The missionaries in the cantons and the little French colony at Onondaga were soon evidently doomed to a like fate. So evident was the hostility of the Five Nations, that Governor d’Ailleboust arrested all the Iroquois in Canada to hold them as hostages. The missionaries at Ganentaa saw their danger, and through the winter formed plans for escape. At last, in March, they prepared for a secret flight, and to cover their design gave a banquet to the Onondagas, adopting the kind in which, according to Indian custom, all the food must be eaten. Dances and games were kept up till a late hour; and when the weary guests at last departed, the French, who had amid the din borne to the water’s edge boats and canoes secretly prepared in their house, embarked, and, plying oar and paddle all night long, reached Lake Ontario unseen and undiscovered even by a wandering hunter. It was not till the following evening that the Onondagas, finding the house at Ganentaa still and quiet, discovered that the French had vanished. But the mode of escape was long a mystery to them, so cautiously and adroitly had all the preparations for flight been made.
Le Moyne, in similar peril on the Mohawk, wrote a farewell letter, which he committed to the Dutch authorities; but the sachems of the tribe suddenly sent him to Montreal in the care of a party, so that in March, 1657, the Jesuit missionaries had all withdrawn from the territory of the Five Nations, after their short but laborious effort to open the eyes of the people to the truths of religion.
The Iroquois then dropped the mask, and war parties swept through the French colony, filling it with fire and blood. Yet the influence of the missionaries had not been in vain. One able man, Garakonthié, had listened and studied, though his unmoved countenance gave no token of interest or assent. He became the protector of the Indian Christians and of French prisoners, as well as an open advocate of peace. Saonchiogwa, the Cayuga sachem, embraced his views, and in the summer of 1660 appeared at Montreal as an envoy of peace, restoring some prisoners and demanding a missionary for Onondaga. The Governor of Canada hesitated to ask any of the Jesuit Fathers to undertake so perilous a duty; but as the lives of the French at Onondaga depended on it, Father Le Moyne intrepidly undertook the mission. He was waylaid by Oneidas, but escaped, and reached Oswego. Garakonthié came out to meet him. Once more peace was ratified. Nine prisoners accompanied Garakonthié to Montreal, Le Moyne remaining; but so frail was the newly established peace, that war parties from Mohawk and Onondaga slew, near Montreal, two zealous Sulpitians, the Rev. Messrs. Vignal and Le Maître. Though aware that any moment might be his last, Le Moyne labored on at Onondaga and Cayuga among Huron captives and native Iroquois, many, especially women, having become Christians, and instructing others whom they brought to the missionary. His labors ended in the spring of 1661, when he returned to Canada with the rest of the French captives.
Again war was resumed, and though there were negotiations for peace, and even applications for missionaries, the French Government, weary of being the sport of Indian treachery, resolved to humble the Iroquois. Regular troops and a body of colonists were sent from Europe, and preparations made for a vigorous war. Forts were erected on the Sorel River and Lake Champlain to cover Canada and aid in operations against the Mohawks and Oneidas. The western cantons, influenced by Garakonthié, proposed peace, and their proposals were accepted. Then, in 1665, De Courcelles led a force, on snow-shoes, to the very castles of the Mohawks, and though the tribe was warned in time to escape, their flight had its effect on the other cantons. The Oneidas asked for peace, and the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas renewed their request. De Tracy, the Viceroy of Canada, led in person a force of twelve hundred French and one hundred Indians to the Mohawk country, and laid it waste, burning all their towns and destroying all their stores of provisions.
This exhibition of strength compelled the Mohawks to sue for peace. All the cantons united in the treaty, and all solicited missionaries. Once more were the Jesuits to undertake to propagate Christianity in the towns of the Iroquois league, which had been so uniformly hostile to the French and their allies. In July, 1667, Fathers Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron set out for the field of their mission work, trusting their lives to a Mohawk party. They reached Gandawagué, and there and elsewhere found Christians. A chapel in honor of St. Mary was raised, and Fremin, sending Bruyas to Oneida, began his labors seriously. Pierron, after visiting Albany, returned to Quebec, and in May, 1668, Onondaga was assigned to Father Julian Garnier. Then De Carheil began St. Joseph’s mission at Cayuga; and Fremin, leaving Pierron on the Mohawk, set out for the Seneca country to establish a mission there.
Missionaries were thus at their labors in all the cantons, reviving the faith of the captive Hurons, and winning the better disposed to the faith. At Onondaga, Garakonthié during his life was the great stay of the missions. He did not at once embrace Christianity; but after mature deliberation was baptized with great solemnity in the cathedral of Quebec in 1669, and persevered to his death, respected by English, Dutch, and French, and by the Indians of the Five Nations, as a man of remarkable ability and virtue. The Mohawk canton gave to the faith Catharine Ganneaktena, an Erie captive, who founded subsequently a mission village on the St. Lawrence; Catharine Tehgahkwita, a Mohawk girl whom Canada reveres to this day as a saint; the Chief Assendasé; and subsequently Kryn, known as the Great Mohawk: Oneida gave the Chief Soenrese. Everywhere the missionaries found hearers, and among them many with courage enough to throw off the old ideas and accept Christianity with the strict obligations it imposed. The liquor which was sold without check at Albany made drunkenness prevalent throughout the castles of the Five Nations, brutalizing the braves; and these degraded men became tools of the medicine-men, who, clinging to the old belief, rallied around them the old Pagan party. But it is a remarkable fact that the Jesuit missionaries, while they did not succeed in making the Five Nations Christian, overthrew the worship of Agreskoué, or Tharonhiawagon, their old divinity, so completely that his name disappeared; and even those Iroquois who to this day refuse to accept Christianity, nevertheless worship Niio or Hawenniio, God or the Lord, who is no other than the God preached by the Jesuits in their almost hopeless struggle in the seventeenth century.
The Christians in the cantons were subjected to so many annoyances and petty persecutions, that gradually some sought homes with the Hurons at Lorette; but when, in 1669, the Jesuits offered La Prairie de la Magdelaine, a tract owned by them opposite Montreal, the Iroquois Christians began there the mission of St. Francis Xavier. The opportunity of being free from all molestation, of enjoying their religion in peace, led many to emigrate from the castles in New York, and a considerable village grew up, which the French fostered as a protection to Canada. This mission in time was moved up to Sault St. Louis, and became the present village of Caughnawaga, of which St. Regis is an offshoot. About the same time Iroquois Christians gathered at the Sulpitian Mission of the Mountain formed a village there beside that of the Algonquins, and this, removed to the Lake of the Two Mountains, still subsists, the same church serving for the flock divided in language.
These missions, continually recruited by accessions of converts from New York, afforded the missionaries the best opportunity for improving the Indians, and the spirit of religious fervor prevailed. The daily devotions, the zeal and piety of these new Christians, won encomiums from the bishop and clergy and from the civil authorities.
The sachems of the league saw with no favorable eye this emigration which was building up Iroquois settlements in Canada; for at Quinté Bay, Lake Ontario, was a third, chiefly of Cayugas, among whom the Sulpitians became missionaries. Finding their own efforts to recall the emigrants fruitless, the sachems complained to the English authorities. Dongan, the able governor of New York, whose great object was to exclude the French from the territory south of the great lakes, took up the matter in earnest. He brought over English Jesuits to replace those of France in the missions in the cantons from the Mohawk to Seneca Lake, and offered the Christian Iroquois in Canada a tract at Saratoga, promising them a missionary and special protection. The fall of James II. prevented the successful issue of this plan; but the opposition made manifest in the English policy roused the old feeling in the Iroquois, and when De la Barre, and subsequently Denonville, marched to attack the Iroquois, the missionaries, no longer safe, abandoned their missions. John de Lamberville, at Onondaga, was the last of the missionaries, and he remained in his chapel till news arrived that Denonville had seized many of the Iroquois in order to send them to the galleys in France, and was advancing at the head of an army. His life was forfeited, but the magnanimous sachems would not punish him for the crime of another. They sent him safely back under an escort.
