Jeune Lorette is situated about eight miles north-west of Quebec, upon the beautiful, romantic stream called the St. Charles, which rushes down many a picturesque gorge, and winds through many pleasant meadows, in its course of some twenty miles from Lake St. Charles away up in the hills to the St. Roch suburb of Quebec. Here it assumes the character of a deep, tortuous dock, incumbered with the débris of many ship-yards, and reflecting the skeleton shapes of big-ribbed merchantmen on the stocks. Here, too, it is generally called the Little River; probably to distinguish it from the great River St. Lawrence, into which it oozes at this point.
But higher up, as I have said, the St. Charles is romantic and rushes on its fate. At Lorette, it divides the village in twain: a western section, for the most part peopled by French-Canadian habitans; an eastern one, inhabited by half-breed Indians, a remnant of the once powerful Hurons of old.
These Canadian Hurons are not, in their present condition, corroborative of the Cooper specifications of Indian life: rather the contrary, in fact. There is a wing of them—a wing without feathers, indeed—settled down at Amherstburgh, on the far western marge of Lake Erie, in Canada, quite six hundred miles away from their brethren of Lorette. When shooting woodcock once in that district, I entered the comfortable log farm-house of the chief of the settlement, whose name was Martin. He was a fat, rather Dutch-looking Indian, but still active and industrious,—for a man who is an Indian and fat. I asked Mr. Martin if he hunted much; to which he replied, No, he did not,—adding, that he never was far into the woods but once in his life, and that was on his own lot of a hundred acres of bush, in which he was lost, on that occasion, for two days.
Among the Hurons of Lorette there are a few young men who hunt moose and caribou in the proper season; but the men, generally speaking, as well as the women, are engaged in the manufacture of snow-shoes and moccasons,—articles for which there is a great demand in Lower Canada. Philippe Vincent, a chieftain and shoemaker of the tribe, told me that he had disposed of twelve hundred dollars' worth of these articles, on a trip to Montreal, from which he had just returned. Many articles of Indian fancy-work are also manufactured by them: beaded pouches for tobacco, bark-work knick-knacks, and curious racks made of the hoofs of the moose, and hung upon the wall to stick small articles into.
On the profits of this work many of them live in comfort,—nay, in luxury. Paul Vincent, a cousin of Philippe mentioned above, and, like him, a chief of the tribe and a renowned builder of snow-shoes, paid two hundred and seventy-five dollars for a piano for his daughter, when I was at Quebec, five or six years ago. Whenever I visited Philippe, that stately man of the Hurons would usher me into a little parlor with a sofa in it and a carpet on the floor; he would produce brandy in a cut decanter, and cake upon a good porcelain plate, and would be merry in French and expansive on the subject of trade.
Most of these hybrid Hurons are quite as white as their Canadian neighbors; but they generally have the horse-tail hair, and black, beady eye of the aborigines. The ordinary dress of the men, in winter, is a blue blanket-coat, made with a capuchon, or hood, which latter is generally trimmed with bright-colored ribbon and ornamented with beads. Epaulettes, fashioned out of pieces of red and blue cloth, somewhat after the pattern of a pen-wiper, impart a distinguished appearance to the shoulders of these garments, which are rendered still more picturesque by being tucked round the body with heavy woollen sashes, variegated in red, blue, and yellow. Some of these sashes are heavily beaded, and worth from five to ten dollars each; and they, as well as the Indian blanket-coats, are to be had at the furriers' shops in Quebec, where there is a considerable demand for them by members of snow-shoe clubs, and others whose occupations or amusements render that style of costume appropriate for their wear. The older women dress in the ordinary squaw costume, with short, narrow petticoats, and embroidered metasses, or leggings. When going out, they fold a blue blanket over all, and put on a regular, unpicturesque, stove-pipe hat, with a band of tin-foil around it,—which makes them look like one of those mulatto coachmen one sees now and then on the box of a bonton barouche, with his silver-mounted hat and double-caped blue box-coat. The young girls are disposed to innovations upon the petticoats, and modifications of the metasses. Once I saw one standing on a great gray crag at the foot of the fall. She looked extremely picturesque at a little distance, giving a nice bit of local color to the scene with her scarlet legs; but on a nearer approach, much of the value of the color disappeared before the unromantic facts of a pale-face petticoat and patent-leather gaiter-boots. I have noticed several of the younger people here with brown hair and blue or gray eyes, significant that the aboriginal blood is being gradually diluted. In another generation or two, there will be little of it left among them. But the correspondents of the press, who described some of these Indians seen by them at Quebec, are mistaken in attributing to them an admixture of Irish blood. Until within eight years past, there were few, if any, Irish to be found in the neighborhood of Lorette. Since that time, the construction of the Quebec water-works, which are supplied from Lake St. Charles, has given employment to hundreds of the Hibernian stock in that neighborhood; and I know not whether their influence as regards race may not be now discernible in the features of many pugnacious Huronites of tender years: but the white element traceable in the lineaments of the present and passing generations of the settlement is distinctly attributable to the proximity of the French-Canadian, whose language has been transfused into them with the blood.
Few, if any, of the older people of Lorette speak English,—Huron and French being the only languages at their command. Since the building of the great reservoir, however, many of the rising generation are picking up the English tongue in its roundest Irish form. Previously, matters were the reverse. I once noticed a handsome, brown-faced boy there, who used to come about with a bow and arrows, soliciting coppers, which were placed one by one in a split stick, shot at, and pocketed by the archer, if hit,—as they almost always were. He spoke Indian and French, and I took him for an olive-branch of the tribe; but, on questioning him, he told me that his name was Bill Coogan, and that he first saw the light, I think, in Cork, Ireland.
There is one charming feature at Lorette,—a winding, dashing cascade, which boils and creams down with splendid fury through a deep gorge fenced with pied and tumbled rocks, and overhung by gnarly-boughed cedars, pines, and birches. There is, or at least there was, a crumbling old saw-mill on a ledge of rock nearly half-way up the torrent. It was in keeping with the scene, and I hope it is there still; but it was very shaky when I last saw it, and has probably made an éboulement down to the foot of the fall before now. Some short distance above the head of the fall, near the bridge by which the two villages are connected, the scene is pictorially damaged by a stark, staring paper-mill, the dominant colors of which are Solferino-red and pea-green. This, a comparatively new feature in the landscape, is not visible from below, however, and it is from there that the fall is seen to best advantage.
To the eye of the experienced fisherman, it is obvious that the St. Charles, with its sparkling rapids, and the deep, swirling pools formed by its numerous "elbows," must erstwhile have been a chosen, retreat of the noble salmon. Even now, notwithstanding the obstructions caused by the immense deposits of ship-yard refuse at its mouth, a few of these fine fish are caught every season by one or two persevering anglers from Quebec,—men who thrive on disappointment,—whose fish-hooks are miniature anchors of Hope. Lake St. Charles, from which the river derives its existence and its name, is a wild, beautiful tarn, about five miles above Lorette, embosomed in hills and woods. There are good bass in that lake, by whose shores there dwells—or dwelt—an ancient fisherman called Gabriel, who supplied anglers with canoes, and paddled them about the waters.
Lorette, although undistinguished by a glance from the mild blue eyes of the Premier Prince of England, was flashed upon, years ago, by the awful light that gleamed from the dark, fierce ones of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. This is how I came to know it.