CHAPTER IX.
CAUGHNAWAGA ON THE MOHAWK.—FATHERS FREMIN AND PIERRON.
AFTER Tekakwitha had lodged Fathers Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron for three days at Gandawague, on the bank of Auries Creek, they went to the castle of Tionnontogen, which it must be remembered had been hastily rebuilt some little distance west of its former site near the Nose, though still on the south side of the river. There, when the pagan festival and debauchery was over, a grand public reception of these ambassadors took place. The people of all the Mohawk villages were assembled for the occasion, Tekakwitha probably among them. In due time, after a most ceremonious welcome, Fremin rose to address them. To render his speech to the nation more impressive, he set up in their midst a great pole forty or fifty feet in height, from the top of which a wampum belt was suspended. He then declared, on the part of Onnontio, that in like manner would hang the first Iroquois who should come to kill a Frenchman or any one of their allies. At this all the Mohawks—men, women, and children—bowed their heads in silent awe, not venturing to look at such an extraordinary gift, nor to speak, until the most accomplished of their orators, having recovered his senses, rose and went through all imaginable mimicries to show his astonishment. As if ignorant of its meaning, he gesticulated and declaimed in the liveliest manner, though a man of more than sixty years of age. Then discovering its true significance, he seized his throat "with both hands in a frightful way, grasping it tightly to represent and at the same time impress upon the multitude about him the horror of this kind of death. After he had spoken, and at length, with a surprising eloquence, exhibiting flashes of wit by no means common, he finished," as the leading ambassador-priest tells us, "by delivering up the captives we demanded, and giving us the choice of the place where we would build our chapel, in the erection of which they proposed to go to work with all despatch. They, moreover, delivered up to us a Frenchman whom they had held captive for some time, and promised us the liberty of twelve Algonquins, partly of the nation of the Nez Percés, partly of that of the Outaouacs [Ottawas]."
Thus at Tionnontogen the labors of Father Fremin began. He was left quite alone among the Mohawks for nearly a year, at the mission of St. Mary's as it was henceforth called. He struggled earnestly during that time to maintain peace and establish Christianity. His companion, Bruyas (whose Mohawk dictionary is exceedingly valuable to students of the Indian language), soon went west to the Oneidas, among whom, little by little, he learned the Oneida dialect. Pierron, on the other hand, after a short stay with Fremin, bent his steps eastward to Schenectady. He visited the English and Dutch at Albany to renew the friendly intercourse of former days; and then this messenger of peace in the early part of the year 1668, travelled back over the great Mohawk war-trail, leading northward. He returned to Quebec to report to Governor de Courselle the progress of the embassy.
Fremin, left entirely to his own devices in the Mohawk Valley, gathered together the captive Christian Hurons, and then went steadily on, preaching, teaching, and baptizing. Once when the young warriors were torturing an Ottawa captive and preparing to burn him, contrary to the articles of peace, the Father by frantic efforts succeeded in saving him; but it was only by dint of rushing through the streets of the village with cries, threats, and entreaties. They could not withstand his zeal. He scattered the assembled crowd. He called down the vengeance of Rawenniio and Onnontio upon their castle of Tionnontogen, if they persisted in thus breaking the peace. The older men, roused at last by his words and actions, put a stop to the outrage. The unhappy victim was rescued from a fiery death, but he fell into a lingering fever brought on by the fright and the sufferings he had endured. In course of time he died, but it was not till he had been fully instructed and baptized by the courageous Father, who thus had the gratification of saving both body and soul.
On the 7th of October, 1668, Pierron returned from his journey to Quebec, and again passed through the lower Mohawk villages on his way to the bark chapel of St. Mary's, which had been erected at Tionnontogen during his absence. If Tekakwitha saw her former guest at that time, it was only as one among a group of Mohawk villagers who watched the missionary as he passed through the streets of the Turtle Castle. He was hurrying on to meet and to replace Father Fremin. This spirited and eloquent founder of the mission now went westward beyond Bruyas at Oneida, in order to make a missionary opening among the Senecas, who also desired a blackgown. This left Father Pierron alone in his turn in charge of the Mohawk mission. His graphic letters to his superiors in Canada during the next few years give many a vivid picture of what was transpiring at that time in the valley.
He was something of an artist. Before he succeeded in mastering the language, he spent much of his time in painting. He found that his pictures stimulated the curiosity of the Mohawks. In their efforts to get at the meaning of them and to explain them to one another, they learned, without realizing it, the very things he wanted to teach them; while he, by listening to their explanations, quickly acquired their language. As the blackgown's pictures were much talked about in the Mohawk villages at this time, and must have influenced the minds of Tekakwitha and her relatives, it will be worth while to give Pierron's description of one of his own productions. "Among these representations I have made," he says, "there is one contrasting a good with a miserable death. What led me to make this was that I saw the old men and the old women would stop their ears with their fingers the moment I began to speak to them of God, and would say to me, 'I do not hear.' I have therefore represented on one side of my picture a Christian who dies a saintly death, with the hands joined as of one holding the cross and his rosary; then his soul is carried by an angel to heaven and the blessed spirits appear awaiting it. On the other side, I have put, lower down, a woman broken with age, who is dying, and unwilling to listen to a missionary Father who points her to paradise; she holds both ears closed with her fingers; but a demon from hell seizes her arms and hands, and himself puts his fingers in the ears of the dying woman. Her soul is carried by three demons; and an angel who comes out of a cloud, sword in hand, hurls them into the bottomless pit. This representation," he continues, "has furnished me an occasion to speak of the immortality of our souls, and of the good and the bad of the other life; and when they once catch the import of my picture, no one presumes to say any more, 'I do not hear.'"
The "Relation" of the same year[40] tells us that Father Pierron accompanied this saintly skill with severe labors making regularly each month a visitation of the seven large villages, over a space of seven and a half leagues in extent, in order that no infant or adult sick person should die without receiving baptism.
Father Boniface now arrived at Quebec from France, and was immediately selected to go to the Mohawk Valley to second Pierron's zeal. We learn further, from the "Relation," that a bitter strife was then in progress: "The war [between the Iroquois and the nine nations of the Loups] humbles them by the loss of their people; but by preventing their permanent stay in one place, it also multiplies obstacles to the conversion of the warriors, who divide up into numerous bands to go singly against the enemy. The Agniers [Mohawks] and the Loups [Mohegans] have brought the war even close to New Orange; and when taken captive they burn and eat one another." The Mohegans and their allies had certain advantages over the Mohawks. They were more numerous; then, too, they were a roving people, difficult to attack, whereas the Mohawks lived in villages and had permanent homes. These last, in order to defend themselves, took care thoroughly to fortify the castles they were then building on the north side of the Mohawk River. As they seem to have had seven villages at this time, which is an unusual number, it is probable that they either had not entirely abandoned their old sites, or else had recently added several villages of captives.
It was while affairs were still in this unsettled condition that Tekakwitha went to live on the north bank of the Mohawk River, near the Cayudutta Creek at Caughnawaga, or Fonda, a few miles west of her earlier home. The French writers continued for some time after this to call the new castle of the Turtles on the north bank by its old name of Gandawague;[41] to prevent confusion, however, we will henceforth call it Caughnawaga, meaning "At the Rapids." That name still clings to a part of the present town of Fonda. The rapids of the Mohawk still ripple there as of old under the sharp-cut hill where, as proved by relics and historic references, the once famous castle stood. The Indians who went forth later from this Caughnawaga in the Mohawk Valley to Canada, carried with them the familiar word. Settling down beside the great rapids of the St. Lawrence River, the sound of rushing water boomed louder than before in their ears, and the name Caughnawaga grew into history there, as well as here. But there it is still a living name, and is passed from mouth to mouth as the well-known home of half the Canienga race; for Caughnawaga in Canada holds to-day that part of the Mohawk nation which in the wranglings of the white men—that is to say, the old French and Indian wars—sided with the French. Brantford, also in Canada, contains the other half of the same nation,—the descendants of Sir William Johnson's Mohawk followers, who were stanch friends of the English. To us Americans, falling heir to their lands, these Mohawks have left no living trace of themselves, though some of their brothers, the Onondagas and Senecas, still dwell in our midst. The Mohawks have gone from us, indeed, leaving us only a memory, all inwrought in a thick array of Indian names. Let us try at least to understand and to preserve these names, in honor of the brave race that once peopled our hills and valleys, our forests and streams.
In the Mohawk Valley, side by side with the name of Fonda, which comes to us from the days of the early white settlers, there lingers the still older name of Caughnawaga, which is dusky with the shadows of two hundred years, and even more. The mere name in partial use there at the present day has served to throw some light on the hill and the spring near the Cayudutta,—enough, at least, to have called to our minds a vision of Mohawk girls with their water-jugs, and to point in a misty way to the almost forgotten home of the Lily of the Mohawks. It is owing, however, to long, careful, critical research, and not to surmise, that the haze of many years has been cleared away at last from the actual site of Caughnawaga Castle. The map of Gen. John S. Clark (page 38) gives its position relative to other Mohawk villages. The plan here given, which was drawn by Rev. C. A. Walworth, shows more especially where this Indian fortress stood in reference to Fonda, on what are now called the "Sand Flats," west of the Cayudutta Creek. The spring which supplied the Mohawks with water is seen, distinctly marked in its cove, half-way down the hill from the castle, towards the Cayudutta. With this plan before us it is needless here to repeat the details of this locality already given in the chapter entitled "Tekakwitha's Spring." In our opening pages we journeyed all the way up the Mohawk Valley from Albany, with here and there a passing glimpse at the scenery, till we reached the castle site at Fonda, which was then fully described. Since that time we have travelled together through the highways and in the byways of history over about thirteen years of Tekakwitha's life. Here we are again at Caughnawaga; and now that we are following up the course of events in regular order from the birth of Tekakwitha, we find that she also has but recently arrived here, having just come to her new home from Gandawague. She can scarcely be called a child any longer, since she takes upon herself so much of the household care, and yet she is quite young. Her life is a busy one. She has taken an active part with the women of her family and their neighbors in building the new bark house which they occupy within the enclosure of palisades at Caughnawaga. Now, at last, they are quite comfortable.
SITE OF CAUGHNAWAGA CASTLE.
(Also called the "Mission of St. Peter's" of the Mohawks, where Tekakwitha was baptized in 1676.)
This is the way the Mohawks were accustomed to build their permanent lodges. They first took saplings, and planted two rows of them firmly in the ground. Then they bent the tops of them over across the intervening space, and tied them together. The shape of the house when finished was not unlike the top of an ambulance wagon. These arched ribs were supported and held in place by poles put in horizontally across the house, near the top. The whole was then neatly covered with square, overlapping pieces of bark, held in place by poles that were tied down over them. The holes in the roof for chimneys and windows were not forgotten, nor the loose pieces of bark to pull over them in case of rain. The Jesuits often found these cabins smoky and dark,—a severe test of their patience when engaged in literary pursuits, or even in reading their breviaries; but for the Mohawks, who had no such tastes, they were good enough.
When the house was finished on which Tekakwitha worked with her aunts and her neighbors, it made a secure shelter for a score of families, all lodged under the same roof and all on one floor. That floor was the bare ground. When the dwelling was fitted up into compartments on either side, with spaces down the centre for fires alternating with spaces for family gatherings at meal-time; when the matrons had assigned to each and every member of the household certain lodge-seats; when mats of rushes had been prepared, and robes of skins were in their places for bed-clothes on bunks along the sides of the house; when plenty of dried corn and smoked meat hung from the ridge-poles of the roof for instant use; when the heavy wooden mortar and pestle were made and stood ready for pounding the corn; when nice little dishes of bark and wooden bowls were at hand, while tucked away in corners were baskets of wampum beads all ready to be strung into belts at the proper time,—when all these things were in order, then at last, after the move from Gandawague on Auries Creek, Tekakwitha felt free to rest and breathe easily. Then she might glance leisurely at the patch of sunlight falling on the floor of the lodge through the doorway at the far end, and decide in her own mind how much time she had before the next meal was to be prepared. Perhaps she would go out to take a look at the strong new palisade that her uncle and the warriors had planned so carefully for defence against the dreaded Mohegans; or she may have preferred to sit quietly by the spring for a while in the beautiful little cove. Being so near the castle, it was comparatively safe from the lurking enemy, who might attack them at any time.
Wentworth Greenhalgh, an Englishman, who went from Albany to Caughnawaga in 1677, thus describes the castle: "Cahaniaga is double stockadoed round; has four forts [ports?] about four foot wide apiece; conteyns about twenty-four houses, and is situated upon the edge of an hill, about a bow shott from the river side." He then gives the situation and size of the other Mohawk towns at that time, and closes his remarks by stating that their corn grew close by the river. The Mohawks chose the flats or river-bottoms for corn-fields because they were fertile, and besides, they were natural openings, with no trees to be cut down and cleared away.
Much of Tekakwitha's time at certain seasons of the year was spent in these corn-fields; and she must have witnessed, if not taken part in, some of the exciting scenes described by Pierron, who was then making his periodical rounds through the Mohawk villages. He frequently gives incidents of Mohawk women who were waylaid and scalped or captured by desultory bands of Mohegans and other tribes with whom they were at war. The constant fear of death that overhung them gave to the minds of these Mohawk squaws a serious turn, and made them more willing than they would otherwise have been to listen to the warning words of the blackgown. More than one of them, haunted perhaps by the remembrance of his pictures and his morality games, which were no less ingenious for gaining their attention, came and asked for baptism. Pierron succeeded also in rousing the chiefs to a sense of the degradation into which the constant purchase of brandy and rum at Albany was sinking them. He reminded them that when once under its influence they were in no condition to repel the attacks either of Satan or the Mohegans. Both he and Fremin had themselves been sufferers during the drunken riots of the Indians. While the two Fathers were together at Tionnontogen, they wrote:—
"It seems sometimes as if the whole village had run mad, so great is the license they take when they give up to drinking. They have hurled firebrands at our heads; they have thrown our papers into the fire; they have broken open our chapel; they have often threatened us with death; and during the three or four days that these debaucheries last, and which recur with frequency, we must suffer a thousand insults without complaint, without food or sleep. In their fury they upset everything that comes in their way, and even butcher one another, not sparing relative, friend, countryman, nor stranger. These things are carried to such excess that the place seems to us no longer tenable; but we shall leave it only with life.... When the storm is over, we are left to go on with our duties quite peaceably."
This state of things continued for some time, as did also the raids of their enemies. It was in the midst of such bristling savage thorns as these that the Lily of the Mohawks grew up from childhood into womanhood. In her new home at Caughnawaga, during these stormy times she lived a sweet, pure life, all uncontaminated. At last the Mohawk chiefs, won by Pierron's reiterated arguments, began to realize that they had among them, in intoxicating drink, "a foreign demon more to be dreaded than those they worship in their dreams." They were induced to take measures against this excess in public council, "and, advised by Father Pierron that the most effectual means would be themselves to make their appeal to the Governor-General of Manhattan, the more prominent among them presented a petition which they had drawn for the purpose." This is the answer which the Governor gave to the request of the Mohawks and the letter of the Father which accompanied it:—
Father,—By your last, I am informed of your complaint, which is seconded by that of the Iroquois chiefs, the Sachems, the Indians, as appears more openly by their petition enclosed in yours, respecting the large quantity of liquors that certain ones of Albany have taken the liberty to sell to the Indians; as a consequence, that great excesses are committed by them, and the worst is feared unless we prevent it. In response, know that I have taken, and will continue to take, all possible care, under the severest penalties, to restrain and oppose the furnishing any excess to the Indians. And I am delighted to see such virtuous thoughts proceed from heathens, to the shame of many Christians; but this must be attributed to your pious instructions, for, well versed in strict discipline, you have shown them the way of mortification both by your precepts and practice.
Your very humble and affectionate servant,
Francis Lovelace.At Fort James, 18th of Nov. 1668.
Fremin and Pierron, during the two years 1668 and 1669, baptized one hundred and fifty-one Indians, of which more than half were children or aged persons who died shortly after baptism. Says the "Relation":—
"This should be considered a sufficiently abundant harvest in a waste land, and we may hope for much from such beginnings. We owe, under God, the birth of this flourishing church to the death and blood of the Reverend Father Jogues. He shed it at the very region where the new Christian church begins to arise; and it seems as though we are to see verified in our days, in his person, the beautiful words of Tertullian: 'The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.'"
That Pierron was fired with the spirit of Jogues, who founded this Mohawk mission in his blood, is proved by the following words, which he wrote in a moment of discouragement:—
"I have attacked drunkenness and lewdness, which are divinities of the country, so madly are these people devoted to them. I have combated these vices.... I have employed gentleness and vigor, threats and entreaties, labors and tears, to build up this new church and to convert these poor savages. There remains nothing more than to shed my blood for their salvation, that which I long for with all the desires of my heart. But after all, I have not yet observed in them those marked amendments which the Holy Spirit effects in those of the heathen whom he would put in the number of the faithful."
FOOTNOTES:
[40] An English translation of this "Relation" is given in the "Early Chapters of Mohawk History," by Dr. Hawley.
[41] See [Appendix, Note B].