8
The Tree of Peace
The Escalation and Resolution of the Iroquois War, 1690–1701
The accommodation between the Five Nations, the French, and their allies that occurred in the final years of the seventeenth century and that culminated with the Great Peace of Montreal of 1701 marked a momentous shift. Togouirout’s death in 1690 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. The Franco-Indigenous policy of isolating the Senecas, and trying to wage war against them alone, had unravelled. One of Togouirout’s nephews, known by the French as La Plaque and plausibly named Onondaquiro in his own language, became particularly conspicuous on the warpath following his uncle’s death. He must have felt the loss dearly. Unlike his uncle, he was considered to be a “rather bad Christian,” but, like him, he nonetheless acquired a great renown for bravery and for being “strongly attached to the French.”1 In a particularly poignant episode reported by the chronicler Bacqueville de la Potherie, La Plaque recognized his father in the heat of combat against a Mohawk war party. “You have given me life, [and so] I give it to you today”; he told him, “but do not find yourself under my hand [again], for I will not spare you.”2 Even as it speaks of continued restraint, the substance of this altercation points to the less compromising tone of the early 1690s.
The warriors from Kahnawake and Kanehsatake who had died during the attack on Lachine in August of 1689 counted among the early victims of this intensified war. Hunting bands soon became targets. Étienne Ganonakoa or Tegananokoa of Kahnawake became another early victim. Having set out with his wife and another man for the fall hunt in August of 1690, he was captured a few weeks later by a party of fourteen Cayuga warriors and brought to Onondaga. There, Tegananokoa was tortured and executed. “My brother,” one of his captors told him at the beginning of his ordeal, “you are dead. It is not we who kill you, it is you who are killing yourself, as you have left us to live among these dogs of Christians of the Sault.” Or, at least, this is what the Jesuits related, based on what his wife told them following her escape. Fathers Cholenec and Charlevoix after him reported this, along with three other instances of Iroquois men and women captured and killed by other Iroquois, highlighting them as a cases of Indigenous martyrdom. Tegananokoa had been an exceptionally fervent neophyte, the missionaries reported, and he remained steadfast in his faith in the midst of the most painful torments. “I gladly give my life for a God who spilled all of his blood for me,” he is reported to have told his captors. That his baptismal name of Étienne conveniently was the same as that of the figure revered as the first martyr of Christianity, called Saint Stephen in English, made him an ideal candidate for missionary promotion, and the ghastly violence of his death seemed like striking evidence of the fact that, as Charlevoix phrased it, the Five Nations in their entirety had now “declared all Christian Iroquois enemies of the homeland [patrie].”3
Of course, the Jesuit account of this death greatly oversimplifies the dynamics at play. It does not make explicit the fact that Tegananokoa’s unyielding expressions of faith in the face of agonizing torment were a Christian variation of a tradition whereby captives were expected to respond to their tormentors with assertions of pride and defiance. Nor does it make it clear that Tegananokoa’s fate might have been different if he had found himself not among Cayugas and Onondagas, but among Mohawks who would have included some of his relatives – though to be sure, Cholenec followed up this account with another of the death of two Onondaga women from Kahnawake, Françoise Gonannhatenha and Marguerite Garongoüas, put to death by their own Onondaga kin. Nor does the missionary account of Tegananokoa’s tormented death make clear that captors and captives generally proved more accommodating than this with each other, something which the fate of the two people captured alongside him allows us to better appreciate. His wife was spared and eventually allowed to return to her native Mohawk country, where she remained until her son came from Kahnawake to fetch her. The other man was tortured and mutilated – losing a few fingers and having his leg slashed – but was then brought to the Caygua village and given a chance to integrate among his captors; taken along with a party of warriors heading towards Montreal, he seized the opportunity to flee and return to the mission.4
There is no question, however, that these years marked a shift in the meaning of war for the Iroquois of the mission settlements and their relatives of the League. The former were targeted, and they fought back. By one count, between the beginning of 1690 and the end of 1692, the Christian Iroquois were involved in the killing of upwards of sixty-six League Iroquois, mainly warriors, and in the capture of an additional forty-six. Meanwhile they saw at least twelve of their own killed, and a minimum of sixteen others captured. Not all of these deaths occurred on the war path. Though missionaries attempted to put an end to the ritual violence of war, colonial officials gladly encouraged it. In late 1689, an Iroquois woman was burnt at Kanehsatake – to Belmont’s great chagrin but with Frontenac’s shrugging acceptance, if not relish; in 1696, four men were burnt in Montreal before the assembled French townspeople, after having been summarily baptized.5 This escalation of the conflict was marked by a return to familiar patterns of warfare, whereby a mixture of diplomacy and force were used to attempt a reunion with relatives. On both sides of the colonial divide, Iroquois now conceptualized peace and resettlement as inseparable: just as the Confederacy Iroquois insisted that the Christian Iroquois return to their ancestral communities in Iroquoia, the Christian Iroquois demanded that the Confederacy Iroquois join their ranks in the Saint Lawrence valley. To be clear, the wholesale relocation of the latter was ultimately neither desirable nor feasible, insofar as the arrival of thousands of newcomers to the region would have placed unbearable strains on the natural resources of the area and created tensions with settler neighbours. Yet the migration of certain individuals and family lineages did hold a key to reconciliation. The Great Peace of Montreal of 1701 can be thought of as a triumph of either French or Five Nations diplomacy, as scholars have tended to interpret it, but it was also in many respects a product of Christian Iroquois intervention.6
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At some point during the summer or fall of 1690, within months of Togouirout’s death, the Kahnawakes rebuilt their village on a new site on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River, a few leagues west of where the old village had stood. It had become apparent that the social costs of the community’s encampment within the confines of Montreal, which entailed unprecedented access to liquor and the attendant disturbances, greatly outweighed the arrangement’s defensive benefits. Residents of the two mission communities now drawn in closer proximity had a few run-ins: a man called Sonawenton, presumably from Kanehsatake, killed another from Kahnawake named Kentaratyron; a certain Sonnawches from the latter village was also killed by a knife thrust into the armpit. Frontenac was extremely critical of his predecessor’s decision.7 Yet life beyond the town was dangerous too. Through the summer, the Iroquois raided French homesteads at various points between Trois Rivières and Montreal. On 4 September, a force of about 125 of their warriors accompanied by 42 Dutch and English men from Albany struck a quarter league from La Prairie – a little over ten kilometers east of Kahnawake.8
The following winter, most of the inhabitants of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake scattered for their hunt as usual, expecting that peace would prevail – Étienne Tegananokoa had been taken by a Cayuga war party specifically, after all, and this did not necessarily signal the hostility of the whole Five Nations against the people of the missions. Towards the very end of the hunting season, though, a band of hunters from the two villages was surprised in the vicinity of Chambly by a party of Mohawk warriors. A few of the hunters were killed in the clash, but the remaining 10 or 12 were taken prisoner. This presented the victorious warriors with an occasion to reciprocate the benevolence of those who had spared the Mohawks at Schenectady in February 1690, and
to renew the diplomatic dialogue. Continuing their journey northwestward with their captives, the force of about 150 men encamped about two leagues from Kahnawake and sent 3 deputies onward to the village where they were admitted “without arms and as friends.” They were headed by none other than Onnonragewas alias Lawrence, who, as noted in chapter 6, had in recent years been one of the most active promoters of a return-migration from the mission settlements to Iroquoia, and who had led the counterattack after the Schenectady raid. Releasing the captive hunters, he explained that while he had not been delegated by his community, he and the warriors genuinely desired to put an end to the war. They had hastened to Kahnawake to warn the people that a combined Five Nations force of 800 men was fast approaching, with the aim of “carry[ing] them off” and of wreaking as much destruction as possible on the colony. The only way of avoiding the violence of capture, he proposed, was for the village’s inhabitants to relocate to Mohawk country.9
This approach was precisely in keeping with the pattern of military and diplomatic activity described in previous chapters, whereby demonstrations of goodwill and negotiations alternated with shows of force and violence, all aimed at persuading an opponent to migrate willingly, or if the occasion presented itself, of capturing them and forcing their migration. At midcentury the opponents targeted for absorption had been neighbouring nations (Wendats, Eries, Neutrals, Susquehannocks, etc.). Now they were stubborn relatives and acquaintances who had aligned themselves with an antagonistic French colonial power. Though they welcomed heartily Onnonragewas’s attempt at reconciliation, the Kahnawakes rejected his suggestion that they abandon the village. In fact, fearing that they might be forcibly detained, the three visitors felt it necessary to give the impression that they and their relatives were themselves entertaining the possibility of relocating there. The Kahnawakes warned Onnonragewas that he should not go back on this pledge, and asked that in the meanwhile he exhort his people to suspend hostilities and to pressure their Mahican allies to do the same. Onnonragewas responded that he would make the other Iroquois nations and the governor of New York concur in his desire for peace, and that if they did not agree, he would abandon them “and […] watch their defeat while smoking quietly on his mat.”10
As Onnonragewas had warned, it was not long before a large contingent of warriors from the western and central Iroquois nations appeared in the vicinity of Montreal and dispersed to raid farmsteads throughout the region. About twenty of these warriors left their encampments to “surrender” and “risk themselves” among the Kahnawakes, leading the Jesuit missionary Bruyas to believe that more would soon follow.11 The Kanehsatakes, who believed that in keeping with Onnonragewas’ recent overtures their community “was not supposed to be subject to insult,” were not so fortunate. An enemy party composed mainly of Onondagas struck there on 17 May, capturing thirty to thirty-five women and children who were out preparing the fields, and killing six or seven other persons in the process.12
Characteristically, in the weeks that followed, the Onondagas released two of the women, entrusting them with two secret wampum belts addressed to Louis Ateriata at Kahnawake and to a certain Tamouratoüa at Kanehsatake. These two chiefs were thereby exhorted to return to their country and to bring along as many of their relatives and friends as possible. Failure to comply, they threatened, would bring about their “inevitable destruction.” But the Onondagas had misjudged the commitment or impressionability of the pair (and of the clan matrons working behind the scene), for upon receiving the wampum belts they promptly presented them to the governor of Montreal, Louis-Hector de Callière, and reiterated their allegiance to the French.13 Informed of Onnonragewas’ overture and given the opportunity to discuss the matter with the two other deputies, Callière thought it best to leave the entire matter in the hands of the Kahnawakes.14
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The complicated, apparently contradictory nature of the relations between the Christian and League Iroquois was a source of great frustration to the French. While the latter found it easier to wage their war against the Five Nations as a whole, the inhabitants of the missions persisted in approaching the conflict with a more nuanced perspective. Although warriors from all of the League’s nations had collaborated in the attack against La Prairie, there was reason to believe as a result of Onnonragewas’s overture that the easternmost nations were inclined to peace. When a party of Christian Iroquois and Frenchmen who had set out along the upper Saint Lawrence in response to the raid on Kanehsatake came upon a smaller party whom they recognized as Mohawks (and Oneidas), they heard them out for fear “of breaking off all accommodation between them and that canton [i.e. nation],” and allowed the bulk to return home unharmed on the agreement that a few would accompany the Christian Iroquois to meet with Callière and that they would send a formal embassy to meet with governor Frontenac.15
When reports reached the colony that a force of New Yorkers, Mohawks, and Mahicans, nominally led by the trader and Albany mayor Peter Schuyler, and including the ubiquitous Garistatsi and Onnonragewas, was advancing along the Richelieu River, the Christian Iroquois responded hesitatingly. Only “a few” of their warriors, under the leadership of the dogique Paul Honoguenhag from Kahnawake and cheered on by the Sulpician priest Gay of La Montagne, joined the reconnaissance force sent to meet it. During the fighting that followed the enemy’s strike at La Prairie on the morning of 11 August, the small number of Christian Iroquois present fought bravely – with Honoguenhag being killed in the process. But it was the Wendats of Lorette, led on this occasion not by one of their own but by a Cayuga captive turned great friend of Frontenac, Ouréhouaré who earned the highest praise. A reinforcement of 120 warriors from Kahnawake who arrived an hour after battle could not be persuaded by the French commander to pursue the harried enemy. When gunshots were heard resounding from La Prairie, these warriors rushed back in that direction. It was soon discovered that these shots had merely been fired in honour of the officers who had died that morning.16
Whether these warriors genuinely believed that they were urgently needed at La Prairie (as they and their missionaries would protest), no doubt fearing that an enemy force had positioned itself between them and their village, or whether they had merely found a pretext to avoid fighting against Mohawks (as Frontenac would persist in believing), it is impossible to say.17 Whatever the case may be, it is clear is that the conflict was continuing its escalation into a new, radicalized phase. A Mohawk and Oneida war party, led by Garistasi and motivated by the desire to avenge the death of Onnonragewas and others who had perished during the attack on La Prairie, surprised between Sorel and Chambly, along the Richelieu River, one of the many Christian Iroquois bands that had by necessity again scattered for the winter hunt, killing 4 and capturing 16. Instead of releasing these captives, as their countrymen had done in June of the previous year, they headed home with them. When a woman who had escaped the attacked reached Kahnawake, a party of 40 or 50 warriors launched an immediate pursuit. They caught up with the enemy along Lake Champlain, annihilating them and recovering their captives. Garistatsi, his son, Kakare, as well as a brother of Onnonragewas – “all the principal Captains” and “the best Indians,” from the New Yorkers’ perspective – were among the dead. After this defeat, the Mohawks and Oneidas complained to the New Yorkers that they had lost 90 men in two years’ time, and that the three Mohawk villages could now only muster 130 men – less than half of what could be mustered a decade earlier.18
The French and their Indigenous allies were emboldened by the outcome of this latest encounter. When some of the warriors who had taken part in it journeyed to Quebec to inform Frontenac of the victory and to request that a new party be supplied to venture against the western Iroquois, the governor was only too happy to oblige. In February of 1692, about 120 warriors from Kahnawake, 40 from Kanehsatake, and 20 from Lorette set out along the upper Saint Lawrence River with another 120 Frenchmen. At the island of Toniata they surprised an encampment of 50 to 60 Senecas a
nd Onondagas, killing 24 and taking 16 captives.19 His enthusiasm boosted by a voyage to France from whence he had just returned, La Plaque followed up that September by mobilizing another war party of 160 Christian Iroquois warriors with the intention of striking against Mohawk country.20 This party did not go far, however, turning back upon reports that a coordinated enemy offensive was afoot.
In response to recent setbacks, and to the encouragement of Peter Schuyler who pressed them to “lay their principal design against” the French Praying Indians, two contingents representing the League’s western and eastern nations mounted a major offensive against Kah-nawake. As the Mohawk chief Rode put it to Schuyler, they intended by persuasion or force to “put the Praying Indians out of a capacity of ever doing you or us any more harm.”21 Forewarned and reinforced by French troops, the people of Kahnawake were, however, exceedingly well equipped to repel the enemy’s words and arms. In late October or early November of 1692, the western contingent, composed of up to 400 Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, was the first to appear in sight of the village. Discovering that their arrival was expected and observing that the fortified mission village was strong enough to resist an assault, the besiegers remained at the edge of the woods and exchanged sporadic fire over the course of two days (or three or four, according to another account) as smaller parties turned to raiding French farmsteads throughout the region. Upon realizing that its intentions had been uncovered, the eastern contingent of 350 Mohawks and Oneidas, journeyed no further north than Lake Champlain.22
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While the intimate relationship between the Kahnawakes and the Mohawks continued to worry Frontenac, Intendant Champigny reported at this time that “one cannot see more faithfulness and bravery than our Natives are showing on all occasions.” The French had “a very great interest in treating them well.”23 The Christian Iroquois had until now demonstrated a willingness to take part in military operations against the distant and unrelated Senecas, to strike at the people of New York and New England, and to assist in defensive operations in the Montreal region, mounting pursuits in response to threats or attacks on outlying settlements, and on a few occasions escorting fur trading convoys past the most dangerous stretch of the Ottawa River. Throughout this period, their isolated hunters and fishermen had periodically fallen victim to enemy war parties.24 Just as the acquaintances, friends, and relatives of the League had resolved to “lay their principal design against” them, the inhabitants of the missions began to resort to more drastic means to ensure their own security and to resolve the conflict in a way that would strengthen their community. During the showdown against the Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca warriors in 1692, an emerging Kahnawake leader named Tatakwiséré, “chief of the Oneidas of this mission,” dragged out of the palisade the captive wife of the dreaded Onondaga war chief Black Kettle – at least one source suggests that she also happened to be Tatakwiséré’s daughter. Because she had revealed an inclination to attempt to escape, and in a pointed gesture of defiance to the besiegers, he clubbed her to death. Proclaiming that he would show no mercy to defectors, he exhorted the people of Kahnawake to do the same.25
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