But if the Dutch were thus an important factor in the Indian wars, the French became almost the controlling influence on the other side. Except for the strip of English colonies along the sea-shore, the North American continent north of Mexico was French. This was not the result of accident or of the greater energy of that nation, but of a systematic policy, beginning with Champlain and never abandoned by his successors. This plan was, as admirably stated by Parkman, “to influence Indian counsels, to hold the balance of power between adverse tribes, to envelop in the net-work of French power and diplomacy the remotest hordes of the wilderness.” With this was combined a love of exploration so great that it was hard to say which assisted the most in spreading their dominion—religion, the love of adventure, diplomatic skill, or military talent. These between them gave the interior of the continent to the French. One of the New York governors wrote home that if the French were to hold all that they had discovered, England would not have a hundred miles from the sea anywhere.
CHAMPLAIN’S BATTLE WITH THE IROQUOIS
By Reuben Gold Thwaites, LL.D.
From the time of the restoration of New France (1632) till the final catastrophe of 1759, Canada remained uninterruptedly French; and from the tide-water of the St. Lawrence as a base, French traders, soldiers, and settlers (habitants) spread westward, northward, and eventually southward. In the year of the restoration probably not over a hundred and eighty of its inhabitants might properly be called settlers, with perhaps a few score military men, seafarers, and visiting commercial adventurers. The majority of residents, of course, centred at Quebec, with a few at the outlying trading-posts of Tadoussac on the east, Three Rivers on the west, and the intervening hamlets of Beaupré, Beauport, and Isle d’Orleans. At the same time the English and Dutch settlements in Virginia, the Middle Colonies, and Massachusetts had probably amassed an aggregate population of twenty-five thousand—for between the years 1627 and 1637 upward of twenty thousand settlers emigrated thither from Europe. While the English government was engaged in efforts to repress the migration toward its own colonies, the utmost endeavors of the powerful French companies, their arguments reinforced by bounties, could not induce more than a few home-loving Frenchmen to try their fortunes amid the rigors of the New World.
With all his tact, Champlain had committed one act of indiscretion, the effects of which were left as an ill-fated legacy to the little colony which he otherwise nursed so well. Seeking to please his Algonquian neighbors upon the St. Lawrence, and at the time eager to explore the country, the commandant, with two of his men-at-arms, accompanied (1609) one of their frequent war-parties against the confederated Iroquois, who lived, for the most part, in New York state and northeastern Pennsylvania. Meeting a hostile band of two hundred and fifty warriors near where Fort Ticonderoga was afterward constructed, Champlain and his white attendants easily routed the enemy by means of firearms, with which the interior savages were as yet unacquainted.[21] His success in this direction was, through the unfortunate importunity of his allies, repeated in 1610; but five years later, when he invaded the Iroquois cantonments in the company of a large body of Huron, whose country to the east of Lake Huron he had been visiting that summer, the tribesmen to the southeast of Lake Ontario were found to have lost much of their fear for white men’s weapons, and the invaders retreated in some disorder.
CHAMPLAIN’S ATTACK ON AN IROQUOIS FORT
(From an old print)
The results were highly disastrous both to the Huron and the French. The former were year by year mercilessly harried by the bloodthirsty Iroquois, until in 1649 they were driven from their homes, and in the frenzy of fear fled first to the islands of Lake Huron, then to Mackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, finally to the southern shores of Lake Superior, and deep within the dark pine forests of northern Wisconsin. In the destruction of Huronia, several Jesuit missionaries suffered torture and death.
As for the squalid little French settlements at Three Rivers, Quebec, and Tadoussac, they soon felt the wrath of the Iroquois, who were the fiercest and best-trained fighters among the savages of North America. Almost annually the war-parties of this dread foe raided the lands of the king, not infrequently appearing in force before the sharp-pointed palisades of New France, over which were waged bloody battles for supremacy. Fortunately logs could turn back a primitive enemy unarmed with cannon; but not infrequently outlying parties of Frenchmen had sorry experiences with the stealthy foe, of whose approach through the tangled forest they had no warning. Champlain’s closing years were much saddened by these merciless assaults which he had unwittingly invited; in the decade after his death the operations of his successors were largely hampered thereby. Montreal, founded by religious enthusiasts in 1642, during its earliest years served as a buffer colony, in the direction of the avenging tribesmen, and supped to the dregs the cup of border turmoil.
Not only were Frenchmen obliged to huddle within their defences, but far and near their Indian allies were swept from the earth. The Iroquois practically destroyed the Algonquin tribes between Quebec and the Saguenay, as well as the Algonquins of the Ottawa, the Huron, and the Petun and Neutrals of the Niagara district. The fur-trade of New France was for a long period almost wholly destroyed; English and Dutch rivals to the south were friendly to the Iroquois, furnished them cheap goods and abundant firearms and ammunition, and egged them on in their northern forays; while toward the Mississippi, and south of the Great Lakes, Iroquois raiders terrorized those tribes which dared to entertain trade relations with the French.