The White and the Gold (31 page)

It would take a whole volume to tell in detail the ups and downs of this struggle, the attacks that each side made on the possessions of the other, the bitter controversy their adherents waged in France, the backing and filling, the hatreds and cruelties. La Tour would not have been able to keep up such an uneven duel if he had not secured the aid of the English settlers at Boston. Plausible and adroit, he convinced the hardheaded Pilgrims that their best interests would be served by helping him to get the upper hand, and they went to the length of sending ships and men to aid him in his efforts. He also brought out a wife, a courageous Amazon named Marie Jacquelin, but as she was the daughter of a barber of Mans, she did not have the rich wardrobe or the fine possessions with which the highborn Madame d’Aunay had brought refinement and distinction to the somewhat baronial halls of Port Royal. She proved so strong a partisan, however, that La Tour left her in charge of the fort at St. John when he made one of his visits to Boston.

D’Aunay took advantage of his rival’s absence to besiege the fort. Madame la Tour fought to the last ditch, encouraging the men of the garrison when they began to lose stomach for more resistance. When the place was taken finally, D’Aunay hanged some of the garrison and kept Madame la Tour a prisoner until she died. In his report D’Aunay declared that the resolute lady “died of spite and rage.”

Shortly after this tragic occurrence things took a turn. D’Aunay was immersed in the cold waters of Annapolis Basin when his canoe upset and died of the exposure. He had enjoyed the full support of the administration in his long struggle with La Tour, but after
his death there seems to have been a school of thought at Fontaine-bleau which favored putting the control of the country in the hands of the latter. La Tour came out with the claim that he had been appointed governor, although he does not seem to have produced any written proof of it. It is a fact that the government took no steps to protect Madame d’Aunay when a merchant of La Rochelle named Le Borgne claimed that the estate owed him 260,000 livres. A lawsuit that he brought was decided in his favor, and the widow was left penniless with her eight children. Perplexed, unhappy, desperate, the poor widow ended by marrying that resourceful widower, La Tour; a most unexpected turnabout in events indeed.

There was no longer a feud to keep the Acadians at war among themselves, but they were not to enjoy peace. The struggle with the English now entered on an active stage and the country would be taken by the English twice more, only to be ceded back to France by treaty.

La Tour died in 1666, bringing to an end a most colorful and fantastic page of history. There have been supporters of both La Tour and D’Aunay to proclaim belief in the merits and honesty of each of the embattled leaders. The controversy will probably never end, although it does not seem to possess anything but academic interest now. One thing seems certain: that both men loved the land over which they fought, that they loved it enough to prolong the struggle when they could have relinquished their part in it and returned to the ease and comforts of civilized life. Between them they maintained a hold on the country through long years of hardship and discouragement.

T
HE Iroquois did not owe their supremacy over the other Indian tribes to their courage and ferocity as much as to the size and shape of their heads. With their great physical strength they combined a high degree of intelligence; and from the roomy cranium which had been given them they derived a capacity for organization which the others lacked. The hit-and-miss Huron, the lackadaisical Neutral, the erratic Erie were creatures of impulse. The men of the Five Nations proceeded always according to plan. They had created a parliamentary procedure for arriving at decisions, and this led to a Spartan-like unity of purpose in carrying out what they had decided.

The chiefs of the Five Nations were chosen by a system which was partly hereditary and partly selective. A dead chief’s successor was never chosen from among his sons—there was always some doubt of paternity—but from his relatives on the distaff side. If none of the cousins and nephews seemed strong enough to suit the opinionated and outspoken rank and file, a council would be called to select the warrior best fitted to assume charge. This entitled the new chief, among other privileges, to sit in the supreme upper council of the Five Nations, which was made up of fifty sachems, each of the tribes having a definite allotment. It was in this upper chamber, this meeting place of senators, that all matters of importance were decided, particularly the questions of war and peace.

The fifty sachems gathered by established custom in the council house at the Valley of Onondaga, the Onondagas being the tribe centrally located. Generally the whole Iroquois population would
move out of the rolling hills and valleys of their fruitful country and follow their leaders to Onondaga, there to sit in dense groups and hold their own conclaves while the great men talked in the council house. The concerted wisdom of these open-air forums, including those of the women who were always given a hearing, would be conveyed by delegates to the solemn council of the sachems and would be fully considered before any final decisions were reached.

Once made, a decision had the unanimous support of all the Five Nations. There was no such thing as conscription, however, and a man who did not want to fight was not compelled to do so. If war had been decided upon, the braves would leave with their tiny supplies of ground corn and maple sugar (it was their custom to live off the land), their guns and tomahawks, knowing that each stage of the campaign ahead of them had been thought out in advance. Nothing had been overlooked. The Iroquois were incapable of such desultory conduct as the Hurons of St. Ignace had shown, smoking the winter months away and dreaming of the strong defenses they were going to build.

It was an intense pride of race which made them conquerors. In the early years of the eighteenth century they admitted to their confederacy a tribe which had been forced out of South Carolina and had migrated to the North, the Tuscaroras. They called themselves thereafter the Six Nations, but their attitude toward the Tuscaroras was always condescending and resentful.

It was not difficult for a race as well organized as this to prevail over the shiftless and scatterbrain tribes around them. After the Hurons had been eliminated, the Five Nations struck savagely at others nearer to hand. The following year they captured the main village of the Neutrals and drove the vanquished people into the woods, where most of them died of starvation. The Eries, who lived in the fertile country south of the lake of that name, were the next victims. Carrying their canoes as shields, the Iroquois boldly rushed the palisades and then employed the canoes as scaling ladders. Such resourcefulness could not fail of success. They swarmed over the walls and in a single day of blood and fire they wiped the Eries from the face of the earth. The Andastes proved more worthy opponents and it took years to subdue them; but finally the plans hatched by the fifty wise men in the council house at Onondaga proved effective, and the Andastes also ceased to exist as a separate tribe.

The French at this stage were going through a period of weak and fumbling leadership, and it was not strange that their Indian foes, combining sagacity with ferocity, took the initiative into their own hands and never lost it until a climactic stage had been reached! They made peace when the mood seized them; they went back to war when they thought the time ripe, always striking without warning. They called the tune; and the Frenchmen, as well as their witless allies, danced to it.

It so happened that there was a brief moment of peace in the early months of 1653. The Mohawks had been beaten in an attack on Montreal. Two hundred warriors made a surprise attack on the hospital which stood on the high ground across the little St. Pierre River. Jeanne Mance was alone in the place, but a brave soldier named Lambert Closse, who had come out a few years before and had become second-in-command to Maisonneuve, went to the rescue with sixteen men. From six in the morning until six at night the little band held the redskins off, and when the attacking party retired it was in a chastened mood. It was largely due to this defeat that a peace of sorts was patched up.

The Onondagas selected this moment to send a party of eighteen chiefs to Quebec with a singular proposal. They wanted the French to show their friendliness and good faith by establishing a colony among them as had been done earlier with the Hurons. The French were puzzled and dismayed by the suggestion. There was behind it, they were sure, some inexplicably malign purpose. To send settlers down into the heart of the Iroquois country might be condemning them to death, but to refuse would undoubtedy be accepted by the belligerent redskins as an affront and lead to an immediate resumption of hostilities. The Iroquois had made it very clear that they never needed a pretext for war-making. Why, then, this demand that the French step like flies into the diabolical parlor of the spiders on the Finger Lakes?

The Jesuits were more disposed to the idea than the civil officials of the colony. Since the dispersion of the Hurons, they had been weighing the possibility of setting up missions among the Iroquois. Danger to them was an enticement rather than a deterrent. “The blood of the martyrs,” they cried, “is the seed of the Church.” When
Father Ragueneau wrote in the
Relations
defending the idea of establishing a colony by citing the practical reasons which might have influenced the Onondagas, he was no doubt repeating arguments which they had already used to urge an acceptance. He pointed out that the strong fort the French would raise would serve as a rallying point if the village were attacked by other foes. The Onondagas were thinking also undoubtedly of the training they could get in the use and repair of firearms, which they badly needed. The main reason might very well be, however, that the Iroquois man power had been so seriously impaired by the continuous fighting that they needed new blood and were hoping that Indian allies would follow the French into the Valley of Onondaga and agree to adoption into the tribe.

It was decided as a first response to this disturbing invitation to have a survey made. The Jesuits agreed to send Father Simon le Moyne, a wise choice, for this brave priest had already spent some time with the Mohawks and was “tenderly beloved by them.” Ondesonk, as he was called by his Iroquois friends, returned with a favorable report, despite the fact that danger had stalked him at every turn. Jean de Lauson, a Mazarin appointee, was governor at this critical stage and was finding the decision beyond him. He hesitated and temporized and finally decided to send more envoys. Two Jesuits went this time, Father Dablon and Father Chaumonot. The latter was an Italian and the possessor of a silver tongue. The headmen of the Onondagas listened to his harangues with both fascination and delight, but they began nevertheless to underline the felicity of their invitations with open threats: Come down into the Valley of the Onondaga or know our anger. Father Dablon returned to Quebec to report while Father Chaumonot remained to please the braves and assuage their impatience with the gentle fancy of his metaphors.

On receiving Dablon’s report, the governor could no longer evade the issue. The risk of establishing a colony in the Iroquois capital must be taken, he decided. The Jesuits planned to send four of their number, and Fathers le Mercier, Dablon, Ménard, and Frémin were selected. The fine temper of the men of New France had never before been so warmly displayed as at this point; between thirty and forty of them volunteered to go with the party into the valley of the shadow. They were organized under the command of Major Zachary du Puis, and on May 17, 1657, they set out in two large boats and twelve canoes.

The jealousy of the Mohawks, strangely enough, had been aroused by the decision of the French. If there was to be a settlement of the white men, why should it not be with them? Although a treaty of peace had been entered into and was still officially in force, they immediately sent a war party of three hundred braves down the St. Lawrence. After the departure of the boats for Onondaga, they passed Quebec in the stillness of the night and at dawn made a surprise attack on the Huron settlements on the island of Orleans. They killed a few of the docile Christian Indians and carried off more than eighty of them as prisoners, many of them women.

Jean de Lauson, most pusillanimous of all the long succession of governors, stood on the safe ramparts of the citadel of St. Louis and watched the war canoes of the Mohawks, filled with terror-stricken Hurons, their arms raised in supplication to the white gods whose religion they had embraced, pass the French capital in broad daylight. The jeering warriors raised their paddles in mock salute and even maneuvered their craft up and down in front of the town. As a final insult they made their captives stand up and sing.