CHAPTER 21
1663-1702.  

THE MISSIONS.  —THE BRANDY QUESTION.

FOR a year or two after De Tracy had chastised the Mohawks, and humbled the other Iroquois nations, all was rose color on the side of that dreaded confederacy.  The Jesuits, defiant as usual of hardship and death, had begun their ruined missions anew.  Bruyas took the Mission of the Martyrs among the Mohawks; Milet, that of Saint Francis Xavier, among the Oneidas; Lamberville, that of Saint John the Baptist among the Onondagas; Carheil, that of Saint Joseph among the Cayugas; and Raffeix and Julien Gamier shared between them the three missions of the Senecas.  The Iroquois, after their punishment, were in a frame of mind so hopeful that the fathers imagined for a moment that they were all on the point of accepting the faith.  This was a consummation earnestly to be wished, not only from a religious, but also from a political, point of view.  The complete conversion of the Iroquois meant their estrangement from the heretic English and Dutch, and their firm alliance with the French.  It meant safety for Canada, and it insured for her the fur trade of the interior freed from English rivalry.  Hence the importance of these missions, and hence their double character.  While the Jesuit toiled to convert his savage hosts, he watched them at the same time with the eye of a shrewd political agent; reported at Quebec the result of his observations, and by every means in his power sought to alienate them from England, and attach them to France.

Their simple conversion, by placing them wholly under his influence, would have outweighed in political value all other agencies combined; but the flattering hopes of the earlier years soon vanished.  Some petty successes against other tribes so elated the Iroquois that they ceased to care for French alliance or French priests.  Then a few petty reverses would dash their spirits, and dispose them again to listen to Jesuit counsels.  Every success of a war party was a loss to the faith, and every reverse was a gain.  Meanwhile a more repulsive or a more critical existence than that of a Jesuit father in an Iroquois town is scarcely conceivable.  The torture of prisoners turned into a horrible festivity for the whole tribe; foul and crazy orgies in which, as the priest thought, the powers of darkness took a special delight; drunken riots, the work of Dutch brandy, when he was forced to seek refuge from death in his chapel,  a sanctuary which superstitious fear withheld the Indians from violating,  these, and a thousand disgusts and miseries, filled the record of his days; and he bore them all in patience.  Not only were the early Canadian Jesuits men of an intense religious zeal, but they were also men who lived not for themselves but for their Order.  Their faults were many and great, but the grandeur of their self devotion towers conspicuous over all.

At Caughnawaga, near Montreal, may still be seen the remnants of a mission of converted Iroquois, whom the Jesuits induced to leave the temptations of their native towns and settle here, under the wing of the Church.  They served as a bulwark against the English, and sometimes did good service in time of war.  At Sillery, near Quebec, a band of Abenakis, escaping from the neighborhood of the English towards the close of Philip's War, formed another mission of similar character.  The Sulpitians had a third at the foot of the mountain of Montreal, where two massive stone towers of the fortified Indian town are standing to this day.  All these converted savages, as well as those of Lorette and other missions far and near, were used as allies in war, and launched in scalping parties against the border settlements of New England.

Not only the Sulpitians, but also the seminary priests of Quebec, the Re’collets, and even the Capuchins, had missions more or less important, and more or less permanent.  But the Jesuits stood always in the van of religious and political propagandism; and all the forest tribes felt their influence, from Acadia and Maine to the plains beyond the Mississippi.  Next in importance to their Iroquois missions were those among the Algonquins of the northern lakes.  Here was the grand domain of the beaver trade; and the chief woes of the missionary sprang not from the Indians, but from his own countrymen.  Beaver skins had produced an effect akin to that of gold in our own day, and the deepest recesses of the wilderness were invaded by eager seekers after gain.

The focus of the evil was at Father Marquette's old mission of Michilimackinac.  First, year after year came a riotous invasion of coureurs de bois, and then a garrison followed to crown the mischief.  Discipline was very we'ak at these advanced posts, and, to eke out their pay, the soldiers were allowed to trade,  brandy, whether permitted or interdicted, being the chief article of barter.  Father Etienne Carheil was driven almost to despair; and he wrote to the intendant, his fast friend and former pupil, the long letter already mentioned.  "Our missions," he says, " are reduced to such extremity that we can no longer maintain them against the infinity of disorder, brutality, violence, injustice, impiety, impurity, insolence, scorn, and insult, which the deplorable and infamous traffic in brandy has spread universally among the Indians of these parts.  In the despair in which we are plunged, nothing remains for us but to abandon them to the brandy sellers as a domain of drunkenness and debauchery." He complains bitterly of the officers in command of the fort, who, he says, far from repressing disorders, encourage them by their example, and are even worse than their subordinates, " insomuch that all our Indian villages are so many taverns for drunkenness and Sodoms for iniquity, which we shall be forced to leave to the just wrath and vengeance of God." He insists that the garrisons are entirely useless, as they have only four occupations,  first, to keep open liquor shops for crowds of drunken Indians; secondly, to roam from place to place, carrying goods and brandy under the orders of the commandant, who shares their profits; thirdly, to gamble day and night; fourthly, to " turn the fort into a place which I am ashamed to call by its right name;" and he describes, with a curious amplitude of detail, the swarms of Indian girls who are hired to make it their resort.  "Such, Monseigneur, are the only employments of the soldiers maintained here so many years.  If this can be called doing the King service, I admit that such service is done for him here now, and has always been done for him here; but I never saw any other done in my life." He further declares that the commandants oppose and malign the missionaries, while of the presents which the King sends up the country for distribution to the Indians, they, the Indians, get nothing but a little tobacco, and the officer keeps the rest for himself.

From the misconduct of officers and soldiers, the father passes to that of the coureurs de dois and licensed traders; and here he is equally severe.  He dilates on the evils which result from permitting the colonists to go to the Indians instead of requiring the Indians to come to the settlements.  "It serves only to rob the country of all its young men, weaken families, deprive wives of their husbands, sisters of their brothers, and parents of their children; expose the voyagers to a hundred dangers of body and soul; involve them in a multitude of expenses, some necessary, some useless, and some criminal; accustom them to do no work, and at last disgust them with it forever; make them live in constant idleness, unfit them completely for any trade, and render them useless to themselves, their families, and the public.  But it is less as regards the body than as regards the soul that this traffic of the French among the savages is infinitely hurtful.  It carries them far away from churches, separates them from priests and nuns, and severs them from all instruction, all exercise of religion, and all spiritual aid.  It sends them into places wild and almost inaccessible, through a thousand perils by land and water, to carry on by base, abject, and shameful means a trade which would much better be carried on at Montreal."

But in the complete transfer of the trade to Montreal, Father Carheil sees insuperable difficulties; and he proceeds to suggest, as the last and best resort, that garrisons and officers should be withdrawn, and licenses abolished, that discreet and virtuous persons should be chosen to take charge of all the trade of the upper country; that these persons should be in perfect sympathy and correspondence with the Jesuits; and that' the trade should be carried on at the missions of the Jesuits and in their presence.

This letter brings us again face to face with the brandy question, of which we have seen something already in the quarrel between Avaugour and the bishop.  In the summer of 1648 there was held at the mission of Sillery a temperance meeting,  the first in all probability on this continent.  The drum beat after mass, and the Indians gathered at the summons.  Then an Algonquin chief, a zealous convert of the Jesuits, proclaimed to the crowd a late edict of the governor imposing penalties for drunkenness, and, in his own name and that of the other chiefs, exhorted them to abstinence, declaring that all drunkards should be handed over to the French for punishment.  Father Jerome Lalemant looked on delighted.  "It was," he says, "the finest public act of jurisdiction exercised among the Indians since I have been in this country.  From the beginning of the world they have all thought themselves as great lords, the one as the other, and never before submitted to their chiefs any further than they chose to do so."

There was great need of reform; for a demon of drunkenness seemed to possess these unhappy tribes.  Nevertheless, with all their rage for brandy, they sometimes showed in regard to it a self control quite admirable in its way.  When at a fair, a council, or a friendly visit, their entertainers regaled them with rations of the coveted liquor, so prudently measured out that they could not be the worse for it, they would unite their several portions in a common stock, which they would then divide among a few of their number,  thus enabling them to attain that complete intoxication which, in their view, was the true end of all drinking.  The objects of this singular benevolence were expected to requite it in kind on some future occasion.

A drunken Indian, with weapons within reach, was very dangerous, and all prudent persons kept out of his way.     This greatly pleased him; for, seeing everybody run before him, he fancied himself a great chief, and howled and swung his tomahawk with redoubled fury.  If, as often happened, he maimed or murdered some wretch not nimble enough to escape, his countrymen absolved him from all guilt, and blamed only the brandy.  Hence, if an Indian wished to take a safe revenge on some, personal enemy, he would pretend to be drunk; and not only murders but other crimes were often committed by false claimants to the bacchanalian privilege.

In the eyes of the missionaries, brandy was a fiend with all crimes and miseries in his train; and, in fact, nothing earthly could better deserve the epithet infernal than an Indian town in the height of a drunken debauch.  The orgies never ceased till the bottom of the barrel was reached.  Then came repentance, despair, wailing, and bitter invective against the white men, the cause of all the woe.  In the name of the public good, of humanity, and above all of religion, the bishop and the Jesuits denounced the fatal traffic.

Their case was a strong one; but so was the case of their opponents.  There was real and imminent danger that the thirsty savages, if refused brandy by the French, would seek it from the Dutch and English of New York.  It was the most potent lure and the most killing bait.  Wherever it was found, thither the Indians and their beaver skins were sure to go, and the interests of the fur trade, vital to the colony, were bound up with it.  Nor was this all, for the merchants and the civil powers insisted that religion and the saving of souls were bound up with it no less; since, to repel the Indians from the Catholic French, and attract them to the heretic English, was to turn them from ways of grace to ways of perdition.  The argument, no doubt, was dashed largely with hypocrisy in those who used it; but it was one which the priests were greatly perplexed to answer.

In former days, when Canada was not yet transformed from a mission to a colony, the Jesuits entered with a high hand on the work of reform.  It fared hard with the culprit caught in the act of selling brandy to Indians.  They led him, after the sermon, to the door of the church; where, kneeling on the pavement, partially stript and bearing in his hand the penitential torch, he underwent a vigorous flagellation, laid on by Father Le Mercier himself, after the fashion formerly practised in the case of refractory school boys.  Bishop Laval not only discharged against the offenders volleys of wholesale excommunication, but he made of the offence a "reserved case;" that is, a case in which the power of granting absolution was reserved to himself alone.  This produced great commotion, and a violent conflict between religious scruples and a passion for gain.  The bishop and the Jesuits stood inflexible; while their opponents added bitterness to the quarrel by charging them with permitting certain favored persons to sell brandy, unpunished, and even covertly selling it themselves.

Appeal was made to the King, who  with his Jesuit confessor, guardian of his conscience on.  one side,  and Colbert, guardian of his worldly interests on the other  stood in some perplexity.  The case was referred to the fathers of the Sorbonne; and they, after solemn discussion, pronounced the selling of brandy to Indians a mortal sin.  It was next referred to an assembly of the chief merchants and inhabitants of Canada, held under the eye of the governor, intendant, and council, in the Chateau Saint Louis.  Each was directed to state his views in writing.  The great majority were for unrestricted trade in brandy; a few were for a limited and guarded trade; and two or three declared for prohibition.  Decrees of prohibition were passed from time to time, but they were unavailing.  They were revoked, renewed, and revoked again.  They were, in fact, worse than useless; for their chief effect was to turn traders and coureurs de lois into troops of audacious contrabandists.  Attempts were made to limit the brandy trade to the settlements, and exclude it from the forest country, where its regulation was impossible; but these attempts, like the others, were of little avail.  It is worthy of notice that when brandy was forbidden everywhere else, it was permitted in the trade of Tadoussac, carried on for the profit of government.

In spite of the Sorbonne, in spite of Pe’re La Chaise, and of the Archbishop of Paris, whom he also consulted, the King was never at heart a prohibitionist.  His Canadian revenue was drawn from the fur trade; and the singular argument of the partisans of brandy, that its attractions were needed to keep the Indians from contact with heresy, served admirably to salve his conscience.  Bigot as he was, he distrusted the Bishop of Quebec, the great champion of the anti liquor movement.  His own letters, as well as those of his minister, prove that he saw, or thought that he saw, motives for the crusade very different from those inscribed on its banners.  He wrote to Saint-Vallier, Laval's successor in the bishopric, that the brandy trade was very useful to the kingdom of France; that it should be regulated, but not prevented; that the consciences of his subjects must not be disturbed by denunciations of it as a sin; and that."it is well that you (the bishop) should take care that the zeal of the ecclesiastics is not excited by personal interests and passions." Perhaps he alludes to the spirit of encroachment and domination which he and his minister in secret instructions to their officers often impute to the bishop and the clergy; or perhaps he may have in mind other accusations which had reached him from time to time during many years, and of which the following from the pen of the most noted of Canadian governors will serve as an example.  Count Frontenac declares that the Jesuits greatly exaggerate the disorders caused by brandy, and that they easily convince persons " who do not know the interested motives which have led them to harp continually on this string for more than forty years.  .  .  .  They have long wished to have the fur trade entirely to themselves, and to keep out of sight the trade which they have always carried on in the woods, and which they are carrying on there now." 

NOTE

TRADE OF THE JESUITS.   As I have observed in a former volume, the charge against the Jesuits of trading in beaver skins dates from the beginning of the colony.  In the private journal of Father Jerome Lalemant, their superior, occurs the following curious passage, under date of November, 1645: Two years after, on the request of Lalemant, the governor Montmagny.  and his destined successor Ailleboust, gave the Jesuits a certificate to the effect that This leaves it to be inferred that they actually traded, though with good intentions.  In 1664, in reply to similar " calumnies," the Jesuits made by proxy a declaration before the council, stating, " This is an admission in a thin disguise.  The word necessite's is of very elastic interpretation.  In a memoir of Talon, 1667, he mentions, " 
That which Talon did not know with certainty is made reasonably clear for us by a line in the private journal of Father Le Mercier, who writes under date of 17 August, 1665, Father Charles Albanel was charged, under Fremin, with the affairs of the mission, including doubtless the temporal interests, to the prosperity of which Father Le Mercier alludes, and the cares of trade from which Father Fre'min was delivered.  Cavalier de la Salle declared in 1678, La Salle further says that Fre'min, being reported to have made enormous profits, La Salle gives also many other particulars, especially relating to Michilimackinac, where, as he says, the Jesuits had a large stock of beaver skins.  According to Pdronne Dumesnil, Me'moire de 1671, the Jesuits had at that time more than 20,000 francs a year,  partly from trade and partly from charitable contributions of their friends in France.

The King repeatedly forbade the Jesuits and other ecclesiastics in Canada to carry on trade.  On one occasion he threatened strong measures should they continue to disobey him.  
The Jesuits entered also into other branches of trade and industry with a vigor and address which the inhabitants of Canada might have emulated with advantage.  They were successful fishers of eels.  In 1646 their eel pots at Sillery are said to have yielded no less than forty thousand eels, some of which they sold at the modest price of thirty sous a hundred.  The members of the Order were exempted from payment of duties, and in 1674 they were specially empowered to construct mills, including sugar mills, and keep slaves, apprentices, and hired servants.