In default of active aid from the English, there were two policies open to them—to make terms with the French, and to detach from the French cause the Indian tribes of the lakes. They pursued both policies at once: they invited Frontenac to meet them and the English at Albany; he refused. He refused also to come to a meeting at Onondaga. They then sent a deputation to Quebec in 1694; and Frontenac offered a peace which should include the Indian allies of the French and exclude the English. Two nations of the confederacy were ready to accept these terms; the other three rejected them, and there was no peace. In the meantime the Iroquois intrigued with the Lake Indians, and, attracted by the prospect of English goods, the latter came near exchanging the French alliance for combination with the Five Nations and the English. To prevent this result, Frontenac and his officers had resort to infamous methods. Not only at the forest post of Michillimackinac, but at Montreal itself, the French compelled the wavering Indians to burn Iroquois prisoners to death, in order to make peace impossible, and joined themselves in the torture and butchery. Few worse instances of barbarous policy are recorded in history.
| Fort Frontenac reoccupied. |
Such means alone would not attain the desired end. Nothing, the Governor knew, would avail except acknowledged mastery over the Five Nations. The most obvious confession of weakness on the French side in Denonville's disastrous time had been the evacuation of Fort Frontenac; and never had Denonville's successor slackened his determination to reoccupy the post, which, if he had arrived in Canada a day or two earlier, would not have been abandoned. The time came in the summer of 1695. A force, secretly and quickly gathered, was sent up from Montreal; the walls of the fort still standing were repaired; and the Iroquois were startled by the news that the post, which they most dreaded, and which most menaced their confederacy, was again manned by a French garrison. Frontenac was just in time. The day after the expedition started, orders came from France that the fort should not be reoccupied; but he refused to recall his troops, and set himself to justify, by further measures, his disobedience to the home Government.
| Frontenac's expedition against the Five Nations. |
In July, 1696, he set out from Montreal at the head of over 2,000 men. The military strength of Canada was well represented; there were French soldiers of the line, Canadian militia, and friendly Indians. With the old Governor went his best officers—Callières leading the van of the march, Vaudreuil bringing up the rear. The force reached Fort Frontenac, crossed Lake Ontario, and, landing at the mouth of the Oswego river, worked their way up, by stream and lake and portage, towards the goal of the expedition—Onondaga, the central town and meeting-place of the Five Nations. What had happened before happened again. The Indians retreated into the forest before superior numbers, leaving the French a barren conquest over the smouldering ashes of the native town and the standing corn. The Oneidas' village and maize fields were also laid waste, and then the invaders retraced their steps.
| Death of Frontenac. |
Though the expedition was recorded by the French as a success, Frontenac had done no more than Denonville in his march against the Senecas, and a writer on the English side contemptuously refers to it as 'a kind of heroic dotage'.14 The show of force, however, seems to have had the effect of inclining the Iroquois to peace, of proving once more that the French were more active than the English, and that the arm of Onontio was longer than that of the Governor of New York. Early in 1698 came news of the Peace of Ryswick. The Five Nations were subjects neither of England nor of France, but both Canada and New York claimed them. Sturdily to the last, Frontenac repelled English pretensions and half-hearted Indian advances; but the hand of death was upon him, and on November 28, 1698, he died at Quebec, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.
14 Colden, vol. i, chap. xii, p. 202.
| His services to Canada. |
He had rid Canada in a great measure from the scourge of murdering savages. He had humbled the Iroquois to some extent; he had certainly won their respect. How he withstood the English in open warfare, and how he encouraged Frenchmen of his own bold type to explore and to claim the far West, remains to be told. He was a great man for the time and place, great in fearlessness, in self-reliance, in foresight, and in unflinching tenacity of purpose. The element of bombast and arrogance in his character helped him, as it helped other Frenchmen, whose names have lived, in handling native races. As a ruler of wild men, whether coloured or white, he was unsurpassed. The ruthlessness of his policy has left a stain upon his memory; but he gave life and confidence to Canada in time of trouble, and but for him there would have been no future for New France.