FROM 1650 TO 1672
Radisson captured by Iroquois--Radisson escapes--At Onandaga--How the
French were saved--Word of the western land--Westward bound--Dollard's
Heroes--The fight at the Long Sault--To seek the north sea--Discovers
Hudson Bay--Origin of the great fur company
Having destroyed the Hurons, who were under French protection, it is
not surprising that the Iroquois now set themselves to destroy the
French. From Montreal to Tadoussac the St. Lawrence swarmed with war
canoes. No sooner had the river ice broken up and the birds begun
winging north than the Iroquois flocked down the current of the
Richelieu, across Lake St. Peter to Three Rivers, down the St. Lawrence
to Quebec, up the St. Lawrence to Montreal. And the snows of midwinter
afforded no truce to the raids, for the Iroquois cached their canoes in
the forest, and roamed the woods on snowshoes. Settlers fled terrified
from their farms to the towns; farmers dared not work in their fields
without a sentry standing guard; Montreal became a prison; Three Rivers
lay blockaded; and at Quebec the war canoes passed defiantly below the
cannon of Cape Diamond, paddles beating defiance against the gun'els,
or prows flaunting the scalps of victims within cannon fire of Castle
St. Louis. Rich and poor, priests and parishioners, governors and
habitants, all alike trembled before the lurking treachery. Father
Jogues had been captured on his way from the Huron mission; Père Poncet
was likewise kidnapped at Quebec and carried to the tortures of the
Mohawk towns; and a nephew of the Governor of Quebec was a few years
later attacked while hunting near Lake Champlain.
The outraged people of New France realized that fear was only
increasing the boldness of the Iroquois. A Mohawk-chief fell into
their hands. By way of warning, they bound him to a stake and burned
him to death. The Indian revenge fell swift and sure. In 1653 the
Governor of Three Rivers and twelve leading citizens were murdered a
short distance from the fort gates. {95} One night in May of 1652 a
tall, slim, swarthy lad about sixteen years of age was seen winding his
way home to Three Rivers from a day's shooting in the marshes. He had
set out at day dawn with some friends, but fear of the Iroquois had
driven his comrades back. Now at nightfall, within sight of Three
Rivers, when the sunset glittered from the chapel spire, he unslung his
bag of game and sat down to reload his musket. Then he noticed that
the pistols in his belt had been water-soaked from the day's wading,
and he reloaded them too.
Any one who is used to life in the open knows how at sundown wild birds
foregather for a last conclave. Ducks were winging in myriads and
settling on the lake with noisy flacker. Unable to resist the
temptation of one last shot, the boy was gliding noiselessly forward
through the rushes, when suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the
ground, with hands thrown up and eyes bulging from his head. At his
feet lay the corpses of his morning comrades,--scalped, stripped,
hacked almost piecemeal! Then the instinct of the hunted thing, of
flight, of self-protection, eclipsed momentary terror, and the boy was
ducking into the rushes to hide when, with a crash of musketry from the
woods, the Iroquois were upon him.
When he regained consciousness, he was pegged out on the sand amid a
flotilla of beached canoes, where Iroquois warriors were having an
evening meal. So began the captivity, the love of the wilds, the wide
wanderings of one of the most intrepid explorers in New France,--Pierre
Esprit Radisson.
His youth and the fact that he would make a good warrior were in his
favor. When he was carried back to the Mohawk town and with other
prisoners compelled to run the gauntlet between two lines of
tormentors, Radisson ran so fast and dodged so dexterously that he was
not once hit. The feat was greeted with shrieks of delight by the
Iroquois; and the high-spirited boy was given in adoption to a captive
Huron woman.
Things would have gone well had he not bungled an attempt to escape;
but one night, while in camp with three Iroquois hunters, an Algonquin
captive entered. While the Iroquois {96} slept with guns stacked
against the trees, the sleepless Algonquin captive rose noiselessly
where he lay by the fire, seized the Mohawk warriors' guns, threw one
tomahawk across to Radisson, and with the other brained two of the
sleepers. The French boy aimed a blow at the third sleeper, and the
two captives escaped. But they might have saved themselves the
trouble. They were pursued and overtaken on Lake St. Peter, within
sight of Three Rivers. This time Radisson had to endure all the
_diableries_ of Mohawk torture. For two days he was kept bound to the
torture stake. The nails were torn from his fingers, the flesh burnt
from the soles of his feet, a hundred other barbarous freaks of impish
Indian children wreaked on the French boy. Arrows with flaming points
were shot at his naked body. His mutilated finger ends were ground
between stones, or thrust into the smoking bowl of a pipe full of
coals, or bitten by fiendish youngsters being trained up the way a
Mohawk warrior should go.
[Illustration: A CANADIAN IN SNOWSHOES (After La Potherie)]
Radisson's youth, his courage, his very dare-devil rashness, together
with presents of wampum belts from his Indian parents, {97} saved his
life for a second time, and a year of wild wanderings with Mohawk
warriors finally brought him to Albany on the Hudson, where the Dutch
would have ransomed him as they had ransomed the two Jesuits, Jogues
and Poncet; but the boy disliked to break faith a second time with his
loyal Indian friends. Still, the glimpse of white man's life caused a
terrible upheaval of revulsion from the barbarities, the filth, the
vice, of the Mohawk camp. He could endure Indian life no longer. One
morning, in the fall of 1653, he stole out from the Mohawk lodges,
while the mist of day dawn still shadowed the forest, and broke at a
run down the trail of the Mohawk valley for Albany. All day he ran,
pursued by the phantom fright of his own imagination, fancying
everything that crunched beneath his moccasined tread some Mohawk
warrior, seeing in the branches that reeled as he passed the arms of
pursuers stretched out to stop him;--on . . . and on . . . and on, he
ran, pausing neither to eat nor rest; here dashing into the bed of a
stream and running along the pebbled bottom to throw pursuers off the
trail; there breaking through a thicket of brushwood away from the
trail, only to come back to it breathless farther on, when some alarm
of the wind in the trees or deer on the move had proved false. Only
muscles of iron strength, lithe as elastic, could have endured the
strain. Nightfall at last came, hiding him from pursuers; but still he
sped on at a run, following the trail by the light of the stars and the
rush of the river. By sunrise of the second day he was staggering; for
the rocks were slippery with frost and his moccasins worn to tatters.
It was four in the afternoon before he reached the first outlying cabin
of the Dutch settlers. For three days he lay hidden in Albany behind
sacks of wheat in a thin-boarded attic, through the cracks of which he
could see the Mohawks searching everywhere. The Jesuit Poncet gave him
passage money to take ship to Europe by way of New York. New York was
then a village of a few hundred houses, thatch-roofed, with stone fort,
stone church, stone barracks. Central Park was a rocky wilderness.
What is now Wall Street was the stamping ground of pigs and goats.
January of 1654 Radisson {98} reached Europe, no longer a boy, but a
man inured to danger and hardships and daring, though not yet eighteen.
When Radisson came back to Three Rivers in May he found changes had
taken place in New France. Among the men murdered with the Governor of
Three Rivers by the Mohawks the preceding year had been his sister's
husband, and the widow had married one Medard Chouart de Groseillers,
who had served in the Huron country as a lay helper with the martyred
Jesuits. Also a truce had been patched up between the Iroquois and the
French. The Iroquois were warring against the Eries and wanted arms
from the French. A still more treacherous motive underlay the
Iroquois' peace. They wanted a French settlement in their country as a
guarantee of non-intervention when they continued to raid the refugee
Hurons. Such duplicity was unsuspected by New France. The Jesuits
looked upon the peace as designed by Providence to enable them to
establish missions among the Iroquois. Father Le Moyne went from
village to village preaching the gospel and receiving belts of wampum
as tokens of peace--one belt containing as many as seven thousand
beads. When the Onondagas asked for a French colony, Lauzon, the
French Governor, readily consented if the Jesuits would pay the cost,
estimated at about $10,000; and in 1656 Major Dupuis had led fifty
Frenchmen and four Jesuits up the St. Lawrence in long boats through
the wilderness to a little hill on Lake Onondaga, where a palisaded
fort was built, and the lilies of France, embroidered on a white silk
flag by the Ursuline nuns, flung from the breeze above the Iroquois
land. The colony was hardly established before three hundred Mohawks
fell on the Hurons encamped under shelter of Quebec, butchered without
mercy, and departed with shouts of laughter that echoed below the guns
at Cape Diamond, scalps waving from the prow of each Iroquois canoe.
Quebec was thunderstruck, numb with fright. The French dared not
retaliate, or the Iroquois would fall on the colony at Onondaga.
Perhaps people who keep their vision too constantly fixed on heaven
lose {99} sight of the practical duties of earth; but when eighty
Onondagas came again in 1657, inviting a hundred Hurons to join the
Iroquois Confederacy, the Jesuits again suspected no treachery in the
invitation, but saw only a providential opportunity to spread one
hundred Huron converts among the Iroquois pagans. Father Ragueneau,
who had led the poor refugees down from the Christian Islands on
Georgian Bay, now with another priest offered to accompany the Hurons
to the Iroquois nation. An interpreter was needed. Young Radisson,
now twenty-one years of age, offered to go as a lay helper, and the
party of two hundred and twenty French, eighty Iroquois, one hundred
Hurons, departed from the gates of Montreal, July 26.
[Illustration: SAUSON'S MAP, 1656]
Hardly were they beyond recall, before scouts brought word that twelve
hundred Iroquois had gone on the warpath against Canada, and three
Frenchmen of Montreal had been scalped. At last the Governor of Quebec
bestirred himself: he caused twelve Iroquois to be seized and held as
hostages for the safety of the French.
The Onondagas had set out from Montreal carrying the Frenchmen's
baggage. Beyond the first portage they flung the packs on the ground,
hurried the Hurons into canoes so that no two Hurons were in one boat,
and paddled over the {100} water with loud laughter, leaving the French
in the lurch. Father Ragueneau and Radisson quickly read the ominous
signs. Telling the other French to gather up the baggage, they armed
themselves and paddled in swift pursuit. That night Ragueneau's party
and the Onondagas camped together. Nothing was said or done to evince
treachery. Friends and enemies, Onondagas and Hurons and white men,
paddled and camped together for another week; but when, on August 3,
four Huron warriors and two women forcibly seized a canoe and headed
back for Montreal, the Onondagas would delay no longer. That afternoon
as the Indians paddled inshore to camp on one of the Thousand Islands,
some Onondaga braves rushed into the woods as if to hunt. As the
canoes grated the pebbled shore a secret signal was given. The Huron
men with their eyes bent on the beach, intent on landing, never knew
that they had been struck. Onondaga hatchets, clubs, spears, were
plied from the water side, and from the hunters ambushed on shore
crashed musketry that mowed down those who would have fled to the woods.
By night time only a few Huron women and the French had survived the
massacre. Such was the baptism of blood that inaugurated the French
colony at Onondaga. Luckily the fort built on the crest of the hill
above Lake Onondaga was large enough to house stock and provisions.
Outside the palisades there daily gathered more Iroquois warriors, who
no longer dissembled a hunger for Jesuits' preaching. Among the
warriors were Radisson's old friends of the Mohawks, and his foster
father confessed to him frankly that the Confederacy were only delaying
the massacre of the French till they could somehow obtain the freedom
of the twelve Iroquois hostages held at Quebec.
Daily more warriors gathered; nightly the war drum pounded; week after
week the beleaguered and imprisoned French heard their stealthy enemy
closing nearer and nearer on them, and the painted foliage of autumn
frosts gave place to the leafless trees and the drifting snows of
midwinter. The French were hemmed in completely as if on a desert
isle, and no help could come from Quebec, where New France was
literally under Iroquois siege.
{101} The question was, what to do? Messengers had been secretly sent
to Quebec, but the Mohawks had caught the scouts bringing back answers,
and there was no safe escape from the colony through ambushed woods in
midwinter. The Iroquois could afford to bide their time for victims
who could not escape. All winter the whites secretly built boats in
the lofts of the fort, but when the timbers were put together the boats
had to be brought downstairs, and a Huron convert spread a terrifying
report of a second deluge for which the white men were preparing a
second Noah's Ark. Mohawk warriors at once scented an attempt to
escape when the ice broke up in spring, and placed their braves in
ambush along the portages. Also they sent a deputation to see if that
story of the boats were true. Forewarned by Radisson, the whites built
a floor over the boats, heaped canoes above the floor, and invited the
Mohawk spies in. The Mohawks smiled grimly and were reassured. Canoes
would be ripped into shingles if they ran the ice jam of spring. The
Iroquois felt doubly certain of their victims; but Radisson, free to go
among the warriors as one of themselves, learned that they were
plotting to murder half the colony and hold the other half as hostages
for the safety of the twelve Indians in the dungeon at Quebec. The
whites could delay no longer. Something must be done, but what?
Radisson, knowing the Indian customs, proposed a way out.
No normally built savage could refuse an invitation to a sumptuous
feast. According to Indian custom, no feaster dare leave uneaten food
on his plate. Waste to the Indian is crime. In the words of the
Scotch proverb, "Better burst than waste." And all Indians have
implicit faith in dreams. Radisson dreamed--so he told the
Indians--that the white men were to give them a marvelous banquet. No
sooner dreamed than done! The Iroquois probably thought it a chance to
obtain possession inside the fort; but the whites had taken good care
to set the banquet between inner and outer walls.
Such a repast no savage had ever enjoyed in the memory of the race.
All the ambushed spies flocked in from the portages. {102} The painted
warriors washed off their grease, donned their best buckskin, and
rallied to the banquet as to battle. All the stock but one solitary
pig, a few chickens and dogs, had been slaughtered for the kettle.
Such an odor of luscious meat steamed up from the fort for days as
whetted the warriors' hunger to the appetite of ravenous wolves.
Finally, one night, the trumpets blew a blare that almost burst
eardrums. Fifes shrilled, and the rub-a-dub-dub of a dozen drums set
the air in a tremor. A great fire had been kindled between the inner
and outer walls that set shadows dancing in the forest. Then the gates
were thrown open, and in trooped the feasters. All the French acting
as waiters, the whites carried in the kettles--kettles of wild fowl,
kettles of oxen, kettles of dogs, kettles of porridge and potatoes and
corn and what not? That is it--what not? Were the kettles drugged?
Who knows? The feasters ate till their eyes were rolling lugubriously;
and still the kettles came round. The Indians ate till they were
torpid as swollen corpses, and still came the white men with more
kettles, while the mischievous French lad, Radisson, danced a mad jig,
shouting, yelling, "Eat! eat! Beat the drum! Awake! awake! Cheer up!
Eat! eat!"
By midnight every soul of the feast had tumbled over sound asleep, and
at the rear gates were the French, stepping noiselessly, speaking in
whispers, launching their boats loaded with provisions and ammunition.
The soldiers were for going back and butchering every warrior, but the
Jesuits forbade such treachery. Then Radisson, light-spirited as if
the refugees had been setting out on a holiday, perpetrated yet a last
trick on the warriors. To the bell rope of the main gate he fastened a
pig, so when the Indians would pull the rope for admission, they would
hear the tramp of a sentry inside. Then he stuffed effigies of men on
guard round the windows of the fort.
It was a pitchy, sleety night, the river roaring with the loose ice of
spring flood, the forests noisy with the boisterous March wind. Out on
the maelstrom of ice and flood launched the fifty-three colonists,
March 20, 1658. By April they were safe {103} inside the walls of
Quebec, and chance hunters brought word that what with sleep, and the
measured tramp, tramp of the pig, and the baying of the dogs, and the
clucking of the chickens inside the fort, the escape of the whites had
not been discovered for a week. The Indians thought the whites had
gone into retreat for especially long prayers. Then a warrior climbed
the inner palisades, and rage knew no bounds. The fort was looted and
burnt to the ground.
Peltry traffic was the life of New France. Without it the colony would
have perished, and now the rupture of peace with the Iroquois cut off
that traffic. To the Iroquois land south of the St. Lawrence the
French dared not go, and the land of the Hurons was a devastated
wilderness. The boats that came out to New France were compelled to
return without a single peltry, but there still remained the unknown
land of the Algonquin northwest and beyond the Great Lakes. Year after
year young French adventurers essayed the exploration of that land. In
1634 Jean Nicolet, one of Champlain's wood runners, had gone westward
as far as Green Bay and coasted the shores of Lake Michigan. Jesuits,
where they preached on Lake Superior, had been told of a vast land
beyond the Sweet Water Seas,--Great Lakes,--a land where wandered
tribes of warriors powerful as the Iroquois.
Yearly, when the Algonquins came down the Ottawa to trade, Jesuits and
young French adventurers accompanied the canoes back up the Ottawa,
hoping to reach the Unknown Land, which rumor said was bounded only by
the Western Sea. However, the priests went no farther than Lake
Nipissing; but two nameless French wood runners came back from Green
Bay in August of 1656 with marvelous tales of wandering hunters to the
north called "Christines" (Crees), who passed the winter hunting
buffalo on a land bare of trees (the prairie) and the summer fishing on
the shores of the North Sea (Hudson's Bay). They told also of fierce
tribes south of the Christines (the Sioux), who traded with the Indians
of the Spanish settlements in Mexico.
{104} All New France became fired by these reports. When Radisson
returned from Onondaga in April of 1659, he found his brother-in-law,
Chouart Groseillers, just back from Nipissing, where he had been
serving the Jesuits, with more tales of this marvelous undiscovered
land. The two kinsmen decided to go back with the Algonquins that very
year; for, confessed Radisson in his journal, "I longed to see myself
again in a boat."
Thirty other Frenchmen and two Jesuits had assembled in Montreal to
join the Algonquins. More than sixty canoes set out from Montreal in
June, the one hundred and forty Algonquins well supplied with firearms
to defend themselves from marauding Iroquois. Numbers begot courage,
courage carelessness; and before the fleet had reached the Chaudière
Falls, at the modern city of Ottawa, the canoes had spread far apart in
utter forgetfulness of danger. Not twenty were within calling distance
when an Indian prophet, or wandering medicine man, ran down to the
shore, throwing his blanket and hatchet aside as signal of peace, and
shouting out warning of Iroquois warriors ambushed farther up the river.
Drunk with the new sense of power from the possession of French
firearms, perhaps drunk too with French brandy obtained at Montreal,
the Algonquins paused to take the strange captive on board, and
returned thanks for the friendly warning by calling their benefactor a
"coward and a dog and a hen." At the same time they took the
precaution of sleeping in mid-stream with their canoes abreast tied to
water-logged trees. A dull roar through the night mist foretold they
were nearing the great Chaudière Falls; and at first streak of day dawn
there was a rush to land and cross the long portage before the mist
lifted and exposed them to the hostiles.
To any one who knows the region of Canada's capital the scene can
easily be recalled: the long string of canoes gliding through the gray
morning like phantoms; Rideau Falls shimmering on the left like a snowy
curtain; the dense green of Gatineau Point as the birch craft swerved
across the river inshore to the right; the wooded heights, now known as
Parliament Hill, {105} jutting above the river mist, the new foliage of
the topmost trees just tipped with the first primrose shafts of
sunrise; then the vague stir and unrest in the air as the sun came up
till the gray fog became rose mist shot with gold, and rose like a
curtain to the upper airs, revealing the angry, tempest-tossed cataract
straight ahead, hurtling over the rocks of the Chaudière in walls of
living waters. Where the lumber piles of Hull on the right to-day jut
out as if to span Ottawa River to Parliament Hill, the voyageurs would
land to portage across to Lake Du Chêne.
Just as they sheered inshore the morning air was split by a hideous din
of guns and war whoops. The Iroquois had been lying in ambush at the
portage. The Algonquins' bravado now became a panic. They abandoned
canoes and baggage, threw themselves behind a windfall of trees, and
poured a steady rain of bullets across the portage in order to permit
the other canoes to come ashore. When the fog lifted, baggage and
canoes lay scattered on the shore. Behind one barricade of logs lay
the French and Algonquins; behind another, the Iroquois; and woe betide
the warrior who showed his head or dared to cross the open. All day
the warriors kept up their cross fire. Thirteen Algonquins had
perished, and the French were only waiting a chance to abandon the
voyage. Luckily, that night was pitch-dark. The Algonquin leader blew
a long low call through his birch trumpet. All hands rallied and
rushed for the boats to cross the river. All the Frenchmen's baggage
had been lost. Of the white adventurers every soul turned back but
Groseillers and Radisson.
The Algonquins now made up in caution what they had at first lacked.
They voyaged only by night and hid by day. No camp fires were kindled.
No muskets were fired even for game; and the paddlers were presently
reduced to food of _tripe de roche_--green moss scraped from rocks.
Birch canoes could not cross Lake Huron in storm; so the Indians kept
close to the south shore of Georgian Bay, winding among the pink
granite islands, past the ruined Jesuit missions across to the Straits
of Mackinac and on down Lake Michigan to Green Bay.
{106} "But our mind was not to stay here," relates Radisson, "but to
know the remotest people." Sometime between April and July of 1659 the
two white men had followed the Indian hunters across what is now the
state of Wisconsin to "a mighty river like the St. Lawrence." They had
found the Mississippi, first of white men to view the waters since the
treasure-seeking Spaniards of the south crossed the river. They had
penetrated the Unknown. They had discovered the Great Northwest--a
world boundlessly vast; so vast no man forever after in the history of
the human race need be dispossessed of his share of the earth.
Something of the importance of the discovery seems to have impressed
Radisson; for he speaks of the folly of the European nations fighting
for sterile, rocky provinces when here is land enough for all--land
enough to banish poverty.
The two Frenchmen's wanderings with the tribes of the prairie--whether
those tribes were Omahas or Iowas or Mandanes or Mascoutins or
Sioux--cannot be told here. It would fill volumes. I have told the
story fully elsewhere. By spring of 1660 Radisson and Groseillers are
back at Sault Ste. Marie, having gathered wealth of beaver peltries
beyond the dreams of avarice; but scouts have come to the Sault with
ominous news--news of one thousand Iroquois braves on the warpath to
destroy every settlement in New France. Hourly, daily, weekly, have
Quebec and Three Rivers and Montreal been awaiting the blow.
The Algonquins refuse to go down to Quebec with Radisson and
Groseillers. "Fools," shouts Radisson in full assembly of their chiefs
squatting round a council fire, "are you going to allow the Iroquois to
destroy you as they destroyed the Hurons? How are you going to fight
the Iroquois unless you come down to Quebec for guns? Do you want to
see your wives and children slaves? For my part, I prefer to die like
a man rather than live a slave."
The chiefs were shamed out of their cowardice. Five hundred young
warriors undertook to conduct the two white men down to Quebec. They
embarked at once, scouts to the fore reconnoitering all portages, and
guards on duty wherever the {107} boats landed. A few Iroquois braves
were seen near the Long Sault Rapids, but they took to their heels in
such evident fright that Radisson was puzzled to know what had become
of the one thousand braves on the warpath. Carrying the beaver pelts
along the portage so they could be used as shields in case of attack,
the Algonquins came to the foot of the Long Sault Rapids near Montreal,
and saw plainly what had happened to the invading warriors. A
barricade of logs the shape of a square fort stood on the shore. From
the pickets hung the scalps of dead Indians and on the sands lay the
charred remains of white men. Every tree for yards round was peppered
with bullet holes. Here was a charred stake where some victim had been
tortured; there the smashed remnants of half-burnt canoes; and at
another point empty powder barrels. A terrible battle had been waged
but a week before. Radisson could trace, inside the barricade of logs,
holes scooped in the sand where the besieged, desperate with thirst,
had drunk the muddy water. At intervals in the palisades openings had
been hacked, and these were blood stained, as if the scene of the
fiercest fighting. Bark had been burnt from the logs in places, where
the assailants had set fire to the fort.
From Indian refugees at Montreal, Radisson learned details of the
fight. It was the battle most famous in early Canadian annals--the
Long Sault. All winter Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal had cowered
in terror of the coming Iroquois. In imagination the beleaguered
garrisons foresaw themselves martyrs of Mohawk ferocity. It was
learned that seven hundred of the Iroquois warriors were hovering round
the Richelieu opposite Three Rivers. The rest of the braves had passed
the winter man-hunting in the Huron country, and were in spring
descending the Ottawa to unite with the lower band.
Week after week Quebec awaited the blow; but the blow never fell, for
at Montreal was a little band of seventeen heroes, led by a youth of
twenty-five,--Adam Dollard,--who longed to wipe out the stain of a
misspent boyhood by some glorious exploit in the service of the Holy
Cross.
{108} When word came that the upper foragers were descending from the
country of the Hurons to unite with the lower Iroquois against
Montreal, Dollard proposed to go up the Ottawa with a picked party of
chosen fighters, waylay the Iroquois at the foot of the Long Sault
Rapids, and so prevent the attack on Montreal. Sixteen young men
volunteered to join him. Charles Le Moyne, now acting as interpreter
at Montreal, begged the young heroes to delay till reënforcements could
be obtained: seventeen Frenchmen against five hundred Mohawks meant
certain death; but delay meant risk, and Dollard coveted nothing more
than a death of glory. At the chapel of the Hôtel Dieu the young
heroes made what they knew would certainly be their last confession,
bade eternal farewell to friends, and with crushed corn for provisions
set out in canoes for the upper Ottawa. May 1, they came to the foot
of the Long Sault. Here a barricade of logs had been erected in some
skirmish the year before, and here, too, was the usual camping place of
the Iroquois as their canoes came bounding down the swift waters of the
Ottawa. Dollard and his brave boys landed, slung their kettles for the
night meal, and sent scouts upstream to forewarn when the Iroquois
came. The night was passed in prayer. Next day arrived unexpected
reënforcements. Two bands of forty Hurons and four Algonquins, under a
brave Huron convert of the Christian Islands, had asked Maisonneuve's
permission to join Dollard and wreak their pent vengeance on the
Mohawks. Early one morning the scouts reported five Iroquois canoes
coming slowly downstream, and two hundred more warriors behind. There
was not even care to bring a supply of water inside the barricade or
remove kettles from the sticks. Posted in ambush, the young soldiers
fired as soon as the first canoes came within range. This put the rest
of the Iroquois on guard. The whites rushed for the shelter of their
barricade. The Indians dashed to erect a fort of their own. Inside
Dollard's palisades all was activity. Cracks were plastered up with
mud between logs, four marksmen with double stands of arms posted at
each loophole, and a big musketoon leveled straight for the {109}
Iroquois redoubt. The Iroquois rushed out yelling like fiends, and
jumping sideways as they advanced, to avoid becoming targets; but the
scattering fire of the musketoon caught them full abreast and a Seneca
chief fell dead. The Iroquois then broke up Dollard's canoes and tried
to set fire to the logs; but again the musketoon's scattering bullets
mowed a swath of death in the advancing ranks, and for a second time
the red warriors sought shelter behind the logs. Probably to obtain
truce till they could send word to the other warriors on the Richelieu,
the Iroquois then hung out a flag of parley; but the Huron chief knew
what peace with an Iroquois meant. He it was, on the Christian
Islands, who, when the Iroquois had proposed a similar parley for the
purpose of massacring the Hurons, invited their chiefs into the Huron
camp and brained them for their treachery. Dollard's band made answer
to the flag hoisted above the Iroquois pickets by rushing out, securing
the head of the Seneca chief, and elevating it on a pike above their
fort.
But as the fight went on, the whites had to have water, and a few
rushed for the river to fill kettles. This rejoiced the hearts of the
Iroquois. They could guess if the whites were short of water, it only
required more warriors to surround the barricade completely and compel
surrender. Scouts had meanwhile gone for the Iroquois at Richelieu;
and on the fifth day of the siege a roar, gathering volume as it
approached, told Dollard that the seven hundred warriors were coming
through the forest. Among the newcomers were Huron renegades, who
approached within speaking distance of the fort and called out for the
Hurons to save themselves from death by surrender. Death was plainly
inevitable, and all the Hurons but the chief deserted. This reduced
Dollard's band, from sixty to twenty. The whites were now weak from
lack of food and sleep; but for three more days and nights the marksmen
and musketoon plied such deadly aim at the assailants that the Iroquois
actually held a council whether they should retire. The Iroquois
chiefs argued that it would disgrace the nation forever if one thousand
of their warriors were to retire before a handful of beardless white
boys. {110} Solemnly the bundle of war sticks was thrown on the
ground. Then each warrior willing to go on with the siege picked up a
stick. The chiefs chose first and the rest were shamed into doing
likewise. Inside the fort, Dollard's men were at the last extremities.
Blistered and blackened with powder smoke, the fevered men were half
delirious from lack of sleep and water. Some fell to their knees and
prayed. Others staggered with sleep where they stood. Others had not
strength to stand and sank, muttering prayers, to their knees. The
Iroquois were adopting new tactics. They could not reach the palisades
in the face of the withering fire from the musketoon, so they
constructed a movable palisade of trees, behind which marched the
entire band of warriors. In vain Dollard's marksmen aimed their
bullets at the front carriers. Where one fell another stepped in his
place. Desperate, Dollard resolved on a last expedient. Some accounts
say he took a barrel of powder; others, that he wrapped powder in a
huge bole of birch bark. Putting a light to this, he threw it with all
his might; but his strength had failed; the dangerous projectile fell
back inside the barricade, exploding; marksmen were driven from their
places. A moment later the Iroquois were inside the barricade
screeching like demons. They found only three Frenchmen alive; and so
great was the Mohawk rage to be foiled of victims that they fell on the
Huron renegades in their own ranks and put them to death on the spot.
Such was the Battle of the Long Sault of which Radisson saw the scars
on his way down the Ottawa. It saved New France. If seventeen boys
could fight in this fashion, how--the Iroquois asked--would a fort full
of men fight? A few days later Radisson was conducted in triumph
through the streets of Quebec and personally welcomed by the new
governor, d'Argenson.
It can well be imagined that Radisson's account of the vast new lands
discovered by him aroused enthusiasm at Quebec. Among the Crees,
Radisson and Groseillers had heard of that Sea of the North--Hudson
Bay--to which Champlain had {111} tried to go by way of the Ottawa.
The Indians had promised to conduct the two Frenchmen overland to the
North Sea; but Radisson deemed it wise not to reveal this fact lest
other voyageurs should forestall them. Somehow the secret leaked out.
Either Groseillers told it or his wife dropped some hint of it to her
father confessor; but the two explorers were amazed to receive official
orders to conduct the Jesuits to the North Sea by way of the Saguenay.
They refused point-blank to go as subordinates on any expedition. The
fur trade was at this time regulated by license. Any one who proceeded
to the woods without license was liable to imprisonment, the galleys
for life, death if the offense were repeated. Radisson and Groseillers
asked for a license to go north in 1661. D'Avaugour, a bluff soldier
who had become governor, would grant it only on condition of receiving
half the profits. Groseillers and Radisson set off by night without a
license.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE--JESUIT RELATION OF 1662-1663]
{112} This time the Indian canoes struck off into Lake Superior instead
of Lake Michigan, and coasted that billowy inland sea with its iron
shore and shadowy forests. On the northwest side of the lake,
somewhere between Duluth and Fort William, the explorers joined the
Crees, and proceeded northwestward with them, hunting along that Indian
trail to become famous as the fur traders' highway--from Lake Superior
to the Lake of the Woods. The first white man's fort built west of the
Great Lakes, the terrible famine that winter, and the visits of the
Sioux--are all a story in themselves. Spring found the explorers
following the Crees over the height of land from Lake Superior to
Hudson Bay. As soon as the ice loosened, dugouts were launched, and
the voyageurs began that hardest of all canoe trips in America, through
the forest hinterland of Ontario. Here the rivers were a stagnant
marsh, with outlet hidden by dankest forest growth where the light of
the sun never penetrated. There the waters swollen by spring thaw and
broken by the ice jam whirled the {113} boats into rapids before the
paddlers realized. There was wading to mid-waist in ice water. There
were nights when camp was made on water-soaked moss. There were days
when the windfall compelled the canoemen to take the canoes out of the
water and carry them half the time. "At last," writes Radisson, "we
came to the sea, where we found an old house all demolished and
battered with bullets. The Crees told us about Europeans being here;
and we went from isle to isle all that summer." At this time the
canoes must have been coasting the south shore of James Bay, headed
east; for Radisson presently explains that they came to a river, which
rose in a lake near the source of the Saguenay--namely Rupert River.
What was the old house battered with bullets? Was it Hudson's winter
fort of 1610-1611? The Indians of Rupert River to this day have
legends of Hudson having come back to his fort when cast away by the
mutineers.
[Illustration: THE JESUIT MAP OF LAKE SUPERIOR (From the Relation of
1670-1671)]
The furs that Radisson and Groseillers brought back from the north this
time were worth fabulous wealth. The cargo saved New France from
bankruptcy; but the explorers had defied both Church and Governor, and
all the greedy monopolists of Quebec fell on Radisson and Groseillers
with jealous fury. They were fined $20,000 to build a fort at Three
Rivers, though given permission to inscribe their coats of arms on the
gate. A $30,000 fine went to the public treasury of New France, and a
tax of $70,000 was imposed by the Farmers of the Revenue. Of the total
cargo there was left to Radisson and Groseillers only $20,000.
Disgusted, the two explorers personally appealed to the Court of
France; but there the monopolists were all-powerful, and justice was
denied. They tried to induce some of the fishing fleet off Cape Breton
to venture to the North Sea; but there the monopolists' malign
influence was again felt. They were accused of having broken the laws
of Quebec. Zechariah Gillam, a sea captain of Boston, who chanced to
be at Port Royal, offered them his vessel for a voyage to Hudson Bay;
but when the {114} doughty captain came to the ice-locked straits, his
courage failed and he refused to enter. Finally, at Port Royal, with
the last of their meager and dwindling capital, they hired two ships
for a voyage; but one was wrecked on Sable Island while fishing for
supplies, and instead of sailing for Hudson Bay in 1665, Radisson and
Groseillers were summoned to Boston in a lawsuit over the lost vessel.
In Boston they met commissioners of the English government and were
invited to lay their plans before Charles II, King of England. At last
the tide of fortune seemed to be turning. Sailing with Sir George
Carterett, after pirate raid and shipwreck, they reached London to find
the plague raging, and were ordered to Windsor, where Charles received
them, recommended their venture to Prince Rupert, and provided 2 pounds
a week each for their living expenses.
[Illustration: Charles II]
From being penniless outcasts, Radisson and Groseillers suddenly
wakened to find themselves famous. Groseillers seems to have kept in
the background, but Radisson, the younger man, enjoyed the full blaze
of glory, was seen in the King's box at the theater, and was presently
paying furious court to Mistress Mary Kirke, daughter of Sir John
Kirke, whose ancestors had captured Quebec. What with war and the
plague, it was 1668 before the English Admiralty could loan the two
ships _Eaglet_ and _Nonsuch_ for a voyage to Hudson Bay. The expense
was to be defrayed by a band of {115} friends known as the "Gentlemen
Adventurers of England Trading to Hudson Bay," subscribing so much
stock in cash, provision, and goods for trade. Radisson's ship, the
_Eaglet_, was driven back, damaged by storm; but the other, under
Groseillers, went on to Hudson Bay, where the marks set up on the
overland voyage were found at Rupert River, and a small fort was built
for trade. During the delay Radisson was not idle in London. He wrote
the journals of his first four voyages. He married Mary Kirke--some
accounts say, eloped with her. With the help of King Charles and
Prince Rupert he organized what is now known as the Hudson's Bay Fur
Company; for when Groseillers' ship returned in the fall of 1669, its
success in trade had been so great that the Adventurers at once applied
for a royal charter of exclusive monopoly in trade to all the regions,
land and sea, rivers and territories, adjoining Hudson Bay. The
monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company to the Great Northwest was granted
by King Charles in May, 1670.
Here, then, was the situation. England was intrenched south of the St.
Lawrence. England was taking armed possession of all lands bordering
on Hudson Bay and such other lands as the Adventurers might find.
Wedged between was New France with a population of less than six
thousand. If France could have foreseen what her injustice to two poor
adventurers would cost the nation in blood and money, it would have
paid her to pension Radisson like a prince of the blood royal.
NOTE TO CHAPTER VI. The viceroys of New France were shifted so
frequently that little record remains of several but their names. The
official list of the governors under the French régime stands as
follows:
Samuel de Champlain, died at Quebec, Christmas, 1635.
Marc Antoine de Chasteaufort, _pro tem_.
Charles Huault de Montmagny, 1636.
Louis d'Ailleboust of the Montreal Crusaders, 1648.
Jean de Lauzon, 1651.
Charles de Lauzon-Charny (son), _pro tem_.
Louis d'Ailleboust, 1657.
Viscount d'Argenson, 1658, a young man who quarreled with Jesuits.
Viscount d'Avagour, 1661, a bluff soldier, who also quarreled with
Jesuits.
De Mezy, 1663, appointed by Jesuits' influence, but quarreled with them.
{116} Marquis de Tracy, 1663, who was viceroy of all French possessions
in America, and really sent out to act as general.
De Courcelle, 1665, who acts as governor under De Tracy and succeeds
him.
Frontenac, 1672, was recalled through influence of Jesuits, whose
interference he would not tolerate in civil affairs.
De La Barre, 1682, an impotent, dishonest old man, who came to mend his
fortunes.
De Brisay de Denonville, 1685.
Frontenac, 1689.
De Calliere, 1699.
Marquis de Vaudreuil, 1703.
Charles le Moyne, Baron de Longeuil, 1725, son of Le Moyne, the famous
fighter and interpreter of Montreal; brother of Le Moyne d'Iberville,
the commander.
Marquis de Beauharnois, 1726.
Count de la Galissoniere, 1747.
Marquis de la Jonquiere, 1749.
Charles le Moyne, Baron de Longeuil, 1752, son of former Governor.
Duquesne,1752.
Marquis de Vaudreuil, 1755, descendant of first Vaudreuil.
{117}