A Woman of Courage on the West Virginia Frontier (16 page)

Using
il modo soave
, or the “gentle way,” the Jesuits were very successful in their efforts to convert many of the Wyandot to their faith, despite the fact that the Wyandot tended to view them with great curiosity and no small amount of amusement. Outfitted in their distinctive black Jesuit vestments, the Wyandot referred to the priests somewhat derisively as “Black Robes.” These robes were seen by the Wyandot as not only effeminate but ridiculously impractical for a life in the wilderness, as the wearer had great difficulty walking in the dense woodlands, much less climbing in and out of canoes. Further, Wyandot men, who had sparse facial hair and made an almost religious habit of pulling out those few hairs they had with shell tweezers, found the Black Robes’ beards thoroughly disgusting. Moreover, for a race whose culture encouraged the free exploration of sexuality among their unmarried adolescents, the Jesuits’ celibacy seemed both highly curious and more than a little ominous.
¹⁷³

However, as the Jesuits spread their faith, they also sowed the seeds of factionalism among the nations of the confederacy. In the process of conversion, the Black Robes created deep divisions in village communities whose very foundation was built on unity, consensus and tolerance. Converts and traditionalists now began to argue violently and openly, undermining the consensus decision-making process that was the hallmark of Wyandot society. Elders began to lose influence, and village communities, as well as the overall Wyandot community, saw their unity of purpose and corresponding ability to respond to crisis erode away.
¹⁷⁴

While the erosion of cohesion among the Wyandot might be seen as an “intangible” sort of damage, the Jesuits and other French colonists proceeded to inflict a far more real means of calamity on the Wyandot: disease. In 1634, the first French children arrived in Quebec, and Wyandot traders who visited there during the summer soon became sick with measles and smallpox. Returning to their home villages, they spread sickness like a wildfire in the forest. According to one Jesuit, the symptoms of the illness were severe: “This sickness began with violent fever, which was followed by a sort of measles or smallpox, different, however, from that common in France, accompanied in several cases by blindness for some days, or by dimness of sight, and terminated at length by diarrhea which has carried off many and is still bringing some to the grave.”
¹⁷⁵
Before the epidemic in this Jesuit’s village ended later that winter, 20 percent of the tribe’s population was dead.

A “Black Robe” travels via canoe to a mission in Wendake in J.C. Hennessey’s painting,
Jesuit Missionary en Route. Library and Archives Canada
.

Within weeks, these virgin soil diseases touched every longhouse in every village, except, of course, those of the Black Robes, who appeared to have an almost supernatural immunity. Rather than comfort the Wyandot, the Jesuits tried to use this calamity to their advantage, telling the Wyandot that this was a sign of their god’s power and unhappiness that so many clung to their old beliefs, a story many of the Jesuits honestly believed. One of the priests wrote, “With the Faith, the scourge of God came into the country; and, in proportion as the one increased, the other smote them more severely.”
¹⁷⁶

In response, some Wyandot leaders accused the Jesuits of bringing these calamities to Wendake by encouraging their people to abandon the beliefs that had sustained them for centuries. Father Paul Le Jeune wrote to his superiors that the Jesuits were trying

to disabuse the people of the rumors spread by some Huron Apostates, who attribute to the Faith all the wars, diseases, and calamities of the country. They allege their own experience in the confirmation of their imposture; they assert that their change of Religion has caused their change of fortune; and that their Baptism was at once followed by every possible misfortune. The Dutch, they say, have preserved the Iroquois by allowing them to live in their own fashion, just as the Black Gowns have ruined the Hurons by preaching the faith to them
.
¹⁷⁷

By 1640, repetitive waves of European diseases had killed almost 60 percent of the Wyandot population in Wendake, leaving only about ten thousand survivors.
¹⁷⁸
In only six years, a thriving, powerful and prosperous people had been devastated by internal dissent and external bacteria, all sown by the supposed benevolent agents of civilization and the Christian faith. This disaster might have been enough to finish off any society, but the Wyandot now faced a new and even more deadly threat from the Iroquois Confederation.

This eighteenth-century drawing depicts a “savage” Iroquois warrior, like those who attacked the Wyandot in their Wendake homeland.
Library and Archives Canada
.

As discussed in an earlier chapter, because of their growing fur trade and the decimation of the beaver population from over-trapping in their own territory, the Iroquois began to covet the beaver in the hunting grounds of neighboring nations. This desire was even stronger when the Iroquois looked west to the Wendake. The Wyandot, as stated earlier, were master traders, and as a result, their success drew the Iroquois’ ire. What began as a series of small raids in 1640 exploded into open warfare in 1648 when the Iroquois attacked the village of Teanaostaiae and the mission of St. Joseph. In the resulting fighting, the Iroquois killed almost seven hundred Wyandot, as well as the Jesuit missionary, Father Antoine Daniel.
¹⁷⁹

The following spring, the Iroquois returned in mid-March, surprising the Wyandot with such an early offensive. Unbeknownst to the Wyandot, a force of some 1,200 Iroquois, mostly Seneca and Mohawk warriors, had spent the entire winter near Lake Ontario, just south of Wendake. As a result, when they attacked the village of Taenhatentaron on March 16, there were no warriors in the palisade watchtowers to give warning. The Iroquois took the village against virtually no resistance, and four hundred inhabitants were either killed or captured. The Iroquois then moved on to the mission village of St. Louis, where they met stiffer resistance from an assembled force of eighty Wyandot warriors. Nevertheless, the Iroquois were soon victorious and either killed or tortured the remaining survivors, including two Black Robes.
¹⁸⁰

This pattern of Iroquois attacks and Wyandot defeats continued for the next three years. The Iroquois executed a carefully developed strategy designed to exploit Wyandot weaknesses. The Wyandot fought bravely, but in reality, they had lost before the Iroquois even launched their offensive. The seeds of their defeat were sown by the Jesuits, fortified by the diseases the colonists of New France carried among them and brought to blossom through the fratricide caused by an alien religion.

By 1653, the great Wyandot Confederacy was dead, its people driven from their beautiful Wendake forever, and they began decades of wandering in search of a new home. Some would go to Quebec and place themselves under the protection of the French garrison, their descendants being known today as the Hurons of Lorette, while others fled to the Neutrals, the Erie, the Tionontati and other non-Wyandot nations. When some of these nations, such as the Tionontati, were also attacked by the Iroquois, they and their Wyandot guests took refuge on the islands of Lake Huron. For the rest of the surviving Wyandot, their course of wandering led them to Michilimackinac; Manitoulin Island; Green Bay; the Potawatomi; the Illinois; the neighborhood of the Ottawa on Chequamigon Bay, on the south shore of Lake Superior; and again to Michilimackinac. By the late seventeenth century, many had moved to Detroit and the Sandusky River region of Ohio. Here they settled at last, eventually claiming the entire Ohio Country as their own, and here they remained until they left for Kansas in 1842, the last Indian nation exiled from their homes in Ohio.
¹⁸¹

V
ILLAGE
L
IFE

By the time Phebe arrived in the village, the Wyandot had been in that region of Ohio for almost forty years, but most of their customs and way of life remained unchanged from their days in Wendake. What might have seemed most remarkable to her were the roles of men and women in Wyandot society. Having lived all of her twenty-four years in a patriarchal society where the roles of women were marginalized and the world revolved around decisions made by men, Phebe now found herself in a community where women were not only revered but where they were also the dominating influence in the community’s decision-making process. Although the men might hold all the public offices, the women of the village placed them in those offices and the women could dismiss them, as well. If a war chief wanted to take a teenage boy away from the village, they had to obtain permission from the women of the boy’s lineage. To be sure, women’s daily duties involved the care of children, cooking, maintenance of the longhouse, sewing and working in the fields, while men hunted, fished and performed heavy manual labor, much as in European society. However, there was still an important, innate difference between the worlds of settler and Indian. In Wyandot society, women were seen as the very heart of the community. The men might kill to provide necessary subsistence and material needs, but the women of the Wyandot community nurtured it and provided spiritual culture, which was considered of the utmost importance in Wyandot life.
¹⁸²

As for the village itself, it likely covered about two acres, all surrounded by a strong palisade consisting of as many as three to four rows of stakes arranged in a rough oval around the village. Outside the palisade were acres of cornfields that surrounded the village. Most Wyandot settlements contained about two dozen longhouses, called
yannonchia
. Each of these were windowless structures about 150 feet long, although archaeologists have unearthed some that were as long as 250 feet. While longhouses appeared shaggy and dilapidated to the naked eye, they were actually marvels of construction. Built on a wooden frame and covered with slabs of bark, they had to be strong enough to withstand the gale-force winds and heavy snowfalls of a Canada or Ohio winter. As a result, their walls employed vertical support poles, sharpened at one end and pushed or twisted into the ground down to a depth of two to three feet. These poles were then reinforced with horizontal ones that were lashed to them with either shredded bark or rope, and both types of poles were approximately two to four inches in diameter. The roof of the longhouse consisted of additional poles attached to the uprights and then bent to form a semicircular arch. The entire frame was covered with slabs of bark, which had been either soaked or steamed to make them more pliable.
¹⁸³

This photo shows a re-created Wyandot longhouse at “Ska-Nah-Doht” Huron Village, Longwoods Road Conservation Area, Delaware, Ontario, Canada. This modern re-creation is probably similar to the one in which Phebe Cunningham lived during her three years as an adopted member of the Wyandot.
Courtesy of James P. Rowan
.

Once Phebe entered the Wyandot village, her status and future had to be determined. When she told her story to her granddaughter, Phebe said that the village chief was a kind, elderly man named Darby, and in fact, today there is a Little and Big Darby Creek as well as the Darby township in Ohio that are his namesakes. She added that she “was not treated badly after she became acquainted with the Indians and their white captives, some of whom became her friends.”
¹⁸⁴
Interestingly, Phebe apparently said nothing else regarding her time with the Wyandot, although some nineteenth-century accounts say she was given to the dead warrior’s family as a servant but not adopted. From what is known about the Wyandot culture, this is extremely unlikely, and therefore, it is almost certain that she was adopted.