THE MOHAWK VALLEY AND THE MOHAWKS AT THE TIME OF TEKAKWITHA'S BIRTH
Father Jogues was put to death in the year 1646, on the south side of
the Mohawk River, a few miles to the eastward of Fonda, and not far from
the mouth of the Schoharie River. Close to the shrine which has been
erected at Auriesville in his memory, is the very ravine in which,
during his captivity there, he buried his friend and only companion,
Rene Goupil.
Rene, it will be remembered, was cruelly murdered for signing an Indian
child with the sign of the cross. The description of the place where
this occurred is very explicit in Father Jogues' published letters, and
there is no other spot in the whole Mohawk Valley to which it can well
be applied. He mentions a certain river which was a quarter of a league
distant from the Indian town of Ossernenon, where he was held captive;
this was undoubtedly the Schoharie. There in that same vicinity, after
he had escaped from captivity and returned to the Mohawks as a
missionary, he met his own tragic fate, or rather the glorious reward of
his zeal. There, too, or very near there, ten years after his death,
Tekakwitha was born. The exact location of her birthplace has not been
determined. It was either at the Turtle Castle of Ossernenon described
by Jogues, the name of which was afterwards changed, or at a later
village site near Auries Creek, to which the people of that castle
moved, and to which they gave the name of Gandawague.[6] In either case
her birthplace was less than a mile from the present hamlet of
Auriesville.
There Kateri Tekakwitha was born in the year 1656. Her father was a
Mohawk warrior, and her mother a Christian Algonquin captive, who had
been brought up and baptized among the French settlers at Three Rivers
in Canada. The Iroquois, or People of the Long House, including the
Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, were enemies of the
Algonquin tribes and hostile to the French.
The Mohawks especially were accustomed to make frequent raids on the
settlements in Canada, leaving desolation behind them on the St.
Lawrence, and bearing with them to their own valley rich booty, and also
captives to be tortured and burned, or else adopted into the Five
Nations of Iroquois to swell their numbers. If Frenchmen, these captives
were often held as prisoners of war, and haughty terms made for their
ransom. It happened on one of these raids into Canada that Tekakwitha's
mother, the Algonquin, was thus captured. Torn suddenly from a peaceful
home and the French friends who were teaching her "the prayer," she was
hurried through the lakes and woods of a strange country, along the
great war-trail that leads from the St. Lawrence to the Mohawk through
northeastern New York. Fast following in the path of Jogues, the light
canoe that bore her came southward with the braves, and their trophies
of war, through Lake Champlain and then Lake George, the newly
christened Lake St. Sacrament. Little did the captive dream that ever a
child of hers would take that same long journey back again, an exile
from the home that she was then approaching, all unconscious of her
fate. A home, indeed, awaited her coming in the land of the Mohawks. She
was saved from the torture and the fire by a fierce, pagan Mohawk
warrior, who took the young Algonquin for his wife. The gentle girl had
captured the heart of her conqueror.
Their family consisted of one son and an infant daughter, known later as
Kateri Tekakwitha. Pere Claude Chauchetiere, who wrote in 1695,[7] tells
us that they dwelt at "Gandawague, a little village of the Mohawks."
There they must have occupied one section of an Iroquois long-house,
other kindred families filling up its entire length on both sides of an
open space and passage-way through the centre. The occupants of every
four sections or alcoves in these houses, two families being on each
side of the passage, shared a common hearthfire,[8] with a hole above it
in the roof to let in the daylight and let out the smoke. There were
usually five of these fires and twenty families in a house about a
hundred feet in length. These united households gave name and meaning to
the Iroquois League of Kanonsionni, or People of the Long House.
There is reason to believe that Tekakwitha's father took an active part
in the affairs both of the Mohawk nation and the Iroquois League. We are
told, indeed, that after his death her uncle, who seems to have taken
her father's place and responsibilities, was one of the chief men of the
Turtle Castle, whose deputies ranked higher in council than those of the
Bear and Wolf Castles, Andagoron and Tionnontogen. This was because the
turtle was created first, according to their genesis of things. These
three palisaded strongholds and their outlying hamlets made up the
Mohawk (or Canienga) nation. It was likened, in the beautiful figurative
language of the Iroquois, to a group of families gathered round a hearth
or council fire, and filling up one end of the Long House or Great
League of the Five Nations, founded by Hiawatha and his friends. The
duty of the Caniengas of the Mohawk Valley was to guard the eastern
entrance of the Long House, or the door which looked out on the Hudson.
Their privilege was to furnish the great war-chief that should lead the
people of the League to battle.
The proud Senecas, whose portion of the house extended from Seneca Lake
to Niagara, were the western doorkeepers of this household of nations,
waging fierce war on their neighbors near Lake Erie. The wily Onondagas,
wise old politicians, in the middle of the Long House, at Onondaga Lake,
led in council. Their leading chief, the elected president of this first
American republic, lit the central council-fire and sat in state among
the fifty oyanders (sachems) who formed the Iroquois senate. Ten of
these were always Caniengas (or Mohawks), and fourteen were Onondagas.
These two nations and the Senecas were called brothers; while the
intermediate Oneidas and Cayugas were always spoken of as nephews,
because they were younger and less important nations, with fewer
oyanders.
Tekakwitha's father may have been one of the ten Mohawk oyanders, but
there is more reason to believe that he belonged to a class of
war-chiefs who took part only in councils of war. In 1656 these
war-chiefs were very influential, for the Iroquois had set out on a wild
career of conquest, the warlike Mohawks as usual taking the lead. The
very same year that the little Mohawk-Algonquin was born in their land,
they swept like a tornado over Isle Orleans, near Quebec. They carried
off to their castles the last remnant of the Huron people, who, far from
their own land, had gathered near the French guns for protection. These
Hurons from the shores of Lake Huron belonged to the Iroquois stock, as
distinguished from the Algonquin races. In very early times they had
come down to the settlements on the St. Lawrence to trade with the
French, and zealous Jesuit missionaries had accompanied them on their
return to their own country. After great hardships these missionaries
had succeeded in making them Christians, when, as the final result of an
old feud, these Huron-Iroquois, as they are often called, were driven
from their homes in the Northwest by the Iroquois of the League, and
wiped completely out of existence as a nation. Six of the Jesuits who
dwelt among them, and whose strange isolated lives have furnished the
theme for Parkman's glowing pages, were massacred, while others were
cruelly tortured by the ubiquitous Mohawks during the period of ten
short years that elapsed between Jogues' last captivity and Tekakwitha's
birth. Could the father of the Mohawk Lily have reddened his hands in
their blood? It is more than likely; for though Ondessonk or Jogues was
the only one of these martyrs who had reached the Mohawk Valley, they
were all slain by Mohawk braves,--Jogues, Daniel, Brebeuf, Lalemant,
Garnier, and Garreau; nor is this a complete list of the victims. To use
once more the words of John Gilmary Shea, historian of these and their
fellow pioneers,--
"Fain would we pause to follow each in his labors, his trials,
and his toils; recount their dangers from the heathen Huron,
the skulking Iroquois, the frozen river, hunger, cold, and
accident; to show Garnier wrestling with the floating ice,
through which he sank on an errand of mercy; Chabanel
struggling on for years on a mission from which every fibre of
his nature shrunk with loathing; Chaumonot compiling his
grammar on the frozen earth; or the heroic Brebeuf, paralyzed
by a fall, with his collar-bone broken, creeping on his hands
and feet along the road and sleeping unsheltered on the snow
when the very trees were splitting with cold," and later, "as a
martyr, one of the most glorious in our annals for the variety
and atrocity of his torments."
This last-mentioned blackgown, John de Brebeuf, called Echon by the
Hurons, was a writer of valuable works on the Indian language and
customs. He belonged to a noble family of Normandy; and on account of
his great natural courage and soldierly bearing, his agony was prolonged
by the savages with fiendish ingenuity, till finally, failing to wring a
sigh of pain from his lips, they "clove open his chest, took out his
noble heart, and devoured it," as a medicine to make them
fearless-hearted.
The fortitude of a brave man under torture was a spectacle as keenly
appreciated by the Iroquois as were the gladiator fights and martyrdoms
of old by the Romans. The women in this case, however, instead of
decreeing death by turning down their own thumbs, were granted the less
fatal and less dainty privilege of sawing off the thumb of the victim,
as in the case of Jogues at Ossernenon. The human torches of Nero, who
had the early Christians wrapped in straw and placed in his garden on
the Palatine Hill, then set on fire to illuminate his evening revels,
are vividly recalled by the death of Brebeuf's companion, the delicate
and gentle Gabriel Lalemant. He was wrapped in pieces of bark which were
put in a blaze. His writhing frame and quivering flesh contrasted finely
with the stoic endurance of Brebeuf, and the Iroquois kept him alive
till morning, leaving his body at last a black and shapeless mass.
These gifted men living and dying in the wilderness were not without
devoted followers, as can well be imagined; and many of their converts,
the Christian Hurons, a now conquered race, dwelt with their old foes in
the Long House. With the capture of those of the Hurons who had taken
refuge at Isle Orleans the long struggle ended between two branches of a
great Indian family or stock,--the Huron-Iroquois and the Iroquois of
the League. Once victorious, it was the policy of the Five Nations of
the League to quit all enmity, and to give the vanquished a home in
their midst. Though the Hurons lost their national existence when thus
adopted into the League, they did not lose their Christian faith. They
clung to it in the midst of all the wild superstitions of their
conquerors. They explained it to others as well as they could, and they
welcomed with glad hearts any blackgown who was brave enough to tread in
the footsteps of Jogues.
Such an one was Father Lemoyne, who came and went five times among the
Onondagas and the Mohawks between the years 1653 and 1658, even while
they were at war with his countrymen on the St. Lawrence. On a hurried
visit to Fort Orange, the nearest colony of Europeans, he told the
people there of the salt springs which are now a source of wealth at
Syracuse; but the worthy burghers were incredulous and put it down in
their records as "a Jesuit lie." These early settlers of our State, in
spite of such occasional indications of prejudice, were a kind-hearted
and a peace-loving people, always ready to do friendly offices for men
who, unlike their rivals the Canadian traders, seemed to value the souls
of the Indians more than their beaver-skins. They had already rescued
two Jesuits, Jogues and Bressani, from captivity; and they afterwards
sent Father Lemoyne a bottle of wine with which to say Mass at Onondaga.
This last missionary the Indians now called Ondessonk, in memory of
Jogues. He visited the Mohawks in 1656 to console the Huron exiles from
Isle Orleans, and at the same time he reproached the Mohawk warriors for
their cruelty.
This, of course, was little to the taste of Tekakwitha's pagan father,
who took care, no doubt, that the blackgown should have no intercourse
with his Algonquin wife, for in his opinion she was already too fond of
the French Christians. He did not wish her to have his tiny, new-born
daughter signed with the ill-omened cross, and to have the water of
baptism poured on her head. So Ondessonk came and went, passing near,
but not finding Tekakwitha's mother, who still cherished the Christian
faith in her heart. When she knew that he was gone, it must have been
with many a sigh and many a thought of her northern home, that she tied
her baby to its cradle-board, all carved and curtained after the Indian
fashion, and then loaded with the precious burden, went off as usual to
her work in the corn-fields. From time to time she would pause for a
moment to smile at her little breathing bundle as it swung from the
branch of a tree near by, and we may be sure, too, that as she gathered
in the harvest for the winter, she whispered many a prayer for peace and
for the coming of the blackgown to dwell in the land, that her child
might grow up a Christian. Let us hope some distant echo reached her in
the Mohawk corn-field from the shores of Onondaga Lake. For there, where
the city of Syracuse now sits among the hills, a crowd of Iroquois were
gathered at that very time into the rough bark chapel of St. Mary's of
Ganentaha, listening to the Christian law of marriage preached then for
the first time in their land. Quick to understand the new dignity it
gave them, the Onondaga women silently made up their minds to learn "the
prayer," by which they meant Christianity. All the while that the
blackgown was speaking, the captive Hurons who were in the throng gazed
with pent-up joy at the face of their beloved Echon (Chaumonot, the
namesake of Brebeuf), whose voice they had often heard at the mission
forts in their own country. Soon after Echon's visit other fathers came
among the Iroquois nations with a colony of Frenchmen; these last had
been cordially invited to Onondaga. The reason for this invitation was
that its people, hard pressed by their savage enemies, wanted peace with
Onnontio, the French governor, and thought to secure it in this way; the
Mohawks, however, took no part in this temporary peace. They were angry
with the Onondagas for claiming their captives from the Isle Orleans,
and they continued their raids on the French frontier regardless of a
treaty made by their brother nation. It must be remembered, though, that
these Indians, while warring with the French were then and always at
peace with the Dutch of Fort Orange. From them they obtained the
fire-arms that were used so effectively in their warfare in Canada.
The wife of the Mohawk warrior at Gandawague may have heard rumors of
the treaty made with Onnontio; but she saw the great kettle prepared as
usual in the Turtle village for the annual war-dance, and all hope of a
peace with the French died out once more from her heart.
It was the custom of the Mohawks to set this kettle to boil in the early
winter; and from time to time each warrior dropped something in to keep
it going and thus to signify his intention of joining the next
expedition. By February all was in readiness for the great dance of the
nation. A war-dance among the Indians is conducted in some such way as
this: Stripped of all but the breech-cloth, gay with war-paint and
feathers, the dried head of a bear, if that be the totem of his clan,
fastened on head or shoulder, and with rattling deer-hoofs strapped to
his knees, each warrior springs to his place, and the wild dance begins,
accompanied by the beating of a drum. Wilder and wilder grow their
antics, and more boastful the words of their chant, as they catch the
spirit of the dance, till at last they seem the very incarnation of war.
With all the vividness of Indian pantomime, they act out the scenes of
battle before the eyes of the crouching women and children gathered in
silent awe to witness this great savage drama. At first the warriors
seem to be creeping along the forest trail with every faculty alert; and
then with fearful whoops they whirl their tomahawks through the air at a
senseless post, springing back as if in self-defence, falling again upon
the imaginary foe, hacking with violence, and mingling shrieks with
their victorious shouts, till in the flickering light of the fire and
the weird shadows of surrounding objects, the assembled crowd,
completely carried away by the vividness of the pantomime, see human
victims falling beneath their strokes.
During the progress of the annual war-dance at Gandawague a group of
Indian boys stand gazing with wide-open eyes at the heroes of the
Kanienke-ha-ka whose past and future deeds are thus pictured before
them. With swelling hearts they listen to the wild refrain, "Wah-hee!
Ho-ha!" that comes at intervals. Among the smallest of the group we have
in view is Tekakwitha's little brother, and her father is taking part in
the dance. His voice, as it leads a louder swell of the war-song,
startles her from her baby dreams, and she nestles close in her
mother's arms. Later she hears the same voice in the lodge,--a few brief
words rolling from the tongue[9] of the warrior in the low musical tones
of the Mohawk language; and it only lulls her into sounder sleep. The
dance is over, and the crowd scattered; but still we linger about to see
what will happen next. A death-like silence reigns in the village. There
is not one sentinel on watch. It would be well if they were more
vigilant, but for the present they are safe. Their foes are far away,
and the high palisade keeps off the prowling beasts. The darkness of
night has closed over them. It is the hour for dreams, and dreams are
the religion of the red-man. They are treasured up and told to the
medicine-man or sorcerer, the influential being who is both priest and
doctor in the village. When the excitement of the war-dance has subsided
and the people are all sleeping soundly, this mysterious personage with
stealthy tread may be seen to issue from the silent cluster of houses,
and by the light of the moon he gathers his herbs and catches the
uncanny creatures of the night with which to weave his spells. He knows
that the young warriors will be coming to him for some inkling of their
fate on the war-path, and besides he must supply a certain cure for
their wounds. When he has found it for them he will gather them all in
the public square at Gandawague, and after other exhibitions of his
skill will perhaps cut his own lip, and when the blood is flowing
freely, will stanch it and cure it in a moment by applying his magic
drug. It will be well for his fame if there be not the keen eye of a
French Jesuit in the crowd to watch him as he quickly sucks the blood
into his mouth. He knows that the warriors are easily duped by his
cunning, and will probably buy his mixture. Happy in its possession,
they will fear no evil effects from their wounds. Their sweethearts too
seek the sorcerer to have their fortunes told, and the old men and women
come to him with their ailments. Even the orators are glad of a hint
from his fertile brain; and the oyander or matron of rank who is about
to nominate a new chief may perhaps consult him. If her choice has been
already made, however, it is no easy task to persuade her to change her
mind.
With the month of March comes the Dream-Feast, and then the medicine-man
is in his glory. For three days the town is in a hubbub, given up to
every freak of the imagination. All the dreams of its people, no matter
how foolish and unreasonable, must be fulfilled in some way to the
dreamer's satisfaction. The wiser heads among them have to tax their
ingenuity to the utmost to prevent the worst excesses of this crazy
celebration. The Christian Indians, above all, dreaded its coming for if
the sorcerer's interpretation pointed in their direction, they were sure
to suffer. During the celebration of the Dream-Feast the Algonquin
captive would not fail to hide herself and her children in the darkest
corner she could find. She had a better chance to pass unnoticed,
however, than the more numerous Huron Christians, who, like herself, had
been captured by the Iroquois. Against these there was a growing enmity
encouraged no doubt by the sorcerers, who profited least of all by their
presence among the people. Some months after the time of the
Dream-Feast the gathering storm burst over their heads. On the 3d of
August, 1657, the Hurons, who dwelt at Onondaga, were suddenly
massacred. The party that had been advocating friendship with the
French, and which had taken the lead in establishing the French colony
at Onondaga, headed by Garacontie ("The Sun that advances"), were fast
losing ground. The situation, even of the French colonists who were
there, was becoming critical; and in April, 1658, when Tekakwitha was in
her second year, strange things happened in the Long House of the Five
Nations.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] See Appendix, Note B,--the words "Gandawague" and "Tekakwitha."
[7] Chauchetiere's manuscript, "La Vie de la B. Catherine Tegakouita,
dite a present La Saincte Sauuagesse," is still extant. It was copied by
the author of this volume at Montreal in 1884, and was first printed in
1887: "Manate, De la Presse Cramoisy de Jean-Marie Shea."
[8] See Vol. IV., Contributions to American Ethnology, by Lewis H.
Morgan, LL.D., giving description and ground plan of an Iroquois
long-house.
[9] "The Mohawk language is on the tongue; the Wyandot is in the
throat."--SCHOOLCRAFT'S _Red Race_.