SECTION SECOND.  CANADA   A   MISSION

CHAPTER 4
1653-1658.  

THE JESUITS AT ONONDAGA.

IN the summer of 1653 all Canada turned to fasting and penance, processions, vows, and supplications.  The saints and the Virgin were beset with unceasing prayer.  The wretched little colony was like some puny garrison, starving and sick, compassed with inveterate foes, supplies cut off, and succor hopeless.

At Montreal  the advance guard of the settlements, a sort of Castle Dangerous, held by about fifty Frenchmen, and said by a pious writer of the day to exist only by a continuous miracle  some two hundred Iroquois fell upon twenty-six Frenchmen.  The Christians were outmatched, eight to one; but, says the chronicle, the Queen of Heaven was on their side, and the Son of Mary refuses nothing to his holy mother.  Through her intercession, the Iroquois shot so wildly that at their first fire every bullet missed its mark, and they met with a bloody defeat.  The palisaded settlement of Three Rivers, though in a position less exposed than that of Montreal, was in no less jeopardy.  A noted war chief of the Mohawk Iroquois had been captured here the year before, and put to death; and his tribe swarmed out, like a nest of angry hornets, to revenge him.  Not content with defeating and killing the commandant, Du Plessis Bochart, they encamped during the winter in the neighboring forest, watching for an opportunity to surprise the place.  Hunger drove them off, but they returned in the spring, infesting every field and pathway; till at length some six hundred of their warriors landed in secret and lay hidden in the depths of the woods, silently biding their time.  Having failed, however, in an artifice designed to lure the French out of their defences, they showed themselves on all sides, plundering, burning, and destroying, up to the palisades of the fort.

Of the three settlements which, with their feeble dependencies, then comprised the whole of Canada, Quebec was least exposed to Indian attacks, being partially covered by Montreal and Three Rivers.  Nevertheless, there was no safety this year, even under the cannon of Fort Saint Louis.  At Cap Rouge, a few miles above, the Jesuit Poncet saw a poor woman who had a patch of corn beside her cabin, but could find nobody to harvest it.  The father went to seek aid; met one Mathurin Franchetot, whom he persuaded to undertake the charitable task, and was returning with him, when they both fell into an ambuscade of Iroquois, who seized them and dragged them off.  Thirty-two men embarked in canoes at Quebec to follow the retreating savages and rescue the prisoners.  Pushing rapidly up the Saint Lawrence, they approached Three Rivers, found it beset by the Mohawks, and bravely threw themselves into it, to the great joy of its defenders and discouragement of the assailants.

Meanwhile, the intercession of the Virgin wrought new marvels at Montreal, and a bright ray of hope beamed forth from the darkness and the storm to cheer the hearts of her votaries.  It was on the twenty-sixth of June that sixty of the Onondaga Iroquois appeared in sight of the fort, shouting from a distance that they came on an errand of peace, and asking safe conduct for some of their number.  Guns, scalping knives, tomahawks, were all laid aside; and, with a confidence truly astonishing, a deputation of chiefs, naked and defenceless, came into the midst of those whom they had betrayed so often.  The French had a mind to seize them, and pay them in kind for past treachery; but they refrained, seeing in this wondrous change of heart the manifest hand of Heaven.  Nevertheless, it can be explained without a miracle.  The Iroquois, or at least the western nations of their league, had just become involved in war with their neighbors the Eries, and " one war at a time " was the sage maxim of their policy.

All was smiles and blandishment in the fort at Montreal; presents were exchanged, and the deputies departed, bearing home golden reports of the French.  An Oneida deputation soon followed; but the enraged Mohawks still infested Montreal and beleaguered Three Rivers, till one of their principal chiefs and four of their best warriors were captured by a party of Christian Hurons.  Then, seeing themselves abandoned by the other nations of the league and left to wage the war alone, they too made overtures of peace.

A grand council was held at Quebec.  Speeches were made, and wampum belts exchanged.  The Iroquois left some of their chief men as pledges of sincerity, and two young soldiers offered themselves as reciprocal pledges on the part of the French.  The war was over; at least Canada had found a moment to take breath for the next struggle.  The fur trade was restored again, with promise of plenty; for the beaver, profiting by the quarrels of their human foes, had of late greatly multiplied.  It was a change from death to life; for Canada lived on the beaver, and robbed of this, her only sustenance, had been dying slowly since the strife began.

" Yesterday," writes Father Le Mercier, "all was dejection and gloom; today, all is smiles and gayety.  On Wednesday, massacre, burning, and pillage; on Thursday, gifts and visits, as among friends.  If the Iroquois have their hidden designs, so too has God.

" On the day of the Visitation of the Holy Virgin, the chief, Aontarisati, so regretted by the Iroquois, was taken prisoner by our Indians, instructed by our fathers, and baptized; and on the same day, being put to death, he ascended to heaven.  I doubt not that he thanked the Virgin for his misfortune and the blessing that followed, and that he prayed to God for his countrymen.

"The people of Montreal made a solemn vow to celebrate publicly the fete of this mother of all blessings ; whereupon the Iroquois came to ask for peace.

"It was on the day of the Assumption of this Queen of angels and of men that the Hurons took at Montreal that other famous Iroquois chief, whose capture caused the Mohawks to seek our alliance.

" On the day when the Church honors the Nativity of the Holy Virgin, the Iroquois granted Father Poncet his life; and he, or rather the Holy Virgin and the holy angels, labored so well in the work of peace, that on Saint Michael's Day it was resolved in a council of the elders that the father should be conducted to Quebec, and a lasting treaty made with the French."

Happy as was this consummation, Father Poncet's path to it had been a thorny one.  He has left us his own rueful story, written in obedience to the command of his superior.  He and his companion in misery had been hurried through the forests, from Cap Rouge on the Saint Lawrence to the Indian towns on the Mohawk.  He tells us how he slept among dank weeds, dropping with the cold dew; how frightful colics assailed him as he waded waist deep through a mountain stream; how one of his feet was blistered and one of his legs benumbed; how an Indian snatched away his reliquary and lost the precious contents.  "I had, "he says, "a picture of Saint Ignatius with our Lord bearing the cross, and another of Our Lady of Pity surrounded by the five wounds of her Son.  They were my joy and my consolation; but I hid them in a bush, lest the Indians should laugh at them." He kept, however, a little image of the crown of thorns, in which he found great comfort, as well as in communion with his patron saints, Saint Raphael, Saint Martha, and Saint Joseph.  On one occasion he asked these celestial friends for something to soothe his thirst, and for a bowl of broth to revive his strength.  Scarcely had he framed the petition when an Indian gave him some wild plums; and in the evening, as he lay fainting on the ground, another brought him the coveted broth.  Weary and forlorn, he reached at last the lower Mohawk town, where, after being stripped, and with his companion forced to run the gantlet, he was placed on a scaffold of bark, surrounded by a crowd of grinning and mocking savages.  As it began to rain, they took him into one of their lodges, and amused themselves by making him dance, sing, and perform various fantastic tricks for their amusement.  He seems to have done his best to please them; "but," adds the chronicler, " I will say in passing, that as he did not succeed to their liking in these buffooneries (singeries), they would have put him to death if a young Huron prisoner had not offered himself to sing, dance, and make wry faces in place of the father, who had never learned the trade."

Having sufficiently amused themselves, they left him for a time in peace; when an old one eyed Indian approached, took his hands, examined them, selected the left forefinger, and calling a child four or five years old, gave him a knife, and told him to cut it off, which the imp proceeded to do, his victim meanwhile singing the Vexilla Regis.  After this preliminary, they would have burned him, like Franchetot, his unfortunate companion, had not a squaw happily adopted him in place, as he says, of a deceased brother.  He was installed at once in the lodge of his new relatives, where, bereft of every rag of Christian clothing, and attired in leggins, moccasins, and a greasy shirt, the astonished father saw himself transformed into an Iroquois.  But his deliverance was at hand.  A special agreement providing for it had formed a part of the treaty concluded at Quebec; and he now learned that he was to be restored to his countrymen.  After a march of almost intolerable hardship, he saw himself once more among Christians,  Heaven, as he modestly thinks, having found him unworthy of martyrdom.

"At last," he writes, "we reached Montreal on the twenty-first of October, the nine weeks of my captivity being accomplished, in honor of Saint Michael and all the holy angels.  On the sixth of November the Iroquois who conducted me made their presents to confirm the peace; and thus, on a Sunday evening, eighty-and-one days after my capture,  that is to say, nine times nine days,  this great business of the peace was happily concluded, the holy angels showing by this number nine, which is specially dedicated to them, the part they bore in this holy work." This incessant supernaturalism is the key to the early history of New France.  

Peace was made; but would peace endure ? There was little chance of it, and this for several reasons.  First, the native fickleness of the Iroquois, who, astute and politic to a surprising degree, were in certain respects, like all savages, mere grown up children.  Next, their total want of control over their fierce and capricious young warriors, any one of whom could break the peace with impunity whenever he saw fit; and, above all, the strong probability that the Iroquois had made peace in order, under cover of it, to butcher or kidnap the unhappy remnant of the Hurons who were living, under French protection, on the island of Orleans, immediately below Quebec.  I have already told the story of the destruction of this people and of the Jesuit missions established among them.  The conquerors were eager to complete their bloody triumph by seizing upon the refugees of Orleans, killing the elders, and strengthening their own tribes by the adoption of the women, children, and youths.  The Mohawks and the Onondagas were competitors for the prize.  Each coveted the Huron colony, and each was jealous lest his rival should pounce upon it first.

When the Mohawks brought home Poncet, they covertly gave wampum belts to the Huron chiefs, and invited them to remove to their villages.  It was the wolf's invitation to the lamb.  The Hurons, aghast with terror, went secretly to the Jesuits, and told them that demons had whispered in their ears an  See " Jesuits in North America." invitation to destruction.  So helpless were both the Hurons and their French supporters, that they saw no recourse but dissimulation.  The Hurons promised to go, and only sought excuses to gain time.

The Onondagas had a deeper plan.  Their towns were already full of Huron captives, former converts of the Jesuits, cherishing their memory and constantly repeating their praises.  Hence their tyrants conceived the idea that by planting at Onondaga a colony of Frenchmen under the direction of these beloved fathers, the Hurons of Orleans, disarmed of suspicion, might readily be led to join them.  Other motives, as we shall see, tended to the same end, and the Onondaga deputies begged, or rather demanded, that a colony of Frenchmen should be sent among them.

Here was a dilemma.  Was not this, like the Mohawk invitation to the Hurons, an invitation to butchery? On the other hand, to refuse would probably kindle the war afresh.  The Jesuits had long nursed a project bold to temerity.  Their great Huron mission was ruined; but might not another be built up among the authors of this ruin, and the Iroquois themselves, tamed by the power of the Faith, be annexed to the kingdoms of Heaven and of France ? Thus would peace be restored to Canada, a barrier of fire opposed to the Dutch and English heretics, and the power of the Jesuits vastly increased.  Yet the time was hardly ripe for such an attempt.  Before thrusting a head into the tiger's jaws, it would be well to try the effect of thrusting in a hand.  They resolved to compromise with the danger, and before risking a colony at Onondaga to send thither an envoy who could soothe the Indians, confirm them in pacific designs, and pave the way for more decisive steps.  The choice fell on Father Simon Le Moyne.

The errand was mainly a political one; and this sagacious and able priest, versed in Indian languages and customs, was well suited to do it.  " On the second day of the month of July, the festival of the Visitation of the Most Holy Virgin, ever favorable to our enterprises, Father Simon Le Moyne set out from Quebec for the country of the Onondaga Iroquois." In these words does Father Le Mercier chronicle the departure of his brother Jesuit.  Scarcely was he gone when a band of Mohawks, under a redoubtable half breed known as the Flemish Bastard, arrived at Quebec; and when they heard that the envoy was to go to the Onondagas without visiting their tribe, they took the imagined slight in high dudgeon, displaying such jealousy and ire that a letter was sent after Le Moyne, directing him to proceed to the Mohawk towns before his return.  But he was already beyond reach, and the angry Mohawks were left to digest their wrath.

At Montreal, Le Moyne took a canoe, a young Frenchman, and two or three Indians, and began the tumultuous journey of the Upper Saint Lawrence.  Nature, or habit, had taught him to love the wilderness life.  He and his companions had struggled all day against the surges of La Chine, and were bivouacked at evening by the Lake of Saint Louis, when a cloud of mosquitoes fell upon them, followed by a shower of warm rain.  The father, stretched under a tree, seems clearly to have enjoyed himself.  " It is a pleasure," he writes, "the sweetest and most innocent imaginable, to have no other shelter than trees planted by Nature since the creation of the world." Sometimes, during their journey, this primitive tent proved insufficient, and they would build a bark hut or find a partial shelter under their inverted canoe.  Now they glided smoothly over the sunny bosom of the calm and smiling river, and now strained every nerve to fight their slow way against the rapids, dragging their canoe upward in the shallow water by the shore, as one leads an unwilling horse by the bridle, or shouldering it and bearing it through the forest to the smoother current above.  Game abounded; and they saw great herds of elk quietly defiling between the water and the woods, with little heed of men, who in that perilous region found employment enough in hunting one another.

At the entrance of Lake Ontario they met a party of Iroquois fishermen, who proved friendly, and guided them on their way.  Ascending the Onondaga, they neared their destination; and now all misgivings as to their reception at the Iroquois capital were dispelled.  The inhabitants came to meet them, bringing roasting ears of the young maize and bread made of its pulp, than which they knew no luxury more exquisite.  Their faces beamed welcome.  Le Moyne was astonished.  "I never," he says, "saw the like among Indians before." They were flattered by his visit, and, for the moment, were glad to see him.  They hoped for great advantages from the residence of Frenchmen among them; and having the Erie war on their hands, they wished for peace with Canada.  "One would call me brother," writes Le Moyne; "another, uncle; another, cousin.  I never had so many relations."

He was overjoyed to find that many of the Huron converts, who had long been captives at Onondaga, had not forgotten the teachings of their Jesuit instructors.  Such influence as they had with their conquerors was sure to be exerted in behalf of the French.  Deputies of the Senecas, Cayugas, and Oneidas at length arrived, and on the tenth of August the criers passed through the town, summoning all to hear the words of Onontio.  The naked dignitaries, sitting, squatting, or lying at full length, thronged the smoky hall of council.  The father knelt and prayed in a loud voice, invoking the aid of Heaven, cursing the demons who are spirits of discord, and calling on the tutelar angels of the country to open the ears of his listeners.  Then he opened his packet of presents and began his speech.  " I was full two hours," he says, "in making it, speaking in the tone of a chief, and walking to and fro, after their fashion, like an actor on a theatre." Not only did he imitate the prolonged accents of the Iroquois orators, but he adopted and improved their figures of speech, and addressed them in turn by their respective tribes, bands, and families, calling their men of note by name, as if he had been born among them.  They were delighted; and their ejaculations of approval  hoh-hoh-hoh  came thick and fast at every pause of his harangue.  Especially were they pleased with the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh presents, whereby the reverend speaker gave to the four upper nations of the league four hatchets to strike their new enemies, the Eries; while by another present he meta-phorically daubed their faces with the war paint.  However it may have suited the character of a Christian priest to hound on these savage hordes to a war of extermination which they had themselves provoked, it is certain that, as a politician, Le Moyne did wisely; since in the war with the Eries lay the best hope of peace for the French.

The reply of the Indian orator was friendly to overflowing.  He prayed his French brethren to choose a spot on the lake of Onondaga, where they might dwell in the country of the Iroquois, as they dwelt already in their hearts.  Le Moyne promised, and made two presents to confirm the pledge.  Then, his mission fulfilled, he set out on his return, attended by a troop of Indians.  As he approached the lake, his escort showed him a large spring of water, possessed, as they told him, by a bad spirit.  Le Moyne tasted it, then boiled a little of it, and produced a quantity of excellent salt.  He had discovered the famous salt springs of Onondaga.  Fishing and hunting, the party pursued their way till, at noon of the seventh of September, Le Moyne reached Montreal.

When he reached Quebec, his tidings cheered for a while the anxious hearts of its tenants; but an unwonted incident soon told them how hollow was the ground beneath their feet.  Le Moyne, accompanied by two Onondagas and several Hurons and Algonquins, was returning to Montreal, when he and his companions were set upon by a war party of Mohawks.  The Hurons and Algonquins were killed.  One of the Onondagas shared their fate, and the other, with Le Moyne himself, was seized and bound fast.  The captive Onondaga, however, was so loud in his threats and denunciations that the Mohawks released both him and the Jesuit.  Here was a foreshadowing of civil war,  Mohawk against Onondaga, Iroquois against Iroquois.  The quarrel was patched up, but fresh provocations were imminent.

The Mohawks took no part in the Erie war, and hence their hands were free to fight the French and the tribes allied with them.  Reckless of their promises, they began a series of butcheries,  fell upon the French at Isle aux Oies, killed a lay brother of the Jesuits at Sillery, and attacked Montreal.  Here, being roughly handled, they came for a time to their senses, and offered terms, promising to spare the French, but declaring that they would still wage war against the Hurons and Algonquins.  These were allies whom the French were pledged to protect; but so helpless was the colony that the insolent and humiliating proffer was accepted, and another peace ensued, as hollow as the last.  The indefatigable Le Moyne was sent to the Mohawk towns to confirm it, "so far," says the chronicle, "as it is possible to confirm a peace made by infidels backed by heretics." The Mohawks received him with great rejoicing; yet his life was not safe for a moment.  A warrior, feigning madness, raved through the town with uplifted hatchet, howling for his blood; but the saints watched over him and balked the machinations of hell.  He came off alive and returned to Montreal, spent with famine and fatigue.

Meanwhile a deputation of eighteen Onondaga chiefs arrived at Quebec.  There was a grand council.  The Onondagas demanded a colony of Frenchmen to dwell among them.  Lauson, the governor, dared neither to consent nor to refuse.  A middle course was chosen; and two Jesuits, Chaumonot and Dablon, were sent, like Le Moyne, partly to gain time, partly to reconnoitre, and partly to confirm the Onondagas in such good intentions as they might entertain.  Chaumonot was a veteran of the Huron mission, who, miraculously as he himself supposed, had acquired a great fluency in the Huron tongue, which is closely allied to that of the Iroquois.  Dablon, a new comer, spoke, as yet, no Indian.

Their voyage up the Saint Lawrence was enlivened by an extraordinary bear hunt, and by the antics of one of their Indian attendants, who, having dreamed that he had swallowed a frog, roused the whole camp by the gymnastics with which he tried to rid himself of the intruder.  On approaching Onondaga, they were met by a chief who sang a song of welcome, a part of which he seasoned with touches of humor,  apostrophizing the fish in the river Onondaga, naming each sort, great or small, and calling on them in turn to come into the nets of the Frenchmen and sacrifice life cheerfully for their behoof.  Hereupon there was much laughter among the Indian auditors.  An unwonted cleanliness reigned in the town; the streets had been cleared of refuse, and the arched roofs of the long houses of bark were covered with red skinned children staring at the entry of the "black robes."

Crowds followed behind, and all was jubilation.  The dignitaries of the tribe met them on the way, and greeted them with a speech of welcome.  A feast of bear's meat awaited them; but, unhappily, it was Friday, and the fathers were forced to abstain.

" On Monday, the fifteenth of November, at nine in the morning, after having secretly sent to Paradise a dying infant by the waters of baptism, all the elders and the people having assembled, we opened the council by public prayer." Thus writes Father Dablon.  His colleague, Chaumonot, a Frenchman bred in Italy, now rose, with a long belt of wampum in his hand, and proceeded to make so effective a display of his rhetorical gifts that the Indians were lost in admiration, and their orators put to the blush by his improvements on their own metaphors.  "If he had spoken all day," said the delighted auditors, "we should not have had enough of it." "The Dutch," added others, "have neither brains nor tongues; they never tell us about paradise and hell; on the contrary, they lead us into bad ways."

On the next day the chiefs returned their answer.  The council opened with a song or chant, which was divided into six parts, and which, according to Dablon, was exceedingly well sung.  The burden of the fifth part was as follows: 

" Farewell war! farewell tomahawk! We have been fools till now; henceforth we will be brothers,  yes, we will be brothers."

Then came four presents, the third of which enraptured the fathers.  It was a belt of seven thousand beads of wampum.  "But this," says Dablon, "was as nothing to the words that accompanied it." " It is the gift of the faith," said the orator.  " It is to tell you that we are believers; it is to beg you not to tire of instructing us.  Have patience, seeing that we are so dull in learning prayer; push it into our heads and our hearts." Then he led Chaumonot into the midst of the assembly, clasped him in his arms, tied the belt about his waist, and protested, with a suspicious redundancy of words, that as he clasped the father, so would he clasp the faith.

What had wrought this sudden change of heart? The eagerness of the Onondagas that the French should settle among them had, no doubt, a large share in it.  For the rest, the two Jesuits saw abundant signs of the fierce, uncertain nature of those with whom they were dealing.  Erie prisoners were brought in and tortured before their eyes,  one of them being a young stoic of about ten years, who endured his fate without a single outcry.  Huron women and children, taken in war and adopted by their captors, were killed on the slightest provocation, and sometimes from mere caprice.  For several days the whole town was in an uproar with the crazy follies of the "dream feast," and one of the Fathers nearly lost his life in this Indian Bedlam.

One point was clear: the French must make a settlement at Onondaga, and that speedily, or, despite their professions of brotherhood, the Onondagas would make war.  Their attitude became menacing; from urgency they passed to threats; and the two priests felt that the critical posture of affairs must at once be reported at Quebec.  But here a difficulty arose.  It was the beaver hunting season; and, eager as were the Indians for a French colony, not one of them would offer to conduct the Jesuits to Quebec in order to fetch one.  It was not until nine masses had been said to Saint John the Baptist, that a number of Indians consented to forego their hunting, and escort Father Dablon home.l Chaumonot remained at Onondaga, to watch his dangerous hosts and soothe their rising jealousies.

It was the second of March when Dablon began his journey.  His constitution must have been of iron, or he would have succumbed to the appalling hardships of the way.  It was neither winter nor spring.  The lakes and streams were not yet open, but the half thawed ice gave way beneath the foot.  One of the Indians fell through and was drowned.  Swamp and forest were clogged with sodden snow, and ceaseless rains drenched them as they toiled on, knee deep in slush.  Happily, the Saint Lawrence was open.  They found an old wooden canoe by the shore, embarked, and reached Montreal after a journey of four weeks.

Dablon descended to Quebec.  There was long and anxious counsel in the chambers of Fort Saint Louis.  The Jesuits had information that if the demands of the Onondagas were rejected, they would join the Mohawks to destroy Canada.  But why were they so eager for a colony of Frenchmen ? Did they want them as hostages, that they might attack the Hurons and Algonquins without risk of French interference; or would they massacre them, and then, like tigers mad with the taste of blood, turn upon the helpless settlements of the Saint Lawrence? An abyss yawned on either hand.  Lauson, the governor, was in an agony of indecision; but at length he declared for the lesser and remoter peril, and gave his voice for the colony.  The Jesuits were of the same mind, though it was they, and not he, who must bear the brunt of danger.  " The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church," said one of them; " and if we die by the fires of the Iroquois, we shall have won eternal life by snatching souls from the fires of hell."

Preparation was begun at once.  The expense fell on the Jesuits, and the outfit is said to have cost them seven thousand livres,  a heavy sum for Canada at that day.  A pious gentleman, Zachary Du Puys, major of the fort of Quebec, joined the expedition with ten soldiers; and between thirty and forty other Frenchmen also enrolled themselves, impelled by devotion or destitution.  Four Jesuits, • Le Mercier, the superior, with Dablon, Mdnard, and Fre'min,  besides two lay brothers of the order, formed, as it were, the pivot of the enterprise.  The governor made them the grant of a hundred square leagues of land in the heart of the Iroquois country,  a preposterous act, which, had the Iroquois known it, would have rekindled the war; but Lauson had a mania for land grants, and was himself the proprietor of vast domains which he could have occupied only at the cost of his scalp.

Embarked  in two large boats  and  followed by twelve canoes filled with Hurons, Onondagas, and a few Senecas lately arrived, they set out on the seventeenth of May " to attack the demons," as Le Mercier writes, "in their very stronghold." With shouts, tears, and benedictions, priests, soldiers, and inhabitants waved farewell from the strand.  They passed the bare steeps of Cape Diamond and the mission house nestled beneath the heights of Sillery, and vanished from the anxious eyes that watched the last gleam of their receding oars.

Meanwhile three hundred Mohawk warriors had taken the war path, bent on killing or kidnapping the Hurons of Orleans.  When they heard of the departure of the colonists for Onondaga, their rage was unbounded; for not only were they full of jealousy towards their Onondaga confederates, but they had hitherto derived great profit from the control which their local position gave them over the traffic between this tribe and the Dutch of the Hudson,  upon whom the Onondagas, in common with all the upper Iroquois, had been dependent for their guns, hatchets, scalping knives, beads, blankets, and brandy.  These supplies would now be furnished by the French, and the Mohawk speculators saw their occupation gone.  Nevertheless, they had just made peace with the French, and for the moment were not quite in the mood to break it.  To wreak their spite, they took a middle course,  crouched in ambush among the bushes at Point Saint Croix, ten or twelve leagues above Quebec, allowed the boats bearing the French to pass unmolested, and fired a volley at the canoes in the rear, filled with Onondagas, Senecas, and Hurons.  Then they fell upon them with a yell, and, after wounding a lay brother of the Jesuits who was among them, bound and flogged such of the Indians as they could seize.  The astonished Onondagas protested and threatened; whereupon the Mohawks feigned great surprise, declared that they had mistaken them for Hurons, called them brothers, and suffered the whole party to escape without further injury.

The three hundred marauders now paddled their large canoes of elm bark stealthily down the current, passed Quebec undiscovered in the dark night of the nineteenth of May, landed in early morning on the island of Orleans, and ambushed themselves to surprise the Hurons as they came to labor in their cornfields.  They were tolerably successful,  killed six, and captured more than eighty, the rest taking refuge in their fort, where the Mohawks dared not attack them.

At noon, the French on the rock of Quebec saw forty canoes approaching from the island of Orleans, and defiling, with insolent parade, in front of the town, all crowded with the Mohawks and their prisoners, among whom were a great number of Huron girls.  Their captors, as they passed, forced them to sing and dance.  The Hurons were the allies, or rather the wards, of the French, who were in every way pledged to protect them.  Yet the cannon of Fort Saint Louis were silent, and the crowd stood gaping in bewilderment and fright.  Had an attack been made, nothing but a complete success and the capture of many prisoners to serve as hostages could have prevented the enraged Mohawks from taking their revenge on the Onondaga colonists.  The emergency demanded a prompt and clear sighted soldier.  The governor, Lauson, was a gray haired civilian, who, however enterprising as a speculator in wild lands, was in no way matched to the desperate crisis of the hour.  Some of the Mohawks landed above and below the town, and plundered the houses from which the scared inhabitants had fled.  Not a soldier stirred and not a gun was fired.  The French, bullied by a horde of naked savages, became an object of contempt to their own allies.

The Mohawks carried their prisoners home, burned six of them, and adopted or rather enslaved the rest.

Meanwhile the Onondaga colonists pursued their perilous way.  At Montreal they exchanged their heavy boats for canoes, and resumed their journey with a flotilla of twenty of these sylvan vessels.  A few days after, the Indians of the party had the satisfaction of pillaging a small band of Mohawk hunters, in vicarious reprisal for their own wrongs.  On the twenty-sixth of June, as they neared Lake Ontario, they heard a loud and lamentable voice from the edge of the forest; whereupon, having beaten their drum to show that they were Frenchmen, they beheld a spectral figure, lean and covered with scars, which proved to be a pious Huron, one Joachim Ondakout, captured by the Mohawks in their descent on the island of Orleans, five or six weeks before.  They had carried him to their village and begun to torture him; after which they tied him fast and lay down to sleep, thinking to resume their pleasure on the morrow.  His cuts and burns being only on the surface, he had the good fortune to free himself from his bonds, and, naked as he was, to escape to the woods.  He held his course northwestward, through regions even now a wilderness, gathered wild strawberries to sustain life, and in fifteen days reached the Saint Lawrence, nearly dead with exhaustion.  The Frenchmen gave him food and a canoe, and the living skeleton paddled with a light heart for Quebec.

The colonists themselves soon began to suffer from hunger.  Their fishing failed on Lake Ontario, and they were forced to content themselves with cranberries of the last year, gathered in the meadows.  Of their Indians, all but five deserted them.  The Father Superior fell ill, and when they reached the mouth of the Oswego many of the starving Frenchmen had completely lost heart.  Weary and faint, they dragged their canoes up the rapids, when suddenly they were cheered by the sight of a stranger canoe swiftly descending the current.  The Onondagas, aware of their approach, had sent it to meet them, laden with Indian corn and fresh salmon.  Two more canoes followed, freighted like the first; and now all was abundance till they reached their journey's end, the Lake of Onondaga.  It lay before them in the July sun, a glittering mirror, framed in forest verdure.

They knew that Chaumonot with a crowd of Indians was awaiting them at a spot on.  the margin of the water, which he and Dablon had chosen as the site of their settlement.  Landing on the strand, they fired, to give notice of their approach, five small cannon which they had brought in their canoes.  Waves, woods, and hills resounded with the thunder of their miniature artillery.  Then re-embarking, they advanced in order, four canoes abreast, towards the destined spot.  In front floated their banner of white silk, embroidered in large letters with the name of Jesus.  Here were Du Puys and his soldiers, with the picturesque uniforms and quaint weapons of their time; Le Mercier and his Jesuits in robes of black; hunters and bush rangers; Indians painted and feathered for a festal day.  As they neared the place where a spring bubbling from the hillside is still known as the "Jesuits' Well," they saw the edge of the forest dark with the muster of savages whose yells of welcome answered the salvo of their guns.  Happily for them, a flood of summer rain saved them from the orators, and forced white men and red alike to seek such shelter as they could find.  Their hosts, with hospitable intent, would fain have sung and danced all night; but the Frenchmen pleaded fatigue, and the courteous savages, squatting around their tents, chanted in monotonous tones to lull them to sleep.  In the morning they woke refreshed, sang Te Deurn, reared an altar, and, with a solemn mass, took possession of the country in the name of Jesus.

Three things, which they saw or heard of in their new home, excited their astonishment.  The first was the vast flight of wild pigeons which in spring darkened the air around the Lake of Onondaga; the second was the salt springs of Salina; the third was the rattlesnakes, which Le Mercier describes with excellent precision,  adding that, as he learns from the Indians, their tails are good for toothache and their flesh for fever.  These reptiles, for reasons best known to themselves, haunted the neighborhood of the salt springs, but did not intrude their presence into the abode of the French.

On the seventeenth of July, Le Mercier and Chaumonot, escorted by a file of soldiers, set out for Onondaga, scarcely five leagues distant.  They followed the Indian trail, under the leafy arches of the woods, by hill and hollow, still swamp and gurgling brook, till through the opening foliage they saw the Iroquois capital, compassed with cornfields and girt with its rugged palisade.  As the Jesuits, like black spectres, issued from the shadows of the forest, followed by the plumed soldiers with shouldered arquebuses, the red skinned population swarmed out like bees, and they denied to the town through gazing and admiring throngs.  All conspired to welcome them.  Feast followed feast throughout the afternoon, till, what with harangues and songs, bear's meat, beaver tails, and venison, beans, corn, and grease, they were wellnigh killed with kindness.  " If, after this, they murder us," writes Le Mercier, "it will be from fickleness, not premeditated treachery." But the Jesuits, it seems, had not sounded the depths of Iroquois dissimulation.

There was one exception to the real or pretended joy.  Some Mohawks were in the town, and their orator was insolent and sarcastic; but the ready tongue of Chaumonot turned the laugh against him and put him to shame.

Here burned the council fire of the Iroquois, and at this very time the deputies of the five tribes were assembling.  The session opened on the twenty-fourth.  In the great council house, on the earthen floor and the broad platforms, beneath the smoke begrimed concave of the bark roof, stood, sat, or squatted the wisdom and valor of the confederacy,  Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas; sachems, counsellors, orators, warriors fresh from Erie victories; tall, stalwart figures, limbed like Grecian statues.

The pressing business of the council over, it was Chaumonot's turn to speak.  But, first, all the Frenchmen, kneeling in a row, with clasped hands, sang the Veni Creator, amid the silent admiration of the auditors.  Then Chaumonot rose, with an immense wampum belt in his hand, and said:

"It is not trade that brings us here.  Do you think that your beaver skins can pay us for all our toils and dangers? Keep them, if you like; or, if any fall into our hands, we shall use them only for your service.  We seek not the things that perish.  It is for the Faith that we have left our homes to live in your hovels of bark, and eat food which the beasts of our country would scarcely touch.  We are the messengers whom God has sent to tell you that his Son became a man for the love of you; that this man, the Son of God, is the prince and master of men; that he has prepared in heaven eternal joys for those who obey him, and kindled the fires of hell for those who will not receive his word.  If you reject it, whoever you are,  Onondaga, Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga, or Oneida, know that Jesus Christ, who inspires my heart and my voice, will plunge you one day into hell.  Avert this ruin; be not the authors of your own destruction; accept the truth; listen to the voice of the Omnipotent."

Such, in brief, was the pith of the father's exhortation.  As he spoke Indian like a native, and as his voice and gestures answered to his words, we may believe what Le Mercier tells us, that his hearers listened with mingled wonder, admiration, and terror.  The work was well begun.  The Jesuits struck while the iron was hot; built a small chapel for the mass, installed themselves in the town, and preached and catechised from morning till night.

The Frenchmen at the lake were not idle.  The chosen site of their settlement was the crown of a hill commanding a broad view of waters and forests.  The axemen fell to their work, and a ghastly wound soon gaped in the green bosom of the woodland.  Here, among the stumps and prostrate trees of the unsightly clearing, the blacksmith built his forge, saw and hammer plied their trade; palisades were shaped and beams squared, in spite of heat, mosquitoes, and fever.  At one time twenty men were ill, and lay gasping under a wretched shed of bark; but they all recovered, and the work went on, till at length a capacious house, large enough to hold the whole colony, rose above the ruin of the forest.  A palisade was set around it, and the Mission of Saint Mary of Gannentaa was begun.

France and the Faith were intrenched on the Lake of Onondaga.  How long would they remain there ? The future alone could tell.  The mission, it must not be forgotten, had a double scope,  half ecclesiastical, half political.  The Jesuits had essayed a fearful task,  to convert the Iroquois to God and to the King, thwart the Dutch heretics of the Hudson, save souls from hell, avert ruin from Canada, and thus raise their order to a place of honor and influence both hard earned and well earned.  The mission at Lake Onondaga was but a base of operations.  Long before they were lodged and fortified here, Chaumonot and Me"nard set out for the Cayugas, whence the former proceeded to the Senecas, the most numerous and powerful of the five confederate nations; and in the following spring another mission was begun among the Oneidas.  Their reception was not unfriendly; but such was the reticence and dissimulation of these inscrutable savages, that it was impossible to foretell results.  The women proved, as might be expected, far more impressible than the men; and in them the fathers placed great hope, since in this, the most savage people of the continent, women held a degree of political influence never perhaps equalled in any civilized nation.

 But while infants were baptized and squaws converted, the crosses of the mission were many and great.  The devil bestirred himself with more than his ordinary activity; "for," as one of the fathers writes, "when in sundry nations of the earth men are rising up in strife against us (the Jesuits), then how much more the demons, on whom we continually wage war!" It was these infernal sprites, as the priests believed, who engendered suspicions and calumnies in the dark and superstitious minds of the Iroquois, and prompted them in dreams to destroy the apostles of the Faith.  Whether the foe was of earth or hell, the Jesuits were like those who tread the lava crust that palpitates with the throes of the coming eruption, while the molten death beneath their feet glares white hot through a thousand crevices.  Yet, with a sublime enthusiasm and a glorious constancy, they toiled and they hoped, though the skies around were black with portent.

In the year in which the colony at Onondaga was begun, the Mohawks murdered the Jesuit Garreau on his way up the Ottawa.  In the following spring, a hundred Mohawk warriors came to Quebec to carry more of the Hurons into slavery, though the remnant of that unhappy people, since the catastrophe of the last year, had sought safety in a palisaded camp within the limits of the French town, and immediately under the ramparts of Fort Saint Louis.  Here, one might think, they would have been safe; but Charny, son and successor of Lauson, seems to have been even more imbecile than his father, and listened meekly to the threats of the insolent strangers who told him that unless he abandoned the Hurons to their mercy, both they and the French should feel the weight of Mohawk tomahawks.  They demanded, further, that the French should give them boats to carry 'their prisoners; but, as there were none at hand, this last humiliation was spared.  The Mohawks were forced to make canoes, in which they carried off as many as possible of their victims.

When the Onondagas learned this last exploit of their rivals, their jealousy knew no bounds, and a troop of them descended to Quebec to claim their share in the human plunder.  Deserted by the French, the despairing Hurons abandoned themselves to their fate; and about fifty of those whom the Mohawks had left obeyed the behest of their tyrants, and embarked for Onondaga.  They reached Montreal in July, and thence proceeded towards their destination in company with the Onondaga warriors.  The Jesuit Ragueneau, bound also for Onondaga, joined them.  Five leagues above Montreal, the warriors left him behind; but he found an old canoe on the bank, in which, after abandoning most of his baggage, he contrived to follow with two or three Frenchmen who were with him.  There was a rumor that a hundred Mohawk warriors were lying in wait among the Thousand Islands to plunder the Onondagas of their Huron prisoners.  It proved a false report.  A speedier catastrophe awaited these unfortunates.

Towards evening on the third of August, after the party had landed to encamp, an Onondaga chief made advances to a Christian Huron girl, as he had already done at every encampment since leaving Montreal.  Being repulsed for the fourth time, he split her head with his tomahawk.  It was the beginning of a massacre.  The Onondagas rose upon their prisoners, killed seven men, all Christians, before the eyes of the horrified Jesuit, and plundered the rest of all they had.  When Kagueneau protested, they told him with insolent mockery that they were acting by direction of the governor and the superior of the Jesuits.  The priest himself was secretly warned that he was to be killed during the night; and he was surprised in the morning to find himself alive.  On reaching Onondaga, some of the Christian captives were burned, including several women and their infant children.

The confederacy was a hornet's nest, buzzing with preparation, and fast pouring out its wrathful swarms.  The indomitable Le Moyne had gone again to the Mohawks, whence he wrote that two hundred of them had taken the war path against the Algonquins of Canada; and, a little later, that all were gone but women, children, and old men.  A great war party of twelve hundred Iroquois from all the five cantons was to advance into Canada in the direction of the Ottawa.  The settlements on the Saint Lawrence were infested with prowling warriors, who killed the Indian allies of the French, and plundered the French themselves, whom they treated with an insufferable insolence; for they felt themselves masters of the situation, and knew that the Onondaga colony was in their power.  Near Montreal they killed three Frenchmen.  "They approach like foxes," writes a Jesuit, "attack like lions, and disappear like birds." Charny, fortunately, had resigned the government in despair in order to turn priest, and the brave soldier d'Ailleboust had taken his place.  He caused twelve of the Iroquois to be seized and held as hostages.  This seemed to increase their fury.  An embassy came to Quebec and demanded the release of the hostages, but were met with a sharp reproof and a flat refusal.

At the mission on Lake Onondaga the crisis was drawing near.  The unbridled young warriors, whose capricious lawlessness often set at naught the monitions of their crafty elders, killed wantonly at various times thirteen Christian Hurons, captives at  Onondaga.  Ominous reports reached the ears of the colonists.  They heard of a secret council at which their death was decreed.  Again, they heard that they were to be surprised and captured, that the Iroquois in force were then to descend upon Canada, lay waste the outlying settlements, and torture them, the colonists, in sight of their countrymen, by which they hoped to extort what terms they pleased.  At length a dying Onondaga, recently converted and baptized, confirmed the rumors, and revealed the whole plot.

It was to take effect before the spring opened; but the hostages in the hands of d'Ailleboust embarrassed the conspirators and caused delay.  Messengers were sent in haste to call in the priests from the detached missions; and all the colonists, fifty-three in number, were soon gathered at their fortified house on the lake.  Their situation was frightful.  Fate hung over them by a hair, and escape seemed hopeless.  Of Du Puys's ten soldiers, nine wished to desert; but the attempt would have been fatal.  A throng of Onondaga warriors were day and night on the watch, bivouacked around the house.  Some of them had built their huts of bark before the gate, and here, with calm, impassive faces, they lounged and Smoked their pipes; or, wrapped in their blankets, strolled about the yards and outhouses, attentive to all that passed.  Their behavior was very friendly.  The Jesuits, themselves adepts in dissimulation, were amazed at the depth of their duplicity; for the conviction had been forced upon them that some of the chiefs had nursed their treachery from the first.  In this extremity Du Puys and the Jesuits showed an admirable coolness, and among them devised a plan of escape, critical and full of doubt, but not devoid of hope.

First, they must provide means of transportation; next, they must contrive to use them undiscovered.  They had eight canoes, all of which combined would not hold half their company.  Over the mission house was a large loft or garret, and here the carpenters were secretly set at work to construct two large and light flatboats, each capable of carrying fifteen men.  The task was soon finished.  The most difficult part of their plan remained.

There was a beastly superstition prevalent among the Hurons, the Iroquois, and other tribes.  It consisted of a "medicine" or mystic feast, in which it was essential that the guests should devour everything set before them, however inordinate in quantity, unless absolved from duty by the person in whose behalf the solemnity was ordained, he, on his part, taking no share in the banquet.  So grave was the obligation, and so strenuously did the guests fulfil it, that even their ostrich digestion was sometimes ruined past redemption by the excess of this benevolent gluttony.  These festins d manger tout had been frequently denounced as diabolical by the Jesuits, during their mission among the Hurons; but now, with a pliancy of conscience as excusable in this case as in any other, they resolved to set aside their scruples, although, judged from their point of view, they were exceedingly well founded.

Among the French was a young man who had been adopted by an Iroquois chief, and who spoke the language fluently.  He now told his Indian father that it had been revealed to him in a dream that he would soon die unless the spirits were appeased by one of these magic feasts.  Dreams were the oracles of the Iroquois, and woe to those who slighted them.  A day was named for the sacred festivity.  The fathers killed their hogs to meet the occasion, and, that nothing might be wanting, they ransacked their stores for all that might give piquancy to the entertainment.  It took place in the evening of the twentieth of March, apparently in a large enclosure outside the palisade surrounding the mission house.  Here, while blazing fires or glaring pine knots shed their glow on the wild assemblage, Frenchmen and Iroquois joined in the dance, or vied with each other in games of agility and skill.  The politic fathers offered prizes to the winners, and the Indians entered with zest into the sport, the better, perhaps, to hide their treachery and hoodwink their intended victims; for they little suspected that a subtlety, deeper this time than their own, was at work to countermine them.  Here too were the French musicians, and drum, trumpet, and cymbal lent their clangor to the din of shouts and laughter.  Thus the evening wore on, till at length the serious labors of the feast began.  The kettles were brought in, and their steaming contents ladled into the wooden bowls which each provident guest had brought with him.  Seated gravely in a ring, they fell to their work.  It was a point of high conscience not to flinch from duty on these solemn occasions; and though they might burn the young man tomorrow, they would gorge themselves like vultures in his behoof today.

Meantime, while the musicians strained their lungs and their arms to drown all other sounds, a band of anxious Frenchmen, in the darkness of the cloudy night, with cautious tread and bated breath, carried the boats from the rear of the mission house down to the border of the lake.  It was near eleven o'clock.  The miserable guests were choking with repletion.  They prayed the young Frenchman to dispense them from further surfeit.  " Will you suffer me to die ? " he asked, in piteous tones.  They bent to their task again; but Nature soon reached her utmost limit, and they sat helpless as a conventicle of gorged turkey buzzards, without the power possessed by those unseemly birds to rid themselves of the burden.  "That will do," said the young man; "you have eaten enough: my life is saved.  Now you can sleep till we come in the morning to waken you for prayers." And one of his companions played soft airs on a violin to lull them to repose.  Soon all were asleep, or in a lethargy akin to sleep.  The few remaining Frenchmen now silently withdrew and cautiously descended to the shore, where their comrades, already embarked, lay on their oars anxiously awaiting them.  Snow was falling fast as they pushed out upon the murky waters.  The ice of the winter had broken up, but recent frosts had glazed the surface with a thin crust.  The two boats led the way, and the canoes followed in their wake, while men in the bows of the foremost boat broke the ice with clubs as they advanced.  They reached the outlet and rowed swiftly down the dark current of the Oswego.  When day broke, Lake Onondaga was far behind, and around them was the leafless, lifeless forest.

When the Indians woke in the morning, dull and stupefied from their nightmare slumbers, they were astonished at the silence that reigned in the mission house.  They looked through the palisade.  Nothing was stirring but a bevy of hens clucking and scratching in the snow, and one or two dogs imprisoned in the house and barking to be set free.  The Indians waited for some time, then climbed the palisade, burst in the doors, and found the house empty.  Their amazement was unbounded.  How, without canoes, could the French have escaped by water? And how else could they escape? The snow which had fallen during the night completely hid their footsteps.  A superstitious awe seized the Iroquois.  They thought that the "black robes " and their flock had flown off through the air.

Meanwhile the fugitives pushed their flight with the energy of terror, passed in safety the rapids of the Oswego, crossed Lake Ontario, and descended the Saint Lawrence with the loss of three men drowned in the rapids.  On the third of April they reached Montreal, and on the twenty-third arrived at Quebec.  They had saved their lives; but the mission of Onondaga was a miserable failure.