In July, 1648, the mission station of St. Joseph, fifteen miles from St. Marie, was utterly destroyed, the priest in charge was shot dead, and 700 prisoners were carried off. In the following year 1,200 warriors of the Five Nations swept like a torrent through the Huron cantons, fifteen native towns were attacked, ravaged, and burnt, and the brave priest, De Breboeuf, was tortured and slain. Other devoted missionaries shared his fate; the shepherds were slaughtered, and the survivors of the flock were scattered abroad. For the Hurons made little or no attempt to defend themselves; fear came upon them and trouble; they fell down, and there was none to help them. The fort at St. Marie stood, for even the Iroquois hesitated to attack armed walls; but its purpose was gone with the slaughter and dispersion of the Huron clans. The priests who still lived abandoned it, and spent a miserable winter with a crowd of Indian fugitives on a neighbouring island in Lake Huron. There too they built a fort; but famine and the Iroquois followed them, and in 1650 they left the country, taking with them to Quebec some 300 Huron converts. The refugees were settled on the Isle of Orleans; yet even there, five or six years later, they were attacked by the Iroquois, and at length they found a secure abiding-place at Lorette, near the banks of the river St. Charles. The rest of their kinsfolk were scattered abroad. Some were incorporated in the Five Nations. Others, driven from point to point, were found in after years at the northern end of Lake Michigan or at Detroit, and, under the new name of Wyandots, played some part in later Canadian history; but the Huron nation was blotted out, the Huron country became a desert, and the light which had shone brightly for a few years in the far-off land was put out for ever.
| Weakness of the French in Canada. |
Most readers of the story of the Huron missions will study it mainly as an episode in religious enterprise. They will note the heroism of the Jesuit priests—their faithfulness unto death, their constancy under torture and suffering not surpassed by the stoicism of the North American Indians themselves. They will mourn the failure of their efforts, the butchery, the martyrdom, but will record that all was not absolutely thrown away; for even in the lodges of the Five Nations we read that some of the nameless Hurons held to the faith which their French teachers loved and served so well. But this is not the true moral of the story. The significance of the events lay in proving the French to be weak and the Iroquois to be strong, in demonstrating with horrible thoroughness that the white men in Canada were powerless to protect their friends, in thus making more difficult what was difficult enough already, in retarding the progress of European colonization in Canada. The want of concentration, the attempt to do too much, the somewhat paralysing influence of the particular form of the Christian religion which the French brought with them—all these elements of weakness came out in connexion with the Huron missions; and meanwhile precious years were lost to France which could not be afterwards made good; for in these same years the English, not producing martyrs and heroes, so much as fathers of families, were taking firm root in North American soil, plodding slowly but surely along the road to colonization.
| The strength and ferocity of the Iroquois. |
The Iroquois were like man-eating tigers. The taste of human blood whetted their appetite for more. Fresh from the slaughter of the Hurons, in 1650-1 they fell upon the Neutral Nation, whose home was on the northern shore of Lake Erie, stretching to the east across the Niagara river. The Neutrals had held aloof from Iroquois and Huron alike, whence their name; but their neutrality did not protect them from utter extermination at the hands of the Five Nations. Over against them on the southern side of the lake were the Eries, second to none as ferocious savages, and known to the French as the 'Nation of the Cats.' Their turn came next, in 1654-5. They fought hard, behind palisades and with poisoned arrows; but they too were blotted out, and only on the south were left native warriors to cope with the conquering Iroquois. These were the Andastes, on the line of the Susquehanna river, who year after year gave blow for blow, until they too succumbed to superior numbers.
Nothing withstood the Five Nations; yet their fighting men were few, and their losses great. For the time they nearly ruined the French cause in Canada, but in the end their work of destruction rendered the triumph of the white man more inevitable and more complete. They broke up and killed out tribes, whose forces, if united to their own, might have overwhelmed the Europeans; and in doing so they sapped their own strength. They kept up their numbers only by the incorporation of natives who had learned to look to Europeans for guidance and support; and in course of time, fallen from their high estate, they found salvation not as leaders of red men but as allies of white.
| Mission of Le Moyne to the Five Nations. |
It seems marvellous that the confederation held together, and there were, it is true, occasional outbursts of inter-tribal jealousy and suspicion. Difference of geographical position tended to difference of policy. The most determined foes of the French were the Mohawks—the easternmost nation, supplied with firearms by the Dutchmen at Albany, and having easy access to the St. Lawrence. At the other end of the line the Senecas had their hands full in the Erie war, and were little disposed, while it lasted, to molest the Europeans. In the centre, the Onondagas, always few in numbers and already recruited by captive Hurons, were minded to attract to their ranks the Huron refugees at Quebec. So about the autumn of 1653, overtures of peace were made to the French, even the Mohawks for the moment dissembling their enmity; and in the following year a Jesuit priest, Le Moyne, was sent as an envoy to the Iroquois country.
The mission was notable in more ways than one. Le Moyne was the first white man to follow up the St. Lawrence from Montreal to Lake Ontario, and his journey marked the beginning of diplomatic relations between the French and the Iroquois. Thenceforward there was always the nucleus of a French party among the Five Nations, the elements of a divided policy in lieu of solid hostility to the French. Here was an illustration too of the value of the Jesuit priests to the French cause, as well as of the danger of employing them. None equalled these priests in the statecraft necessary for dealing with savages, but none were at the time in question so ready in season or out of season to promote a forward policy, involving future complications and dispersion of strength.
| Attempt at a French settlement among the Five Nations. |