these bonds, as did the way in which war forced people to move, divide, and recombine.8
The waterways and portages linking Wabanaki country to the Saint Lawrence valley were already well trodden by the time the French arrived in the area, with the Chaudière River offering an entry into the region for the Eastern Wabanakis, and the Saint François and Richelieu Rivers presenting others to the Western Wabanakis. These populations had affinities with the region’s Algonqu
in and Innu inhabitants. Algonquians all, they shared similar beliefs and customs, and spoke languages that, though not mutually intelligible, were sufficiently related that individuals from one group could achieve with relative ease some degree of understanding of the other’s tongue. The range of their hunting grounds overlapped in the woodlands of the south shore of the Saint Lawrence, and it was not uncommon for bands from the two regions to hunt together for a season and for some of their members to intermarry. It is likely that these interactions became more frequent through the early decades of the seventeenth century as hunting patterns shifted to accommodate trade with the Europeans on the Atlantic coast, and with Wabanakis ranging increasingly further than before to the north in search of coveted beaver pelts. Other commodities followed this path to reach the Saint Lawrence valley, including not only manufactured goods from across the ocean but also wampum, which was fashioned from clam and whelk shells from the waters off what is today New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and perhaps corn, which was more abundantly cultivated in these more southerly regions. A common enmity towards the Iroquois also united the Algonquians of the Saint Lawrence and the Wabanakis. Periodically during the 1630 and 1640s, small groups of men from the Kennebec came down the Chaudière and up the Saint Lawrence Rivers towards the vicinity of Trois Rivières “to help their allies in their wars.”9
As observed in chapter 2, visits and the occasional marriages at Kamiskouaouangachit had allowed the Jesuits to hope that the village would soon be “inhabited by Abnaquiois.”10 Two Wabanaki ambassadors who had visited there in 1640 to make amends for the murder of an Algonquin man in their country took the opportunity to renew the peace between their people and the people of Kamiskouaouangachit. One of that community’s principal men, Noël Tekouerimat it is likely, had on this occasion explained the importance of the new faith: “If you wish to bind our two nations by a perfect friendship, it is necessary that we should all believe the same: have yourself baptized, and cause your people to do likewise; that bond will be stronger than any gifts. We pray to God, and know no other friends or brothers than those who pray like us.”11 Through the 1640s, a handful of Algonquins, Innu, and Wabanakis leaders persisted in their efforts to cultivate an alliance between their peoples by occasionally visiting each other’s villages. One Wabanaki captain, having been catechized by one of the mission’s residents during a winter hunt spent together, was insistent that he receive baptism, saying that “he should not be refused on account of his being a stranger, because Paradise is as much for those of his Nation as for the others.” He went as far as to proclaim that “he wished to remain always with the Christians of Sillery, in order to maintain his Faith,” as soon as he had a chance to return to his country to settle his personal affairs. Though this man, having been baptized as Jean-Baptiste, was killed by an Iroquois war party on the journey back to his home country and thus prevented from having to either follow through or renege on his pledge, a small handful of other Wabanakis did assimilate into the community over the years.12
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