To any one who knows the region of Canada's capital the scene can easily be recalled: the long string of canoes gliding through the gray morning like phantoms; Rideau Falls shimmering on the left like a snowy curtain; the dense green of Gatineau Point as the birch craft swerved across the river inshore to the right; the wooded heights, now known as Parliament Hill, jutting above the river mist, the new foliage of the topmost trees just tipped with the first primrose shafts of sunrise; then the vague stir and unrest in the air as the sun came up till the gray fog became rose mist shot with gold, and rose like a curtain to the upper airs, revealing the angry, tempest-tossed cataract straight ahead, hurtling over the rocks of the Chaudière in walls of living waters. Where the lumber piles of Hull on the right to-day jut out as if to span Ottawa River to Parliament Hill, the voyageurs would land to portage across to Lake Du Chêne.
Just as they sheered inshore the morning air was split by a hideous din of guns and war whoops. The Iroquois had been lying in ambush at the portage. The Algonquins' bravado now became a panic. They abandoned canoes and baggage, threw themselves behind a windfall of trees, and poured a steady rain of bullets across the portage in order to permit the other canoes to come ashore. When the fog lifted, baggage and canoes lay scattered on the shore. Behind one barricade of logs lay the French and Algonquins; behind another, the Iroquois; and woe betide the warrior who showed his head or dared to cross the open. All day the warriors kept up their cross fire. Thirteen Algonquins had perished, and the French were only waiting a chance to abandon the voyage. Luckily, that night was pitch-dark. The Algonquin leader blew a long low call through his birch trumpet. All hands rallied and rushed for the boats to cross the river. All the Frenchmen's baggage had been lost. Of the white adventurers every soul turned back but Groseillers and Radisson.
The Algonquins now made up in caution what they had at first lacked. They voyaged only by night and hid by day. No camp fires were kindled. No muskets were fired even for game; and the paddlers were presently reduced to food of tripe de roche—green moss scraped from rocks. Birch canoes could not cross Lake Huron in storm; so the Indians kept close to the south shore of Georgian Bay, winding among the pink granite islands, past the ruined Jesuit missions across to the Straits of Mackinac and on down Lake Michigan to Green Bay.
"But our mind was not to stay here," relates Radisson, "but to know the remotest people." Sometime between April and July of 1659 the two white men had followed the Indian hunters across what is now the state of Wisconsin to "a mighty river like the St. Lawrence." They had found the Mississippi, first of white men to view the waters since the treasure-seeking Spaniards of the south crossed the river. They had penetrated the Unknown. They had discovered the Great Northwest—a world boundlessly vast; so vast no man forever after in the history of the human race need be dispossessed of his share of the earth. Something of the importance of the discovery seems to have impressed Radisson; for he speaks of the folly of the European nations fighting for sterile, rocky provinces when here is land enough for all—land enough to banish poverty.
The two Frenchmen's wanderings with the tribes of the prairie—whether those tribes were Omahas or Iowas or Mandanes or Mascoutins or Sioux—cannot be told here. It would fill volumes. I have told the story fully elsewhere. By spring of 1660 Radisson and Groseillers are back at Sault Ste. Marie, having gathered wealth of beaver peltries beyond the dreams of avarice; but scouts have come to the Sault with ominous news—news of one thousand Iroquois braves on the warpath to destroy every settlement in New France. Hourly, daily, weekly, have Quebec and Three Rivers and Montreal been awaiting the blow.
The Algonquins refuse to go down to Quebec with Radisson and Groseillers. "Fools," shouts Radisson in full assembly of their chiefs squatting round a council fire, "are you going to allow the Iroquois to destroy you as they destroyed the Hurons? How are you going to fight the Iroquois unless you come down to Quebec for guns? Do you want to see your wives and children slaves? For my part, I prefer to die like a man rather than live a slave."
The chiefs were shamed out of their cowardice. Five hundred young warriors undertook to conduct the two white men down to Quebec. They embarked at once, scouts to the fore reconnoitering all portages, and guards on duty wherever the boats landed. A few Iroquois braves were seen near the Long Sault Rapids, but they took to their heels in such evident fright that Radisson was puzzled to know what had become of the one thousand braves on the warpath. Carrying the beaver pelts along the portage so they could be used as shields in case of attack, the Algonquins came to the foot of the Long Sault Rapids near Montreal, and saw plainly what had happened to the invading warriors. A barricade of logs the shape of a square fort stood on the shore. From the pickets hung the scalps of dead Indians and on the sands lay the charred remains of white men. Every tree for yards round was peppered with bullet holes. Here was a charred stake where some victim had been tortured; there the smashed remnants of half-burnt canoes; and at another point empty powder barrels. A terrible battle had been waged but a week before. Radisson could trace, inside the barricade of logs, holes scooped in the sand where the besieged, desperate with thirst, had drunk the muddy water. At intervals in the palisades openings had been hacked, and these were blood stained, as if the scene of the fiercest fighting. Bark had been burnt from the logs in places, where the assailants had set fire to the fort.
From Indian refugees at Montreal, Radisson learned details of the fight. It was the battle most famous in early Canadian annals—the Long Sault. All winter Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal had cowered in terror of the coming Iroquois. In imagination the beleaguered garrisons foresaw themselves martyrs of Mohawk ferocity. It was learned that seven hundred of the Iroquois warriors were hovering round the Richelieu opposite Three Rivers. The rest of the braves had passed the winter man-hunting in the Huron country, and were in spring descending the Ottawa to unite with the lower band.
Week after week Quebec awaited the blow; but the blow never fell, for at Montreal was a little band of seventeen heroes, led by a youth of twenty-five,—Adam Dollard,—who longed to wipe out the stain of a misspent boyhood by some glorious exploit in the service of the Holy Cross.
When word came that the upper foragers were descending from the country of the Hurons to unite with the lower Iroquois against Montreal, Dollard proposed to go up the Ottawa with a picked party of chosen fighters, waylay the Iroquois at the foot of the Long Sault Rapids, and so prevent the attack on Montreal. Sixteen young men volunteered to join him. Charles Le Moyne, now acting as interpreter at Montreal, begged the young heroes to delay till reënforcements could be obtained: seventeen Frenchmen against five hundred Mohawks meant certain death; but delay meant risk, and Dollard coveted nothing more than a death of glory. At the chapel of the Hôtel Dieu the young heroes made what they knew would certainly be their last confession, bade eternal farewell to friends, and with crushed corn for provisions set out in canoes for the upper Ottawa. May 1, they came to the foot of the Long Sault. Here a barricade of logs had been erected in some skirmish the year before, and here, too, was the usual camping place of the Iroquois as their canoes came bounding down the swift waters of the Ottawa. Dollard and his brave boys landed, slung their kettles for the night meal, and sent scouts upstream to forewarn when the Iroquois came. The night was passed in prayer. Next day arrived unexpected reënforcements. Two bands of forty Hurons and four Algonquins, under a brave Huron convert of the Christian Islands, had asked Maisonneuve's permission to join Dollard and wreak their pent vengeance on the Mohawks. Early one morning the scouts reported five Iroquois canoes coming slowly downstream, and two hundred more warriors behind. There was not even care to bring a supply of water inside the barricade or remove kettles from the sticks. Posted in ambush, the young soldiers fired as soon as the first canoes came within range. This put the rest of the Iroquois on guard. The whites rushed for the shelter of their barricade. The Indians dashed to erect a fort of their own. Inside Dollard's palisades all was activity. Cracks were plastered up with mud between logs, four marksmen with double stands of arms posted at each loophole, and a big musketoon leveled straight for the Iroquois redoubt. The Iroquois rushed out yelling like fiends, and jumping sideways as they advanced, to avoid becoming targets; but the scattering fire of the musketoon caught them full abreast and a Seneca chief fell dead. The Iroquois then broke up Dollard's canoes and tried to set fire to the logs; but again the musketoon's scattering bullets mowed a swath of death in the advancing ranks, and for a second time the red warriors sought shelter behind the logs. Probably to obtain truce till they could send word to the other warriors on the Richelieu, the Iroquois then hung out a flag of parley; but the Huron chief knew what peace with an Iroquois meant. He it was, on the Christian Islands, who, when the Iroquois had proposed a similar parley for the purpose of massacring the Hurons, invited their chiefs into the Huron camp and brained them for their treachery. Dollard's band made answer to the flag hoisted above the Iroquois pickets by rushing out, securing the head of the Seneca chief, and elevating it on a pike above their fort.