CHAPTER 30
1649.
GARNIER. CHABANEL.
THE TOBACCO MISSIONS. SAINT  JEAN ATTACKED. DEATH OF GARNIER.  THE JOURNEY OF CHABANEL. HIS DEATH. GARREAU AND GRELON.
Late in the preceding autumn the Iroquois had taken the war-path in force.  At the end of November, two escaped prisoners came to Isle Saint  Joseph with the news that a band of three hundred warriors was hovering in the Huron forests, doubtful whether to invade the island or to attack the towns of the Tobacco Nation in the valleys of the Blue Mountains.  The Father Superior, Ragueneau, sent a runner thither in all haste, to warn the inhabitants of their danger.

There were at this time two missions in the Tobacco Nation, Saint  Jean and Saint  Matthias,  the latter under the charge of the Jesuits Garreau and Grelon, and the former under that of Garnier and Chabanel.  Saint  Jean, the principal seat of the mission of the same name, was a town of five or six hundred families.  Its population was, moreover, greatly augmented by the bands of fugitive Hurons who had taken refuge there.  When the warriors were warned by Ragueneau's messenger of a probable attack from the Iroquois, they were far from being daunted, but, confiding in their numbers, awaited the enemy in one of those fits of valor which characterize the unstable courage of the savage.  At Saint  Jean all was paint, feathers, and uproar, singing, dancing, howling, and stamping.  Quivers were filled, knives whetted, and tomahawks sharpened; but when, after two days of eager expectancy, the enemy did not appear, the warriors lost patience.  Thinking, and probably with reason, that the Iroquois were afraid of them, they resolved to sally forth, and take the offensive.  With yelps and whoops they defiled into the forest, where the branches were gray and bare, and the ground thickly covered with snow.  They pushed on rapidly till the following day, but could not discover their wary enemy, who had made a wide circuit, and was approaching the town from another quarter.  By ill luck, the Iroquois captured a Tobacco Indian and his squaw, straggling in the forest not far from Saint  Jean; and the two prisoners, to propitiate them, told them the defenceless condition of the place, where none remained but women, children, and old men.  The delighted Iroquois no longer hesitated, but silently and swiftly pushed on towards the town.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon of the seventh of December.  Chabanel had left the place a day or two before, in obedience to a message from Ragueneau, and Garnier was here alone.  He was making his rounds among the houses, visiting the sick and instructing his converts, when the horrible din of the war-whoop rose from the borders of the clearing, and, on the instant, the town was mad with terror.  Children and girls rushed to and fro, blind with fright; women snatched their infants, and fled they knew not whither.  Garnier ran to his chapel, where a few of his converts had sought asylum.  He gave them his benediction, exhorted them to hold fast to the Faith, and bade them fly while there was yet time.  For himself, he hastened back to the houses, running from one to another, and giving absolution or baptism to all whom he found.  An Iroquois met him, shot him with three balls through the body and thigh, tore off his cassock, and rushed on in pursuit of the fugitives.  Garnier lay for a moment on the ground, as if stunned; then, recovering his senses, he was seen to rise into a kneeling posture.  At a little distance from him lay a Huron, mortally wounded, but still showing signs of life.  With the Heaven that awaited him glowing before his fading vision, the priest dragged himself towards the dying Indian, to give him absolution; but his strength failed, and he fell again to the earth.  He rose once more, and again crept forward, when a party of Iroquois rushed upon him, split his head with two blows of a hatchet, stripped him, and left his body on the ground.   At this time the whole town was on fire.  The invaders, fearing that the absent warriors might return and take their revenge, hastened to finish their work, scattered firebrands every where, and threw children alive into the burning houses.  They killed many of the fugitives, captured many more, and then made a hasty retreat through the forest with their prisoners, butchering such of them as lagged on the way.  Saint  Jean lay a waste of smoking ruins thickly strewn with blackened corpses of the slain.

Towards evening, parties of fugitives reached Saint  Matthias, with tidings of the catastrophe.  The town was wild with alarm, and all stood on the watch, in expectation of an attack; but when, in the morning, scouts came in and reported the retreat of the Iroquois, Garreau and Grelon set out with a party of converts to visit the scene of havoc.  For a long time they looked in vain for the body of Garnier; but at length they found him lying where he had fallen, so scorched and disfigured, that he was recognized with difficulty.  The two priests wrapped his body in a part of their own clothing; the Indian converts dug a grave on the spot where his church had stood; and here they buried him.  Thus, at the age of forty-four, died Charles Garnier, the favorite child of wealthy and noble parents, nursed in Parisian luxury and ease, then living and dying, a more than willing exile, amid the hardships and horrors of the Huron wilderness.  His life and his death are his best eulogy.  Brébeuf was the lion of the Huron mission, and Garnier was the lamb; but the lamb was as fearless as the lion.

When, on the following morning, the warriors of Saint  Jean returned from their rash and bootless sally, and saw the ashes of their desolated homes and the ghastly relics of their murdered families, they seated themselves amid the ruin, silent and motionless as statues of bronze, with heads bowed down and eyes fixed on the ground.  Thus they remained through half the day.  Tears and wailing were for women; this was the mourning of warriors.

Garnier's colleague, Chabanel, had been recalled from Saint  Jean by an order from the Father Superior, who thought it needless to expose the life of more than one priest in a position of so much danger.  He stopped on his way at Saint  Matthias, and on the morning of the seventh of December, the day of the attack, left that town with seven or eight Christian Hurons.  The journey was rough and difficult.  They proceeded through the forest about eighteen miles, and then encamped in the snow.  The Indians fell asleep; but Chabanel, from an apprehension of danger, or some other cause, remained awake.  About midnight he heard a strange sound in the distance, a confusion of fierce voices, mingled with songs and outcries.  It was the Iroquois on their retreat with their prisoners, some of whom were defiantly singing their war-songs, after the Indian custom.  Chabanel waked his companions, who instantly took flight.  He tried to follow, but could not keep pace with the light-footed savages, who returned to Saint  Matthias, and told what had occurred.  They said, however, that Chabanel had left them and taken an opposite direction, in order to reach Isle Saint  Joseph.  His brother priests were for some time ignorant of what had befallen him.  At length a Huron Indian, who had been converted, but afterward apostatized, gave out that he had met him in the forest, and aided him with his canoe to cross a river which lay in his path.  Some supposed that he had lost his way, and died of cold and hunger; but others were of a different opinion.  Their suspicion was confirmed some time afterwards by the renegade Huron, who confessed that he had killed Chabanel and thrown his body into the river, after robbing him of his clothes, his hat, the blanket or mantle which was strapped to his shoulders, and the bag in which he carried his books and papers.  He declared that his motive was hatred of the Faith, which had caused the ruin of the Hurons.  The priest had prepared himself for a worse fate.  Before leaving Sainte Marie on the Wye, to go to his post in the Tobacco Nation, he had written to his brother to regard him as a victim destined to the fires of the Iroquois.  He added, that, though he was naturally timid, he was now wholly indifferent to danger; and he expressed the belief that only a superhuman power could have wrought such a change in him.

Garreau and Grelon, in their mission of Saint  Matthias, were exposed to other dangers than those of the Iroquois.  A report was spread, not only that they were magicians, but that they had a secret understanding with the enemy.  A nocturnal council was called, and their death was decreed.  In the morning, a furious crowd gathered before a lodge which they were about to enter, screeching and yelling after the manner of Indians when they compel a prisoner to run the gantlet.  The two priests, giving no sign of fear, passed through the crowd and entered the lodge unharmed.  Hatchets were brandished over them, but no one would be the first to strike.  Their converts were amazed at their escape, and they themselves ascribed it to the interposition of a protecting Providence.  The Huron missionaries were doubly in danger, not more from the Iroquois than from the blind rage of those who should have been their friends.