CHAPTER VII

A HAPLESS FRENCH GOVERNOR

Like all strong men Frontenac made many enemies. He was recalled in 1682, and General La Barre, a man of about sixty, was sent out in his place. La Barre had made a good record in the West Indies, but was entirely unable to handle the difficult problems which met him in New France. In an evil hour for the French, the Iroquois had conquered the southern neighbors with whom they had long waged wars that had occupied much of their time and strength. Now, they were free to turn on the Indian allies of Canada of whose commercial gains through the fur trade with the French they had long been envious. Frontenac before his departure had found the Iroquois unusually arrogant and unruly, although they had come to regard him as the greatest of all “Onontios,” as they named the governors of New France. The Dutch and the English had meanwhile made more or less successful advances to the Iroquois, who now fully realized their own importance from the efforts of both French and English to gain their support.

For two years La Barre struggled on, entangling rather than helping the situation. At length an Iroquois chief was murdered in a village of French Indians, and the crisis came. In the early spring of 1684, French canoes were plundered by the Senecas and La Barre felt that he must assert his power, or the Indians would lose their respect for the French. After making great preparations, he started with his soldiers and frontiersmen for the Seneca country by way of the St. Lawrence to Fort Frontenac and thence across Lake Ontario. The opposing current of the river was so strong that frequently the men could make no progress by paddling, but were obliged to tow the canoes or push them along with poles. Every few miles were rapids around which the canoes were transported and through which the flatboats were pulled with the greatest effort. The mosquitoes were “insufferably troublesome,” hovering over the men in such clouds that they could hardly see their way,--so one of the soldiers wrote. At Fort Frontenac, the men fell ill of a malarial fever which killed many and disabled more. La Barre repented more than once of entering upon an expedition that he now saw would be disastrous.

Whatever his former warlike purposes, La Barre was now eager for peace. He sent Le Moyne, a veteran interpreter whom the Iroquois called the “Partridge,” to the Onondagas asking them to meet him on the southern side of the lake, twenty miles or so north of Oswego. Le Moyne returned in a few days with the famous Onondaga chief, “Big Mouth”; in French this is “La Grande Gueule,” which the soldiers shortened into “Grangula.” Big Mouth had recently been conferring with the English, whose arbitrary demands had offended his pride; he was now in a haughty mood that boded ill for the French.

The Indian chief was accompanied by a train of thirty young warriors. As soon as he disembarked, General La Barre sent him a present of bread and wine, and thirty salmon-trouts. At the same time he gave him to understand that he was pleased at his arrival, and would be glad to have an interview with him after he had rested himself. To conceal from Big Mouth the weakness of the French forces Le Moyne represented to him that the most of the soldiers had been left behind at Fort Frontenac, and that the troops which he saw were the general’s guards; but one of the Iroquois knew a little of the French tongue. Strolling noiselessly about the tents by night he overheard the talk of the soldiers and learned the true state of affairs.

It was two days after his arrival before Big Mouth gave notice to La Barre that he was ready for an interview. The council was held on an open spot between the two encampments. From the picture drawn by one of the French soldiers we see the arrangement. La Barre was seated in state in an armchair with his Jesuit interpreter beside him and the French officers ranged on his right and left. The two lines of French soldiers formed two more sides of the square. Opposite La Barre sat the Indians with Big Mouth, their spokesman, in front, and between them in the centre of the square was placed the great Calumet or Pipe of Peace. The stem of this huge pipe was about four feet long, and the body or bowl about eight inches high. The bowl was of handsome red stone, well polished, and the stem of a strong reed or cane, trimmed with yellow, white, and green feathers. In shape it resembled a huge hammer more than anything else. The Indians used these calumets for negotiations as we use a flag of truce, holding them peculiarly sacred. To violate the rights of this venerable pipe was regarded among them as a flaming crime that would draw down mischief upon their nations. About this calumet were piled the wampum belts to be presented by the speakers.

[Illustration: Map of La Barre and Grangula]

La Barre opened the council, speaking boldly and with apparent assurance. He made no allusion to his original purpose of making war on the Senecas, but announced that the king, his master, had sent him there with a guard to meet the principal chiefs of the Five Nations at an appointed council fire. The Five Nations had made infractions upon the peace concluded between them and the French. Should Big Mouth be willing, as their representative, to make reparation and offer promises for the future, the great French monarch desired that La Barre and Big Mouth should smoke together the calumet of peace.

La Barre recounted the three offences of the Iroquois. They had robbed and ill-used French traders; for this he demanded reparation. They had brought the English to the lakes which belonged to the French, thus diverting trade from the latter; this he would forget, provided it did not happen again. They had attacked the Illinois, and still held many in captivity. “These people are my master’s children,” said La Barre, “and must therefore cease to be your slaves.” They must be sent home at once. He enforced each statement with a wampum belt, and ended every request with an announcement, as bold as though he had the whole French army at his back, that should these demands not be complied with, he “had express orders to declare war,” even going so far once as to say, “in case of your refusal, war is positively proclaimed.” He would gladly leave them in peace, should they prove “religious observers of the treaties,” but if not he added, concluding with a statement which he knew to be false, he would be obliged to join the governor of New York, who had orders from his king to assist La Barre in burning the five villages and cutting off the Iroquois.

While La Barre’s interpreter translated this speech, Grangula sat silent and attentive, gazing steadily at the bowl of his pipe. After the harangue was finished he rose and walked round inside the square made by the French and savages, five or six times. Then he returned to his place, and drawing himself to his full height began to speak. “Onontio, I honor you,” he said, “and all the warriors that accompany me do the same. Your interpreter has made an end of his discourse, and now I come to begin mine. My voice glides to your ear, pray listen to my words.”

He thought that the French captain must have started out from Quebec with some strange idea that the Five Nations had been wiped out by fire or flood. Nothing else, he implied, could make him set out against so powerful a federation with such an army. The Indian chief ironically assured the French general of the continued prosperity of the Five Nations, congratulating him that he brought the calumet of peace, rather than the bloody axe that had been so often dyed with the blood of the French. Then he spoke out boldly and directly, telling La Barre that he knew better than to believe the Frenchman’s pretence that he did not have any other purpose in approaching the lake than to smoke the pipe of peace with the Onondagas. He saw plainly that the Onontio meant to “knock them on the head,” if the French arms had not been so much weakened. The French soldiers were to be congratulated that the Great Spirit had visited them with sickness, for only thus had their lives been saved from Indian massacre. Even the women and old men and children would have attacked the French camp without fear, had not Akouessan (Le Moyne) appeared at the Onondaga village announcing that he was an ambassador of peace, not of war.

With this bold and telling introduction, in which he revealed to the French his full comprehension of their weakness and of their deceit, Big Mouth proceeded to consider the accusations of La Barre. The pillage of French traders he justified on the ground that they were carrying arms to the Illinois, and for this he flatly refused to give satisfaction, declaring insultingly that even the old men of his tribe had long ceased to fear the French. They had conducted the English to the lakes to traffic with French allies, just as the Algonquins conducted the French to the Five Nations to trade with them. Moreover, he claimed that they had a perfect right to do as they pleased in this matter. “We are born free-men,” he declared proudly, “and have no dependence either upon the Onontio [governor of Canada], or the Corlaer [governor of New York]. We have power to go where we please, to conduct whoever we will to the places we resort to, and to buy and sell where we think fit.” If the French chose they might make slaves of their allies, robbing them of the liberty of entertaining any other Indians, but the Five Nations would brook no such interference. The Iroquois attacked the Illinois because they invaded their territory, hunting beavers on their lands. Big Mouth met the reproof of La Barre with a bold stroke in return. He declared that in defending their own lands against the Illinois they had done less than the English and French, who without any right, had usurped the grounds they now possessed, dislodging from them several nations in order to make way for the building of their cities, villages, and forts.

Big Mouth closed his address with a warning. A year ago the hatchet had been buried in the presence of Count Frontenac at his fort, and the tree of peace had been planted. It was then stipulated that this fort should be used as a place of retreat for traders, and not a refuge for soldiers. Big Mouth warned the French to take care lest so great a number of soldiers as he now saw before him “stifle and choke the tree of peace,” and hinder it from shading both countries with its leaves. The Iroquois were ready to dance under its branches the dance of peace, and never dig up the hatchet to cut it down, unless the governors of Canada and New York, jointly or separately, should invade the country given by the Great Spirit to their ancestors. The Indian orator presented two wampum belts and sat down.

As soon as he had done, Le Moyne and the Jesuits interpreted his answer to La Barre, who thereupon retired to his tent and stormed and blustered till somebody came and represented to him that good manners were not to be expected from an Iroquois. It was little wonder that La Barre raged. The Indian chief had seen through his artifices, had yielded to none of his demands, and had contrived to assert the complete independence of his own tribes and their contempt for the French.

Big Mouth entertained some of the French officers at a feast, which he opened for them by dancing an Indian dance. There was another council in the afternoon, and the terms of peace were settled upon in the evening. These terms were in the usual form of Indian treaties. A “word” of the Iroquois was answered by a “word” of the French accepting it, and all disputed points were taken up in a series of such “words.”

The Iroquois offered to the French a beverage devoid of bitterness to purify whatever inconvenience they had experienced on their voyage, and to dispel whatever bad air they had breathed between Montreal and this council fire,--a beverage of which the malarial French were certainly in dire need. They reminded the French of the deep ditch dug the year before, into which all unkind things that might occur were to be cast, and requested the French to throw into it the Seneca robbery, to which the French agreed. Again the tree of peace was set up, each side solemnly adjuring the other to sustain and strengthen it. The French agreed to depart at once, and then,--and not till then,--did the Iroquois consent to renew the former treaty, “dispelling all the clouds that had obscured the Sun from their sight.”

Thus ended the grand expedition of La Barre. No real satisfaction had been gained by the French, but a weak truce had been made, and the Iroquois had taken the opportunity to assert boldly their independence of French and English alike, whom they treated as invaders of their rightful possessions.

Big Mouth and his men returned to their homes, and the French set out for Montreal. The few healthy men that remained manned the General’s canoes and took charge of the flat-bottomed boats in which the soldiers were carried. Of the dangers attendant on shooting the rapids in these boats one of the soldiers draws a vivid picture, declaring that he and his companions wished themselves back in the canoes that had brought them up, when they shot down such precipices of water as had never been heard of before. The main current wound its way in and out past eddies and rocks, dashing along as fast as a cannon ball, and the men steered as well as they could along this zigzag course, knowing that a false stroke of the oar would send them upon the rocks. But in spite of the discomfort and the danger, this soldier confesses from the safe shelter of Montreal that, though the risk was very great, “yet, by way of compensation one had the satisfaction of running a great way in a very short time.” And he closes with a word of sympathy for La Barre. “All the world blames our General for his bad success.... The people here are busy in wafting to court a thousand calumnies against him.... But after all the poor man could do no more than he did.”

PART II

THE STRUGGLE FOR POSSESSION