Perhaps this interruption was not wholly dictated by greed, but was strongly influenced by political interests. This fact must be noted. When Catharine Ganneaktena, an Erie Indian woman adopted into the Oneida tribe, was led to serious thought by Bruyas, to whom she taught the language in 1668, and with her Christian husband was persecuted by the pagans, the couple left for Montreal. Here she was baptized and confirmed by Bishop Laval. Instructed by Raffeix, who was somewhat of a statesman, Catharine invited several of her family in New York to Canada, and early in 1670 they founded the Indian village of La Prairie, where members of the Iroquois Confederacy might come to settle. According to the code of laws established in this Christian community, every one must renounce belief in dreams, polygamy, and drunkenness. This settlement was destined to be a powerful influence, not only in the Christianization of the Indians, but upon the politics of New York. In 1674, the wife of Kryn, “the great Mohawk,” who had conquered the Mohegans, became a Christian, and her husband abandoned her. Happening in his wanderings to visit the Christian village of La Prairie, Kryn was impressed with the peace and order reigning in it, and after a time became a Christian.
Returning to his home on the Mohawk, Kryn told what he had seen, and persuaded forty of his fellows from Caughnawaga (now Fonda, New York) to follow him. They reached La Prairie on Easter Sunday, 1676. From this time forth Kryn was an active missionary, on one occasion talking over a whole party of sixty Mohawks sent by Dongan on a raid against the French, and converting four of them to Christianity. He also persuaded the Oneidas and Onondagas to keep peace with the French, and in this was aided by the remarkable influence of Garakonthie, the Christian protector of “the black coats.” It was Kryn who led, and it was these “praying Indians” from Canada who with the French were sent by Frontenac to destroy Schenectady in 1690; and it was he who just before the attack harangued them to the highest pitch of fury. His especial pretext for revenge was the murder of sixty Canadian Indians by the Iroquois about six months previously.
For many years La Prairie was the gathering-place of seceders from the confederacy who had adopted the religion of their French teachers. In 1763 the village had three hundred fighting men; during the Revolution the number increased, and at present the Indian reservation at Caughnawaga, about twenty miles from Montreal, contains about thirteen hundred Roman Catholic Indians. These facts explain why the Mohawks and others of the confederacy had so many relatives fighting for the French, and why the political situation in New York, until the fall of French dominion, was so complex. As a rule, the Iroquois preferred the more sensuous religion of the French, while eager also for the strouds, duffels, guns, and blankets of the Dutch. Under Gallic and British influences, their hearts were as often divided as their heads were distracted. They were like tourists from Dover to Calais, when in the choppy seas which seethe between the coasts of England, France, and Holland.
In 1684 Jean de Lamberville, the last Jesuit settler in New York among the Iroquois, departed for Canada amid the lamentations of the Onondagas who escorted him. In a few generations all traces of the work of the French missionaries had vanished from the Mohawk Valley. In our days, when under the farmer’s plough or labourer’s pickaxe, the earth casts out her dead, the copper rings with the sign of the cross tell the touching story of the Indian maiden’s faith. Under the eloquent pen of John Gilmary Shea the thrilling story of labour and martyrdom glows. The Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs at Auriesville shows that even modern piety can find fresh stimulus in recalling the events which have made the Mohawk Valley classic ground to devout pilgrims as well as to the scholar and patriot.
For over a century—from 1664 until 1783—the diplomatic, military, and eleemosynary operations of British agents and armies among the Iroquois were actively carried on. These were prolonged and costly, and had much to do with making the enormous public debt of England, still unpaid. The effect was to affect powerfully the imagination of the British public. It was not merely the fiction of Cooper which created the tendency of the Englishman just landed at Castle Garden to look for painted and feathered Indians on Broadway. The author of “Leatherstocking” did but stimulate the imagination already fed by the narratives of returned veterans. Thousands of soldiers, who had heard the war-whoop in forest battles, told their stories at British hearthstones until well into this century. They, with Cooper, are responsible for the idea that forests grow in Philadelphia. The fear still possessing English children that American visitors, even of unmixed European blood, may turn red or black, is one prompted by tradition as well as by literary fiction.
| [4] | Letter to the writer, Feb. 7, 1890. |
CHAPTER IV.
THE STRUGGLE FOR A CONTINENT.
For the possession of the North American continent two nations, France and England, representing the two civilizations, Roman and Teutonic, which dominate respectively Southern and Northern Europe, contended. France, in America, embodied the Roman or more ancient type of civilization, in which government and order were represented by the priest and the soldier, while the people had little or nothing to do with the government, except to obey. External authority was everything; inward condition, little or nothing. The French system was not that of real colonization, but of military possession; and the desired form of social and political order was that based on monarchy and feudalism. In the despotism of a Church subordinate to a ruler in Italy, and of a State represented by a monarch, the individual was lost, and the people’s function was simply to submit and pay taxes. They were taught to look upon their privileges and enjoyments as the gifts of the sovereign and of the Church. Authority emanated from the government, which represented God, and represented Him infallibly.
The English colonists, whose leaders had been largely trained in the Dutch Republic, represented the best elements of Teutonic civilization, those of English blood being more English than the Englishmen left behind, and more Teutonic than the Germans. Most of the principles and institutions wrought out in the experience of the colonists, especially those now seen to be most peculiarly American, were not of British, but of continental origin. New England was settled mostly by immigrants who had left England before 1640; and nearly all their leaders had come by way of Holland, receiving their political and military education in the United States of Holland, and under its red, white, and blue flag.