1649.
RUIN OF THE HURONS.
St. Louis on Fire • Invasion • St. Ignace captured • Brébeuf and
Lalemant • Battle at St. Louis • Sainte Marie threatened • Renewed
Fighting • Desperate Conflict • A Night of Suspense • Panic among the
Victors • Burning of St. Ignace • Retreat of the Iroquois
More than eight months had passed since the catastrophe of St. Joseph.
The winter was over, and that dreariest of seasons had come, the
churlish forerunner of spring. Around Sainte Marie the forests were gray
and bare, and, in the cornfields, the oozy, half-thawed soil, studded
with the sodden stalks of the last autumn's harvest, showed itself in
patches through the melting snow.
At nine o'clock on the morning of the sixteenth of March, the priests
saw a heavy smoke rising over the naked forest towards the south-east,
about three miles distant. They looked at each other in dismay. "The
Iroquois! They are burning St. Louis!" Flames mingled with the smoke;
and, as they stood gazing, two Christian Hurons came, breathless and
aghast, from the burning town. Their worst fear was realized. The
Iroquois were there; but where were the priests of the mission, Brébeuf
and Lalemant?
Late in the autumn, a thousand Iroquois, chiefly Senecas and Mohawks,
had taken the war-path for the Hurons. They had been all winter in the
forests, hunting for subsistence, and moving at their leisure towards
their prey. The destruction of the two towns of the mission of St.
Joseph had left a wide gap, and in the middle of March they entered the
heart of the Huron country, undiscovered. Common vigilance and common
sense would have averted the calamities that followed; but the Hurons
were like a doomed people, stupefied, sunk in dejection, fearing
everything, yet taking no measures for defence. They could easily have
met the invaders with double their force, but the besotted warriors lay
idle in their towns, or hunted at leisure in distant forests; nor could
the Jesuits, by counsel or exhortation, rouse them to face the danger.
Before daylight of the sixteenth, the invaders approached St. Ignace,
which, with St. Louis and three other towns, formed the mission of the
same name. They reconnoitred the place in the darkness. It was defended
on three sides by a deep ravine, and further strengthened by palisades
fifteen or sixteen feet high, planted under the direction of the
Jesuits. On the fourth side it was protected by palisades alone; and
these were left, as usual, unguarded. This was not from a sense of
security; for the greater part of the population had abandoned the town,
thinking it too much exposed to the enemy, and there remained only about
four hundred, chiefly women, children, and old men, whose infatuated
defenders were absent hunting, or on futile scalping-parties against the
Iroquois. It was just before dawn, when a yell, as of a legion of
devils, startled the wretched inhabitants from their sleep; and the
Iroquois, bursting in upon them, cut them down with knives and hatchets,
killing many, and reserving the rest for a worse fate. They had entered
by the weakest side; on the other sides there was no exit, and only
three Hurons escaped. The whole was the work of a few minutes. The
Iroquois left a guard to hold the town, and secure the retreat of the
main body in case of a reverse; then, smearing their faces with blood,
after their ghastly custom, they rushed, in the dim light of the early
dawn, towards St. Louis, about a league distant.
The three fugitives had fled, half naked, through the forest, for the
same point, which they reached about sunrise, yelling the alarm. The
number of inhabitants here was less, at this time, than seven hundred;
and, of these, all who had strength to escape, excepting about eighty
warriors, made in wild terror for a place of safety. Many of the old,
sick, and decrepit were left perforce in the lodges. The warriors,
ignorant of the strength of the assailants, sang their war-songs, and
resolved to hold the place to the last. It had not the natural strength
of St. Ignace; but, like it, was surrounded by palisades.
Here were the two Jesuits, Brébeuf and Lalemant. Brébeuf's converts
entreated him to escape with them; but the Norman zealot, bold scion of
a warlike stock, had no thought of flight. His post was in the teeth of
danger, to cheer on those who fought, and open Heaven to those who fell.
His colleague, slight of frame and frail of constitution, trembled
despite himself; but deep enthusiasm mastered the weakness of Nature,
and he, too, refused to fly.
Scarcely had the sun risen, and scarcely were the fugitives gone, when,
like a troop of tigers, the Iroquois rushed to the assault. Yell echoed
yell, and shot answered shot. The Hurons, brought to bay, fought with
the utmost desperation, and with arrows, stones, and the few guns they
had, killed thirty of their assailants, and wounded many more. Twice the
Iroquois recoiled, and twice renewed the attack with unabated ferocity.
They swarmed at the foot of the palisades, and hacked at them with their
hatchets, till they had cut them through at several different points.
For a time there was a deadly fight at these breaches. Here were the two
priests, promising Heaven to those who died for their faith,--one giving
baptism, and the other absolution. At length the Iroquois broke in, and
captured all the surviving defenders, the Jesuits among the rest. They
set the town on fire; and the helpless wretches who had remained, unable
to fly, were consumed in their burning dwellings. Next they fell upon
Brébeuf and Lalemant, stripped them, bound them fast, and led them with
the other prisoners back to St. Ignace, where all turned out to wreak
their fury on the two priests, beating them savagely with sticks and
clubs as they drove them into the town. At present, there was no time
for further torture, for there was work in hand.
The victors divided themselves into several bands, to burn the
neighboring villages and hunt their flying inhabitants. In the flush of
their triumph, they meditated a bolder enterprise; and, in the
afternoon, their chiefs sent small parties to reconnoitre Sainte Marie,
with a view to attacking it on the next day.
Meanwhile the fugitives of St. Louis, joined by other bands as terrified
and as helpless as they, were struggling through the soft snow which
clogged the forests towards Lake Huron, where the treacherous ice of
spring was still unmelted. One fear expelled another. They ventured upon
it, and pushed forward all that day and all the following night,
shivering and famished, to find refuge in the towns of the Tobacco
Nation. Here, when they arrived, they spread a universal panic.
Ragueneau, Bressani, and their companions waited in suspense at Sainte
Marie. On the one hand, they trembled for Brébeuf and Lalemant; on the
other, they looked hourly for an attack: and when at evening they saw
the Iroquois scouts prowling along the edge of the bordering forest,
their fears were confirmed. They had with them about forty Frenchmen,
well armed; but their palisades and wooden buildings were not
fire-proof, and they had learned from fugitives the number and ferocity
of the invaders. They stood guard all night, praying to the Saints, and
above all to their great patron, Saint Joseph, whose festival was close
at hand.
In the morning they were somewhat relieved by the arrival of about three
hundred Huron warriors, chiefly converts from La Conception and Sainte
Madeleine, tolerably well armed, and full of fight. They were expecting
others to join them; and meanwhile, dividing into several bands, they
took post by the passes of the neighboring forest, hoping to waylay
parties of the enemy. Their expectation was fulfilled; for, at this
time, two hundred of the Iroquois were making their way from St. Ignace,
in advance of the main body, to begin the attack on Sainte Marie. They
fell in with a band of the Hurons, set upon them, killed many, drove the
rest to headlong flight, and, as they plunged in terror through the
snow, chased them within sight of Sainte Marie. The other Hurons,
hearing the yells and firing, ran to the rescue, and attacked so
fiercely, that the Iroquois in turn were routed, and ran for shelter to
St. Louis, followed closely by the victors. The houses of the town had
been burned, but the palisade around them was still standing, though
breached and broken. The Iroquois rushed in; but the Hurons were at
their heels. Many of the fugitives were captured, the rest killed or put
to utter rout, and the triumphant Hurons remained masters of the place.
The Iroquois who escaped fled to St. Ignace. Here, or on the way
thither, they found the main body of the invaders; and when they heard
of the disaster, the whole swarm, beside themselves with rage, turned
towards St. Louis to take their revenge. Now ensued one of the most
furious Indian battles on record. The Hurons within the palisade did not
much exceed a hundred and fifty; for many had been killed or disabled,
and many, perhaps, had straggled away. Most of their enemies had guns,
while they had but few. Their weapons were bows and arrows, war-clubs,
hatchets, and knives; and of these they made good use, sallying
repeatedly, fighting like devils, and driving back their assailants
again and again. There are times when the Indian warrior forgets his
cautious maxims, and throws himself into battle with a mad and reckless
ferocity. The desperation of one party, and the fierce courage of both,
kept up the fight after the day had closed; and the scout from Sainte
Marie, as he bent listening under the gloom of the pines, heard, far
into the night, the howl of battle rising from the darkened forest. The
principal chief of the Iroquois was severely wounded, and nearly a
hundred of their warriors were killed on the spot. When, at length,
their numbers and persistent fury prevailed, their only prize was some
twenty Huron warriors, spent with fatigue and faint with loss of blood.
The rest lay dead around the shattered palisades which they had so
valiantly defended. Fatuity, not cowardice, was the ruin of the Huron
nation.
The lamps burned all night at Sainte Marie, and its defenders stood
watching till daylight, musket in hand. The Jesuits prayed without
ceasing, and Saint Joseph was besieged with invocations. "Those of us
who were priests," writes Ragueneau, "each made a vow to say a mass in
his honor every month, for the space of a year; and all the rest bound
themselves by vows to divers penances." The expected onslaught did not
take place. Not an Iroquois appeared. Their victory had been bought too
dear, and they had no stomach for more fighting. All the next day, the
eighteenth, a stillness, like the dead lull of a tempest, followed the
turmoil of yesterday,--as if, says the Father Superior, "the country
were waiting, palsied with fright, for some new disaster."
On the following day,--the journalist fails not to mention that it was
the festival of Saint Joseph,--Indians came in with tidings that a panic
had seized the Iroquois camp, that the chiefs could not control it, and
that the whole body of invaders was retreating in disorder, possessed
with a vague terror that the Hurons were upon them in force. They had
found time, however, for an act of atrocious cruelty. They planted
stakes in the bark houses of St. Ignace, and bound to them those of
their prisoners whom they meant to sacrifice, male and female, from old
age to infancy, husbands, mothers, and children, side by side. Then, as
they retreated, they set the town on fire, and laughed with savage glee
at the shrieks of anguish that rose from the blazing dwellings. [1]
[1] The site of St. Ignace still bears evidence of the catastrophe, in
the ashes and charcoal that indicate the position of the houses, and the
fragments of broken pottery and half-consumed bone, together with
trinkets of stone, metal, or glass, which have survived the lapse of two
centuries and more. The place has been minutely examined by Dr. Taché.
They loaded the rest of their prisoners with their baggage and plunder,
and drove them through the forest southward, braining with their
hatchets any who gave out on the march. An old woman, who had escaped
out of the midst of the flames of St. Ignace, made her way to St.
Michel, a large town not far from the desolate site of St. Joseph. Here
she found about seven hundred Huron warriors, hastily mustered. She set
them on the track of the retreating Iroquois, and they took up the
chase,--but evidently with no great eagerness to overtake their
dangerous enemy, well armed as he was with Dutch guns, while they had
little beside their bows and arrows. They found, as they advanced, the
dead bodies of prisoners tomahawked on the march, and others bound fast
to trees and half burned by the fagots piled hastily around them. The
Iroquois pushed forward with such headlong speed, that the pursuers
could not, or would not, overtake them; and, after two days, they gave
over the attempt.