The captives were marched away in triumph to the Mohawk country. In three successive villages Jogues was compelled to run the gauntlet; on one of which dreadful occasions he rejoiced his soul by “a vision of the glory of the Queen of Heaven.” Again, when consumed with hunger and thirst, an ear of Indian corn on the stalk being thrown to him, he found cause of exultation in the few drops of water contained in the curl of the leaf, because they sufficed to baptize two captive neophytes! The brave Ahasistari perished in the flames, having received absolution, “with all the courage of a Christian martyr and the stoicism of an Indian chief.” A young Indian convert too, having marked the sign of the cross on an infant’s brow, was struck with a tomahawk, in the belief that he was aiming to destroy the child by a charm.
Jogues expected a similar fate, but his life was spared; and roaming through the forest of the Mohawk, he carved the cross and the name of Christ on the bark of trees; and advancing thus to the confines of the Mohawk country, was ransomed by Van Cuyler, the Dutch commandant of Albany, on the Hudson. To reach Canada again Jogues was obliged to return to France. He was shipwrecked however, on the English coast near Falmouth, and falling into hands as merciless as the Iroquois, was plundered by wreckers even of the clothes from his back. Father Bressani, another Jesuit—who on his way from the Hurons was taken captive by the Iroquois, and having seen his companion furnish a cannibal feast, was stripped and ill-used till his life only was left—was saved also by the humanity of the Dutch.
In 1645, the French desirous of establishing peace with the Five Nations, a great assembly took place at Three Rivers, a little above Montreal, on the St. Lawrence, where were present the French officers in full uniform and five Indian sachems in all their bravery. Speeches were made in the figurative style of the Indians, with great professions of everlasting peace, the Algonquins being a party thereto. “We have thrown,” said the Mohawk orator, “the hatchet so high in the air, and beyond the skies, that no arm on earth can reach to bring it down. The shades of our braves that have fallen in war have gone so deep into the earth, that they never can be heard calling for revenge.”
Peace being assured, and having been preserved through one winter, Father Jogues desirous, of establishing a mission among the Five Nations, and being the only person who understood the language of the Onondagas, set out as its founder in the month of June. His mind seemed prophetic of his fate, and his last words to his Christian brethren were, “Ibo et non redibo!” I shall go, but shall never return. And so it was. Arrived in the Mohawk country, he was taken prisoner, on charge of having blighted the corn. He met his death with composure; his head was hung on the palisade of the Indian village, and his body thrown into the peaceful Mohawk River. Nor did the Jesuits alone satisfy themselves with penetrating to the east. Gabriel Dreuillettes, accompanied by an Indian guide, crossed the St. Lawrence to the sources of the Kennebec in Maine; and descending that river, reached a missionary station of the Franciscans on the Penobscot, established several years before by D’Aulney. Leaving these, his Christian brethren, he established himself in the remoter wilderness, where a chapel was built, and Indian converts gathered around him.
As regarded their intercourse with the Indians, the versatile French seemed to acquire much greater influence over these children of the forest than the stern and uncompromising settlers of New England. The remarks of the historian Hildreth on this subject deserve attention. “The French missionaries, better acquainted with human nature and the philosophy of religion, were more moderate in their demands and more tender in their treatment. Though themselves enthusiasts of the highest pitch, they asked not so much of their converts ecstacies and metaphysics as admiring reverence and ceremonial observances, which ever constitute the religion of the multitude. Themselves in the highest degree self-denying and ascetic, surpassing in this respect even their puritan rivals, they yet looked with fatherly indulgence on the human weaknesses and easily-besetting sins of their converts. These converts were admitted to all the privileges of French subjects; intermarriages became frequent—for prejudices of caste were much less strong on the part of the French than of the English—and thence resulted a mixed race; the Canadian couriers of the woods, boatmen and woodsmen, combining the hardihood and activity of the Indian, with the more docile, manageable and persevering temper of the French. There were dozens of Jesuit missionaries employed in New France, not less zealous than Eliot, and far more enterprising, whose travels and adventures show religious influences and theocratic ideas not less operative in the first exploration of the distant West, than in the original settlement of New England.”
After the display of Iroquois ferocity, and the murder of Jogues, of which that seemed the signal, war was resumed. The proud Iroquois determined on the destruction or dispersion of the Hurons and Wyandots, and the missionaries labouring among these nations shared their fate. On the morning of July 4, 1648, the village of St. Joseph, in the absence of the Indians, who were on the chase, and when only women and children remained, was surprised by a war-party of Mohawks. The village was fired, and the remorseless tomahawk began its bloody work. The terrified women and children flocked round the missionary, Father Daniel, who seeing the destruction which was at hand, hastened through the village, speaking words of Christian comfort and baptizing the dying. When the enemy advanced to the chapel, the calm, devoted preacher stood before them to oppose their entrance of the sacred building. For a moment they were awe-stricken, and paused as if to retire; the next they discharged against him a shower of arrows. Bleeding from many wounds, he lifted up his hands and voice, and overpowering the yells of the savages by his words of pity and forgiveness, he received finally his death-blow from a hatchet. The following winter, in the dead of night, a thousand Iroquois warriors attacked the village of St. Ignatius and murdered its four hundred inhabitants; the same fate befell St. Louis, in which dwelt the missionaries Brebeuf and Lallemand. Both could have escaped, but that their Christian zeal and love forbade them to desert converts who might need baptism in the hour of death. Faithful to the last, these servants of Christ, having spent their lives in works of love, died as martyrs. Brebeuf for three hours, and Lallemand for seventeen, were subjected to the direst Indian tortures, the stoic Indians themselves beholding with amazement the firmness of their victims. Wonderful was the Christian heroism of these missionaries. The history of man hardly contains any greater. Charlevoix says truly, writing of these men, “The Lord communicates himself without measure to those who sacrifice themselves without reserve.” And, speaking of them personally, he adds, “I myself knew some of them in my youth, and I found them such as I have painted them, bending under the labour of a long apostleship, with bodies exhausted by fatigues and broken with age, but still preserving all the vigour of the apostolic spirit.”
It had been the desire of the missionaries, after this Huron calamity, to have collected the scattered remains of the nation on the Grand Manitoulin Isle, in Lake Huron. But it was not accomplished. The Huron nation was never again to be collected, and the station on the Manitoulin was abandoned.
The pride of the Iroquois increased with their successes, even as the zeal of the missionaries grew with their sufferings, and the conversion of the formidable Five Nations became now the object of their desire; but this object was too vast even for their accomplishment. The Iroquois, possessed of fire-arms obtained from the Dutch, now also their partisans, resolved on the extermination of the French, and their war-parties triumphed at Three Rivers and advanced to Quebec, killing the governor at the one place, and a priest at the other. “No frightful solitude of the wilderness,” says Bancroft, “no impenetrable recess of the frozen north, was safe against the passions of the Five Nations. Their chiefs, animated not only by cruelty but by pride, were resolved that no nation should role but themselves.”
In this state of terrible alarm, beset by enemies as powerful as they were remorseless, New France despatched one of her council and Father Dreuillettes, the missionary of the north-east, to ask aid from the united colonies of New England against the Mohawks; but “the story of their sufferings, and their murdered missionaries, were listened to with indifference: no aid could be obtained from that quarter.” Nothing was left for them but to suffer or to help themselves, and after they had remained for about three years in this state of constant alarm, the Iroquois consented to peace.
According to Indian custom, numbers of the vanquished Hurons had been adopted into the nation and families of the conquerors; and many of these carried thus with them into the bosom of the Five Nations, affection for the French, and some knowledge of Christianity; and when Father Le Moyne was sent as envoy to ratify the treaty of peace, he was welcomed by a party of his old Huron friends. This circumstance awoke in his soul the hope that those mighty nations might be converted to Christianity, and the whole west become subject to France. A vaster field was now open for missionary labour than before. Le Moyne established himself on Mohawk River, and two others, Dablon and Chaumonot, an Italian priest and an old missionary among the Hurons, took up their quarters at Onondaga, the village of that nation, where they were warmly welcomed. They were welcomed also by the Oneidas. A grand assembly of the nations gathered, “under the open sky and among the primeval forests,” to receive the emissaries of Christ. Chaumonot addressed them with all the fervour and impassioned eloquence of an Italian orator, and his Indian audience were transported out of themselves. “Happy land!” sang the excited chiefs, “happy land, in which the French are to dwell! Glad tidings! glad tidings! It is well that we have spoken together; it is well that we have a heavenly message!”