| Abandonment of Fort Frontenac. Recall of Denonville and return of Frontenac. |
The horrors of Lachine stand out in Canadian history as a kind of Sicilian Vespers or Massacre of St. Bartholomew. The upper part of the colony, Montreal and its neighbourhood, was paralysed with terror, and once more, for a moment, the Iroquois seemed to threaten the very existence of New France. It was not so in fact. Below Three Rivers Canada was safe, and the savages did not, as in old days, parade their triumph beneath the cliffs of Quebec. Meanwhile Denonville had already been recalled, his last act being to order in his panic the evacuation and destruction of Fort Frontenac; and the old Frenchman, after whom that fort had been named, came back in his seventieth year to save and to rule Canada.
| Callières. |
Another competent man returned with Frontenac, after a short visit to France—Callières, the Governor of Montreal. He was a strong second in command, and, when Frontenac died, was appointed to succeed him, and carried on his work. The two commanders arrived in the autumn of 1689, to find all in confusion and distress; but Frontenac was not forgotten. His presence gave confidence, and even among the Iroquois his name secured respect. It was his habit to see with his own eyes, to take his own line, to act with promptitude and decision. These qualities, when coupled with ten years' previous experience of the colony, were invaluable at a crisis. He might quarrel with Intendants, browbeat Councillors, and denounce Jesuit priests; but to the settlers he gave security, to the adventurous backwoodsmen of the West he was a congenial leader, and to the Indians he was the great Onontio, whose actions matched his words.
| Confidence restored by Frontenac. His dealings with the Indians. |
For the time he was not in a position to carry war into the Iroquois country, and the Iroquois would not listen to friendly overtures. He contented himself, therefore, with strengthening the forts and defences of the colony and with issuing proclamations to the wavering tribes of the lakes. It was one thing when La Barre or Denonville spoke, it was another when the words were those of Frontenac. His next step was to intimidate the English allies of the Five Nations, and to send three raiding parties into New England and New York. This was the kind of irregular warfare for which the Canadians were best suited. All three expeditions were successful; and their success, coupled with two defeats of parties of Iroquois on the Ottawa, by Du Luth in 1689 and Nicolas Perrot in 1690, both noted leaders of coureurs de bois, gave new heart to Canada. Before the summer of 1690 ended, the Indians of the upper lakes came down in force to trade at Montreal, and the grey-headed Governor-General of New France led the war dance, hatchet in hand, appealing to savages in savage fashion, as only a versatile Frenchman could.
It was a typical proceeding. French priests turned heathens into Christians, but left them on their savage lines. French hunters lived among Indians, adopting Indian garb and Indian methods; and the great Governor of Canada, who of all others was a ruler of men, led a yelling crowd in their native prelude for war, as sure in self-esteem, as sure in the esteem of his company, as if he were treading a minuet in stately fashion at the Court of Versailles. The English had no such address; but not having it they ran less risk for the future of their kind. They kept the heathen, for the most part, outside their pale. They did little to convert them. They did little to befriend or protect them. But the English race remained stronger and purer in its dour isolation than the assimilated and assimilating Frenchmen of what was then Upper Canada.
| Insecurity of the French settlers above Three Rivers. |
Raids and counter raids went on. Of the part which the English took in the fighting, something will be said presently. So far as the struggle was between the French and the Five Nations, the scene of action was either the Ottawa river, or the angle between the Richelieu and the St. Lawrence. Always important, as being the direct trade route from Lake Huron, the Ottawa was more important now, seeing that there was a larger population in Canada than in bygone days dependent on the fur trade, and that since Denonville's abortive expedition against the Senecas, the massacre of Lachine, and the evacuation of Fort Frontenac, the French had lost command of the upper St. Lawrence.
The corner of land lying between Chambly on the Richelieu and Montreal was the old battlefield of French and Iroquois. By this line, before Tracy's expedition of 1666, the Mohawks had raided Canada; by this line, once more, their war-parties came. Below the Three Rivers, at Quebec and in its neighbourhood, there was no fear of the Indians, though there was both apprehension and reality of English invasion, and distress from English blockade of Canadian trade. But in the upper half of the colony, of which Montreal was the centre, there was no security for life or property outside fortifications and stockades.