Between the night and morning of August 4 and 5, in 1689, a terrific thunderstorm had broken over Montreal. Amidst the crack of hail and crash of falling trees, with the thunder reverberating from the mountain like cannonading, whilst the frightened people stood gazing at the play of lightning across their windows, fourteen hundred Iroquois warriors landed behind Montreal, beached their canoes, and stole upon the settlement. What next followed beggars description. Nothing else like it occurs in the history of Canada. For years this summer was to be known as "the Year of the Massacre."
Before the storm subsided, the Iroquois had stationed themselves in circles round every house outside the walls of Montreal. At the signal of a whistle, the warriors fell on the settlement like beasts of prey. Neither doors nor windows were fastened in that age, and the people, deep in sleep after the vigil of the storm, were dragged from their beds before they were well awake. Men, women, and children fell victims to such ingenuity of cruelty as only savage vengeance could conceive. Children were dashed to pieces before their parents' eyes; aged parents tomahawked before struggling sons and daughters; fathers held powerless that they might witness the tortures wreaked on wives and daughters. Homes which had heard some alarm and were on guard were set on fire, and those who perished in the flames died a merciful death compared to those who fell in the hands of the victors. By daybreak two hundred people had been wantonly butchered. A hundred and fifty more had been taken captives. As if their vengeance could not be glutted, the Iroquois crossed the river opposite Montreal, and, in full sight of the fort, weakly garrisoned and paralyzed with fright, spent the rest of the week, day and night, torturing the white captives. By night victims could be seen tied to the torture stake amid the wreathing flames, with the tormentors dancing round the camp fire in maniacal ferocity. Denonville was simply powerless. He lost his head, and seemed so panic-stricken that he forbade even volunteer bands from rallying to the rescue. For two months the Iroquois overran Canada unchecked. Indeed, it was years before the boldness engendered by this foray became reduced to respect for French authority. Settlement after settlement, the marauders raided. From Montreal to Three Rivers crops went up in flame, and the terrified habitants came cowering with their families to the shelter of the palisades.
WILLIAM OF ORANGE
In the midst of this universal terror came the country's savior. Frontenac had been recalled because he quarreled with the intendant and he quarreled with the Jesuits and he quarreled with the fur traders; but his bitterest enemies did not deny that he could put the fear of the Lord and respect for the French into the Iroquois' heart. Arbitrary he was as a czar, but just always! To be sure he mended his fortunes by personal fur trade, but in doing so he cheated no man; and he worked no injustice, and he wrought in all things for the lasting good of the country. Homage he demanded as to a king, once going so far as to drive the Sovereign Councilors from his presence with the flat of a sword; but he firmly believed and he had publicly proved that he was worthy of homage, and that the men who are forever shouting "liberty—liberty and the people's rights," are frequently wolves in sheep's clothing, eating out the vitals of a nation's prosperity.
Here, then, was the haughty, hot-headed, aggressive Frontenac, sent back in his old age to restore the prestige of New France, where both La Barre the grafter, and Denonville the courteous Christian gentleman, had failed.
To this period of Iroquois raids belongs one of the most heroic episodes in Canadian life. The only settlers who had not fled to the protection of the palisaded forts were the grand old seigniors, the new nobility of New France, whose mansions were like forts in themselves, palisaded, with stone bastions and water supply and yards for stock and mills inside the walls. Here the seigniors, wildwood knights of a wilderness age, held little courts that were imitations of the Governor's pomp at Quebec. Sometimes during war the seignior's wife and daughters were reduced to plowing in the fields and laboring with the women servants at the harvest; but ordinarily the life at the seigniory was a life of petty grandeur, with such style as the backwoods afforded. In the hall or great room of the manor house was usually an enormous table used both as court of justice by the seignior and festive board. On one side was a huge fireplace with its homemade benches, on the other a clumsily carved chiffonier loaded with solid silver. In the early days the seignior's bedstead might be in the same room,—an enormous affair with panoplies of curtains and counterpanes of fur rugs and feather mattresses, so high that it almost necessitated a ladder. But in the matter of dress the rude life made up in style what it lacked in the equipments of a grand mansion.
The bishop's description of the women's dresses I have already given, though at this period the women had added to the "sins" of bows and furbelows and frills, which the bishop deplored, the yet more heinous error of such enormous hoops that it required fine maneuvering on the part of a grand dame to negotiate the door of the family coach; and however pompous the seignior's air, it must have suffered temporary eclipse in that coach from the hoops of his spouse and his spouse's daughters. As for the seignior, when he was not dressed in buckskin, leading bushrovers on raids, he appeared magnificent in all the grandeur that a 20 pounds wig and Spanish laces and French ruffles and imported satins could lend his portly person; and if the figure were not portly, one may venture to guess, from the pictures of stout gentlemen in the quilted brocades of the period, that padding made up what nature lacked.
Such a seigniory was Verchères, some twenty miles from Montreal, on the south side of the St. Lawrence. M. de Verchères was an officer in one of the regiments, and chanced to be absent from home during October of 1696, doing duty at Quebec. Madame de Verchères was visiting in Montreal. Strange as it may seem, the fort and the family had been left in charge of the daughter, Madeline, at this time only fourteen years of age. At eight o'clock on the morning of October 22 she had gone four hundred paces outside the fort gates when she heard the report of musket firing. The rest of the story may be told in her own words: