_The Jesuits and the Iroquois.--Mission Villages.--Michillimackinac.
--Father Carheil.--Temperance.--Brandy and the Indians.--Strong
Measures.--Disputes.--License and Prohibition.--Views of the
King.--Trade and the Jesuits._
|For a year or two after De Tracy had chastised the Mohawks, and humbled
the other Iroquois nations, all was rose color on the side of that
dreaded confederacy. The Jesuits, defiant as usual of hardship and
death, had begun their ruined missions anew. Bruyas took the Mission
of the Martyrs among the Mohawks; Milet, that of Saint Francis Xavier,
among the Oneidas; Lamberville, that of Saint John the Baptist among the
Onondagas; Carheil, that of Saint Joseph among the Cayugas; and Raffeix
and Julien Gamier shared between them the three missions of the Senecas.
The Iroquois, after their punishment, were in a frame of mind so
hopeful, that the fathers imagined for a moment that they were all on
the point of accepting the faith. This was a consummation earnestly to
be wished, not only from a religious, but also from a political point of
view. The complete conversion of the Iroquois meant their estrangement
from the heretic English and Dutch, and their firm alliance with the
French. It meant safety for Canada, and it ensured for her the fur trade
of the interior freed from English rivalry. Hence the importance of
these missions, and hence their double character. While the Jesuit
toiled to convert his savage hosts, he watched them at the same time
with the eye of a shrewd political agent; reported at Quebec the result
of his observations, and by every means in his power sought to alienate
them from England, and attach them to France.
Their simple conversion, by placing them wholly under his influence,
would have outweighed in political value all other agencies combined;
but the flattering hopes of the earlier years soon vanished. Some petty
successes against other tribes so elated the Iroquois, that they ceased
to care for French alliance or French priests. Then a few petty reverses
would dash their spirits, and dispose them again to listen to Jesuit
counsels. Every success of a war-party was a loss to the faith, and
every reverse was a gain. Meanwhile a more repulsive or a more critical
existence than that of a Jesuit father in an Iroquois town is scarcely
conceivable. The torture of prisoners turned into a horrible festivity
for the whole tribe; foul and crazy orgies in which, as the priest
thought, the powers of darkness took a special delight; drunken riots,
the work of Dutch brandy, when he was forced to seek refuge from death
in his chapel, a sanctuary which superstitious fear withheld the Indians
from violating; these, and a thousand disgusts and miseries, filled the
record of his days, and he bore them all in patience. Not only were the
early Canadian Jesuits men of an intense religious zeal, but they were
also men who lived not for themselves but for their order. Their faults
were many and great, but the grandeur of their self-devotion towers
conspicuous over all.
At Caughnawaga, near Montreal, may still be seen the remnants of a
mission of converted Iroquois, whom the Jesuits induced to leave the
temptations of their native towns and settle here, under the wing of the
church. They served as a bulwark against the English, and sometimes
did good service in time of war. At Sillery, near Quebec, a band of
Abenaquis, escaping from the neighborhood of the English towards the
close of Philip’s War, formed another mission of similar character.
The Sulpitians had a third at the foot of the mountain of Montreal,
where two massive stone towers of the fortified Indian town are standing
to this day. All these converted savages, as well as those of Lorette
and other missions far and near, were used as allies in war, and
launched in scalping parties against the border settlements of New
England.
Not only the Sulpitians, but also the seminary priests of Quebec, the
Recollets, and even the Capuchins, had missions more or less important,
and more or less permanent; but the Jesuits stood always in the van of
religious and political propagandism; and all the forest tribes
felt their influence, from Acadia and Maine to the plains beyond the
Mississippi. Next in importance to their Iroquois missions were those
among the Algonquins of the northern lakes. Here was the grand domain of
the beaver trade; and the chief woes of the missionary sprang not from
the Indians, but from his own countrymen. Beaver-skins had produced an
effect akin to that of gold in our own day, and the deepest recesses of
the wilderness were invaded by eager seekers after gain. The focus of
the evil was at Father Marquette’s old mission of Michillimackinac.
First, year after year came a riotous invasion of _coureurs de bois_,
and then a garrison followed to crown the mischief. Discipline was very
weak at these advanced posts, and, to eke out their pay, the soldiers
were allowed to trade; brandy, whether permitted or interdicted, being
the chief article of barter. Father Etienne Carheil was driven almost
to despair; and he wrote to the intendant, his fast friend and former
pupil, the long letter already mentioned. “Our missions,” he says,
“are reduced to such extremity that we can no longer maintain them
against the infinity of disorder, brutality, violence, injustice,
impiety, impurity, insolence, scorn, and insult, which the deplorable
and infamous traffic in brandy has spread universally among the Indians
of these parts.... In the despair in which we are plunged, nothing
remains for us but to abandon them to the brandy sellers as a domain of
drunkenness and debauchery.”
He complains bitterly of the officers in command of the fort, who, he
says, far from repressing disorders, encourage them by their example,
and are even worse than their subordinates, “insomuch that all our
Indian villages are so many taverns for drunkenness and Sodoms for
iniquity, which we shall be forced to leave to the just wrath and
vengeance of God.” He insists that the garrisons are entirely useless,
as they have only four occupations: first, to keep open liquor shops
for crowds of drunken Indians; secondly, to roam from place to place,
carrying goods and brandy under the orders of the commandant, who shares
their profits; thirdly, to gamble day and night; fourthly, to “turn
the fort into a place which I am ashamed to call by its right name;”
and he describes, with a curious amplitude of detail, the swarms
of Indian girls who are hired to make it their resort. “Such,
monseigneur, are the only employments of the soldiers maintained here so
many years. If this can be called doing the king service, I admit that
such service is done for him here now, and has always been done for him
here; but I never saw any other done in my life.” He further declares
that the commandants oppose and malign the missionaries, while of the
presents which the king sends up the country for distribution to the
Indians, they, the Indians, get nothing but a little tobacco, and the
officer keeps the rest for himself. *
* Of the officers in command at Michillimackinac while
Carheil was there, he partially excepts La Durantaye from
his strictures, but bears very hard on La Motte-Cadillac,
who hated the Jesuits and was hated by them in turn. La
Motte, on his part, writes that “the missionaries wish to be
masters wherever they are, and cannot tolerate anybody above
themselves.” N. Y. Colonial Docs., IX. 587. For much more
emphatic expressions of his views concerning them, see two
letters from him, translated in Sheldon’s Early History of
Michigan.
From the misconduct of officers and soldiers, he passes to that of the
_coureurs de bois_ and licensed traders; and here he is equally severe.
He dilates on the evils which result from permitting the colonists to
go to the Indians instead of requiring the Indians to come to the
settlements. “It serves only to rob the country of all its young
men, weaken families, deprive wives of their husbands, sisters of
their brothers, and parents of their children; expose the voyagers to
a hundred dangers of body and soul; involve them in a multitude of
expenses, some necessary, some useless, and some criminal; accustom them
to do no work, and at last disgust them with it for ever; make them live
in constant idleness, unlit them completely for any trade, and render
them useless to themselves, their families, and the public. But it is
less as regards the body than as regards the soul, that this traffic of
the French among the savages is infinitely hurtful. It carries them far
away from churches, separates them from priests and nuns, and severs
them from all instruction, all exercise of religion, and all spiritual
aid. It sends them into places wild and almost inaccessible, through
a thousand perils by land and water, to carry on by base, abject,
and shameful means a trade which would much better be carried on at
Montreal.”
But in the complete transfer of the trade to Montreal, he sees
insuperable difficulties, and he proceeds to suggest, as the last
and best resort, that garrisons and officers should be withdrawn, and
licenses abolished; that discreet and virtuous persons should be chosen
to take charge of all the trade of the upper country; that these persons
should be in perfect sympathy and correspondence with the Jesuits; and
that the trade should be carried on at the missions of the Jesuits and
in their presence. *
This letter brings us again face to face with the brandy question, of
which we have seen something already in the quarrel between Avaugour
and the bishop. In the summer of 1648, there was held at the mission
of Sillery a temperance meeting; the first in all probability on this
continent. The drum beat after mass, and the Indians gathered at the
summons. Then an Algonquin chief, a zealous convert of the Jesuits,
proclaimed to the crowd a late edict of the governor imposing penalties
for drunkenness, and, in his own name and that of the other chiefs,
exhorted them to abstinence, declaring that all drunkards should be
handed over to the French for punishment. Father Jerome Lalemant
looked on delighted. “It was,” he says, “the finest public act
of jurisdiction exercised among the Indians since I have been in
this country. From the beginning of the world they have all thought
themselves as great lords, the one as the other, and never before
submitted to their chiefs any further than they chose to do so.” *
* Lettre du Pere Etienne Carheil de la Compagnie de Jésus à
l'Intendant Champigny, Michillimackinac, 30 Août, 1702
(Archives Nationales) Lalemant, Rel, 1648, p. 43.
There was great need of reform; for a demon of drunkenness seemed to
possess these unhappy tribes. Nevertheless, with all their rage for
brandy, they sometimes showed in regard to it a self-control quite
admirable in its way. When at a fair, a council, or a friendly visit,
their entertainers regaled them with rations of the coveted liquor, so
prudently measured out that they could not be the worse for it, they
would unite their several portions in a common stock, which they would
then divide among a few of their number, thus enabling them to attain
that complete intoxication which, in their view, was the true end of
all drinking. The objects of this singular benevolence were expected to
requite it in kind on some future occasion.
A drunken Indian with weapons within reach, was very dangerous, and
all prudent persons kept out of his way. This greatly pleased him; for,
seeing everybody run before him, he fancied himself a great chief,
and howled and swung his tomahawk with redoubled fury. If, as often
happened, he maimed or murdered some wretch not nimble enough to escape,
his countrymen absolved him from all guilt, and blamed only the brandy.
Hence, if an Indian wished to take a safe revenge on some personal
enemy, he would pretend to be drunk; and, not only murders but other
crimes were often committed by false claimants to the bacchanalian
privilege.
In the eyes of the missionaries, brandy was a fiend with all crimes
and miseries in his train; and, in fact, nothing earthly could better
deserve the epithet infernal than an Indian town in the height of a
drunken debauch. The orgies never ceased till the bottom of the
barrel was reached. Then came repentance, despair, wailing, and bitter
invective against the white men, the cause of all the woe. In the name
of the public good, of humanity, and above all of religion, the bishop
and the Jesuits denounced the fatal traffic.
Their case was a strong one; but so was the case of their opponents.
There was real and imminent danger that the thirsty savages, if refused
brandy by the French, would seek it from the Dutch and English of New
York. It was the most potent lure and the most killing bait. Wherever it
was found, thither the Indians and their beaver-skins were sure to go,
and the interests of the fur trade, vital to the colony, were bound
up with it. Nor was this all, for the merchants and the civil powers
insisted that religion and the saving of souls were bound up with it no
less; since, to repel the Indians from the Catholic French, and attract
them to the heretic English, was to turn them from ways of grace to
ways of perdition. * The argument, no doubt, was dashed largely with
hypocrisy in those who used it; but it was one which the priests were
greatly perplexed to answer.
In former days, when Canada was not yet transformed from a mission to a
colony, the Jesuits entered with a high hand on the work of reform.
* “Ce commerce est absolument nécessaire pour attirer les
sauvages dans les colonies françoises, et par ce moyen leur
donner les premières teintures de la foy.” Mémoire de
Colbert, joint à sa lettre à Duchesneau du 24 Mai, 1678.
It fared hard with the culprit caught in the act of selling brandy to
Indians. They led him, after the sermon, to the door of the church;
where, kneeling on the pavement, partially stript and bearing in his
hand the penitential torch, he underwent a vigorous flagellation, laid
on by Father Le Mercier himself, after the fashion formerly practised in
the case of refractory school-boys. * Bishop Laval not only discharged
against the offenders volleys of wholesale excommunication, but he made
of the offence a “reserved case;” that is, a case in which the power
of granting absolution was reserved to himself alone. This produced
great commotion, and a violent conflict between religious scruples and
a passion for gain. The bishop and the Jesuits stood inflexible; while
their opponents added bitterness to the quarrel by charging them with
permitting certain favored persons to sell brandy, unpunished, and even
covertly selling it themselves. **
* Mémoire de Dumesnil, 1671.
** Lettre de Charles Aubert de la Chesnaye, 24 Oct., 1693.
After speaking of the excessive rigor of the bishop, he
adds: “L’on dit, et il est vrai, que dans ces temps si
fâcheux, sous prétexte de pauvreté dans les familles,
certaines gens avoient permission d’en traiter, je crois
toujours avec la réserve de ne pas enivrer.” Dumesnil,
Mémoire de 1671, says that Laval excommunicated all brandy-
sellers, “à l’exception, néanmoins, de quelques particuliers
qu’il voulait favoriser.” He says further that the bishop
and the Jesuit Ragueneau had a clerk whom they employed at
500 francs a year to trade with the Indians, paying them in
liquors for their furs; and that for a time the
ecclesiastics had this trade to themselves, their severities
having deterred most others from venturing into it. La
Salle, Mémoire de 1678, declares that, “Ils (les Jésuites)
refusent l’absolution a ceux qui ne veulent pas promettre de
n’en plus vendre, et s’ils meurent en cet état, ils les
privent de la sépulture ecclésiastique: au contraire, ils so
permettent à eux mesmes sans aucune difficulté ce mesme
trafic, quoyque toute sorte de trafic soit interdite à tous
les ecclésiastiques par les ordonnances du Roy et par une
bulle expresse du Pape.” I give these assertions as I find
them, and for what they are worth.
Appeal was made to the king, who, with his Jesuit confessor, guardian
of his conscience on one side, and Colbert, guardian of his worldly
interests on the other, stood in some perplexity. The case was referred
to the fathers of the Sorbonne, and they, after solemn discussion,
pronounced the selling of brandy to Indians a mortal sin. * It was
next referred to an assembly of the chief merchants and inhabitants of
Canada, held under the eye of the governor, intendant, and council, in
the Chateau St. Louis. Each was directed to state his views in writing.
The great majority were for unrestricted trade in brandy; a few were for
a limited and guarded trade; and two or three declared for prohibition.
** Decrees of prohibition were passed from time to time, but they were
unavailing. They were revoked, renewed, and revoked again. They were, in
fact, worse than useless; for their chief effect was to turn traders
and _coureurs de bois_ into troops of audacious contrabandists. Attempts
were made to limit the brandy trade to the settlements, and exclude it
from the forest country, where its regulation was impossible; but these
attempts, like the others, were of little avail. It is worthy of notice
that, when brandy was forbidden everywhere else, it was permitted in the
trade of Tadoussac, carried on for the profit of government. ***
* Délibération de la Sorbonne sur la Traite des Boissons, 8
Mars, 1676.
** Procès-verbal de l’Assemblée tenue au Château de St.
Louis de Québec, le 26 Oct., 1676, et jours suivants.
*** Lettre de Charles Aubert de la Chesnaye, 24 Oct., 1693.
In the course of the quarrel a severe law passed by the
General Court of Massachusetts against the sale of liquors
to Indians was several times urged as an example to be
imitated. A copy of it was sent to the minister, and is
still preserved in the Archives of the Marine and Colonies.
In spite of the Sorbonne, in spite of Père La Chaise, and of the
Archbishop of Paris, whom he also consulted, the king was never at heart
a prohibitionist. * His Canadian revenue was drawn from the fur
trade; and the singular argument of the partisans of brandy, that its
attractions were needed to keep the Indians from contact with heresy,
served admirably to salve his conscience. Bigot as he was, he distrusted
the Bishop of Quebec, the great champion of the anti-liquor movement.
His own letters, as well as those of his minister, prove that he saw or
thought that he saw motives for the crusade very different from those
inscribed on its banners. He wrote to Saint-Vallier, Laval’s successor
in the bishopric, that the brandy trade was very useful to the kingdom
of France; that it should be regulated, but not prevented; that the
consciences of his subjects must not be disturbed by denunciations of
it as a sin; and that “it is well that you (_the bishop_) should
take care that the zeal of the ecclesiastics is not excited by personal
interests and passions.” ** Perhaps he alludes to the spirit of
encroachment and domination which he and his minister in secret
instructions to their officers often impute to the bishop and the
clergy, or perhaps he may have in mind other accusations which had
reached him
* See, among other evidence, Mémoire sur la Traite des
Boissons, 1678.
** Le Roy à Saint-Vallier, 7 Avril, 1691
from time to time during many years, and of which the following from the
pen of the most noted of Canadian governors will serve as an example.
Count Frontenac declares that the Jesuits greatly exaggerate the
disorders caused by brandy, and that they easily convince persons
“who do not know the interested motives which have led them to harp
continually on this string for more than forty years.... They have long
wished to have the fur trade entirely to themselves, and to keep out
of sight the trade which they have always carried on in the woods, and
which they are carrying on there now.” *
_Trade of the Jesuits._--As I have observed in a former volume, the
charge against the Jesuits of trading in beaver-skins dates from
the beginning of the colony. In the private journal of Father Jerome
Lalemant, their superior, occurs the following curious passage, under
date of November, 1645: “Pour la traite des castors. Le 15 de Nov.
le bruit estant qu’on s’en alloit icy publier la defense qui auoit
esté publiée aux Trois Riuieres que pas vu n’eut à traiter avec les
sauvages, le P. Vimont demanda à Mons. des Chastelets commis general
si nous serions de pire condition soubs eux que soubs Messieurs de la
Compagnie. La conclusion fut que non et que cela iroit pour nous à
U ordinaire, mais que nous le fissions doucement.” Journal des
Jésuites. Two years after, on the request of Lalemant, the governor
Montmagny, and his destined successor Aillebout, gave the Jesuits a
certificate to the effect that “les pères de la compagnie de Jésus
sont innocents de la calomnie qui leur a été imputée, et ce qu’ils
en ont fiait a été pour le bien de la communauté et pour un bon
sujet.” This leaves it to be inferred that they actually
traded, though with good intentions. In 1664, in reply to similar
“calumnies,” the Jesuits made by proxy a declaration before the
council, stating, “que les dits Révérends Pères Jésuites
n’ont fait jamais aucune profession de vendre et n’ont jamais
rien vendu, mais seulement que les marchandises qu’ils donnent aux
particuliers ne sont que pour avoir leurs
* Frontenac au Ministre, 29 Oct., 1676.
nécessités.” This is an admission in a thin disguise. The word
nécessités is of very elastic interpretation. In a memoir of Talon,
1667, he mentions, “la traite de pelleteries qu’on assure qu’ils
(les Jésuites) font aux Outaouacks et au Cap de la Madeleine; ce que je
ne sais pas de science certaine.”
That which Talon did not know with certainty is made reasonably clear
for us by a line in the private journal of Father Le Mercier, who writes
under date of 17 August, 1665, “Le Père Frémin remonte supérieur
au Cap de la Magdeleine, ou le temporel est en bon estât. Comme il
est delivre de tout soin d'aucune traite, il doit s’appliquer à
l’instruction tant des Montagnets que des Algonquins.” Father
Charles Albanel was charged, under Frémin, with the affairs of the
mission, including doubtless the temporal interests, to the prosperity
of which Father Le Merciei alludes, and the cares of trade from which
Father Frémin was delivered. Cavelier de la Salle declared in 1678,
“Le père Arbanelle (Albanel) jésuite a traité au Cap (de la
Madeleine) pour 700 pistoles de peaux d’orignaux et de castors; luy
mesme me l’a dit en 1667. Il vend le pain, le vin, le bled, le lard,
et il tient magazin au Cap aussi bien que le frère Joseph à Québec.
Ce frère gagne 500 pour 100 sur tous les peuples. Ils (les Jésuites)
ont bâti leur collège en partie de leur traite et en partie de
l’emprunt.” La Salle further says that Frémin, being reported to
have made enormous profits, “ce père répondit au gouverneur (qui
lui en avait fait des plaintes) par un billet que luy a conservé, que
c’estoit une calomnie que ce grand gain prétendu; puisque tout ce qui
se passoit par ses mains ne pouvoit produire par an que quatre mille
de revenant bon, tous frais faits, sans comprendre les gages des
domestiques.” La Salle gives also many other particulars, especially
relating to Michillimackinac, where, as he says, the Jesuits had a large
stock of beaver-skins. According to Peronne Dumesnil, Mémoire de 1671,
the Jesuits had at that time more than 20,000 francs a year, partly
from trade and partly from charitable contributions of their friends in
France.
The king repeatedly forbade the Jesuits and other ecclesiastics in
Canada to carry on trade. On one occasion he threatened strong measures
should they continue to disobey him. Le Roi à Frontenac, 28 Avril,
1677. In the same year the minister wrote to the intendant Duchesneau:
“Vous ne sauriez apporter trop de precautions pour abolir entièrement
la coustume que les Ecclesiastiques séculiers et réguliers avaient
pris de traitter ou de faire traitter leurs valets,” 18 Avril, 1677.
The Jesuits entered also into other branches of trade and industry with
a vigor and address which the inhabitants of Canada might have emulated
with advantage. They were successful fishers of eels. In 1646, their
eel-pots at Sillery are said to have yielded no less than forty thousand
eels, some of which they sold at the modest price of thirty sous a
hundred. Ferland, Notes sur les Registres de N. D. de Québec, 82. The
members of the order were exempted from payment of duties, and in 1674
they were specially empowered to construct mills, including sugar-mills,
and beep slaves, apprentices, and hired servants. Droit Canadien, 180.