CHAPTER 8
1687.
DENONVILLE AND THE SENECAS.
TREACHERY OF DENONVILLE, IROQUOIS GENEROSITY, THE INVADING ARMY, THE WESTERN ALLIES, PLUNDER OF ENGLISH TRADERS, ARRIVAL OF THE ALLIES, SCENE AT THE FRENCH CAMP, MARCH OF DENONVILLE,  AMBUSCADE, BATTLE, VICTORY, THE SENECA BABYLON, IMPERFECT SUCCESS.
A host of flat-boats filled with soldiers, and a host of Indian canoes, struggled against the rapids of the Saint Lawrence, and slowly made their way to Fort Frontenac.  Among the troops was La Hontan.  When on his arrival he entered the gate of the fort, he saw a strange sight.  A row of posts was planted across the area within, and to each post an Iroquois was tied by the neck, hands, and feet, "in such a way," says the indignant witness, "that he could neither sleep nor drive off the mosquitoes." A number of Indians attached to the expedition, all of whom were Christian converts from the mission villages, were amusing themselves by burning the fingers of these unfortunates in the bowls of their pipes, while the sufferers sang their death songs.  La Hontan recognized one of them who, during his campaign with La Barre, had often feasted him in his wigwam; and the sight so exasperated the young officer that he could scarcely refrain from thrashing the tormentors with his walking stick.  

Though the prisoners were Iroquois, they were not those against whom the expedition was directed; nor had they, so far as appears, ever given the French any cause of complaint.  They belonged to two neutral villages, called Kente and Ganneious, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, forming a sort of colony, where the Sulpitians of Montreal had established a mission.  They hunted and fished for the garrison of the fort, and had been on excellent terms with it.  Denonville, however, feared that they would report his movements to their relations across the lake; but this was not his chief motive for seizing them.  Like La Barre before him, he had received orders from the court that, as the Iroquois were robust and strong, he should capture as many of them as possible, and send them to France as galley slaves.  The order, without doubt, referred to prisoners taken in war; but Denonville, aware that the hostile Iroquois were not easily caught, resolved to entrap their unsuspecting relatives.

The intendant Champigny accordingly proceeded to the fort in advance of the troops, and invited the neighboring Iroquois to a feast.  They came to the number of thirty men and about ninety women and children, whereupon they were surrounded and captured by the intendant's escort and the two hundred men of the garrison.  The inhabitants of the village of Ganneious were not present; and one Perre, with a strong party of Canadians and Christian Indians, went to secure them.  He acquitted himself of his errand with great address, and returned with eighteen warriors and about sixty women and children.  Champigny's exertions did not end here.  Learning that a party of Iroquois were peaceably fishing on an island in the Saint Lawrence, he offered them also the hospitalities of Fort Frontenac; but they were too wary to be entrapped.  Four or five Iroquois were however caught by the troops on their way up the river.  They were in two or more parties, and they all had with them their women and children, which was never the case with Iroquois on the war-path.  Hence the assertion of Denonville, that they came with hostile designs, is very improbable.  As for the last six months he had constantly urged them, by the lips of Lamberville, to visit him and smoke the pipe of peace, it is not unreasonable to suppose that these Indian families were on their way to the colony in consequence of his invitations.  Among them were the son and brother of Big Mouth, who of late had been an advocate of peace; and, in order not to alienate him, these two were eventually set free.  The other warriors were tied like the rest to stakes at the fort.

The whole number of prisoners thus secured was fifty-one, sustained by such food as their wives were able to get for them.  Of more than a hundred and fifty women and children captured with them, many died at the fort, partly from excitement and distress, and partly from a pestilential disease.  The survivors were all baptized, and then distributed among the mission villages in the colony.  The men were sent to Quebec, where some of them were given up to their Christian relatives in the missions who had claimed them, and whom it was not expedient to offend; and the rest, after being baptized, were sent to France, to share with convicts and Huguenots the horrible slavery of the royal galleys.  

Before reaching Fort Frontenac, Denonville, to his great relief, was joined by Lamberville, delivered from the peril to which the governor had exposed him.  He owed his life to an act of magnanimity on the part of the Iroquois, which does them signal honor.  One of the prisoners at Fort Frontenac had contrived to escape, and, leaping sixteen feet to the ground from the window of a blockhouse, crossed the lake, and gave the alarm to his countrymen.  Apparently, it was from him that the Onondagas learned that the invitations of Onontio were a snare; that he had entrapped their relatives, and was about to fall on their Seneca brethren with all the force of Canada.  The Jesuit, whom they trusted and esteemed, but who had been used as an instrument to beguile them, was summoned before a council of the chiefs.  They were in a fury at the news; and Lamberville, as much astonished by it as they, expected instant death, when one of them is said to have addressed him to the following effect: "We know you too well to believe that you meant to betray us.  We think that you have been deceived as well as we; and we are not unjust enough to punish you for the crime of others.  But you are not safe here.  When once our young men have sung the warsong, they will listen to nothing but their fury; and we shall not be able to save you." They gave him guides, and sent him by secret paths to meet the advancing army.  

Again the fields about Fort Frontenac were covered with tents, camp-sheds, and wigwams.  Regulars, militia, and Indians, there were about two thousand men; and, besides these, eight hundred regulars just arrived from France had been left at Montreal to protect the settlers.  Fortune thus far had smiled on the enterprise, and she now gave Denonville a fresh proof of her favor.  On the very day of his arrival, a canoe came from Niagara with news that a large body of allies from the west had reached that place three days before, and were waiting his commands.  It was more than he had dared to hope.  In the preceding autumn, he had ordered Tonty, commanding at the Illinois, and La Durantaye, commanding at Michillimackinac, to muster as many coureurs de bois and Indians as possible, and join him early in July at Niagara.  The distances were vast, and the difficulties incalculable.  In the eyes of the pious governor, their timely arrival was a manifest sign of the favor of Heaven.  At Fort Saint Louis, of the Illinois, Tonty had mustered sixteen Frenchmen and about two hundred Indians, whom he led across the country to Detroit; and here he found Du Lhut, La Foret, and La Durantaye, with a large body of French and Indians from the upper lakes.  It had been the work of the whole winter to induce these savages to move.  Presents, persuasion, and promises had not been spared—and while La Durantaye, aided by the Jesuit Engelran, labored to gain over the tribes of Michillimackinac, the indefatigable Nicolas Perrot was at work among those of the Mississippi and Lake Michigan.  They were of a race unsteady as aspens and fierce as wild-cats, full of mutual jealousies, without rulers, and without laws; for each was a law to himself.  It was difficult to persuade them, and, when persuaded, scarcely possible to keep them so.  Perrot, however, induced some of them to follow him to Michillimackinac, where many hundreds of Algonquin savages were presently gathered: a perilous crew, who changed their minds every day, and whose dancing, singing, and yelping might turn at any moment into war-whoops against each other or against their hosts, the French.  The Hurons showed more stability; and La Durantaye was reasonably sure that some of them would follow him to the war, though it was clear that others were bent on allying themselves with the Senecas and the English.  As for the Pottawatamies, Sacs, Ojibwas, Ottawas, and other Algonquin hordes, no man could foresee what they would do.  Suddenly a canoe arrived with news that a party of English traders was approaching.  It will be remembered that two bands of Dutch and English, under Rooseboom and McGregory, had prepared to set out together for Michillimackinac, armed with commissions from Dongan.  They had rashly changed their plan, and parted company.  Rooseboom took the lead, and McGregory followed some time after.  Their hope was that, on reaching Michillimackinac, the Indians of the place, attracted by their cheap goods and their abundant supplies of rum, would declare for them and drive off the French; and this would probably have happened, but for the prompt action of La Durantaye.  The canoes of Rooseboom, bearing twenty-nine whites and five Mohawks and Mohicans, were not far distant, when, amid a prodigious hubbub, the French commander embarked to meet him with a hundred and twenty coureurs de bois.  Behind them followed a swarm of Indian canoes, whose occupants scarcely knew which side to take, but for the most part inclined to the English.  Rooseboom and his men, however, naturally thought that they came to support the French; and, when La Durantaye bore down upon them with threats of instant death if they made the least resistance, they surrendered at once.  The captors carried them in triumph to Michillimackinac, and gave their goods to the delighted Indians.

"It is certain," wrote Denonville; "that, if the English had not been stopped and pillaged, the Hurons and Ottawas would have revolted and cut the throats of all our Frenchmen." As it was, La Durantaye's exploit produced a revulsion of feeling, and many of the Indians consented to follow him.  He lost no time in leading them down the lake to join Du Lhut at Detroit; and, when Tonty arrived, they all paddled for Niagara.  On the way, they met McGregory with a party about equal to that of Rooseboom.  He had with him a considerable number of Ottawa and Huron prisoners whom the Iroquois had captured, and whom he meant to return to their countrymen as a means of concluding the long projected triple alliance between the English, the Iroquois, and the tribes of the lakes.  This bold scheme was now completely crushed.  All the English were captured and carried to Niagara, whence they and their luckless precursors were sent prisoners to Quebec.

La Durantaye and his companions, with a hundred and eighty coureurs de bois and four hundred Indians, waited impatiently at Niagara for orders from the governor.  A canoe despatched in haste from Fort Frontenac soon appeared; and they were directed to repair at once to the rendezvous at Irondequoit Bay, on the borders of the Seneca country.  

Denonville was already on his way thither.  On the fourth of July, he had embarked at Fort Frontenac with four hundred bateaux and canoes, crossed the foot of Lake Ontario, and moved westward along the southern shore.  The weather was rough, and six days passed before he descried the low headlands of Irondequoit Bay.  Far off on the glimmering water, he saw a multitude of canoes advancing to meet him.  It was the flotilla of La Durantaye.  Good management and good luck had so disposed it that the allied bands, concentring from points more than a thousand miles distant, reached the rendezvous on the same day.  This was not all.  The Ottawas of Michillimackinac, who refused to follow La Durantaye, had changed their minds the next morning, embarked in a body, paddled up the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, crossed to Toronto, and joined the allies at Niagara.  White and red, Denonville now had nearly three thousand men under his command.  All were gathered on the low point of land that separates Irondequoit Bay from Lake Ontario.  "Never," says an eye-witness, "had Canada seen such a sight; and never, perhaps, will she see such a sight again.  Here was the camp of the regulars from France, with the general's head-quarters; the camp of the four battalions of Canadian militia, commanded by the noblesse of the country; the camp of the Christian Indians; and, farther on, a swarm of savages of every nation.  Their features were different, and so were their manners, their weapons, their decorations, and their dances.  They sang and whooped and harangued in every accent and tongue.  Most of them wore nothing but horns on their heads, and the tails of beasts behind their backs.  Their faces were painted red or green, with black or white spots; their ears and noses were hung with ornaments of iron; and their naked bodies were daubed with figures of various sorts of animals." 

These were the allies from the upper lakes.  The enemy, meanwhile, had taken alarm.  Just after the army arrived, three Seneca scouts called from the edge of the woods, and demanded what they meant to do.  "To fight you, you blockheads," answered a Mohawk Christian attached to the French.  A volley of bullets was fired at the scouts; but they escaped, and carried the news to their villages.  Many of the best warriors were absent.  Those that remained, four hundred or four hundred and fifty by their own accounts, and eight hundred by that of the French, mustered in haste; and, though many of them were mere boys, they sent off the women and children, hid their most valued possessions, burned their chief town, and prepared to meet the invaders.

On the twelfth, at three o'clock in the afternoon, Denonville began his march, leaving four hundred men in a hastily built fort to guard the bateaux and canoes.  Troops, officers, and Indians, all carried their provisions at their backs.  Some of the Christian Mohawks guided them; but guides were scarcely needed, for a broad Indian trail led from the bay to the great Seneca town, twenty-two miles southward.  They marched three leagues through the open forests of oak, and encamped for the night.  In the morning, the heat was intense.  The men gasped in the dead and sultry air of the woods, or grew faint in the pitiless sun, as they waded waist-deep through the rank grass of the narrow intervales.  They passed safely through two dangerous defiles, and, about two in the afternoon, began to enter a third.  Dense forests covered the hills on either hand.  La Durantaye with Tonty and his cousin Du Lhut led the advance, nor could all Canada have supplied three men better for the work.  Each led his band of coureurs de bois, white Indians, without discipline, and scarcely capable of it, but brave and accustomed to the woods.  On their left were the Iroquois converts from the missions of Saut Saint Louis and the Mountain of Montreal, fighting under the influence of their ghostly prompters against their own countrymen.  On the right were the pagan Indians from the west.  The woods were full of these painted spectres, grotesquely horrible in horns and tail; and among them flitted the black robe of Father Engelran, the Jesuit of Michillimackinac.  Nicolas Perrot and two other bush-ranging Frenchmen were assigned to command them, but in fact they obeyed no man.  These formed the vanguard, eight or nine hundred in all, under an excellent officer, Callieres, governor of Montreal.  Behind came the main body under Denonville, each of the four battalions of regulars alternating with a battalion of Canadians.  Some of the regulars wore light armor, while the Canadians were in plain attire of coarse cloth or buckskin.  Denonville, oppressed by the heat, marched in his shirt.  "It is a rough life," wrote the marquis, "to tramp afoot through the woods, carrying one's own provisions in a haversack, devoured by mosquitoes, and faring no better than a mere soldier." With him was the Chevalier de Vaudreuil, who had just arrived from France in command of the eight hundred men left to guard the colony, and who, eager to take part in the campaign, had pushed forward alone to join the army.  Here, too, were the Canadian seigniors at the head of their vassals, Berthier, La Valterie, Granville, Longueuil, and many more.  A guard of rangers and Indians brought up the rear.

Scouts thrown out in front ran back with the report that they had reached the Seneca clearings, and had seen no more dangerous enemy than three or four women in the cornfields.  This was a device of the Senecas to cheat the French into the belief that the inhabitants were still in the town.  It had the desired effect.  The vanguard pushed rapidly forward, hoping to surprise the place, and ignorant that, behind the ridge of thick forests on their right, among a tangled growth of beech-trees in the gorge of a brook, three hundred ambushed warriors lay biding their time.

Hurrying forward through the forest, they left the main body behind, and soon reached the end of the defile.  The woods were still dense on their left and front; but on their right lay a great marsh, covered with alder thickets and rank grass.  Suddenly the air was filled with yells, and a rapid though distant fire was opened from the thickets and the forest.  Scores of painted savages, stark naked, some armed with swords and some with hatchets, leaped screeching from their ambuscade, and rushed against the van.  Almost at the same moment a burst of whoops and firing sounded in the defile behind.  It was the ambushed three hundred supporting the onset of their countrymen in front; but they had made a fatal mistake.  Deceived by the numbers of the vanguard, they supposed it to be the whole army, never suspecting that Denonville was close behind with sixteen hundred men.  It was a surprise on both sides.  So dense was the forest that the advancing battalions could see neither the enemy nor each other.  Appalled by the din of whoops and firing, redoubled by the echoes of the narrow valley, the whole army was seized with something like a panic.  Some of the officers, it is said, threw themselves on the ground in their fright.  There were a few moments of intense bewilderment.  The various corps became broken and confused, and moved hither and thither without knowing why.  Denonville behaved with great courage.  He ran, sword in hand, to where the uproar was greatest, ordered the drums to beat the charge, turned back the militia of Berthier who were trying to escape, and commanded them and all others whom he met to fire on whatever looked like an enemy.  He was bravely seconded by Callieres, La Valterie, and several other officers.  The Christian Iroquois fought well from the first, leaping from tree to tree, and exchanging shots and defiance with their heathen countrymen; till the Senecas, seeing themselves confronted by numbers that seemed endless, abandoned the field, after heavy loss, carrying with them many of their dead and all of their wounded.  Denonville made no attempt to pursue.  He had learned the dangers of this blind warfare of the woods; and he feared that the Senecas would waylay him again in the labyrinth of bushes that lay between him and the town.  "Our troops," he says, "were all so overcome by the extreme heat and the long march that we were forced to remain where we were till morning.  We had the pain of witnessing the usual cruelties of the Indians, who cut the dead bodies into quarters, like butchers' meat, to put into their kettles, and opened most of them while still warm to drink the blood.  Our rascally Ottawas particularly distinguished themselves by these barbarities, as well as by cowardice; for they made off in the fight.  We had five or six men killed on the spot, and about twenty wounded, among whom was Father Engelran, who was badly hurt by a gun-shot.  Some prisoners who escaped from the Senecas tell us that they lost forty men killed outright, twenty-five of whom we saw butchered.  One of the escaped prisoners saw the rest buried, and he saw also more than sixty very dangerously wounded." 

In the morning, the troops advanced in order of battle through a marsh covered with alders and tall grass, whence they had no sooner emerged than, says Abbe Belmont, "we began to see the famous Babylon of the Senecas, where so many crimes have been committed, so much blood spilled, and so many men burned.  It was a village or town of bark, on the top of a hill.  They had burned it a week before.  We found nothing in it but the graveyard and the graves, full of snakes and other creatures; a great mask, with teeth and eyes of brass, and a bearskin drawn over it, with which they performed their conjurations." The fire had also spared a number of huge receptacles of bark, still filled with the last season's corn; while the fields around were covered with the growing crop, ripening in the July sun .  There were hogs, too, in great number; for the Iroquois did not share the antipathy with which Indians are apt to regard that unsavory animal, and from which certain philosophers have argued their descent from the Jews.

The soldiers killed the hogs, burned the old corn, and hacked down the new with their swords.  Next they advanced to an abandoned Seneca fort on a hill half a league distant, and burned it, with all that it contained.  Ten days were passed in the work of havoc.  Three neighboring villages were levelled, and all their fields laid waste.  The amount of corn destroyed was prodigious.  Denonville reckons it at the absurdly exaggerated amount of twelve hundred thousand bushels.

The Senecas, laden with such of their possessions as they could carry off, had fled to their confederates in the east; and Denonville did not venture to pursue them.  His men, feasting without stint on green corn and fresh pork, were sickening rapidly, and his Indian allies were deserting him.  "It is a miserable business," he wrote, "to command savages, who, as soon as they have knocked an enemy in the head, ask for nothing but to go home and carry with them the scalp, which they take off like a skull-cap.  You cannot believe what trouble I had to keep them till the corn was cut."

On the twenty-fourth, he withdrew, with all his army, to the fortified post at Irondequoit Bay, whence he proceeded to Niagara, in order to accomplish his favorite purpose of building a fort there.  The troops were set at work, and a stockade was planted on the point of land at the eastern angle between the River Niagara and Lake Ontario, the site of the ruined fort built by La Salle nine years before.  Here he left a hundred men, under the Chevalier de Troyes, and, embarking with the rest of the army, descended to Montreal.

The campaign was but half a success.  Joined to the capture of the English traders on the lakes, it had, indeed, prevented the defection of the western Indians, and in some slight measure restored their respect for the French, of whom, nevertheless, one of them was heard to say that they were good for nothing but to make war on hogs and corn.  As for the Senecas, they were more enraged than hurt.  They could rebuild their bark villages in a few weeks; and, though they had lost their harvest, their confederates would not let them starve.  A converted Iroquois had told the governor before his departure that, if he overset a wasps' nest, he must crush the wasps, or they would sting him.  Denonville left the wasps alive.
* * * * *
DENONVILLE'S CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE SENECAS, The chief authorities on this matter are the journal of Denonville, of which there is a translation in the Colonial Documents of New York, IX.; the letters of Denonville to the Minister; the Etat Present de l'Eglise de la Colonie Francaise, by Bishop Saint-Vallier; the Recueil de ce qui s'est passe en Canada au Sujet de la Guerre, tant des Anglais que des Iroquois, depuis l'annee 1682; and the excellent account by Abbe Belmont in his chronicle called Histoire du Canada.  To these may be added La Hontan, Tonty, Nicolas Perrot, La Potherie, and the Senecas examined before the authorities of Albany, whose statements are printed in the Colonial Documents, III.  These are the original sources.  Charlevoix drew his account from a portion of them.  It is inexact, and needs the correction of his learned annotator, Mr.  Shea.  Colden, Smith, and other English writers follow La Hontan.

The researches of Mr.  O.  H.  Marshall, of Buffalo, have left no reasonable doubt as to the scene of the battle, and the site of the neighboring town.  The Seneca ambuscade was on the marsh and the hills immediately north and west of the present village of Victor; and their chief town, called Gannagaro by Denonville, was on the top of Boughton's Hill, about a mile and a quarter distant.  Immense quantities of Indian remains were formerly found here, and many are found to this day.  Charred corn has been turned up in abundance by the plough, showing that the place was destroyed by fire.  The remains of the fort burned by the French are still plainly visible on a hill a mile and a quarter from the ancient town.  A plan of it will be found in Squier's Aboriginal Monuments of New York.  The site of the three other Seneca towns destroyed by Denonville, and called Totiakton, Gannondata, and Gannongarae, can also be identified.  See Marshall, in Collections N.  Y.  Hist.  Soc., 2d Series, II.  Indian traditions of historical events are usually almost worthless; but the old Seneca chief Dyunehogawah, or "John Blacksmith," who was living a few years ago at the Tonawanda reservation, recounted to Mr.  Marshall with remarkable accuracy the story of the battle as handed down from his ancestors who lived at Gannagaro, close to the scene of action.  Gannagaro was the Canagorah of Wentworth Greenalgh's Journal.  The old Seneca, on being shown a map of the locality, placed his finger on the spot where the fight took place, and which Avas long known to the Senecas by the name of Dyagodiyu, or "The Place of a Battle." It answers in the most perfect manner to the French contemporary descriptions.