[IV.]
A COUNCIL.
The North American savage, with an unerring instinct which republics might well study, sent his wisest men to the front to represent him.
A great circle of Indians, ranged according to their tribes, sat around Frontenac when the stone windmill trod its noon shadow underfoot. Te Deum had been sung in the chapel, and thanks offered for his safe arrival. The principal men of Montreal, with the governor’s white and gold officers, sat now within the circle behind his chair.
But Frontenac faced every individual of his Indian children, moving before them, their natural leader, as he made his address of greeting, admonition, and approval, through Du Lhut as interpreter. The old courtier loved Indians. They appealed to that same element in him which the coureurs de bois knew how to reach. The Frenchman has a wild strain of blood. He takes kindly and easily to the woods. He makes himself an appropriate and even graceful figure against any wilderness background, and goes straight to Nature’s heart, carrying all the refinements of civilization with him.
The smoke of the peace pipe went up hour after hour. By strictest rules of precedence each red orator rose in his turn and spoke his tribe’s reply to Onontio.[4] An Indian never hurried eloquence. The sun might tip toward Mount Royal, and the steam of his own deferred feast reach his nose in delicious suggestion. He had to raise the breeze of prosperity, to clear the sun, to wipe away tears for friends slain during past misunderstandings with Onontio’s other children, and to open the path of peace between their lodges and the lodges of his tribe. Ottawa, Huron, Cree, Nipissing, Ojibwa, or Pottawatamie, it was necessary for him to bury the hatchet in pantomime, to build a great council-fire whose smoke should rise to heaven in view of all the nations, and gather the tribes of the lakes in one family council with the French around this fire forever.
“Each red orator rose in his turn and spoke his tribe’s reply.”—Page 40.