But to return to Count Frontenac, marching up the steep streets of Quebec to Château St. Louis that October evening of 1689, amid the jubilant shouts of friends and enemies, Jesuit and Recollet, fur trader and councilor,—the haughty Governor set himself to the task of not only crushing the Iroquois but invading and conquering the land of the English, whom he believed had furnished arms to the Iroquois. Now that war had been openly declared between England and France, Frontenac was determined on a campaign of aggression. He would keep the English so busy defending their own borders that they would have no time to tamper with the Indian allies of the French on the Mississippi.
This is one of the darkest pages of Canada's past. War is not a pretty thing at any time, but war that lets loose the bloodhounds of Indian ferocity leaves the blackest scar of all.
There were to be three war parties: one from Quebec to attack the English settlements around what is now Portland, Maine; a second from Three Rivers to lay waste the border lands of New Hampshire; a third from Montreal to assault the English and Dutch of the Upper Hudson.
The Montrealers set out in midwinter of 1690, a few months after Frontenac's arrival, led by the Le Moyne brothers, Ste. Hélène and Maricourt and Iberville, with one of the Le Bers, and D'Ailleboust, nephew of the first D'Ailleboust at Montreal. The raiders consisted of some two hundred and fifty men, one hundred Indian converts and one hundred and fifty bushrovers, hardy, supple, inured to the wilderness as to native air, whites and Indians dressed alike in blanket coat, hood hanging down the back, buckskin trousers, beaded moccasins, snowshoes of short length for forest travel, cased musket on shoulder, knife, hatchet, pistols, bullet pouch hanging from the sashed belt, and provisions in a blanket, knapsack fashion, carried on the shoulders.
QUEBEC, 1689
The woods lay snow padded, silent, somber. Up the river bed of the Richelieu, over the rolling drifts, glided the bushrovers. Somewhere on the headwaters of the Hudson the Indians demanded what place they were to attack. Iberville answered, "Albany." "Humph," grunted the Indians with a dry smile at the camp fire, "since when have the French become so brave?" A midwinter thaw now turned the snowy levels to swimming lagoons, where snowshoes were useless, and the men had to wade knee-deep day after day through swamps of ice water. Then came one of those sudden changes,—hard frost with a blinding snowstorm. Where the trail forked for Albany and Schenectady it was decided to follow the latter, and about four o'clock in the afternoon, on the 8th of February, the bush-rovers reached a hut where there chanced to be several Mohawk squaws. Crowding round the chimney place to dry their clothes now stiff with ice, the bushrangers learned from the Indian women that Schenectady lay completely unguarded. There had been some village festival that day among the Dutch settlers. The gates at both ends of the town lay wide open, and as if in derision of danger from the far distant French, a snow man had been mockingly rolled up to the western gate as sentry, with a sham pipe stuck in his mouth. The Indian rangers harangued their braves, urging them to wash out all wrongs in the blood of the enemy, and the Le Moyne brothers moved from man to man, giving orders for utter silence. At eleven that night, shrouded by the snowfall, the bushrovers reached the palisades of Schenectady. They had intended to defer the assault till dawn, but the cold hastened action, and, uncasing their muskets, they filed silently past the snow man in the middle of the open gate and encircled the little village of fifty houses. When the lines met at the far gate, completely investing the town, a wild yell rent the air! Doors were hacked down. Indians with tomahawks stood guard outside the windows, and the dastardly work began,—as gratuitous a butchery of innocent people as ever the Iroquois perpetrated in their worst raids. Two hours the massacre lasted, and when it was over the French had, to their everlasting discredit, murdered in cold blood thirty-eight men (among them the poor inoffensive dominie), ten women, twelve children; and the victors held ninety captives. To the credit of Iberville he offered life to one Glenn and his family, who had aided in ransoming many French from the Iroquois, and he permitted this man to name so many friends that the bloodthirsty Indians wanted to know if all Schenectady were related to this white man. One other house in the town was spared,—that of a widow with five children, under whose roof a wounded Frenchman lay. For the rest, Schenectady was reduced to ashes, the victors harnessing the Dutch farmers' horses to carry off the plunder. Of the captives, twenty-seven men and boys were carried back to Quebec. The other captives, mainly women and children, were given to the Indians. Forty livres for every human scalp were paid by the Sovereign Council of Quebec to the raiders.
