Chapter III: The Settlement of Canada and the Five Nation Indians (2)

The Frenchmen determined to strike soon and hard at the Five Nations. In January, 1666, in dead of winter, Courcelles led an expedition against them up the Richelieu, by Lakes Champlain and George, on to the head waters of the Hudson river. The route, well known in after years, was unfamiliar then, and instead of turning to the west into the country of the Mohawks, the Frenchmen found themselves in the middle of February near the small Dutch settlement of Schenectady, where they were challenged as invaders of an English province, for in 1664 the Duke of York had become proprietor of New Netherland. It was news to the French commander that the valley of the Hudson had passed into British hands--unwelcome news, and would have been more unwelcome, had he foreseen the results of the change on after history. Of all events which strengthened the English cause in America against the French, the most important perhaps was the substitution of English for Dutch ownership of the present State of New York. At the time, no rupture took place between French and English, and, after an interchange of courtesies, Courcelles led his troops back to Canada, losing men through cold and privation, and {105} by the hands of the Mohawks, who dogged his retreat. He had achieved nothing, yet the daring of his venture seems to have impressed the Indians, and he had gained knowledge which was soon to tell.

[Sidenote: _and of Tracy._]

In September of the same year he set out again with 1,300 men, the whole commanded by Tracy in person. This time no mistake was made as to the route. The hearts of the Mohawks failed them. They fled before the invaders, leaving their strongholds empty and undefended. Each village in turn was burnt to the ground, the stores were destroyed or carried off, and, homeless and starving, the Indians were glad to make peace with the French, leaving Canada unmolested for some years to come. During those years the colony grew stronger, the administration was recast, the settlements were organized, and, beyond the line of colonization, explorers carried French influence further to the west.

In 1667, Tracy returned to France. In 1671, Courcelles and Talon followed him. In 1672, Count Frontenac came out as Governor to Canada.

[Sidenote: _Prominence of individual leaders in the early history of Canada._]

It has been noted above how great are the contrasts in the story of Canada, and, so far as it was colonized, how much in the system was artificial, how little was the result of natural growth. The record of Canada, as compared with that of the English colonies in America, is much more a series of biographies, much less a chronicle of a community. Of the great men, whose lives and doings make up Canadian history in French times, it may be said that some created Canada, while others were Canada's own creations. In other words, some were in but not of Canada; they came out from France to make, to rule, to save, or to try to save, the French colony on the St. Lawrence; while others, though many of them also came out from home, and all of them were in their way builders of New France, yet were the outcome of Canada itself, the result of the unbounded freedom of its backwoods, {106} their deeds being done and their lives spent mainly beyond the limits of the Canadian settlements. To the first class belong, among others, Champlain (though Champlain's name might in truth appear in either list), Talon, Frontenac, and Montcalm. The second class comprises the names of explorers such as La Salle, of Du Luth, the noted _coureur de bois_, and of Iberville, the bold guerilla chief, who raided the English in Newfoundland and on Hudson Bay, who carried out La Salle's unfinished work in Louisiana, and of whom, when dead, Charlevoix wrote: 'The late M. d'Iberville, who had all the good qualities of his country without any of its defects, would have led them (his countrymen) to the end of the world.'[7]

[Footnote 7: Charlevoix's _Letters to the Duchess of Lesdiguieres_, Eng. tr., 1763, p. 104.]

Of these last there will be more to tell. Of the former class it may be said that, while not children of Canada, their influence on the history of the colony and their distinction in Canadian annals was in proportion to the extent to which New France was the land of their adoption. If we except discoverers, the three greatest names in Canadian history are Champlain, Frontenac, and Montcalm, all three of whom died at Quebec.

[Sidenote: _Count Frontenac._]

The strongly marked contrasts characteristic of Canada and its story are illustrated in the case of Count Frontenac. Like other Governors, before and after him, he came out from the very centre of civilization, the Court of France: from serving in the finest army in the world, he came to rule a barbarous borderland, and to command troops, the majority of whom were backwoodsmen or native Indians, or at best a half-disciplined militia. He did not come young to the work. He was fifty-two on his arrival. When he was appointed Governor for the second time, in 1689, he was in his seventieth year. He had great merits and great defects. He was pretentious, arrogant, violent and overbearing, {107} insubordinate to his employers, somewhat unscrupulous in his policy, and not cleanhanded in repairing his broken fortunes. On the other hand, he was resourceful, fearless, and determined; he stood by his friends, he was not unkindly, he had in many respects broad views, and above all he believed in Canada, its fortunes, and its peoples. He had in a high degree the admirable French quality of adapting himself to places and to men. He was trusted and revered by the Indians beyond any other French or English Governor, for, while he refused to treat them as equals, he humoured their customs and to some extent walked in their ways. His force of character impressed native and colonist alike. He took Canada in hand at a time of danger and disorganization. When he died, he left her on the lines of prosperity and possible greatness.

[Sidenote: _His first government._]

The term of his first government lasted for ten years, from 1672 to 1682. They were years of constant wrangling and worry. He was at daggers drawn with the Jesuits, and his quarrels with his colleagues on the Council, notably the Intendant, Duchesnau, were similar to the disputes between Warren Hastings and Francis at another time and place. The end of it was that both Frontenac and Duchesnau were recalled; but Frontenac had left his mark, and after seven years' interval, during which two governors failed, he was sent back at a critical time to Canada.

[Sidenote: _His attempt to introduce political representation._]

[Sidenote: _Jealousy between Quebec and Montreal._]

Two incidents in his first administration may be picked out as illustrating the boldness of his character, and implying foresight and breadth of view unusual in a French Governor under Louis XIV. The first was his crude attempt, already noticed,[8] to form a kind of Canadian parliament on the old French model, with the three estates of clergy, nobles, and people. It was a rash step to take immediately after his arrival, when he could not have known the conditions of the colony, and must have known well the wishes of the King. {108} It brought upon him a severe reprimand from home, and his scheme came to nothing. But the step, if ill timed, was in the right direction. Some semblance of popular assembly would have done much for Canada, if only as tending to create a national sentiment and to allay local jealousies. For among the many elements of weakness in the colony in its early days was the semi-independence of Montreal. Montreal was the commercial depot for the upper St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, and the great lakes. It was the meeting-place of French and native fur-traders. In it centred the natural wealth of Canada, and to it resorted the most enterprising and the least settled part of the population. It was jealous of the older settlement of Quebec, which was the seat of government, the centre of law and order, and which, being nearer the sea, commanded the import and export trade with Europe. Under its feudal Seigniors, the Sulpician monks, Montreal claimed to have some voice in the appointment of the local Governor; and Perrot its Governor, in the early days of Frontenac's first administration, defied within the limits of his district the authority of the Governor-General, and imprisoned his officers.

[Footnote 8: See above, p. 97, note.]

[Sidenote: _Founding of Fort Frontenac._]

The second event to be specially noted was the building of a fort on the northern bank of the St. Lawrence, at the point where it flows out of Lake Ontario. The place was known to the Indians as Cataraqui. It is now the site of the town of Kingston. The new fort, built in 1673, the year after Frontenac came to Canada, was named after him, Fort Frontenac. Its building marked the onward movement of the French. Hitherto their main concern had been to secure mastery of the central St. Lawrence between Quebec and Montreal, together with the command of the Richelieu river. Among the Iroquois, they had fought chiefly with the Mohawks, the easternmost and nearest of the Five Nations. But before Frontenac came, and long before the central St. Lawrence was wholly safe, traders and missionaries had {109} gained knowledge of the western lakes, and Fort Frontenac was built to be at once a new outpost of the colony, guarding the upper reaches of the St. Lawrence, and a starting-point for further exploiting the trade routes of the west. By building it, the Frenchmen made good their claim to the river of Canada for its whole length from the lakes to the sea, and planted themselves at the entrance of a new and vast system of waterways.

As the St. Lawrence on its upward course broadens into Lake Ontario, so, as the French went further west, the story of Canada widens out. From the tale of two or three river settlements it slowly grows into the history of a continent. The struggle becomes more and more a struggle not so much for bare existence as for supremacy. The Iroquois were a deadly danger still, but the danger largely consisted in the fact that behind them was a strong and, as a rule to them, a friendly European colony--the English State of New York. Every year intensified the rivalry between French and English. Every year showed that both sought to control the trade of the west. The main practical issue, for the time being, was whether the furs from the lake region should come down the St. Lawrence to Montreal and Quebec, or be diverted to Albany through the country of the Five Nations. The Iroquois held the key of the position, and they knew it. Unless they could be taught either to fear or to love the French, there was little hope for Canada.

[Sidenote: _The French come into contact with the Senecas._]

As the French moved up the St. Lawrence, and along Lake Ontario, they passed along the line of the Five Nations, and came directly into conflict with the furthermost and the strongest of the five, the Senecas. After Tracy's successful expedition against the Mohawks in 1666, the Iroquois gave comparatively little trouble for some years. They knew well the difference between a strong and a weak _Onontio_, as they styled the Governor of Canada, and for Courcelles, and his successor Frontenac, they had a wholesome respect. {110} When Frontenac was recalled, in 1682, there was a different tale to tell.

[Sidenote: _Frontenac recalled and succeeded by La Barre._]

His successor in that year was La Barre, an old soldier of some distinction, who had been Governor of Cayenne, which he recaptured from the English. In Canada he proved to be an irresolute commander and an incapable administrator, notable even among Canadian officials for greed of gain. The Iroquois became more and more menacing. The Senecas especially, at the western end of the line, who had never yet felt in any measure the weight of the French arm, raided the Indians of the Illinois, who were nominally under French protection, threatened the tribes of the lakes, and were in a fair way to master the trade on which Canada depended. There had been some prospect of a rupture between the Five Nations and the English, owing to border forays on Virginia and Maryland; but in 1684, at a great council held at Albany, the old alliance was solemnly renewed. There was no hope from this quarter for the French.

[Sidenote: _His expedition against the Iroquois._]

[Sidenote: _Its failure._]

[Sidenote: _He is succeeded by De Denonville._]

La Barre, whatever may have been his faults, was in a most difficult position, but made up his mind to take the offensive, hoping by a demonstration of force to bring the Iroquois to terms. Having collected troops and native allies, he moved up the St. Lawrence in the summer of 1684, from Montreal to Fort Frontenac. There he waited while his force sickened with malarial fever. After delay he moved his men across to the southern side of Lake Ontario, and encamped at a place called La Famine, where more men went down with fever. There, at length, deputies of the Iroquois came to meet him. He talked swelling words, but the state of his camp gave them the lie. He made a kind of truce, in which the Indians practically dictated the terms, and he retreated down the river again, having encouraged his enemies, disgusted his allies, brought embarrassment on the colony, and procured his own recall. He was succeeded in the following year by the Marquis de Denonville.

{111} [Sidenote: _His expedition against the Senecas._]

[Sidenote: _Posts placed at Niagara and Detroit._]

Denonville was at once more capable and more honest than La Barre, but he had still greater difficulties to contend with. The Iroquois were now quite out of hand, and Dongan, the able Governor of New York, was taking a stronger line than was the wont of most Governors in the English colonies, making a bold bid for the control of the lake region. However, ample reinforcements were sent from France with orders to attack the Five Nations, and in the summer of 1687 the French Governor set out with an overwhelming force against the Senecas. His troops, nearly 3,000 in all, mustered at Irondequoit Bay, halfway along the southern shore of Lake Ontario. From thence a route led southwards to the chief town of the Senecas. Many of the Seneca warriors were out of the country at the time, and the French, advancing in strength, dispersed the savages who remained, reached the town, already burnt and deserted, and after destroying corn and devastating the neighbouring land, returned to the lake. A fort was then built at the further end of the lake, below Niagara,[9] to command the junction of Lakes Erie and Ontario, as in the previous year a stockade had been constructed on the strait of Detroit, to control the passage from Lake Huron to Lake Erie; after which the Governor returned to Montreal.

[Footnote 9: In March of this same year Dongan was urging on the Lords of Trade the building of an English fort at Niagara, or as he called it, Oneigra, 'near the great lake on the way whereby our people go hunting and trading. It is very necessary for our trade and correspondence with the Indians, and for securing our right to the country' (_Calendar of State Papers_, Colonial, 1685-8, p. 328).]

[Sidenote: _Fruitlessness of the expedition._]

[Sidenote: _The massacre of Lachine._]

The French, to quote Colden's words,[10] had 'got nothing but dry blows by this expedition.' Denonville had not done enough. He had enraged the confederate Indians without crippling them. A few months before, with odious treachery, he had ordered some friendly Iroquois to be kidnapped and sent to France to serve in the galleys. The tribesmen of the prisoners neither forgave nor forgot, and in less than two {112} years' time they paid the debt. On the island of Montreal, some eight miles above the town to the south-west, at the head of rapids now cut by a canal, and at the lower end of the broad reach of the St. Lawrence--which bears the name of Lake St. Louis--was the settlement of Lachine. At the beginning of August, 1689, at dead of night and under cover of a storm, many hundred Iroquois warriors broke in upon the settlers. Two hundred of the French were butchered there and then. One hundred and twenty were carried off, some to be tortured and burnt almost within sight of their countrymen, others to be gradually done to death in the lodges of the Five Nations. A detachment of eighty French soldiers was also cut to pieces, and outside forts and palisades the country was a scene of death and desolation.

[Footnote 10: _History of the Five Nations_ (3rd ed.), vol. i, chap. v, p. 82.]

[Sidenote: _Abandonment of Fort Frontenac. Recall of Denonville and return of Frontenac._]

The horrors of Lachine stand out in Canadian history as a kind of Sicilian Vespers or Massacre of St. Bartholomew. The upper part of the colony, Montreal and its neighbourhood, was paralysed with terror, and once more, for a moment, the Iroquois seemed to threaten the very existence of New France. It was not so in fact. Below Three Rivers Canada was safe, and the savages did not, as in old days, parade their triumph beneath the cliffs of Quebec. Meanwhile Denonville had already been recalled, his last act being to order in his panic the evacuation and destruction of Fort Frontenac; and the old Frenchman, after whom that fort had been named, came back in his seventieth year to save and to rule Canada.

[Sidenote: _Callieres._]

Another competent man returned with Frontenac, after a short visit to France--Callieres, the Governor of Montreal. He was a strong second in command, and, when Frontenac died, was appointed to succeed him, and carried on his work. The two commanders arrived in the autumn of 1689, to find all in confusion and distress; but Frontenac was not forgotten. His presence gave confidence, and even among the {113} Iroquois his name secured respect. It was his habit to see with his own eyes, to take his own line, to act with promptitude and decision. These qualities, when coupled with ten years' previous experience of the colony, were invaluable at a crisis. He might quarrel with Intendants, browbeat Councillors, and denounce Jesuit priests; but to the settlers he gave security, to the adventurous backwoodsmen of the West he was a congenial leader, and to the Indians he was the great _Onontio_, whose actions matched his words.

[Sidenote: _Confidence restored by Frontenac._]

[Sidenote: _His dealings with the Indians._]

For the time he was not in a position to carry war into the Iroquois country, and the Iroquois would not listen to friendly overtures. He contented himself, therefore, with strengthening the forts and defences of the colony and with issuing proclamations to the wavering tribes of the lakes. It was one thing when La Barre or Denonville spoke, it was another when the words were those of Frontenac. His next step was to intimidate the English allies of the Five Nations, and to send three raiding parties into New England and New York. This was the kind of irregular warfare for which the Canadians were best suited. All three expeditions were successful; and their success, coupled with two defeats of parties of Iroquois on the Ottawa, by Du Luth in 1689 and Nicolas Perrot in 1690, both noted leaders of _coureurs de bois_, gave new heart to Canada. Before the summer of 1690 ended, the Indians of the upper lakes came down in force to trade at Montreal, and the grey-headed Governor-General of New France led the war dance, hatchet in hand, appealing to savages in savage fashion, as only a versatile Frenchman could.

It was a typical proceeding. French priests turned heathens into Christians, but left them on their savage lines. French hunters lived among Indians, adopting Indian garb and Indian methods; and the great Governor of Canada, who of all others was a ruler of men, led a yelling crowd in their native prelude for war, as sure in {114} self-esteem, as sure in the esteem of his company, as if he were treading a minuet in stately fashion at the Court of Versailles. The English had no such address; but not having it they ran less risk for the future of their kind. They kept the heathen, for the most part, outside their pale. They did little to convert them. They did little to befriend or protect them. But the English race remained stronger and purer in its dour isolation than the assimilated and assimilating Frenchmen of what was then Upper Canada.

[Sidenote: _Insecurity of the French settlers above Three Rivers._]

Raids and counter raids went on. Of the part which the English took in the fighting, something will be said presently. So far as the struggle was between the French and the Five Nations, the scene of action was either the Ottawa river, or the angle between the Richelieu and the St. Lawrence. Always important, as being the direct trade route from Lake Huron, the Ottawa was more important now, seeing that there was a larger population in Canada than in bygone days dependent on the fur trade, and that since Denonville's abortive expedition against the Senecas, the massacre of Lachine, and the evacuation of Fort Frontenac, the French had lost command of the upper St. Lawrence.

The corner of land lying between Chambly on the Richelieu and Montreal was the old battlefield of French and Iroquois. By this line, before Tracy's expedition of 1666, the Mohawks had raided Canada; by this line, once more, their war-parties came. Below the Three Rivers, at Quebec and in its neighbourhood, there was no fear of the Indians, though there was both apprehension and reality of English invasion, and distress from English blockade of Canadian trade. But in the upper half of the colony, of which Montreal was the centre, there was no security for life or property outside fortifications and stockades.

[Sidenote: _Madeleine de Vercheres._]

Some twenty miles below Montreal, on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence, in the troubled belt of land between that river and the Richelieu, was the Seigniory of Vercheres. {115} There was on it a fort and a blockhouse, which, in the last week of October, 1692, was the scene of one of the most picturesque episodes in all the annals of border warfare. The Seignior, a military man, was absent, the fort was nearly empty, for the able-bodied men were working in the fields, when the Iroquois came down on the place. The Seignior's daughter, Madeleine de Vercheres, a girl of fourteen, took charge of the fort, having for a garrison, over and above women and children, two terrified soldiers, one hired man-servant, one refugee settler, an old man of eighty, and two small boys, her brothers. She gave the command, she placed each at his post, she misled the savages by a show of imaginary force, and watching day and night she held them at bay, until, at the end of a week, a party of soldiers came to her relief from Montreal. Years afterwards the tale of the siege was taken down from her own lips; and her name lives, and deserves to live, in the history of Canada. The girl's heroism is the chief, but not the only, point of the story. That the Mohawks should have prowled round the fort for a week without seriously attempting to take it, and without finding out that it was nearly defenceless, shows how helpless and stupid these noted warriors were when face to face with a fortification. On the other hand, that a post, only twenty miles distant from Montreal, was left for a week without relief, proves how paralysed, or at least how weakened, were the French by a long series of Indian incursions. This was in Frontenac's time; but Frontenac had the English on his hands, and was short of men. Had it been otherwise, there would have been no beleaguering of girls in forts, and Canada would have lost a pretty story.

[Sidenote: _Revival of the French cause._]

As it was, the scale soon turned in favour of the French. In dead of winter, at the beginning of 1693, a mixed body of Canadians and Indians broke in upon the Mohawk towns, and, in spite of a somewhat disastrous retreat, inflicted considerable loss on their persistent enemies; while later {116} in the year, at the bidding of the sturdy old Governor, a strong party of _coureurs de bois_ came down the Ottawa, convoying a long pent-up and most welcome cargo of furs. This 'gave as universal joy to Canada as the arrival of the galleons give in Spain';[11] and Frontenac was hailed as the father of the people.

[Footnote 11: Colden's _History of the Five Nations_ (3rd ed.), vol. i, chap. ix, p. 159.]

[Sidenote: _The Iroquois complain of English inaction._]

More soldiers came out from France, and the Iroquois began to lose heart. Many of their warriors had fallen, and not a few, converted by the Jesuits, had settled in Canada, being known to their heathen countrymen as the 'praying Indians.'[12] From the English colonies little or no help had come, beyond supplies of arms and ammunition. The councils at Albany produced on the English side pretentious speeches, criticism, encouragement, and promises which were never fulfilled; but the words of the Indians were more to the point, 'the whole burden of the war lies on us alone ... we alone cannot continue the war against the French by reason of the recruits they daily receive from the other side the Great Lake.'[13] They had been faithful to the English alliance, more faithful than the English deserved, and more faithful than any civilized nation would have been under like circumstances; but they tired of fighting singlehanded, and the chain of the covenant began to rust.

[Footnote 12: The converted Iroquois were settled at Caughnawaga, which was on the south bank of the St. Lawrence, at the Sault St. Louis, and directly opposite Lachine. They were often called Caughnawagas.]

[Footnote 13: Colden, vol. i, chap. x, p. 176.]

[Sidenote: _Their policy towards the French._]

[Sidenote: _Barbarity of Frontenac._]

In default of active aid from the English, there were two policies open to them--to make terms with the French, and to detach from the French cause the Indian tribes of the lakes. They pursued both policies at once: they invited Frontenac to meet them and the English at Albany; he refused. He refused also to come to a meeting at Onondaga. {117} They then sent a deputation to Quebec in 1694; and Frontenac offered a peace which should include the Indian allies of the French and exclude the English. Two nations of the confederacy were ready to accept these terms; the other three rejected them, and there was no peace. In the meantime the Iroquois intrigued with the Lake Indians, and, attracted by the prospect of English goods, the latter came near exchanging the French alliance for combination with the Five Nations and the English. To prevent this result, Frontenac and his officers had resort to infamous methods. Not only at the forest post of Michillimackinac, but at Montreal itself, the French compelled the wavering Indians to burn Iroquois prisoners to death, in order to make peace impossible, and joined themselves in the torture and butchery. Few worse instances of barbarous policy are recorded in history.

[Sidenote: _Fort Frontenac reoccupied._]

Such means alone would not attain the desired end. Nothing, the Governor knew, would avail except acknowledged mastery over the Five Nations. The most obvious confession of weakness on the French side in Denonville's disastrous time had been the evacuation of Fort Frontenac; and never had Denonville's successor slackened his determination to reoccupy the post, which, if he had arrived in Canada a day or two earlier, would not have been abandoned. The time came in the summer of 1695. A force, secretly and quickly gathered, was sent up from Montreal; the walls of the fort still standing were repaired; and the Iroquois were startled by the news that the post, which they most dreaded, and which most menaced their confederacy, was again manned by a French garrison. Frontenac was just in time. The day after the expedition started, orders came from France that the fort should not be reoccupied; but he refused to recall his troops, and set himself to justify, by further measures, his disobedience to the home Government.

[Sidenote: _Frontenac's expedition against the Five Nations._]

In July, 1696, he set out from Montreal at the head of {118} over 2,000 men. The military strength of Canada was well represented; there were French soldiers of the line, Canadian militia, and friendly Indians. With the old Governor went his best officers--Callieres leading the van of the march, Vaudreuil bringing up the rear. The force reached Fort Frontenac, crossed Lake Ontario, and, landing at the mouth of the Oswego river, worked their way up, by stream and lake and portage, towards the goal of the expedition--Onondaga, the central town and meeting-place of the Five Nations. What had happened before happened again. The Indians retreated into the forest before superior numbers, leaving the French a barren conquest over the smouldering ashes of the native town and the standing corn. The Oneidas' village and maize fields were also laid waste, and then the invaders retraced their steps.

[Sidenote: _Death of Frontenac._]

Though the expedition was recorded by the French as a success, Frontenac had done no more than Denonville in his march against the Senecas, and a writer on the English side contemptuously refers to it as 'a kind of heroic dotage'.[14] The show of force, however, seems to have had the effect of inclining the Iroquois to peace, of proving once more that the French were more active than the English, and that the arm of _Onontio_ was longer than that of the Governor of New York. Early in 1698 came news of the Peace of Ryswick. The Five Nations were subjects neither of England nor of France, but both Canada and New York claimed them. Sturdily to the last, Frontenac repelled English pretensions and half-hearted Indian advances; but the hand of death was upon him, and on November 28, 1698, he died at Quebec, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.

[Footnote 14: Colden, vol. i, chap. xii, p. 202.]

[Sidenote: _His services to Canada._]

He had rid Canada in a great measure from the scourge of murdering savages. He had humbled the Iroquois to some extent; he had certainly won their respect. How he withstood the English in open warfare, and how he {119} encouraged Frenchmen of his own bold type to explore and to claim the far West, remains to be told. He was a great man for the time and place, great in fearlessness, in self-reliance, in foresight, and in unflinching tenacity of purpose. The element of bombast and arrogance in his character helped him, as it helped other Frenchmen, whose names have lived, in handling native races. As a ruler of wild men, whether coloured or white, he was unsurpassed. The ruthlessness of his policy has left a stain upon his memory; but he gave life and confidence to Canada in time of trouble, and but for him there would have been no future for New France.

[Sidenote: _The Iroquois make peace with the French._]

His deeds and his character bore fruit immediately after his death. At the invitation of his successor, Callieres, a general meeting of all the Indian tribes was held at Montreal, in 1701, to which the Iroquois condescended to send representatives. Peace was made; and the French, whom the Five Nations had brought to the brink of ruin, emerged from the contest as acknowledged arbitrators between the native races of North America.

[Sidenote: _Causes which inclined the Iroquois to peace. Loss of numbers._]

Thus, with the close of the seventeenth century, came in effect the close of the life-and-death struggle between the Five Nation Indians and the Canadian settlers. What were the causes which brought the Iroquois to terms? The first and most potent was loss of numbers. Continual bloodshed had reduced the male population of the confederates by half;[15] and mixture by adoption, it may well be supposed, had brought some alloy into the old fighting breed. When white men meet coloured men in war, there is always the same tale to tell. The white men suffer reverses, as long as they are a handful, and until the native race has lost a certain proportion of its warriors. Then strength, and knowledge, and discipline prevail; and the issue is no longer in doubt. But no other coloured race in the history of colonization fought with Europeans, man for man, like the Iroquois, and never {120} submitting, treated sullenly as equals only when the white race were absolutely superior in numbers. Big battalions in the end usually determine the course of history. They certainly decided the fate of North America. Numerical strength turned the scale in favour of the French, as against the Iroquois. It subsequently turned the scale in favour of the English, as against the French.

[Footnote 15: See Parkman's _Count Frontenac_, last page, note.]

[Sidenote: _Personality of Frontenac._]

The second cause which influenced the Iroquois was Frontenac's personality. In dealing with him the Indians dealt, and knew that they dealt, with a man who in the greatest straits would never give way an inch. There was no compromise in his policy. He meant to be master; the savages knew it, and respected him accordingly. He did not live to complete his work, and it was not thoroughly completed; but he lived long enough to cripple the Five Nations, and after his time their strength declined.

[Sidenote: _Shortcomings of the English._]

A third cause was the failure of the English. They missed their opportunities. The path of English colonization has been strewn with lost opportunities. The end has been achieved in most cases, and in most parts of the world; but it has been achieved only after long years of toil, expense, and loss of life, which a little foresight might well have avoided. There was no Frontenac on the English side, no man who went in advance of his Government, who framed and forced a strong policy. One Governor of New York, the Irishman Dongan, was active and determined, but those who came after did little. The element of compromise in the English character, and in the policy of the English Government, made itself felt. Colony was jealous of colony, petty legislatures wrangled, and farmers resented being called to fight instead of sowing or harvesting their crops. Over and above all, whether as friends or as foes, the Frenchmen stretched out their right hands to the native races of North America; the English lived their lives apart, and for the time they paid the penalty.

{121} [Sidenote: _Founding of Detroit._]

[Sidenote: _La Mothe Cadillac._]

Thus the Five Nations made peace with the French at Montreal. At the very same time, at Albany,[16] they gave the English a title to the lake regions. In the year 1686, by Denonville's orders, Du Luth, with a party of _coureurs de bois_, established a French outpost on the strait (Detroit) between Lakes Huron and Erie,[17] his object being to prevent the fur trade of the upper lakes passing down that way to the Iroquois country, and thence to the English market at Albany. The post was not maintained; but some years afterwards a more permanent occupation took place. Frontenac had died; but he left behind him men trained in his school, keen on a forward policy, on holding in the interests of France and in their own the passes of the West. Such a man was La Mothe Cadillac, who in 1694 had been sent to take command at Michillimackinac. He urged upon the French Government the importance of controlling the outlet from Lake Huron to Lake Erie, and, having obtained their consent, was the founder of the city of Detroit. He began the work in July, 1701, but before his expedition actually reached the place, the Five Nations took alarm, recognizing that Detroit, like Fort Frontenac, would limit their range and endanger their power.

[Footnote 16: The great meeting at Montreal was held on Aug. 4, 1701. The deed of cession referred to in the text was dated July 19, 1701.]

[Footnote 17: See above, p. 111.]

[Sidenote: _The Iroquois cede their hunting-grounds to the King of England._]

They sent representatives of all their nations to Albany, and there, on July 19, 1701, ceded to the King of England their 'beaver hunting-ground,' retaining for themselves the right of free hunting. The deed was of the most formal character, attested by the totem marks of all the Five Nations.[18] It is an interesting document, setting forth that the Iroquois had already subjected themselves and their lands 'on this side of Cataraqui (Ontario) lake wholly to the Crown of {122} England,' and conveying to the King a wide area to the north of the lake, which the Five Nations claimed as their hunting-ground in right of conquest. The tract was estimated at 800 miles in length by 400 in breadth, extending on the north to Lake Superior, on the west to Chicago, and it specifically included Detroit,[19] the French designs on which were stated as the reason for making the cession. A white man's hand must have drawn the deed. It gave away the Iroquois entirely. Hitherto they had stubbornly rejected any English claim to sovereignty. Brother the Governor of New York had been, but not father, and no allegiance had been offered to the King of England; but in the conveyance William III figured as 'the great lord and master' of the Five Nations, and on paper the acknowledgement of British sovereignty was complete.

[Footnote 18: A certified copy in manuscript sent home at the time may be seen at the Record Office, and a printed copy is included in the New York documents.]

[Footnote 19: Spoken of in the deed in one place as 'Tiengsachrondio alias Fort de Tret.']

It was a piece of parchment only, and as such and no more the Iroquois probably regarded it; but it embodied a small element of fact. These hardheaded, hardhanded Indians were gradually being worn down by the white men on either side, owing such measure of independence as they still retained not so much to their own fighting strength as to the constant enmity between Great Britain and France. When war broke out again, after Queen Anne's accession, they remained for the most part neutral; what they had claimed and conveyed as their hunting-ground passed more and more under French control, while, as the result of Marlborough's victories on the other side of the Atlantic, their own land and its cantons was awarded to Great Britain in 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht.[20]

[Footnote 20: Clause xv of the Treaty of Utrecht ran as follows: 'The subjects of France inhabiting Canada, and others, shall hereafter give no hinderance or molestation to the Five Nations or Cantons of Indians subject to the dominion of Great Britain nor to the other natives of America who are friends to the same.']

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