CHAPTER 14
1666, 1667.  

THE MOHAWKS CHASTISED.

THE governor, Courcelle, says Father Le Mercier, "breathed nothing but war," and was bent on immediate action.  He was for the present subordinate to Tracy, who, however, forbore to cool his ardor, and allowed him to proceed.  The result was an enterprise bold to rashness.  Courcelle, with about five hundred men, prepared to march in the depth of a Canadian winter to the Mohawk towns,  a distance estimated at three hundred leagues.  Those who knew the country vainly urged the risks and difficulties of the attempt.  The adventurous governor held fast to his purpose, and only waited till the Saint Lawrence should be well frozen.  Early in January, it was a solid floor; and on the ninth the march began.  Officers and men stopped at Sillery, and knelt in the little mission chapel before the shrine of Saint Michael, to ask the protection and aid of the warlike archangel; then they resumed their course, and, with their snow shoes tied at their backs, walked with difficulty and toil over the bare and slippery ice.  A keen wind swept the river, and the fierce cold gnawed them to the bone.  Ears, noses, fingers, hands, and knees were frozen; some fell in torpor, and were dragged on by their comrades to the shivering bivouac.  When, after a march of ninety miles, they reached Three Rivers, a considerable number were disabled, and had to be left behind; but others joined them from the garrison, and they set out again.  Ascending the Richelieu, and passing the new forts at Sorel and Chambly, they reached at the end of the month the third fort, called Ste.  The're'se.  On the thirtieth they left it, and continued their march up the frozen stream.  

About two hundred of them were Canadians, and of these seventy were old Indian fighters from Montreal, versed in wood craft, seasoned to the climate, and trained among dangers and alarms.  Courcelle quickly learned their value, and his " Blue Coats," as he called them, were always placed in the van.  Here, wrapped in their coarse blue capotes, with blankets and provisions strapped at their backs, they strode along on snow shoes, which recent storms had made indispensable.  The regulars followed as they could.  They were not yet the tough and experienced woodsmen that they and their descendants afterwards became; and their snow shoes embarrassed them, burdened as they were with the heavy loads which all carried alike, from Courcelle to the lowest private.

Lake Champlain lay glaring in the winter sun, a sheet of spotless snow; and the wavy ridges of the Adirondacks bordered the dazzling landscape with the cold gray of their denuded forests.  The long procession of weary men crept slowly on under the lee of the shore; and when night came they bivouacked by squads among the trees, dug away the snow with their snow shoes, piled it in a bank around them, built their fire in the middle, and crouched about it on beds of spruce or hemlock,  while, as they lay close packed for mutual warmth, the winter sky arched them like a vault of burnished steel, sparkling with the cold diamond lustre of its myriads of stars.  This arctic serenity of the elements was varied at times by heavy snow storms, and before they reached their journey's end the earth and the ice were buried to the unusual depth of four feet.  From Lake Champlain they passed to Lake George and the frigid glories of its snow wrapped mountains, thence crossed to the Hudson, and groped their way through the woods in search of the Mohawk towns.  They soon went astray; for thirty Algonquins, whom they had taken as guides, had found the means of a grand debauch at Fort Ste.  The’rese, drunk themselves into helplessness, and lingered behind.  Thus Courcelle and his men mistook the path, and, marching by way of Saratoga Lake and Long Lake, found themselves, on Saturday the twentieth of February, close to the little Dutch hamlet of Corlaer, or Schenectady.  Here the chief man in authority told them that most of the Mohawks and Oneidas had gone to war with another tribe.  They however caught a few stragglers, and had a smart skirmish with a party of warriors, losing an officer and several men.  Half frozen and half starved, they encamped in the neighboring woods, where, on Sunday, three envoys appeared from Albany, to demand why they had invaded the territories of his Royal Highness the Duke of York.  It was now that they learned for the first time that the New Netherlands had passed into English hands, a change which boded no good to Canada.  The envoys seemed to take their explanations in good part, made them a present of wine and provisions, and allowed them to buy further supplies from the Dutch of Schenectady.  They even invited them to enter the village, but Courcelle declined,  partly because the place could not hold them all, and partly because he feared that his men, once seated in a chimney corner, could never be induced to leave it.  

Their position was cheerless enough; for the vast beds of snow around them were soaking slowly under a sullen rain, and there was danger that the lakes might thaw and cut off their retreat.  " Ye Mohaukes," says the old English report of the affair, "were all gone to their Castles with resolution to fight it out against the french, who, being refresht and supplyed with the aforesaid provisions, made a shew of marching towards the Mohaukes Castles, but with faces about, and great sylence and dilligence, return'd towards Cannada." "Surely," observes the narrator, "so bould and hardy an attempt hath not hapned in any age." The end hardly answered to the beginning.  The retreat, which began on Sunday night, was rather precipitate.  The Mohawks hovered about their rear, and took a few prisoners, but famine and cold proved more deadly foes, and sixty men perished before they reached the shelter of Fort Ste.  The're'se.  On the eighth of March, Courcelle came to the neighboring fort of Saint Louis or Chambly.  Here he found the Jesuit Albanel acting as chaplain; and, being in great ill humor, he charged him with causing the failure of the expedition by detaining the Algonquin guides.  This singular notion took such possession of him, that, when a few days after he met the Jesuit Fre’min at Three Rivers, he embraced him ironically, saying, at the same time, " My father, I am the unluckiest gentleman in the world; and you, and the rest of you, are the cause of it." The pious Tracy and the prudent Talon tried to disarm his suspicions, and with such success that he gave up an intention he had entertained of discarding his Jesuit confessor, and forgot or forgave the imagined wrong.

Unfortunate as this expedition was, it produced a strong effect on the Iroquois by convincing them that their forest homes were no safe asylum from French attacks.  In May, the Senecas sent an embassy of peace; and the other nations, including the Mohawks, soon followed.  Tracy, on his part, sent the Jesuit Be’chefer to learn on the spot the real temper of the savages, and ascertain whether peace could safely be made with them.  The Jesuit was scarcely gone when news came that a party of officers hunting near the outlet of Lake Champlain had been set upon by the Mohawks, and that seven of them had been captured or killed.  Among the captured was Leroles, a cousin of Tracy; and among the killed was a young gentleman named Chasy, his nephew.

On this the Jesuit envoy was recalled; twenty-four Iroquois deputies were seized and imprisoned; and Sorel, captain in the regiment of Carignan, was sent with three hundred men to chastise the perfidious Mohawks.  If, as it seems, he was expected to attack their fortified towns or "castles," as the English call them, his force was too small.  This time, however, there was no fighting.  At two days from his journey's end, Sorel met the famous chief called the Flemish Bastard, bringing back Leroles and his fellow captives, and charged, as he alleged, to offer full satisfaction for the murder of Chasy.  Sorel believed him, retraced his course, and with the Bastard in his train returned to Quebec.

Quebec was full of Iroquois deputies, all bent on peace or pretending to be so.  On the last day of August there was a grand council in the garden of the Jesuits.  Some days later, Tracy invited the Flemish Bastard and a Mohawk chief named Agariata to his table, when allusion was made to the murder of Chasy.  On this the Mohawk, stretching out his arm, exclaimed in a braggart tone, "This is the hand that split the head of that young man." The indignation of the company may be imagined.  Tracy told his insolent guest that he should never kill anybody else; and he was led out and hanged in presence of the Bastard.  There was no more talk of peace.  Tracy prepared to march in person against the Mohawks with all the force of Canada.

On the day of the Exaltation of the Cross, "for whose glory," says the chronicler, "this expedition is undertaken," Tracy and Courcelle left Quebec with thirteen hundred men.  They crossed Lake Champlain, and launched their boats again on the waters of Saint Sacrament, now Lake George.  It was the first of the warlike pageants that have made that fair scene historic.  October had begun, and the romantic wilds breathed the buoyant life of the most inspiring of American seasons, when the blue jay screams from the woods, the wild duck splashes along the lake, and the echoes of distant mountains prolong the quavering cry of the loon; when weather stained rocks are plumed with the fiery crimson of the sumach, the claret hues of young oaks, the amber and scarlet of the maple, and the sober purple of the ash; or when gleams of sunlight, shot aslant through the rents of cool autumnal clouds, chase fitfully along the glowing sides of painted mountains.  Amid this gorgeous euthanasia of the dying season, the three hundred boats and canoes trailed in long procession up the lake, threaded the labyrinth of the Narrows,  that sylvan fairy land of tufted islets and quiet waters,  and landed at length where Fort William Henry was afterwards built.

About a hundred miles of forests, swamps, rivers, and mountains still lay between them and the Mohawk towns.  There seems to have been an Indian path, for this was the ordinary route of the Mohawk and Oneida war parties; but the path was narrow, broken, full of gullies and pitfalls, crossed by streams, and in one place interrupted by a lake which they passed on rafts.  A hundred and ten "Blue Coats," of Montreal, led the way, under Charles Le Moyne; Repentigny commanded the levies from Quebec.  In all there were six hundred Canadians, six hundred regulars, and a hundred Indians from the missions, who ranged the woods in front, flank, and rear, like hounds on the scent.  Red or white, Canadians or regulars, all were full of zeal.  "It seems to them," writes Mother Mary, " that they are going to lay siege to Paradise, and win it and enter in, because they are righting for religion and the faith." Their ardor was rudely tried.  Officers as well as men carried loads at their backs, whence ensued a large blister on the shoulders of the Chevalier de Chaumont, in no way used to such burdens.  Tracy, old, heavy, and infirm, was inopportunely seized with the gout.  A Swiss soldier tried to carry him on his shoulders across a rapid stream; but midway his strength failed, and he was barely able to deposit his ponderous load on a rock.  A Huron came to his aid, and bore Tracy safely to the farther bank.  Courcelle was attacked with cramps, and had to be carried for a time like his commander.  Provisions gave out, and men and officers grew faint with hunger.  The Montreal soldiers had for chaplain a sturdy priest, Dollier de Casson, as large as Tracy and far stronger; for the incredible story is told of him that when in good condition he could hold two men seated on his extended hands.  Now, however, he was equal to no such exploit, being not only deprived of food, but also of sleep, by the necessity of listening at night to the confessions of his pious flock; and his shoes, too, had failed him, nothing remaining but the upper leather, which gave him little comfort among the sharp stones.  He bore up manfully, being by nature brave and light hearted; and when a servant of the Jesuits fell into the water, he threw off his cassock and leaped after him.  His strength gave out, and the man was drowned; but a grateful Jesuit led him aside, and requited his efforts with a morsel of bread.  A wood of chestnut trees full of nuts at length stayed the hunger of the famished troops.

It was Saint Theresa's day when they approached the lower Mohawk town.  A storm of wind and rain set in; but, anxious to surprise the enemy, they pushed on all night amid the moan and roar of the forest,  over slippery logs, tangled roots, and oozy mosses, under dripping boughs and through saturated bushes.  This time there was no want of good guides; and when in the morning they issued from the forest, they saw, amid its cornfields, the palisades of the Indian stronghold.  They had two small pieces of cannon brought from the lake by relays of men, but they did not stop to use them.  Their twenty drums beat the charge, and they advanced to seize the place by coup-de-main.  Luckily for them, a panic had seized the Indians: not that they were taken by surprise, for they had discovered the approaching French, and, two days before, had sent away their women and children in preparation for a desperate fight; but the din of the drums, which they took for so many devils in the French service, and the armed men advancing from the rocks and thickets in files that seemed interminable, so wrought on the scared imagination of the warriors that they fled in terror to their next town, a short distance above.  Tracy lost no time, but hastened in pursuit.  A few Mohawks were seen on the hills, yelling and firing too far for effect.  Repentigny, at the risk of his scalp, climbed a neighboring height, and looked down on the little army, which seemed so numerous as it passed beneath, "that," writes the superior of the Ursulines, " he told me that he thought the good angels must have joined with it: whereat he stood amazed." 

The second town or fort was taken as easily as the first; so, too, were the third and the fourth.  The Indians yelled, and fled without killing a man; and still the troops pursued, following the broad trail which led from town to town along the valley of the Mohawk.  It was late in the afternoon when the fourth town was entered, and Tracy thought that his work was done; but an Algonquin squaw who had followed her husband to the war, and who had once been a prisoner among the Mohawks, told him that there was still another above.  The sun was near its setting, and the men were tired with their pitiless marching; but again the order was given to advance.  The eager squaw showed the way, holding a pistol in one hand and leading Courcelle with the other; and they soon came in sight of Andaraque", the largest and strongest of the Mohawk forts.  The drums beat with fury, and the troops prepared to attack; but there were none to oppose them.  The scouts sent forward reported that the warriors had fled.  The last of the savage strongholds was in the hands of the French
.
"God has done for us," says Mother Mary, "what he did in ancient days for his chosen people, —• striking terror into our enemies, insomuch that we were victors without a blow.' Certain it is that there is miracle in.  all this; for if the Iroquois had stood fast, they would have given us a great deal of trouble and caused our army great loss, seeing how they were fortified and armed, and how haughty and bold they are."

The French were astonished as they looked about them.  These Iroquois forts were very different from those that Jogues had seen here twenty years before, or from that which in earlier times set Champlain and his Hurons at defiance.  The Mohawks had had counsel and aid from their Dutch friends, and adapted their savage defences to the rules of European art.  Andaraque" was a quadrangle formed of a triple palisade, twenty feet high, and flanked by four bastions.  Large vessels of bark filled with water were placed on the platforms of the palisade for defence against fire.  The dwellings which these fortifications enclosed were in many cases built of wood, though the form and arrangement of the primitive bark lodge of the Iroquois seems to have been preserved.  Some of the wooden houses were a hundred and twenty feet long, with fires for eight or nine families.  Here, and in subterranean caches, was stored a prodigious quantity of Indian corn and other provisions; and all the dwellings were supplied with carpenters' tools, domestic utensils, and many other appliances of comfort.

The only living things in Andaraque", when the French entered, were two old women, a small boy, and a decrepit old man, who, being frightened by the noise of the drums, had hidden himself under a canoe.  From them the victors learned that the Mohawks, retreating from the other towns, had gathered here, resolved to fight to the last; but at sight of the troops their courage failed, and the chief was first to run, crying out, "Let us save ourselves, brothers! the whole world is coming against us!"

A cross was planted, and at its side the royal arms.  The troops were drawn up in battle array, when Jean Baptiste du Bois, an officer deputed by Tracy, advancing sword in hand to the front, proclaimed in a loud voice that he took possession in the name of the King of all the country of the Mohawks; and the troops shouted three times, Vive le Hoi.

That night a mighty bonfire illumined the Mohawk forests; and the scared savages from their hiding places among the rocks saw their palisades, their dwellings, their stores of food, and all their possessions turned to cinders and ashes.  The two old squaws captured in the town threw themselves in despair into the flames of their blazing homes.  When morning came, there was nothing left of Andaraque but smouldering embers, rolling their pale smoke against the painted background of the October woods.  Te Deum was sung and mass said; and then the victors began their backward march,  burning, as they went, all the remaining forts, with all their hoarded stores of corn, except such as they needed for themselves.  If they had failed to destroy their enemies in battle, they hoped that winter and famine would do the work of shot and steel.

While there was distress among the Mohawks, there was trouble among their English neighbors, who claimed as their own the country which Tracy had invaded.  The English authorities were the more disquieted, because they feared that the lately conquered Dutch might join hands with the French against them.  When Nicolls, governor of New York, heard of Tracy's advance, he wrote to the governors of the New England colonies, begging them to join him against the French invaders, and urging that if Tracy's force were destroyed or captured, the conquest of Canada would be an easy task.  There was war at the time between the two Crowns; and the British court had already entertained this project of conquest, and sent orders to its colonies to that effect.  But the New England governors  ill prepared for war, and fearing that their Indian neighbors, who were enemies of the Mohawks, might take part with the French  hesitated to act, and the affair ended in a correspondence, civil if not sincere, between Nicolls and Tracy.  The treaty of Bre’da, in the following year, secured peace for a time between the rival colonies.

The return of Tracy was less fortunate than his advance.  The rivers, swollen by autumn rains, were difficult to pass; and in crossing Lake Champlain two canoes were overset in a storm, and eight men were drowned.  From Saint Anne, a new fort built early in the summer on Isle La Motte, near the northern end of the lake, he sent news of his success to Quebec, where there was great rejoicing and a solemn thanksgiving.  Signs and prodigies had not been wanting to attest the interest of the upper and nether powers in the crusade against the myrmidons of hell.  At one of the forts on the Richelieu, " the soldiers," says Mother Mary, "were near dying of fright.  They saw a great fiery cavern in the sky, and from this cavern came plaintive voices mixed with frightful bowlings.  Perhaps it was the demons, enraged because we had depopulated a country where they had been masters so long, and had said mass and sung the praises of God in a place where there had never before been anything but foulness and abomination."

Tracy had at first meant to abandon Fort Saint Anne; but he changed his mind after returning to Quebec.  Meanwhile the season had grown so late that there was no time to send proper supplies to the garrison.  Winter closed, and the place was not only ill provisioned, but was left without a priest.  Tracy wrote to the superior of the Sulpitians at Montreal to send one without delay; but the request was more easily made than fulfilled, for he forgot to order an escort, and the way was long and dangerous.  The stout hearted Dollier de Casson was told, however, to hold himself ready to go at the first opportunity.  His recent campaigning had left him in no condition for braving fresh hardships, for he was nearly disabled by a swelling on one of his knees.  By way of cure he resolved to try a severe bleeding, and the Sangrado of Montreal did his work so thoroughly that his patient fainted under his hands.  As he returned to consciousness, he became aware that two soldiers had entered the room.  They told him that they were going in the morning to Chambly, which was on the way to Saint Anne; and they invited him to go with them.  "Wait till the day after tomorrow," replied the priest, "and I will try." The delay was obtained; and on the day fixed the party set out by the forest path to Chambly, a distance of about four leagues.  When they reached it, Dollier de Casson was nearly spent; but he concealed his plight from the commanding officer, and begged an escort to Saint Anne, some twenty leagues farther.  As the officer would not give him one, he threatened to go alone, on which ten men and an ensign were at last ordered to conduct him.  Thus attended, he resumed his journey after a day's rest.  One of the soldiers fell through the ice, and none of his comrades dared help him.  Dollier de Casson, making the sign of the cross, went to his aid, and, more successful than on the former occasion, caught him and pulled him out.  The snow was deep; and the priest, having arrived in the preceding summer, had never before worn snow shoes, while a sack of clothing, and his portable chapel which he carried at his back, joined to the pain of his knee and the effects of his late bleeding, made the march a purgatory.

He was sorely needed at Fort Saint Anne.  There was pestilence in the garrison.  Two men had just died without absolution, while more were at the point of death, and praying for a priest.  Thus it happened that when the sentinel descried far off, on the ice of Lake Champlain, a squad of soldiers approaching, and among them a black cassock, every officer and man not sick or on duty came out with one accord to meet the new comer.  They overwhelmed him with welcome and with thanks.  One took his sack, another his portable chapel, and they led him in triumph to the fort.  First he made a short prayer, then went his rounds among the sick, and then came to refresh himself with the officers.  Here was La Motte de la Lucieire, the commandant; La Durantaye, a name destined to be famous in Canadian annals: and a number of young subalterns.  The scene was no strange one to Dollier de Casson, for he had been an officer of cavalry in his time, and fought under Turenne; a good soldier, without doubt, at the mess table or in the field, and none the worse a priest that he had once followed the wars.  He was of a lively humor, given to jests and mirth; as pleasant a father as ever said Benedicite.  The soldier and the gentleman still lived under the cassock of the priest.  He was greatly respected and beloved; and his influence as a peace maker, which he often had occasion to exercise, is said to have been remarkable.  When the time demanded it, he could use arguments more cogent than those of moral suasion.  Once, in a camp of Algonquins, when, as 'he was kneeling in prayer, an insolent savage came to interrupt him, the father, without rising, knocked the intruder flat by a blow of his fist; and the other Indians, far from being displeased, were filled with admiration at the exploit.

His cheery temper now stood him in good stead; for there was dreary work before him, and he was not the man to flinch from it.  The garrison of Saint Anne had nothing to live on but salt pork and half spoiled flour.  Their hogshead of vinegar had sprung a leak, and the contents had all oozed out.  They had rejoiced in the supposed possession of a reasonable stock of brandy; but they soon discovered that the sailors, on the voyage from France, had emptied the casks and filled them again with salt water.  The scurvy broke out with fury.  In a short time, forty out of the sixty men became victims of the loathsome malady.  Day or night, Dollier de Casson and Forestier, the equally devoted young surgeon, had no rest.  The surgeon's strength failed, and the priest was himself slightly attacked with the disease.  Eleven men died; and others languished for want of help, for their comrades shrank from entering the infected dens where they lay.  In their extremity some of them devised an ingenious expedient.  Though they had nothing to bequeath, they made wills in which they left imaginary sums of money to those who had befriended them; and thenceforth they found no lack of nursing.

In the intervals of his labors, Dollier de Casson would run to and fro for warmth and exercise on a certain track of beaten snow, between two of the bastions, reciting his breviary as he went, so that those who saw him might have thought him out of his wits.  One day La Motte called out to him as he was thus engaged, "Eh, Monsieur le cure", if the Iroquois should come, you must defend that bastion.  My men are all deserting me, and going over to you and the doctor." To which the father replied, "Get me some litters with wheels, and I will bring them out to man my bastion.  They are brave enough now; no fear of their running away." With banter like this, they sought to beguile their miseries; and thus the winter wore on at Fort Saint Anne.

Early in spring they saw a troop of Iroquois approaching, and prepared as well as they could to make fight; but the strangers proved to be ambassadors of peace.  The destruction of the Mohawk towns had produced a deep effect, not on that nation alone, but also on the other four members of the league.  They were disposed to confirm the promises of peace which they had already made; and Tracy had spurred their good intentions by sending them a message that unless they quickly presented themselves at Quebec, he would hang all the chiefs whom he had kept prisoners after discovering their treachery in the preceding summer.  The threat had its effect: deputies of the Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas presently arrived in a temper of befitting humility.  The Mohawks were at first afraid to come, but in April they sent the Flemish Bastard with overtures of peace, and in July a large deputation of their chiefs appeared at Quebec.  They and the rest left some of their families as hostages, and promised that if any of their people should kill a Frenchman, they would give them up to be hanged.  They begged, too, for blacksmiths, surgeons, and Jesuits to live among them.  The presence of the Jesuits in their towns was in many ways an advantage to them; while to the colony it was of the greatest importance.  Not only was conversion to the Church justly regarded as the best means of attaching the Indians to the French and alienating them from the English; but the Jesuits living in the midst of them could influence even those whom they could not convert, soothe rising jealousies, counteract English intrigues, and keep the rulers of the colony informed of all that was passing in the Iroquois towns.  Thus, half Christian missionaries, half political agents, the Jesuits prepared to resume the hazardous mission of the Iroquois.  Fre"min and Pierron were ordered to the Mohawks, Bruyas to the Oneidas, and three others were named for the three nations of the league.  The troops had made the peace; the Jesuits were the rivets to hold it fast,  and peace endured without absolute rupture for nearly twenty years.  Of all the French expeditions against the Iroquois, that of Tracy was the most productive of good.