Peeps at Many Lands: Canada

by J. T. Bealby

This brave and stubborn fight proved to be the salvation of the French settlements strung along the St. Lawrence. The Iroquois, although they were the victors, were so thoroughly disheartened that they turned their canoes about and paddled back by the way they had come, and for many a day the white men had rest from their attacks.

Thirty-two years later, in the autumn, when the woods were beginning to shed their leaves, and the men were gathering in the last lingering remnants of their harvest, another heroic deed was done, which still lives fresh and green in Canadian song and story. Twenty miles from Montreal, on the south bank of the River St. Lawrence, was the blockhouse of Verchères, enclosed within a palisade of palings. The lord of the manor was absent from home, and within the blockhouse the only persons were Madeline, the daughter of the lord of the manor, a girl of fourteen, her two little brothers, one of them twelve years of age, the other younger, and two old men-servants. The rest of the men were at work in the fields, outside the stockade, and at some distance from it.

It was a beautiful morning, and Madeline, attended by one of the old men, started out for the river. But before she had advanced very far her quick young eyes caught sight of a band of painted savages approaching the farm. She at once started to run back to the stockade, at the same time shouting a warning to the harvesters in the fields. And she had barely time to get within the shelter of the palisade and close the gates when the Iroquois were upon it. Both the men-servants were old soldiers, and as soon as the gate of the stockade was closed one of them went straight to the powder-magazine, intending to blow up himself and all who were inside the stockade, to prevent them from falling into the hands of the ruthless red men. Death by their own hands would, he was convinced, be preferable to torture and a horrible death at the hands of the savages. But Madeline Verchères thought there was a third alternative, and she checked the old man, and prevented him from blowing up the magazine.

Being herself animated by the loftiest and stanchest courage, she made her little garrison promise to obey her, and then proceeded to give to each a fixed and definite duty to perform. The fort possessed one cannon. This Madeline bade one of the old soldiers discharge at the enemy. The report alarmed them, but did not drive them away.

Almost immediately after this the beleaguered garrison saw a canoe approaching on the river. Madeline at once guessed that the occupants were women friends of her own. As there was no one else to go down to the water's edge to meet them, Madeline determined to go herself, for the two old men could not be spared from the defence of the stockade. The Indians, seeing the young girl going down to the river alone, were afraid to attack her, for they suspected a trap or stratagem of war. Madeline was therefore able to get her friends safely within the stockade.

But though there was no stratagem in this act, there was stratagem in the method of defence which Madeline adopted. She took care to have a relay of sentinels, challenging each other at stated intervals and at stated places; she made signals, which the Indians were able to see, as though issuing orders to a full garrison; she practised every device she could think of to deceive the enemy into the belief that the defenders were a numerous and undaunted band. And for a whole week this brave-hearted girl, with two old men, two little boys, and three or four women, kept a whole band of fierce and remorseless Iroquois successfully at bay. At the end of that time help, summoned by the escaped harvesters of the manor, arrived from Montreal, and the little beleaguered garrison was relieved.

CHAPTER XIV

THE HABITANT OF THE ST. LAWRENCE SHORE

The earliest white settlers on the shores of the St. Lawrence came from France, and the country of their adoption was known as New France. To this very day, not only the language, but the manner of life and most of the social institutions of the province of Quebec, are still emphatically French. And yet the French-Canadians, despite their passionate devotion to their race and their language, their religious creed (Roman Catholicism), and the customs and manners of their ancestors, manifest an irreproachable loyalty to the British Crown. When, soon after the middle of the seventeenth century, the new country was first settled, the land was granted by the King of France to French gentlemen, who became known as seigneurs, or lords of the manor. In return for these grants the seigneurs paid homage to the French King, and bound themselves by an oath to fight for him in time of need. They were also bound to have their land cleared of trees within a given time, otherwise the seigneury was to be taken away from them again. The seigneur in his turn granted slices of his lands to humbler arrivals from France—emigrants, as we should call them nowadays, though they called themselves, and are known to history as, "habitants." Their relation to their seigneur was something like that of medieval vassals to their feudal lord.