But if Champlain was a mighty figure in the imagination of the red man of the Mohawk Valley, there was coming a greater than he. This new man was to impress more deeply the imagination of all the Iroquois, and his name was to live in their language as long as their speech was heard on the earth. Champlain was a bringer of war; “Corlaer” was an apostle of peace.
Arendt Van Curler is a perfectly clear figure in the Indian tradition, and in the history and documentary archives of the Empire State. Having no descendants to embalm his name in art or literature, he has not had his monument. Yet he deserves to have his name enrolled high among the makers of America. The ignorance, errors—and there is a long list of them—of writers on American and local history concerning Arendt Van Curler, have been gross and inexcusable. It were surely worth while to know the original of that “Corlaer” after whom the Indians named, first the governors of New York, and later the governors of English Canada, and finally Queen Victoria, the Empress of India. To the Iroquois mind, Corlaer was the representative of Teutonic civilization. Other governors of colonies and prominent figures among the pale-faces, they called by names coined by themselves, just as they named their own warriors from trivial incidents or temporary associations. Even the King of Great Britain was only their unnamed “Father;” but as our ablest American historian, Francis Parkman, has said: “His [Van Curler’s] importance in the eyes of the Iroquois, and their attachment to him are shown by the fact that they always used his name (in the form of Corlaer) as the official designation of the governor of New York, just as they called the governors of Canada, Onontio, and those of Pennsylvania, Onas. I know of no other instance in which Iroquois used the name of an individual to designate the holder of an office. Onontio means ‘a great mountain;’ Onas means ‘a quill or pen;’ Kinshon, the governor of Massachusetts, ‘a fish.’ ”[[4]]
Rev. I. A. Cuoq, in his “Lexique de la Langue Iroquoise,” also remarks that the title Kora, the present form of [Van] Curler, given even yet to the kings and queens of England and to the English governors of Canada, is a purely Iroquois creation; while that of Onontio, used of the French king and governors, was given for the first time to Montmagny, the successor of Champlain. Quite differently from their method in the case of Van Curler, they translated, with the aid of the French missionaries, Montmagny’s name, rendering it freely by Onontio, which means, strictly speaking, “the beautiful mountain,” rather than “the great mountain.” The term Onontio was used until the end of the French dominion in America, whereas Kora [or Corlaer] is still in vogue; Queen Victoria being to the Canadian Indians Kora-Kowa, or the great Van Curler.
As first-cousin of Kilian Van Rensselaer, Arendt Van Curler, a native of the country near Amsterdam, but probably of Huguenot descent, reached America in 1630, and became superintendent and justice of the colony at Rensselaerwyck. From the very first he dealt with the Indians in all honour, truth, and justice. He was a man of sterling integrity, a Dutch patriot, and a Christian of the Reformed faith, but also a man of continental ideas, a lover of all good men, and a Catholic in the true sense of the term. He rescued from death and torture the Christian prisoners in Mohawk villages; and his first visit into, or “discovery” of the Valley as far as Fonda in September, 1642, was to ransom Father Jogues. His description of “the most beautiful land on the Mohawk River that eye ever saw,” and the journal of his journey, probably sent with his letter of June 16, 1643, to the Patroon, form the first written description of the Valley. He mastered the vernacular of the savages, visited them at their council-fires, heard their complaints, dealt honestly with them, and compelled others to do the same. The first covenant of friendship, made in 1617, between the Dutch and the Iroquois, and its various later renewals, he developed into a policy of lasting peace and amity. The scattered links of friendship between the Dutch and the confederacy of Indians he forged into an irrefragable chain, which, until the English-speaking white men went to war in 1775, was never broken. In 1663 he saved the army of Courcelles from starvation and probably destruction. Winning alike the respect of the French in Canada, and of their enemies, the Mohawks, he was invited to visit the governor, Tracy, in Quebec. On his journey thither in 1667, he was drowned in Lake Champlain near Rock Regis, the boundary-mark between the Iroquois and Algonkin Indians. This lake, like the Mohawk River, and the town of Schenectady which he founded, the Indians and Canadians called Corlaer.
Rarely, if ever, was a council held in Albany or at Johnson’s house or at the Onondaga fireplace, that Corlaer’s name was not mentioned, and their “covenant chain” with him referred to under the varied figures of rhetoric.
Van Curler’s policy was continued and expanded by Peter Schuyler, a son of Van Curler’s warm personal friend, Philip Schuyler. As the Iroquois in speaking never closed the lips, but used the orotund with abundance of gutturals, they were unable to pronounce properly names in which labial consonants occurred. They could not say Peter; so they called their friend “Quider.” The policy of Johnson was simply a continuation and expansion of that of these two Hollanders, Van Curler and Schuyler. There was no name of any white man that Johnson heard oftener in the mouths of the Indians than that of Corlaer; and yet, in the index of seventy thousand references to the Johnson manuscripts in Albany there is no reference to this founder of the Dutch policy of peace with the Indians.
In their political and social procedures, in public discourse, and in the etiquette of councils, no denizens of European courts were more truly bond-slaves to etiquette and custom than these forest senators. In certain outward phases of life—especially noticed by the man of hats, boots, and clean underclothing—the Indian seems to be a child of freedom, untutored and unsophisticated. In reality he is a slave compared to the enlightened and civilized man. He is by heredity, training, and environment fettered almost beyond hope. His mind can move out of predestined grooves only after long education, when a new God, new conceptions, induced power of abstract reasoning, and an entirely new mental outlook are given him. First of all, the savage needs a right idea of the Maker of the universe and of the laws by which the creation is governed; and then only does his mental freedom begin. So far from being free from prescribed form, he is less at liberty than a Chinese or Hindu. His adherence to ceremonial runs into bigotry. The calumet must be smoked. The opening speech must be on approved models. The wampum belts are as indispensable in a treaty as are seals and signatures in a Berlin conference or a Paris treaty. To challenge tradition, to step out of routine, to think for himself, and to act according to conviction, is more dangerous and costly to him than to one who has lived under the codes of civilization.
To gain his almost invincible influence over these red republicans of the woods, Johnson, like his previous exemplars, had to let patience have her perfect work. He had to stoop to them in order to lift them up. He even learned to outdo them in ostentation of etiquette, in rigid adherence to form, in close attention to long speeches without interruption, in convincing eloquence, in prolixity when it was necessary to subdue the red man’s brain and flesh by the power of the tongue, and in shine and glitter of outward display. Like a shrewd strategist, this typical Irishman knew when to exercise his native gift of garrulity in talking against time, and when also to condense into fiery sentences the message of the hour.
One chief reason, however, why the Iroquois preferred to talk with him more than with the average colonial grandee, was because they were not when before him at the mercy of interpreters. Despite the fact that time was of little value to the savage, it was rather trying to an Indian orator, after dilating for an hour or two in all the gorgeous eloquence of figurative language, to the manifest acceptance of his own kinsmen at least, to have an interpreter render the substance of his oration in a few sentences. Unaccustomed to abstract reasoning, the Indian was perforce obliged to draw the images of thought entirely from the environment of his life on land and water. Hence his speech superabounded with metaphors. He thoroughly enjoyed the discourse of one of his pale-faced brothers whose flowery language, while insufferably prolix to his fellow-whites, ran on in exuberant verbosity. In such a case, as Johnson soon learned to know, the sons of the forest felt complimented and flattered. Rarely was a speaker interrupted. Extreme rigidity of decorum was the rule at their councils. On great and solemn occasions the women were called as witnesses and listeners to hold in their memory words spoken or promises given.
There were other resources of human intercourse besides words. The wampum strings that reminded one of rosaries, or the belts made of hundreds and thousands of black and white shells, served as telegrams, letters missive, credentials, contracts, treaties, currency, and most of the purposes in diplomacy and business. The principal chief of a tribe had the custody of these archives of State. A definite value was placed upon these drilled, polished, and strung disks or oval cylinders of shell. The Dutch soon learned to make a better fabric than the Indian original, and they taught the art to the other colonists. Weeden, in his “Economic History of New England,” has shown how great an aid to commerce this, the ancient money of nearly all nations, proved in the early days when coined money was so scarce. The belts used as newsletters, as tokens of peace or war, as records of the past, or as confirmations of treaties, were often generous in width and length, beautifully made, and fringed with coloured strings. Schenectady was a famous place of wampum or seewant manufacture; and Hille Van Olinda, an interpreter, received in 1692 two pounds eight shillings for two great belts. Two others of like proportions cost three pounds twelve shillings. A large quantity of this sort of currency was always carried by the French to win over the Indians to their side. The same commercial and diplomatic tactics were also followed by the English, and especially by Johnson.