The White and the Gold (64 page)

This unending altercation brought the King to a decision finally. The power of Frontenac must be curbed. Accordingly, late in the year of the settlement of the Perrot-Fénelon affair, 1675, a new intendant was appointed in the person of Jacques Duchesneau, who had been serving the monarchy well in a financial post at Tours. To strengthen the position of the new official it was decided further that the filling of places on the Sovereign Council was to become the direct prerogative of the King. Frontenac might make recommendations, but the King would choose the men to serve.

Frontenac and Duchesneau fought from the outset. The haughty eye of the aristocratic governor held nothing but scorn whenever it rested on the plebeian intendant. Within a month of the arrival of Duchesneau at Quebec the two men were at daggers drawn. They quarreled over the right to preside at the meetings of the Sovereign Council, and it took five years to settle the point, the final resolution being in favor of Duchesneau. They accused each other of making personal fortunes out of the fur trade. Frontenac wrote to Colbert that Duchesneau was not only incompetent but a tool of the Jesuits. Duchesneau countered with charges that the governor was using the authority of his high post to buy beaver skins at prices below market value. Frontenac complained that spies had been introduced into his household to report on his actions.

It reached a point where the two men hated each other so violently that they instinctively took opposite sides on every question. Their adherents fought in the streets. The meetings of the Sovereign Council were given over to the bitter wrangling of the two high officials.

To complicate matters further Laval returned to Canada in 1680. He had been granted finally the right for which he had fought so long, and it was as the Bishop of Quebec that he stepped off the ship. He was now sixty years of age but he seemed much older, a bent and frail figure, hobbling rather than walking. His face was gray and gaunt, his hair had thinned to white wisps.

But if his eye betokened the haste of the passing years, it was with no diminution of intensity that it rested on the ashes of Lower Town, which had been burned to the ground a short time before, or when it turned upward and saw the Château of St. Louis on the
crest. The old man knew that he would have to struggle hard to get the Lower Town rebuilt on a better, sounder basis. He knew also that the hardest fight of his career lay ahead of him with the stormy governor who now occupied the château.

The King, on promptings from Frontenac without a doubt, had promulgated a decree the year before which had cut much of the ground from beneath the feet of the clerical leader. It had provided that the tithes should be paid to the parish priests, who were established in perpetuity, and no longer to removable priests, who came and went at the bidding of the bishop. This was the old controversy on which the King and Laval had taken opposite sides for so many years. The bishop finally had lost. He had taken his defeat philosophically, it appeared, but those who knew the intensity of his conviction of the need to keep the clergy of Canada under close control instead of allowing them to settle down in lifetime inertia in one parish were certain he was no more than biding his time. Sooner of later, when the proper opportunity arose, the fighting bishop would reopen the issue, prepared to face all the powers of earth.

Bishop Laval’s attitude at first was conciliatory. If there could be peace with the autocrat of the château, he desired it. Only if Frontenac proved as belligerent as he had been in the past would the head of the Church enter the lists against him. His first step was to make a tour of the country, traveling by barge and canoe to every parish in his huge diocese, observing with joy the evidences of growth in the population. He returned after months of travel a thoroughly tired old man.

Inevitably the bishop was drawn into the conflict between the two state officials. He ranged himself on the side of Duchesneau, realizing, no doubt, that the latter needed support in the duel with his high-placed adversary and would be willing to accept the bishop’s own terms. The indomitable will of Laval, the hauteur of Frontenac, the stubbornness of Duchesnau: here were the elements for a titanic battle. The colony divided into two camps. Frontenac had with him the men engaged in the conquest of the West, La Salle, Du Lhut, the leading fur traders. Laval and Duchesneau had the royal appointees on the Sovereign Council, the solid merchants of Montreal and Three Rivers. The old issues were brought out to add fuel to the fire: the brandy traffic, the proper control of the
coureurs de bois
, the right of state officials to engage in trade. Both
sides bombarded Versailles with their complaints and proofs, and at first it seemed certain that the governor would prevail. At any rate, Duchesneau received a letter which was designed to put him in his place. “Though it appears by the letters of M. de Frontenac,” wrote the minister, “that his conduct leaves something to be desired, there is assuredly far more to blame in yours than in his.… It is difficult to believe that you act in the spirit which the service of the King demands; that is to say, without interest and without passion. If a change does not appear in your conduct before next year, His Majesty will not keep you in your office.”

This threat did nothing to check the turbulence of the intendant. The squabbling grew even more intense, and Versailles heard stories of violence in Quebec which shocked the King and even ruffled the composure of Colbert. Frontenac, it was claimed, had summoned the sixteen-year-old son of Duchesneau to the château to explain his part in a street brawl and had struck the boy in an excess of rage and had torn his coat, making it necessary for the intendant to barricade his house in order to protect his offspring against the wrath of the governor. Frontenac seems to have ignored this story, but his friends denied it loudly and bitterly, claiming that it had been invented.

In 1681 Colbert placed the affairs of the French colonies in the hands of his son, the Marquis de Seignelay. In order to gain the favor of the new incumbent, both sides promptly bombarded him with great masses of memoranda bearing on all phases of the long dispute. This seems to have precipitated a decision on the part of the King. He had long since wearied of the endless bickerings in Canada and the barrage of charges and countercharges. There might be different levels of guilt, but both men, clearly, were at fault. Instead of deciding openly between Frontenac and Duchesneau, he again straddled the issue. He recalled them both.

On May 9, 1882, the King sent his order of recall to the governor, saying in part, “Being satisfied with the services you rendered me in the commandement I entrusted to you in my country in New France, I am writing to you this letter that you are to return to my court on the first ship which will leave Quebec for France.”

A gentle form of dismissal, indeed, but one that could not be misunderstood.

W
HILE man-made storms kept the little colony in unhappy agitation, a real storm was brewing which threatened the very existence of New France. Its rumblings could be heard in the teeming villages of the Senecas and in the council house at Onondaga. Every wind from the south carried whispers of war. The first muffled thunderings of the trouble had reached the ears of France’s allies, and so great was the dread they felt that the tribes along the Ottawa had been thrown into abject inactivity. Even in the Illinois country, so far away, the warriors scowled in fear and their women raised supplications to their ineffective gods. The evil wind blew about the ramparts of the Château of St. Louis at Quebec and carried its message of uncertainty and unrest through the narrow, sloping streets of the town.

Frontenac had known of the Iroquois unrest before his cantankerous quarrels with Duchesneau resulted in his recall. He had striven to continue and consolidate the peace by his usual methods of persuasion, summoning the Five Nations rather haughtily to a conference with him. The Iroquois held off at first. They were willing to confer with Onontio, they said, but he must come to them. He had sought the meeting, not they. Finally a great Iroquois chief named Tegannisoriens met the governor at Fort Frontenac to extend a formal invitation for talks to be held at Oswego, which lay well within the territory of the Long House. Frontenac succeeded in buttering up this brave warrior with a great wampum belt and a scarlet and gold jacket and a silken cravat. He seems to have succeeded
in convincing the delegation that the proposed meeting at Oswego was now unnecessary. At any rate, he returned to Quebec confident that he had stifled the discontent. Soon thereafter he returned to France under the cloud of dismissal.

But his hopes of peace had been built on a false optimism. Tegannisoriens had been honestly convinced of the wisdom of peace, but he was only one of many. The bitter chiefs who had no scarlet jackets or silken cravats to wear were still in favor of digging up the hatchet again after its long period of sequestration.

To succeed Frontenac and to avert the storm there now came the Sieur de le Febvre de la Barre, accompanied by a self-satisfied man named Jacques de Meules, Sieur de la Source, who was to act as intendant. With the colony rent into factions and the mutterings of war all along the rivers and the forest trails, they were indeed a sorry pair to gather up the reins of office. La Barre was sixty years old and had been a lawyer most of his life. Translated to the French West Indies in charge of the military and naval forces, he had won quite a reputation for himself in some trouble with the English (who must have been most incompetently led indeed) and had begun to swagger and demand the title of Monsieur le Général. He seems to have accepted the post with the intention of making a rich man of himself.

It is not surprising that evil days soon fell upon Canada. Frontenac, with all his faults, had been the possessor of a conscience for his responsibilities. La Barre was a boastful and greedy fraud.

La Barre proceeded to make a series of grievous mistakes. He had come to Canada with a preconceived dislike for his predecessor and a determination to stand in the way of La Salle. When he received a letter from the latter, informing him of the discovery of the mouth of the Mississippi, he openly expressed his disbelief and even wrote to the King, voicing his opinion that the matter was of small consequence. He succeeded in persuading the King of this and received a letter in which Louis said, “I am convinced like you that the discovery of the Sieur de la Salle is very useless and that such enterprises ought to be prevented in future.” Certain now that he had royal support, the new governor proceeded to detain the men La Salle had sent east for supplies and to refuse all requests for assistance against Iroquois aggression in the West. He even went to the extreme step of seizing Fort Frontenac and impounding all La Salle’s property on the pretext that the latter had not fulfilled the
terms on which it had been granted to him. Finally he sent an officer, the Chevalier de Baugis, to take possession of the fort that La Salle had erected to serve as his headquarters in the Illinois country.

His next false step was to set himself up in business with a coterie of Canadian merchants and to establish a great store of trade goods at Michilimackinac. The syndicate thus formed operated fleets of canoes and ships on the Great Lakes, and it was a matter of necessity for them to have peace. La Barre accordingly sent Charles le Moyne, the good old standby who could always be depended upon to accomplish whatever was demanded of him, to visit the Iroquois leaders at Onondaga and invite them to a conference at Montreal. As usual, Le Moyne succeeded in his efforts, and in course of time a delegation of over forty chiefs came to meet the new governor at a council held in the church of Bonsecours.

La Barre cut a poor figure in the negotiations that followed. He lacked the easy dignity of Frontenac and seemed to be very ill at ease under the unflinching scrutiny of forty pairs of intent black eyes. He showered the chiefs with presents to the value of two thousand crowns and urged them in return to respect the peace with France and at the same time refrain from attacks on the Indians of the upper lakes without notifying the French first. The chiefs agreed on both points, but in view of what happened later it is clear they had no intention of keeping their promises. The question of the western tribes was then introduced and La Barre demanded to know why the Iroquois had attacked the Illinois without provocation.

“Because they deserved to die,” declared the chief Iroquois spokesman.

The issue having thus been introduced, the delegation from the hostile tribes complained that La Salle had been supplying the Illinois with guns and powder; as he had indeed, that being the only way to hold the western confederacy together. La Barre had no hesitation in declaring that La Salle would be punished. He is even supposed to have disclaimed all responsibility for the actions of the great explorer and to have left the impression with the Iroquois that they had carte blanche to deal with La Salle as they saw fit.