River City (32 page)

Slowly, the flames scaled his legs. His loss of blood helped him fall into a stupor. He would awaken to his own body raging against him, and he cried out, yet made no sound. Angels descended from a cloud, and he was dreaming of bees, flitting among the trim flowers outside his uncle’s home in France and also amid the wildflowers of the Huron lands. His heart burst with a new passion, with love and a deep longing as Father Gabriel Lalemant was stripped clean of his body.

In the fall of 1650, one Father Paul Ragueneau and a handful of Huron survivors passed through Ville-Marie by canoe, paddling downriver to the greater security of Quebec. Maisonneuve brought Ragueneau into his hut, where he fed him beans and pork and bread, and they sat together, with Jeanne Mance also in attendance, listening. He told them of Father Brébeuf’s martyrdom, and Father Lalemant’s, then detailed the more devastating news. He counselled, “In this place, you are about sixty Frenchmen, twenty Huron, a few Algonquin and two of our Fathers.”

Maisonneuve nodded. The correct number of French was fifty-nine.

“Thirty thousand Huron have been massacred, or captured and brought into slavery, or routed,” he reported. “Corpses darken fields as far as an eagle’s
eye can see. Villages have been razed, the fires without end. Huron children were cooked on spits, their parents delivered to hideous deaths. Paul, our Fathers were subjected to unspeakable cruelties. How will you, a band of sixty, hold out when thirty thousand Huron could not? Thirty … thousand. For the love of God, save yourselves. For the time of your martyrdom will be ordained according to the pleasure of the Iroquois.”

They fell to a silence, grieving over the news. Only when the stove fire dimmed and the evening cooled did Jeanne Mance speak, wrapping her shawl around her. “Forgive me, Father,” she said, her voice grave, “but the hour of our deaths will be chosen by God, not by Iroquois.”

The guest did not argue against her point of view, but he wondered if he had not fully transcribed the horror he had witnessed. Some moments later, though, her voice resumed in the candlelight.

“What have we done?” she inquired, a question Father Ragueneau felt was not asked of him, but rather was directed inwardly, to herself. “We came here to convert the Indians, and now the Huron have been massacred and we are at war with the Iroquois.”

The weight of her words fell upon the shoulders of Maisonneuve.

That night, Jeanne Mance gathered the people of Ville-Marie together before the communal altar and asked that they pray the whole night through. Thousands of souls had flown to heaven, and they were to ask the Heavenly Father to receive His Huron children. They would also light candles for the souls of Father Brébeuf and Father Lalemant, trusted friends of their community who had been martyred.

The men and women of Ville-Marie looked to one another, and held one another, and wept, for the lives of those who had been lost and for the tribulation of that hour. Never had a time been so perilous. “We shall carry on,” Jeanne Mance declared simply, and she knelt before the altar. Maisonneuve knelt beside her, and in his hands upraised the Cartier Dagger as a symbol of their perseverance, their resilience and their good hope.

The men and women of Fort Perilous prayed, their fervour ignited all the more by the prospect of annihilation.

The restoration of the mountain cross remained on a list of projects for the community at Ville-Marie, but practical matters had a habit of taking precedence. Devotees still made the trek up the mountainside to pray where the cross had been erected before the Iroquois had committed their desecration, toppling it and gouging it with their axes and partially burning it before the fire was doused by a downpour. Maisonneuve had not arranged to meet Jeanne Mance there—nevertheless they chanced upon one another at the sacred spot. Each had come with an escort of three armed men in case of attack.

“I’ve been thinking,” Maisonneuve admitted.

“Have you?”

“Of the matter we’ve discussed.”

“It bears hard thought. And prayer.”

Winter, as seen in the leaden sky, was imminent. The leaves were down, the breeze cool and brisk. The waterfowl had departed. Following the first fall of snow, this pilgrimage would become more difficult.

“I’ve decided,” Maisonneuve said.

“Yes?” Jeanne Mance knew the import of this decision. If he chose to execute their plan, he would be gone awhile, and the survival of the colony would rest in her hands. If he decided to stay, she’d be spared that considerable burden, yet they would be obliged to persevere on hope alone, without any real expectations.

“I’m returning to France,” Maisonneuve revealed.

Although the idea had begun with her, moving it towards reality was difficult to bear. Already strained, in her frailty, from the hike up the mountain, Jeanne Mance partially seated herself upon a boulder, absorbing the news. “It must be done,” she said. “We cannot go it alone.”

Over time, he had come to agree with her. Although the idea of crossing the Atlantic at this difficult time in the colony’s life filled him with foreboding, they desperately needed new and skilled recruits, men who could use a gun
but also an axe or a hoe, women who could plant corn one day and weave garments the next. A few of their people had died or been killed, and others had fled home. In any case, they needed to do much more than merely recoup their losses. The time had come to either dramatically expand or perish.

“There’s a problem about costs. Right now, I don’t have the money to travel to France and recruit new settlers. It’ll take time and persuasion.”

Clearly, he was broaching the issue to see if she could propose a solution. In her usual efficient manner, she had long anticipated the question and had devised a financial scheme.

“The hospital fund has money. Madame de Bullion set aside the original donation when we first arrived, for our expansion. I have corresponded with her. She is in complete agreement. We have no need to enlarge the hospital at this time, so the money can be put to another use. In order to secure it, I have proposed that we offer land to the hospital to hold the loan, until such time as the funds can be reimbursed.”

“How much?”

“Twenty thousand livres.”

That would be sufficient, and Maisonneuve took heart. “Let’s do that, then. We’ll let the citizens know the plan.”

“The financing remains our compact,” Jeanne Mance corrected him. “Madame de Bullion insists that her generosity remain a secret.”

Maisonneuve often chose to work this way. “Agreed,” he declared.

“When do you go?” she asked.

“A ship is at Quebec right now. If my paddlers are in good form, I can make it before departure.”

“I see.” She lowered her head. This was sounding quite real. “Well, then.”

Maisonneuve took a deep breath. He looked over the countryside from the mountain’s aerie. The St. Lawrence, never bothered, plodded on. In the distance, south, the lumbering hills from which the Iroquois faithfully emerged were smudged by cloud. “Jeanne. Something else requires our agreement. I am leaving with the expectation of finding one hundred new settlers. Should I fail, I shall not return. I will only send word. You must promise me, on your honour under God, on your oath, that if I cannot find one hundred new men and
women, you will dissolve Ville-Marie and return everyone, including yourself, to France.”

There it was.

While they had often debated the colony’s survival, never had matters come down to a simple premise: we cross this line, or we accept our failure. The next few years would be arduous, the risk of being annihilated ever-present. With the Huron nation decimated, the prospects for the fur trade were abysmal, and with the Iroquois likely to be on the warpath, the risks in gathering a harvest were extreme. Life would be strenuous, and, with their commander gone, precarious. Two prospects were nagging her. Maisonneuve might fail. He might not be able to persuade enough daring souls to travel across the ocean to a land of hardship and harrowing terror. Or he might succeed, and return, only to find his beloved village razed to the ground, each of its citizens charred on a stake or, God willing, buried.

“If you hear that we have been destroyed,” she told him, “then you, too, must abandon the mission. At least I will know, as I turn into flames, that my death will have spared those who have not yet arrived a similar fate.”

“You will vow to come home, should I fail?” he pressed her again.

“Home?” she asked. “This is home. But I shall do as you say. If you are unable to provide us with a minimum of one hundred new citizens, then I shall abolish the community here and return us all to France.”

For that one moment, they stepped away from their solitary lives. Jeanne Mance stretched her hand forward, and Maisonneuve clasped it, not to shake it in any formal way, but to hold her palm and entwine their fingers, a momentous act of intimacy neither would forget. Then he signalled to their guards, and cautiously the group made its way down the rocky mountainside.

The years proved unbearably hard while Maisonneuve tramped through France, trying to recruit immigrants. The Iroquois, having vanquished the Huron, travelled the St. Lawrence River, marauding at will. Excursions beyond the walls of Fort Perilous became rare for the residents there. Confined, they
danced to fiddlers’ tunes and sang the music they’d learned in France. And they began to sing new songs, too. They prayed and worked hard and maintained their weapons in fighting trim. Young boys were taught to shoot before they could handle a gardening implement, and young girls, if allowed beyond the gates at all, carried extra gunpowder upon their backs in case a prolonged fight ensued before they made it back.

Along the river, no man stepped from his door without a rifle, pistols, knives and a sword, and, if he could help it, he never walked alone. A mother sent the dogs out first and armed her children as point guards before she dared hang a laundry. Jeanne Mance would only walk from Fort Perilous to her hospital, now called Hôtel-Dieu, the Hospital of God, with dogs and a heavily armed escort, and she was prepared to stay at the hospital for weeks on end if Iroquois harried the path home.

The struggle was greater than merely surviving. They also needed to make the colony viable. That role fell to the
coureurs de bois,
and in particular to Médard Chouart des Groseilliers and Pierre-Esprit Radisson.

“Des Gros,” as he had become known, had arrived in New France in 1641, at twenty-three. For the next five years he worked as a servant among the Jesuits, travelling with them deep into the Huron territories. In 1647 he married, and in 1653, already a widower, he married again. His second bride was a half-sister to Radisson, a young man who begged to join him in the quest for furs. Radisson had never been to the Great Lakes, but his enthusiasm and evident experience—as a youth, he had been captured and enslaved by the Iroquois—impressed the somewhat older man, and he brought him along.

This was a dangerous time to canoe the waterways. Yet Des Gros spoke Iroquois, Huron and Algonquin and had heard from conversations among the Indians of the existence of tribes further north and west. Such news validated the risk. These distant tribes, who had yet to encounter the white man and lived far beyond the territorial incursions of the Iroquois, could supply the French with a greater abundance of furs than anyone had imagined possible.

His ambition, then, was to lead an expedition deeper into the continent’s wilderness. Huron who had arrived at Trois-Rivières told of an immense fur cache along the banks of a great salt bay. With that information, Des Gros travelled
to Boston and induced merchants there to finance an excursion north by ship, for he believed that he could sail down into the saltwater bay from the Atlantic to secure the furs. The project interested the Boston English, as it would give them access to the northern half of the continent denied them by the French. The trip failed, ice choked the vessel off from its route, but the Frenchman did not surrender his ambition. Des Gros waited for the right circumstance to try again.

In 1654, Maisonneuve returned.

At Fort Perilous, the people were jubilant. Not only did he bring with him a hundred new recruits, he returned with one hundred and fifty-four! Bakers and a brewer, a cooper and a coppersmith, three millers and a pastry chef, a shoemaker, a few weavers and masons. He brought a stonecutter and a nail maker, drain makers and stove makers, carpenters and joiners, a saw maker and a hatter, a cutler and a pair of rifle makers, a road-builder, a blacksmith to shoe horses—and he brought horses!—and gardeners and even sixty plain tillers of the soil. He even brought along a few more priests. Every one of them was prepared to fire a weapon, and each man stood well armed and eager.

The population had suddenly more than doubled. In the exultation of those days, men and women quickly married, and Jeanne Mance prepared herself to begin delivering babies. They had a community! Life! Hope and aspiration! They had good work to do. Dangers persisted, yet they could begin to believe that their defences just might prove adequate.

Also, now, Marguerite Bourgeoys lived among them. In the thirty-three-year-old recruit, Jeanne Mance instantly discovered a sure and devoted friend, while the colony discovered a schoolmistress who would never waver from an undertaking. She began teaching Indian children in the hospital and French children wherever she could find them hiding inside the fort. Before long, she was building a schoolhouse, and in due course she would become the mother superior of the Congregation of Notre Dame de Ville-Marie. Saintly and determined, she created projects and saw them through to conclusion, taking
the pressure off Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance and giving the colony much of its stability and drive.

And Marguerite Bourgeoys found the energy and time to do what others had let slip. She reconstructed the cross upon the mountain. Pilgrimages there soon became frequent. To climb the mountain, kneel at the cross and pray and return alive indicated that the cause was not lost, that the project on the island of Montreal persevered.