Until quite recently the word “Mohawk,” suddenly uttered, was sufficient to startle a New Brunswick Indian. The late Edward Jack upon asking an Indian child, “What is a Mohawk?” received this reply, “A Mohawk is a bad Indian who kills people and eats them.” Parkman describes the Mohawks as the fiercest, the boldest, yet most politic savages to whom the American forests ever gave birth and nurture. As soon as a canoe could float they were on the war path, and with the cry of the returning wild fowl mingled the yell of these human tigers. They burned, hacked and devoured, exterminating whole villages at once.
A Mohawk war party once captured an Algonquin hunting party in which were three squaws who had each a child of a few weeks or months old. At the first halt the captors took the infants, tied them to wooden spits, roasted them alive before 14 a fire and feasted on them before the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications and frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them, were met with mockery and laughter. “They are not men, they are wolves!” sobbed one of the wretched women, as she told what had befallen her to the Jesuit missionary.
Fearful as the Maliseets were of the Mohawks they were in turn exceedingly cruel to their own captives and, strange as it may appear, the women were even more cruel than the men. In the course of the border wars English captives were exposed to the most revolting and barbarous outrages, some were even burned alive by our St. John river Indians.
But while cruel to their enemies, and even at times cruel to their wives, the Indians were by no means without their redeeming features. They were a modest and virtuous race, and it is quite remarkable that with all their bloodthirstiness in the New England wars there is no instance on record of the slightest rudeness to the person of any female captive. This fact should be remembered to their credit by those who most abhor their bloodthirstiness and cruelty. Nor were the savages without a certain sense of justice. This we learn from the following incident in the experience of the English captive John Gyles.
“While at the Indian village (Medoctec) I had been cutting wood and was binding it up with an Indian rope in order to carry it to the wigwam when a stout ill-natured young fellow about 20 years of age threw me backward, sat on my breast and pulling out his knife said that he would kill me, for he had never yet killed an English person. I told him that he might go to war and that would be more manly than to kill a poor captive who was doing their drudgery for them. Notwithstanding all I could say he began to cut and stab me on my breast. I seized him by the hair and tumbled him from off me on his back and followed him with my fist and knee so that he presently said he had enough; but when I saw the blood run and felt the smart I at him again and bid him get up and not lie there like a dog—told him of his former abuses offered to me and other poor captives, and that if ever he offered the like to me again I would pay him double. I sent him before me, took up my burden of wood and came to the Indians and told them the whole truth and they commended me, and I don’t remember that ever he offered me the least abuse afterward, though he was big enough to have dispatched two of me.”
The unfortunate conduct of some of the New England governors together with other circumstances that need not here be mentioned, led the Maliseets to be hostile to the English. Toward the French, however, they were from the very first disposed to be friendly, and when de Monts, Champlain and Poutrincourt arrived at the mouth of our noble river on the memorable 24th day of June, 1604, they found awaiting them the representatives of an aboriginal race of unknown antiquity, and of interesting language, traditions and customs, who welcomed them with outward manifestations of delight, and formed with them an alliance that remained unbroken throughout the prolonged struggle between the rival powers for supremacy in Acadia.
Indian Encampment and Chief