Between 1650 and 1653, Noël Tekouerimat and the Jesuit Gabriel Druillettes undertook efforts to broaden the alliance from the familiar Eastern Wabanakis of the Kennebec to the less familiar Western Wabanakis. It was not uncommon for Algonquins, and sometimes Innu, to encounter bands of Sokokis and Loups in the woods that lay east of the Richelieu River and Lake Champlain, where their hunting ranges overlapped. Although some of their respective elders could recollect an “ancient friendship” between them, the language barrier and the apprehensive climate fostered by the Five Nations’ aggression meant that encounters now tended to be characterized by violence. Hunting parties frequently mistook each other for the dreaded Iroquois and came to blows; the dead, even when mistakes were elucidated, cried for vengeance.13 Tekouerimat and Druillettes’s efforts to extend the Franco-Indigenous alliance to the Sokokis, “to tie the knot of the ancient friendship that had once been maintained between them,” as well as to the Sokokis’ own Pocumtuck, Pennacook, Mahican, and Minisink allies, began to yield results in 1653.14 The renewal of this peace cleared the way for Sokokis and these “Loups” to hunt to the south of the Saint Lawrence valley and trade in its French establishments. The destruction by the Iroquois of the main Sokoki village of Squakheag in 1663, and the conclusion of the Franco-Iroquois peace of 1667, both appear to have contributed to this northward movement.15
These Sokokis and Loups reached the Saint Lawrence valley in small and highly mobile numbers, and tended to roam its south shore between the mouth of the Richelieu River and Trois Rivières. Among the areas that held a particular attraction was the delta of the Saint François River, which, by a chain of streams and portages, reached far into the Western Wabanaki homelands in what is today Vermont and New Hampshire. The point at which the Saint François merged into the Saint Lawrence, at the westernmost extremity of a swelling known as Lake Saint Pierre, was described by the chronicler Claude-Charles Le Roy Bacqueville de La Potherie at the turn of the century as “one of the most pleasurable and most delightful areas on earth.” It featured both mature woods and prairies, and game abounded there: migratory birds “in profusion” in the spring and fall, and wood ducks all year long; Lake Saint Pierre and the Saint François River’s channels abounded with fish. “This area is therefore like the center of the best of all that we could dream of in Canada,” La Potherie concluded, regretting that its only disadvantage was its vulnerability in times of war.16
Jean Crevier, one of the more prominent fur traders at Cap de la Madeleine near the town Trois Rivières, took up residence at the mouth of the Saint François River in 1668 or 1669, having secured a seigneurial claim to it which was confirmed a few years later. In parallel to his activity as an enterprising seigneur, which entailed running a manorial farm of modest scale and seeing to the gradual settlement of the area by French habitants, Crevier remained thoroughly involved in the trade with Indigenous peoples – as were, indeed, several of the colonists who joined him there. His wife, Marguerite Hertel, was herself the daughter of a prominent interpreter and trader, and she appears to have been as much involved in the business as her husband; their son Joseph took an active role in it too, as did relatives on the Hertel side, including her brother, the officer and interpreter Joseph-François Hertel de la Fresnière. From time to time, the Crevier-Hertel seigneurial couple served as godparents to Indigenous children baptized at the parish church of Sorel. At seventeen kilometers’ distance, it was the closest church until the inauguration of one within their own seigneury in 1687. Yet the pair was noted as being among those who, in spite of the condemnation of the church, engaged briskly in the liquor trade. One of twenty prominent colonists convened by Frontenac in 1678 to opine on the subject, Jean Crevier expressed a view that reflected his experience on the Saint François River: “[I]f the trading of spirits is not permitted, it would do considerable harm to the country, insofar as the large number of Sokoki Natives who have established themselves there and who are brought up with liquor amongst the English, would return to them and deprive the habitants of the great profit that they bring them.”17 Through the last quarter of the century, the Jesuits would focus their attention on those Wabanakis willing to settle at Kamiskouaouangachit and along the Chaudière River, while those who remained along the Saint François River would continue to live beyond the bounds of the mission community – and earn a reputation for being people of a particularly unruly sort.
***
Kamiskouaouangachit had long since been in decline by the time war in New England began pushing unprecedented numbers of Wabanakis towards the Saint Lawrence valley. Reporting on the state of the Jesuit residence there in 1676, Father Jean Enjalran described it as “a solitary house” staffed by four priests and a lay brother. The bastioned stone fort still stood. Within it, the chapel of Saint Michel, reconstructed in 1663 on the ruins of the one that had been destroyed by fire six years earlier, could be described as “handsome” but it now served primarily as a parish church for the area’s French habitants. The place had come to be valued less as a mission per se than as a linguistic training ground for missionaries preparing for journeys into the Great Lakes or Saguenay hinterlands. “[W]e have only a few Algonkin families, who come here at certain times,” explained Enjarlan. Kamiskouaouangachit nevertheless continued to retain its importance as a ritual and diplomatic center for the Algonquins and Innu, and male descendants of the mission’s influential first leaders, Tekouerimat and Etinechkawat, continued to be recognized as its heads. It so happened that Charles Negaskaouat, alias Tekouerimat, had just died in 1675.18
The several hundred Wabanakis who reached the mission beginning in the late spring of 1676 “were gladly received [and] adopted” by the few people who continued to orbit around it.19 Like their Iroquoian neighbours, though on a much more limited scale, the Innu, Algonquins, and Wabanakis all used formalized adoption as a means of incorporating outsiders into the community.20 In this context it would have been conceived of, at least in part, in religious terms, as described in earlier chapters: through baptism, neophytes were adopted into the family of the Christian God. Perhaps the refrain intoned thirty-six years earlier – “we know no other friends or brothers than those who pray like us” – was again repeated. In any case, it would have been apparent to the Wabanaki newcomers to Kamiskouaouangachit, and particularly to the leaders who had guided their followers there, that conversion to the new religion was a key to solidifying the alliance with the local community, with the missionaries, and with the neighbouring colonists.21
A captain named Pirouakki, who arrived at Kamiskouaouangachit in the spring or summer of 1676 and who enjoyed considerable prominence among the refugees, was quick to appropriate the spiritual power and seize the practical advantages that Christianity represented. Like Togouirout at Kentake only a few years earlier, he may have perceived in the missionary teachings an antidote to the epidemics, drunkenness, and wide-ranging cultural disruptions that his people were facing in these times of upheaval and exile. More cynically, he may have realized that conversion was a prerequisite to securing whatever material assistance the missionaries were willing to offer. Following an initial meeting with the Jesuit missionary, Father Jacques Vaultier, Pirouakki displayed an “incredible ardor to become a Christian, and to incite the others to procure the same happiness for themselves.” He responded to Vaultier’s invitation to come to church, brought with him “those over whom he had more special authority, because they were his nearest relatives,” and took the habit of exhorting on a daily basis the others to do the same and of denouncing drunkenness. In November both he and his wife were baptized. While she took on the name of Françoise, he assumed that of Michel – a badge of his importance in light of the fact that Sillery’s parish church was consecrated to Saint Michael. What is more, he appears to have gone on to be acknowledged as the new Tekouerimat, succeeding Charles Negaskaouat alias Tekouerimat as the mission community’s “first captain.” The evidence for this is circumstantial but convincing: five years l
ater the mission’s chief was indeed named Michel Tekouerimat and was married to a Françoise; no other couple bearing the same two baptismal names appear in Sillery’s sacramental registers.22
Though a small number of Western Wabanakis reached Kamiskouaouangachit as a result of the First Anglo-Wabanaki War, these tended, as in past decades, to gravitate towards Trois Rivières and Montreal and to set up small encampments in the vicinity of Sorel and Lake Saint Pierre.23 Most of these refugees, like those who arrived at Kamiskouaouangachit, came in search of a safe place where they might weather the storm. It was because “they did not wish to get mixed up in the war that most of the Natives of New England had with the English, [that] they had left their country to live among the French,” claimed a Jesuit petition for funding submitted to the Crown a few years later.24 A small number may have intended to use Canada as a base of operations, and its traders as a source for the lead shot and gunpowder necessary to continue hostilities – certainly this is what New Englanders believed that they sought.25
In fact, French colonial authorities offered little material or moral support to the visiting warriors. The imperial contest on North American soil was simmering, and Frontenac was intent on preventing the arrival of Wabanakis from drawing the colony into another ruinous conflict against the Five Nations (even as he sponsored an aggressive westward expansion of the fur trade that would do just that). Meeting with some of the refugees, he “received them on condition that they would not return to make war on the English” and informed them that they were not to fight the Iroquois “on the territories of the French.”26 As one resentful Wabanaki warrior would put it to one of his captives during the final stretch of the war, “the French love the English better than the Indians.”27
Lack of official sympathy was but one of many causes of concern for the refugees. The Jesuits of Kamiskouaouangachit were not as proficient in the Wabanaki language as they were in Innu and Algonquin, and accordingly had some difficulty communicating with the newcomers. More significantly, the missionaries lacked the means to adequately supply them with provisions, even though fields were available around the mission. The food shortages which plagued Kamiskouaouangachit through much of 1676 were compounded during the summer by a “serious illness.”28 A few years later, the western explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle would encounter in current-day Michigan a diverse group of “Sauvages de la Nouvelle-Angleterre” who as a result of the war had set out in search of a new country. “They did not choose it amongst our habitations,” they explained to him, “because of the rarity of beaver as well as the difficulty of making clearings, because they [these habitations, i.e. the Saint Lawrence valley] consist only of forests.” Instead, these wandering refugees now hoped to establish themselves either with the Iroquois or “in some other good country similar to that which they had left.”29 From his vantage point at Kamiskouaouangachit, the Jesuit missionary Jacques Bigot was forced to concur that “the country in which they lived is much better than this one with regard to food, to hunting, and to fishing.”30
Indeed, the Saint Lawrence valley could seem like a pale substitute for Wabanaki country. At Kamiskouaouangachit all but the most zealous catechumens – Pirouakki was identified as one of these stalwarts – left on a regular basis, and in keeping with traditional subsistence patterns nearly all of them scattered for the winter hunt.31 Discovering that the bulk of Metacomet’s supporters had capitulated, and that the head rebel’s own death in August of 1676 had largely ended the conflict in the south, these bands attempted to return to the lands from which they had been driven away. Many were dismayed to discover that settlers and garrisons had taken their place. Frustrated, one party of Pocumtucks and Norrwottucks, who had found what they hoped would be only a temporary refuge in Canada, launched a devastating raid on both the towns of Hatfield and Deerfield on the Connecticut River in September of 1677. Another band of Pennacooks and Nipmucks returned to the Merrimack valley, but quickly made up their minds not to remain and did their best to convince relatives who had spent the last two years around the headwaters of the Connecticut to accompany them back to Canada.32
***
Hostilities between New England and the Wabanakis came to an end in April of 1678, when Governor Edmund Andros negotiated a treaty with the last of the hostile bands. But the persistent threat posed by real and rumoured Mohawk raiding parties, who had been invited by the English to assist in the repression of the uprising, continued for a few years to serve as a spur to migration to Canada.33 Though hostilities abated, the relocation of families from the Kennebec to Kamiskouaouangachit had a snowballing effect. As with Kentake, the importance played by subsistence patterns and bonds of kinship in drawing Wabanakis to the Saint Lawrence valley, and to Kamiskouaouangachit in particular, was considerable. One missionary noted of the newcomers who arrived there in the late 1670s: “Several returned to Acadia: some to bring hither their fathers and mothers; some their brethren; others their best friends, and even all their countrymen, if they could, and with such eagerness for their salvation that, on their arrival, the missionary found them already instructed in most of our mysteries.”34
Father Jacques Bigot, who with his brother Vincent had recently taken over the mission, chronicled in a haphazard fashion this influx of Wabanakis: during the first six months of 1681, it received sixty newcomers, of whom forty received baptism; on 13 September, twenty arrived (including the purportedly “most noted of all the captains”); during the spring and summer of the following year, more than one hundred persons reached the mission. These numbers, claimed Bigot, did not include those “who stay here only a month or two.”35 Owing to the rapid expansion of the mission’s population and the fact that over the half century since its foundation its site had grown increasingly hemmed in by the plots of French habitants, it became necessary to relocate. The newcomers themselves pressed Bigot on this matter, claiming that “if there had been sufficient space for them to be received there and grow their Indian corn for their subsistence,” they would more readily have settled near the French and embraced their religion.36
The most appealing sites were located along the lower stretch of the Chaudière River, which flowed from the south into the Saint Lawrence almost opposite Kamiskouaouangachit. This river’s most distinctive feature was the way in which, a short distance before reaching the larger stream, its waters plunged dramatically from a height of about thirty-five meters – it was to this “Sault de la Chaudière”, meaning Kettle Falls, in reference to the resulting mist and bubbling of water, that the tributary owed its name. From there the Chaudière reached far inland to the watersheds of the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers, making this a crucial canoe route. Its lower stretch was as yet sparsely settled by colonists, and fell within the expansive seigneury of Lauzon, which happened to belong to Charles de Lauzon de Charny, who since serving as interim governor at the height of the Iroquois assault on the Wendat refugees had joined the priesthood and retired to France. The Jesuits appear to have acquired a first plot of land along the river from his representatives before 1679, but it was small, thickly wooded, and pleas for an allocation of royal funds to pay for its clearing remained unanswered.37 At last, in July of 1683, Governor La Barre and Intendant De Meulles granted the Jesuits a serviceable tract of land for the use of the Wabanakis, beyond the seigneury of Lauzon, some fifteen leagues or fifty kilometers up the Chaudière River (about where Sainte Marie de Beauce stands today). The Wabanakis knew this site as Msakkikkan, meaning “Many Fields” – pointing to the presence there of clearings that could be sown with minor effort, and that must have drawn deer as well. It is very likely that this location was a regular site of encampment. “As that place is on the road that leads to their country,” reasoned the missionaries, “it will induce many who are still in Acadia to come to settle among us.”38
In December of 1683, Father Jacques Bigot inaugurated a small chapel built of bark along the Chaudière, placing it and his mission under the patronage of Saint Fran�
�ois de Sales. Some uncertainty persists as to its exact location: while the use of the name Msakkikkan in the mission’s sacramental registers suggests that it was initially established about fifty kilometers up the river, the village core could by the decade’s end instead be found closer to the river’s mouth, next to the falls themselves.39 Such ambiguity notwithstanding, the foundation of the new mission was accompanied by a symbolic gesture: at the suggestion of their missionary, and in emulation of what the Wendats had done shortly after their arrival at the Island of Orleans three decades earlier and on a few occasions since, the neophyte community pooled wampum beads to prepare a token of devotion and alliance to be sent across the sea. Destined for the tomb of their new patron saint in Annecy, in the southeast of France, it was assembled by a neophyte named “Tall Jeanne” (la Grande) and had its extremities embroidered in porcupine quills by another woman named Colette. Like the wampum sent from Lorette to Chartres, it was large and bore a Latin inscription “S. Franc. Salesio Abnaq. D.” (an abbreviation of “Sancto Francisco Salisio Abnaquiis Donatum,” “Presented to St. Francis de Sales by the Abnaquis”). Before being sent off, it was first deposited in offering under the painting of the saint which adorned the mission’s chapel. As with other such transatlantic exchanges of wampum, this present was an affirmation of collective identity designed to muster interest in the new settlement, and no doubt to elicit assistance in the form of funding or a reciprocal gift of relics which might sanctify and protect the community.40
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