Count Frontenac
and
New France

Under Louis XIV.

The
events recounted in this book group themselves in the main about a
single figure, that of Count Frontenac, the most remarkable man who
ever represented the crown of France in the New World. From strangely
unpromising beginnings, he grew with every emergency, and rose equal
to every crisis. His whole career was one of conflict, sometimes petty
and personal, sometimes of momentous consequence, involving the
question of national ascendancy on this continent. Now that this
question is put at rest for ever, it is hard to conceive the anxiety
which it wakened in our forefathers. But for one rooted error of
French policy, the future of the English-speaking races in America
would have been more than endangered.

Under the rule of Frontenac occurred the first serious collision of
the rival powers, and the opening of the grand scheme of military
occupation by which France strove to envelop and hold in check the
industrial populations of the
viii
English colonies. It was he who made
that scheme possible.

In “The Old Régime in Canada,” I tried to show
from what inherent
causes this wilderness empire of the Great Monarch fell at last before
a foe, superior indeed in numbers, but lacking all the forces that
belong to a system of civil and military centralization. The present
volume will show how valiantly, and for a time how successfully, New
France battled against a fate which her own organic fault made
inevitable. Her history is a great and significant drama, enacted
among untamed forests, with a distant gleam of courtly splendors and
the regal pomp of Versailles.

The authorities on which the book rests are drawn chiefly from the
manuscript collections of the French government in the Archives
Nationales, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and, above all, the vast
repositories of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies. Others are
from Canadian and American sources. I have, besides, availed myself of
the collection of French, English, and Dutch documents published by
the State of New York, under the excellent editorship of Dr.
O’Callaghan, and of the manuscript collections made in France by the
governments of Canada and of Massachusetts. A considerable number of
books, contemporary or nearly so with
ix
the events described, also help
to throw light upon them; and these have all been examined. The
citations in the margins represent but a small part of the authorities
consulted.

This mass of material has been studied with extreme care, and peculiar
pains have been taken to secure accuracy of statement. In the preface
of “The Old Régime,” I wrote: “Some of the results here reached are of
a character which I regret, since they cannot be agreeable to persons
for whom I have a very cordial regard. The conclusions drawn from the
facts may be matter of opinion: but it will be remembered that the
facts themselves can be overthrown only by overthrowing the evidence
on which they rest, or bringing forward counter-evidence of equal or
greater strength; and neither task will be found an easy one.”

The invitation implied in these words has not been accepted.
“The Old Régime” was met by vehement protest in some
quarters; but, so far as I know, none of the statements of
fact contained in it have been attacked by evidence, or even
challenged. The lines just quoted are equally applicable to
this volume. Should there be occasion, a collection of
documentary proofs will be published more than sufficient to
make good the positions taken. Meanwhile, it will, I
think, be clear to an impartial reader that the
x
story is told, not in the interest of any race or nationality,
but simply in that of historical truth.

When, at the age of eighteen, I formed the purpose of writing on
French-American history, I meant at first to limit myself to the great
contest which brought that history to a close. It was by an
afterthought that the plan was extended to cover the whole field, so
that the part of the work, or series of works, first conceived, would,
following the sequence of events, be the last executed. As soon as the
original scheme was formed, I began to prepare for executing it by
examining localities, journeying in forests, visiting Indian tribes,
and collecting materials. I have continued to collect them ever since,
so that the accumulation is now rather formidable; and, if it is to be
used at all, it had better be used at once. Therefore, passing over
for the present an intervening period of less decisive importance, I
propose to take, as the next subject of this series, “Montcalm and the
Fall of New France.”

Boston, 1 Jan., 1877.

Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV.

PREFACE.

CHAPTER I. 1620-1672.

COUNT AND COUNTESS FRONTENAC.

Mademoiselle de Montpensier and Madame de Frontenac • Orleans •
The Maréchale de Camp • Count Frontenac •
Conjugal Disputes • Early Life of Frontenac •
His Courtship and Marriage • Estrangement •
Scenes at St. Fargeau • The Lady of Honor dismissed •
Frontenac as a Soldier • He is made Governor of New France •
Les Divines.

CHAPTER II. 1672-1675

FRONTENAC AT QUEBEC.

Arrival • Bright Prospects • The Three Estates of New France •
Speech of the Governor • His Innovations •
Royal Displeasure • Signs of Storm •
Frontenac and the Priests • His Attempts to civilize the Indians •
Opposition • Complaints and Heart-burnings.

CHAPTER III. 1673-1675.

FRONTENAC AND PERROT.

La Salle • Fort Frontenac • Perrot • His Speculations •
His Tyranny • The Bush-rangers • Perrot revolts •
Becomes alarmed • Dilemma of Frontenac •
Mediation of Fénelon • Perrot in Prison •
Excitement of the Sulpitians • Indignation of Fénelon •
Passion of Frontenac • Perrot on Trial •
Strange Scenes • Appeal to the King •
Answers of Louis XIV. and Colbert • Fénelon rebuked.

xii

CHAPTER IV. 1675-1682.

FRONTENAC AND DUCHESNEAU.

Frontenac receives a Colleague • He opposes the Clergy •
Disputes in the Council • Royal Intervention •
Frontenac rebuked • Fresh Outbreaks •
Charges and Countercharges • The Dispute grows hot •
Duchesneau condemned and Frontenac warned • The Quarrel continues •
The King loses Patience • More Accusations •
Factions and Feuds • A Side Quarrel • The King threatens •
Frontenac denounces the Priests •
The Governor and the Intendant recalled • Qualities of Frontenac.

CHAPTER V. 1682-1684.

LE FEBVRE DE LA BARRE.

His Arrival at Quebec • The Great Fire •
A Coming Storm • Iroquois Policy • The Danger imminent •
Indian Allies of France • Frontenac and the Iroquois •
Boasts of La Barre • His Past Life • His Speculations •
He takes Alarm • His Dealings with the Iroquois •
His Illegal Trade • His Colleague denounces him •
Fruits of his Schemes • His Anger and his Fears.

CHAPTER VI. 1684.

LA BARRE AND THE IROQUOIS.

Dongan • New York and its Indian Neighbors •
The Rival Governors • Dongan and the Iroquois •
Mission to Onondaga • An Iroquois Politician •
Warnings of Lamberville • Iroquois Boldness •
La Barre takes the Field • His Motives •
The March • Pestilence • Council at La Famine •
The Iroquois defiant • Humiliation of La Barre •
The Indian Allies • Their Rage and Disappointment •
Recall of La Barre.

xiii

CHAPTER VII. 1685-1687.

DENONVILLE AND DONGAN.

Troubles of the New Governor • His Character •
English Rivalry • Intrigues of Dongan • English Claims •
A Diplomatic Duel • Overt Acts • Anger of Denonville •
James II. checks Dongan • Denonville emboldened •
Strife in the North • Hudson’s Bay •
Attempted Pacification • Artifice of Denonville •
He prepares for War.

CHAPTER VIII. 1687.

DENONVILLE AND THE SENECAS.

Treachery of Denonville • Iroquois Generosity •
The Invading Army • The Western Allies •
Plunder of English Traders • Arrival of the Allies •
Scene at the French Camp • March of Denonville •
Ambuscade • Battle • Victory •
The Seneca Babylon • Imperfect Success.

CHAPTER IX. 1687-1689.

THE IROQUOIS INVASION.

Altercations • Attitude of Dongan • Martial Preparation •
Perplexity of Denonville • Angry Correspondence •
Recall of Dongan • Sir Edmund Andros • Humiliation of Denonville •
Distress of Canada • Appeals for Help • Iroquois Diplomacy •
A Huron Macchiavel • The Catastrophe •
Ferocity of the Victors • War with England •
Recall of Denonville.

CHAPTER X. 1689-1690.

RETURN OF FRONTENAC.

Versailles • Frontenac and the King •
Frontenac sails for Quebec • Projected Conquest of New York •
Designs of the King • Failure • Energy of Frontenac •
Fort Frontenac • Panic • Negotiations •
The Iroquois in Council • Chevalier d’Aux •
Taunts of the Indian Allies • Boldness of Frontenac •
An Iroquois Defeat • Cruel Policy • The Stroke parried.

xiv

CHAPTER XI. 1690.

THE THREE WAR-PARTIES.

Measures of Frontenac • Expedition against Schenectady •
The March • The Dutch Village • The Surprise •
The Massacre • Prisoners spared • Retreat •
The English and their Iroquois Friends • The Abenaki War •
Revolution at Boston • Capture of Pemaquid •
Capture of Salmon Falls • Capture of Fort Loyal •
Frontenac and his Prisoner • The Canadians encouraged.

CHAPTER XII. 1690.

MASSACHUSETTS ATTACKS QUEBEC.

English Schemes • Capture of Port Royal •
Acadia reduced • Conduct of Phips •
His History and Character • Boston in Arms •
A Puritan Crusade • The March from Albany •
Frontenac and the Council • Frontenac at Montreal •
His War Dance • An Abortive Expedition •
An English Raid • Frontenac at Quebec •
Defences of the Town • The Enemy arrives.

CHAPTER XIII. 1690.

DEFENCE OF QUEBEC.

Phips on the St. Lawrence • Phips at Quebec •
A Flag of Truce • Scene at the Château •
The Summons and the Answer • Plan of Attack •
Landing of the English • The Cannonade •
The Ships repulsed • The Land Attack •
Retreat of Phips • Condition of Quebec •
Rejoicings of the French • Distress at Boston.

CHAPTER XIV. 1690-1694.

THE SCOURGE OF CANADA.

Iroquois Inroads • Death of Bienville • English Attack •
A Desperate Fight • Miseries of the Colony • Alarms •
A Winter Expedition • La Chesnaye burned •
The Heroine of Verchères • Mission Indians •
The Mohawk Expedition • Retreat and Pursuit •
Relief arrives • Frontenac Triumphant.

xv

CHAPTER XV. 1691-1695.

AN INTERLUDE.

Appeal of Frontenac • His Opponents • His Services •
Rivalry and Strife • Bishop Saint-Vallier •
Society at the Château • Private Theatricals •
Alarm of the Clergy • Tartuffe • A Singular Bargain •
Mareuil and the Bishop • Mareuil on Trial •
Zeal of Saint-Vallier • Scandals at Montreal •
Appeal to the King • The Strife composed •
Libel against Frontenac.

CHAPTER XVI. 1690-1694.

THE WAR IN ACADIA.

State of that Colony • The Abenakis • Acadia and New England •
Pirates • Baron de Saint-Castin • Pentegoet •
The English Frontier • The French and the Abenakis •
Plan of the War • Capture of York • Villebon •
Grand War-party • Attack of Wells • Pemaquid rebuilt •
John Nelson • A Broken Treaty • Villieu and Thury •
Another War-party • Massacre at Oyster River.

CHAPTER XVII. 1690-1697.

NEW FRANCE AND NEW ENGLAND.

The Frontier of New England • Border Warfare •
Motives of the French • Needless Barbarity •
Who were answerable? • Father Thury •
The Abenakis waver • Treachery at Pemaquid •
Capture of Pemaquid • Projected Attack on Boston •
Disappointment • Miseries of the Frontier • A Captive Amazon.

CHAPTER XVIII. 1693-1697.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH RIVALRY.

Le Moyne d’Iberville • His Exploits in Newfoundland •
In Hudson’s Bay • The Great Prize • The Competitors •
Fatal Policy of the King • The Iroquois Question •
Negotiation • Firmness of Frontenac • English Intervention •
War renewed • State of the West • Indian Diplomacy •
Cruel Measures • A Perilous Crisis • Audacity of Frontenac.

xvi

CHAPTER XIX. 1696-1698.

FRONTENAC ATTACKS THE ONONDAGAS.

March of Frontenac • Flight of the Enemy • An Iroquois Stoic •
Relief for the Onondagas • Boasts of Frontenac •
His Complaints • His Enemies • Parties in Canada •
Views of Frontenac and the King • Frontenac prevails •
Peace of Ryswick • Frontenac and Bellomont •
Schuyler at Quebec • Festivities • A Last Defiance.

CHAPTER XX. 1698.

DEATH OF FRONTENAC.

His Last Hours • His Will • His Funeral •
His Eulogist and his Critic • His Disputes with the Clergy •
His Character.

CHAPTER XXI. 1699-1701.

CONCLUSION.

The New Governor • Attitude of the Iroquois •
Negotiations • Embassy to Onondaga • Peace •
The Iroquois and the Allies • Difficulties •
Death of the Great Huron • Funeral Rites •
The Grand Council • The Work of Frontenac finished •
Results.

APPENDIX.

INDEX.

[Illustration: Map of Canada and Adjacent Countries towards the Close
of the 17th century.]

At
Versailles there is the portrait of a lady, beautiful and young.
She is painted as Minerva, a plumed helmet on her head, and a shield
on her arm. In a corner of the canvas is written Anne de La
Grange-Trianon, Comtesse de Frontenac. This blooming goddess was the
wife of the future governor of Canada.

Madame de Frontenac, at the age of about twenty, was a favorite
companion of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the grand-daughter of Henry
IV. and daughter of the weak and dastardly Gaston, Duke of Orleans.
Nothing in French annals has found more readers than the story of the
exploit of this spirited princess at Orleans during the civil
2
war of the Fronde. Her cousin Condé, chief of the revolt, had
found favor in her eyes; and she had espoused his cause against her
cousin, the king. The royal army threatened Orleans. The duke, her
father, dared not leave Paris; but he consented that his daughter
should go in his place to hold the city for Condé and the
Fronde.

The princess entered her carriage and set out on her errand, attended
by a small escort. With her were three young married ladies, the
Marquise de Bréauté, the Comtesse de Fiesque, and the Comtesse de
Frontenac. In two days they reached Orleans. The civic authorities
were afraid to declare against the king, and hesitated to open the
gates to the daughter of their duke, who, standing in the moat with
her three companions, tried persuasion and threats in vain. The
prospect was not encouraging, when a crowd of boatmen came up from the
river and offered the princess their services. “I accepted them
gladly,” she writes, “and said a thousand fine things, such as one
must say to that sort of people to make them do what one wishes.” She
gave them money as well as fair words, and begged them to burst open
one of the gates. They fell at once to the work; while the guards and
officials looked down from the walls, neither aiding nor resisting
them. “To animate the boatmen by my presence,” she continues, “I
mounted a hillock near by. I did not look to see which way I went, but
clambered up like a cat, clutching brambles and thorns, and jumping
over hedges without hurting myself.
3
Madame de Bréauté, who is the most
cowardly creature in the world, began to cry out against me and
everybody who followed me; in fact, I do not know if she did not swear
in her excitement, which amused me very much.” At length, a hole was
knocked in the gate; and a gentleman of her train, who had directed
the attack, beckoned her to come on. “As it was very muddy, a man took
me and carried me forward, and thrust me in at this hole, where my
head was no sooner through than the drums beat to salute me. I gave my
hand to the captain of the guard. The shouts redoubled. Two men took
me and put me in a wooden chair. I do not know whether I was seated in
it or on their arms, for I was beside myself with joy. Everybody was
kissing my hands, and I almost died with laughing to see myself in
such an odd position.” There was no resisting the enthusiasm of the
people and the soldiers. Orleans was won for the Fronde.
[1]

The young Countesses of Frontenac and Fiesque had constantly followed
her, and climbed after her through the hole in the gate. Her father
wrote to compliment them on their prowess, and addressed his letter
à Mesdames les Comtesses, Maréchales de Camp dans
l’armée de ma fille contre le Mazarin. Officers and soldiers
took part in the pleasantry; and, as Madame de Frontenac passed on
horseback before the troops, they saluted her with the honors paid to
a brigadier.

When the king, or Cardinal Mazarin who controlled
4
him, had triumphed over the revolting princes, Mademoiselle de Montpensier
paid the penalty of her exploit by a temporary banishment from the court.
She roamed from place to place, with a little court of her own, of which
Madame de Frontenac was a conspicuous member. During the war, Count
Frontenac had been dangerously ill of a fever in Paris; and his wife
had been absent for a time, attending him. She soon rejoined the
princess, who was at her château of St. Fargeau, three days’ journey
from Paris, when an incident occurred which placed the married life of
her fair companion in an unexpected light. “The Duchesse de Sully came
to see me, and brought with her M. d’Herbault and M. de Frontenac.
Frontenac had stopped here once before, but it was only for a week,
when he still had the fever, and took great care of himself like a man
who had been at the door of death. This time he was in high health.
His arrival had not been expected, and his wife was so much surprised
that everybody observed it, especially as the surprise seemed to be
not at all a pleasant one. Instead of going to talk with her husband,
she went off and hid herself, crying and screaming because he had said
that he would like to have her company that evening. I was very much
astonished, especially as I had never before perceived her aversion to
him. The elder Comtesse de Fiesque remonstrated with her; but she only
cried the more. Madame de Fiesque then brought books to show her her
duty as a wife; but it did no good, and at last she got into such a
state
5
that we sent for the curé with holy water to exorcise her.”
[2]

Count Frontenac came of an ancient and noble race, said to have been
of Basque origin. His father held a high post in the household of
Louis XIII., who became the child’s god-father, and gave him his own
name. At the age of fifteen, the young Louis showed an incontrollable
passion for the life of a soldier. He was sent to the seat of war in
Holland, to serve under the Prince of Orange. At the age of nineteen,
he was a volunteer at the siege of Hesdin; in the next year, he was at
Arras, where he distinguished himself during a sortie of the garrison;
in the next, he took part in the siege of Aire; and, in the next, in
those of Callioure and Perpignan. At the age of twenty-three, he was
made colonel of the regiment of Normandy, which he commanded in
repeated battles and sieges of the Italian campaign. He was several
times wounded, and in 1646 he had an arm broken at the siege of
Orbitello. In the same year, when twenty-six years old, he was raised
to the rank of maréchal de camp, equivalent to that of
brigadier-general. A year or two later, we find him at Paris, at the
house of his father, on the Quai des Célestins.
[3]

In the same neighborhood lived La Grange-Trianon, Sieur de Neuville, a
widower of fifty,
6
with one child, a daughter of sixteen, whom he had
placed in the charge of his relative, Madame de Bouthillier. Frontenac
fell in love with her. Madame de Bouthillier opposed the match, and
told La Grange that he might do better for his daughter than to marry
her to a man who, say what he might, had but twenty thousand francs a
year. La Grange was weak and vacillating: sometimes he listened to his
prudent kinswoman, and sometimes to the eager suitor; treated him as a
son-in-law, carried love messages from him to his daughter, and ended
by refusing him her hand, and ordering her to renounce him on pain of
being immured in a convent. Neither Frontenac nor his mistress was of
a pliant temper. In the neighborhood was the little church of St.
Pierre aux Bœufs, which had the privilege of uniting couples without
the consent of their parents; and here, on a Wednesday in October,
1648, the lovers were married in presence of a number of Frontenac’s
relatives. La Grange was furious at the discovery; but his anger soon
cooled, and complete reconciliation followed.
[4]

The happiness of the newly wedded pair was short. Love soon changed to
aversion, at least on the part of the bride. She was not of a tender
nature; her temper was imperious, and she had a restless craving for
excitement. Frontenac, on his part, was the most wayward and
headstrong of men. She bore him a son; but maternal cares
7
were not to her liking. The infant, François Louis, was placed
in the keeping of a nurse at the village of Clion; and his young mother
left her husband, to follow the fortunes of Mademoiselle de Montpensier,
who for a time pronounced her charming, praised her wit and beauty, and
made her one of her ladies of honor. Very curious and amusing are some
of the incidents recounted by the princess, in which Madame de Frontenac
bore part; but what is more to our purpose are the sketches traced here
and there by the same sharp pen, in which one may discern the traits of
the destined saviour of New France. Thus, in the following, we see him
at St. Fargeau in the same attitude in which we shall often see him at
Quebec.

The princess and the duke her father had a dispute touching her
property. Frontenac had lately been at Blois, where the duke had
possessed him with his own views of the questions at issue.
Accordingly, on arriving at St. Fargeau, he seemed disposed to assume
the character of mediator. “He wanted,” says the princess, “to discuss
my affairs with me: I listened to his preaching, and he also spoke
about these matters to Préfontaine (her man of business).
I returned to the house after our promenade, and we went to dance in the
great hall. While we were dancing, I saw Préfontaine walking at
the farther end with Frontenac, who was talking and gesticulating. This
continued for a long time. Madame de Sully noticed it also, and seemed
disturbed by it, as I was myself. I said, ‘Have we not danced enough?’
8
Madame de Sully assented, and we went out. I called Préfontaine,
and asked him, ‘What was Frontenac saying to you?’ He answered: ‘He was
scolding me. I never saw such an impertinent man in my life.’ I went to
my room, and Madame de Sully and Madame de Fiesque followed. Madame de Sully
said to Préfontaine: ‘I was very much disturbed to see you talking
with so much warmth to Monsieur de Frontenac; for he came here in such
ill-humor that I was afraid he would quarrel with you. Yesterday, when
we were in the carriage, he was ready to eat us.’ The Comtesse de
Fiesque said, ‘This morning he came to see my mother-in-law, and
scolded at her.’ Préfontaine answered: ‘He wanted to throttle me. I
never saw a man so crazy and absurd.’ We all four began to pity poor
Madame de Frontenac for having such a husband, and to think her right
in not wanting to go with him.” [5]

Frontenac owned the estate of Isle Savary,
on the Indre, not far from Blois; and here, soon after the above
scene, the princess made him a visit. “It is a pretty enough place,”
she says, “for a man like him. The house is well furnished, and he
gave me excellent entertainment. He showed me all the plans he had for
improving it, and making gardens, fountains, and ponds. It would need
the riches of a superintendent of finance to execute his schemes, and
how anybody else should venture to think of them I cannot comprehend.”

“While Frontenac was at St. Fargeau,” she
9
continues, “he kept open table, and many of my people went to dine with
him; for he affected to hold court, and acted as if everybody owed duty
to him. The conversation was always about my affair with his Royal
Highness (her father), whose conduct towards me was always
praised, while mine was blamed. Frontenac spoke ill of Préfontaine,
and, in fine, said every thing he could to displease me and stir up my
own people against me. He praised every thing that belonged to himself,
and never came to sup or dine with me without speaking of some
ragoût or some new sweetmeat which had been served up on
his table, ascribing it all to the excellence of the officers of his
kitchen. The very meat that he ate, according to him, had a different
taste on his board than on any other. As for his silver plate, it was
always of good workmanship; and his dress was always of patterns
invented by himself. When he had new clothes, he paraded them like a
child. One day he brought me some to look at, and left them on my
dressing-table. We were then at Chambord. His Royal Highness came into
the room, and must have thought it odd to see breeches and doublets in
such a place. Préfontaine and I laughed about it a great deal.
Frontenac took everybody who came to St. Fargeau to see his stables;
and all who wished to gain his good graces were obliged to admire his
horses, which were very indifferent. In short, this is his way in
every thing.” [6]

Though not himself of the highest rank, his
10
position at court was, from the courtier point of view, an enviable
one. The princess, after her banishment had ended, more than once
mentions incidentally that she had met him in the cabinet of the
queen. Her dislike of him became intense, and her fondness for his
wife changed at last to aversion. She charges the countess with
ingratitude. She discovered, or thought that she discovered, that
in her dispute with her father, and in certain dissensions in her
own household, Madame de Frontenac had acted secretly in opposition
to her interests and wishes. The imprudent lady of honor received
permission to leave her service. It was a woful scene. “She saw me
get into my carriage,” writes the princess, “and her distress was
greater than ever. Her tears flowed abundantly: as for me, my
fortitude was perfect, and I looked on with composure while she
cried. If any thing could disturb my tranquility, it was the
recollection of the time when she laughed while I was crying.”
Mademoiselle de Montpensier had been deeply offended, and
apparently with reason. The countess and her husband received an order
never again to appear in her presence; but soon after, when the
princess was with the king and queen at a comedy in the garden of the
Louvre, Frontenac, who had previously arrived, immediately changed his
position, and with his usual audacity took a post so conspicuous that
she could not help seeing him. “I confess,” she says, “I was so angry
that I could find no pleasure in the play; but I said nothing to the
king and queen, fearing that
11
they would not take such a view of the
matter as I wished.” [7]

With the close of her relations with “La Grande Mademoiselle,” Madame
de Frontenac is lost to sight for a while. In 1669, a Venetian embassy
came to France to beg for aid against the Turks, who for more than two
years had attacked Candia in overwhelming force. The ambassadors
offered to place their own troops under French command, and they asked
Turenne to name a general officer equal to the task. Frontenac had the
signal honor of being chosen by the first soldier of Europe for this
most arduous and difficult position. He went accordingly. The result
increased his reputation for ability and courage; but Candia was
doomed, and its chief fortress fell into the hands of the infidels,
after a protracted struggle, which is said to have cost them a hundred
and eighty thousand men. [8]

Three years later, Frontenac received the appointment of Governor and
Lieutenant-General for the king in all New France. “He was,” says
Saint-Simon, “a man of excellent parts, living much in society, and
completely ruined. He found it hard to bear the imperious temper of
his wife; and he was given the government of Canada to deliver him
from her, and afford him some means of living.”
[9] Certain scandalous songs of the day
12
assign a different motive for his appointment. Louis XIV. was
enamoured of Madame de Montespan. She had once smiled upon Frontenac;
and it is said that the jealous king gladly embraced the opportunity
of removing from his presence, and from hers, a lover who had
forestalled him. [10]

Frontenac’s wife had no thought of following him across the sea. A
more congenial life awaited her at home. She had long had a friend of
humbler station than herself, Mademoiselle d’Outrelaise, daughter of
an obscure gentleman of Poitou, an amiable and accomplished person,
who became through life her constant companion. The extensive building
called the Arsenal, formerly the residence of Sully, the minister of
Henry IV., contained suites of apartments which were granted to
persons who had influence enough to obtain
13
them. The Duc de Lude, grand master of artillery, had them at his
disposal, and gave one of them to Madame de Frontenac. Here she made
her abode with her friend; and here at last she died, at the age of
seventy-five. The annalist Saint-Simon, who knew the court and all
belonging to it better than any other man of his time, says of her:
“She had been beautiful and gay, and was always in the best society,
where she was greatly in request. Like her husband, she had little
property and abundant wit. She and Mademoiselle d’Outrelaise, whom
she took to live with her, gave the tone to the best company of Paris
and the court, though they never went thither. They were called
Les Divines. In fact, they demanded incense like goddesses;
and it was lavished upon them all their lives.”

Mademoiselle d’Outrelaise died long before the countess, who retained
in old age the rare social gifts which to the last made her apartments
a resort of the highest society of that brilliant epoch. It was in her
power to be very useful to her absent husband, who often needed her
support, and who seems to have often received it.

She was childless. Her son, François Louis, was killed, some say in
battle, and others in a duel, at an early age. Her husband died nine
years before her; and the old countess left what little she had to her
friend Beringhen, the king’s master of the horse.
[11]

Frontenac
was fifty-two years old when he landed at Quebec. If time
had done little to cure his many faults, it had done nothing to weaken
the springs of his unconquerable vitality. In his ripe middle age, he
was as keen, fiery, and perversely headstrong as when he quarrelled
with Préfontaine in the hall at St. Fargeau.

Had nature disposed him to melancholy, there was much in his position
to awaken it. A man of courts and camps, born and bred in the focus of
a most gorgeous civilization, he was banished to the ends of the
earth, among savage hordes and half-reclaimed forests, to exchange the
splendors of St. Germain and the dawning glories of Versailles for a
stern gray rock, haunted by sombre priests, rugged merchants and
traders, blanketed Indians, and wild bush-rangers. But Frontenac was a
man of action. He wasted no time in vain regrets, and
15
set himself to
his work with the elastic vigor of youth. His first impressions had
been very favorable. When, as he sailed up the St. Lawrence, the basin
of Quebec opened before him, his imagination kindled with the grandeur
of the scene. “I never,” he wrote, “saw any thing more superb than the
position of this town. It could not be better situated as the future
capital of a great empire.” [1]

That Quebec was to become the capital of a great empire there seemed
in truth good reason to believe. The young king and his minister
Colbert had labored in earnest to build up a new France in the west.
For years past, ship-loads of emigrants had landed every summer on the
strand beneath the rock. All was life and action, and the air was full
of promise. The royal agent Talon had written to his master: “This
part of the French monarchy is destined to a grand future. All that I
see around me points to it; and the colonies of foreign nations, so
long settled on the seaboard, are trembling with fright in view of
what his Majesty has accomplished here within the last seven years.
The measures we have taken to confine them within narrow limits, and
the prior claim we have established against them by formal acts of
possession, do not permit them to extend themselves except at peril of
having war declared against them as usurpers; and this, in fact, is
what they seem greatly to fear.” [2]

16
Frontenac shared the spirit of the hour. His first step was to survey
his government. He talked with traders, colonists, and officials;
visited seigniories, farms, fishing-stations, and all the infant
industries that Talon had galvanized into life; examined the new ship
on the stocks, admired the structure of the new brewery, went to Three
Rivers to see the iron mines, and then, having acquired a tolerably
exact idea of his charge, returned to Quebec. He was well pleased with
what he saw, but not with the ways and means of Canadian travel; for
he thought it strangely unbecoming that a lieutenant-general of the
king should be forced to crouch on a sheet of bark, at the bottom of a
birch canoe, scarcely daring to move his head to the right or left
lest he should disturb the balance of the fragile vessel.

At Quebec he convoked the council, made them a speech, and
administered the oath of allegiance. [3]
This did not satisfy him. He resolved that all Quebec
should take the oath together. It was little but a pretext. Like many
of his station, Frontenac was not in full sympathy with the
centralizing movement of the time, which tended to level ancient
rights, privileges, and prescriptions under the ponderous roller of
the monarchical administration. He looked back with regret to the day
when the three orders of the state, clergy, nobles, and commons, had a
place and a power in the direction of national affairs. The three
orders still subsisted, in form, if not in substance, in some of
17
the provinces of France; and Frontenac conceived the idea of reproducing
them in Canada. Not only did he cherish the tradition of faded
liberties, but he loved pomp and circumstance, above all, when he was
himself the central figure in it; and the thought of a royal governor
of Languedoc or Brittany, presiding over the estates of his province,
appears to have fired him with emulation.

He had no difficulty in forming his order of the clergy. The Jesuits
and the seminary priests supplied material even more abundant than he
wished. For the order of the nobles, he found three or four
gentilshommes at Quebec, and these he reinforced with a number of
officers. The third estate consisted of the merchants and citizens;
and he formed the members of the council and the magistrates into
another distinct body, though, properly speaking, they belonged to the
third estate, of which by nature and prescription they were the head.
The Jesuits, glad no doubt to lay him under some slight obligation,
lent him their church for the ceremony that he meditated, and aided in
decorating it for the occasion. Here, on the twenty-third of October,
1672, the three estates of Canada were convoked, with as much pomp and
splendor as circumstances would permit. Then Frontenac, with the ease
of a man of the world and the loftiness of a grand seigneur,
delivered himself of the harangue he had prepared. He wrote
exceedingly well; he is said also to have excelled as an orator;
certainly he was never averse to the tones of his own eloquence. His
18
speech was addressed to a double audience: the throng that filled the
church, and the king and the minister three thousand miles away. He
told his hearers that he had called the assembly, not because he
doubted their loyalty, but in order to afford them the delight of
making public protestation of devotion to a prince, the terror of
whose irresistible arms was matched only by the charms of his person
and the benignity of his rule. “The Holy Scriptures,” he said,
“command us to obey our sovereign, and teach us that no pretext or
reason can dispense us from this obedience.” And, in a glowing eulogy
on Louis XIV., he went on to show that obedience to him was not only a
duty, but an inestimable privilege. He dwelt with admiration on the
recent victories in Holland, and held forth the hope that a speedy and
glorious peace would leave his Majesty free to turn his thoughts to
the colony which already owed so much to his fostering care. “The true
means,” pursued Frontenac, “of gaining his favor and his support, is
for us to unite with one heart in laboring for the progress of
Canada.” Then he addressed, in turn, the clergy, the nobles, the
magistrates, and the citizens. He exhorted the priests to continue
with zeal their labors for the conversion of the Indians, and to make
them subjects not only of Christ, but also of the king; in short, to
tame and civilize them, a portion of their duties in which he plainly
gave them to understand that they had not hitherto acquitted
themselves to his satisfaction. Next, he appealed to the nobles,
commended
19
their gallantry, and called upon them to be as assiduous in
the culture and improvement of the colony as they were valiant in its
defence. The magistrates, the merchants, and the colonists in general
were each addressed in an appropriate exhortation. “I can assure you,
messieurs,” he concluded, “that if you faithfully discharge your
several duties, each in his station, his Majesty will extend to us all
the help and all the favor that we can desire. It is needless, then,
to urge you to act as I have counselled, since it is for your own
interest to do so. As for me, it only remains to protest before you
that I shall esteem myself happy in consecrating all my efforts, and,
if need be, my life itself, to extending the empire of Jesus Christ
throughout all this land, and the supremacy of our king over all the
nations that dwell in it.”

He administered the oath, and the assembly
dissolved. He now applied himself to another work: that of giving a
municipal government to Quebec, after the model of some of the cities
of France. In place of the syndic, an official supposed to represent
the interests of the citizens, he ordered the public election of three
aldermen, of whom the senior should act as mayor. One of the number
was to go out of office every year, his place being filled by a new
election; and the governor, as representing the king, reserved the
right of confirmation or rejection. He then, in concert with the chief
inhabitants, proceeded to frame a body of regulations for the
government of a town destined, as he again and again declares, to
become the capital
20
of a mighty empire; and he farther ordained that
the people should hold a meeting every six months to discuss questions
involving the welfare of the colony. The boldness of these measures
will scarcely be appreciated at the present day. The intendant Talon
declined, on pretence of a slight illness, to be present at the
meeting of the estates. He knew too well the temper of the king, whose
constant policy it was to destroy or paralyze every institution or
custom that stood in the way of his autocracy. The despatches in which
Frontenac announced to his masters what he had done received in due
time their answer. The minister Colbert wrote: “Your assembling of the
inhabitants to take the oath of fidelity, and your division of them
into three estates, may have had a good effect for the moment; but it
is well for you to observe that you are always to follow, in the
government of Canada, the forms in use here; and since our kings have
long regarded it as good for their service not to convoke the
states-general of the kingdom, in order, perhaps, to abolish
insensibly this ancient usage, you, on your part, should very rarely,
or, to speak more correctly, never, give a corporate form to the
inhabitants of Canada. You should even, as the colony strengthens,
suppress gradually the office of the syndic, who presents petitions in
the name of the inhabitants; for it is well that each should speak for
himself, and no one for all.”
[4]

21
Here, in brief, is the whole spirit of the French colonial rule in
Canada; a government, as I have elsewhere shown, of excellent
intentions, but of arbitrary methods. Frontenac, filled with the
traditions of the past, and sincerely desirous of the good of the
colony, rashly set himself against the prevailing current. His
municipal government, and his meetings of citizens, were, like his
three estates, abolished by a word from the court, which, bold and
obstinate as he was, he dared not disobey. Had they been allowed to
subsist, there can be little doubt that great good would have resulted
to Canada.

Frontenac has been called a mere soldier. He was an excellent soldier,
and more besides. He was a man of vigorous and cultivated mind,
penetrating observation, and ample travel and experience. His zeal for
the colony, however, was often counteracted by the violence of his
prejudices, and by two other influences. First, he was a ruined man,
who meant to mend his fortunes; and his wish that Canada should
prosper was joined with a determination to reap a goodly part of her
prosperity for himself. Again, he could not endure a rival; opposition
maddened him, and, when crossed or thwarted, he forgot every thing but
his passion. Signs of storm quickly showed themselves between him and
the intendant Talon; but the danger was averted by the departure of
that official for France. A cloud then rose in the direction of the
clergy.

“Another thing displeases me,” writes Frontenac,
22
“and this is the complete dependence of the grand vicar and the seminary
priests on the Jesuits, for they never do the least thing without their
order: so that they (the Jesuits) are masters in spiritual matters,
which, as you know, is a powerful lever for moving every thing else.”
[5]
And he complains that they
have spies in town and country, that they abuse the confessional,
intermeddle in families, set husbands against wives, and parents
against children, and all, as they say, for the greater glory of God.
“I call to mind every day, Monseigneur, what you did me the honor to
say to me when I took leave of you, and every day I am satisfied more
and more of the great importance to the king’s service of opposing the
slightest of the attempts which are daily made against his authority.”
He goes on to denounce a certain sermon, preached by a Jesuit, to the
great scandal of loyal subjects, wherein the father declared that the
king had exceeded his powers in licensing the trade in brandy when the
bishop had decided it to be a sin, together with other remarks of a
seditious nature. “I was tempted several times,” pursues Frontenac,
“to leave the church with my guards and interrupt the sermon; but I
contented myself with telling the grand vicar and the superior of the
Jesuits, after it was over, that I was very much surprised at what I
had heard, and demanded justice at their hands. They greatly blamed
the preacher, and disavowed him, attributing his language, after their
custom, to an excess of zeal, and
23
making many apologies, with which I
pretended to be satisfied; though I told them, nevertheless, that
their excuses would not pass current with me another time, and, if the
thing happened again, I would put the preacher in a place where he
would learn how to speak. Since then they have been a little more
careful, though not enough to prevent one from always seeing their
intention to persuade the people that, even in secular matters, their
authority ought to be respected above any other. As there are many
persons here who have no more brains than they need, and who are
attached to them by ties of interest or otherwise, it is necessary to
have an eye to these matters in this country more than anywhere else.”
[6]

The churchmen, on their part, were not idle. The bishop, who was then
in France, contrived by some means to acquaint himself with the
contents of the private despatches sent by Colbert in reply to the
letters of Frontenac. He wrote to another ecclesiastic to communicate
what he had learned, at the same time enjoining great caution; “since,
while it is well to acquire all necessary information, and to act upon
it, it is of the greatest importance to keep secret our possession of
such knowledge.” [7]

The king and the minister, in their instructions to Frontenac, had
dwelt with great emphasis on
24
the expediency of civilizing the Indians,
teaching them the French language, and amalgamating them with the
colonists. Frontenac, ignorant as yet of Indian nature and
unacquainted with the difficulties of the case, entered into these
views with great heartiness. He exercised from the first an
extraordinary influence over all the Indians with whom he came in
contact; and he persuaded the most savage and refractory of them, the
Iroquois, to place eight of their children in his hands. Four of these
were girls and four were boys. He took two of the boys into his own
household, of which they must have proved most objectionable inmates;
and he supported the other two, who were younger, out of his own
slender resources, placed them in respectable French families, and
required them to go daily to school. The girls were given to the
charge of the Ursulines. Frontenac continually urged the Jesuits to
co-operate with him in this work of civilization, but the results of
his urgency disappointed and exasperated him. He complains that in the
village of the Hurons, near Quebec, and under the control of the
Jesuits, the French language was scarcely known. In fact, the fathers
contented themselves with teaching their converts the doctrines and
rites of the Roman Church, while retaining the food, dress, and habits
of their original barbarism.

In defence of the missionaries, it should be said that, when brought
in contact with the French, the Indians usually caught the vices of
civilization without its virtues; but Frontenac made no allowances.
25
“The Jesuits,” he writes, “will not civilize the Indians, because they
wish to keep them in perpetual wardship. They think more of beaver
skins than of souls, and their missions are pure mockeries.” At the
same time he assures the minister that, when he is obliged to correct
them, he does so with the utmost gentleness. In spite of this somewhat
doubtful urbanity, it seems clear that a storm was brewing; and it was
fortunate for the peace of the Canadian Church that the attention of
the truculent governor was drawn to other quarters.

Not
long before Frontenac’s arrival, Courcelle, his predecessor, went
to Lake Ontario with an armed force, in order to impose respect on the
Iroquois, who had of late become insolent. As a means of keeping them
in check, and at the same time controlling the fur trade of the upper
country, he had recommended, like Talon before him, the building of a
fort near the outlet of the lake. Frontenac at once saw the advantages
of such a measure, and his desire to execute it was stimulated by the
reflection that the proposed fort might be made not only a safeguard
to the colony, but also a source of profit to himself.

At Quebec, there was a grave, thoughtful, self-contained young man,
who soon found his way into Frontenac’s confidence. There was between
them the sympathetic attraction of two bold and
27
energetic spirits; and though Cavelier de la Salle had neither the
irritable vanity of the count, nor his Gallic vivacity of passion,
he had in full measure the same unconquerable pride and hardy
resolution. There were but two or three men in Canada who knew the
western wilderness so well. He was full of schemes of ambition and
of gain; and, from this moment, he and Frontenac seem to have formed
an alliance, which ended only with the governor’s recall.

In telling the story of La Salle, I have described the execution of
the new plan: the muster of the Canadians, at the call of Frontenac;
the consternation of those of the merchants whom he and La Salle had
not taken into their counsels, and who saw in the movement the
preparation for a gigantic fur trading monopoly; the intrigues set on
foot to bar the enterprise; the advance up the St. Lawrence; the
assembly of Iroquois at the destined spot; the ascendency exercised
over them by the governor; the building of Fort Frontenac on the
ground where Kingston now stands, and its final transfer into the
hands of La Salle, on condition, there can be no doubt, of sharing the
expected profits with his patron. [1]

On the way to the lake, Frontenac stopped for some time at Montreal,
where he had full opportunity to become acquainted with a state of
things to which his attention had already been directed. This state of
things was as follows:—

When the intendant, Talon, came for the second
28
time to Canada, in 1669, an officer named Perrot, who had married his
niece, came with him. Perrot, anxious to turn to account the influence
of his wife’s relative, looked about him for some post of honor and
profit, and quickly discovered that the government of Montreal was
vacant. The priests of St. Sulpice, feudal owners of the place, had
the right of appointing their own governor. Talon advised them to
choose Perrot, who thereupon received the desired commission, which,
however, was revocable at the will of those who had granted it. The
new governor, therefore, begged another commission from the king, and
after a little delay he obtained it. Thus he became, in some measure,
independent of the priests, who, if they wished to rid themselves of
him, must first gain the royal consent.

Perrot, as he had doubtless foreseen, found himself in an excellent
position for making money. The tribes of the upper lakes, and all the
neighboring regions, brought down their furs every summer to the
annual fair at Montreal. Perrot took his measures accordingly. On the
island which still bears his name, lying above Montreal and directly
in the route of the descending savages, he built a storehouse, and
placed it in charge of a retired lieutenant named Brucy, who stopped
the Indians on their way, and carried on an active trade with them, to
the great profit of himself and his associate, and the great loss of
the merchants in the settlements below. This was not all. Perrot
connived at the desertion of his own
29
soldiers, who escaped to the woods, became coureurs de bois, or
bush-rangers, traded with the Indians in their villages, and shared
their gains with their commander. Many others, too, of these forest
rovers, outlawed by royal edicts, found in the governor of Montreal a
protector, under similar conditions.

The journey from Quebec to Montreal often consumed a fortnight. Perrot
thought himself virtually independent; and relying on his commission
from the king, the protection of Talon, and his connection with other
persons of influence, he felt safe in his position, and began to play
the petty tyrant. The judge of Montreal, and several of the chief
inhabitants, came to offer a humble remonstrance against disorders
committed by some of the ruffians in his interest. Perrot received
them with a storm of vituperation, and presently sent the judge to
prison. This proceeding was followed by a series of others, closely
akin to it, so that the priests of St. Sulpice, who received their
full share of official abuse, began to repent bitterly of the governor
they had chosen.

Frontenac had received stringent orders from the king to arrest all
the bush-rangers, or coureurs de bois; but, since he had scarcely a
soldier at his disposal, except his own body-guard, the order was
difficult to execute. As, however, most of these outlaws were in the
service of his rival, Perrot, his zeal to capture them rose high
against every obstacle. He had, moreover, a plan of his own in regard
to them, and had already petitioned the
30
minister for a galley, to the benches of which the captive bush-rangers
were to be chained as rowers, thus supplying the representative of the
king with a means of transportation befitting his dignity, and at the
same time giving wholesome warning against the infraction of royal
edicts. [2] Accordingly, he sent
orders to the judge, at Montreal, to seize every coureur de bois
on whom he could lay hands.

The judge, hearing that two of the most notorious were lodged in the
house of a lieutenant named Carion, sent a constable to arrest them;
whereupon Carion threatened and maltreated the officer of justice, and
helped the men to escape. Perrot took the part of his lieutenant, and
told the judge that he would put him in prison, in spite of Frontenac,
if he ever dared to attempt such an arrest again.
[3]

When Frontenac heard what had happened, his ire was doubly kindled. On
the one hand, Perrot had violated the authority lodged by the king in
the person of his representative; and, on the other, the mutinous
official was a rival in trade, who had made great and illicit profits,
while his superior had, thus far, made none. As a governor and as a
man, Frontenac was deeply moved; yet, helpless as he was, he could do
no more than send three of his guardsmen, under a lieutenant named
Bizard, with orders to arrest Carion and bring him to Quebec.

The commission was delicate. The arrest was
31
to be made in the
dominions of Perrot, who had the means to prevent it, and the audacity
to use them. Bizard acted accordingly. He went to Carion’s house, and
took him prisoner; then proceeded to the house of the merchant Le Ber,
where he left a letter, in which Frontenac, as was the usage on such
occasions, gave notice to the local governor of the arrest he had
ordered. It was the object of Bizard to escape with his prisoner
before Perrot could receive the letter; but, meanwhile, the wife of
Carion ran to him with the news, and the governor suddenly arrived, in
a frenzy of rage, followed by a sergeant and three or four soldiers.
The sergeant held the point of his halberd against the breast of
Bizard, while Perrot, choking with passion, demanded, “How dare you
arrest an officer in my government without my leave?” The lieutenant
replied that he acted under orders of the governor-general, and gave
Frontenac’s letter to Perrot, who immediately threw it into his face,
exclaiming: “Take it back to your master, and tell him to teach you
your business better another time. Meanwhile you are my prisoner.”
Bizard protested in vain. He was led to jail, whither he was followed
a few days after by Le Ber, who had mortally offended Perrot by
signing an attestation of the scene he had witnessed. As he was the
chief merchant of the place, his arrest produced a great sensation,
while his wife presently took to her bed with a nervous fever.

As Perrot’s anger cooled, he became somewhat
32
alarmed. He had resisted
the royal authority, and insulted its representative. The consequences
might be serious; yet he could not bring himself to retrace his steps.
He merely released Bizard, and sullenly permitted him to depart, with
a letter to the governor-general, more impertinent than apologetic.
[4]

Frontenac, as his enemies declare, was accustomed, when enraged, to
foam at the mouth. Perhaps he did so when he learned the behavior of
Perrot. If he had had at command a few companies of soldiers, there
can be little doubt that he would have gone at once to Montreal,
seized the offender, and brought him back in irons; but his body-guard
of twenty men was not equal to such an enterprise. Nor would a muster
of the militia have served his purpose; for the settlers about Quebec
were chiefly peaceful peasants, while the denizens of Montreal were
disbanded soldiers, fur traders, and forest adventurers, the best
fighters in Canada. They were nearly all in the interest of Perrot,
who, if attacked, had the temper as well as the ability to make a
passionate resistance. Thus civil war would have ensued, and the anger
of the king would have fallen on both parties. On the other hand, if
Perrot were left unpunished, the coureurs de bois, of whom he was
the patron, would set no bounds to their audacity, and Frontenac, who
had been ordered to suppress them, would be condemned as negligent or
incapable.

Among the priests of St. Sulpice at Montreal
33
was the Abbé Salignac de Fénelon, half-brother of the
celebrated author of Télémaque. He was
a zealous missionary, enthusiastic and impulsive, still young, and
more ardent than discreet. One of his uncles had been the companion of
Frontenac during the Candian war, and hence the count’s relations with
the missionary had been very friendly. Frontenac now wrote to Perrot,
directing him to come to Quebec and give account of his conduct; and
he coupled this letter with another to Fénelon, urging him to
represent to the offending governor the danger of his position, and
advise him to seek an interview with his superior, by which the
difficulty might be amicably adjusted. Perrot, dreading the
displeasure of the king, soothed by the moderate tone of Frontenac’s
letter, and moved by the assurances of the enthusiastic abbé, who was
delighted to play the part of peace-maker, at length resolved to
follow his counsel. It was mid-winter. Perrot and Fénelon set out
together, walked on snow-shoes a hundred and eighty miles down the
frozen St. Lawrence, and made their appearance before the offended
count.

Frontenac, there can be little doubt, had never intended that Perrot,
once in his power, should return to Montreal as its governor; but
that, beyond this, he meant harm to him, there is not the least proof.
Perrot, however, was as choleric and stubborn as the count himself;
and his natural disposition had not been improved by several years of
petty autocracy at Montreal. Their interview was brief, but stormy.
When it ended, Perrot was a
34
prisoner in the château, with guards placed over him by day and
night. Frontenac made choice of one La Nouguère, a retired
officer, whom he knew that he could trust, and sent him to Montreal
to command in place of its captive governor. With him he sent also a
judge of his own selection. La Nouguère set himself to his work
with vigor. Perrot’s agent or partner, Brucy, was seized, tried, and
imprisoned; and an active hunt was begun for his coureurs de
bois. Among others, the two who had been the occasion of the
dispute were captured and sent to Quebec, where one of them was
solemnly hanged before the window of Perrot’s prison; with the view,
no doubt, of producing a chastening effect on the mind of the
prisoner. The execution was fully authorized, a royal edict having
ordained that bush-ranging was an offence punishable with death.
[5] As the result of these
proceedings, Frontenac reported to the minister that only five
coureurs de bois remained at large; all the rest having returned to
the settlements and made their submission, so that farther hanging was
needless.

Thus the central power was vindicated, and Montreal brought down from
her attitude of partial independence. Other results also followed, if
we may believe the enemies of Frontenac, who declare that, by means of
the new commandant and other persons in his interest, the
governor-general possessed himself of a great part of the trade from
which he had ejected Perrot, and that
35
the coureurs de bois, whom he
hanged when breaking laws for his rival, found complete impunity when
breaking laws for him.

Meanwhile, there was a deep though subdued excitement among the
priests of St. Sulpice. The right of naming their own governor, which
they claimed as seigniors of Montreal, had been violated by the action
of Frontenac in placing La Nouguère in command without consulting
them. Perrot was a bad governor; but it was they who had chosen him,
and the recollection of his misdeeds did not reconcile them to a
successor arbitrarily imposed upon them. Both they and the colonists,
their vassals, were intensely jealous of Quebec; and, in their
indignation against Frontenac, they more than half forgave Perrot.
None among them all was so angry as the Abbé Fénelon.
He believed that he had been used to lure Perrot into a trap; and his
past attachment to the governor-general was turned into wrath. High
words had passed between them; and, when Fénelon returned to
Montreal, he vented his feelings in a sermon plainly levelled at
Frontenac. [6] So sharp and bitter
was it, that his brethren of St. Sulpice hastened to disclaim it; and
Dollier de Casson, their Superior, strongly reproved the preacher,
who protested in return that his words were not meant to apply to
Frontenac in particular, but only to bad rulers in general. His
offences, however, did not cease with the sermon; for he espoused
the cause of
36
Perrot with more than zeal, and went about among the colonists to
collect attestations in his favor. When these things were reported
to Frontenac, his ire was kindled, and he summoned Fénelon
before the council at Quebec to answer the charge of instigating
sedition.

Fénelon had a relative and friend in the person of the Abbé
d’Urfé, his copartner in the work of the missions. D’Urfé,
anxious to conjure down the rising storm, went to Quebec to seek an
interview with Frontenac; but, according to his own account, he was very
ill received, and threatened with a prison. On another occasion, the count
showed him a letter in which D’Urfé was charged with having used
abusive language concerning him. Warm words ensued, till Frontenac,
grasping his cane, led the abbé to the door and dismissed him,
berating him from the top of the stairs in tones so angry that the
sentinel below spread the report that he had turned his visitor out of
doors. [7]

Two offenders were now arraigned before the council of Quebec: the
first was Perrot, charged with disobeying the royal edicts and
resisting the royal authority; the other was the Abbé
Fénelon. The councillors were at this time united in the
interest of Frontenac, who had the power of appointing and removing
them. Perrot, in no way softened by a long captivity, challenged the
governor-general, who presided at the council board, as a party to
the suit and his personal enemy, and
37
took exception to several of the members as being connections of La
Nouguère. Frontenac withdrew, and other councillors or judges
were appointed provisionally; but these were challenged in turn by
the prisoner, on one pretext or another. The exceptions were
overruled, and the trial proceeded, though not without signs of
doubt and hesitation on the part of some of the councillors.
[8]

Meanwhile, other sessions were held for the trial of Fénelon; and a
curious scene ensued. Five councillors and the deputy attorney-general
were seated at the board, with Frontenac as presiding judge, his hat
on his head and his sword at his side, after the established custom.
Fénelon, being led in, approached a vacant chair, and was about to
seat himself with the rest, when Frontenac interposed, telling him
that it was his duty to remain standing while answering the questions
of the council. Fénelon at once placed himself in the chair, and
replied that priests had the right to speak seated and with heads
covered.

“Yes,” returned Frontenac, “when they are summoned as witnesses, but
not when they are cited to answer charges of crime.”

“My crimes exist nowhere but in your head,” replied the abbé. And,
putting on his hat, he drew it down over his brows, rose, gathered his
cassock about him, and walked in a defiant manner
38
to and fro. Frontenac told him that his conduct was wanting in respect
to the council, and to the governor as its head. Fénelon several
times took off his hat, and pushed it on again more angrily than ever,
saying at the same time that Frontenac was wanting in respect to his
character of priest, in citing him before a civil tribunal. As he
persisted in his refusal to take the required attitude, he was at length
told that he might leave the room. After being kept for a time in the
anteroom in charge of a constable, he was again brought before the
council, when he still refused obedience, and was ordered into a sort of
honorable imprisonment. [9]

This behavior of the effervescent abbé, which Frontenac justly enough
characterizes as unworthy of his birth and his sacred office, was,
nevertheless, founded on a claim sustained by many precedents. As an
ecclesiastic, Fénelon insisted that the bishop alone, and not the
council, had the right to judge him. Like Perrot, too, he challenged
his judges as parties to the suit, or otherwise interested against
him. On the question of jurisdiction, he had all the priests on his
side. Bishop Laval was in France; and Bernières, his grand vicar, was
far from filling the place of the strenuous and determined prelate.
Yet the ecclesiastical storm rose so high that the councillors,
discouraged and daunted, were no longer amenable to the will of
Frontenac; and it was resolved at last to refer the whole matter to
39
the king. Perrot was taken from the prison, which he had occupied from
January to November, and shipped for France, along with Fénelon. An
immense mass of papers was sent with them for the instruction of the
king; and Frontenac wrote a long despatch, in which he sets forth the
offences of Perrot and Fénelon, the pretensions of the ecclesiastics,
the calumnies he had incurred in his efforts to serve his Majesty, and
the insults heaped upon him, “which no man but me would have endured
so patiently.” Indeed, while the suits were pending before the
council, he had displayed a calmness and moderation which surprised
his opponents. “Knowing as I do,” he pursues, “the cabals and
intrigues that are rife here, I must expect that every thing will be
said against me that the most artful slander can devise. A governor in
this country would greatly deserve pity, if he were left without
support; and, even should he make mistakes, it would surely be very
pardonable, seeing that there is no snare that is not spread for him,
and that, after avoiding a hundred of them, he will hardly escape
being caught at last.” [10]

In his charges of cabal and intrigue, Frontenac had chiefly in view
the clergy, whom he profoundly distrusted, excepting always the
Récollet friars, whom he befriended because the bishop and the Jesuits
opposed them. The priests on their part declare that he persecuted
them, compelled
40
them to take passports like laymen when travelling about the colony,
and even intercepted their letters. These accusations and many others
were carried to the king and the minister by the Abbé
d’Urfé, who sailed in the same ship with Fénelon. The
moment was singularly auspicious to him. His cousin, the Marquise
d’Allègre, was on the point of marrying Seignelay, the son of
the minister Colbert, who, therefore, was naturally inclined to listen
with favor to him and to Fénelon, his relative. Again, Talon,
uncle of Perrot’s wife, held a post at court, which brought him into close
personal relations with the king. Nor were these the only influences
adverse to Frontenac and propitious to his enemies. Yet his enemies
were disappointed. The letters written to him both by Colbert and by
the king are admirable for calmness and dignity. The following is from
that of the king:—

“Though I do not credit all that has been told me concerning various
little annoyances which you cause to the ecclesiastics, I nevertheless
think it necessary to inform you of it, in order that, if true, you
may correct yourself in this particular, giving to all the clergy
entire liberty to go and come throughout all Canada without compelling
them to take out passports, and at the same time leaving them perfect
freedom as regards their letters. I have seen and carefully examined
all that you have sent touching M. Perrot; and, after having also seen
all the papers given by him in his defence, I have condemned his
action in
41
imprisoning an officer of your guard. To punish him, I have
had him placed for a short time in the Bastile, that he may learn to
be more circumspect in the discharge of his duty, and that his example
may serve as a warning to others. But after having thus vindicated my
authority, which has been violated in your person, I will say, in
order that you may fully understand my views, that you should not
without absolute necessity cause your commands to be executed within
the limits of a local government, like that of Montreal, without first
informing its governor, and also that the ten months of imprisonment
which you have made him undergo seems to me sufficient for his fault.
I therefore sent him to the Bastile merely as a public reparation for
having violated my authority. After keeping him there a few days, I
shall send him back to his government, ordering him first to see you
and make apology to you for all that has passed; after which I desire
that you retain no resentment against him, and that you treat him in
accordance with the powers that I have given him.”
[11]

Colbert writes in terms equally measured, and adds: “After having
spoken in the name of his Majesty, pray let me add a word in my own.
By the marriage which the king has been pleased to make between the
heiress of the house of Allègre and my son, the Abbé
d’Urfé has become very closely connected with me, since he is
cousin german of my daughter-in-law; and this induces me
42
to request you to show him especial consideration, though, in the
exercise of his profession, he will rarely have occasion to see you.”

As D’Urfé had lately addressed a memorial to Colbert, in which the
conduct of Frontenac is painted in the darkest colors, the almost
imperceptible rebuke couched in the above lines does no little credit
to the tact and moderation of the stern minister.

Colbert next begs Frontenac to treat with kindness the priests of
Montreal, observing that Bretonvilliers, their Superior at Paris, is
his particular friend. “As to M. Perrot,” he continues, “since ten
months of imprisonment at Quebec and three weeks in the Bastile may
suffice to atone for his fault, and since also he is related or
connected with persons for whom I have a great regard, I pray you to
accept kindly the apologies which he will make you, and, as it is not
at all likely that he will fall again into any offence approaching
that which he has committed, you will give me especial pleasure in
granting him the honor of your favor and friendship.”
[12]

Fénelon, though the recent marriage had allied him also to Colbert,
fared worse than either of the other parties to the dispute. He was
indeed sustained in his claim to be judged by an ecclesiastical
tribunal; but his Superior, Bretonvilliers, forbade him to return to
Canada, and the king approved the prohibition. Bretonvilliers wrote to
the Sulpitian priests of Montreal: “I exhort you to profit
43
by the example of M. de Fénelon. By having busied himself too
much in worldly matters, and meddled with what did not concern him,
he has ruined his own prospects and injured the friends whom he wished
to serve. In matters of this sort, it is well always to stand neutral.”
[13]

While
writing to Frontenac in terms of studied mildness, the king and
Colbert took measures to curb his power. In the absence of the bishop,
the appointment and removal of councillors had rested wholly with the
governor; and hence the council had been docile under his will. It was
now ordained that the councillors should be appointed by the king
himself. [1] This was not the only
change. Since the departure of the intendant Talon, his office had been
vacant; and Frontenac was left to rule alone. This seems to have been an
experiment on the part of his masters at Versailles, who, knowing the
peculiarities of his temper, were perhaps willing to try the effect of
leaving him without a colleague. The experiment had not
45
succeeded. An intendant was now, therefore, sent to Quebec, not only
to manage the details of administration, but also to watch the
governor, keep him, if possible, within prescribed bounds, and report
his proceedings to the minister. The change was far from welcome to
Frontenac, whose delight it was to hold all the reins of power in his
own hands; nor was he better pleased with the return of Bishop Laval,
which presently took place. Three preceding governors had quarrelled
with that uncompromising prelate; and there was little hope that
Frontenac and he would keep the peace. All the signs of the sky
foreboded storm.

The storm soon came. The occasion of it was that old vexed question of
the sale of brandy, which has been fully treated in another volume,
[2]
and on which it is needless to dwell here. Another dispute
quickly followed; and here, too, the governor’s chief adversaries
were the bishop and the ecclesiastics. Duchesneau, the new intendant,
took part with them. The bishop and his
clergy were, on their side, very glad of a secular ally; for their
power had greatly fallen since the days of Mézy, and the rank and
imperious character of Frontenac appear to have held them in some awe.
They avoided as far as they could a direct collision with him, and
waged vicarious war in the person of their friend the intendant.
Duchesneau was not of a conciliating spirit, and he felt strong in the
support of the clergy; while Frontenac, when his temper was roused,
would fight with haughty and
46
impracticable obstinacy for any position
which he had once assumed, however trivial or however mistaken. There
was incessant friction between the two colleagues in the exercise of
their respective functions, and occasions of difference were rarely
wanting.

The question now at issue was that of honors and precedence at church
and in religious ceremonies, matters of substantial importance under
the Bourbon rule. Colbert interposed, ordered Duchesneau to treat
Frontenac with becoming deference, and warned him not to make himself
the partisan of the bishop; [3] while,
at the same time, he exhorted Frontenac to live in harmony with the
intendant.
[4] The dispute
continued till the king lost patience.

“Through all my kingdom,” he wrote to the governor, “I do not hear of
so many difficulties on this matter (of ecclesiastical honors) as I
see in the church of Quebec.” [5]
And he directs him to conform to the practice established in the city
of Amiens, and to exact no more; “since you ought to be satisfied with
being the representative of my person in the country where I have placed
you in command.”

At the same time, Colbert corrects the intendant. “A memorial,” he
wrote, “has been placed in my hands, touching various ecclesiastical
honors, wherein there continually appears a great pretension
47
on your part, and on that of the bishop of Quebec in your favor, to
establish an equality between the governor and you. I think I have
already said enough to lead you to know yourself, and to understand
the difference between a governor and an intendant; so that it is no
longer necessary for me to enter into particulars, which could only
serve to show you that you are completely in the wrong.”
[6]

Scarcely was this quarrel suppressed, when another sprang up. Since
the arrival of the intendant and the return of the bishop, the council
had ceased to be in the interest of Frontenac. Several of its members
were very obnoxious to him; and chief among these was Villeray, a
former councillor whom the king had lately reinstated. Frontenac
admitted him to his seat with reluctance. “I obey your orders,” he
wrote mournfully to Colbert; “but Villeray is the principal and most
dangerous instrument of the bishop and the Jesuits.”
[7] He says, farther, that many
people think him to be a Jesuit in disguise, and that he is an
intriguing busybody, who makes trouble everywhere. He also denounces
the attorney-general, Auteuil, as an ally of the Jesuits. Another of
the reconstructed council, Tilly, meets his cordial approval; but he
soon found reason to change his mind concerning him.

The king had recently ordered that the intendant, though holding only
the third rank in the
48
council, should act as its president.
[8] The commission of Duchesneau,
however, empowered him to preside only in the absence of the governor;
[9] while Frontenac is styled
“chief and president of the council” in several of the despatches
addressed to him. Here was an inconsistency. Both
parties claimed the right of presiding, and both could rest their
claim on a clear expression of the royal will.

Frontenac rarely began a new quarrel till the autumn vessels had
sailed for France; because a full year must then elapse before his
adversaries could send their complaints to the king, and six months
more before the king could send back his answer. The governor had been
heard to say, on one of these occasions, that he should now be master
for eighteen months, subject only to answering with his head for what
he might do. It was when the last vessel was gone in the autumn of
1678 that he demanded to be styled chief and president on the
records of the council; and he showed a letter from the king in which
he was so entitled. [10]
In spite of this, Duchesneau resisted, and appealed to precedent to
sustain his position. A long series of stormy sessions followed. The
councillors in the clerical interest supported the intendant. Frontenac,
chafed and angry, refused all compromise. Business was stopped for weeks.
49
Duchesneau lost temper, and became abusive. Auteuil tried to interpose
in behalf of the intendant. Frontenac struck the table with his fist,
and told him fiercely that he would teach him his duty. Every day
embittered the strife. The governor made the declaration usual with
him on such occasions, that he would not permit the royal authority to
suffer in his person. At length he banished from Quebec his three most
strenuous opponents, Villeray, Tilly, and Auteuil, and commanded them
to remain in their country houses till they received his farther
orders. All attempts at compromise proved fruitless; and Auteuil, in
behalf of the exiles, appealed piteously to the king.

The answer came in the following summer: “Monsieur le Comte de
Frontenac,” wrote Louis XIV., “I am surprised to learn all the new
troubles and dissensions that have occurred in my country of New
France, more especially since I have clearly and strongly given you to
understand that your sole care should be to maintain harmony and peace
among all my subjects dwelling therein; but what surprises me still
more is that in nearly all the disputes which you have caused you
have advanced claims which have very little foundation. My edicts,
declarations, and ordinances had so plainly made known to you my will,
that I have great cause of astonishment that you, whose duty it is to
see them faithfully executed, have yourself set up pretensions
entirely opposed to them. You have wished to be styled chief and
president on the records of the Supreme Council, which is contrary
50
to my edict concerning that council; and I am the more surprised at
this demand, since I am very sure that you are the only man in my
kingdom who, being honored with the title of governor and
lieutenant-general, would care to be styled chief and president of
such a council as that of Quebec.”

He then declares that neither Frontenac nor the intendant is to have
the title of president, but that the intendant is to perform the
functions of presiding officer, as determined by the edict. He
continues:—

“Moreover, your abuse of the authority which I have confided to you in
exiling two councillors and the attorney-general for so trivial a
cause cannot meet my approval; and, were it not for the distinct
assurances given me by your friends that you will act with more
moderation in future, and never again fall into offences of this
nature, I should have resolved on recalling you.”
[11]

Colbert wrote to him with equal severity: “I have communicated to the
king the contents of all the despatches which you have written to me
during the past year; and as the matters of which they treat are
sufficiently ample, including dissensions almost universal among those
whose duty it is to preserve harmony in the country under your
command, his Majesty has been pleased to examine all the papers sent
by all the parties interested,
51
and more particularly those appended to your letters. He has thereupon
ordered me distinctly to make known to you his intentions.” The minister
then proceeds to reprove him sharply in the name of the king, and concludes:
“It is difficult for me to add any thing to what I have just said. Consider
well that, if it is any advantage or any satisfaction to you that his
Majesty should be satisfied with your services, it is necessary that you
change entirely the conduct which you have hitherto pursued.”
[12]

This, one would think, might have sufficed to bring the governor to
reason, but the violence of his resentments and antipathies overcame
the very slender share of prudence with which nature had endowed him.
One morning, as he sat at the head of the council board, the bishop on
his right hand, and the intendant on his left, a woman made her
appearance with a sealed packet of papers. She was the wife of the
councillor Amours, whose chair was vacant at the table. Important
business was in hand, the registration of a royal edict of amnesty to
the coureurs de bois. The intendant, who well knew what the packet
contained, demanded that it should be opened. Frontenac insisted that
the business before the council should
52
proceed. The intendant renewed his demand, the council sustained him,
and the packet was opened accordingly. It contained a petition from
Amours, stating that Frontenac had put him in prison, because, having
obtained in due form a passport to send a canoe to his fishing station
of Matane, he had afterwards sent a sail-boat thither without applying
for another passport. Frontenac had sent for him, and demanded by what
right he did so. Amours replied that he believed that he had acted in
accordance with the intentions of the king; whereupon, to borrow the
words of the petition, “Monsieur the governor fell into a rage, and
said to your petitioner, ‘I will teach you the intentions of the king,
and you shall stay in prison till you learn them;’ and your petitioner
was shut up in a chamber of the château, wherein he still remains.”
He proceeds to pray that a trial may be granted him according to law.
[13]

Discussions now ensued which lasted for days, and now and then became
tempestuous. The governor, who had declared that the council had
nothing to do with the matter, and that he could not waste time in
talking about it, was not always present at the meetings, and it
sometimes became necessary to depute one or more of the members to
visit him. Auteuil, the attorney-general, having been employed on this
unenviable errand, begged the council to dispense him from such duty
in future, “by reason,” as he says, “of the abuse, ill treatment, and
threats which he received from
53
Monsieur the governor, when he last had the honor of being deputed to
confer with him, the particulars whereof he begs to be excused from
reporting, lest the anger of Monsieur the governor should be kindled
against him still more.” [14]
Frontenac, hearing of this charge, angrily denied it, saying that the
attorney-general had slandered and insulted him, and that it was his
custom to do so. Auteuil rejoined that the governor had accused him
of habitual lying, and told him that he would have his hand cut off.
All these charges and countercharges may still be found entered in due
form on the old records of the council at Quebec.

It was as usual upon the intendant that the wrath of Frontenac fell
most fiercely. He accuses him of creating cabals and intrigues, and
causing not only the council, but all the country, to forget the
respect due to the representative of his Majesty. Once, when Frontenac
was present at the session, a dispute arose about an entry on the
record. A draft of it had been made in terms agreeable to the
governor, who insisted that the intendant should sign it. Duchesneau
replied that he and the clerk would go into the adjoining room, where
they could examine it in peace, and put it into a proper form.
Frontenac rejoined that he would then have no security that what he
had said in the council would be accurately reported. Duchesneau
persisted, and was going out with the draft in his hand, when
Frontenac planted himself before the door, and
54
told him that he should not leave the council chamber till he had signed
the paper. “Then I will get out of the window, or else stay here all day,”
returned Duchesneau. A lively debate ensued, and the governor at length
yielded the point. [15]

The imprisonment of Amours was short, but strife did not cease. The
disputes in the council were accompanied throughout with other
quarrels which were complicated with them, and which were worse than
all the rest, since they involved more important matters and covered a
wider field. They related to the fur trade, on which hung the very
life of the colony. Merchants, traders, and even habitants, were
ranged in two contending factions. Of one of these Frontenac was the
chief. With him were La Salle and his lieutenant, La Forêt; Du Lhut,
the famous leader of coureurs de bois; Boisseau, agent of the
farmers of the revenue; Barrois, the governor’s secretary; Bizard,
lieutenant of his guard; and various others of greater or less
influence. On the other side were the members of the council, with
Aubert de la Chesnaye, Le Moyne and all his sons, Louis Joliet,
Jacques Le Ber, Sorel, Boucher, Varennes, and many more, all supported
by the intendant Duchesneau, and also by his fast allies, the
ecclesiastics. The faction under the lead of the governor had every
advantage, for it was sustained by all the power of his office.
Duchesneau was beside himself with rage. He wrote to the court letters
full of bitterness, accused Frontenac of illicit trade,
55
denounced his followers, and sent huge bundles of procès-verbaux
and attestations to prove his charges.

But if Duchesneau wrote letters, so too did Frontenac; and if the
intendant sent proofs, so too did the governor. Upon the unfortunate
king and the still more unfortunate minister fell the difficult task
of composing the quarrels of their servants, three thousand miles
away. They treated Duchesneau without ceremony. Colbert wrote to him:
“I have examined all the letters, papers, and memorials that you sent
me by the return of the vessels last November, and, though it appears
by the letters of M. de Frontenac that his conduct leaves something to
be desired, there is assuredly far more to blame in yours than in his.
As to what you say concerning his violence, his trade with the
Indians, and in general all that you allege against him, the king has
written to him his intentions; but since, in the midst of all your
complaints, you say many things which are without foundation, or which
are no concern of yours, it is difficult to believe that you act in
the spirit which the service of the king demands; that is to say,
without interest and without passion. If a change does not appear in
your conduct before next year, his Majesty will not keep you in your
office.” [16]

At the same time, the king wrote to Frontenac, alluding to the
complaints of Duchesneau, and exhorting the governor to live on good
terms with
56
him. The general tone of the letter is moderate, but the
following significant warning occurs in it: “Although no gentleman in
the position in which I have placed you ought to take part in any
trade, directly or indirectly, either by himself or any of his
servants, I nevertheless now prohibit you absolutely from doing so.
Not only abstain from trade, but act in such a manner that nobody can
even suspect you of it; and this will be easy, since the truth will
readily come to light.” [17]

Exhortation and warning were vain alike. The first ships which
returned that year from Canada brought a series of despatches from the
intendant, renewing all his charges more bitterly than before. The
minister, out of patience, replied by berating him without mercy. “You
may rest assured,” he concludes, “that, did it not appear by your
later despatches that the letters you have received have begun to make
you understand that you have forgotten yourself, it would not have
been possible to prevent the king from recalling you.”
[18]

Duchesneau, in return, protests all manner of deference to the governor,
but still insists that he sets the royal edicts at naught; protects a
host of coureurs de bois who are in league with him; corresponds
with Du Lhut, their chief; shares his illegal profits, and causes all
the disorders which afflict the colony. “As for me, Monseigneur, I have
done every thing within the scope of my office to prevent these evils;
but all the pains I have taken
57
have only served to increase the aversion of
Monsieur the governor against me, and to bring my ordinances into
contempt. This, Monseigneur, is a true account of the disobedience of
the coureurs de bois, of which I twice had the honor to speak to
Monsieur the governor; and I could not help telling him, with all
possible deference, that it was shameful to the colony and to us that
the king, our master, of whom the whole world stands in awe, who has
just given law to all Europe, and whom all his subjects adore, should
have the pain of knowing that, in a country which has received so many
marks of his paternal tenderness, his orders are violated and scorned;
and a governor and an intendant stand by, with folded arms, content
with saying that the evil is past remedy. For having made these
representations to him, I drew on myself words so full of contempt and
insult that I was forced to leave his room to appease his anger. The
next morning I went to him again, and did all I could to have my
ordinances executed; but, as Monsieur the governor is interested with
many of the coureurs de bois, it is useless to attempt to do any
thing. He has gradually made himself master of the trade of Montreal;
and, as soon as the Indians arrive, he sets guards in their camp,
which would be very well, if these soldiers did their duty and
protected the savages from being annoyed and plundered by the French,
instead of being employed to discover how many furs they have brought,
with a view to future operations. Monsieur the governor then compels
58
the Indians to pay his guards for protecting them; and he has never
allowed them to trade with the inhabitants till they had first given
him a certain number of packs of beaver skins, which he calls his
presents. His guards trade with them openly at the fair, with their
bandoleers on their shoulders.”

He says, farther, that Frontenac sends up goods to Montreal, and
employs persons to trade in his behalf; and that, what with the beaver
skins exacted by him and his guards under the name of presents, and
those which he and his favorites obtain in trade, only the smaller
part of what the Indians bring to market ever reaches the people of
the colony. [19]

This despatch, and the proofs accompanying it, drew from the king a
sharp reproof to Frontenac.

“What has passed in regard to the coureurs de bois is entirely
contrary to my orders; and I cannot receive in excuse for it your
allegation that it is the intendant who countenances them by the trade
he carries on, for I perceive clearly that the fault is your own. As I
see that you often turn the orders that I give you against the very
object for which they are given, beware not to do so on this occasion.
I shall hold you answerable for bringing the disorder of the coureurs
de bois to an end throughout Canada; and this you will easily succeed
in doing, if you make a proper use of my authority. Take care not to
persuade yourself that what I write to you comes from the ill
59
offices of the intendant. It results from what I fully know from every
thing which reaches me from Canada, proving but too well what you are
doing there. The bishop, the ecclesiastics, the Jesuit fathers, the
Supreme Council, and, in a word, everybody, complain of you; but I am
willing to believe that you will change your conduct, and act with the
moderation necessary for the good of the colony.”
[20]

Colbert wrote in a similar strain; and Frontenac saw that his position
was becoming critical. He showed, it is true, no sign of that change
of conduct which the king had demanded; but he appealed to his allies
at court to use fresh efforts to sustain him. Among the rest, he had a
strong friend in the Maréchal de Bellefonds, to whom he wrote, in the
character of an abused and much-suffering man: “You exhort me to have
patience, and I agree with you that those placed in a position of
command cannot have too much. For this reason, I have given examples
of it here such as perhaps no governor ever gave before; and I have
found no great difficulty in doing so, because I felt myself to be the
master. Had I been in a private station, I could not have endured such
outrageous insults without dishonor. I have always passed over in
silence those directed against me personally; and have never given way
to anger, except when attacks were made on the authority of which I
have the honor to be the guardian. You could not believe all the
annoyances
60
which the intendant tries to put upon me every day, and which, as you
advise me, I scorn or disregard. It would require a virtue like yours
to turn them to all the good use of which they are capable; yet, great
as the virtue is which has enabled you to possess your soul in
tranquillity amid all the troubles of the court, I doubt if you could
preserve such complete equanimity among the miserable tumults of
Canada.” [21]

Having given the principal charges of Duchesneau against Frontenac, it
is time to give those of Frontenac against Duchesneau. The governor
says that all the coureurs de bois would be brought to submission
but for the intendant and his allies, who protect them, and carry on
trade by their means; that the seigniorial house of Duchesneau’s
partner, La Chesnaye, is the constant resort of these outlaws; and
that he and his associates have large storehouses at Montreal, Isle
St. Paul, and Rivière du Loup, whence they send goods into the
Indian country, in contempt of the king’s orders.
[22] Frontenac also complains
of numberless provocations from the intendant. “It is no fault of mine
that I am not on good terms with M. Duchesneau; for I have done every
thing I could to that end, being too submissive to your Majesty’s
commands not to suppress my sharpest indignation the moment your will
is known to me. But, Sire, it is not so with him; and his desire to
excite new disputes, in the hope of making me appear their
61
principal author, has been so great that the last ships were hardly
gone, when, forgetting what your Majesty had enjoined upon us both,
he began these dissensions afresh, in spite of all my precautions.
If I depart from my usual reserve in regard to him, and make bold to
ask justice at the hands of your Majesty for the wrongs and insults
I have undergone, it is because nothing but your authority can keep
them within bounds. I have never suffered more in my life than when
I have been made to appear as a man of violence and a disturber of
the officers of justice: for I have always confined myself to what
your Majesty has prescribed; that is, to exhorting them to do their
duty when I saw that they failed in it. This has drawn upon me, both
from them and from M. Duchesneau, such cutting affronts that your
Majesty would hardly credit them.”
[23]

In 1681, Seignelay, the son of Colbert, entered upon the charge of the
colonies; and both Frontenac and Duchesneau hastened to congratulate
him, protest their devotion, and overwhelm him with mutual
accusations. The intendant declares that, out of pure zeal for the
king’s service, he shall tell him every thing. “Disorder,” he says,
“reigns everywhere; universal confusion prevails throughout every
department of business; the pleasure of the king, the orders of the
Supreme Council, and my ordinances remain unexecuted; justice is
openly violated, and trade is destroyed; violence, upheld by
authority, decides every thing;
62
and nothing consoles the people, who
groan without daring to complain, but the hope, Monseigneur, that you
will have the goodness to condescend to be moved by their misfortunes.
No position could be more distressing than mine, since, if I conceal
the truth from you, I fail in the obedience I owe the king, and in the
fidelity that I vowed so long since to Monseigneur, your father, and
which I swear anew at your hands; and if I obey, as I must, his
Majesty’s orders and yours, I cannot avoid giving offence, since I
cannot render you an account of these disorders without informing you
that M. de Frontenac’s conduct is the sole cause of them.”
[24]

Frontenac had written to Seignelay a few days before: “I have no doubt
whatever that M. Duchesneau will, as usual, overwhelm me with
fabrications and falsehoods, to cover his own ill conduct. I send
proofs to justify myself, so strong and convincing that I do not see
that they can leave any doubt; but, since I fear that their great
number might fatigue you, I have thought it better to send them to my
wife, with a full and exact journal of all that has passed here day by
day, in order that she may extract and lay before you the principal
portions.

“I send you in person merely the proofs of the conduct of M.
Duchesneau, in barricading his house and arming all his servants, and
in coming three weeks ago to insult me in my room. You will see
thereby to what a pitch of temerity and
63
lawlessness he has transported
himself, in order to compel me to use violence against him, with the
hope of justifying what he has asserted about my pretended outbreaks
of anger.” [25]

The mutual charges of the two functionaries were much the same; and,
so far at least as concerns trade, there can be little doubt that they
were well founded on both sides. The strife of the rival factions grew
more and more bitter: canes and sticks played an active part in it,
and now and then we hear of drawn swords. One is reminded at times of
the intestine feuds of some mediæval city, as, for example, in the
following incident, which will explain the charge of Frontenac against
the intendant of barricading his house and arming his servants:—

On the afternoon of the twentieth of March, a son of Duchesneau,
sixteen years old, followed by a servant named Vautier, was strolling
along the picket fence which bordered the descent from the Upper to
the Lower Town of Quebec. The boy was amusing himself by singing a
song, when Frontenac’s partisan, Boisseau, with one of the guardsmen,
approached, and, as young Duchesneau declares, called him foul names,
and said that he would give him and his father a thrashing. The boy
replied that he would have nothing to say to a fellow like him, and
would beat him if he did not keep quiet; while the servant, Vautier,
retorted Boisseau’s abuse, and taunted him with low birth and
disreputable employments. Boisseau made report to
64
Frontenac, and Frontenac complained to Duchesneau, who sent his son,
with Vautier, to give the governor his version of the affair. The bishop,
an ally of the intendant, thus relates what followed. On arriving with
a party of friends at the château, young Duchesneau was shown into
a room in which were the governor and his two secretaries, Barrois and
Chasseur. He had no sooner entered than Frontenac seized him by the arm,
shook him, struck him, called him abusive names, and tore the sleeve of
his jacket. The secretaries interposed, and, failing to quiet the
governor, opened the door and let the boy escape. Vautier, meanwhile,
had remained in the guard-room, where Boisseau struck at him with his
cane; and one of the guardsmen went for a halberd to run him through
the body. After this warm reception, young Duchesneau and his servant
took refuge in the house of his father. Frontenac demanded their
surrender. The intendant, fearing that he would take them by force,
for which he is said to have made preparation, barricaded himself and
armed his household. The bishop tried to mediate, and after protracted
negotiations young Duchesneau was given up, whereupon Frontenac locked
him in a chamber of the château, and kept him there a month.
[26]

The story of Frontenac’s violence to the boy is flatly denied by his
friends, who charge Duchesneau
65
and his partisans with circulating
libels against him, and who say, like Frontenac himself, that the
intendant used every means to exasperate him, in order to make
material for accusations. [27]

The disputes of the rival factions spread through all Canada. The most
heinous offence in the eyes of the court with which each charged the
other was the carrying of furs to the English settlements; thus
defrauding the revenue, and, as the king believed, preparing the ruin
of the colony. The intendant farther declared that the governor’s
party spread among the Indians the report of a pestilence at
Montreal, in order to deter them from their yearly visit to the fair,
and thus by means of coureurs de bois obtain all their beaver skins
at a low price. The report, according to Duchesneau, had no other
foundation than the fate of eighteen or twenty Indians, who had lately
drunk themselves to death at La Chine. [28]

Montreal, in the mean time, was the scene of a sort of by-play, in
which the chief actor was the local governor, Perrot. He and Frontenac
appear to have found it for their common interest to come to a mutual
understanding; and this was perhaps easier on the part of the count,
since his quarrel with Duchesneau gave sufficient employment to his
natural pugnacity. Perrot was now left to make a reasonable profit
from the illicit trade which had once kindled the wrath of his
superior;
66
and, the danger of Frontenac’s anger being removed, he
completely forgot the lessons of his imprisonment.

The intendant ordered Migeon, bailiff of Montreal, to arrest some of
Perrot’s coureurs de bois. Perrot at once arrested the bailiff, and
sent a sergeant and two soldiers to occupy his house, with orders to
annoy the family as much as possible. One of them, accordingly, walked
to and fro all night in the bed-chamber of Migeon’s wife. On another
occasion, the bailiff invited two friends to supper: Le Moyne
d’Iberville and one Bouthier, agent of a commercial house at Rochelle.
The conversation turned on the trade carried on by Perrot. It was
overheard and reported to him, upon which he suddenly appeared at the
window, struck Bouthier over the head with his cane, then drew his
sword, and chased him while he fled for his life. The seminary was
near at hand, and the fugitive clambered over the wall. Dollier de
Casson dressed him in the hat and cassock of a priest, and in this
disguise he escaped. [29]
Perrot’s
avidity sometimes carried him to singular extremities. “He has been
seen,” says one of his accusers, “filling barrels of brandy with his
own hands, and mixing it with water to sell to the Indians. He
bartered with one of them his hat, sword, coat, ribbons, shoes, and
stockings, and boasted that he had made thirty pistoles by the
bargain, while the Indian walked about town equipped as governor.”
[30]

Every ship from Canada brought to the king fresh complaints of
Duchesneau against Frontenac, and of Frontenac against Duchesneau; and
the king replied with rebukes, exhortations, and threats to both. At
first he had shown a disposition to extenuate and excuse the faults of
Frontenac, but every year his letters grew sharper. In 1681 he wrote:
“Again I urge you to banish from your mind the difficulties which you
have yourself devised against the execution of my orders; to act with
mildness and moderation towards all the colonists, and divest yourself
entirely of the personal animosities which have thus far been almost
your sole motive of action. In conclusion, I exhort you once more to
profit well by the directions which this letter contains; since,
unless you succeed better herein than formerly, I cannot help
recalling you from the command which I have intrusted to you.”
[31]

The dispute still went on. The autumn ships from Quebec brought back
the usual complaints, and the long-suffering king at length made good
his threat. Both Frontenac and Duchesneau received their recall, and
they both deserved it. [32]

The last official act of the governor, recorded in the register of the
council of Quebec, is the formal
68
declaration that his rank in that body is superior to that of the intendant.
[33]

The key to nearly all these
disputes lies in the relations between Frontenac and the Church. The
fundamental quarrel was generally covered by superficial issues, and
it was rarely that the governor fell out with anybody who was not in
league with the bishop and the Jesuits. “Nearly all the disorders in
New France,” he writes, “spring from the ambition of the
ecclesiastics, who want to join to their spiritual authority an
absolute power over things temporal, and who persecute all who do not
submit entirely to them.” He says that the intendant and the
councillors are completely under their control, and dare not decide
any question against them; that they have spies everywhere, even in
his house; that the bishop told him that he could excommunicate even a
governor, if he chose; that the missionaries in Indian villages say
that they are equals of Onontio, and tell their converts that all will
go wrong till the priests have the government of Canada; that directly
or indirectly they meddle in all civil affairs; that they trade even
with the English of New York; that, what with Jesuits, Sulpitians, the
bishop, and the seminary of Quebec, they hold two-thirds of the good
lands of Canada; that, in view of the poverty of the country, their
revenues are enormous; that, in short, their object is mastery, and
that they use all means to compass it.
[34]
The recall of the governor was a triumph
69
to the ecclesiastics, offset but slightly by the recall of their instrument,
the intendant, who had done his work, and whom they needed no longer.

Thus far, we have seen Frontenac on his worst side. We shall see him
again under an aspect very different. Nor must it be supposed that the
years which had passed since his government began, tempestuous as they
appear on the record, were wholly given over to quarrelling. They had
their periods of uneventful calm, when the wheels of administration
ran as smoothly as could be expected in view of the condition of the
colony. In one respect at least, Frontenac had shown a remarkable
fitness for his office. Few white men have ever equalled or approached
him in the art of dealing with Indians. There seems to have been a
sympathetic relation between him and them. He conformed to their ways,
borrowed their rhetoric, flattered them on occasion with great
address, and yet constantly maintained towards them an attitude of
paternal superiority. When they were concerned, his native haughtiness
always took a form which commanded respect without exciting anger. He
would not address them as brothers, but only as children;
and even the Iroquois, arrogant as they were, accepted the new relation.
In their eyes Frontenac was by far the greatest of all the “Onontios,” or
governors of Canada. They admired
70
the prompt and fiery soldier who played with their children, and gave
beads and trinkets to their wives; who read their secret thoughts and
never feared them, but smiled on them when their hearts were true, or
frowned and threatened them when they did amiss. The other tribes,
allies of the French, were of the same mind; and their respect for
their Great Father seems not to have been permanently impaired by his
occasional practice of bullying them for purposes of extortion.

Frontenac appears to have had
a liking not only for Indians, but also for that roving and lawless
class of the Canadian population, the coureurs de bois, provided
always that they were not in the service of his rivals. Indeed, as
regards the Canadians generally, he refrained from the strictures with
which succeeding governors and intendants freely interlarded their
despatches. It was not his instinct to clash with the humbler classes,
and he generally reserved his anger for those who could retort it.

He had the air of distinction natural to a man familiar all his life
with the society of courts, and he was as gracious and winning on some
occasions as he was unbearable on others. When in good humor, his
ready wit and a certain sympathetic vivacity made him very agreeable.
At times he was all sunshine, and his outrageous temper slumbered
peacefully till some new offence wakened it again; nor is there much
doubt that many of his worst outbreaks were the work of his enemies,
who knew his foible, and studied to exasperate him.
71
He was full of contradictions; and, intolerant and implacable as he
often was, there were intervals, even in his bitterest quarrels, in
which he displayed a surprising moderation and patience. By fits he
could be magnanimous. A woman once brought him a petition in burlesque
verse. Frontenac wrote a jocose answer. The woman, to ridicule him,
contrived to have both petition and answer slipped among the papers
of a suit pending before the council. Frontenac had her fined a few
francs, and then caused the money to be given to her children.
[35]

When he sailed for France, it was a day of rejoicing to more than half
the merchants of Canada, and, excepting the Récollets, to all the
priests; but he left behind him an impression, very general among the
people, that, if danger threatened the colony, Count Frontenac was the
man for the hour.

When
the new governor, La Barre, and the new intendant, Meules,
arrived at Quebec, a dismal greeting waited them. All the Lower Town
was in ashes, except the house of the merchant Aubert de la Chesnaye,
standing alone amid the wreck. On a Tuesday, the fourth of August, at
ten o’clock in the evening, the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu were roused
from their early slumbers by shouts, outcries, and the ringing of
bells; “and,” writes one of them, “what was our terror to find it as
light as noonday, the flames burned so fiercely and rose so high.”
Half an hour before, Chartier de Lotbinière, judge of the king’s
court, heard the first alarm, ran down the descent now called Mountain
Street, and found every thing in confusion in the town below. The
house of Etienne Planchon was in a blaze; the fire was spreading to
those of his
73
neighbors, and had just leaped the narrow street to the
storehouse of the Jesuits. The season was excessively dry; there were
no means of throwing water except kettles and buckets, and the crowd
was bewildered with excitement and fright. Men were ordered to tear
off roofs and pull down houses; but the flames drove them from their
work, and at four o’clock in the morning fifty-five buildings were
burnt to the ground. They were all of wood, but many of them were
storehouses filled with goods; and the property consumed was more in
value than all that remained in Canada.
[1]

Under these gloomy auspices, Le Febvre de la Barre began his reign. He
was an old officer who had achieved notable exploits against the
English in the West Indies, but who was now to be put to a test far
more severe. He made his lodging in the château; while his colleague,
Meules, could hardly find a shelter. The buildings of the Upper Town
were filled with those whom the fire had made roofless, and the
intendant was obliged to content himself with a house in the
neighboring woods. Here he was ill at ease, for he dreaded an Indian
war and the scalping-knives of the Iroquois.
[2]

So far as his own safety was concerned, his alarm was needless; but
not so as regarded the colony with whose affairs he was charged. For
those who had eyes to see it, a terror and a woe lowered in the future
of Canada. In an evil
74
hour for her, the Iroquois had conquered their southern neighbors,
the Andastes, who had long held their ground against them, and at
one time threatened them with ruin. The hands of the confederates
were now free; their arrogance was redoubled by victory, and, having
long before destroyed all the adjacent tribes on the north and west,
[3] they looked for fresh victims
in the wilderness beyond. Their most easterly tribe, the Mohawks,
had not forgotten the chastisement they had received from Tracy and
Courcelle. They had learned to fear the French, and were cautious
in offending them; but it was not so with the remoter Iroquois. Of
these, the Senecas at the western end of the “Long House,” as they
called their fivefold league, were by far the most powerful, for they
could muster as many warriors as all the four remaining tribes
together; and they now sought to draw the confederacy into a series
of wars, which, though not directed against the French, threatened
soon to involve them. Their first movement westward was against the
tribes of the Illinois. I have already described their bloody inroad
in the summer of 1680. [4]
They made the valley of the Illinois a desert, and returned
with several hundred prisoners, of whom they burned those that were
useless, and incorporated the young and strong into their own tribe.

This movement of the western Iroquois had a double incentive, their
love of fighting and their
75
love of gain. It was a war of conquest and
of trade. All the five tribes of the league had become dependent on
the English and Dutch of Albany for guns, powder, lead, brandy, and
many other things that they had learned to regard as necessities.
Beaver skins alone could buy them, but to the Iroquois the supply of
beaver skins was limited. The regions of the west and north-west, the
upper Mississippi with its tributaries, and, above all, the forests of
the upper lakes, were occupied by tribes in the interest of the
French, whose missionaries and explorers had been the first to visit
them, and whose traders controlled their immense annual product of
furs. La Salle, by his newly built fort of St. Louis, engrossed the
trade of the Illinois and Miami tribes; while the Hurons and Ottawas,
gathered about the old mission of Michillimackinac, acted as factors
for the Sioux, the Winnebagoes, and many other remote hordes. Every
summer they brought down their accumulated beaver skins to the fair at
Montreal; while French bush-rangers roving through the wilderness,
with or without licenses, collected many more.
[5]

It was the purpose of the Iroquois to master all this traffic, conquer
the tribes who had possession of it, and divert the entire supply of
furs to themselves, and through themselves to the English and Dutch.
That English and Dutch traders urged them on is affirmed by the
French, and is very likely. The accomplishment of the scheme would
76
have ruined Canada. Moreover, the Illinois, the Hurons, the Ottawas,
and all the other tribes threatened by the Iroquois, were the allies
and “children” of the French, who in honor as in interest were bound
to protect them. Hence, when the Seneca invasion of the Illinois
became known, there was deep anxiety in the colony, except only among
those in whom hatred of the monopolist La Salle had overborne every
consideration of the public good. La Salle’s new establishment of St.
Louis was in the path of the invaders; and, if he could be crushed,
there was wherewith to console his enemies for all else that might
ensue.

Bad as was the posture of affairs, it was made far worse by an
incident that took place soon after the invasion of the Illinois. A
Seneca chief engaged in it, who had left the main body of his
countrymen, was captured by a party of Winnebagoes to serve as a
hostage for some of their tribe whom the Senecas had lately seized.
They carried him to Michillimackinac, where there chanced to be a
number of Illinois, married to Indian women of that neighborhood. A
quarrel ensued between them and the Seneca, whom they stabbed to death
in a lodge of the Kiskakons, one of the tribes of the Ottawas. Here
was a casus belli likely to precipitate a war fatal to all the
tribes about Michillimackinac, and equally fatal to the trade of
Canada. Frontenac set himself to conjure the rising storm, and sent a
messenger to the Iroquois to invite them to a conference.

77
He found them unusually arrogant. Instead of coming to him, they
demanded that he should come to them, and many of the French wished
him to comply; but Frontenac refused, on the ground that such a
concession would add to their insolence, and he declined to go farther
than Montreal, or at the utmost Fort Frontenac, the usual place of
meeting with them. Early in August he was at Montreal, expecting the
arrival of the Ottawas and Hurons on their yearly descent from the
lakes. They soon appeared, and he called them to a solemn council.
Terror had seized them all. “Father, take pity on us,” said the Ottawa
orator, “for we are like dead men.” A Huron chief, named the Rat,
declared that the world was turned upside down, and implored the
protection of Onontio, “who is master of the whole earth.” These
tribes were far from harmony among themselves. Each was jealous of the
other, and the Ottawas charged the Hurons with trying to make favor
with the common enemy at their expense. Frontenac told them that they
were all his children alike, and advised them to live together as
brothers, and make treaties of alliance with all the tribes of the
lakes. At the same time, he urged them to make full atonement for the
death of the Seneca murdered in their country, and carefully to
refrain from any new offence.

Soon after there was another arrival. La Forêt, the officer in command
at Fort Frontenac, appeared, bringing with him a famous Iroquois chief
called Decanisora or Tegannisorens, attended by a number
78
of warriors.
They came to invite Frontenac to meet the deputies of the five tribes
at Oswego, within their own limits. Frontenac’s reply was
characteristic. “It is for the father to tell the children where to
hold council, not for the children to tell the father. Fort Frontenac
is the proper place, and you should thank me for going so far every
summer to meet you.” The Iroquois had expressed pacific intentions
towards the Hurons and Ottawas. For this Frontenac commended him, but
added: “The Illinois also are children of Onontio, and hence brethren
of the Iroquois. Therefore they, too, should be left in peace; for
Onontio wishes that all his family should live together in union.” He
confirmed his words with a huge belt of wampum. Then, addressing the
flattered deputy as a great chief, he desired him to use his influence
in behalf of peace, and gave him a jacket and a silk cravat, both
trimmed with gold, a hat, a scarlet ribbon, and a gun, with beads for
his wife, and red cloth for his daughter. The Iroquois went home
delighted. [6]

Perhaps on this occasion Frontenac was too confident of his influence
over the savage confederates. Such at least was the opinion of
Lamberville, Jesuit missionary at Onondaga, the Iroquois capital. From
what he daily saw around him, he thought the peril so imminent that
concession on the part of the French was absolutely necessary, since
not only the Illinois, but some of the tribes of the lakes, were in
danger of speedy and complete destruction.
79
“Tegannisorens loves the
French,” he wrote to Frontenac, “but neither he nor any other of the
upper Iroquois fear them in the least. They annihilate our allies,
whom by adoption of prisoners they convert into Iroquois; and they do
not hesitate to avow that after enriching themselves by our plunder,
and strengthening themselves by those who might have aided us, they
will pounce all at once upon Canada, and overwhelm it in a single
campaign.” He adds that within the past two years they have reinforced
themselves by more than nine hundred warriors, adopted into their
tribes. [7]

Such was the crisis when Frontenac left Canada at the moment when he
was needed most, and Le Febvre de la Barre came to supplant him. The
new governor introduces himself with a burst of rhodomontade. “The
Iroquois,” he writes to the king, “have twenty-six hundred warriors.
I will attack them with twelve hundred men. They know me before seeing
me, for they have been told by the English how roughly I handled them
in the West Indies.” This bold note closes rather tamely; for the
governor adds, “I think that if the Iroquois believe that your Majesty
would have the goodness to give me some help, they will make peace,
and let our allies alone, which would save the trouble and expense of
an arduous war.” [8] He
then begs hard for troops, and in fact there was great need of them,
for there were none in Canada;
80
and even Frontenac had been compelled
in the last year of his government to leave unpunished various acts of
violence and plunder committed by the Iroquois. La Barre painted the
situation in its blackest colors, declared that war was imminent, and
wrote to the minister, “We shall lose half our trade and all our
reputation, if we do not oppose these haughty conquerors.”
[9]

A vein of gasconade appears in most of his letters, not however
accompanied with any conclusive evidence of a real wish to fight. His
best fighting days were past, for he was sixty years old; nor had he
always been a man of the sword. His early life was spent in the law;
he had held a judicial post, and had been intendant of several French
provinces. Even the military and naval employments, in which he
afterwards acquitted himself with credit, were due to the part he took
in forming a joint-stock company for colonizing Cayenne.
[10]
In fact, he was but half a soldier; and it was perhaps for
this reason that he insisted on being called, not Monsieur le
Gouverneur, but Monsieur le Général. He was equal to Frontenac
neither in vigor nor in rank, but he far surpassed him in avidity.
Soon after his arrival, he wrote to the minister that he should not
follow the example of
81
his predecessors in making money out of his government by trade; and
in consideration of these good intentions he asked for an addition to
his pay. [11]
He then immediately made alliances with certain merchants of
Quebec for carrying on an extensive illicit trade, backed by all the
power of his office. Now ensued a strange and miserable complication.
Questions of war mingled with questions of personal gain. There was a
commercial revolution in the colony. The merchants whom Frontenac
excluded from his ring now had their turn. It was they who, jointly
with the intendant and the ecclesiastics, had procured the removal of
the old governor; and it was they who gained the ear of the new one.
Aubert de la Chesnaye, Jacques Le Ber, and the rest of their faction,
now basked in official favor; and La Salle, La Forêt, and the other
friends of Frontenac, were cast out. There was one exception.
Greysolon Du Lhut, leader of coureurs de bois, was too important to
be thus set aside. He was now as usual in the wilderness of the north,
the roving chief of a half savage crew, trading, exploring, fighting,
and laboring with persistent hardihood to foil the rival English
traders of Hudson’s Bay. Inducements to gain his adhesion were
probably held out to him by La Barre and his allies: be this as it
may, it is certain that he acted in harmony with the faction of the
new governor. With La Forêt it was widely different. He commanded Fort
Frontenac, which belonged to La Salle, when La Barre’s associates,
82
La Chesnaye and Le Ber, armed with an order from the governor, came up
from Montreal, and seized upon the place with all that it contained.
The pretext for this outrage was the false one that La Salle had not
fulfilled the conditions under which the fort had been granted to him.
La Forêt was told that he might retain his command, if he would join
the faction of La Barre; but he refused, stood true to his chief, and
soon after sailed for France.

La Barre summoned the most able and experienced persons in the colony
to discuss the state of affairs. Their conclusion was that the
Iroquois would attack and destroy the Illinois, and, this accomplished,
turn upon the tribes of the lakes, conquer or destroy them also, and
ruin the trade of Canada. [12]
Dark as was the prospect, La Barre and his fellow-speculators flattered
themselves that the war could be averted for a year at least. The Iroquois
owed their triumphs as much to their sagacity and craft as to their
extraordinary boldness and ferocity. It had always been their policy to
attack their enemies in detail, and while destroying one to cajole the
rest. There seemed little doubt that they would leave the tribes of the
lakes in peace till they had finished the ruin of the Illinois; so that
if these, the allies of the colony, were abandoned to their fate, there
would be time for a profitable trade in the direction of Michillimackinac.

83
But hopes seemed vain and prognostics illusory, when, early in spring,
a report came that the Seneca Iroquois were preparing to attack, in
force, not only the Illinois, but the Hurons and Ottawas of the lakes.
La Barre and his confederates were in dismay. They already had large
quantities of goods at Michillimackinac, the point immediately
threatened; and an officer was hastily despatched, with men and
munitions, to strengthen the defences of the place.
[13]
A small vessel was sent to France
with letters begging for troops. “I will perish at their head,” wrote
La Barre to the king, “or destroy your enemies;”
[14]
and he assures the minister that the Senecas
must be attacked or the country abandoned.
[15]
The intendant, Meules, shared something of
his alarm, and informed the king that “the Iroquois are the only
people on earth who do not know the grandeur of your Majesty.”
[16]

While thus appealing to the king, La Barre sent Charles le Moyne as
envoy to Onondaga. Through his influence, a deputation of forty-three
Iroquois chiefs was sent to meet the governor at Montreal. Here a
grand council was held in the newly built church. Presents were given
the deputies to the value of more than two thousand crowns. Soothing
speeches were made them; and they were urged not to attack the tribes
of the lakes, nor to plunder French traders, without permission.
[17]
84
They assented; and La Barre then asked, timidly, why they made war on
the Illinois. “Because they deserve to die,” haughtily returned the
Iroquois orator. La Barre dared not answer. They complained that La
Salle had given guns, powder, and lead to the Illinois; or, in other
words, that he had helped the allies of the colony to defend
themselves. La Barre, who hated La Salle and his monopolies, assured
them that he should be punished. [17]
It is affirmed, on good
authority, that he said more than this, and told them they were
welcome to plunder and kill him. [18]
The rapacious old man was playing with a two-edged sword.

Thus the Illinois, with the few Frenchmen who had tried to defend
them, were left to perish; and, in return, a brief and doubtful
respite was gained for the tribes of the lakes. La Barre and his
confederates took heart again. Merchandise, in abundance, was sent to
Michillimackinac, and thence to the remoter tribes of the north and
west. The governor and his partner, La Chesnaye, sent up a fleet of
thirty canoes; [20] and, a
85
little later, they are reported to have sent more than a hundred. This
forest trade robbed the colonists, by forestalling the annual market of
Montreal; while a considerable part of the furs acquired by it were
secretly sent to the English and Dutch of New York. Thus the heavy
duties of the custom-house at Quebec were evaded; and silver coin was
received in payment, instead of questionable bills of exchange.
[21]
Frontenac
had not been faithful to his trust; but, compared to his successor, he
was a model of official virtue.

La Barre busied himself with ostentatious preparation for war; built
vessels at Fort Frontenac, and sent up fleets of canoes, laden or
partly laden with munitions. But his accusers say that the king’s
canoes were used to transport the governor’s goods, and that the men
sent to garrison Fort Frontenac were destined, not to fight the
Iroquois, but to sell them brandy. “Last year,” writes the intendant,
“Monsieur de la Barre had a vessel built, for which he made his
Majesty pay heavily;” and he proceeds to say that it was built for
trade, and was used for no other purpose. “If,” he continues, “the two
(king’s) vessels now at Fort Frontenac had not been used for
trading, they would have saved us half the expense we have been forced
to incur in transporting munitions and supplies. The pretended
necessity of having vessels at this fort, and the consequent employing
86
of carpenters, and sending up of iron, cordage, sails, and many other
things, at his Majesty’s charge, was simply in the view of carrying on
trade.” He says, farther, that in May last, the vessels, canoes, and
men being nearly all absent on this errand, the fort was left in so
defenceless a state that a party of Senecas, returning from their
winter hunt, took from it a quantity of goods, and drank as much
brandy as they wanted. “In short,” he concludes, “it is plain that
Monsieur de la Barre uses this fort only as a depot for the trade of
Lake Ontario.” [22]

In the spring of 1683, La Barre had taken a step as rash as it was
lawless and unjust. He sent the Chevalier de Baugis, lieutenant of his
guard, with a considerable number of canoes and men, to seize La
Salle’s fort of St. Louis on the river Illinois; a measure which,
while gratifying the passions and the greed of himself and his allies,
would greatly increase he danger of rupture with the Iroquois. Late in
the season, he despatched seven canoes and fourteen men, with goods to
the value of fifteen or sixteen thousand livres, to trade with the
tribes of the Mississippi. As he had sown, so he reaped. The seven
canoes passed through the country of the Illinois. A large war party
of Senecas and Cayugas invaded it in February. La Barre had told their
chiefs that they were welcome to plunder the canoes of La Salle. The
Iroquois were not discriminating. They fell upon
87
the governor’s canoes, seized all the goods, and captured the men.
[23] Then they
attacked Baugis at Fort St. Louis. The place, perched on a rock, was
strong, and they were beaten off; but the act was one of open war.

When La Barre heard the news, he was furious.
[24] He trembled
for the vast amount of goods which he and his fellow-speculators had
sent to Michillimackinac and the lakes. There was but one resource: to
call out the militia, muster the Indian allies, advance to Lake
Ontario, and dictate peace to the Senecas, at the head of an imposing
force; or, failing in this, to attack and crush them. A small vessel
lying at Quebec was despatched to France, with urgent appeals for
immediate aid, though there was little hope that it could arrive in
time. She bore a long letter, half piteous, half bombastic, from La
Barre to the king. He declared that extreme necessity and the despair
of the people had forced him into war, and protested that he should
always think it a privilege to lay down life for his Majesty. “I
cannot refuse to your country of Canada, and your faithful subjects,
to throw myself, with unequal forces, against
88
the foe, while at the same time begging your aid for a poor, unhappy
people on the point of falling victims to a nation of barbarians.”
He says that the total number of men in Canada capable of bearing arms
is about two thousand; that he received last year a hundred and fifty
raw recruits; and that he wants, in addition, seven or eight hundred
good soldiers. “Recall me,” he concludes, “if you will not help me,
for I cannot bear to see the country perish in my hands.” At the same
time, he declares his intention to attack the Senecas, with or without
help, about the middle of August. [25]

Here we leave him, for a while, scared, excited, and blustering.

The
Dutch colony of New Netherland had now become the English colony
of New York. Its proprietor, the Duke of York, afterwards James II. of
England, had appointed Colonel Thomas Dongan its governor. He was a
Catholic Irish gentleman of high rank, nephew of the famous Earl of
Tyrconnel, and presumptive heir to the earldom of Limerick. He had
served in France, was familiar with its language, and partial to its
king and its nobility; but he nevertheless gave himself with vigor to
the duties of his new trust.

The Dutch and English colonists aimed at a share in the western fur
trade, hitherto a monopoly of Canada; and it is said that Dutch
traders had already ventured among the tribes of the Great Lakes,
boldly poaching on the French preserves.
90
Dongan did his utmost to promote their interests, so far at least as
was consistent with his instructions from the Duke of York, enjoining
him to give the French governor no just cause of offence.
[1]

For several years past, the Iroquois had made forays against the
borders of Maryland and Virginia, plundering and killing the settlers;
and a declared rupture between those colonies and the savage
confederates had more than once been imminent. The English believed
that these hostilities were instigated by the Jesuits in the Iroquois
villages. There is no proof whatever of the accusation; but it is
certain that it was the interest of Canada to provoke a war which
might, sooner or later, involve New York. In consequence of a renewal
of such attacks, Lord Howard of Effingham, governor of Virginia, came
to Albany in the summer of 1684, to hold a council with the Iroquois.

The Oneidas, Onondagas, and Cayugas were the offending tribes. They
all promised friendship for the future. A hole was dug in the
court-yard of the council house, each of the three threw a hatchet
into it, and Lord Howard and the representative of
91
Maryland added two others; then the hole was filled, the song of peace
was sung, and the high contracting parties stood pledged to mutual
accord. [2] The Mohawks were also
at the council, and the Senecas soon after arrived; so that all the
confederacy was present by its deputies. Not long before, La Barre,
then in the heat of his martial preparations, had sent a messenger to
Dongan with a letter, informing him that, as the Senecas and Cayugas
had plundered French canoes and assaulted a French fort, he was
compelled to attack them, and begging that the Dutch and English
colonists should be forbidden to supply them with arms.
[3] This letter produced two results,
neither of them agreeable to the writer: first, the Iroquois were
fully warned of the designs of the French; and, secondly, Dongan
gained the opportunity he wanted of asserting the claim of his king to
sovereignty over the confederacy, and possession of the whole country
south of the Great Lakes. He added that, if the Iroquois had done
wrong, he would require them, as British subjects, to make reparation;
and he urged La Barre, for the sake of peace between the two colonies,
to refrain from his intended invasion of British territory.
[4]

Dongan next laid before the assembled sachems the complaints made
against them in the letter of La Barre. They replied by accusing the
French of carrying arms to their enemies, the Illinois
92
and the Miamis. “Onontio,” said their orator, “calls us his children,
and then helps our enemies to knock us in the head.” They were somewhat
disturbed at the prospect of La Barre’s threatened attack; and Dongan
seized the occasion to draw from them an acknowledgment of subjection
to the Duke of York, promising in return that they should be protected
from the French. They did not hesitate. “We put ourselves,” said the
Iroquois speaker, “under the great sachem Charles, who lives over the Great
Lake, and under the protection of the great Duke of York, brother of
your great sachem.” But he added a moment after, “Let your friend
(King Charles) who lives over the Great Lake know that we are a free
people, though united to the English.” [5]
They consented that the arms of the Duke of York should be planted in their
villages, being told that this would prevent the French from
destroying them. Dongan now insisted that they should make no treaty
with Onontio without his consent; and he promised that, if their
country should be invaded, he would send four hundred horsemen and as
many foot soldiers to their aid.

As for the acknowledgment of subjection to the king and the Duke of
York, the Iroquois neither understood its full meaning nor meant to
abide by it. What they did clearly understand was that, while they
recognized Onontio, the governor of Canada, as their father, they
recognized Corlaer,
93
the governor of New York, only as their brother.
[6] Dongan, it seems,
could not, or dared not, change this mark of equality. He did his
best, however, to make good his claims, and sent Arnold Viele, a Dutch
interpreter, as his envoy to Onondaga. Viele set out for the Iroquois
capital, and thither we will follow him.

He mounted his horse, and in the heats of August rode westward along
the valley of the Mohawk. On a hill a bow-shot from the river, he saw
the first Mohawk town, Kaghnawaga, encircled by a strong palisade.
Next he stopped for a time at Gandagaro, on a meadow near the bank;
and next, at Canajora, on a plain two miles away. Tionondogué, the
last and strongest of these fortified villages, stood like the first
on a hill that overlooked the river, and all the rich meadows around
were covered with Indian corn. The largest of the four contained but
thirty houses, and all together could furnish scarcely more than three
hundred warriors. [7]

When the last Mohawk town was passed, a ride of four or five days
still lay before the envoy. He held his way along the old Indian
trail, now traced through the grass of sunny meadows, and now
tunnelled through the dense green of shady forests, till it led him to
the town of the Oneidas, containing
94
about a hundred bark houses, with twice as many fighting men, the
entire force of the tribe. Here, as in the four Mohawk villages, he
planted the scutcheon of the Duke of York, and, still advancing,
came at length to a vast open space where the rugged fields,
patched with growing corn, sloped upwards into a broad, low hill,
crowned with the clustered lodges of Onondaga. There were from one
to two hundred of these large bark dwellings, most of them holding
several families. The capital of the confederacy was not fortified
at this time, and its only defence was the valor of some four hundred
warriors. [8]

In this focus of trained and organized savagery, where ferocity was
cultivated as a virtue, and every emotion of pity stifled as unworthy
of a man; where ancient rites, customs, and traditions were held with
the tenacity of a people who joined the extreme of wildness with the
extreme of conservatism,—here burned the council fire of the five
confederate tribes; and here, in time of need, were gathered their
bravest and their wisest to debate high questions of policy and war.

The object of Viele was to confirm the Iroquois in their very
questionable attitude of subjection to the British crown, and persuade
them to make no treaty or agreement with the French, except through
the intervention of Dongan, or at least
95
with his consent. The envoy found two Frenchmen in the town, whose
presence boded ill to his errand. The first was the veteran colonist
of Montreal, Charles le Moyne, sent by La Barre to invite the Onondagas
to a conference. They had known him, in peace or war, for a quarter of
a century; and they greatly respected him. The other was the Jesuit
Jean de Lamberville, who had long lived among them, and knew them
better than they knew themselves. Here, too, was another personage who
cannot pass unnoticed. He was a famous Onondaga orator named
Otréouati, and called also Big Mouth, whether by reason of the
dimensions of that feature or the greatness of the wisdom that issued
from it. His contemporary, Baron La Hontan, thinking perhaps that his
French name of La Grande Gueule was wanting in dignity, Latinized it
into Grangula; and the Scotchman, Colden, afterwards improved it into
Garangula, under which high-sounding appellation Big Mouth has descended
to posterity. He was an astute old savage, well trained in the arts of
Iroquois rhetoric, and gifted with the power of strong and caustic
sarcasm, which has marked more than one of the chief orators of the
confederacy. He shared with most of his countrymen the conviction that
the earth had nothing so great as the league of the Iroquois; but, if
he could be proud and patriotic, so too he could be selfish and mean.
He valued gifts, attentions, and a good meal, and would pay for them
abundantly in promises, which he kept or not, as his own interests
96
or those of his people might require. He could use bold and loud words
in public, and then secretly make his peace with those he had denounced.
He was so given to rough jokes that the intendant, Meules, calls him a
buffoon; but his buffoonery seems to have been often a cover to his
craft. He had taken a prominent part in the council of the preceding
summer at Montreal; and, doubtless, as he stood in full dress before
the governor and the officers, his head plumed, his face painted, his
figure draped in a colored blanket, and his feet decked with
embroidered moccasins, he was a picturesque and striking object. He
was less so as he squatted almost naked by his lodge fire, with a
piece of board laid across his lap, chopping rank tobacco with a
scalping-knife to fill his pipe, and entertaining the grinning circle
with grotesque stories and obscene jests. Though not one of the
hereditary chiefs, his influence was great. “He has the strongest head
and the loudest voice among the Iroquois,” wrote Lamberville to La
Barre. “He calls himself your best friend…. He is a venal creature,
whom you do well to keep in pay. I assured him I would send him the
jerkin you promised.” [9]
Well as the Jesuit knew the Iroquois, he was
deceived if he thought that Big Mouth was securely won.

Lamberville’s constant effort was to prevent a rupture. He wrote with
every opportunity to the governor, painting the calamities that war
would
97
bring, and warning him that it was vain to hope that the league
could be divided, and its three eastern tribes kept neutral, while the
Senecas were attacked. He assured him, on the contrary, that they
would all unite to fall upon Canada, ravaging, burning, and butchering
along the whole range of defenceless settlements. “You cannot believe,
Monsieur, with what joy the Senecas learned that you might possibly
resolve on war. When they heard of the preparations at Fort Frontenac,
they said that the French had a great mind to be stripped, roasted,
and eaten; and that they will see if their flesh, which they suppose
to have a salt taste, by reason of the salt which we use with our
food, be as good as that of their other enemies.”
[10]
Lamberville also informs the governor that the Senecas have made
ready for any emergency, buried their last year’s corn, prepared a
hiding place in the depth of the forest for their old men, women, and
children, and stripped their towns of every thing that they value; and
that their fifteen hundred warriors will not shut themselves up in
forts, but fight under cover, among trees and in the tall grass, with
little risk to themselves and extreme danger to the invader. “There is
no profit,” he says, “in fighting with this sort of banditti, whom you
cannot catch, but who will catch many of your people. The Onondagas
wish to bring about an agreement. Must the father and the children,
they ask, cut each other’s throats?”

98
The Onondagas, moved by the influence of the Jesuit and the gifts of
La Barre, did in fact wish to act as mediators between their Seneca
confederates and the French; and to this end they invited the Seneca
elders to a council. The meeting took place before the arrival of
Viele, and lasted two days. The Senecas were at first refractory, and
hot for war, but at length consented that the Onondagas might make
peace for them, if they could; a conclusion which was largely due to
the eloquence of Big Mouth.

The first act of Viele was a blunder. He told the Onondagas that the
English governor was master of their country; and that, as they were
subjects of the king of England, they must hold no council with the
French without permission. The pride of Big Mouth was touched. “You
say,” he exclaimed to the envoy, “that we are subjects of the king of
England and the Duke of York; but we say that we are brothers. We must
take care of ourselves. The coat of arms which you have fastened to
that post cannot defend us against Onontio. We tell you that we shall
bind a covenant chain to our arm and to his. We shall take the Senecas
by one hand and Onontio by the other, and their hatchet and his sword
shall be thrown into deep water.” [11]

Thus well and manfully did Big Mouth assert the independence of his
tribe, and proclaim it the arbiter of peace. He told the warriors,
moreover, to close their ears to the words of the Dutchman,
99
who spoke as if he were drunk; [12]
and it was resolved at last that he, Big Mouth, with an embassy of
chiefs and elders, should go with Le Moyne to meet the French governor.

While these things were passing at Onondaga, La Barre had finished his
preparations, and was now in full campaign. Before setting out, he had
written to the minister that he was about to advance on the enemy,
with seven hundred Canadians, a hundred and thirty regulars, and two
hundred mission Indians; that more Indians were to join him on the
way; that Du Lhut and La Durantaye were to meet him at Niagara with a
body of coureurs de bois and Indians from the interior; and that,
“when we are all united, we will perish or destroy the enemy.”
[13] On the same day, he wrote to the
king: “My purpose is to exterminate the Senecas; for otherwise your
Majesty need take no farther account of this country, since there is no
hope of peace with them, except when they are driven to it by force. I
pray you do not abandon me; and be assured that I shall do my duty at
the head of your faithful colonists.” [14]

A few days after writing these curiously incoherent epistles, La Barre
received a letter from his colleague, Meules, who had no belief that
he meant to fight, and was determined to compel him to do so, if
possible. “There is a report,” wrote the intendant, “that you mean to
make peace. It is doing great harm. Our Indian allies will despise
100
us. I trust the story is untrue, and that you will listen to no overtures.
The expense has been enormous. The whole population is roused.”
[15] Not satisfied with
this, Meules sent the general a second letter, meant, like the first,
as a tonic and a stimulant. “If we come to terms with the Iroquois,
without first making them feel the strength of our arms, we may expect
that, in future, they will do every thing they can to humiliate us,
because we drew the sword against them, and showed them our teeth. I
do not think that any course is now left for us but to carry the war
to their very doors, and do our utmost to reduce them to such a point
that they shall never again be heard of as a nation, but only as our
subjects and slaves. If, after having gone so far, we do not fight
them, we shall lose all our trade, and bring this country to the brink
of ruin. The Iroquois, and especially the Senecas, pass for great
cowards. The Reverend Father Jesuit, who is at Prairie de la
Madeleine, told me as much yesterday; and, though he has never been
among them, he assured me that he has heard everybody say so. But,
even if they were brave, we ought to be very glad of it; since then we
could hope that they would wait our attack, and give us a chance to
beat them. If we do not destroy them, they will destroy us. I think
you see but too well that your honor and the safety of the country are
involved in the results of this war.” [16]

101
While Meules thus wrote to the governor, he wrote also to the
minister, Seignelay, and expressed his views with great distinctness.
“I feel bound in conscience to tell you that nothing was ever heard of
so extraordinary as what we see done in this country every day. One
would think that there was a divided empire here between the king and
the governor; and, if things should go on long in this way, the
governor would have a far greater share than his Majesty. The persons
whom Monsieur la Barre has sent this year to trade at Fort Frontenac
have already shared with him from ten to twelve thousand crowns.” He
then recounts numerous abuses and malversations on the part of the
governor. “In a word, Monseigneur, this war has been decided upon in
the cabinet of Monsieur the general, along with six of the chief
merchants of the country. If it had not served their plans, he would
have found means to settle every thing; but the merchants made him
understand that they were in danger of being plundered, and that,
having an immense amount of merchandise in the woods in nearly two
hundred canoes fitted out last year, it was better to make use of the
people of the country to carry on war against the Senecas. This being
done, he hopes to make extraordinary profits without any risk, because
one of two things will happen: either we shall gain some considerable
advantage over the savages, as there is reason to hope, if Monsieur
the general will but attack them in their villages; or else we shall
make a peace which will keep every thing
102
safe for a time. These are assuredly the sole motives of this war,
which has for principle and end nothing but mere interest. He says
himself that there is good fishing in troubled waters.
[17]

“With all our preparations for war, and all the expense in which
Monsieur the general is involving his Majesty, I will take the liberty
to tell you, Monseigneur, though I am no prophet, that I discover no
disposition on the part of Monsieur the general to make war against
the aforesaid savages. In my belief, he will content himself with
going in a canoe as far as Fort Frontenac, and then send for the
Senecas to treat of peace with them, and deceive the people, the
intendant, and, if I may be allowed with all possible respect to say
so, his Majesty himself.

“P. S.—I will finish this letter, Monseigneur, by telling you that
he set out yesterday, July 10th, with a detachment of two hundred men.
All Quebec was filled with grief to see him embark on an expedition of
war tête-à-tête with the man named La Chesnaye.
Everybody says that the war is a sham, that these two will arrange every
103
thing between them, and, in a word, do whatever will help their trade. The
whole country is in despair to see how matters are managed.”
[18]

After a long stay at Montreal, La Barre embarked his little army at La
Chine, crossed Lake St. Louis, and began the ascent of the upper St.
Lawrence. In one of the three companies of regulars which formed a
part of the force was a young subaltern, the Baron la Hontan, who has
left a lively account of the expedition. Some of the men were in flat
boats, and some were in birch canoes. Of the latter was La Hontan,
whose craft was paddled by three Canadians. Several times they
shouldered it through the forest to escape the turmoil of the rapids.
The flat boats could not be so handled, and were dragged or pushed up
in the shallow water close to the bank, by gangs of militia men,
toiling and struggling among the rocks and foam. The regulars,
unskilled in such matters, were spared these fatigues, though
tormented night and day by swarms of gnats and mosquitoes, objects of
La Hontan’s bitterest invective. At length the last rapid was passed,
and they moved serenely on their way, threaded the mazes of the
Thousand Islands, entered what is now the harbor of Kingston, and
landed under the palisades of Fort Frontenac.

Here the whole force was soon assembled, the regulars in their tents,
the Canadian militia and the Indians in huts and under sheds of bark.
Of these red allies there were several hundred: Abenakis
104
and
Algonquins from Sillery, Hurons from Lorette, and converted Iroquois
from the Jesuit mission of Saut St. Louis, near Montreal. The camp of
the French was on a low, damp plain near the fort; and here a
malarious fever presently attacked them, killing many and disabling
many more. La Hontan says that La Barre himself was brought by it to
the brink of the grave. If he had ever entertained any other purpose
than that of inducing the Senecas to agree to a temporary peace, he
now completely abandoned it. He dared not even insist that the
offending tribe should meet him in council, but hastened to ask the
mediation of the Onondagas, which the letters of Lamberville had
assured him that they were disposed to offer. He sent Le Moyne to
persuade them to meet him on their own side of the lake, and, with
such of his men as were able to move, crossed to the mouth of Salmon
River, then called La Famine.

The name proved prophetic. Provisions fell short from bad management
in transportation, and the men grew hungry and discontented. September
had begun; the place was unwholesome, and the malarious fever of Fort
Frontenac infected the new encampment. The soldiers sickened rapidly.
La Barre, racked with suspense, waited impatiently the return of Le
Moyne. We have seen already the result of his mission, and how he and
Lamberville, in spite of the envoy of the English governor, gained
from the Onondaga chiefs the promise to meet Onontio in council. Le
Moyne appeared at La Famine on the third of the month, bringing
105
with
him Big Mouth and thirteen other deputies. La Barre gave them a feast
of bread, wine, and salmon trout, and on the morning of the fourth the
council began.

Before the deputies arrived, the governor had sent the sick men
homeward in order to conceal his helpless condition; and he now told
the Iroquois that he had left his army at Fort Frontenac, and had come
to meet them attended only by an escort. The Onondaga politician was
not to be so deceived. He, or one of his party, spoke a little French;
and during the night, roaming noiselessly among the tents, he
contrived to learn the true state of the case from the soldiers.

The council was held on an open spot near the French encampment. La
Barre was seated in an arm-chair. The Jesuit Bruyas stood by him as
interpreter, and the officers were ranged on his right and left. The
Indians sat on the ground in a row opposite the governor; and two
lines of soldiers, forming two sides of a square, closed the
intervening space. Among the officers was La Hontan, a spectator of
the whole proceeding. He may be called a man in advance of his time;
for he had the caustic, sceptical, and mocking spirit which a century
later marked the approach of the great revolution, but which was not a
characteristic of the reign of Louis XIV. He usually told the truth
when he had no motive to do otherwise, and yet was capable at times of
prodigious mendacity. [19]
106
There is no reason to believe that he indulged in it on the
present occasion, and his account of what he now saw and heard may
probably be taken as substantially correct. According to him, La Barre
opened the council as follows:—

“The king my master, being informed that the Five Nations of the
Iroquois have long acted in a manner adverse to peace, has ordered me
to come with an escort to this place, and to send Akouessan (Le
Moyne) to Onondaga to invite the principal chiefs to meet me. It is
the wish of this great king that you and I should smoke the calumet of
peace together, provided that you promise, in the name of the Mohawks,
Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, to give entire satisfaction
and indemnity to his subjects, and do nothing in future which may
occasion rupture.”

Then he recounted the offences of the Iroquois. First, they had
maltreated and robbed French traders in the country of the Illinois;
“wherefore,” said the governor, “I am ordered to demand reparation,
and in case of refusal to declare war against you.”

Next, “the warriors of the Five Nations have introduced the English
into the lakes which belong to the king my master, and among the
tribes who are his children, in order to destroy the trade of his
subjects, and seduce these people from the obedience they owe him. I
am willing to forget this; but, should it happen again, I am expressly
ordered to declare war against you.”

107
Thirdly, “the warriors of the Five Nations have made sundry barbarous
inroads into the country of the Illinois and Miamis, seizing, binding,
and leading into captivity an infinite number of these savages in time
of peace. They are the children of my king, and are not to remain your
slaves. They must at once be set free and sent home. If you refuse to
do this, I am expressly ordered to declare war against you.”

La Barre concluded by assuring Big Mouth, as representing the Five
Nations of the Iroquois, that the French would leave them in peace if
they made atonement for the past, and promised good conduct for the
future; but that, if they did not heed his words, their villages
should be burned, and they themselves destroyed. He added, though he
knew the contrary, that the governor of New York would join him in war
against them.

During the delivery of this martial harangue, Big Mouth sat silent and
attentive, his eyes fixed on the bowl of his pipe. When the
interpreter had ceased, he rose, walked gravely two or three times
around the lines of the assembly, then stopped before the governor,
looked steadily at him, stretched his tawny arm, opened his capacious
jaws, and uttered himself as follows:—

“Onontio, I honor you, and all the warriors who are with me honor you.
Your interpreter has ended his speech, and now I begin mine. Listen to
my words.

“Onontio, when you left Quebec, you must have thought that the heat of
the sun had burned the
108
forests that make our country inaccessible to
the French, or that the lake had overflowed them so that we could not
escape from our villages. You must have thought so, Onontio; and
curiosity to see such a fire or such a flood must have brought you to
this place. Now your eyes are opened; for I and my warriors have come
to tell you that the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks
are all alive. I thank you in their name for bringing back the calumet
of peace which they gave to your predecessors; and I give you joy that
you have not dug up the hatchet which has been so often red with the
blood of your countrymen.

“Listen, Onontio. I am not asleep. My eyes are open; and by the sun
that gives me light I see a great captain at the head of a band of
soldiers, who talks like a man in a dream. He says that he has come to
smoke the pipe of peace with the Onondagas; but I see that he came to
knock them in the head, if so many of his Frenchmen were not too weak
to fight. I see Onontio raving in a camp of sick men, whose lives the
Great Spirit has saved by smiting them with disease. Our women had
snatched war-clubs, and our children and old men seized bows and
arrows to attack your camp, if our warriors had not restrained them,
when your messenger, Akouessan, appeared in our village.”

He next justified the pillage of French traders on the ground, very
doubtful in this case, that they were carrying arms to the Illinois,
enemies of the confederacy; and he flatly refused to make reparation,
telling La Barre that even the old men
109
of his tribe had no fear of the
French. He also avowed boldly that the Iroquois had conducted English
traders to the lakes. “We are born free,” he exclaimed, “we depend
neither on Onontio nor on Corlaer. We have the right to go
whithersoever we please, to take with us whomever we please, and buy
and sell of whomever we please. If your allies are your slaves or your
children, treat them like slaves or children, and forbid them to deal
with anybody but your Frenchmen.

“We have knocked the Illinois in the head, because they cut down the
tree of peace and hunted the beaver on our lands. We have done less
than the English and the French, who have seized upon the lands of
many tribes, driven them away, and built towns, villages, and forts in
their country.

“Listen, Onontio. My voice is the voice of the Five Tribes of the
Iroquois. When they buried the hatchet at Cataraqui (Fort Frontenac)
in presence of your predecessor, they planted the tree of peace in the
middle of the fort, that it might be a post of traders and not of
soldiers. Take care that all the soldiers you have brought with you,
shut up in so small a fort, do not choke this tree of peace. I assure
you in the name of the Five Tribes that our warriors will dance the
dance of the calumet under its branches; and that they will sit quiet
on their mats and never dig up the hatchet, till their brothers,
Onontio and Corlaer, separately or together, make ready to attack the
country that the Great Spirit has given to our ancestors.”

The session presently closed; and La Barre
110
withdrew to his tent,
where, according to La Hontan, he vented his feelings in invective,
till reminded that good manners were not to be expected from an
Iroquois. Big Mouth, on his part, entertained some of the French at a
feast which he opened in person by a dance. There was another session
in the afternoon, and the terms of peace were settled in the evening.
The tree of peace was planted anew; La Barre promised not to attack
the Senecas; and Big Mouth, in spite of his former declaration,
consented that they should make amends for the pillage of the traders.
On the other hand, he declared that the Iroquois would fight the
Illinois to the death; and La Barre dared not utter a word in behalf
of his allies. The Onondaga next demanded that the council fire should
be removed from Fort Frontenac to La Famine, in the Iroquois country.
This point was yielded without resistance; and La Barre promised to
decamp and set out for home on the following morning.
[20]

Such was the futile and miserable end of the grand expedition. Even
the promise to pay for the plundered goods was contemptuously broken.
[21]
The honor rested with the Iroquois. They had spurned the
French, repelled the claims of the English, and by act and word
asserted their independence of both.

La Barre embarked and hastened home in advance
111
of his men. His camp was again full of the sick. Their comrades placed them,
shivering with ague fits, on board the flat-boats and canoes; and the whole
force, scattered and disordered, floated down the current to Montreal.
Nothing had been gained but a thin and flimsy truce, with new troubles
and dangers plainly visible behind it. The better to understand their
nature, let us look for a moment at an episode of the campaign.

When La Barre sent messengers with gifts and wampum belts to summon
the Indians of the Upper Lakes to join in the war, his appeal found a
cold response. La Durantaye and Du Lhut, French commanders in that
region, vainly urged the surrounding tribes to lift the hatchet. None
but the Hurons would consent, when, fortunately, Nicolas Perrot
arrived at Michillimackinac on an errand of trade. This famous
coureur de bois—a very different person from Perrot, governor of
Montreal—was well skilled in dealing with Indians. Through his
influence, their scruples were overcome; and some five hundred
warriors, Hurons, Ottawas, Ojibwas, Pottawatamies, and Foxes, were
persuaded to embark for the rendezvous at Niagara, along with a
hundred or more Frenchmen. The fleet of canoes, numerous as a flock of
blackbirds in autumn, began the long and weary voyage. The two
commanders had a heavy task. Discipline was impossible. The French
were scarcely less wild than the savages. Many of them were painted
and feathered like their red companions, whose ways they imitated with
perfect success. The Indians, on their part,
112
were but half-hearted for the work in hand, for they had already
discovered that the English would pay twice as much for a beaver
skin as the French; and they asked nothing better than the appearance
of English traders on the lakes, and a safe peace with the Iroquois,
which should open to them the market of New York. But they were like
children with the passions of men, inconsequent, fickle, and wayward.
They stopped to hunt on the shore of Michigan, where a Frenchman
accidentally shot himself with his own gun. Here was an evil omen.
But for the efforts of Perrot, half the party would have given up the
enterprise, and paddled home. In the Strait of Detroit there was another
hunt, and another accident. In firing at a deer, an Indian wounded his
own brother. On this the tribesmen of the wounded man proposed to kill
the French, as being the occasion of the mischance. Once more the skill
of Perrot prevailed; but when they reached the Long Point of Lake Erie,
the Foxes, about a hundred in number, were on the point of deserting
in a body. As persuasion failed, Perrot tried the effect of taunts.
“You are cowards,” he said to the naked crew, as they crowded about him with
their wild eyes and long lank hair. “You do not know what war is: you
never killed a man and you never ate one, except those that were given
you tied hand and foot.” They broke out against him in a storm of
abuse. “You shall see whether we are men. We are going to fight the
Iroquois; and, unless you do your part, we will knock you in the
head.” “You will
113
never have to give yourselves the trouble,” retorted
Perrot, “for at the first war-whoop you will all run off.” He gained
his point. Their pride was roused, and for the moment they were full
of fight. [22]

Immediately after, there was trouble with the Ottawas, who became
turbulent and threatening, and refused to proceed. With much ado, they
were persuaded to go as far as Niagara, being lured by the rash
assurance of La Durantaye that three vessels were there, loaded with a
present of guns for them. They carried their canoes by the cataract,
launched them again, paddled to the mouth of the river, and looked for
the vessels in vain. At length a solitary sail appeared on the lake.
She brought no guns, but instead a letter from La Barre, telling them
that peace was made, and that they might all go home. Some of them had
paddled already a thousand miles, in the hope of seeing the Senecas
humbled. They turned back in disgust, filled with wrath and scorn
against the governor and all the French. Canada had incurred the
contempt, not only of enemies, but of allies. There was danger that
these tribes would repudiate the French alliance, welcome the English
traders, make peace at any price with the Iroquois, and carry their
beaver skins to Albany instead of Montreal.

The treaty made at La Famine was greeted with contumely through all
the colony. The governor found, however, a comforter in the Jesuit
Lamberville,
114
who stood fast in the position which he had held from the
beginning. He wrote to La Barre: “You deserve the title of saviour of
the country for making peace at so critical a time. In the condition
in which your army was, you could not have advanced into the Seneca
country without utter defeat. The Senecas had double palisades, which
could not have been forced without great loss. Their plan was to keep
three hundred men inside, and to perpetually harass you with twelve
hundred others. All the Iroquois were to collect together, and fire
only at the legs of your people, so as to master them, and burn them
at their leisure, and then, after having thinned their numbers by a
hundred ambuscades in the woods and grass, to pursue you in your
retreat even to Montreal, and spread desolation around it.”
[23]

La Barre was greatly pleased with this letter, and made use of
it to justify himself to the king. His colleague, Meules, on the other
hand, declared that Lamberville, anxious to make favor with the
governor, had written only what La Barre wished to hear. The intendant
also informs the minister that La Barre’s excuses are a mere pretence;
that everybody is astonished and disgusted with him; that the sickness
of the troops was his own fault, because he kept them encamped on wet
ground for an unconscionable length of time; that Big Mouth shamefully
befooled and bullied him; that, after the council at La Famine, he
lost his wits, and went off in a fright; that,
115
since the return of the troops, the officers have openly expressed their
contempt for him; and that the people would have risen against him, if
he, Meules, had not taken measures to quiet them.
[24] These, with many other charges,
flew across the sea from the pen of the intendant.

The next ship from France brought the following letter from the
king:—

Monsieur de la Barre,—Having been informed
that your years do not permit you to support the fatigues inseparable
from your office of governor and lieutenant-general in Canada, I send
you this letter to acquaint you that I have selected Monsieur de
Denonville to serve in your place; and my intention is that, on his
arrival, after resigning to him the command, with all instructions
concerning it, you embark for your return to France.

Louis.

La Barre sailed for home; and the Marquis de Denonville, a pious
colonel of dragoons, assumed the vacant office.

Denonville
embarked at Rochelle in June, with his wife and a part of
his family. Saint-Vallier, the destined bishop, was in the same
vessel; and the squadron carried five hundred soldiers, of whom a
hundred and fifty died of fever and scurvy on the way. Saint-Vallier
speaks in glowing terms of the new governor. “He spent nearly all his
time in prayer and the reading of good books. The Psalms of David were
always in his hands. In all the voyage, I never saw him do any thing
wrong; and there was nothing in his words or acts which did not show a
solid virtue and a consummate prudence, as well in the duties of the
Christian life as in the wisdom of this world.”
[1]

When they landed, the nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu
117
were overwhelmed with the
sick. “Not only our halls, but our church, our granary, our hen-yard,
and every corner of the hospital where we could make room, were filled
with them.” [2]

Much was expected of Denonville. He was to repair the mischief wrought
by his predecessor, and restore the colony to peace, strength, and
security. The king had stigmatized La Barre’s treaty with the Iroquois
as disgraceful, and expressed indignation at his abandonment of the
Illinois allies. All this was now to be changed; but it was easier to
give the order at Versailles than to execute it in Canada.
Denonville’s difficulties were great; and his means of overcoming them
were small. What he most needed was more troops and more money. The
Senecas, insolent and defiant, were still attacking the Illinois; the
tribes of the north-west were angry, contemptuous, and disaffected;
the English of New York were urging claims to the whole country south
of the Great Lakes, and to a controlling share in all the western fur
trade; while the English of Hudson’s Bay were competing for the
traffic of the northern tribes, and the English of New England were
seizing upon the fisheries of Acadia, and now and then making
piratical descents upon its coast. The great question lay between New
York and Canada. Which of these two should gain mastery in the west?

Denonville, like Frontenac, was a man of the army and the court. As a
soldier, he had the experience of thirty years of service; and he was
in
118
high repute, not only for piety, but for probity and honor. He was
devoted to the Jesuits, an ardent servant of the king, a lover of
authority, filled with the instinct of subordination and order, and,
in short, a type of the ideas, religious, political, and social, then
dominant in France. He was greatly distressed at the disturbed
condition of the colony; while the state of the settlements, scattered
in broken lines for two or three hundred miles along the St. Lawrence,
seemed to him an invitation to destruction. “If we have a war,” he
wrote, “nothing can save the country but a miracle of God.”

Nothing was more likely than war. Intrigues were on foot between the
Senecas and the tribes of the lakes, which threatened to render the
appeal to arms a necessity to the French. Some of the Hurons of
Michillimackinac were bent on allying themselves with the English.
“They like the manners of the French,” wrote Denonville; “but they
like the cheap goods of the English better.” The Senecas, in collusion
with several Huron chiefs, had captured a considerable number of that
tribe and of the Ottawas. The scheme was that these prisoners should
be released, on condition that the lake tribes should join the Senecas
and repudiate their alliance with the French.
[3]
The governor of New York favored this intrigue to the utmost.

Denonville was quick to see that the peril of the colony rose, not
from the Iroquois alone, but from the English of New York, who
prompted them.
119
Dongan understood the situation. He saw that the French
aimed at mastering the whole interior of the continent. They had
established themselves in the valley of the Illinois, had built a fort
on the lower Mississippi, and were striving to entrench themselves at
its mouth. They occupied the Great Lakes; and it was already evident
that, as soon as their resources should permit, they would seize the
avenues of communication throughout the west. In short, the grand
scheme of French colonization had begun to declare itself. Dongan
entered the lists against them. If his policy should prevail, New
France would dwindle to a feeble province on the St. Lawrence: if the
French policy should prevail, the English colonies would remain a
narrow strip along the sea. Dongan’s cause was that of all these
colonies; but they all stood aloof, and left him to wage the strife
alone. Canada was matched against New York, or rather against the
governor of New York. The population of the English colony was larger
than that of its rival; but, except the fur traders, few of the
settlers cared much for the questions at issue.
[4]
Dongan’s chief difficulty,
however, rose from the relations of the French and English kings.
Louis XIV. gave Denonville an unhesitating support. James II., on the
other hand, was for a time cautious to timidity. The two monarchs were
closely united. Both hated constitutional liberty, and both held the
same principles of supremacy in church and state; but
120
Louis was triumphant and powerful, while James, in conflict with his
subjects, was in constant need of his great ally, and dared not offend
him.

The royal instructions to Denonville enjoined him to humble the
Iroquois, sustain the allies of the colony, oppose the schemes of
Dongan, and treat him as an enemy, if he encroached on French
territory. At the same time, the French ambassador at the English
court was directed to demand from James II. precise orders to the
governor of New York for a complete change of conduct in regard to
Canada and the Iroquois. [5]
But Dongan,
like the French governors, was not easily controlled. In the absence
of money and troops, he intrigued busily with his Indian neighbors.
“The artifices of the English,” wrote Denonville, “have reached such a
point that it would be better if they attacked us openly and burned
our settlements, instead of instigating the Iroquois against us for
our destruction. I know beyond a particle of doubt that M. Dongan
caused all the five Iroquois nations to be assembled last spring at
Orange (Albany), in order to excite them against us, by telling them
publicly that I meant to declare war against them.” He says, further,
that Dongan supplies them with arms and ammunition, incites them to
attack the colony, and urges them to deliver Lamberville, the priest
at Onondaga, into his hands. “He has sent people, at the same time, to
our Montreal Indians to entice them over to
121
him, promising them missionaries to instruct them, and assuring them
that he would prevent the introduction of brandy into their villages.
All these intrigues have given me not a little trouble throughout the
summer. M. Dongan has written to me, and I have answered him as a man
may do who wishes to dissimulate and does not feel strong enough to
get angry.” [6]

Denonville, accordingly, while biding his time, made use of counter
intrigues, and, by means of the useful Lamberville, freely distributed
secret or “underground” presents among the Iroquois chiefs; while the
Jesuit Engelran was busy at Michillimackinac in adroit and vigorous
efforts to prevent the alienation of the Hurons, Ottawas, and other
lake tribes. The task was difficult; and, filled with anxiety, the
father came down to Montreal to see the governor, “and communicate to
me,” writes Denonville, “the deplorable state of affairs with our
allies, whom we can no longer trust, owing to the discredit into which
we have fallen among them, and from which we cannot recover, except by
gaining some considerable advantage over the Iroquois; who, as I have
had the honor to inform you, have labored incessantly since last
autumn to rob us of all our allies, by using every means to make
treaties with them independently of us. You may be assured, Monseigneur,
that the English are the chief cause of the arrogance and insolence of
the Iroquois, adroitly using them to extend the limits of their dominion,
122
and uniting with them as one nation, insomuch that the English claims
include no less than the Lakes Ontario and Erie, the region of Saginaw
(Michigan), the country of the Hurons, and all the country in
the direction of the Mississippi.” [7]

The most pressing danger was the defection of the lake tribes. “In
spite of the king’s edicts,” pursues Denonville, “the coureurs de
bois have carried a hundred barrels of brandy to Michillimackinac in
a single year; and their libertinism and debauchery have gone to such
an extremity that it is a wonder the Indians have not massacred them
all to save themselves from their violence and recover their wives and
daughters from them. This, Monseigneur, joined to our failure in the
last war, has drawn upon us such contempt among all the tribes that
there is but one way to regain our credit, which is to humble the
Iroquois by our unaided strength, without asking the help of our
Indian allies.” [8] And he begs hard
for a strong reinforcement of troops.

Without doubt, Denonville was right in thinking that the chastising of
the Iroquois, or at least the Senecas, the head and front of mischief,
was a matter of the last necessity. A crushing blow dealt against them
would restore French prestige, paralyze English intrigue, save the
Illinois from destruction, and confirm the wavering allies of Canada.
Meanwhile, matters grew from bad to worse. In the north and in the
west, there was
123
scarcely a tribe in the French interest which was not either attacked
by the Senecas or cajoled by them into alliances hostile to the colony.
“We may set down Canada as lost,” again writes Denonville, “if we do
not make war next year; and yet, in our present disordered state, war
is the most dangerous thing in the world. Nothing can save us but the
sending out of troops and the building of forts and blockhouses. Yet I
dare not begin to build them; for, if I do, it will bring down all the
Iroquois upon us before we are in a condition to fight them.”

Nevertheless, he made what preparations he could, begging all the
while for more soldiers, and carrying on at the same time a
correspondence with his rival, Dongan. At first, it was courteous on
both sides; but it soon grew pungent, and at last acrid. Denonville
wrote to announce his arrival, and Dongan replied in French: “Sir, I
have had the honor of receiving your letter, and greatly rejoice at
having so good a neighbor, whose reputation is so widely spread that
it has anticipated your arrival. I have a very high respect for the
king of France, of whose bread I have eaten so much that I feel under
an obligation to prevent whatever can give the least umbrage to our
masters. M. de la Barre is a very worthy gentleman, but he has not
written to me in a civil and befitting style.”
[9]

Denonville replied with many compliments: “I know not what reason you
may have had to be
124
dissatisfied with M. de la Barre; but I know very
well that I should reproach myself all my life if I could fail to
render to you all the civility and attention due to a person of so
great rank and merit. In regard to the affair in which M. de la Barre
interfered, as you write me, I presume you refer to his quarrel with
the Senecas. As to that, Monsieur, I believe you understand the
character of that nation well enough to perceive that it is not easy
to live in friendship with a people who have neither religion, nor
honor, nor subordination. The king, my master, entertains affection
and friendship for this country solely through zeal for the
establishment of religion here, and the support and protection of the
missionaries whose ardor in preaching the faith leads them to expose
themselves to the brutalities and persecutions of the most ferocious
of tribes. You know better than I what fatigues and torments they have
suffered for the sake of Jesus Christ. I know your heart is penetrated
with the glory of that name which makes Hell tremble, and at the
mention of which all the powers of Heaven fall prostrate. Shall we be
so unhappy as to refuse them our master’s protection? You are a man of
rank and abounding in merit. You love our holy religion. Can we not
then come to an understanding to sustain our missionaries by keeping
those fierce tribes in respect and fear?”
[10]

This specious appeal for maintaining French Jesuits on English
territory, or what was claimed
125
as such, was lost on Dongan, Catholic
as he was. He regarded them as dangerous political enemies, and did
his best to expel them, and put English priests in their place.
Another of his plans was to build a fort at Niagara, to exclude the
French from Lake Erie. Denonville entertained the same purpose, in
order to exclude the English; and he watched eagerly the moment to
execute it. A rumor of the scheme was brought to Dongan by one of the
French coureurs de bois, who often deserted to Albany, where they
were welcomed and encouraged. The English governor was exceedingly
wroth. He had written before in French out of complaisance. He now
dispensed with ceremony, and wrote in his own peculiar English: “I am
informed that you intend to build a fort at Ohniagero (Niagara) on
this side of the lake, within my Master’s territoryes without
question. I cannot beleev that a person that has your reputation in
the world would follow the steps of Monsr. Labarr, and be ill advized
by some interested persons in your Governt. to make disturbance
between our Masters subjects in those parts of the world for a little
pelttree (peltry). I hear one of the Fathers (the Jesuit Jean de
Lamberville) is gone to you, and th’other that stayed (Jacques de
Lamberville) I have sent for him here lest the Indians should insult
over him, tho’ it’s a thousand pittys that those that have made such
progress in the service of God should be disturbed, and that by the
fault of those that laid the foundation of Christianity amongst these
barbarous people;
126
setting apart the station I am in, I am as much
Monsr. Des Novilles (Denonville’s) humble servant as any friend he
has, and will ommit no opportunity of manifesting the same. Sir, your
humble servant, Thomas Dongan.”
[11]

Denonville in reply denied that he meant to build a fort at Niagara,
and warned Dongan not to believe the stories told him by French
deserters. “In order,” he wrote, “that we may live on a good
understanding, it would be well that a gentleman of your character
should not give protection to all the rogues, vagabonds, and thieves
who desert us and seek refuge with you, and who, to gain your favor,
think they cannot do better than tell nonsensical stories about us,
which they will continue to do so long as you listen to them.”
[12]

The rest of the
letter was in terms of civility, to which Dongan returned: “Beleive me
it is much joy to have soe good a neighbour of soe excellent
qualifications and temper, and of a humour altogether differing from
Monsieur de la Barre, your predecessor, who was so furious and hasty
and very much addicted to great words, as if I had bin to have bin
frighted by them. For my part, I shall take all immaginable care that
the Fathers who preach the Holy Gospell to those Indians over whom I
have power bee not in the least ill treated, and upon that very
accompt have sent for one of each nation to come to me, and then those
beastly crimes you reproove shall be checked severely,
127
and all my
endevours used to surpress their filthy drunkennesse, disorders,
debauches, warring, and quarrels, and whatsoever doth obstruct the
growth and enlargement of the Christian faith amongst those people.”
He then, in reply to an application of Denonville, promised to give up
“runawayes.” [13]

Promise was not followed by performance; and he still favored to the
utmost the truant Frenchmen who made Albany their resort, and often
brought with them most valuable information. This drew an angry letter
from Denonville. “You were so good, Monsieur, as to tell me that you
would give up all the deserters who have fled to you to escape
chastisement for their knavery. As most of them are bankrupts and
thieves, I hope that they will give you reason to repent having
harbored them, and that your merchants who employ them will be
punished for trusting such rascals.” [14]
To the great wrath of the French governor, Dongan
persisted in warning the Iroquois that he meant to attack them. “You
proposed, Monsieur,” writes Denonville, “to submit every thing to the
decision of our masters. Nevertheless, your emissary to the Onondagas
told all the Five Nations in your name to pillage and make war on us.”
Next, he berates his rival for furnishing the Indians with rum. “Think
you that religion will make any progress, while your traders supply
the savages in abundance with the liquor which, as you ought to know,
converts them into demons and their lodges into counterparts of Hell?”

128
“Certainly,” retorts Dongan, “our Rum doth as little hurt as your
Brandy, and, in the opinion of Christians, is much more wholesome.”
[15]

Each tried incessantly to out-general the other. Denonville, steadfast
in his plan of controlling the passes of the western country, had
projected forts, not only at Niagara, but also at Toronto, on Lake
Erie, and on the Strait of Detroit. He thought that a time had come
when he could, without rashness, secure this last important passage;
and he sent an order to Du Lhut, who was then at Michillimackinac, to
occupy it with fifty coureurs de bois.
[16]
That enterprising chief accordingly repaired
to Detroit, and built a stockade at the outlet of Lake Huron on the
western side of the strait. It was not a moment too soon. The year
before, Dongan had sent a party of armed traders in eleven canoes,
commanded by Johannes Rooseboom, a Dutchman of Albany, to carry
English goods to the upper lakes. They traded successfully, winning
golden opinions from the Indians, who begged them to come every year;
and, though Denonville sent an officer to stop them at Niagara, they
returned in triumph, after an absence of three months.
[17]
A larger expedition was organized in the autumn of 1686.
Rooseboom again set out for the lakes with twenty or more canoes. He
was to winter among the Senecas, and wait the arrival of Major
McGregory, a Scotch officer, who was to leave Albany
129
in the spring
with fifty men, take command of the united parties, and advance to
Lake Huron, accompanied by a band of Iroquois, to form a general
treaty of trade and alliance with the tribes claimed by France as her
subjects. [18]

Denonville was beside himself at the news. He had already urged upon
Louis XIV. the policy of buying the colony of New York, which he
thought might easily be done, and which, as he said, “would make us
masters of the Iroquois without a war.” This time he wrote in a less
pacific mood: “I have a mind to go straight to Albany, storm their
fort, and burn every thing.” [19]
And he begged for soldiers more earnestly than ever.
“Things grow worse and worse. The English stir up the Iroquois against
us, and send parties to Michillimackinac to rob us of our trade. It
would be better to declare war against them than to perish by their
intrigues.” [20]

He complained bitterly to Dongan, and Dongan replied: “I beleeve it is
as lawfull for the English as the French to trade amongst the remotest
Indians. I desire you to send me word who it was that pretended to
have my orders for the Indians to plunder and fight you. That is as
false as ’tis true that God is in heaven. I have desired you to send
for the deserters. I know not who they are but had rather such
Rascalls and Bankrouts,
130
as you call them, were amongst their own
countrymen.”

He had, nevertheless, turned them to good account; for, as the English
knew nothing of western geography, they employed these French
bush-rangers to guide their trading parties. Denonville sent orders to
Du Lhut to shoot as many of them as he could catch.

Dongan presently received despatches from the English court, which
showed him the necessity of caution; and, when next he wrote to his
rival, it was with a chastened pen: “I hope your Excellency will be so
kinde as not desire or seeke any correspondence with our Indians of
this side of the Great lake (Ontario): if they doe amisse to any of
your Governmt. and you make it known to me, you shall have all justice
done.” He complained mildly that the Jesuits were luring their
Iroquois converts to Canada; “and you must pardon me if I tell you
that is not the right way to keepe fair correspondence. I am daily
expecting Religious men from England, which I intend to put amongst
those five nations. I desire you would order Monsr. de Lamberville
that soe long as he stayes amongst those people he would meddle only
with the affairs belonging to his function. Sir, I send you some
Oranges, hearing that they are a rarity in your partes.”
[22]

“Monsieur,” replies Denonville, “I thank you
131
for your oranges. It is a great pity that they were all rotten.”

The French governor, unlike his rival, felt strong in the support of
his king, who had responded amply to his appeals for aid; and the
temper of his letters answered to his improved position. “I was led,
Monsieur, to believe, by your civil language in the letter you took
the trouble to write me on my arrival, that we should live in the
greatest harmony in the world; but the result has plainly shown that
your intentions did not at all answer to your fine words.” And he
upbraids him without measure for his various misdeeds: “Take my word
for it. Let us devote ourselves to the accomplishment of our masters’
will; let us seek, as they do, to serve and promote religion; let us
live together in harmony, as they desire. I repeat and protest,
Monsieur, that it rests with you alone; but do not imagine that I am a
man to suffer others to play tricks on me. I willingly believe that
you have not ordered the Iroquois to plunder our Frenchmen; but,
whilst I have the honor to write to you, you know that Salvaye, Gédeon
Petit, and many other rogues and bankrupts like them, are with you,
and boast of sharing your table. I should not be surprised that you
tolerate them in your country; but I am astonished that you should
promise me not to tolerate them, that you so promise me again, and
that you perform nothing of what you promise. Trust me, Monsieur, make
no promise that you are not willing to keep.”
[23]

132
Denonville, vexed and perturbed by his long strife with Dongan and the
Iroquois, presently found a moment of comfort in tidings that reached
him from the north. Here, as in the west, there was violent rivalry
between the subjects of the two crowns. With the help of two French
renegades, named Radisson and Groseilliers, the English Company of
Hudson’s Bay, then in its infancy, had established a post near the
mouth of Nelson River, on the western shore of that dreary inland sea.
The company had also three other posts, called Fort Albany, Fort
Hayes, and Fort Rupert, at the southern end of the bay. A rival French
company had been formed in Canada, under the name of the Company of
the North; and it resolved on an effort to expel its English
competitors. Though it was a time of profound peace between the two
kings, Denonville warmly espoused the plan; and, in the early spring
of 1686, he sent the Chevalier de Troyes from Montreal, with eighty or
more Canadians, to execute it. [24]
With Troyes went Iberville, Sainte-Hélène, and Maricourt,
three of the sons of Charles Le Moyne; and the Jesuit Silvy joined the
party as chaplain.

They ascended the Ottawa, and thence, from stream to stream and lake
to lake, toiled painfully towards their goal. At length, they neared
Fort
133
Hayes. It was a stockade with four bastions, mounted with cannon.
There was a strong blockhouse within, in which the sixteen occupants
of the place were lodged, unsuspicious of danger. Troyes approached at
night. Iberville and Sainte-Hélène with a few followers
climbed the palisade on one side, while the rest of the party burst
the main gate with a sort of battering ram, and rushed in, yelling the
war-whoop. In a moment, the door of the blockhouse was dashed open,
and its astonished inmates captured in their shirts.

The victors now embarked for Fort Rupert, distant forty leagues along
the shore. In construction, it resembled Fort Hayes. The fifteen
traders who held the place were all asleep at night in their
blockhouse, when the Canadians burst the gate of the stockade and
swarmed into the area. One of them mounted by a ladder to the roof of
the building, and dropped lighted hand-grenades down the chimney,
which, exploding among the occupants, told them unmistakably that
something was wrong. At the same time, the assailants fired briskly on
them through the loopholes, and, placing a petard under the walls,
threatened to blow them into the air. Five, including a woman, were
killed or wounded; and the rest cried for quarter. Meanwhile,
Iberville with another party attacked a vessel anchored near the fort,
and, climbing silently over her side, found the man on the watch
asleep in his blanket. He sprang up and made fight, but they killed
him, then stamped on the deck to rouse those below, sabred two of them
as they came up
134
the hatchway, and captured the rest. Among them was
Bridger, governor for the company of all its stations on the bay.

They next turned their attention to Fort Albany, thirty leagues from
Fort Hayes, in a direction opposite to that of Fort Rupert. Here there
were about thirty men, under Henry Sargent, an agent of the company.
Surprise was this time impossible; for news of their proceedings had
gone before them, and Sargent, though no soldier, stood on his
defence. The Canadians arrived, some in canoes, some in the captured
vessel, bringing ten captured pieces of cannon, which they planted in
battery on a neighboring hill, well covered by intrenchments from the
English shot. Here they presently opened fire; and, in an hour, the
stockade with the houses that it enclosed was completely riddled. The
English took shelter in a cellar, nor was it till the fire slackened
that they ventured out to show a white flag and ask for a parley.
Troyes and Sargent had an interview. The Englishman regaled his
conqueror with a bottle of Spanish wine; and, after drinking the
health of King Louis and King James, they settled the terms of
capitulation. The prisoners were sent home in an English vessel which
soon after arrived; and Maricourt remained to command at the bay,
while Troyes returned to report his success to Denonville.
[25]

This buccaneer exploit exasperated the English public, and it became
doubly apparent that the state of affairs in America could not be
allowed to continue. A conference had been arranged between the two
powers, even before the news came from Hudson’s Bay; and Count d’Avaux
appeared at London as special envoy of Louis XIV. to settle the
questions at issue. A treaty of neutrality was signed at Whitehall,
and commissioners were appointed on both sides.
[26]
Pending the discussion, each
party was to refrain from acts of hostility or encroachment; and, said
the declaration of the commissioners, “to the end the said agreement
may have the better effect, we do likewise agree that the said serene
kings shall immediately send necessary orders in that behalf to their
respective governors in America.” [27]
Dongan accordingly was directed to keep a friendly
correspondence with his rival, and take good care to give him no cause
of complaint. [28]

It was this missive which had dashed the ardor of the English
governor, and softened his epistolary style. More than four months
after, Louis XIV. sent corresponding instructions to Denonville;
[29]
but,
136
meantime, he had sent him
troops, money, and munitions in abundance, and ordered him to attack
the Iroquois towns. Whether such a step was consistent with the recent
treaty of neutrality may well be doubted; for, though James II. had
not yet formally claimed the Iroquois as British subjects, his
representative had done so for years with his tacit approval, and out
of this claim had risen the principal differences which it was the
object of the treaty to settle.

Eight hundred regulars were already in the colony, and eight hundred
more were sent in the spring, with a hundred and sixty-eight thousand
livres in money and supplies. [30]
Denonville was prepared to strike. He had pushed his preparations
actively, yet with extreme secrecy; for he meant to fall on the
Senecas unawares, and shatter at a blow the mainspring of English
intrigue. Harmony reigned among the chiefs of the colony, military,
civil, and religious. The intendant Meules had been recalled on the
complaints of the governor, who had quarrelled with him; and a new
intendant, Champigny, had been sent in his place. He was as pious as
Denonville himself, and, like him, was in perfect accord with the
bishop and the Jesuits. All wrought together to promote the new
crusade.

It was not yet time to preach it, or at least Denonville thought so.
He dissembled his purpose to the last moment, even with his best
friends. Of all the Jesuits among the Iroquois, the two
137
brothers
Lamberville had alone held their post. Denonville, in order to deceive
the enemy, had directed these priests to urge the Iroquois chiefs to
meet him in council at Fort Frontenac, whither, as he pretended, he
was about to go with an escort of troops, for the purpose of
conferring with them. The two brothers received no hint whatever of
his real intention, and tried in good faith to accomplish his wishes;
but the Iroquois were distrustful, and hesitated to comply. On this,
the elder Lamberville sent the younger with letters to Denonville to
explain the position of affairs, saying at the same time that he
himself would not leave Onondaga except to accompany the chiefs to the
proposed council. “The poor father,” wrote the governor, “knows
nothing of our designs. I am sorry to see him exposed to danger; but,
should I recall him, his withdrawal would certainly betray our plans
to the Iroquois.” This unpardonable reticence placed the Jesuit in
extreme peril; for the moment the Iroquois discovered the intended
treachery they would probably burn him as its instrument. No man in
Canada had done so much as the elder Lamberville to counteract the
influence of England and serve the interests of France, and in return
the governor exposed him recklessly to the most terrible of deaths.
[31]

138
In spite of all his pains, it was whispered abroad that there was to
be war; and the rumor was brought to the ears of Dongan by some of the
Canadian deserters. He lost no time in warning the Iroquois, and their
deputies came to beg his help. Danger humbled them for the moment; and
they not only recognized King James as their sovereign, but consented
at last to call his representative Father Corlaer instead of
Brother. Their father, however, dared not promise them soldiers;
though, in spite of the recent treaty, he caused gunpowder and lead to
be given them, and urged them to recall the powerful war-parties which
they had lately sent against the Illinois.
[32]

Denonville at length broke silence, and ordered the militia to muster.
They grumbled and hesitated, for they remembered the failures of La
Barre. The governor issued a proclamation, and the bishop a pastoral
mandate. There were sermons, prayers, and exhortations in all the
churches. A revulsion of popular feeling followed; and the people,
says Denonville, “made ready for the march with extraordinary
animation.” The church showered blessings on them as they went, and
daily masses were ordained for the downfall of the foes of Heaven and
of France. [33]

A host
of flat-boats filled with soldiers, and a host of Indian
canoes, struggled against the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and slowly
made their way to Fort Frontenac. Among the troops was La Hontan. When
on his arrival he entered the gate of the fort, he saw a strange
sight. A row of posts was planted across the area within, and to each
post an Iroquois was tied by the neck, hands, and feet, “in such a
way,” says the indignant witness, “that he could neither sleep nor
drive off the mosquitoes.” A number of Indians attached to the
expedition, all of whom were Christian converts from the mission
villages, were amusing themselves by burning the fingers of these
unfortunates in the bowls of their pipes, while the sufferers sang
their death songs. La Hontan recognized one of them who, during his
campaign with La Barre, had often feasted him in his wigwam;
140
and the
sight so exasperated the young officer that he could scarcely refrain
from thrashing the tormentors with his walking stick.
[1]

Though the prisoners were Iroquois, they were not those against whom
the expedition was directed; nor had they, so far as appears, ever
given the French any cause of complaint. They belonged to two neutral
villages, called Kenté and Ganneious, on the north shore of Lake
Ontario, forming a sort of colony, where the Sulpitians of Montreal
had established a mission. [2] They
hunted and fished for the garrison of the fort, and had been on excellent
terms with it. Denonville, however, feared that they would report his
movements to their relations across the lake; but this was not his chief
motive for seizing them. Like La Barre before him, he had received orders
from the court that, as the Iroquois were robust and strong, he should
capture as many of them as possible, and send them to France as galley
slaves. [3] The order, without doubt,
referred to prisoners taken in war; but Denonville, aware that the
hostile Iroquois were not easily caught, resolved to entrap their
unsuspecting relatives.

The intendant Champigny accordingly proceeded to the fort in advance
of the troops, and invited the neighboring Iroquois to a feast. They
141
came to the number of thirty men and about ninety women and children,
whereupon they were surrounded and captured by the intendant’s escort
and the two hundred men of the garrison. The inhabitants of the
village of Ganneious were not present; and one Perré, with a strong
party of Canadians and Christian Indians, went to secure them. He
acquitted himself of his errand with great address, and returned with
eighteen warriors and about sixty women and children. Champigny’s
exertions did not end here. Learning that a party of Iroquois were
peaceably fishing on an island in the St. Lawrence, he offered them
also the hospitalities of Fort Frontenac; but they were too wary to be
entrapped. Four or five Iroquois were however caught by the troops on
their way up the river. They were in two or more parties, and they all
had with them their women and children, which was never the case with
Iroquois on the war-path. Hence the assertion of Denonville, that they
came with hostile designs, is very improbable. As for the last six
months he had constantly urged them, by the lips of Lamberville, to
visit him and smoke the pipe of peace, it is not unreasonable to
suppose that these Indian families were on their way to the colony in
consequence of his invitations. Among them were the son and brother of
Big Mouth, who of late had been an advocate of peace; and, in order
not to alienate him, these two were eventually set free. The other
warriors were tied like the rest to stakes at the fort.

The whole number of prisoners thus secured
142
was fifty-one, sustained by
such food as their wives were able to get for them. Of more than a
hundred and fifty women and children captured with them, many died at
the fort, partly from excitement and distress, and partly from a
pestilential disease. The survivors were all baptized, and then
distributed among the mission villages in the colony. The men were
sent to Quebec, where some of them were given up to their Christian
relatives in the missions who had claimed them, and whom it was not
expedient to offend; and the rest, after being baptized, were sent to
France, to share with convicts and Huguenots the horrible slavery of
the royal galleys. [4]

Before reaching Fort Frontenac, Denonville, to his great relief, was
joined by Lamberville, delivered from the peril to which the governor
had exposed him. He owed his life to an act of magnanimity
143
on the part
of the Iroquois, which does them signal honor. One of the prisoners at
Fort Frontenac had contrived to escape, and, leaping sixteen feet to
the ground from the window of a blockhouse, crossed the lake, and gave
the alarm to his countrymen. Apparently, it was from him that the
Onondagas learned that the invitations of Onontio were a snare; that
he had entrapped their relatives, and was about to fall on their
Seneca brethren with all the force of Canada. The Jesuit, whom they
trusted and esteemed, but who had been used as an instrument to
beguile them, was summoned before a council of the chiefs. They were
in a fury at the news; and Lamberville, as much astonished by it as
they, expected instant death, when one of them is said to have
addressed him to the following effect: “We know you too well to
believe that you meant to betray us. We think that you have been
deceived as well as we; and we are not unjust enough to punish you for
the crime of others. But you are not safe here. When once our young
men have sung the war-song, they will listen to nothing but their fury;
and we shall not be able to save you.” They gave him guides, and sent
him by secret paths to meet the advancing army.
[5]

Again the fields about Fort Frontenac were covered with tents,
camp-sheds, and wigwams. Regulars, militia, and Indians, there were
about two thousand men; and, besides these, eight hundred regulars
just arrived from France had been left at Montreal to protect the
settlers. [6]
Fortune thus far had smiled on the enterprise,
and she now gave Denonville a fresh proof of her favor. On the very
day of his arrival, a canoe came from Niagara with news that a large
body of allies from the west had reached that place three days before,
and were waiting his commands. It was more than he had dared to hope.
In the preceding autumn, he had ordered Tonty, commanding at the
Illinois, and La Durantaye, commanding at Michillimackinac, to muster
as many coureurs de bois and Indians as possible, and join him early
in July at Niagara. The distances were vast, and the difficulties
incalculable. In the eyes of the pious governor, their timely arrival
was a manifest sign of the favor of Heaven. At Fort St. Louis, of the
Illinois, Tonty had mustered sixteen Frenchmen and about two hundred
Indians, whom he led across the country to Detroit; and here he found
Du Lhut, La Forêt, and La Durantaye, with a large body of French
145
and Indians from the upper lakes. [7]
It had been the work of the whole winter to induce these savages to move.
Presents, persuasion, and promises had not been spared; and while La
Durantaye, aided by the Jesuit Engelran, labored to gain over the tribes
of Michillimackinac, the indefatigable Nicolas Perrot was at work among
those of the Mississippi and Lake Michigan. They were of a race unsteady
as aspens and fierce as wild-cats, full of mutual jealousies, without
rulers, and without laws; for each was a law to himself. It was difficult
to persuade them, and, when persuaded, scarcely possible to keep them so.
Perrot, however, induced some of them to follow him to Michillimackinac,
where many hundreds of Algonquin savages were presently gathered: a
perilous crew, who changed their minds every day, and whose dancing,
singing, and yelping might turn at any moment into war-whoops against
each other or against their hosts, the French. The Hurons showed more
stability; and La Durantaye was reasonably sure that some of them
would follow him to the war, though it was clear that others were bent
on allying themselves with the Senecas and the English. As for the
Pottawatamies, Sacs, Ojibwas, Ottawas, and other Algonquin hordes, no
man could foresee what they would do. [8]

Suddenly a canoe arrived with news that a party of English traders
was approaching. It will be
146
remembered that two bands of Dutch and English, under
Rooseboom and McGregory, had prepared to set out together for
Michillimackinac, armed with commissions from Dongan. They had rashly
changed their plan, and parted company. Rooseboom took the lead, and
McGregory followed some time after. Their hope was that, on reaching
Michillimackinac, the Indians of the place, attracted by their cheap
goods and their abundant supplies of rum, would declare for them and
drive off the French; and this would probably have happened, but for
the prompt action of La Durantaye. The canoes of Rooseboom, bearing
twenty-nine whites and five Mohawks and Mohicans, were not far
distant, when, amid a prodigious hubbub, the French commander embarked
to meet him with a hundred and twenty coureurs de bois.
[9] Behind them followed a swarm
of Indian canoes, whose occupants scarcely knew which side to take,
but for the most part inclined to the English. Rooseboom and his men,
however, naturally thought that they came to support the French; and,
when La Durantaye bore down upon them with threats of instant death
if they made the least resistance, they surrendered at once. The
captors carried them in triumph to Michillimackinac, and gave their
goods to the delighted Indians.

“It is certain,” wrote Denonville; “that, if the English had not been
stopped and pillaged, the Hurons and Ottawas would have revolted and
cut
147
the throats of all our Frenchmen.” [10]
As it was, La Durantaye’s exploit
produced a revulsion of feeling, and many of the Indians consented to
follow him. He lost no time in leading them down the lake to join Du
Lhut at Detroit; and, when Tonty arrived, they all paddled for
Niagara. On the way, they met McGregory with a party about equal to
that of Rooseboom. He had with him a considerable number of Ottawa and
Huron prisoners whom the Iroquois had captured, and whom he meant to
return to their countrymen as a means of concluding the long projected
triple alliance between the English, the Iroquois, and the tribes of
the lakes. This bold scheme was now completely crushed. All the
English were captured and carried to Niagara, whence they and their
luckless precursors were sent prisoners to Quebec.

La Durantaye and his companions, with a hundred and eighty coureurs
de bois and four hundred Indians, waited impatiently at Niagara for
orders from the governor. A canoe despatched in haste from Fort
Frontenac soon appeared; and they were directed to repair at once to
the rendezvous at Irondequoit Bay, on the borders of the Seneca
country. [11]

Denonville was already on his way thither. On the fourth of July, he
had embarked at Fort Frontenac with four hundred bateaux and canoes,
148
crossed the foot of Lake Ontario, and moved westward along the
southern shore. The weather was rough, and six days passed before he
descried the low headlands of Irondequoit Bay. Far off on the
glimmering water, he saw a multitude of canoes advancing to meet him.
It was the flotilla of La Durantaye. Good management and good luck had
so disposed it that the allied bands, concentring from points more
than a thousand miles distant, reached the rendezvous on the same day.
This was not all. The Ottawas of Michillimackinac, who refused to
follow La Durantaye, had changed their minds the next morning,
embarked in a body, paddled up the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, crossed
to Toronto, and joined the allies at Niagara. White and red,
Denonville now had nearly three thousand men under his command.
[12]

All were gathered on the low point of land that
separates Irondequoit Bay from Lake Ontario. “Never,” says an
eye-witness, “had Canada seen such a sight; and never, perhaps, will
she see such a sight again. Here was the camp of the regulars from
France, with the general’s head-quarters; the camp of the four
battalions of Canadian militia, commanded by the noblesse of the
country; the camp of the Christian Indians; and, farther on, a swarm
of savages of every nation. Their features were different, and so were
their manners, their weapons, their decorations, and their dances.
They sang and whooped and harangued in every accent
149
and tongue. Most of them wore nothing but horns on their heads, and the
tails of beasts behind their backs. Their faces were painted red or green,
with black or white spots; their ears and noses were hung with ornaments
of iron; and their naked bodies were daubed with figures of various sorts
of animals.” [13]

These were the allies from the upper lakes. The enemy, meanwhile, had
taken alarm. Just after the army arrived, three Seneca scouts called
from the edge of the woods, and demanded what they meant to do. “To
fight you, you blockheads,” answered a Mohawk Christian attached to
the French. A volley of bullets was fired at the scouts; but they
escaped, and carried the news to their villages.
[14]
Many of the best warriors were absent. Those that remained,
four hundred or four hundred and fifty by their own accounts, and
eight hundred by that of the French, mustered in haste; and, though
many of them were mere boys, they sent off the women and children, hid
their most valued possessions, burned their chief town, and prepared
to meet the invaders.

On the twelfth, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Denonville began
his march, leaving four hundred men in a hastily built fort to guard
the bateaux and canoes. Troops, officers, and Indians, all carried
their provisions at their backs. Some of the Christian Mohawks guided
them; but guides were scarcely needed, for a broad Indian trail led
150
from the bay to the great Seneca town, twenty-two miles southward.
They marched three leagues through the open forests of oak, and
encamped for the night. In the morning, the heat was intense. The men
gasped in the dead and sultry air of the woods, or grew faint in the
pitiless sun, as they waded waist-deep through the rank grass of the
narrow intervales. They passed safely through two dangerous defiles,
and, about two in the afternoon, began to enter a third. Dense forests
covered the hills on either hand. La Durantaye with Tonty and his
cousin Du Lhut led the advance, nor could all Canada have supplied
three men better for the work. Each led his band of coureurs de
bois, white Indians, without discipline, and scarcely capable of it,
but brave and accustomed to the woods. On their left were the Iroquois
converts from the missions of Saut St. Louis and the Mountain of
Montreal, fighting under the influence of their ghostly prompters
against their own countrymen. On the right were the pagan Indians from
the west. The woods were full of these painted spectres, grotesquely
horrible in horns and tail; and among them flitted the black robe of
Father Engelran, the Jesuit of Michillimackinac. Nicolas Perrot and
two other bush-ranging Frenchmen were assigned to command them, but in
fact they obeyed no man. These formed the vanguard, eight or nine
hundred in all, under an excellent officer, Callières, governor of
Montreal. Behind came the main body under Denonville, each of the four
battalions of regulars
151
alternating with a battalion of Canadians. Some of the regulars wore
light armor, while the Canadians were in plain attire of coarse cloth
or buckskin. Denonville, oppressed by the heat, marched in his shirt.
“It is a rough life,” wrote the marquis, “to tramp afoot through the
woods, carrying one’s own provisions in a haversack, devoured by
mosquitoes, and faring no better than a mere soldier.”
[15] With him was the Chevalier de
Vaudreuil, who had just arrived from France in command of the eight
hundred men left to guard the colony, and who, eager to take part in
the campaign, had pushed forward alone to join the army. Here, too,
were the Canadian seigniors at the head of their vassals, Berthier,
La Valterie, Granville, Longueuil, and many more. A guard of rangers
and Indians brought up the rear.

Scouts thrown out in front ran back with the report that they had
reached the Seneca clearings, and had seen no more dangerous enemy
than three or four women in the cornfields. This was a device of the
Senecas to cheat the French into the belief that the inhabitants were
still in the town. It had the desired effect. The vanguard pushed
rapidly forward, hoping to surprise the place, and ignorant that,
behind the ridge of thick forests on their right, among a tangled
growth of beech-trees in the gorge of a brook, three hundred ambushed
warriors lay biding their time.

Hurrying forward through the forest, they left the main body behind,
and soon reached the end
152
of the defile. The woods were still dense on
their left and front; but on their right lay a great marsh, covered
with alder thickets and rank grass. Suddenly the air was filled with
yells, and a rapid though distant fire was opened from the thickets
and the forest. Scores of painted savages, stark naked, some armed
with swords and some with hatchets, leaped screeching from their
ambuscade, and rushed against the van. Almost at the same moment a
burst of whoops and firing sounded in the defile behind. It was the
ambushed three hundred supporting the onset of their countrymen in
front; but they had made a fatal mistake. Deceived by the numbers of
the vanguard, they supposed it to be the whole army, never suspecting
that Denonville was close behind with sixteen hundred men. It was a
surprise on both sides. So dense was the forest that the advancing
battalions could see neither the enemy nor each other. Appalled by the
din of whoops and firing, redoubled by the echoes of the narrow
valley, the whole army was seized with something like a panic. Some of
the officers, it is said, threw themselves on the ground in their
fright. There were a few moments of intense bewilderment. The various
corps became broken and confused, and moved hither and thither without
knowing why. Denonville behaved with great courage. He ran, sword in
hand, to where the uproar was greatest, ordered the drums to beat the
charge, turned back the militia of Berthier who were trying to escape,
and commanded them and all others whom he met to fire
153
on whatever looked like an enemy. He was bravely seconded by
Callières, La Valterie, and several other officers. The Christian
Iroquois fought well from the first, leaping from tree to tree, and
exchanging shots and defiance with their heathen countrymen; till the
Senecas, seeing themselves confronted by numbers that seemed endless,
abandoned the field, after heavy loss, carrying with them many of their
dead and all of their wounded. [16]

Denonville made no attempt to
pursue. He had learned the dangers of this blind warfare of the woods;
and he feared that the Senecas would waylay him again in the labyrinth
of bushes that lay between him and the town. “Our troops,” he says,
“were all so overcome by the extreme heat and the long march that we
were forced to remain where we were till morning. We had the pain of
witnessing the usual cruelties of the Indians, who cut the dead bodies
into quarters, like butchers’ meat, to put into their kettles, and
opened most of them while still warm to drink the blood. Our rascally
Ottawas particularly distinguished themselves by these barbarities, as
well as by cowardice; for they made off in the fight. We had five or
six men killed on the spot, and about twenty wounded, among whom was
Father Engelran, who was badly hurt by a gun-shot. Some prisoners who
escaped from the Senecas tell us that they lost forty men killed
outright, twenty-five of whom we saw butchered.
154
One of the escaped prisoners saw the rest buried, and he saw also more
than sixty very dangerously wounded.” [17]

In the morning, the troops advanced in order of battle through a marsh
covered with alders and tall grass, whence they had no sooner emerged
than, says Abbé Belmont, “we began to see the famous Babylon of the
Senecas, where so many crimes have been committed, so much blood
spilled, and so many men burned. It was a village or town of bark, on
the top of a hill. They had burned it a week before. We found nothing
in it but the graveyard and the graves, full of snakes and other
creatures; a great mask, with teeth and eyes of brass, and a bearskin
drawn over it, with which they performed their conjurations.”
[18] The fire had also spared a number
of huge receptacles of bark, still filled with the last season’s corn;
while the fields around were covered with the growing crop, ripening in
the July sun. There were hogs, too, in great number; for the Iroquois did
not share the antipathy with which Indians are apt to regard that unsavory
animal, and from which certain philosophers have argued their descent
from the Jews.

The soldiers killed the hogs, burned the old corn, and hacked down the
new with their swords. Next they advanced to an abandoned Seneca fort
on a hill half a league distant, and burned it, with
155
all that it contained. Ten days were passed in the work of havoc. Three
neighboring villages were levelled, and all their fields laid waste.
The amount of corn destroyed was prodigious. Denonville reckons it at
the absurdly exaggerated amount of twelve hundred thousand bushels.

The Senecas, laden with such of their possessions as they could carry
off, had fled to their confederates in the east; and Denonville did
not venture to pursue them. His men, feasting without stint on green
corn and fresh pork, were sickening rapidly, and his Indian allies
were deserting him. “It is a miserable business,” he wrote, “to
command savages, who, as soon as they have knocked an enemy in the
head, ask for nothing but to go home and carry with them the scalp,
which they take off like a skull-cap. You cannot believe what trouble
I had to keep them till the corn was cut.”

On the twenty-fourth, he withdrew, with all his army, to the fortified
post at Irondequoit Bay, whence he proceeded to Niagara, in order to
accomplish his favorite purpose of building a fort there. The troops
were set at work, and a stockade was planted on the point of land at
the eastern angle between the River Niagara and Lake Ontario, the site
of the ruined fort built by La Salle nine years before.
[19] Here he left a hundred men, under the
Chevalier de Troyes, and, embarking with the rest of the army,
descended to Montreal.

The campaign was but half a success. Joined
156
to the capture of the English traders on the lakes, it had, indeed,
prevented the defection of the western Indians, and in some slight
measure restored their respect for the French, of whom, nevertheless,
one of them was heard to say that they were good for nothing but to
make war on hogs and corn. As for the Senecas, they were more enraged
than hurt. They could rebuild their bark villages in a few weeks; and,
though they had lost their harvest, their confederates would not let
them starve. [20]
A converted Iroquois had told the governor before his
departure that, if he overset a wasps’ nest, he must crush the wasps,
or they would sting him. Denonville left the wasps alive.

When
Dongan heard that the French had invaded the Senecas, seized
English traders on the lakes, and built a fort at Niagara, his wrath
was kindled anew. He sent to the Iroquois, and summoned them to meet
him at Albany; told the assembled chiefs that the late calamity had
fallen upon them because they had held councils with the French
without asking his leave; forbade them to do so again, and informed
them that, as subjects of King James, they must make no treaty, except
by the consent of his representative, the governor of New York. He
declared that the Ottawas and other remote tribes were also British
subjects; that the Iroquois should unite with them, to expel the
French from the west; and that all alike should bring down their
beaver skins to the English at Albany. Moreover, he enjoined them to
159
receive no more French Jesuits into their towns, and to call home
their countrymen whom these fathers had converted and enticed to
Canada. “Obey my commands,” added the governor, “for that is the only
way to eat well and sleep well, without fear or disturbance.” The
Iroquois, who wanted his help, seemed to assent to all he said. “We
will fight the French,” exclaimed their orator, “as long as we have a
man left.” [1]

At the same time, Dongan wrote to Denonville demanding the immediate
surrender of the Dutch and English captured on the lakes. Denonville
angrily replied that he would keep the prisoners, since Dongan had
broken the treaty of neutrality by “giving aid and comfort to the
savages.” The English governor, in return, upbraided his correspondent
for invading British territory. “I will endevour to protect his
Majesty’s subjects here from your unjust invasions, till I hear from
the King, my Master, who is the greatest and most glorious Monarch
that ever set on a Throne, and would do as much to propagate the
Christian faith as any prince that lives. He did not send me here to
suffer you to give laws to his subjects. I hope, notwithstanding all
your trained souldiers and greate Officers come from Europe, that our
masters at home will suffer us to do ourselves justice on you for the
injuries and spoyle you have committed on us; and I assure you, Sir,
if my Master gives leave, I will be as soon at Quebeck as
160
you shall be
att Albany. What you alleage concerning my assisting the Sinnakees
(Senecas) with arms and ammunition to warr against you was never
given by mee untill the sixt of August last, when understanding of
your unjust proceedings in invading the King my Master’s territorys in
a hostill manner, I then gave them powder, lead, and armes, and united
the five nations together to defend that part of our King’s dominions
from your jnjurious invasion. And as for offering them men, in that
you doe me wrong, our men being all buisy then at their harvest, and I
leave itt to your judgment whether there was any occasion when only
foure hundred of them engaged with your whole army. I advise you to
send home all the Christian and Indian prisoners the King of England’s
subjects you unjustly do deteine. This is what I have thought fitt to
answer to your reflecting and provoking letter.”
[2]

As for the French claims to the Iroquois country and the upper lakes,
he turned them to ridicule. They were founded, in part, on the
missions established there by the Jesuits. “The King of China,”
observes Dongan, “never goes anywhere without two Jessuits with him. I
wonder you make not the like pretence to that Kingdome.” He speaks
with equal irony of the claim based on discovery: “Pardon me if I say
itt is a mistake, except you will affirme that a few loose fellowes
rambling amongst Indians to keep themselves from starving gives the
French a right to the Countrey.” And of the claim
161
based on geographical divisions: “Your reason is that some rivers or rivoletts
of this country run out into the great river of Canada. O just God!
what new, farr-fetched, and unheard-of pretence is this for a title
to a country. The French King may have as good a pretence to all those
Countrys that drink clarett and Brandy.” [3]
In spite of his sarcasms, it is clear that the claim of prior discovery and
occupation was on the side of the French.

The dispute now assumed a new phase. James II. at length consented to
own the Iroquois as his subjects, ordering Dongan to protect them, and
repel the French by force of arms, should they attack them again.
[4]
At the same
time, conferences were opened at London between the French ambassador
and the English commissioners appointed to settle the questions at
issue. Both disputants claimed the Iroquois as subjects, and the
contest wore an aspect more serious than before.

The royal declaration was a great relief to Dongan. Thus far he had
acted at his own risk; now he was sustained by the orders of his king.
He instantly assumed a warlike attitude; and, in the next spring,
wrote to the Earl of Sunderland that he had been at Albany all winter,
with four hundred infantry, fifty horsemen, and eight hundred Indians.
This was not without cause, for a report had come from Canada that the
French
162
were about to march on Albany to destroy it. “And now, my
Lord,” continues Dongan, “we must build forts in
ye countrey upon
ye great Lakes,
as ye French doe, otherwise we lose
ye Countrey,
ye Bever trade, and our Indians.”
[5] Denonville, meanwhile, had begun
to yield, and promised to send back McGregory and the men captured
with him. [6]
Dongan, not satisfied, insisted on payment for all the captured
merchandise, and on the immediate demolition of Fort Niagara. He added
another demand, which must have been singularly galling to his rival.
It was to the effect that the Iroquois prisoners seized at Fort
Frontenac, and sent to the galleys in France, should be surrendered as
British subjects to the English ambassador at Paris or the secretary
of state in London. [7]

Denonville was sorely perplexed. He was hard pressed, and eager for
peace with the Iroquois at any price; but Dongan was using every means
to prevent their treating of peace with the French governor until he
had complied with all the English demands. In this extremity,
Denonville sent Father Vaillant to Albany, in the hope of bringing his
intractable rival to conditions less humiliating. The Jesuit played
his part with ability, and proved more than a match for his adversary
in dialectics; but Dongan held fast to all his demands. Vaillant
163
tried to temporize, and asked for a truce, with a view to a final settlement
by reference to the two kings. [8]
Dongan referred the question to a meeting of Iroquois chiefs, who declared
in reply that they would make neither peace nor truce till Fort Niagara was
demolished and all the prisoners restored. Dongan, well pleased,
commended their spirit, and assured them that King James, “who is the
greatest man the sunn shines uppon, and never told a ly in his life,
has given you his Royall word to protect you.”
[9] Vaillant returned from his bootless
errand; and a stormy correspondence followed between the two governors.
Dongan renewed his demands, then protested his wish for peace, extolled
King James for his pious zeal, and declared that he was sending over
missionaries of his own to convert the Iroquois.
[10] What Denonville wanted was not their
conversion by Englishmen, but their conversion by Frenchmen, and the presence
in their towns of those most useful political agents, the Jesuits.
[11] He
replied angrily, charging Dongan with preventing the conversion of the
Iroquois by driving off the French missionaries, and accusing him,
farther, of instigating the tribes of New York to attack
164
Canada.[12] Suddenly there was a
change in the temper of his letters. He wrote to his rival in terms of
studied civility; declared that he wished he could meet him, and
consult with him on the best means of advancing the cause of true
religion; begged that he would not refuse him his friendship; and
thanked him in warm terms for befriending some French prisoners whom
he had saved from the Iroquois, and treated with great kindness.
[13]

This change was due to despatches from Versailles, in which Denonville
was informed that the matters in dispute would soon be amicably
settled by the commissioners; that he was to keep on good terms with
the English commanders, and, what pleased him still more, that the
king of England was about to recall Dongan.
[14]
In fact, James II.
had resolved on remodelling his American colonies. New York, New
Jersey, and New England had been formed into one government under Sir
Edmund Andros; and Dongan was summoned home, where a regiment was
given him, with the rank of major-general of artillery. Denonville
says that, in his efforts to extend English trade to the Great
165
Lakes and the Mississippi, his late rival had been influenced by motives
of personal gain. Be this as it may, he was a bold and vigorous defender
of the claims of the British crown.

Sir Edmund Andros now reigned over New York; and, by the terms of his
commission, his rule stretched westward to the Pacific. The usual
official courtesies passed between him and Denonville; but Andros
renewed all the demands of his predecessor, claimed the Iroquois as
subjects, and forbade the French to attack them.
[15]
The new governor was worse than the old. Denonville wrote to the
minister: “I send you copies of his letters, by which you will see that
the spirit of Dongan has entered into the heart of his successor, who may
be less passionate and less interested, but who is, to say the least, quite
as much opposed to us, and perhaps more dangerous by his suppleness and
smoothness than the other was by his violence. What he has just done
among the Iroquois, whom he pretends to be under his government, and
whom he prevents from coming to meet me, is a certain proof that
neither he nor the other English governors, nor their people, will
refrain from doing this colony all the harm they can.”
[16]

While these things were passing, the state of Canada was deplorable,
and the position of its
166
governor as mortifying as it was painful. He
thought with good reason that the maintenance of the new fort at
Niagara was of great importance to the colony, and he had repeatedly
refused the demands of Dongan and the Iroquois for its demolition. But
a power greater than sachems and governors presently intervened. The
provisions left at Niagara, though abundant, were atrociously bad.
Scurvy and other malignant diseases soon broke out among the soldiers.
The Senecas prowled about the place, and no man dared venture out for
hunting, fishing, or firewood. [17]
The fort was first a prison, then a hospital, then a
charnel-house, till before spring the garrison of a hundred men was
reduced to ten or twelve. In this condition, they were found towards
the end of April by a large war-party of friendly Miamis, who entered
the place and held it till a French detachment at length arrived for
its relief. [18]
The garrison of Fort Frontenac had suffered from the same
causes, though not to the same degree. Denonville feared that he
should be forced to abandon them both. The way was so long and so
dangerous, and the governor had grown of late so cautious, that he
dreaded the risk of maintaining such remote communications. On second
thought, he resolved to keep Frontenac and sacrifice Niagara. He
promised Dongan that he would demolish it, and he kept his word.
[19]

He was forced to another and a deeper humiliation. At the imperious
demand of Dongan and the Iroquois, he begged the king to send back the
prisoners entrapped at Fort Frontenac, and he wrote to the minister:
“Be pleased, Monseigneur, to remember that I had the honor to tell you
that, in order to attain the peace necessary to the country, I was
obliged to promise that I would beg you to send back to us the
prisoners I sent you last year. I know you gave orders that they
should be well treated, but I am informed that, though they were well
enough treated at first, your orders were not afterwards executed with
the same fidelity. If ill treatment has caused them all to die,—for
they are people who easily fall into dejection, and who die of
it,—and if none of them come back, I do not know at all whether we
can persuade these barbarians not to attack us again.”
[20]

What had brought the marquis to this pass? Famine, destitution,
disease, and the Iroquois were making Canada their prey. The fur trade
had been stopped for two years; and the people, bereft of their only
means of subsistence, could contribute nothing to their own defence.
Above Three Rivers, the whole population was imprisoned in stockade
forts hastily built in every seigniory.
[21]
168
Here they were safe, provided that
they never ventured out; but their fields were left untilled, and the
governor was already compelled to feed many of them at the expense of
the king. The Iroquois roamed among the deserted settlements or
prowled like lynxes about the forts, waylaying convoys and killing or
capturing stragglers. Their war-parties were usually small; but their
movements were so mysterious and their attacks so sudden, that they
spread a universal panic through the upper half of the colony. They
were the wasps which Denonville had failed to kill.

“We should
succumb,” wrote the distressed governor, “if our cause were not the
cause of God. Your Majesty’s zeal for religion, and the great things
you have done for the destruction of heresy, encourage me to hope that
you will be the bulwark of the Faith in the new world as you are in
the old. I cannot give you a truer idea of the war we have to wage
with the Iroquois than by comparing them to a great number of wolves
or other ferocious beasts, issuing out of a vast forest to ravage the
neighboring settlements. The people gather to hunt them down; but
nobody can find their lair, for they are always in motion. An abler
man than I would be greatly at a loss to manage the affairs of this
country. It is for the interest of the colony to have peace at any
cost whatever. For the glory of the king and the good of religion, we
should be glad to have it an advantageous one; and so it would have
been, but for the
169
malice of the English and the protection they have
given our enemies.” [22]

And yet he had, one would think, a reasonable force at his disposal.
His thirty-two companies of regulars were reduced by this time to
about fourteen hundred men, but he had also three or four hundred
Indian converts, besides the militia of the colony, of whom he had
stationed a large body under Vaudreuil at the head of the Island of
Montreal. All told, they were several times more numerous than the
agile warriors who held the colony in terror. He asked for eight
hundred more regulars. The king sent him three hundred. Affairs grew
worse, and he grew desperate. Rightly judging that the best means of
defence was to take the offensive, he conceived the plan of a double
attack on the Iroquois, one army to assail the Onondagas and Cayugas,
another the Mohawks and Oneidas. [23]
Since to reach the
Mohawks as he proposed, by the way of Lake Champlain, he must pass
through territory indisputably British, the attempt would be a
flagrant violation of the treaty of neutrality. Nevertheless, he
implored the king to send him four thousand soldiers to accomplish it.
[24]
His fast friend,
the bishop, warmly seconded his appeal. “The glory of God is
involved,”
170
wrote the head of the church, “for the Iroquois are the
only tribe who oppose the progress of the gospel. The glory of the
king is involved, for they are the only tribe who refuse to recognize
his grandeur and his might. They hold the French in the deepest
contempt; and, unless they are completely humbled within two years,
his Majesty will have no colony left in Canada.”
[25]
And the prelate proceeds to tell the minister
how, in his opinion, the war ought to be conducted. The appeal was
vain. “His Majesty agrees with you,” wrote Seignelay, “that three or
four thousand men would be the best means of making peace, but he
cannot spare them now. If the enemy breaks out again, raise the
inhabitants, and fight as well as you can till his Majesty is prepared
to send you troops.” [26]

A hope had dawned on the governor. He had been more active of late in
negotiating than in fighting, and his diplomacy had prospered more
than his arms. It may be remembered that some of the Iroquois
entrapped at Fort Frontenac had been given to their Christian
relatives in the mission villages. Here they had since remained.
Denonville thought that he might use them as messengers to their
heathen countrymen, and he sent one or more of them to Onondaga with
gifts and overtures of peace. That shrewd old politician, Big Mouth,
was still strong in influence at the Iroquois capital, and his name
was great to the farthest bounds of the confederacy. He knew by
personal experience the advantages of a neutral
171
position between the
rival European powers, from both of whom he received gifts and
attentions; and he saw that what was good for him was good for the
confederacy, since, if it gave itself to neither party, both would
court its alliance. In his opinion, it had now leaned long enough
towards the English; and a change of attitude had become expedient.
Therefore, as Denonville promised the return of the prisoners, and was
plainly ready to make other concessions, Big Mouth, setting at naught
the prohibitions of Andros, consented to a conference with the French.
He set out at his leisure for Montreal, with six Onondaga, Cayuga, and
Oneida chiefs; and, as no diplomatist ever understood better the
advantage of negotiating at the head of an imposing force, a body of
Iroquois warriors, to the number, it is said, of twelve hundred, set
out before him, and silently took path to Canada.

The ambassadors paddled across the lake and presented themselves
before the commandant of Fort Frontenac, who received them with
distinction, and ordered Lieutenant Perelle to escort them to
Montreal. Scarcely had the officer conducted his august charge five
leagues on their way, when, to his amazement, he found himself in the
midst of six hundred Iroquois warriors, who amused themselves for a
time with his terror, and then accompanied him as far as Lake St.
Francis, where he found another body of savages nearly equal in
number. Here the warriors halted, and the ambassadors
172
with their escort gravely pursued their way to meet Denonville at
Montreal. [27]

Big Mouth spoke haughtily, like a man who knew his power. He told the
governor that he and his people were subjects neither of the French
nor of the English; that they wished to be friends of both; that they
held their country of the Great Spirit; and that they had never been
conquered in war. He declared that the Iroquois knew the weakness of
the French, and could easily exterminate them; that they had formed a
plan of burning all the houses and barns of Canada, killing the
cattle, setting fire to the ripe grain, and then, when the people were
starving, attacking the forts; but that he, Big Mouth, had prevented
its execution. He concluded by saying that he was allowed but four
days to bring back the governor’s reply; and that, if he were kept
waiting longer, he would not answer for what might happen.
[28] Though it appeared by
some expressions in his speech that he was ready to make peace only
with the French, leaving the Iroquois free to attack the Indian allies
of the colony, and though, while the ambassadors were at Montreal,
their warriors on the river above actually killed several of the
Indian converts, Denonville felt himself compelled to pretend
ignorance of the outrage. [29]
A declaration of neutrality was drawn up, and Big Mouth
173
affixed to it the figures of sundry birds and beasts as the signatures
of himself and his fellow-chiefs. [30]
He promised, too, that within a certain time deputies from the whole
confederacy should come to Montreal and conclude a general peace.

The time arrived, and they did not appear. It became known, however,
that a number of chiefs were coming from Onondaga to explain the
delay, and to promise that the deputies should soon follow. The chiefs
in fact were on their way. They reached La Famine, the scene of La
Barre’s meeting with Big Mouth; but here an unexpected incident
arrested them, and completely changed the aspect of affairs.

Among the
Hurons of Michillimackinac there was a chief of high renown named
Kondiaronk, or the Rat. He was in the prime of life, a redoubted
warrior, and a sage counsellor. The French seem to have admired him
greatly. “He is a gallant man,” says La Hontan, “if ever there was
one;” while Charlevoix declares that he was the ablest Indian the
French ever knew in America, and that he had nothing of the savage but
the name and the dress. In spite of the father’s eulogy, the moral
condition of the Rat savored strongly of the wigwam. He had given
Denonville great trouble by his constant intrigues with the Iroquois,
with whom he had once made a plot for the massacre of his neighbors,
the Ottawas, under cover of a pretended treaty.
[31] The French had spared no pains to gain
174
him; and he had at length been induced to declare for them, under a
pledge from the governor that the war should never cease till the
Iroquois were destroyed. During the summer, he raised a party of forty
warriors, and came down the lakes in quest of Iroquois scalps.
[32] On the way, he
stopped at Fort Frontenac to hear the news, when, to his amazement,
the commandant told him that deputies from Onondaga were coming in a
few days to conclude peace, and that he had better go home at once.

“It is well,” replied the Rat.

He knew that for the Hurons it was not well. He and his tribe stood
fully committed to the war, and for them peace between the French and
the Iroquois would be a signal of destruction, since Denonville could
not or would not protect his allies. The Rat paddled off with his
warriors. He had secretly learned the route of the expected deputies;
and he shaped his course, not, as he had pretended, for
Michillimackinac, but for La Famine, where he knew that they would
land. Having reached his destination, he watched and waited four or
five days, till canoes at length appeared, approaching from the
direction of Onondaga. On this, the Rat and his friends hid themselves
in the bushes.

The new comers were the messengers sent as precursors of the embassy.
At their head was a famous personage named Decanisora, or
Tegannisorens, with whom were three other chiefs, and, it seems, a
number of warriors. They had scarcely
175
landed when the ambushed Hurons
gave them a volley of bullets, killed one of the chiefs, wounded all
the rest, and then, rushing upon them, seized the whole party except a
warrior who escaped with a broken arm. Having secured his prisoners,
the Rat told them that he had acted on the suggestion of Denonville,
who had informed him that an Iroquois war-party was to pass that way.
The astonished captives protested that they were envoys of peace. The
Rat put on a look of amazement, then of horror and fury, and presently
burst into invectives against Denonville for having made him the
instrument of such atrocious perfidy. “Go, my brothers,” he exclaimed,
“go home to your people. Though there is war between us, I give you
your liberty. Onontio has made me do so black a deed that I shall
never be happy again till your five tribes take a just vengeance upon
him.” After giving them guns, powder, and ball, he sent them on their
way, well pleased with him and filled with rage against the governor.

In accordance with Indian usage, he, however, kept one of them to be
adopted, as he declared, in place of one of his followers whom he had
lost in the skirmish; then, recrossing the lake, he went alone to Fort
Frontenac, and, as he left the gate to rejoin his party, he said
coolly, “I have killed the peace: we shall see how the governor will
get out of this
176
business.” [33] Then, without loss of
time, he repaired to Michillimackinac, and gave his Iroquois prisoner
to the officer in command. No news of the intended peace had yet
reached that distant outpost; and, though the unfortunate Iroquois
told the story of his mission and his capture, the Rat declared that
it was a crazy invention inspired by the fear of death, and the
prisoner was immediately shot by a file of soldiers. The Rat now sent
for an old Iroquois who had long been a prisoner at the Huron village,
telling him with a mournful air that he was free to return to his
people, and recount the cruelty of the French, who, had put their
countryman to death. The liberated Iroquois faithfully acquitted
himself of his mission. [34]

One incident seemed for a moment likely to rob the intriguer of the
fruits of his ingenuity. The Iroquois who had escaped in the skirmish
contrived to reach Fort Frontenac some time after the last visit of
the Rat. He told what had happened; and, after being treated with the
utmost attention, he was sent to Onondaga, charged with explanations
and regrets. The Iroquois dignitaries seemed satisfied, and Denonville
wrote to the minister that
177
there was still good hope of peace. He little knew his enemy. They could
dissemble and wait; but they neither believed the governor nor forgave
him. His supposed treachery at La Famine, and his real treachery at Fort
Frontenac, filled them with a patient but unextinguishable rage. They sent
him word that they were ready to renew the negotiation; then they sent
again, to say that Andros forbade them. Without doubt they used his
prohibition as a pretext. Months passed, and Denonville remained in
suspense. He did not trust his Indian allies, nor did they trust him.
Like the Rat and his Hurons, they dreaded the conclusion of peace, and
wished the war to continue, that the French might bear the brunt of it,
and stand between them and the wrath of the Iroquois.
[35]

In the direction of the Iroquois, there was a long and ominous
silence. It was broken at last by the crash of a thunderbolt. On the
night between the fourth and fifth of August, a violent hail-storm
burst over Lake St. Louis, an expansion of the St. Lawrence a little
above Montreal. Concealed by the tempest and the darkness, fifteen
hundred warriors landed at La Chine, and silently posted themselves
about the houses of the sleeping settlers, then screeched the
war-whoop, and began the most frightful massacre in Canadian history.
The houses were burned, and men, women, and children indiscriminately
butchered. In the neighborhood were three stockade forts, called
Rémy, Roland, and La Présentation; and they all had
178
garrisons. There was
also an encampment of two hundred regulars about three miles distant,
under an officer named Subercase, then absent at Montreal on a visit
to Denonville, who had lately arrived with his wife and family. At
four o’clock in the morning, the troops in this encampment heard a
cannon-shot from one of the forts. They were at once ordered under
arms. Soon after, they saw a man running towards them, just escaped
from the butchery. He told his story, and passed on with the news to
Montreal, six miles distant. Then several fugitives appeared, chased
by a band of Iroquois, who gave over the pursuit at sight of the
soldiers, but pillaged several houses before their eyes. The day was
well advanced before Subercase arrived. He ordered the troops to
march. About a hundred armed inhabitants had joined them, and they
moved together towards La Chine. Here they found the houses still
burning, and the bodies of their inmates strewn among them or hanging
from the stakes where they had been tortured. They learned from a
French surgeon, escaped from the enemy, that the Iroquois were all
encamped a mile and a half farther on, behind a tract of forest.
Subercase, whose force had been strengthened by troops from the forts,
resolved to attack them; and, had he been allowed to do so, he would
probably have punished them severely, for most of them were helplessly
drunk with brandy taken from the houses of the traders. Sword in hand,
at the head of his men, the daring officer entered the forest; but, at
that moment, a voice from the rear
179
commanded a halt. It was that of
the Chevalier de Vaudreuil, just come from Montreal, with positive
orders from Denonville to run no risks and stand solely on the
defensive. Subercase was furious. High words passed between him and
Vaudreuil, but he was forced to obey.

The troops were led back to Fort Roland, where about five hundred
regulars and militia were now collected under command of Vaudreuil. On
the next day, eighty men from Fort Rémy attempted to join them; but
the Iroquois had slept off the effect of their orgies, and were again
on the alert. The unfortunate detachment was set upon by a host of
savages, and cut to pieces in full sight of Fort Roland. All were
killed or captured, except Le Moyne de Longueuil, and a few others,
who escaped within the gate of Fort Rémy.
[36]

Montreal was wild with terror. It had been fortified with palisades
since the war began; but, though there were troops in the town under
the governor himself, the people were in mortal dread. No attack was
made either on the town or on any of the forts, and such of the
inhabitants as could reach them were safe; while the Iroquois held
undisputed possession of the open country, burned all the houses and
barns over an extent of nine miles, and roamed in small parties,
pillaging and scalping, over more than twenty miles. There is
180
no mention of their having encountered opposition; nor do they seem to
have met with any loss but that of some warriors killed in the attack
on the detachment from Fort Rémy, and that of three drunken stragglers
who were caught and thrown into a cellar in Fort La Présentation. When
they came to their senses, they defied their captors, and fought with
such ferocity that it was necessary to shoot them. Charlevoix says
that the invaders remained in the neighborhood of Montreal till the
middle of October, or more than two months; but this seems incredible,
since troops and militia enough to drive them all into the St.
Lawrence might easily have been collected in less than a week. It is
certain, however, that their stay was strangely long. Troops and
inhabitants seem to have been paralyzed with fear.

At length, most of them took to their canoes, and recrossed Lake St.
Louis in a body, giving ninety yells to show that they had ninety
prisoners in their clutches. This was not all; for the whole number
carried off was more than a hundred and twenty, besides about two
hundred who had the good fortune to be killed on the spot. As the
Iroquois passed the forts, they shouted, “Onontio, you deceived us,
and now we have deceived you.” Towards evening, they encamped on the
farther side of the lake, and began to torture and devour their
prisoners. On that miserable night, stupefied and speechless groups
stood gazing from the strand of La Chine at the lights that gleamed
along the distant shore of Châteaugay, where their
181
friends, wives, parents, or children agonized in the fires of the Iroquois,
and scenes were enacted of indescribable and nameless horror. The greater
part of the prisoners were, however, reserved to be distributed among the
towns of the confederacy, and there tortured for the diversion of the
inhabitants. While some of the invaders went home to celebrate their
triumph, others roamed in small parties through all the upper parts of
the colony, spreading universal terror.
[37]

Canada lay bewildered and benumbed under the shock of this calamity;
but the cup of her misery was not full. There was revolution in
182
England. James II., the friend and ally of France, had been driven
from his kingdom, and William of Orange had seized his vacant throne.
Soon there came news of war between the two crowns. The Iroquois alone
had brought the colony to the brink of ruin; and now they would be
supported by the neighboring British colonies, rich, strong, and
populous, compared to impoverished and depleted Canada.

A letter of recall for Denonville was already on its way.
[38] His successor arrived in
October, and the marquis sailed for France. He was a good soldier in a
regular war, and a subordinate command; and he had some of the
qualities of a good governor, while lacking others quite as essential.
He had more activity than vigor, more personal bravery than firmness,
and more clearness of perception than executive power. He filled his
despatches with excellent recommendations, but was not the man to
carry them into effect. He was sensitive, fastidious, critical, and
conventional, and plumed himself on his honor, which was not always
able to bear a strain; though as regards illegal trade, the besetting
sin of Canadian governors, his hands were undoubtedly clean.
[39] It is said that he had an
183
instinctive antipathy for Indians, such as some
persons have for certain animals; and the coureurs de bois, and
other lawless classes of the Canadian population, appeared to please
him no better. Their license and insubordination distressed him, and
he constantly complained of them to the king. For the Church and its
hierarchy his devotion was unbounded; and his government was a season
of unwonted sunshine for the ecclesiastics, like the balmy days of the
Indian summer amid the gusts of November. They exhausted themselves in
eulogies of his piety; and, in proof of its depth and solidity, Mother
Juchereau tells us that he did not regard station and rank as very
useful aids to salvation. While other governors complained of too many
priests, Denonville begged for more. All was harmony between him and
Bishop Saint-Vallier; and the prelate was constantly his friend, even
to the point of justifying his worst act, the treacherous seizure of
the Iroquois neutrals. [40]
When he left Canada, the only mourner besides the
churchmen was his colleague, the intendant Champigny; for the two
chiefs of the colony, joined in a common union with the Jesuits, lived
together in unexampled concord. On his arrival at court, the good
offices of his clerical allies gained for him the highly honorable
post of governor of the royal children, the young Dukes of Burgundy,
Anjou, and Berri.

The
sun of Louis XIV. had reached its zenith. From a morning of
unexampled brilliancy it had mounted to the glare of a cloudless noon;
but the hour of its decline was near. The mortal enemy of France was
on the throne of England, turning against her from that new point of
vantage all the energies of his unconquerable genius. An invalid built
the Bourbon monarchy, and another invalid battered and defaced the
imposing structure: two potent and daring spirits in two frail bodies,
Richelieu and William of Orange.

Versailles gave no sign of waning glories. On three evenings of the
week, it was the pleasure of the king that the whole court should
assemble in the vast suite of apartments now known as the Halls of
Abundance, of Venus, of Diana, of Mars,
185
of Mercury, and of Apollo. The
magnificence of their decorations, pictures of the great Italian
masters, sculptures, frescoes, mosaics, tapestries, vases and statues
of silver and gold; the vista of light and splendor that opened
through the wide portals; the courtly throngs, feasting, dancing,
gaming, promenading, conversing, formed a scene which no palace of
Europe could rival or approach. Here were all the great historic names
of France, princes, warriors, statesmen, and all that was highest in
rank and place; the flower, in short, of that brilliant society, so
dazzling, captivating, and illusory. In former years, the king was
usually present, affable and gracious, mingling with his courtiers and
sharing their amusements; but he had grown graver of late, and was
more often in his cabinet, laboring with his ministers on the task of
administration, which his extravagance and ambition made every day
more burdensome. [1]

There was one corner of the world where his emblem, the sun, would not
shine on him. He had done his best for Canada, and had got nothing for
his pains but news of mishaps and troubles. He was growing tired of
the colony which he had nursed with paternal fondness, and he was more
than half angry with it because it did not prosper. Denonville’s
letters had grown worse and worse; and,
186
though he had not heard as yet
of the last great calamity, he was sated with ill tidings already.

Count Frontenac stood before him. Since his recall, he had lived at
court, needy and no longer in favor; but he had influential friends,
and an intriguing wife, always ready to serve him. The king knew his
merits as well as his faults; and, in the desperate state of his
Canadian affairs, he had been led to the resolution of restoring him
to the command from which, for excellent reasons, he had removed him
seven years before. He now told him that, in his belief, the charges
brought against him were without foundation.
[2] “I send you back to
Canada,” he is reported to have said, “where I am sure that you will
serve me as well as you did before; and I ask nothing more of you.”
[3] The post
was not a tempting one to a man in his seventieth year. Alone and
unsupported,—for the king, with Europe rising against him, would give
him no more troops,—he was to restore the prostrate colony to hope
and courage, and fight two enemies with a force that had proved no
match for one of them alone. The audacious count trusted himself, and
undertook the task; received the royal instructions, and took his last
leave of the master whom even he after a fashion honored and admired.

He repaired to Rochelle, where two ships of the royal navy were
waiting his arrival, embarked in
187
one of them, and sailed for the New
World. An heroic remedy had been prepared for the sickness of Canada,
and Frontenac was to be the surgeon. The cure, however, was not of his
contriving. Denonville had sent Callières, his second in command, to
represent the state of the colony to the court, and beg for help.
Callières saw that there was little hope of more troops or any
considerable supply of money; and he laid before the king a plan,
which had at least the recommendations of boldness and cheapness. This
was to conquer New York with the forces already in Canada, aided only
by two ships of war. The blow, he argued, should be struck at once,
and the English taken by surprise. A thousand regulars and six hundred
Canadian militia should pass Lake Champlain and Lake George in canoes
and bateaux, cross to the Hudson and capture Albany, where they would
seize all the river craft and descend the Hudson to the town of New
York, which, as Callières stated, had then about two hundred houses
and four hundred fighting men. The two ships were to cruise at the
mouth of the harbor, and wait the arrival of the troops, which was to
be made known to them by concerted signals, whereupon they were to
enter and aid in the attack. The whole expedition, he thought, might
be accomplished in a month; so that by the end of October the king
would be master of all the country. The advantages were manifold. The
Iroquois, deprived of English arms and ammunition, would be at the
mercy of the French; the question of English rivalry in the
188
west would
be settled for ever; the king would acquire a means of access to his
colony incomparably better than the St. Lawrence, and one that
remained open all the year; and, finally, New England would be
isolated, and prepared for a possible conquest in the future.

The king accepted the plan with modifications, which complicated and
did not improve it. Extreme precautions were taken to insure secrecy;
but the vast distances, the difficult navigation, and the accidents of
weather appear to have been forgotten in this amended scheme of
operation. There was, moreover, a long delay in fitting the two ships
for sea. The wind was ahead, and they were fifty-two days in reaching
Chedabucto, at the eastern end of Nova Scotia. Thence Frontenac and
Callières had orders to proceed in a merchant ship to Quebec, which
might require a month more; and, on arriving, they were to prepare for
the expedition, while at the same time Frontenac was to send back a
letter to the naval commander at Chedabucto, revealing the plan to
him, and ordering him to sail to New York to co-operate in it. It was
the twelfth of September when Chedabucto was reached, and the
enterprise was ruined by the delay. Frontenac’s first step in his new
government was a failure, though one for which he was in no way
answerable. [4]

It will be well to observe what were the intentions of the king
towards the colony which he proposed to conquer. They were as follows:
If any Catholics were found in New York, they might be left
undisturbed, provided that they took an oath of allegiance to the
king. Officers, and other persons who had the means of paying ransoms,
were to be thrown into prison. All lands in the colony, except those
of Catholics swearing allegiance, were to be taken from their owners,
and granted under a feudal tenure to the French officers and soldiers.
All property, public or private, was to be seized, a portion of it
given to the grantees of the land, and the rest sold on account of the
king. Mechanics and other workmen might, at the discretion of the
commanding officer, be kept as prisoners to work at fortifications and
do other labor. The rest of the English and Dutch inhabitants, men,
women, and children, were to be carried out of the colony and
dispersed in New England, Pennsylvania, or other places, in such a
manner that they could not combine in any attempt to recover their
property and their country. And, that the conquest might be perfectly
secure, the nearest settlements of New England were to be destroyed,
and those more remote laid under contribution.
[5]

In the next century, some of the people of Acadia were torn from their
homes by order of a British commander. The act was harsh and violent,
and the innocent were involved with the guilty; but many of the
sufferers had provoked their fate, and deserved it.

Louis XIV. commanded that eighteen thousand unoffending persons should
be stripped of all that they possessed, and cast out to the mercy of
the wilderness. The atrocity of the plan is matched by its folly. The
king gave explicit orders, but he gave neither ships nor men enough to
accomplish them; and the Dutch farmers, goaded to desperation, would
have cut his sixteen hundred soldiers to pieces. It was the scheme of
a man blinded by a long course of success. Though perverted by
flattery and hardened by unbridled power, he was not cruel by nature;
and here, as in the burning of the Palatinate and the persecution of
the Huguenots, he would have stood aghast, if his dull imagination
could have pictured to him the miseries he was preparing to inflict.
[6]

With little hope left that the grand enterprise against New York could
succeed, Frontenac made sail for Quebec, and, stopping by the way at
Isle Percée, learned from Récollet missionaries the irruption of the
Iroquois at Montreal. He hastened on; but the wind was still against
him, and the autumn woods were turning brown before he reached his
destination. It was evening when he landed, amid fireworks,
illuminations, and the firing of cannon. All Quebec came to meet him
by torchlight; the members of the council offered their respects, and
the Jesuits made him an harangue of welcome.
[7]
It was but a welcome of words. They and the councillors had done
their best to have him recalled, and hoped that they were rid of him
for ever; but now he was among them again, rasped by the memory of
real or fancied wrongs. The count, however, had no time for
quarrelling. The king had told him to bury old animosities and forget
the past, and for the present he was too busy to break the royal
injunction. [8]
He caused boats to be made ready, and in spite of
incessant rains pushed up the river to Montreal. Here he found
Denonville and his frightened wife. Every thing was in confusion. The
Iroquois were gone, leaving dejection and terror behind them.
Frontenac reviewed the troops. There were seven or eight hundred of
them in the town, the rest being in garrison at the
192
various forts. Then he repaired to what was once La Chine, and surveyed
the miserable waste of ashes and desolation that spread for miles around.

To his extreme disgust, he learned that Denonville had sent a Canadian
officer by secret paths to Fort Frontenac, with orders to Valrenne,
the commandant, to blow it up, and return with his garrison to
Montreal. Frontenac had built the fort, had given it his own name, and
had cherished it with a paternal fondness, reinforced by strong hopes
of making money out of it. For its sake he had become the butt of
scandal and opprobrium; but not the less had he always stood its
strenuous and passionate champion. An Iroquois envoy had lately with
great insolence demanded its destruction of Denonville; and this
alone, in the eyes of Frontenac, was ample reason for maintaining it
at any cost. [9] He
still had hope that it might be saved, and with all the energy of
youth he proceeded to collect canoes, men, provisions, and arms;
battled against dejection, insubordination, and fear, and in a few
days despatched a convoy of three hundred men to relieve the place,
and stop the execution of Denonville’s orders. His orders had been but
too promptly obeyed. The convoy was scarcely gone an hour, when, to
Frontenac’s unutterable wrath, Valrenne appeared with his garrison. He
reported that he had set fire to every thing in the fort that would
burn, sunk the three vessels belonging to it, thrown the cannon into
the lake, mined the walls and bastions, and left matches burning
193
in the powder magazine; and, further, that when he and his men were five
leagues on their way to Montreal a dull and distant explosion told
them that the mines had sprung. It proved afterwards that the
destruction was not complete; and the Iroquois took possession of the
abandoned fort, with a large quantity of stores and munitions left by
the garrison in their too hasty retreat. [10]

There was one ray of light through the clouds. The unwonted news of a
victory came to Montreal. It was small, but decisive, and might be an
earnest of greater things to come. Before Frontenac’s arrival,
Denonville had sent a reconnoitring party up the Ottawa. They had gone
no farther than the Lake of Two Mountains, when they met twenty-two
Iroquois in two large canoes, who immediately bore down upon them,
yelling furiously. The French party consisted of twenty-eight
coureurs de bois under Du Lhut and Mantet, excellent partisan
chiefs, who manœuvred so well that the rising sun blazed full
in the eyes of the advancing enemy, and spoiled their aim. The French
received their fire, which wounded one man; then, closing with them
while their guns were empty, gave them a volley, which killed and
wounded eighteen of their number. One swam ashore. The remaining three
were captured, and given to the Indian allies to be burned.
[11]

194
This gleam of sunshine passed, and all grew black again. On a snowy
November day, a troop of Iroquois fell on the settlement of La
Chesnaye, burned the houses, and vanished with a troop of prisoners,
leaving twenty mangled corpses on the snow.
[12] “The terror,” wrote the
bishop, “is indescribable.” The appearance of a few savages would put
a whole neighborhood to flight. [13]
So desperate, wrote Frontenac, were the needs of the colony, and
so great the contempt with which the Iroquois regarded it, that it
almost needed a miracle either to carry on war or make peace. What he
most earnestly wished was to keep the Iroquois quiet, and so leave his
hands free to deal with the English. This was not easy, to such a
pitch of audacity had late events raised them. Neither his temper nor
his convictions would allow him to beg peace of them, like his
predecessor; but he had inordinate trust in the influence of his name,
and he now took a course which he hoped might answer his purpose
without increasing their insolence. The perfidious folly of Denonville
in seizing their countrymen at Fort Frontenac had been a prime cause
of their hostility; and, at the request of the late governor, the
surviving captives, thirteen in all, had been taken from the galleys,
gorgeously clad in French attire, and sent back to Canada in the ship
which carried Frontenac. Among them was a famous Cayuga war-chief
called
195
Ourehaoué, whose loss had infuriated the Iroquois.
[14]
Frontenac gained his good-will on the voyage; and, when
they reached Quebec, he lodged him in the château, and treated him
with such kindness that the chief became his devoted admirer and
friend. As his influence was great among his people, Frontenac hoped
that he might use him with success to bring about an accommodation. He
placed three of the captives at the disposal of the Cayuga, who
forthwith sent them to Onondaga with a message which the governor had
dictated, and which was to the following effect: “The great Onontio,
whom you all know, has come back again. He does not blame you for what
you have done; for he looks upon you as foolish children, and blames
only the English, who are the cause of your folly, and have made you
forget your obedience to a father who has always loved and never
deceived you. He will permit me, Ourehaoué, to return to you as soon
as you will come to ask for me, not as you have spoken of late, but
like children speaking to a father.” [15]
Frontenac hoped that they would send an embassy to reclaim their chief, and
thus give him an opportunity to use his personal influence over them. With
the three released captives, he sent an Iroquois convert named Cut Nose
with a wampum belt to announce his return.

When the deputation arrived at Onondaga and made known their errand,
the Iroquois
196
magnates, with their usual deliberation, deferred
answering till a general council of the confederacy should have time
to assemble; and, meanwhile, they sent messengers to ask the mayor of
Albany, and others of their Dutch and English friends, to come to the
meeting. They did not comply, merely sending the government
interpreter, with a few Mohawk Indians, to represent their interests.
On the other hand, the Jesuit Milet, who had been captured a few
months before, adopted, and made an Oneida chief, used every effort to
second the designs of Frontenac. The authorities of Albany tried in
vain to induce the Iroquois to place him in their hands. They
understood their interests too well, and held fast to the Jesuit.
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