Thirty-two years had passed since those ill-judged expeditions in which Champlain had given help to the Hurons against the Iroquois. The unforgiving savages had never forgotten the wrong. A new generation inherited the feud, and was at length prepared to exact the fitting vengeance. The Iroquois had trading relations with the Dutchmen of Albany on the Hudson, who had supplied them with fire-arms. About one-half of their warriors were now armed with muskets, and were able to use them. 1642 A.D. They overran the country of the Hurons; they infested the neighbourhood of the French settlements. Boundless forests stretched all around; on the great river forest trees on both sides dipped their branches in the stream. When Frenchmen travelled in the woods for a little distance from their homes, they were set upon by the lurking savages and often slain; when they sailed on the river, hostile canoes shot out from ambush. No man now could safely hunt or fish or till his ground. The Iroquois attacked in overwhelming force the towns of their Huron enemies; forced the inadequate defences; burned the palisades and wooden huts; slaughtered with indescribable tortures the wretched inhabitants. In one of these towns they found Brébœuf and one of his companions. They bound the ill-fated missionaries to stakes; they hung around their necks collars of red-hot iron; they poured boiling water on their heads; they cut stripes of flesh from their quivering limbs and ate them in their sight. To the last Brébœuf cheered with hopes of heaven the native converts who shared his agony. And thus was gained the crown of martyrdom for which, in the fervour of their enthusiasm, these good men had long yearned.
In a few years the Huron nation was extinct; famine and small-pox swept off those whom the Iroquois spared. The Huron Mission was closed by the extirpation of the race for whom it was founded. Many of the missionaries perished; some returned to France. Their labour seemed to have been in vain; their years of toil and suffering had left no trace. It was their design to change the savages of Canada into good Catholics, industrious farmers, loyal subjects of France. If they had been successful, Canada would have attracted a more copious immigration, and a New France might have been solidly established on the American continent. The feudal system would have cumbered the earth for generations longer; Catholicism, the irreconcilable enemy to freedom of thought and to human progress, would have overspread and blighted the valley of the St. Lawrence. For once the fierce Iroquois were the allies and vindicators of liberty. Their cruel arms gave a new course to Canadian history. They frustrated plans whose success would have wedded Northern America to despotism in Church and in State. They prepared a way for the conquest of New France by the English, and thus helped, influentially, to establish free institutions over those vast regions which lie to the northward of the Great Lakes.
CHAPTER IV.
THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
The discovery of the Mississippi by Ferdinand de Soto was not immediately productive of benefit. For nearly a century and a half after this ill-fated explorer slept beneath the waters which he had been the first to cross, the “Father of Rivers” continued to flow through unpeopled solitudes, unvisited by civilized men. The French possessed the valley of the St. Lawrence. The English had thriving settlements on the Atlantic sea-board; but the Alleghany Mountains, which shut them in on the west, allowed room for the growth of many years, and there was yet therefore no reason to seek wider limits. The valley of the Mississippi remained a hunting-ground for the savages who had long possessed it.
In course of years it became evident that England and France must settle by conflict their claims upon the American continent. The English still maintained their right, originating in discovery, to all the territory occupied by the French; and from time to time they sent out expeditions to re-assert by invasion the dormant claim. To the French, magnificent possibilities offered themselves. The whole enormous line of the Mississippi and its tributaries, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, could be seized and held; a military settlement could secure the mouth of the river; the English could be hemmed in between the Alleghanies and the ocean, and the increase of their settlements frustrated.
1671 A.D. Nicholas Perrot, a French officer, met, on the King’s business, a gathering of Indian delegates, at a point near the northern extremity of Lake Michigan. There he was told of a vast river, called by some Mechasepé, by others Mississippi. In what direction it flowed the savages could not tell, but they were sure it did not flow either to the north or to the east. The acute Frenchman readily perceived that this mysterious stream must discharge its waters into the Pacific or into the Gulf of Mexico, and that in either case its control must be of high value to France.