CHAPTER XI

LEWIS AND CLARK

The First White Men to ascend the Missouri to its Sources and descend

the Columbia to the Pacific--Exciting Adventures on the Cañons of the

Missouri, the Discovery of the Great Falls and the Yellowstone--Lewis'

Escape from Hostiles

APPENDIX

INDEX

ILLUSTRATIONS

Stealing from the Fort by Night . . . . . . Frontispiece

Map of the Great Fur Country

Three Rivers in 1757

Map of the Iroquois Country in the Days of Radisson

Albany from an Old Print

The Battery, New York, in Radisson's Time

Fort Amsterdam, from an ancient engraving executed in Holland

One of the Earliest Maps of the Great Lakes

Paddling past Hostiles

Jogues, the Jesuit Missionary, who was tortured by the Mohawks

Château de Ramezay, Montreal

A Cree Brave, with the Wampum String

An Old-time Buffalo Hunt on the Plains among the Sioux

Father Marquette, from an old painting discovered in Montreal

Voyageurs running the Rapids of the Ottawa River

Montreal in 1760

Château St. Louis, Quebec, 1669

A Parley on the Plains

Martello Tower of Refuge in Time of Indian Wars--Three Rivers

Skin for Skin, Coat of Arms and Motto, Hudson's Bay Company

Hudson's Bay Company Coins, made of Lead melted from

Tea-chests at York Factory

Hudson Bay Dog Trains laden with Furs arriving at Lower

Fort Garry, Red River

Indians and Hunters spurring to the Fight

Fights at the Foothills of the Rockies, between Crows and Snakes

Each Man landed with Pack on his Back and trotted away over Portages

A Cree Indian of the Minnesota Borderlands

A Group of Cree Indians

The Soldiers marched out from Mount Royal for the Western Sea

Traders' Boats running the Rapids of the Athabasca River

The Ragged Sky-line of the Mountains

Hungry Hall, 1870

A Monarch of the Plains

Fur Traders towed down the Saskatchewan in the Summer of 1900

Tepees dotted the Valley

An Eskimo Belle

Samuel Hearne

Eskimo using Double-bladed Paddle

Eskimo Family, taken by Light of Midnight Sun

Fort Garry, Winnipeg, a Century Ago

Plan of Fort Prince of Wales, from Robson's drawing, 1733-1747

Fort Prince of Wales

Beaver Coin of the Hudson's Bay Company

Alexander Mackenzie

Eskimo trading his Pipe, carved from Walrus Tusk, for the

Value of Three Beaver Skins

Quill and Beadwork on Buckskin

Fort William, Headquarters Northwest Company, Lake Superior

Running a Rapid on Mackenzie River

Slave Lake Indians

Good Hope, Mackenzie River, Hudson's Bay Company Fort

The Mouth of the Mackenzie by the Light of the Midnight Sun

Captain Meriwether Lewis

Captain William Clark

Tracking up Stream

Typical Mountain Trapper

The Discovery of the Great Falls

Fighting a Grizzly

Packer carrying Goods across Portage

Spying on Enemy's Fort

Indian Camp at Foothills of Rockies

On Guard

Indians of the Up-country or Pays d'en Haut

PART I

PIERRE ESPRIT RADISSON

ADVENTURES OF THE FIRST WHITE MAN TO

EXPLORE THE WEST, THE NORTHWEST,

AND THE NORTH

[Illustration: Map of the Great Fur Company.]

Pathfinders of the West

CHAPTER I

1651-1653

RADISSON'S FIRST VOYAGE

The Boy Radisson is captured by the Iroquois and carried to the Mohawk

Valley--In League with Another Captive, he slays their Guards and

escapes--He is overtaken in Sight of Home--Tortured and adopted in the

Tribe, he visits Orange, where the Dutch offer to ransom him--His Escape

Early one morning in the spring of 1652 three young men left the little

stockaded fort of Three Rivers, on the north bank of the St. Lawrence,

for a day's hunting in the marshes of Lake St. Peter. On one side were

the forested hills, purple with the mists of rising vapor and still

streaked with white patches of snow where the dense woods shut out the

sunlight. On the other lay the silver expanse of the St. Lawrence,

more like a lake than a river, with mile on mile southwestward of

rush-grown marshes, where plover and curlew and duck and wild geese

flocked to their favorite feeding-grounds three hundred years ago just

as they do to-day. Northeastward, the three mouths of the St. Maurice

poured their spring flood into the St. Lawrence.

The hunters were very young. Only hunters rash with the courage of

untried youth would have left the shelter of the fort walls when all

the world knew that the Iroquois had been lying in ambush round the

little settlement of Three Rivers day and night for the preceding year.

Not a week passed but some settler working on the outskirts of Three

Rivers was set upon and left dead in his fields by marauding Iroquois.

The tortures suffered by Jogues, the great Jesuit missionary who had

been captured by the Iroquois a few years before, were still fresh in

the memory of every man, woman, and child in New France. It was from

Three Rivers that Piescaret, the famous Algonquin chief who could

outrun a deer, had set out against the Iroquois, turning his snowshoes

back to front, so that the track seemed to lead north when he was

really going south, and then, having thrown his pursuers off the trail,

coming back on his own footsteps, slipping up stealthily on the

Iroquois that were following the false scent, and tomahawking the

laggards.[1] It was from Three Rivers that the Mohawks had captured

the Algonquin girl who escaped by slipping off the thongs that bound

her. Stepping over the prostrate forms of her sleeping guards, such a

fury of revenge possessed her that she seized an axe and brained the

nearest sleeper, then eluded her pursuers by first hiding in a hollow

tree and afterward diving under the debris of a beaver dam.

[Illustration: Three Rivers in 1757.]

These things were known to every inhabitant of Three Rivers. Farmers

had flocked into the little fort and could venture back to their fields

only when armed with a musket.[2] Yet the three young hunters rashly

left the shelter of the fort walls and took the very dangerous path

that led between the forests and the water. One of the young men was

barely in his seventeenth year.[3] This was Pierre Esprit Radisson,

from St. Malo, the town of the famous Cartier. Young Radisson had only

come to New France the year before, and therefore could not realize the

dangers of Indian warfare. Like boys the world over, the three went

along, boasting how they would fight if the Indians came. One skirted

the forest, on the watch for Iroquois, the others kept to the water, on

the lookout for game. About a mile from Three Rivers they encountered

a herdsman who warned them to keep out from the foot of the hills.

Things that looked like a multitude of heads had risen out of the earth

back there, he said, pointing to the forests. That set the young

hunters loading their pistols and priming muskets. It must also have

chilled their zest; for, shooting some ducks, one of the young men

presently declared that he had had enough--he was going back. With

that daring which was to prove both the lodestar and the curse of his

life, young Radisson laughed to scorn the sudden change of mind.

Thereupon the first hunter was joined by the second, and the two went

off in high dudgeon. With a laugh, Pierre Radisson marched along

alone, foreshadowing his after life,--a type of every pathfinder facing

the dangers of the unknown with dauntless scorn, an immortal type of

the world-hero.

Shooting at every pace and hilarious over his luck, Radisson had

wandered some nine miles from the fort, when he came to a stream too

deep to ford and realized that he already had more game than he could

possibly carry. Hiding in hollow trees what he could not bring back,

he began trudging toward Three Rivers with a string of geese, ducks,

and odd teal over his shoulders, Wading swollen brooks and scrambling

over windfalls, he retraced his way without pause till he caught sight

of the town chapel glimmering in the sunlight against the darkening

horizon above the river. He was almost back where his comrades had

left him; so he sat down to rest. The cowherd had driven his cattle

back to Three Rivers.[4] The river came lapping through the rushes.

There was a clacking of wild-fowl flocking down to their marsh nests;

perhaps a crane flopped through the reeds; but Radisson, who had

laughed the nervous fears of the others to scorn, suddenly gave a start

at the lonely sounds of twilight. Then he noticed that his pistols

were water-soaked. Emptying the charges, he at once reloaded, and with

characteristic daring crept softly back to reconnoitre the woods.

Dodging from tree to tree, he peered up and down the river. Great

flocks of ducks were swimming on the water. That reassured him, for

the bird is more alert to alarm than man. The fort was almost within

call. Radisson determined to have a shot at such easy quarry; but as

he crept through the grass toward the game, he almost stumbled over

what rooted him to the spot with horror. Just as they had fallen,

naked and scalped, with bullet and hatchet wounds all over their

bodies, lay his comrades of the morning, dead among the rushes.

Radisson was too far out to get back to the woods. Stooping, he tried

to grope to the hiding of the rushes. As he bent, half a hundred heads

rose from the grasses, peering which way he might go. They were

behind, before, on all sides--his only hope was a dash for the

cane-grown river, where he might hide by diving and wading, till

darkness gave a chance for a rush to the fort. Slipping bullet and

shot in his musket as he ran, and ramming down the paper, hoping

against hope that he had not been seen, he dashed through the

brushwood. A score of guns crashed from the forest.[5] Before he

realized the penalty that the Iroquois might exact for such an act, he

had fired back; but they were upon him. He was thrown down and

disarmed. When he came giddily to his senses, he found himself being

dragged back to the woods, where the Iroquois flaunted the fresh scalps

of his dead friends. Half drawn, half driven, he was taken to the

shore. Here, a flotilla of canoes lay concealed where he had been

hunting wild-fowl but a few hours before. Fires were kindled, and the

crotched sticks driven in the ground to boil the kettle for the evening

meal. The young Frenchman was searched, stripped, and tied round the

waist with a rope, the Indians yelling and howling like so many wolves

all the while till a pause was given their jubilation by the alarm of a

scout that the French and Algonquins were coming. In a trice, the fire

was out and covered. A score of young braves set off to reconnoitre.

Fifty remained at the boats; but if Radisson hoped for a rescue, he was

doomed to disappointment. The warriors returned. Seventy Iroquois

gathered round a second fire for the night. The one predominating

passion of the savage nature is bravery. Lying in ambush, they had

heard this French youth laugh at his comrades' fears. In defiance of

danger, they had seen him go hunting alone. After he had heard an

alarm, he had daringly come out to shoot at the ducks. And, then, boy

as he was, when attacked he had instantly fired back at numerous enough

enemies to have intimidated a score of grown men. There is not the

slightest doubt it was Radisson's bravery that now saved him from the

fate of his companions.

His clothes were returned. While the evening meal was boiling, young

warriors dressed and combed the Frenchman's hair after the manner of

braves. They daubed his cheeks with war-paint; and when they saw that

their rancid meats turned him faint, they boiled meat in clean water

and gave him meal browned on burning sand.[6] He did not struggle to

escape, so he was now untied. That night he slept between two warriors

under a common blanket, through which he counted the stars. For fifty

years his home was to be under the stars. It is typically Radisson

when he could add: "I slept a sound sleep; for they wakened me upon the

breaking of the day." In the morning they embarked in thirty-seven

canoes, two Indians in each boat, with Radisson tied to the cross-bar

of one, the scalps lying at his feet. Spreading out on the river, they

beat their paddles on the gunwales of the canoes, shot off guns, and

uttered the shrill war-cry--"Ah-oh! Ah-oh! Ah-oh!" [7] Lest this

were not sufficient defiance to the penned-up fort on the river bank,

the chief stood up in his canoe, signalled silence, and gave three

shouts. At once the whole company answered till the hills rang; and

out swung the fleet of canoes with more shouting and singing and firing

of guns, each paddle-stroke sounding the death knell to the young

Frenchman's hopes.

By sunset they were among the islands at the mouth of the Richelieu,

where muskrats scuttled through the rushes and wild-fowl clouded the

air. The south shore of Lake St. Peter was heavily forested; the

north, shallow. The lake was flooded with spring thaw, and the Mohawks

could scarcely find camping-ground among the islands. The young

prisoner was deathly sick from the rank food that he had eaten and

heart-sick from the widening distance between himself and Three Rivers.

Still, they treated him kindly, saying, "Chagon! Chagon!--Be merry!

Cheer up!" The fourth day up the Richelieu, he was embarked without

being fastened to the cross-bar, and he was given a paddle. Fresh to

the work, Radisson made a labor of his oar. The Iroquois took the

paddle and taught him how to give the light, deft, feather strokes of

the Indian canoeman. On the river they met another band of warriors,

and the prisoner was compelled to show himself a trophy of victory and

to sing songs for his captors. That evening the united bands kindled

an enormous campfire and with the scalps of the dead flaunting from

spear heads danced the scalp dance, reënacting in pantomime all the

episodes of the massacre to the monotonous chant-chant, of a recitative

relating the foray. At the next camping-ground, Radisson's hair was

shaved in front and decorated on top with the war-crest of a brave.

Having translated the white man into a savage, they brought him one of

the tin looking-glasses used by Indians to signal in the sun. "I,

viewing myself all in a pickle," relates Radisson, "smeared with red

and black, covered with such a top, . . . could not but fall in love

with myself, if I had not had better instructions to shun the sin of

pride."

Radisson saw that apparent compliance with the Mohawks might win him a

chance to escape; so he was the first to arise in the morning, wakening

the others and urging them that it was time to break camp. The stolid

Indians were not to be moved by an audacious white boy. Watching the

young prisoner, the keepers lay still, feigning sleep. Radisson rose.

They made no protest. He wandered casually down to the water side.

One can guess that the half-closed eyelids of his guards opened a

trifle: was the mouse trying to get away from the cat? To the Indians'

amusement, instead of trying to escape, Radisson picked up a spear and

practised tossing it, till a Mohawk became so interested that he jumped

up and taught the young Frenchman the proper throws. That day the

Indians gave him the present of a hunting-knife. North of Lake

Champlain, the river became so turbulent that they were forced to land

and make a _portage_. Instead of lagging, as captives frequently did

from very fear as they approached nearer and nearer what was almost

certain to mean death-torture in the Iroquois villages--Radisson

hurried over the rocks, helping the older warriors to carry their

packs. At night he was the first to cut wood for the camp fire.

About a week from the time they had left Lake St. Peter, they entered

Lake Champlain. On the shores of the former had been enacted the most

hideous of all Indian customs--the scalp dance. On the shores of the

latter was performed one of the most redeeming rites of Indian warfare.

Round a small pool of water a coppice of branches was interlaced. Into

the water were thrown hot stones till the enclosure was steaming. Here

each warrior took a sweat-bath of purification to prepare for reunion

with his family. Invoking the spirits as they bathed, the warriors

emerged washed--as they thought--of all blood-guilt.[8]

[Illustration: Map of the Iroquois country in the days of Radisson.]

In the night shots sounded through the heavy silence of the forest, and

the Mohawks embarked in alarm, compelling their white prisoner to lie

flat in the bottom of the canoe. In the morning when he awakened, he

found the entire band hidden among the rushes of the lake. They spent

several days on Lake Champlain, then glided past wooded mountains down

a calm river to Lake George, where canoes were abandoned and the

warriors struck westward through dense forests to the country of the

Iroquois. Two days from the lake slave women met the returning braves,

and in Radisson's words, "loaded themselves like mules with baggage."

On this woodland march Radisson won golden opinions for himself by two

acts: struck by an insolent young brave, he thrashed the culprit

soundly; seeing an old man staggering under too heavy a load, the white

youth took the burden on his own shoulders.

The return of the warriors to their villages was always celebrated as a

triumph. The tribe marched out to meet them, singing, firing guns,

shouting a welcome, dancing as the Israelites danced of old when

victors returned from battle. Men, women, and children lined up on

each side armed with clubs and whips to scourge the captives. Well for

Radisson that he had won the warriors' favor; for when the time came

for him to run the gantlet of Iroquois _diableries_, instead of being

slowly led, with trussed arms and shackled feet, he was stripped free

and signalled to run so fast that his tormentors could not hit him.

Shrieks of laughter from the women, shouts of applause from the men,

always greeted the racer who reached the end of the line unscathed. A

captive Huron woman, who had been adopted by the tribe, caught the

white boy as he dashed free of a single blow clear through the lines of

tormentors. Leading him to her cabin, she fed and clothed him.

Presently a band of braves marched up, demanded the surrender of

Radisson, and took him to the Council Lodge of the Iroquois for

judgment.

Old men sat solemnly round a central fire, smoking their calumets in

silence. Radisson was ordered to sit down. A coal of fire was put in

the bowl of the great Council Pipe and passed reverently round the

assemblage. Then the old Huron woman entered, gesticulating and

pleading for the youth's life. The men smoked on silently with deep,

guttural "ho-ho's," meaning "yes, yes, we are pleased." The woman was

granted permission to adopt Radisson as a son. Radisson had won his

end. Diplomacy and courage had saved his life. It now remained to

await an opportunity for escape.

Radisson bent all his energies to become a great hunter. He was given

firearms, and daily hunted with the family of his adoption. It so

happened that the family had lost a son in the wars, whose name had

signified the same as Radisson's--that is, "a stone"; so the Pierre of

Three Rivers became the Orimha of the Mohawks. The Iroquois husband of

the woman who had befriended him gave such a feast to the Mohawk braves

as befitted the prestige of a warrior who had slain nineteen enemies

with his own hand. Three hundred young Mohawks sat down to a collation

of moose nose and beaver tails and bears' paws, served by slaves. To

this banquet Radisson was led, decked out in colored blankets with

garnished leggings and such a wealth of wampum strings hanging from

wrists, neck, hair, and waist that he could scarcely walk. Wampum

means more to the Indian than money to the white man. It represents

not only wealth but social standing, and its value may be compared to

the white man's estimate of pink pearls. Diamond-cutters seldom spend

more than two weeks in polishing a good stone. An Indian would spend

thirty days in perfecting a single bit of shell into fine wampum.

Radisson's friends had ornamented him for the feast in order to win the

respect of the Mohawks for the French boy. Striking his hatchet

through a kettle of sagamite to signify thus would he break peace to

all Radisson's foes, the old Iroquois warrior made a speech to the

assembled guests. The guests clapped their hands and shouted, "Chagon,

Orimha!--Be merry, Pierre!" The Frenchman had been formally adopted as

a Mohawk.

The forests were now painted in all the glories of autumn. All the

creatures of the woodlands shook off the drowsy laziness of summer and

came down from the uplands seeking haunts for winter retreat. Moose

and deer were on the move. Beaver came splashing down-stream to

plaster up their wattled homes before frost. Bear and lynx and marten,

all were restless as the autumn winds instinct with coming storm. This

is the season when the Indian sets out to hunt and fight. Furnished

with clothing, food, and firearms, Radisson left the Mohawk Valley with

three hunters. By the middle of August, the rind of the birch is in

perfect condition for peeling. The first thing the hunters did was to

slit off the bark of a thick-girthed birch and with cedar linings make

themselves a skiff. Then they prepared to lay up a store of meat for

the winter's war-raids. Before ice forms a skim across the still

pools, nibbled chips betray where a beaver colony is at work; so the

hunters began setting beaver traps. One night as they were returning

to their wigwam, there came through the leafy darkness the weird sound

of a man singing. It was a solitary Algonquin captive, who called out

that he had been on the track of a bear since daybreak. He probably

belonged to some well-known Iroquois, for he was welcomed to the

camp-fire. The sight of a face from Three Rivers roused the

Algonquin's memories of his northern home. In the noise of the

crackling fire, he succeeded in telling Radisson, without being

overheard by the Iroquois, that he had been a captive for two years and

longed to escape.

"Do you love the French?" the Algonquin asked Radisson.

"Do you love the Algonquin?" returned Radisson, knowing they were

watched.

"As I do my own nation." Then leaning across to Radisson,

"Brother--white man!--Let us escape! The Three Rivers--it is not far

off! Will you live like a Huron in bondage, or have your liberty with

the French?" Then, lowering his voice, "Let us kill all three this

night when they are asleep!"

From such a way of escape, the French youth held back. The Algonquin

continued to urge him. By this time, Radisson must have heard from

returning Iroquois warriors that they had slain the governor of Three

Rivers, Duplessis-Kerbodot, and eleven other Frenchmen, among whom was

the husband of Radisson's eldest sister, Marguerite.[9]

While Radisson was still hesitating, the suspicious Iroquois demanded

what so much whispering was about; but the alert Algonquin promptly

quieted their fears by trumping up some hunting story. Wearied from

their day's hunt, the three Mohawks slept heavily round the camp-fire.

They had not the least suspicion of danger, for they had stacked their

arms carelessly against the trees of the forest. Terrified lest the

Algonquin should attempt to carry out his threat, Radisson pretended to

be asleep. Rising noiselessly, the Algonquin sat down by the fire.

The Mohawks slept on. The Algonquin gave Radisson a push. The French

boy looked up to see the Algonquin studying the postures of the

sleeping forms. The dying fire glimmered like a blotch of blood under

the trees. Stepping stealthy as a cat over the sleeping men, the

Indian took possession of their firearms. Drawn by a kind of horror,

Radisson had risen. The Algonquin thrust one of the tomahawks into the

French lad's hands and pointed without a word at the three sleeping

Mohawks. Then the Indian began the black work. The Mohawk nearest the

fire never knew that he had been struck, and died without a sound.

Radisson tried to imitate the relentless Algonquin, but, unnerved with

horror, he bungled the blow and lost hold of the hatchet just as it

struck the Mohawk's head. The Iroquois sprang up with a shout that

awakened the third man, but the Algonquin was ready. Radisson's blow

proved fatal. The victim reeled back dead, and the third man was

already despatched by the Algonquin.

Radisson was free. It was a black deed that freed him, but not half so

black as the deeds perpetrated in civilized wars for less cause; and

for that deed Radisson was to pay swift retribution.

Taking the scalps as trophies to attest his word, the Algonquin threw

the bodies into the river. He seized all the belongings of the dead

men but one gun and then launched out with Radisson on the river. The

French youth was conscience-stricken. "I was sorry to have been in

such an encounter," he writes, "but it was too late to repent." Under

cover of the night mist and shore foliage, they slipped away with the

current. At first dawn streak, while the mist still hid them, they

landed, carried their canoe to a sequestered spot in the dense forest,

and lay hidden under the upturned skiff all that day, tormented by

swarms of mosquitoes and flies, but not daring to move from

concealment. At nightfall, they again launched down-stream, keeping

always in the shadows of the shore till mist and darkness shrouded

them, then sheering off for mid-current, where they paddled for dear

life. Where camp-fires glimmered on the banks, they glided past with

motionless paddles. Across Lake Champlain, across the Richelieu, over

long _portages_ where every shadow took the shape of an ambushed

Iroquois, for fourteen nights they travelled, when at last with many

windings and false alarms they swept out on the wide surface of Lake

St. Peter in the St. Lawrence.

Within a day's journey of Three Rivers, they were really in greater

danger than they had been in the forests of Lake Champlain. Iroquois

had infested that part of the St. Lawrence for more than a year. The

forest of the south shore, the rush-grown marshes, the wooded islands,

all afforded impenetrable hiding. It was four in the morning when they

reached Lake St. Peter. Concealing their canoe, they withdrew to the

woods, cooked their breakfast, covered the fire, and lay down to sleep.

In a couple of hours the Algonquin impatiently wakened Radisson and

urged him to cross the lake to the north shore on the Three Rivers

side. Radisson warned the Indian that the Iroquois were ever lurking

about Three Rivers. The Indian would not wait till sunset. "Let us

go," he said. "We are past fear. Let us shake off the yoke of these

whelps that have killed so many French and black robes (priests). . . .

If you come not now that we are so near, I leave you, and will tell the

governor you were afraid to come."

Radisson's judgment was overruled by the impatient Indian. They pushed

their skiff out from the rushes. The water lay calm as a sea of

silver. They paddled directly across to get into hiding on the north

shore. Halfway across Radisson, who was at the bow, called out that he

saw shadows on the water ahead. The Indian stood up and declared that

the shadow was the reflection of a flying bird. Barely had they gone a

boat length when the shadows multiplied. They were the reflections of

Iroquois ambushed among the rushes. Heading the canoe back for the

south shore, they raced for their lives. The Iroquois pursued in their

own boats. About a mile from the shore, the strength of the fugitives

fagged. Knowing that the Iroquois were gaining fast, Radisson threw

out the loathsome scalps that the Algonquin had persisted in carrying.

By that strange fatality which seems to follow crime, instead of

sinking, the hairy scalps floated on the surface of the water back to

the pursuing Iroquois. Shouts of rage broke from the warriors.

Radisson's skiff was so near the south shore that he could see the

pebbled bottom of the lake; but the water was too deep to wade and too

clear for a dive, and there was no driftwood to afford hiding. Then a

crash of musketry from the Iroquois knocked the bottom out of the

canoe. The Algonquin fell dead with two bullet wounds in his head and

the canoe gradually filled, settled, and sank, with the young Frenchman

clinging to the cross-bar mute as stone. Just as it disappeared under

water, Radisson was seized, and the dead Algonquin was thrown into the

Mohawk boats.

Radisson alone remained to pay the penalty of a double crime; and he

might well have prayed for the boat to sink. The victors shouted their

triumph. Hurrying ashore, they kindled a great fire. They tore the

heart from the dead Algonquin, transfixed the head on a pike, and cast

the mutilated body into the flames for those cannibal rites in which

savages thought they gained courage by eating the flesh of their

enemies. Radisson was rifled of clothes and arms, trussed at the

elbows, roped round the waist, and driven with blows back to the

canoes. There were other captives among the Mohawks. As the canoes

emerged from the islands, Radisson counted one hundred and fifty

Iroquois warriors, with two French captives, one white woman, and

seventeen Hurons. Flaunting from the canoe prows were the scalps of

eleven Algonquins. The victors fired off their muskets and shouted

defiance until the valley rang. As the seventy-five canoes turned up

the Richelieu River for the country of the Iroquois, hope died in the

captive Hurons and there mingled with the chant of the Mohawks'

war-songs, the low monotonous dirge of the prisoners:--

"If I die, I die valiant!

I go without fear

To that land where brave men

Have gone long before me--

If I die, I die valiant."

Twelve miles up the Richelieu, the Iroquois landed to camp. The

prisoners were pegged out on the sand, elbows trussed to knees, each

captive tied to a post. In this fashion they lay every night of

encampment, tortured by sand-flies that they were powerless to drive

off. At the entrance to the Mohawk village, a yoke was fastened to the

captives' necks by placing pairs of saplings one on each side down the

line of prisoners. By the rope round the waist of the foremost

prisoner, they were led slowly between the lines of tormentors. The

captives were ordered to sing. If one refused or showed fear, a Mohawk

struck off a finger with a hatchet, or tore the prisoners' nails out,

or thrust red-hot irons into the muscles of the bound arms.[10] As

Radisson appeared, he was recognized with shouts of rage by the friends

of the murdered Mohawks. Men, women, and children armed with rods and

skull-crackers--leather bags loaded with stones--rushed on the slowly

moving file of prisoners.

"They began to cry from both sides," says Radisson; "we marching one

after another, environed with people to witness that hideous sight,

which seriously may be called the image of Hell in this world."

The prisoners moved mournfully on. The Hurons chanted their death

dirge. The Mohawk women uttered screams of mockery. Suddenly there

broke from the throng of onlookers the Iroquois family that had adopted

Radisson. Pushing through the crew of torturers, the mother caught

Radisson by the hair, calling him by the name of her dead son, "Orimha!

Orimha!" She cut the thongs that bound him to the poles, and wresting

him free shoved him to her husband, who led Radisson to their own lodge.

"Thou fool," cried the old chief, "thou wast my son! Thou makest

thyself an enemy! Thou lovest us not, though we saved thy life!

Wouldst kill me, too?" Then, with a rough push to a mat on the ground,

"Chagon--now, be merry! It's a merry business you've got into! Give

him something to eat!"

Trembling with fear, young Radisson put as bold a face on as he could

and made a show of eating what the squaw placed before him. He was

still relating his adventures when there came a roar of anger from the

Mohawks outside, who had discovered his absence from the line. A

moment later the rabble broke into the lodge. Jostling the friendly

chief aside, the Mohawk warriors carried Radisson back to the orgies of

the torture. The prisoners had been taken out of the stocks and placed

on several scaffoldings. One poor Frenchman fell to the ground bruised

and unable to rise. The Iroquois tore the scalp from his head and

threw him into the fire. That was Radisson's first glimpse of what was

in store for him. Then he, too, stood on the scaffolding among the

other prisoners, who never ceased singing their death song. In the

midst of these horrors--_diableries_, the Jesuits called them--as if

the very elements had been moved with pity, there burst over the

darkened forest a terrific hurricane of hail and rain. This put out

the fires and drove all the tormentors away but a few impish children,

who stayed to pluck nails from the hands and feet of the captives and

shoot arrows with barbed points at the naked bodies. Every iniquity

that cruelty could invent, these children practised on the captives.

Red-hot spears were brought from the lodge fires and thrust into the

prisoners. The mutilated finger ends were ground between stones.

Thongs were twisted round wrists and ankles, by sticks put through a

loop, till flesh was cut to the bone. As the rain ceased falling, a

woman, who was probably the wife of one of the murdered Mohawks,

brought her little boy to cut one of Radisson's fingers with a flint

stone. The child was too young and ran away from the gruesome task.

Gathering darkness fell over the horrible spectacle. The exhausted

captives, some in a delirium from pain, others unconscious, were led to

separate lodges, or dragged over the ground, and left tied for the

night. The next morning all were returned to the scaffolds, but the

first day had glutted the Iroquois appetite for tortures. The friendly

family was permitted to approach Radisson. The mother brought him food

and told him that the Council Lodge had decided not to kill him for

that day--they wanted the young white warrior for their own ranks; but

even as the cheering hope was uttered, came a brave with a pipe of live

coals, in which he thrust and held Radisson's thumb. No sooner had the

tormentor left than the woman bound up the burn and oiled Radisson's

wounds. He suffered no abuse that day till night, when the soles of

both feet were burned. The majority of the captives were flung into a

great bonfire. On the third day of torture he almost lost his life.

First came a child to gnaw at his fingers. Then a man appeared armed

for the ghastly work of mutilation. Both these the Iroquois father of

Radisson sent away. Once, when none of the friendly family happened to

be near, Radisson was seized and bound for burning, but by chance the

lighted faggot scorched his executioner. A friendly hand slashed the

thongs that bound him, and he was drawn back to the scaffold.

Past caring whether he lived or died, and in too great agony from the

burns of his feet to realize where he was going, Radisson was conducted

to the Great Council. Sixty old men sat on a circle of mats, smoking,

round the central fire. Before them stood seven other captives.

Radisson only was still bound. A gust of wind from the opening lodge

door cleared the smoke for an instant and there entered Radisson's

Indian father, clad in the regalia of a mighty chief. Tomahawk and

calumet and medicine-bag were in his hands. He took his place in the

circle of councillors. Judgment was to be given on the remaining

prisoners.

After passing the Council Pipe from hand to hand in solemn silence, the

sachems prepared to give their views. One arose, and offering the

smoke of incense to the four winds of heaven to invoke witness to the

justice of the trial, gave his opinion on the matter of life or death.

Each of the chiefs in succession spoke. Without any warning whatever,

one chief rose and summarily tomahawked three of the captives. That

had been the sentence. The rest were driven, like sheep for the

shambles, to life-long slavery.

Radisson was left last. His case was important. He had sanctioned the

murder of three Mohawks. Not for a moment since he was recaptured had

they dared to untie the hands of so dangerous a prisoner. Amid deathly

silence, the Iroquois father stood up. Flinging down medicine-bag, fur

robe, wampum belts, and tomahawk, he pointed to the nineteen scars upon

his side, each of which signified an enemy slain by his own hand. Then

the old Mohawk broke into one of those impassioned rhapsodies of

eloquence which delighted the savage nature, calling back to each of

the warriors recollection of victories for the Iroquois. His eyes took

fire from memory of heroic battle. The councillors shook off their

imperturbable gravity and shouted "Ho, ho!" Each man of them had a

memory of his part in those past glories. And as they applauded, there

glided into the wigwam the mother, singing some battle-song of valor,

dancing and gesticulating round and round the lodge in dizzy,

serpentine circlings, that illustrated in pantomime those battles of

long ago. Gliding ghostily from the camp-fire to the outer dark, she

suddenly stopped, stood erect, advanced a step, and with all her might

threw one belt of priceless wampum at the councillors' feet, one

necklace over the prisoner's head.

Before the applause could cease or the councillors' ardor cool, the

adopted brother sprang up, hatchet in hand, and sang of other

victories. Then, with a delicacy of etiquette which white pleaders do

not always observe, father and son withdrew from the Council Lodge to

let the jury deliberate. The old sachems were disturbed. They had

been moved more than their wont. Twenty withdrew to confer. Dusk

gathered deeper and deeper over the forests of the Mohawk Valley.

Tawny faces came peering at the doors, waiting for the decision.

Outsiders tore the skins from the walls of the lodge that they, too,

might witness the memorable trial of the boy prisoner. Sachem after

sachem rose and spoke. Tobacco was sacrificed to the fire-god. Would

the relatives of the dead Mohawks consider the wampum belts full

compensation? Could the Iroquois suffer a youth to live who had joined

the murderers of the Mohawks? Could the Mohawks afford to offend the

great Iroquois chief who was the French youth's friend? As they

deliberated, the other councillors returned, accompanied by all the

members of Radisson's friendly family. Again the father sang and

spoke. This time when he finished, instead of sitting down, he caught

the necklace of wampum from Radisson's neck, threw it at the feet of

the oldest sachem, cut the captive's bonds, and, amid shouts of

applause, set the white youth free.

One of the incomprehensible things to civilization is how a white man

_can_ degenerate to savagery. Young Radisson's life is an

illustration. In the first transports of his freedom, with the Mohawk

women dancing and singing around him, the men shouting, he leaped up,

oblivious of pain; but when the flush of ecstasy had passed, he sank to

the mat of the Iroquois lodge, and he was unable to use his burned feet

for more than a month. During this time the Iroquois dressed his

wounds, brought him the choice portions of the hunt, gave him clean

clothing purchased at Orange (Albany), and attended to his wants as if

he had been a prince. No doubt the bright eyes of the swarthy young

French boy moved to pity the hearts of the Mohawk mothers, and his

courage had won him favor among the warriors. He was treated like a

king. The women waited upon him like slaves, and the men gave him

presents of firearms and ammunition--the Indian's most precious

possessions. Between flattered vanity and indolence, other white men,

similarly treated, have lost their self-respect. Beckworth, of the

Missouri, became to all intents and purposes a savage; and Bird, of the

Blackfeet, degenerated lower than the Indians. Other Frenchmen

captured from the St. Lawrence, and white women taken from the New

England colonies, became so enamored of savage life that they refused

to leave the Indian lodges when peace had liberated them. Not so

Radisson. Though only seventeen, flattered vanity never caused him to

forget the gratitude he owed the Mohawk family. Though he relates his

life with a frankness that leaves nothing untold, he never at any time

returned treachery for kindness. The very chivalry of the French

nature endangered him all the more. Would he forget his manhood, his

birthright of a superior race, his inheritance of nobility from a

family that stood foremost among the _noblesse_ of New France?

[Illustration: Albany, from an Old Print.]

The spring of 1653 came with unloosening of the rivers and stirring of

the forest sap and fret of the warrior blood. Radisson's Iroquois

father held great feasts in which he heaved up the hatchet to break the

kettle of sagamite against all enemies. Would Radisson go on the

war-path with the braves, or stay at home with the women and so lose

the respect of the tribe? In the hope of coming again within reach of

Three Rivers, he offered to join the Iroquois in their wars. The

Mohawks were delighted with his spirit, but they feared to lose their

young warrior. Accepting his offer, they refused to let him accompany

them to Quebec, but assigned him to a band of young braves, who were to

raid the border-lands between the Huron country of the Upper Lakes and

the St. Lawrence. This was not what Radisson wanted, but he could not

draw back. There followed months of wild wanderings round the regions

of Niagara. The band of young braves passed dangerous places with

great precipices and a waterfall, where the river was a mile wide and

unfrozen. Radisson was constrained to witness many acts against the

Eries, which must have one of two effects on white blood,--either turn

the white man into a complete savage, or disgust him utterly with

savage life. Leaving the Mohawk village amid a blare of guns and

shouts, the young braves on their maiden venture passed successively

through the lodges of Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas, where

they were feasted almost to death by the Iroquois Confederacy.[11]

Then they marched to the vast wilderness of snow-padded forests and

heaped windfall between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.

Snow still lay in great drifts under the shadow of hemlock and spruce;

and the braves skimmed forward winged with the noiseless speed of

snow-shoes. When the snow became too soft from thaw for snow-shoes,

they paused to build themselves a skiff. It was too early to peel the

bark off the birch, so they made themselves a dugout of the walnut

tree. The wind changed from north to south, clearing the lakes of ice

and filling the air with the earthy smells of up-bursting growth.

"There was such a thawing," writes Radisson, "ye little brookes flowed

like rivers, which made us embark to wander over that sweet sea."

Lounging in their skiff all day, carried from shore to shore with the

waves, and sleeping round camp-fires on the sand each night, the young

braves luxuriated in all the delights of sunny idleness and spring

life. But this was not war. It was play, and play of the sort that

weans the white man from civilization to savagery.

One day a scout, who had climbed to the top of a tree, espied two

strange squaws. They were of a hostile tribe. The Mohawk bloodthirst

was up as a wolf's at the sight of lambs. In vain Radisson tried to

save the women by warning the Iroquois that if there were women, there

must be men, too, who would exact vengeance for the squaws' death. The

young braves only laid their plans the more carefully for his warning

and massacred the entire encampment. Prisoners were taken, but when

food became scarce they were brutally knocked on the head. These

tribes had never heard guns before, and at the sound of shots fled as

from diabolical enemies. It was an easy matter for the young braves in

the course of a few weeks to take a score of scalps and a dozen

prisoners. At one place more than two hundred beaver were trapped. At

the end of the raid, the booty was equally divided. Radisson asked

that the woman prisoner be given to him; and he saved her from torture

and death on the return to the Mohawks by presenting her as a slave to

his Indian mother. All his other share of booty he gave to the

friendly family. The raid was over. He had failed of his main object

in joining it. He had not escaped. But he had made one important

gain. His valor had reëstablished the confidence of the Indians so

that when they went on a free-booting expedition against the whites of

the Dutch settlements at Orange (Albany), Radisson was taken with them.

Orange, or Albany, consisted at that time of some fifty thatched

log-houses surrounded by a settlement of perhaps a hundred and fifty

farmers. This raid was bloodless. The warriors looted the farmers'

cabins, emptied their cupboards, and drank their beer cellars dry to

the last drop. Once more Radisson kept his head. While the braves

entered Fort Orange roaring drunk, Radisson was alert and sober. A

drunk Indian falls an easy prey in the bartering of pelts. The

Iroquois wanted guns. The Dutch wanted pelts. The whites treated the

savages like kings; and the Mohawks marched from house to house

feasting of the best. Radisson was dressed in garnished buckskin and

had been painted like a Mohawk. Suspecting some design to escape, his

Iroquois friends never left him. The young Frenchman now saw white men

for the first time in almost two years; but the speech that he heard

was in a strange tongue. As Radisson went into the fort, he noticed a

soldier among the Dutch. At the same instant the soldier recognized

him as a Frenchman, and oblivious of the Mohawks' presence blurted out

his discovery in Iroquois dialect, vowing that for all the paint and

grease, this youth was a white man below. The fellow's blundering

might have cost Radisson's life; but the youth had not been a captive

among crafty Mohawks for nothing. Radisson feigned surprise at the

accusation. That quieted the Mohawk suspicions and they were presently

deep in the beer pots of the Dutch. Again the soldier spoke, this time

in French. It was the first time that Radisson had heard his native

tongue for months. He answered in French. At that the soldier emitted

shouts of delight, for he, too, was French, and these strangers in an

alien land threw their arms about each other like a pair of long-lost

brothers with exclamations of joy too great for words.

[Illustration: The Battery, New York, in Radisson's Time.]

From that moment Radisson became the lion of Fort Orange. The women

dragged him to their houses and forced more dainties on him than he

could eat. He was conducted from house to house in triumph, to the

amazed delight of the Indians. The Dutch offered to ransom him at any

price; but that would have exposed the Dutch settlement to the

resentment of the Mohawks and placed Radisson under heavy obligation to

people who were the enemies of New France. Besides, his honor was

pledged to return to his Indian parents; and it was a long way home to

have to sail to Europe and back again to Quebec. Perhaps, too, there

was deep in his heart what he did not realize--a rooted love for the

wilds that was to follow him all through life. By the devious course

of captivity, he had tasted of a new freedom and could not give it up.

He declined the offer of the Dutch. In two days he was back among the

Mohawks ten times more a hero than he had ever been. Mother and

sisters were his slaves.

But between love of the wilds and love of barbarism is a wide

difference. He had not been back for two weeks when that glimpse of

crude civilization at Orange recalled torturing memories of the French

home in Three Rivers. The filthy food, the smoky lodges, the cruelties

of the Mohawks, filled him with loathing. The nature of the white man,

which had been hidden under the grease and paint of the savage--and in

danger of total eclipse--now came upper-most. With Radisson, to think

was to act. He determined to escape if it cost him his life.

Taking only a hatchet as if he were going to cut wood, Radisson left

the Indian lodge early one morning in the fall of 1653. Once out of

sight from the village, he broke into a run, following the trail

through the dense forests of the Mohawk Valley toward Fort Orange. On

and on he ran, all that day, without pause to rest or eat, without

backward glance, with eye ever piercing through the long leafy vistas

of the forest on the watch for the fresh-chipped bark of the trees that

guided his course, or the narrow indurated path over the spongy mould

worn by running warriors. And when night filled the forest with the

hoot of owl, and the far, weird cries of wild creatures on the rove,

there sped through the aisled columns of star light and shadow, the

ghostly figure of the French boy slim, and lithe as a willow, with

muscles tense as ironwood, and step silent as the mountain-cat. All

that night he ran without a single stop. Chill daybreak found him

still staggering on, over rocks slippery with the night frost, over

windfall tree on tree in a barricade, through brawling mountain brooks

where his moccasins broke the skim of ice at the edge, past rivers

where he half waded, half swam. He was now faint from want of food;

but fear spurred him on. The morning air was so cold that he found it

better to run than rest. By four of the afternoon he came to a

clearing in the forest, where was the cabin of a settler. A man was

chopping wood. Radisson ascertained that there were no Iroquois in the

cabin, and, hiding in it, persuaded the settler to carry a message to

Fort Orange, two miles farther on. While he waited Indians passed the

cabin, singing and shouting. The settler's wife concealed him behind

sacks of wheat and put out all lights. Within an hour came a rescue

party from Orange, who conducted him safely to the fort. For three

days Radisson hid in Orange, while the Mohawks wandered through the

fort, calling him by name.

Gifts of money from the Jesuit, Poncet, and from a Dutch merchant,

enabled Radisson to take ship from Orange to New York, and from New

York to Europe.

[Illustration: Fort Amsterdam, from an ancient engraving executed in

Holland. This view of Fort Amsterdam on the Manhattan is copied from

an ancient engraving executed in Holland. The fort was erected in 1623

but finished upon the above model by Governor Van Twiller in 1635.]

Père Poncet had been captured by the Mohawks the preceding summer, but

had escaped to Orange.[12] Embarking on a small sloop, Radisson sailed

down the Hudson to New York, which then consisted of some five hundred

houses, with stores, barracks, a stone church, and a dilapidated fort.

Central Park was a forest; goats and cows pastured on what is now Wall

Street; and to east and west was a howling wilderness of marsh and

woods. After a stay of three weeks, Radisson embarked for Amsterdam,

which he reached in January, 1654.

[1] Benjamin Sulte in _Chronique Trifluvienne_.

[2] It was in August of this same year, 1652, that the governor of

Three Rivers was slain by the Iroquois. Parkman gives this date, 1653,

Garneau, 1651, L'Abbé Tanguay, 1651; Dollier de Casson, 1651, Belmont,

1653. Sulte gives the name of the governor Duplessis-Kerbodot, not

Bochart, as given in Parkman.

[3] Dr. Bryce has unearthed the fact that in a petition to the House of

Commons, 1698, Radisson sets down his age as sixty-two. This gives the

year of his birth as 1636. On the other hand, Sulte has record of a

Pierre Radisson registered at Quebec in 1681, aged fifty-one, which

would make him slightly older, if it is the same Radisson. Mr. Sulte's

explanation is as follows: Sébastien Hayet of St. Malo married Madeline

Hénault. Their daughter Marguerite married Chouart, known as

Groseillers. Madeline Hénault then married Pierre Esprit Radisson of

Paris, whose children were Pierre, our hero, and two daughters.

[4] A despatch from M. Talon in 1666 shows there were 461 families in

Three Rivers. State papers from the Minister to M. Frontenac in 1674

show there were only 6705 French in all the colony. Averaging five a

family, there must have been 2000 people at Three Rivers. Fear of the

Iroquois must have driven the country people inside the fort, so that

the population enrolled was larger than the real population of Three

Rivers. Sulte gives the normal population of Three Rivers in 1654 as

38 married couples, 13 bachelors, 38 boys, 26 girls--in all not 200.

[5] At first flush, this seems a slip in _Radisson's Relation_. Where

did the Mohawks get their guns? _New York Colonial Documents_ show

that between 1640 and 1650 the Dutch at Fort Orange had supplied the

Mohawks alone with four hundred guns.

[6] One of many instances of Radisson's accuracy in detail. All tribes

have a trick of browning food on hot stones or sand that has been taken

from fire. The Assiniboines gained their name from this practice: they

were the users of "boiling stones."

[7] I have asked both natives and old fur-traders what combination of

sounds in English most closely resembles the Indian war-cry, and they

have all given the words that I have quoted. One daughter of a chief

factor, who went through a six weeks' siege by hostiles in her father's

fort, gave a still more graphic description. She said: "you can

imagine the snarls of a pack of furiously vicious dogs saying 'ah-oh'

with a whoop, you have it; and you will not forget it!"

[8] This practice was a binding law on many tribes. Catlin relates it

of the Mandans, and Hearne of the Chipewyans. The latter considered it

a crime to kiss wives and children after a massacre without the bath of

purification. Could one know where and when that universal custom of

washing blood-guilt arose, one mystery of existence would be unlocked.

[9] I have throughout followed Mr. Sulte's correction of the name of

this governor. The mistake followed by Parkman, Tanguay, and

others--it seems--was first made in 1820, and has been faithfully

copied since. Elsewhere will be found Mr. Sulte's complete elucidation

of the hopeless dark in which all writers have involved Radisson's

family.

[10] If there were not corroborative testimony, one might suspect the

excited French lad of gross exaggeration in his account of Iroquois

tortures; but the Jesuits more than confirm the worst that Radisson

relates. Bad as these torments were, they were equalled by the deeds

of white troops from civilized cities in the nineteenth century. A

band of Montana scouts came on the body of a comrade horribly mutilated

by the Indians. They caught the culprits a few days afterwards.

Though the government report has no account of what happened, traders

say the bodies of the guilty Indians were found skinned and scalped by

the white troops.

[11] Radisson puts the Senecas before the Cayugas, which is different

from the order given by the Jesuits.

[12] The fact that Radisson confessed his sins to this priest seems

pretty well to prove that Pierre was a Catholic and not a Protestant,

as has been so often stated.

CHAPTER II

1657-1658

RADISSON'S SECOND VOYAGE

Radisson returns to Quebec, where he joins the Jesuits to go to the

Iroquois Mission--He witnesses the Massacre of the Hurons among the

Thousand Islands--Besieged by the Iroquois, they pass the Winter as

Prisoners of War--Conspiracy to massacre the French foiled by Radisson.

From Amsterdam Radisson took ship to Rochelle. Here he found himself a

stranger in his native land. All his kin of whom there is any

record--Pierre Radisson, his father, Madeline Hénault, his mother,

Marguerite and Françoise, his elder and younger sisters, his uncle and

aunt, with their daughter, Elizabeth--were now living at Three Rivers

in New France.[1] Embarking with the fishing fleet that yearly left

France for the Grand Banks, Radisson came early in the spring of 1654

to Isle Percée at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. He was still a week's

journey from Three Rivers, but chance befriended him. Algonquin canoes

were on the way up the river to war on the Iroquois. Joining the

Indian canoes, he slipped past the hilly shores of the St. Lawrence and

in five days was between the main bank on the north side and the muddy

shallows of the Isle of Orleans. Sheering out where the Montmorency

roars over a precipice in a shining cataract, the canoes glided across

St. Charles River among the forests of masts heaving to the tide below

the beetling heights of Cape Diamond, Quebec.

[Illustration: One of the earliest maps of the Great Lakes.]

It was May, 1651, when he had first seen the turrets and spires of

Quebec glittering on the hillside in the sun; it was May, 1652, that

the Iroquois had carried him off from Three Rivers; and it was May,

1654, when he came again to his own. He was welcomed back as from the

dead. Changes had taken place in the interval of his captivity. A

truce had been arranged between the Iroquois and the French. Now that

the Huron missions had been wiped out by Iroquois wars, the Jesuits

regarded the truce as a Divine provision for a mission among the

Iroquois. The year that Radisson escaped from the Mohawks, Jesuit

priests had gone among them. A still greater change that was to affect

his life more vitally had taken place in the Radisson family. The year

that Radisson had been captured, the outraged people of Three Rivers

had seized a Mohawk chief and burned him to death. In revenge, the

Mohawks murdered the governor of Three Rivers and a company of

Frenchmen. Among the slain was the husband of Radisson's sister,

Marguerite. When Radisson returned, he found that his widowed sister

had married Médard Chouart Groseillers, a famous fur trader of New

France, who had passed his youth as a lay helper to the Jesuit missions

of Lake Huron.[2] Radisson was now doubly bound to the Jesuits by

gratitude and family ties. Never did pagan heart hear an evangel more

gladly than the Mohawks heard the Jesuits. The priests were welcomed

with acclaim, led to the Council Lodge, and presented with belts of

wampum. Not a suspicion of foul play seems to have entered the

Jesuits' mind. When the Iroquois proposed to incorporate into the

Confederacy the remnants of the Hurons, the Jesuits discerned nothing

in the plan but the most excellent means to convert pagan Iroquois by

Christian Hurons. Having gained an inch, the Iroquois demanded the

proverbial ell. They asked that a French settlement be made in the

Iroquois country. The Indians wanted a supply of firearms to war

against all enemies; and with a French settlement miles away from help,

the Iroquois could wage what war they pleased against the Algonquins

without fear of reprisals from Quebec--the settlement of white men

among hostiles would be hostage of generous treatment from New France.

Of these designs, neither priests nor governor had the slightest

suspicion. The Jesuits were thinking only of the Iroquois' soul; the

French, of peace with the Iroquois at any cost.

In 1656 Major Dupuis and fifty Frenchmen had established a French

colony among the Iroquois.[3] The hardships of these pioneers form no

part of Radisson's life, and are, therefore, not set down here. Peace

not bought by a victory is an unstable foundation for Indian treaty.

The Mohawks were jealous that their confederates, the Onondagas, had

obtained the French settlement. In 1657, eighty Iroquois came to

Quebec to escort one hundred Huron refugees back to Onondaga for

adoption into the Confederacy. These Hurons were Christians, and the

two Jesuits, Paul Ragueneau and François du Péron, were appointed to

accompany them to their new abode. Twenty young Frenchmen joined the

party to seek their fortunes at the new settlement; but a man was

needed who could speak Iroquois. Glad to repay his debt to the

Jesuits, young Radisson volunteered to go as a _donné_, that is, a lay

helper vowed to gratuitous services.

It was midsummer before all preparations had been made. On July 26,

the party of two hundred, made up of twenty Frenchmen, eighty Iroquois,

and a hundred Hurons, filed out of the gates of Montreal, and winding

round the foot of the mountain followed a trail through the forest that

took them past the Lachine Rapids. The Onondaga _voyageurs_ carried

the long birch canoes inverted on their shoulders, two Indians at each

end; and the other Iroquois trotted over the rocks with the Frenchmen's

baggage on their backs. The day was hot, the _portage_ long and

slippery with dank moisture. The Huron children fagged and fell

behind. At nightfall, thirty of the haughty Iroquois lost patience,

and throwing down their bundles made off for Quebec with the avowed

purpose of raiding the Algonquins. On the way, they paused to scalp

three Frenchmen at Montreal, cynically explaining that if the French

persisted in taking Algonquins into their arms, the white men need not

be surprised if the blow aimed at an Algonquin sometimes struck a

Frenchman. That act opened the eyes of the French to the real meaning

of the peace made with the Iroquois; but the little colony was beyond

recall. To insure the safety of the French among the Onondagas, the

French governor at Quebec seized a dozen Iroquois and kept them as

hostages of good conduct.

Meanwhile, all was confusion on Lake St. Louis, where the last band of

colonists had encamped. The Iroquois had cast the Frenchmen's baggage

on the rocks and refused to carry it farther. Leaving the whites all

embarrassed, the Onondagas hurriedly embarked the Hurons and paddled

quickly out of sight. The act was too suddenly unanimous not to have

been premeditated. Why had the Iroquois carried the Hurons away from

the Frenchmen? Father Ragueneau at once suspected some sinister

purpose. Taking only a single sack of flour for food, he called for

volunteers among the twenty Frenchmen to embark in a leaky, old canoe

and follow the treacherous Onondagas. Young Radisson was one of the

first to offer himself. Six others followed his example; and the seven

Frenchmen led by the priest struck across the lake, leaving the others

to gather up the scattered baggage.

The Onondagas were too deep to reveal their plots with seven armed

Frenchmen in pursuit. The Indians permitted the French boats to come

up with the main band. All camped together in the most friendly

fashion that night; but the next morning one Iroquois offered passage

in his canoe to one Frenchman, another Iroquois to another of the

whites, and by the third day, when they came to Lake St. Francis, the

old canoe had been abandoned. The French were scattered promiscuously

among the Iroquois, with no two whites in one boat. The Hurons were

quicker to read the signs of treachery than the French. There were

rumors of one hundred Mohawks lying in ambush at the Thousand Islands

to massacre the coming Hurons. On the morning of August 3 four Huron

warriors and two women seized a canoe, and to the great astonishment of

the encampment launched out before they could be stopped. Heading the

canoe back for Montreal, they broke out in a war chant of defiance to

the Iroquois.

The Onondagas made no sign, but they evidently took council to delay no

longer. Again, when they embarked, they allowed no two whites in one

canoe. The boats spread out. Nothing was said to indicate anything

unusual. The lake lay like a silver mirror in the August sun. The

water was so clear that the Indians frequently paused to spear fish

lying below on the stones. At places the canoes skirted close to the

wood-fringed shore, and braves landed to shoot wild-fowl. Radisson and

Ragueneau seemed simultaneously to have noticed the same thing.

Without any signal, at about four in the afternoon, the Onondagas

steered their canoes for a wooded island in the middle of the St.

Lawrence. With Radisson were three Iroquois and a Huron. As the canoe

grated shore, the bowman loaded his musket and sprang into the thicket.

Naturally, the Huron turned to gaze after the disappearing hunter.

Instantly, the Onondaga standing directly behind buried his hatchet in

the Huron's head. The victim fell quivering across Radisson's feet and

was hacked to pieces by the other Iroquois. Not far along the shore

from Radisson, the priest was landing. He noticed an Iroquois chief

approach a Christian Huron girl. If the Huron had not been a convert,

she might have saved her life by becoming one of the chief's many

slaves; but she had repulsed the Onondaga pagan. As Ragueneau looked,

the girl fell dead with her skull split by the chief's war-axe. The

Hurons on the lake now knew what awaited them; and a cry of terror

arose from the children. Then a silence of numb horror settled over

the incoming canoes. The women were driven ashore like lambs before

wolves; but the valiant Hurons would not die without striking one blow

at their inveterate and treacherous enemies. They threw themselves

together back to back, prepared to fight. For a moment this show of

resistance drove off the Iroquois. Then the Onondaga chieftain rushed

forward, protesting that the two murders had been a personal quarrel.

Striking back his own warriors with a great show of sincerity, he bade

the Hurons run for refuge to the top of the hill. No sooner had the

Hurons broken rank, than there rushed from the woods scores of

Iroquois, daubed in war-paint and shouting their war-cry. This was the

hunt to which the young braves had dashed from the canoes to be in

readiness behind the thicket. Before the scattered Hurons could get

together for defence, the Onondagas had closed around the hilltop in a

cordon. The priest ran here, there, everywhere,--comforting the dying,

stopping mutilation, defending the women. All the Hurons were

massacred but one man, and the bodies were thrown into the river. With

blankets drawn over their heads that they might not see, the women

huddled together, dumb with terror. When the Onondagas turned toward

the women, the Frenchmen stood with muskets levelled. The Onondagas

halted, conferred, and drew off.

[Illustration: Paddling past Hostiles.]

The fight lasted for four hours. Darkness and the valor of the little

French band saved the women for the time. The Iroquois kindled a fire

and gathered to celebrate their victory. Then the old priest took his

life in his hands. Borrowing three belts of wampum, he left the

huddling group of Huron women and Frenchmen and marched boldly into the

circle of hostiles. The lives of all the French and Hurons hung by a

thread. Ragueneau had been the spiritual guide of the murdered tribe

for twenty years; and he was now sobbing like a child. The Iroquois

regarded his grief with sardonic scorn; but they misjudged the manhood

below the old priest's tears. Ragueneau asked leave to speak. They

grunted permission. Springing up, he broke into impassioned, fearless

reproaches of the Iroquois for their treachery. Casting one belt of

wampum at the Onondaga chief's feet, the priest demanded pledges that

the massacre cease. A second belt was given to register the Onondaga's

vow to conduct the women and children safely to the Iroquois country.

The third belt was for the safety of the French at Onondaga.

The Iroquois were astonished. They had looked for womanish pleadings.

They had heard stern demands coupled with fearless threats of

punishment. When Ragueneau sat down, the Onondaga chief bestirred

himself to counteract the priest's powerful impression. Lounging to

his feet, the Onondaga impudently declared that the governor of Quebec

had instigated the massacre. Ragueneau leaped up with a denial that

took the lie from the scoundrel's teeth. The chief sat down abashed.

The Council grunted "Ho, ho!" accepting the wampum and promising all

that the Jesuit had asked.

Among the Thousand Islands, the French who had remained behind to

gather up the baggage again joined the Onondagas. They brought with

them from the Isle of Massacres a poor Huron woman, whom they had found

lying insensible on a rock. During the massacre she had hidden in a

hollow tree, where she remained for three days. In this region,

Radisson almost lost his life by hoisting a blanket sail to his canoe.

The wind drifted the boat so far out that Radisson had to throw all

ballast overboard to keep from being swamped. As they turned from the

St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario up the Oswego River for Onondaga, they

met other warriors of the Iroquois nation. In spite of pledges to the

priest, the meeting was celebrated by torturing the Huron women to

entertain the newcomers. Not the sufferings of the early Christians in

Rome exceeded the martyrdom of the Christian Hurons among the

Onondagas. As her mother mounted the scaffold of tortures, a little

girl who had been educated by the Ursulines of Quebec broke out with

loud weeping. The Huron mother turned calmly to the child:--

"Weep not my death, my little daughter! We shall this day be in

heaven," said she; "God will pity us to all eternity. The Iroquois

cannot rob us of that."

As the flames crept about her, her voice was heard chanting in the

crooning monotone of Indian death dirge: "Jesu--have pity on us!

Jesu--have pity on us!" The next moment the child was thrown into the

flames, repeating the same words.

The Iroquois recognized Radisson. He sent presents to his Mohawk

parents, who afterwards played an important part in saving the French

of Onondaga. Having passed the falls, they came to the French fort

situated on the crest of a hill above a lake. Two high towers

loopholed for musketry occupied the centre of the courtyard. Double

walls, trenched between, ran round a space large enough to enable the

French to keep their cattle inside the fort. The _voyageurs_ were

welcomed to Onondaga by Major Dupuis, fifty Frenchmen, and several

Jesuits.

The pilgrims had scarcely settled at Onondaga before signs of the

dangers that were gathering became too plain for the blind zeal of the

Jesuits to ignore. Cayugas, Onondagas, and Senecas, togged out in

war-gear, swarmed outside the palisades. There was no more dissembling

of hunger for the Jesuits' evangel. The warriors spoke no more soft

words, but spent their time feasting, chanting war-songs, heaving up

the war-hatchet against the kettle of sagamite--which meant the rupture

of peace. Then came four hundred Mohawks, who not only shouted their

war-songs, but built their wigwams before the fort gates and

established themselves for the winter like a besieging army. That the

intent of the entire Confederacy was hostile to Onondaga could not be

mistaken; but what was holding the Indians back? Why did they delay

the massacre? Then Huron slaves brought word to the besieged fort of

the twelve Iroquois hostages held at Quebec. The fort understood what

stayed the Iroquois blow. The Confederacy dared not attack the

isolated fort lest Quebec should take terrible vengeance on the

hostages.

[Illustration: Jogues, the Jesuit missionary, who was tortured by the

Mohawks. From a painting in Château de Ramezay, Montreal.]

The French decided to send messengers to Quebec for instructions before

closing navigation cut them off for the winter. Thirteen men and one

Jesuit left the fort the first week of September. Mohawk spies knew of

the departure and lay in ambush at each side of the narrow river to

intercept the party; but the messengers eluded the trap by striking

through the forests back from the river directly to the St. Lawrence.

Then the little fort closed its gates and awaited an answer from

Quebec. Winter settled over the land, blocking the rivers with ice and

the forest trails with drifts of snow; but no messengers came back from

Quebec. The Mohawks had missed the outgoing scouts: but they caught

the return coureurs and destroyed the letters. Not a soul could leave

the fort but spies dogged his steps. The Jesuits continued going from

lodge to lodge, and in this way Onondaga gained vague knowledge of the

plots outside the fort. The French could venture out only at the risk

of their lives, and spent the winter as closely confined as prisoners

of war. Of the ten drilled soldiers, nine threatened to desert. One

night an unseen hand plunged through the dark, seized the sentry, and

dragged him from the gate. The sentry drew his sword and shouted, "To

arms!" A band of Frenchmen sallied from the gates with swords and

muskets. In the tussle the sentry was rescued, and gifts were sent out

in the morning to pacify the wounded Mohawks. Fortunately the besieged

had plenty of food inside the stockades; but the Iroquois knew there

could be no escape till the ice broke up in spring, and were quite

willing to exchange ample supplies of corn for tobacco and firearms.

The Huron slaves who carried the corn to the fort acted as spies among

the Mohawks for the French.

In the month of February the vague rumors of conspiracy crystallized

into terrible reality. A dying Mohawk confessed to a Jesuit that the

Iroquois[4] Council had determined to massacre half the company of

French and to hold the other half till their own Mohawk hostages were

released from Quebec. Among the hostiles encamped before the gates was

Radisson's Indian father. This Mohawk was still an influential member

of the Great Council. He, too, reported that the warriors were bent on

destroying Onondaga.[5] What was to be done? No answer had come from

Quebec, and no aid could come till the spring. The rivers were still

blocked with ice; and there were not sufficient boats in the fort to

carry fifty men down to Quebec. "What could we do?" writes Radisson.

"We were in their hands. It was as hard to get away from them as for a

ship in full sea without a pilot."

They at once began constructing two large flat-bottomed boats of light

enough draft to run the rapids in the flood-tide of spring. Carpenters

worked hidden in an attic; but when the timbers were mortised together,

the boats had to be brought downstairs, where one of the Huron slaves

caught a glimpse of them. Boats of such a size he had never before

seen. Each was capable of carrying fifteen passengers with full

complement of baggage. Spring rains were falling in floods. The

convert Huron had heard the Jesuits tell of Noah's ark in the deluge.

Returning to the Mohawks, he spread a terrifying report of an impending

flood and of strange arks of refuge built by the white men. Emissaries

were appointed to visit the French fort; but the garrison had been

forewarned. Radisson knew of the coming spies from his Indian father;

and the Jesuits had learned of the Council from their converts. Before

the spies arrived, the French had built a floor over their flatboats,

and to cover the fresh floor had heaped up a dozen canoes. The spies

left the fort satisfied that neither a deluge nor an escape was

impending. Birch canoes would be crushed like egg-shells if they were

run through the ice jams of spring floods. Certain that their victims

were trapped, the Iroquois were in no haste to assault a double-walled

fort, where musketry could mow them down as they rushed the hilltop.

The Indian is bravest under cover; so the Mohawks spread themselves in

ambush on each side of the narrow river and placed guards at the falls

where any boats must be _portaged_.

Of what good were the boats? To allay suspicion of escape, the Jesuits

continued to visit the wigwams.[6] The French were in despair. They

consulted Radisson, who could go among the Mohawks as with a charmed

life, and who knew the customs of the Confederacy so well. Radisson

proposed a way to outwit the savages. With this plan the priests had

nothing to do. To the harum-scarum Radisson belong the sole credit and

discredit of the escapade. On his device hung the lives of fifty

innocent men. These men must either escape or be massacred. Of

bloodshed, Radisson had already seen too much; and the youth of

twenty-one now no more proposed to stickle over the means of victory

than generals who wear the Victoria cross stop to stickle over means

to-day.

Radisson knew that the Indians had implicit faith in dreams; so

Radisson had a dream.[7] He realized as critics of Indian customs fail

to understand that the fearful privations of savage life teach the

crime of waste. The Indian will eat the last morsel of food set before

him if he dies for it. He believes that the gods punish waste of food

by famine. The belief is a religious principle and the

feasts--_festins à tout manger_--are a religious act; so Radisson

dreamed--whether sleeping or waking--that the white men were to give a

great festival to the Iroquois. This dream he related to his Indian

father. The Indian like his white brother can clothe a vice under

religious mantle. The Iroquois were gluttonous on a religious

principle. Radisson's dream was greeted with joy. _Coureurs_ ran

through the forest, bidding the Mohawks to the feast. Leaving ambush

of forest and waterfall, the warriors hastened to the walls of

Onondaga. To whet their appetite, they were kept waiting outside for

two whole days. The French took turns in entertaining the waiting

guests. Boisterous games, songs, dances, and music kept the Iroquois

awake and hilarious to the evening of the second day. Inside the fort

bedlam reigned. Boats were dragged from floors to a sally-port at the

rear of the courtyard. Here firearms, ammunition, food, and baggage

were placed in readiness. Guns which could not be taken were burned or

broken. Ammunition was scattered in the snow. All the stock but one

solitary pig, a few chickens, and the dogs was sacrificed for the

feast, and in the barracks a score of men were laboring over enormous

kettles of meat. Had an Indian spy climbed to the top of a tree and

looked over the palisades, all would have been discovered; but the

French entertainers outside kept their guests busy.

[Illustration: Château de Ramezay, Montreal, for years the residence of

the governor, and later the storehouse of the fur companies.]

On the evening of the second day a great fire was kindled in the outer

enclosure, between the two walls. The trumpets blew a deafening blast.

The Mohawks answered with a shout. The French clapped their hands.

The outer gates were thrown wide open, and in trooped several hundred

Mohawk warriors, seating themselves in a circle round the fire.

Another blare of trumpets, and twelve enormous kettles of mincemeat

were carried round the circle of guests. A Mohawk chief rose solemnly

and gave his deities of earth, air, and fire profuse thanks for having

brought such generous people as the French among the Iroquois. Other

chiefs arose and declaimed to their hearers that earth did not contain

such hosts as the French. Before they had finished speaking there came

a second and a third and a fourth relay of kettles round the circle of

feasters. Not one Iroquois dared to refuse the food heaped before him.

By the time the kettles of salted fowl and venison and bear had passed

round the circle, each Indian was glancing furtively sideways to see if

his neighbor could still eat. He who was compelled to forsake the

feast first was to become the butt of the company. All the while the

French kept up a din of drums and trumpets and flageolets, dancing and

singing and shouting to drive off sleep. The eyes of the gorging

Indians began to roll. Never had they attempted to demolish such a

banquet. Some shook their heads and drew back. Others fell over in

the dead sleep that results from long fasting and overfeeding and fresh

air. Radisson was everywhere, urging the Iroquois to "Cheer up! cheer

up! If sleep overcomes you, you must awake! Beat the drum! Blow the

trumpet! Cheer up! Cheer up!"

But the end of the repulsive scene was at hand. By midnight the

Indians had--in the language of the white man--"gone under the

mahogany." They lay sprawled on the ground in sodden sleep. Perhaps,

too, something had been dropped in the fleshpots to make their sleep

the sounder. Radisson does not say no, neither does the priest, and

they two were the only whites present who have written of the

episode.[8] But the French would hardly have been human if they had

not assured their own safety by drugging the feasters. It was a common

thing for the fur traders of a later period to prevent massacre and

quell riot by administering a quietus to Indians with a few drops of

laudanum.

The French now retired to the inner court. The main gate was bolted

and chained. Through the loophole of this gate ran a rope attached to

a bell that was used to summon the sentry. To this rope the

mischievous Radisson tied the only remaining pig, so that when the

Indians would pull the rope for admission, the noise of the disturbed

pig would give the impression of a sentry's tramp-tramp on parade.

Stuffed effigies of soldiers were then stuck about the barracks. If a

spy climbed up to look over the palisades, he would see Frenchmen still

in the fort. While Radisson was busy with these precautions to delay

pursuit, the soldiers and priests, led by Major Dupuis, had broken open

the sally-port, forced the boats through sideways, and launched out on

the river. Speaking in whispers, they stowed the baggage in the

flat-boats, then brought out skiffs--dugouts to withstand the ice

jam--for the rest of the company. The night was raw and cold. A skim

of ice had formed on the margins of the river. Through the pitchy

darkness fell a sleet of rain and snow that washed out the footsteps of

the fugitives. The current of mid-river ran a noisy mill-race of ice

and log drift; and the _voyageurs_ could not see one boat length ahead.

To men living in savagery come temptations that can neither be measured

nor judged by civilization. To the French at Onondaga came such a

temptation now. Their priests were busy launching the boats. The

departing soldiers seemed simultaneously to have become conscious of a

very black suggestion. Cooped up against the outer wall in the dead

sleep of torpid gluttony lay the leading warriors of the Iroquois

nation. Were these not the assassins of countless Frenchmen, the

murderers of women, the torturers of children? Had Providence not

placed the treacherous Iroquois in the hands of fifty Frenchmen? If

these warriors were slain, it would be an easy matter to march to the

villages of the Confederacy, kill the old men, and take prisoners the

women. New France would be forever free of her most deadly enemy.

Like the Indians, the white men were trying to justify a wrong under

pretence of good. By chance, word of the conspiracy was carried to the

Jesuits. With all the authority of the church, the priests forbade the

crime. "Their answer was," relates Radisson, "that they were sent to

instruct in the faith of Jesus Christ and not to destroy, and that the

cross must be their sword."

Locking the sally-port, the company--as the Jesuit father

records--"shook the dust of Onondaga from their feet," launched out on

the swift-flowing, dark river and escaped "as the children of Israel

escaped by night from the land of Egypt." They had not gone far

through the darkness before the roar of waters told them of a cataract

ahead. They were four hours carrying baggage and boats over this

_portage_. Sleet beat upon their backs. The rocks were slippery with

glazed ice; and through the rotten, half-thawed snow, the men sank to

mid-waist. Navigation became worse on Lake Ontario; for the wind

tossed the lake like a sea, and ice had whirled against the St.

Lawrence in a jam. On the St. Lawrence, they had to wait for the

current to carry the ice out. At places they cut a passage through the

honeycombed ice with their hatchets, and again they were compelled to

_portage_ over the ice. The water was so high that the rapids were

safely ridden by all the boats but one, which was shipwrecked, and

three of the men were drowned.

They had left Onondaga on the 20th of March, 1658. On the evening of

April 3d they came to Montreal, where they learned that New France had

all winter suffered intolerable insolence from the Iroquois, lest

punishment of the hostiles should endanger the French at Onondaga. The

fleeing colonists waited twelve days at Montreal for the ice to clear,

and were again held back by a jam at Three Rivers; but on April 23 they

moored safely under the heights of Quebec.

_Coureurs_ from Onondaga brought word that the Mohawks had been

deceived by the pig and the ringing bell and the effigies for more than

a week. Crowing came from the chicken yard, dogs bayed in their

kennels, and when a Mohawk pulled the bell at the gate, he could hear

the sentry's measured march. At the end of seven days not a white man

had come from the fort. At first the Mohawks had thought the "black

robes" were at prayers; but now suspicions of trickery flashed on the

Iroquois. Warriors climbed the palisades and found the fort empty.

Two hundred Mohawks set out in pursuit; but the bad weather held them

back. And that was the way Radisson saved Onondaga.[9]

[1] The uncle, Pierre Esprit Radisson, is the one with whom careless

writers have confused the young hero, owing to identity of name.

Madeline Hénault has been described as the explorer's first wife,

notwithstanding genealogical impossibilities which make the explorer's

daughter thirty-six years old before he was seventeen. Even the

infallible Tanguay trips on Radisson's genealogy. I have before me the

complete record of the family taken from the parish registers of Three

Rivers and Quebec, by the indefatigable Mr. Sulte, whose explanation of

the case is this: that Radisson's mother, Madeline Hénault, first

married Sébastien Hayet, of St. Malo, to whom was born Marguerite about

1630; that her second husband was Pierre Esprit Radisson of Paris, to

whom were born our hero and the sisters Françoise and Elizabeth.

[2] I have throughout referred to Médard Chouart, Sieur des

Groseillers, as simply "Groseillers," because that is the name

referring to him most commonly used in the _State Papers_ and old

histories. He was from Charly-Saint-Cyr, near Meaux, and is supposed

to have been born about 1621. His first wife was Helen Martin,

daughter of Abraham Martin, who gave his name to the Plains of Abraham.

[3] This is the story of Onondaga which Parkman has told.

Unfortunately, when Parkman's account was written, _Radisson's

Journals_ were unknown and Mr. Parkman had to rely entirely on the

_Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation_ and the _Jesuit Relations_. After

the discovery of _Radisson's Journals_, Parkman added a footnote to his

account of Onondaga, _quoting_ Radisson in confirmation. If Radisson

may be quoted to corroborate Parkman, Radisson may surely be accepted

as authentic. At the same time, I have compared this journal with

Father Ragueneau's of the same party, and the two tally in every detail.

[4] See _Jesuit Relations_, 1657-1658.

[5] _Letters of Marie de l'Incarnation_.

[6] See Ragueneau's account.

[7] See _Marie de l'Incarnation_ and Dr. Dionne's modern monograph.

[8] This account is drawn mainly from _Radisson's Journal_, partly from

Father Ragueneau, and in one detail from a letter of _Marie de

l'Incarnation_. Garneau says the feasters were drugged, but I cannot

find his authority for this, though from my knowledge of fur traders'

escapes, I fancy it would hardly have been human nature not to add a

sleeping potion to the kettles.

[9] The _festins à tout manger_ must not be too sweepingly condemned by

the self-righteous white man as long as drinking bouts are a part of

civilized customs; and at least one civilized nation has the gross

proverb, "Better burst than waste."

CHAPTER III

1658-1660

RADISSON'S THIRD VOYAGE

The Discovery of the Great Northwest--Radisson and his Brother-in-law,

Groseillers, visit what are now Wisconsin, Minnesota, Dakota, and the

Canadian Northwest--Radisson's Prophecy on first beholding the

West--Twelve Years before Marquette and Jolliet, Radisson sees the

Mississippi--The Terrible Remains of Dollard's Fight seen on the Way

down the Ottawa--Why Radisson's Explorations have been ignored

While Radisson was among the Iroquois, the little world of New France

had not been asleep. Before Radisson was born, Jean Nicolet of Three

Rivers had passed westward through the straits of Mackinaw and coasted

down Lake Michigan as far as Green Bay.[1] Some years later the great

Jesuit martyr, Jogues, had preached to the Indians of Sault Ste. Marie;

but beyond the Sault was an unknown world that beckoned the young

adventurers of New France as with the hands of a siren. Of the great

beyond--known to-day as the Great Northwest--nothing had been learned

but this: from it came the priceless stores of beaver pelts yearly

brought down the Ottawa to Three Rivers by the Algonquins, and in it

dwelt strange, wild races whose territory extended northwest and north

to unknown nameless seas.

The Great Beyond held the two things most coveted by ambitious young

men of New France,--quick wealth by means of the fur trade and the

immortal fame of being a first explorer. Nicolet had gone only as far

as Green Bay and Fox River; Jogues not far beyond the Sault. What

secrets lay in the Great Unknown? Year after year young Frenchmen,

fired with the zeal of the explorer, joined wandering tribes of

Algonquins going up the Ottawa, in the hope of being taken beyond the

Sault. In August, 1656, there came from Green Bay two young Frenchmen

with fifty canoes of Algonquins, who told of far-distant waters called

Lake "Ouinipeg," and tribes of wandering hunters called "Christinos"

(Crees), who spent their winters in a land bare of trees (the prairie),

and their summers on the North Sea (Hudson's Bay). They also told of

other tribes, who were great warriors, living to the south,--these were

the Sioux. But the two Frenchmen had not gone beyond the Great

Lakes.[2] These Algonquins were received at Château St. Louis, Quebec,

with pompous firing of cannon and other demonstrations of welcome. So

eager were the French to take possession of the new land that thirty

young men equipped themselves to go back with the Indians; and the

Jesuits sent out two priests, Leonard Gareau and Gabriel Dreuillettes,

with a lay helper, Louis Boësme. The sixty canoes left Quebec with

more firing of guns for a God-speed; but at Lake St. Peter the Mohawks

ambushed the flotilla. The enterprise of exploring the Great Beyond

was abandoned by all the French but two. Gareau, who was mortally

wounded on the Ottawa, probably by a Frenchman or renegade hunter, died

at Montreal; and Dreuillettes did not go farther than Lake Nipissing.

Here, Dreuillettes learned much of the Unknown from an old Nipissing

chief. He heard of six overland routes to the bay of the North, whence

came such store of peltry.[3] He, too, like the two Frenchmen from

Green Bay, heard of wandering tribes who had no settled lodge like the

Hurons and Iroquois, but lived by the chase,--Crees and Sioux and

Assiniboines of the prairie, at constant war round a lake called

"Ouinipegouek."

[Illustration: A Cree brave, with the wampum string.]

By one of those curious coincidences of destiny which mark the lives of

nations and men, the young Frenchman who had gone with the Jesuit,

Dreuillettes, to Lake Nipissing when the other Frenchmen turned back,

was Médard Chouart Groseillers, the fur trader married to Radisson's

widowed sister, Marguerite.[4]

When Radisson came back from Onondaga, he found his brother-in-law,

Groseillers, at Three Rivers, with ambitious designs of exploration in

the unknown land of which he had heard at Green Bay and on Lake

Nipissing. Jacques Cartier had discovered only one great river, had

laid the foundations of only one small province; Champlain had only

made the circuit of the St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, and the Great Lakes;

but here was a country--if the Indians spoke the truth--greater than

all the empires of Europe together, a country bounded only by three

great seas, the Sea of the North, the Sea of the South, and the Sea of

Japan, a country so vast as to stagger the utmost conception of little

New France.

It was unnecessary for Groseillers to say more. The ambition of young

Radisson took fire. Long ago, when a captive among the Mohawks, he had

cherished boyish dreams that it was to be his "destiny to discover many

wild nations"; and here was that destiny opening the door for him,

pointing the way, beckoning to the toils and dangers and glories of the

discoverer's life. Radisson had been tortured among the Mohawks and

besieged among the Onondagas. Groseillers had been among the Huron

missions that were destroyed and among the Algonquin canoes that were

attacked. Both explorers knew what perils awaited them; but what

youthful blood ever chilled at prospect of danger when a single _coup_

might win both wealth and fame? Radisson had not been home one month;

but he had no sooner heard the plan than he "longed to see himself in a

boat."

A hundred and fifty Algonquins had come down the Ottawa from the Great

Beyond shortly after Radisson returned from Onondaga. Six of these

Algonquins had brought their furs to Three Rivers. Some emissaries had

gone to Quebec to meet the governor; but the majority of the Indians

remained at Montreal to avoid the ambuscade of the Mohawks on Lake St.

Peter. Radisson and Groseillers were not the only Frenchmen conspiring

to wrest fame and fortune from the Upper Country. When the Indians

came back from Quebec, they were accompanied by thirty young French

adventurers, gay as boys out of school or gold hunters before the first

check to their plans. There were also two Jesuits sent out to win the

new domain for the cross.[5] As ignorant as children of the hardships

ahead, the other treasure-seekers kept up nonchalant boasting that

roused the irony of such seasoned men as Radisson and Groseillers.

"What fairer bastion than a good tongue," Radisson demands cynically,

"especially when one sees his own chimney smoke? . . . It is different

when food is wanting, work necessary day and night, sleep taken on the

bare ground or to mid-waist in water, with an empty stomach, weariness

in the bones, and bad weather overhead."

Giving the slip to their noisy companions, Radisson and Groseillers

stole out from Three Rivers late one night in June, accompanied by

Algonquin guides. Travelling only at night to avoid Iroquois spies,

they came to Montreal in three days. Here were gathered one hundred

and forty Indians from the Upper Country, the thirty French, and the

two priests. No gun was fired at Montreal, lest the Mohawks should get

wind of the departure; and the flotilla of sixty canoes spread over

Lake St. Louis for the far venture of the _Pays d'en Haut_. Three days

of work had silenced the boasting of the gay adventurers; and the

_voyageurs_, white and red, were now paddling in swift silence. Safety

engendered carelessness. As the fleet seemed to be safe from Iroquois

ambush, the canoes began to scatter. Some loitered behind. Hunters

went ashore to shoot. The hills began to ring with shot and call. At

the first _portage_ many of the canoes were nine and ten miles apart.

Enemies could have set on the Algonquins in some narrow defile and

slaughtered the entire company like sheep in a pen. Radisson and

Groseillers warned the Indians of the risk they were running. Many of

these Algonquins had never before possessed firearms. With the muskets

obtained in trade at Three Rivers, they thought themselves invincible

and laughed all warning to scorn. Radisson and Groseillers were told

that they were a pair of timid squaws; and the canoes spread apart till

not twenty were within call. As they skirted the wooded shores, a man

suddenly dashed from the forest with an upraised war-hatchet in one

hand and a blanket streaming from his shoulders. He shouted for them

to come to him. The Algonquins were panic-stricken. Was the man

pursued by Mohawks, or laying a trap to lure them within shooting

range? Seeing them hesitate, the Indian threw down blanket and hatchet

to signify that he was defenceless, and rushed into the water to his

armpits.

"I would save you," he shouted in Iroquois.

The Algonquins did not understand. They only knew that he spoke the

tongue of the hated enemy and was unarmed. In a trice, the Algonquins

in the nearest canoe had thrown out a well-aimed lasso, roped the man

round the waist, and drawn him a captive into the canoe.

"Brothers," protested the captive, who seems to have been either a

Huron slave or an Iroquois magician, "your enemies are spread up and

down! Sleep not! They have heard your noise! They wait for you!

They are sure of their prey! Believe me--keep together! Spend not

your powder in vain to frighten your enemies by noise! See that the

stones of your arrows be not bent! Bend your bows! Keep your hatchets

sharp! Build a fort! Make haste!"

But the Algonquins, intoxicated with the new power of firearms, would

hear no warning. They did not understand his words and refused to heed

Radisson's interpretation. Beating paddles on their canoes and firing

off guns, they shouted derisively that the man was "a dog and a hen."

All the same, they did not land to encamp that night, but slept in

midstream, with their boats tied to the rushes or on the lee side of

floating trees. The French lost heart. If this were the beginning,

what of the end? Daylight had scarcely broken when the paddles of the

eager _voyageurs_ were cutting the thick gray mist that rose from the

river to get away from observation while the fog still hid the fleet.

From afar came the dull, heavy rumble of a waterfall.[6]

There was a rush of the twelve foremost canoes to reach the landing and

cross the _portage_ before the thinning mist lifted entirely. Twelve

boats had got ashore when the fog was cleft by a tremendous crashing of

guns, and Iroquois ambushed in the bordering forest let go a salute of

musketry. Everything was instantly in confusion. Abandoning their

baggage to the enemy, the Algonquins and French rushed for the woods to

erect a barricade. This would protect the landing of the other canoes.

The Iroquois immediately threw up a defence of fallen logs likewise,

and each canoe that came ashore was greeted with a cross fire between

the two barricades. Four canoes were destroyed and thirteen of the

Indians from the Upper Country killed. As day wore on, the Iroquois'

shots ceased, and the Algonquins celebrated the truce by killing and

devouring all the prisoners they had taken, among whom was the magician

who had given them warning. Radisson and Groseillers wondered if the

Iroquois were reserving their powder for a night raid. The Algonquins

did not wait to know. As soon as darkness fell, there was a wild

scramble for the shore. A long, low trumpet call, such as hunters use,

signalled the Algonquins to rally and rush for the boats. The French

embarked as best they could. The Indians swam and paddled for the

opposite shore of the river. Here, in the dark, hurried council was

taken. The most of the baggage had been lost. The Indians refused to

help either the Jesuits or the French, and it was impossible for the

white _voyageurs_ to keep up the pace in the dash across an unknown

_portage_ through the dark. The French adventurers turned back for

Montreal. Of the white men, Radisson and Groseillers alone went on.

Frightened into their senses by the encounter, the Algonquins now

travelled only at night till they were far beyond range of the

Iroquois. All day the fugitive band lay hidden in the woods. They

could not hunt, lest Mohawk spies might hear the gunshots. Provisions

dwindled. In a short time the food consisted of _tripe de roche_--a

greenish moss boiled into a soup--and the few fish that might be caught

during hurried nightly launch or morning landing. Sometimes they hid

in a berry patch, when the fruit was gathered and boiled, but

camp-fires were stamped out and covered. Turning westward, they

crossed the barren region of iron-capped rocks and dwarf growth between

the Upper Ottawa and the Great Lakes. Now they were farther from the

Iroquois, and staved off famine by shooting an occasional bear in the

berry patches. For a thousand miles they had travelled against stream,

carrying their boats across sixty _portages_. Now they glided with the

current westward to Lake Nipissing. On the lake, the Upper Indians

always _cached_ provisions. Fish, otter, and beaver were plentiful;

but again they refrained from using firearms, for Iroquois footprints

had been found on the sand.

From Lake Nipissing they passed to Lake Huron, where the fleet divided.

Radisson and Groseillers went with the Indians, who crossed Lake Huron

for Green Bay on Lake Michigan. The birch canoes could not venture

across the lake in storms; so the boats rounded southward, keeping

along the shore of Georgian Bay. Cedar forests clustered down the

sandy reaches of the lake. Rivers dark as cathedral aisles rolled

their brown tides through the woods to the blue waters of Lake Huron.

At one point Groseillers recognized the site of the ruined Jesuit

missions. The Indians waited the chance of a fair day, and paddled

over to the straits at the entrance to Lake Michigan. At Manitoulin

Island were Huron refugees, among whom were, doubtless, the waiting

families of the Indians with Radisson. All struck south for Green Bay.

So far Radisson and Groseillers had travelled over beaten ground. Now

they were at the gateway of the Great Beyond, where no white man had

yet gone.

The first thing done on taking up winter quarters on Green Bay was to

appease the friends of those warriors slain by the Mohawks. A

distribution of gifts had barely dried up the tears of mourning when

news came of Iroquois on the war-path. Radisson did not wait for fear

to unman the Algonquin warriors. Before making winter camp, he offered

to lead a band of volunteers against the marauders. For two days he

followed vague tracks through the autumn-tinted forests. Here were

markings of the dead leaves turned freshly up; there a moccasin print

on the sand; and now the ashes of a hidden camp-fire lying in almost

imperceptible powder on fallen logs told where the Mohawks had

bivouacked. On the third day Radisson caught the ambushed band

unprepared, and fell upon the Iroquois so furiously that not one

escaped.

After that the Indians of the Upper Country could not do too much for

the white men. Radisson and Groseillers were conducted from camp to

camp in triumph. Feasts were held. Ambassadors went ahead with gifts

from the Frenchmen; and companies of women marched to meet the

explorers, chanting songs of welcome. "But our mind was not to stay

here," relates Radisson, "but to know the remotest people; and, because

we had been willing to die in their defence, these Indians consented to

conduct us."

Before the opening of spring, 1659, Radisson and Groseillers had been

guided across what is now Wisconsin to "a mighty river, great, rushing,

profound, and comparable to the St. Lawrence." [7] On the shores of

the river they found a vast nation--"the people of the fire," prairie

tribes, a branch of the Sioux, who received them well.[8] This river

was undoubtedly the Upper Mississippi, now for the first time seen by

white men. Radisson and Groseillers had discovered the Great

Northwest.[9] They were standing on the threshold of the Great Beyond.

They saw before them not the Sea of China, as speculators had dreamed,

not kingdoms for conquest, which the princes of Europe coveted; not a

short road to Asia, of which savants had spun a cobweb of theories.

They saw what every Westerner sees to-day,--illimitable reaches of

prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open

meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon. They saw a land

waiting for its people, wealth waiting for possessors, an empire

waiting for the nation builders.

[Illustration: An Old-time Buffalo Hunt on the Plains among the Sioux.]

What were Radisson's thoughts? Did he realize the importance of his

discovery? Could he have the vaguest premonition that he had opened a

door of escape from stifled older lands to a higher type of manhood and

freedom than the most sanguine dreamer had ever hoped?[10] After an

act has come to fruition, it is easy to read into the actor's mind

fuller purpose than he could have intended. Columbus could not have

realized to what the discovery of America would lead. Did Radisson

realize what the discovery of the Great Northwest meant?

Here is what he says, in that curious medley of idioms which so often

results when a speaker knows many languages but is master of none:--

"The country was so pleasant, so beautiful, and so fruitful, that it

grieved me to see that the world could not discover such inticing

countries to live in. This, I say, because the Europeans fight for a

rock in the sea against one another, or for a steril land . . . where

the people by changement of air engender sickness and die. . . .

Contrariwise, these kingdoms are so delicious and under so temperate a

climate, plentiful of all things, and the earth brings forth its fruit

twice a year, that the people live long and lusty and wise in their

way. What a conquest would this be, at little or no cost? What

pleasure should people have . . . instead of misery and poverty! Why

should not men reap of the love of God here? Surely, more is to be

gained converting souls here than in differences of creed, when wrongs

are committed under pretence of religion! . . . It is true, I

confess, . . . that access here is difficult . . . but nothing is to be

gained without labor and pains." [11]

[Illustration: Father Marquette, from an old painting discovered in

Montreal by Mr. McNab. The date on the picture is 1669.]

Here Radisson foreshadows all the best gains that the West has

accomplished for the human race. What are they? Mainly room,--room to

live and room for opportunity; equal chances for all classes, high and

low; plenty for all classes, high and low; the conquests not of war but

of peace. The question arises,--when Radisson discovered the Great

Northwest ten years before Marquette and Jolliet, twenty years before

La Salle, a hundred years before De la Vérendrye, why has his name been

slurred over and left in oblivion?[12] The reasons are plain.

Radisson was a Christian, but he was not a slave to any creed. Such

liberality did not commend itself to the annalists of an age that was

still rioting in a very carnival of religious persecution. Radisson

always invoked the blessing of Heaven on his enterprises and rendered

thanks for his victories; but he was indifferent as to whether he was

acting as lay helper with the Jesuits, or allied to the Huguenots of

London and Boston. His discoveries were too important to be ignored by

the missionaries. They related his discoveries, but refrained from

mentioning his name, though twice referring to Groseillers. What hurt

Radisson's fame even more than his indifference to creeds was his

indifference to nationality. Like Columbus, he had little care what

flag floated at the prow, provided only that the prow pushed on and on

and on,--into the Unknown. He sold his services alternately to France

and England till he had offended both governments; and, in addition to

withstanding a conspiracy of silence on the part of the Church, his

fame encountered the ill-will of state historians. He is mentioned as

"the adventurer," "the hang-dog," "the renegade." Only in 1885, when

the manuscript of his travels was rescued from oblivion, did it become

evident that history must be rewritten. Here was a man whose

discoveries were second only to those of Columbus, and whose

explorations were more far-ranging and important than those of

Champlain and La Salle and De la Vérendrye put together.