Chapter II: Part 2

Not willing to see his ambitious fort on the Niagara so soon abandoned, de Denonville sent out a new garrison and with them came Father Pierre Milet. He had labored, with rich results, among the Onondagas and Oneidas. No sooner was he among his countrymen, in this remote and forlorn corner of the earth, than he took up his spiritual work with characteristic zeal. On Good Friday of that year, 1688, in the center of the square within the palisades, he caused to be erected a great cross. It was of wood, eighteen feet high, hewn from the forest trees and neatly framed. On the arms of it was carved in abbreviated words the sacred legend, "_Regnat, Vincit, Imperat Christus_," and in the midst of it was engraven the Sacred Heart. Surrounded by the officers of the garrison,--gallant men of France, with shining records, some of them were,--by the soldiers, laborers and friendly Indians, Father Milet solemnly blessed it. Can you not see the little band, kneeling about that symbol of conquest? Around them were the humble cabins and quarters of the soldiers. One of them, holding the altar, was consecrated to worship. Beyond ran the palisades and earthworks--feeble fortifications between the feeble garrison and the limitless, foe-infested wilderness. On one hand smiled the blue Ontario, and at their feet ran the gleaming Niagara, already a synonym of hardship and suffering in the annals of three of the religious orders. What wonder that the sense of isolation and feebleness was borne in upon the little band, or that they devoutly bowed before the cross which was the visible emblem of their strength and consolation in the wilderness. Where is the artist who shall paint us this scene, unique in the annals of any people?

And yet, but a few months later--September 15th of that year--the garrison was recalled, the post abandoned, the palisades broken down, the cabins left rifled and empty; and when priest and soldiers had sailed away, and only the prowling wolf or the stealthy Indian ventured near the spot, Father Milet's great cross still loomed amid the solitude, a silent witness of the faith which knows no vanquishing.

There followed an interim in the occupancy of the Niagara when neither sword nor altar held sway here; nor was the altar reestablished in our region until the permanent rebuilding of Fort Niagara in 1726. True, Father Charlevoix passed up the river in 1721, and has left an interesting account of his journey, his view of the falls, and his brief tarrying at the carrying-place--now Lewiston. This spot was the principal rendezvous of the region for many years; and here, at the cabin of the interpreter Joncaire, where Father Charlevoix was received, we may be sure that spiritual ministrations were not omitted. A somewhat similar incident, twenty-eight years later, was the coming to these shores of the Jesuit Father Bonnecamps. He was not only the spiritual leader but appears to have acted as pilot and guide to De Celoron's expedition--an abortive attempt on the part of Louis XV. to reesablish the claims of France to the inland regions of America. The expedition came up the St. Lawrence and through Lake Ontario, reaching Fort Niagara on July 6, 1749. It passed up the river, across to the south shore of Lake Erie and by way of Chautauqua Lake and the Allegheny down the Ohio. Returning from its utterly futile adventure, we find the party resting at Fort Niagara for three days, October 19-21. Who the resident chaplain was at the post at that date I have not been able to ascertain; but we may be sure that he had a glad greeting for Father Bonnecamps. From 1726, when, as already mentioned, the fort was rebuilt, until its surrender to Sir Wm. Johnson in 1759, a garrison was continually maintained, and without doubt was constantly attended by a chaplain. The register of the post during these years has never been found--the presumption being that it was destroyed by the English--so that the complete list of priests who ministered there is not known.

Only here and there from other sources do we glean a name by which to continue the succession. Father Crespel was stationed at Fort Niagara for about three years from 1729, interrupting his ministrations there with a journey to Detroit, where his order--the Society of Jesus--had established a mission. Of Fort Niagara at this time he says: "I found the place very agreeable; hunting and fishing were very productive; the woods in their greatest beauty, and full of walnut and chestnut trees, oaks, elms and some others, far superior to any we see in France." But not even the banks of the Niagara were to prove an earthly paradise. "The fever," he continues, "soon destroyed the pleasures we began to find, and much incommoded us, until the beginning of autumn, which season dispelled the unwholesome air. We passed the winter very quietly, and would have passed it very agreeably, if the vessel which was to have brought us refreshments had not encountered a storm on the lake, and been obliged to put back to Frontenac, which laid us under the necessity of drinking nothing but water. As the winter advanced, she dared not proceed, and we did not receive our stores till May."

Remember the utter isolation of this post and mission at the period we are considering. To be sure, it was a link in the chain of French posts, which included Quebec, Montreal, Kingston, Niagara, Detroit, Michillimackinac; but in winter the water route for transport was closed, and Niagara, like the upper posts, was thrown on its own resources for existence. There is no place in our domain to-day which fairly may be compared to it for isolation and remoteness. The upper reaches of Alaskan rivers are scarcely less known to the world than was the Niagara at the beginning of the last century. A little fringe of settlement--hostile settlement at that--stretched up the Hudson from New York. Even the Mohawk Valley was still unsettled. From the Hudson to the remotest West the wilderness stretched as a sea, and Fort Niagara was buried in its midst. Although a full century had gone by since Father Dallion first reached its shores, there was now no trace of white men on the banks of the Niagara save at the fort at its mouth, where Father Crespel ministered, and at the carrying-place, where Joncaire the interpreter lived with the Indians. Not even the first Indian villages on Buffalo Creek were to be established for half a century to come.

After Father Crespel's return from Detroit, he remained two years longer at Fort Niagara, caring for the spiritual life of the little garrison, and learning the Iroquois and Ottawah languages well enough to converse with the Indians. "This enabled me," he writes, "to enjoy their company when I took a walk in the environs of our post." The ability to converse with the Indians afterwards saved his life. When his three years of residence at Niagara expired he was relieved, according to the custom of his order, and he passed a season in the convent at Quebec. While he was undoubtedly immediately succeeded at Niagara by another chaplain, I have been unable to learn his name or aught of his ministrations. Indeed, there are but few glimpses of the post to be had from 1733 to 1759, when it fell into the hands of the English. One of the most interesting of these is of the visit of the Sulpitian missionary, the Abbe Piquet, who in 1751 came to Fort Niagara from his successful mission at La Presentation--now Ogdensburg. It is recorded of him that while here he exhorted the Senecas to beware of the white man's brandy; his name may perhaps stand as that of the first avowed temperance worker in the Niagara region.

But the end of the French _regime_ was at hand. For more than a century our home region had been claimed by France; for the last thirty-three years the lily-strewn standard of Louis had flaunted defiance to the English from the banks of the Niagara. Now on a scorching July day the little fort found itself surrounded, with Sir Wm. Johnson's cannon roaring from the wilderness. There was a gallant defense, a baptism of fire and blood, an honorable capitulation. But in that fierce conflict at least one of the consecrated soldiers of the cross--Father Claude Virot--fell before British bullets; and when the triple cross of Britain floated over Fort Niagara, the last altar raised by the French on the east bank of the Niagara river had been overthrown.

* * * * *

On this eventful day in 1759, when seemingly the opportunities for the Catholic Church to continue its work on the Niagara were at an end, there was, in the poor parish of Maryborough, county Kildare, Ireland, a little lad of six whose mission it was to be to bring hither again the blessed offices of his faith. This was Edmund Burke, afterwards Bishop of Zion, and first Vicar-Apostolic of Nova Scotia, but whose name shines not less in the annals of his church because of his zeal as missionary in Upper Canada. Having come to Quebec in 1786, he was, in 1794, commissioned Vicar-General for the whole of Upper Canada--the province having then been established two years. In that year we find him at Niagara, where he was the first English-speaking priest to hold Catholic service. True, there was at the post that year a French missionary named Le Dru, who could speak English; but he had been ordered out of the province for cause. The field was ripe for a man of Father Burke's character and energy. His early mission was near Detroit; he was the first English-speaking priest in Ohio, and it is worthy of note that he was at Niagara on his way east, July 22, 1796--only three weeks before the British finally evacuated Fort Niagara and the Americans took possession. Through his efforts in that year, the Church procured a large lot at Niagara, Ont., where he proposed a missionary establishment. There had probably never been a time, since the English conquest, when there had not been Catholics among the troops quartered on the Niagara; but under a British and Protestant commandant no suitable provision for their worship had been made. In 1798--two years after the British had relinquished the fort on the east side of the river to the Americans--Father Burke, being at the British garrison on the Canadian side, wrote to Monseigneur Plessis:

Here I am at Niagara, instead of having carried out my original
design of going on to Detroit, thence returning to Kingston to pass
the winter. The commander of the garrison, annoyed by the continual
complaints of the civic officials against the Catholic soldiers,
who used to frequent the taverns during the hours of service on
Sunday, gave orders that officers and men should attend the
Protestant service. They had attended for three consecutive Sundays
when I represented to the commander the iniquity of this order. He
replied that he would send them to mass if the chaplain was there,
and he thought it very extraordinary that whilst a chaplain was
paid by the king for the battalion, instead of attending to his
duty he should be in charge of a mission, his men were without
religious services, and his sick were dying without the sacraments.
You see, therefore, that I have reason for stopping short at
Niagara; for we must not permit four companies, of whom three
fourths both of officers and men are Catholics, to frequent the
Protestant church.

The name of the priest against whom the charge of neglect appears to lie, was Duval; but it is not clear that he had ever attended the troops to the Niagara station. But after Father Burke came Father Desjardines and an unbroken succession, with the district fully organized in ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

* * * * *

And now, although our story of mission work in the Niagara region has been long--has reviewed the visitations of two centuries--the reader may have remarked the striking fact that every priest who came into our territory, up to the opening of the nineteenth century, came from Canada. This fact is the more remarkable when we recall the long-continued and vigorous missions of the Jesuits in what is now New York State, extending west nearly to the Genesee River. But the fact stands that no priest from those early establishments made his way westward to the present site of Buffalo. Fathers Lamberville and Milet had been stationed among the Onondagas and Oneidas before coming into our region at Fort Niagara; but they came thither from Canada, by way of Lake Ontario, and not through the wilderness of Western New York. The westernmost mission among the Iroquois was that of Fathers Carheil and Garnier at Cayuga, where they were at work ten years before La Salle built the Griffon on the Niagara. It is interesting to note that this mission, which was established nearest to our own region, was "dedicated to God under the invocation of St. Joseph," and that, two hundred years after, the first Bishop of Buffalo obtained from his Holiness, Pope Pius IX., permission that St. Joseph should be the principal patron saint of this diocese.

The earliest episcopal jurisdiction of the territory now embraced in the city of Buffalo, dating from the first visit of Dallion to the land of the Neuters, was directly vested in the diocese of Rouen--for it was the rule that regions new-visited belonged to the government of the bishop from a port in whose diocese the expedition bearing the missionary had sailed; and this stood until a local ecclesiastical government was formed; the first ecclesiastical association of our region, on the New York side, therefore, is with that grand old city, Rouen, the home of La Salle, scene of the martyrdom of the Maid of Orleans, and the center, through many centuries, of mighty impulses affecting the New World. From 1657 to 1670 our region was embraced in the jurisdiction of the Vicar Apostolic of New France; and from 1670 to the Conquest in the diocese of Quebec. There are involved here, of course, all the questions which grew out of the strife for possession of the Niagara region by the French, English and Dutch. Into these questions we may not enter now further than to note that from 1684 the English claimed jurisdiction of all the region on the east bank of the Niagara and the present site of Buffalo. This claim was in part based on the Treaty of Albany at which the Senecas had signified their allegiance to King Charles; and by that acquiescence nominally put the east side of the Niagara under British rule. The next year, when the Duke of York came to the throne, he decreed that the Archbishop of Canterbury should hold ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the whole Colony of New York. It is very doubtful, however, if the Archbishop of Canterbury had ever heard of the Niagara--the first English translation of Hennepin did not appear for fourteen years after this date; and nothing is more unlikely than that the Senecas who visited the Niagara at this period, or even the Dutch and English traders who gave them rum for beaver-skins, had ever heard of the Archbishop of Canterbury, or cared a copper for his ecclesiastical jurisdiction, either on the Niagara or even in the settlements on the Hudson. In the New York Colony, and afterward State, the legal discrimination against Catholics continued down to 1784, when the law which condemned Catholic priests to imprisonment or even death was repealed. At the date of its repeal there was not a Catholic congregation in the State. Those Catholics who were among the pioneer settlers of Western New York had to go as far east as Albany to perform their religious duties or get their children baptized. Four years later--in 1788--our region was included in the newly-formed diocese of Baltimore. In 1808 we came into the new diocese of New York. Not until 1821 do we find record of the visit of a priest to Buffalo. In 1829 the Church acquired its first property here--through its benefactor whose name and memory are preserved by one of our noblest institutions--Louis Le Couteulx--and the first Buffalo parish was established under the Rev. Nicholas Mertz.

We are coming very close to the present; and yet still later, in 1847, when the diocese of Buffalo was formed, there were but sixteen priests in the sixteen great counties which constituted it. It is superfluous to contrast that time with the present. There is nothing more striking, to the student of the history and development of our region during the last half century, than the increase of the Catholic Church--in parishes and schools, in means of propaganda, in material wealth with its vast resources and power for good, and especially in that personal zeal and unflagging devotion which know no limit and no exhaustion, and are drawn from the same source of strength that inspired and sustained Brebeuf and Chaumonot and their fellow-heroes of the cross on the banks of the Niagara.

The Paschal of the Great Pinch.

THE PASCHAL OF THE GREAT PINCH.

_An Episode in the History of Fort Niagara; being an Extract from
the hitherto unknown Memoirs of the Chevalier De Tregay, Lieutenant
under the Sieur de Troyes, commanding at Fort Denonville (now
called Niagara), in the Year of Starvation 1687; with Captain
Desbergeres at that remote fortress from the joyfull Easter of 1688
till its abandonment; Soldier of His Excellency the Sr. de Brissay,
Marquis de Denonville, Governor and Lieutenant General in New
France; and humble Servitor of His Serene Majesty Louis XIV._

It has been my lot to suffer in many far parts of the earth; to bleed a little and go hungry for the King; to lie freezing for fame and France--and gain nothing thereby but a distemper; but so it is to be a soldier.

And I have seen trouble in my day. I have fought in Flanders on an empty stomach, and have burned my brain among the Spaniards so that I could neither fight nor run away; but of all the heavy employment I ever knew, naught can compare with what befel in the remote parts of New France, where I was with the troops that the Marquis de Denonville took through the wilderness into the cantons of the Iroquois, and afterwards employed to build a stockade and cabins at the mouth of the Strait of Niagara, on the east side, in the way where they go a beaver-hunting. "Fort Denonville," the Sieur de Brissay decreed it should be called, for he held great hopes of the service which it should do him against both the Iroquois and the English; but now that he has fallen into the disfavor that has ever been the reward of faithful service in this accursed land, his name is no more given even to that unhappy spot, but rather it is called Fort Niagara.

There were some hundreds of us all told that reached that fair plateau, after we left the river of the Senecas. It was mid-summer of the year of grace 1687, and we made at first a pleasant camp, somewhat overlooking the great lake, while to the west side of the point the great river made good haven for our batteaux and canoes. There was fine stir of air at night, so that we slept wholesomely, and the wounded began to mend at a great rate. And of a truth, tho' I have adventured in many lands, I have seen no spot which in all its demesne offered a fairer prospect to a man of taste. On the north of us, like the great sea itself, lay the Lake Ontario, which on a summer morning, when touched by a little wind, with the sun aslant, was like the lapis lazuli I have seen in the King's palace--very blue, yet all bright with white and gold. The river behind the camp ran mightily strong, yet for the most part glassy and green like the precious green-stone the lapidaries call verd-antique. Behind us to the south lay the forest, and four leagues away rose the triple mountains wherein is the great fall; but these are not such mountains as we have in Italy and Spain, being more of the nature of a great table-land, making an exceeding hard portage to reach the Strait of Erie above the great fall.

It was truly a most fit place for a fort, and the Marquis de Denonville let none in his command rest day or night until we had made a fortification, in part of earth, surmounted by palisades which the soldiers cut in the woods. There was much of hazard and fatigue in this work, for the whole plain about the fort had no trees; so that some of us went into the forest along the shore to the eastward and some cut their sticks on the west side of the river. It was hard work, getting them up the high bank; but so pressed were we, somewhat by fear of an attack, and even more by the zeal of our commander, that in three days we had built there a pretty good fort with four bastions, where we put two great guns and some pattareras; and we had begun to build some cabins on the four sides of the square in the middle of it. And as we worked, our number was constantly diminished; for the Sieurs Du Luth and Durantaye, with that one-handed Chevalier de Tonty of whom they tell so much, and our allies the savages who had come from the Illinois to join the Governor in his assault upon the Iroquois, as soon as their wounded were able to be moved, took themselves off up the Niagara and over the mountain portage I have spoken of; for they kept a post and place of trade at the Detroit, and at Michillimackinac. And then presently the Marquis himself and all whom he would let go sailed away around the great lake for Montreal. But he ordered that an hundred, officers and men, stay behind to hold this new Fort Denonville. He had placed in command over us the Sieur de Troyes, of whom it would not become me to speak in any wise ill.

There were sour looks and sad, as the main force marched to the batteaux. But the Marquis did not choose to heed anything of that. We were put on parade for the embarkation--though we made a sorry show of it, for there were even then more rags than lace or good leather--and His Excellency spoke a farewell word in the hearing of us all.

"You are to complete your quarters with all convenient expediency," he said to De Troyes, who stood attentive, before us. "There will be no lack of provision sent. You have here in these waters the finest fish in the world. There is naught to fear from these Iroquois wasps--have we not just torn to pieces their nests?"

He said this with a fine bravado, though methought he lacked somewhat of sincerity; for surely scattered wasps might prove troublesome enough to those of us who stayed behind. But De Troyes made no reply, and saluted gravely. And so, with a jaunty word about the pleasant spot where we were to abide, and a light promise to send fresh troops in the spring, the General took himself off, and we were left behind to look out for the wasps. As the boats passed the sandbar and turned to skirt the lake shore to the westward, we gave them a salvo of musketry; but De Troyes raised his hand--although the great Marquis was yet in sight and almost in hailing distance--and forbade another discharge.

"Save your powder," was all he said; and the very brevity of it seemed to mean more than many words, and put us into a low mood for that whole day.

Now for a time that followed there was work enough to keep each man busy, which is best for all who are in this trade of war, especially in the wilderness. It was on the third of August that M. de Brissay left us, he having sent off some of the militia ahead of him; and he bade M. de Vaudreuil stay behind for a space, to help the Sieur de Troyes complete the fort and cabins, and this he did right ably, for as all Canada and the King himself know, M. de Vaudreuil was a man of exceeding great energy and resources in these matters. There was a vast deal of fetching and carrying, of hewing and sawing and framing. And notwithstanding that the sun of that climate was desperately hot the men worked with good hearts, so that there was soon finished an excellent lodgment for the commandant; with a chimney of sticks and clay, and boards arranged into a sort of bedstead; and this M. de Troyes shared with M. de Vaudreuil, until such time as the latter gentleman quit us. There were three other cabins built, with chimneys, doors and little windows. We also constructed a baking-house with a large oven and chimney, partly covered with boards and the remainder with hurdles and clay. We also built an extensive framed building without chimney, and a large store-house with pillars eight feet high, and made from time to time yet other constructions for the men and goods--though, _Dieu defend_! we had spare room for both, soon enough. In the square in the midst of the buildings we digged a well; and although the water was sweet enough, yet from the first, for lack of proper curbing and protection, it was ever much roiled and impure when we drew it, a detriment alike to health and cookery.

M. de Vaudreuil seeing us at last well roofed, and having directed for a little the getting of a store of firewood, made his adieux. Even then, in those fine August days, a spirit of discontent was among us, and more than one spark of a soldier, who at the first camp had been hot upon staying on the Niagara, sought now to be taken in M. de Vaudreuil's escort. But that gentleman replied, that he wished to make a good report of us all to the Governor, and that, for his part, he hoped he might come to us early in the spring, with the promised detachment of troops. And so we parted.

Now the spring before, when we had all followed the Marquis de Denonville across Lake Ontario to harass the cantons of the Iroquois, this establishment of a post on the Niagara was assuredly a part of that gentleman's plan. It is not for me, who am but a mere lieutenant of marines, to show how a great commander should conduct his expeditions; yet I do declare that while there was no lack of provision made for killing such of the savages as would permit it, there was next to none for maintaining troops who were to be left penned up in the savages' country. We who were left at Fort Denonville had but few mattocks or even axes. Of ammunition there was none too much. In the Senecas' country we had destroyed thousands of minots[6] of corn, but had brought along scarce a week's rations of it to this corner. We had none of us gone a-soldiering with our pockets full of seed, and even if we had brought ample store of corn and pumpkin seed, of lentils and salad plants, the season was too late to have done much in gardening. We made some feeble attempts at it; but no rain fell, the earth baked under the sun so hard that great cracks came in it; and what few shoots of corn and pumpkin thrust upward through this parched soil, withered away before any strengthening juices came in them. To hunt far from the fort we durst not, save in considerable parties; so that if we made ourselves safe from the savages, we also made every other living thing safe against us. To fish was well nigh our only recourse; but although many of our men labored diligently at it, they met with but indifferent return.

Thus it was that our most ardent hopes, our very life itself, hung upon the coming of the promised supplies. There was joy at the fort when at length the sail of the little bark was seen; even De Troyes, who had grown exceeding grave and melancholy, took on again something of his wonted spirit. But we were not quite yet to be succored, for it was the season of the most light and trifling airs, so that the bark for two days hung idly on the shining lake, some leagues away from the mouth of the river, while we idled and fretted like children, impatient for her coming. When once we had her within the bar, there was no time lost in unlading. It was a poor soldier indeed who could not work to secure the comfort of his own belly; and the store was so ample that we felt secure for the winter, come what might. The bark that fetched these things had been so delayed by the calms, that she weighed and sailed with the first favoring breeze; and it was not until her sail had fall'n below the horizon that we fairly had sight or smell of what she had brought.

From the first the stores proved bad; still, we made shift to use the best, eked out with what the near-by forest and river afforded. For many weeks we saw no foes. There was little work to do, and the men idled through the days, with no word on their lips but to complain of the food and wish for spring. When the frosts began to fall we had a more vigorous spell of it; but now for the first time appeared the Iroquois wasps. One of our parties, which had gone toward the great fall of the Niagara, lost two men; those who returned reported that their comrades were taken all unawares by the savages. Another party, seeking game to the eastward where a stream cuts through the high bank on its way to the lake,[7] never came back at all. Here we found their bodies and buried them; but their scalps, after the manner of these people, had been taken.

Christmas drew on, but never was a sorrier season kept by soldiers of France. De Troyes had fallen ill. Naught ailed him that we could see save low spirits and a thinning of the blood, which made him too weak to walk. The Father Jean de Lamberville, who had stayed with us, and who would have been our hope and consolation in those days, very early fell desperate ill of a distemper, so that the men had not the help of his ministrations and holy example. Others there were who either from feebleness or lack of discipline openly refused their daily duty and went unpunished. We had fair store of brandy; and on Christmas eve those of us who still held some soul for sport essayed to lighten the hour. We brewed a comfortable draught, built the blaze high, for the frosts were getting exceeding sharp, gathered as many as could be had of officers and worthy men into our cabin, and made brave to sing the songs of France. And now here was a strange thing: that while the hardiest and soundest amongst us had made good show of cheer, had eaten the vile food and tried to speak lightly of our ills, no sooner did we hear our own voices in the songs that carried us back to the pleasantries of our native land, than we fell a-sobbing and weeping like children; which weakness I attribute to the distemper that was already in our blood.

For the days that followed I have no heart to set down much. We never went without the palisades except well guarded to fetch firewood. This duty indeed made the burden of every day. A prodigious store of wood was needed, for the cold surpassed anything I had ever known. The snow fell heavily, and there were storms when for days the gale drave straight across our bleak plateau. There was no blood in us to withstand the icy blasts. Do what we would the chill of the tomb was in the cabins where the men lay. The wood-choppers one day, facing such a storm, fell in the deep drifts just outside the gate. None durst go out to them. The second day the wolves found them--and we saw it all!

There was not a charge of powder left in the fort. There was not a mouthful of fit food. The biscuits had from the first been full of worms and weevils. The salted meat, either from the admixture of sea-water through leaky casks, or from other cause, was rotten beyond the power even of a starving man to hold.

_Le scorbut_ broke out. I had seen it on shipboard, and knew the signs. De Troyes now seldom left his cabin; and when, in the way of duty, I made my devoirs, and he asked after the men, I made shift to hide the truth. But it could not be for long.

"My poor fellows," he sighed one day, as he turned feebly on his couch of planks, "it must be with all as it is with me--see, look here, De Tregay, do you know the sign?" and he bared his shrunken arm and side.

Indeed I knew the signs--the dry, pallid skin, with the purple blotches and indurations. He saw I was at a loss for words.

"_Sang de Dieu!_" he cried, "Is this what soldiers of France must come to, for the glory of"----. He stopped short, as if lacking spirit to go on. "Now I bethink me," he added, in a melancholy voice, "it _is_ what soldiers must come to." Then, after a while he asked:

"How many dead today, De Tregay?"

How many dead! From a garrison of gallant men-at-arms we had become a charnel-house. In six weeks we had lost sixty men. From a hundred at the beginning of autumn, we were now scarce forty, and February was not gone. A few of us, perhaps with stouter stomachs than the rest, did all the duty of the post. We brought the firewood and we buried the dead--picking the frozen clods with infinite toil, that we might lay the bones of our comrades beyond the reach of wolves. Sometimes it was the scurvy, sometimes it was the cold, sometimes, methinks, it was naught but a weak will--or as we say, the broken heart; but it mattered not, the end was the same. More than twenty died in March; and although we were now but a handful of skeletons and accustomed to death, I had no thought of sorrow or of grief, so dulled had my spirit become, until one morning I found the brave De Troyes drawing with frightful pains his dying breath. With the name of a maid he loved upon his lips, the light went out; and with heavy heart I buried him in that crowded ground, and fain would have lain down with him.

And now with our commander under the snow, what little spirit still burned in the best of us seemed to die down. I too bore the signs of the distemper, yet to no great extent, for of all the garrison I had labored by exercise to keep myself wholesome, and in the woods I had tasted of barks and buds and roots of little herbs, hoping to find something akin in its juices to the _herbe de scorbut_[8] which I have known to cure sick sailors. But now I gave over these last efforts for life; for, thought I, spring is tardy in these latitudes. Many weeks must yet pass before the noble Marquis at Montreal (where comforts are) will care to send the promised troop. And the Western savages, our allies the Illinois, the Ottawais, the Miamis, were they not coming to succor us here and to raid the Iroquois cantons? But of what account is the savage's word!

So I thought, and I turned myself on my pallet. I listened. There was no sound in all the place save the beating of a sleet. "It is appointed," I said within me. "Let the end come." And presently, being numb with the cold, I thought I was on a sunny hillside in Anjou. It was the time of the grape-harvest, and the smell of the vines, laughter and sunshine filled the air. Young lads and maids, playmates of my boyhood days, came and took me by the hand....

A twinge of pain made the vision pass. I opened my eyes upon a huge savage, painted and bedaubed, after their fashion. It was the grip of his vast fist that had brought me back from Anjou.

"The Iroquois, then," I thought, "have learned of our extremity, and have broken in, to finish all. So much the better," and I was for sinking back upon the boards, when the savage took from a little pouch a handful of the parched corn which they carry on their expeditions. "Eat," he said, in the language of the Miamis. And then I knew that relief had come--and I knew no more for a space.

Now this was Michitonka himself, who had led his war party from beyond Lake Erie, where the Chevalier de Tonty and Du Luth were, to see how we fared at Fort Denonville, and to make an expedition against the Senecas--of whom we saw no more, from the time the Miamis arrived. There were of all our garrison but twelve not dead, and among those who threw off the distemper was the Father de Lamberville. His recovery gave us the greatest joy. He lay for many weeks at the very verge of the grave, and it was marvelous to all to see his skin, which had been so empurpled and full of malignant humors, come wholesome and fair again. I have often remarked, in this hard country, that of all Europeans the Fathers of the Holy Orders may be brought nearest to death, and yet regain their wonted health. They have the same prejudice for life that the wildest savage has. But as for the rest of us, who are neither savage nor holy, it is by a slim chance that we live at all.

Now the Father, and two or three of the others who had the strength to risk it, set out with a part of Michitonka's people to Cataracouy[9] and Montreal, to carry the news of our extremity. And on a soft April day as we looked over lake, we saw a sail; and we knew that we had kept the fort until the relief company was sent as had been commanded. But it had been a great pinch.

Now I am come to that which after all I chiefly set out to write down; for I have ever held that great woes should be passed over with few words, but it is meet to dwell upon the hour of gladness. And this hour was now arrived, when we saw approach the new commandant, the Sieur Desbergeres, captain of one of the companies of the Detachment of the Marine, and with him the Father Milet, of the Society of Jesus. There was a goodly company, whose names are well writ on the history of this New France: the Sieurs De la Mothe, La Rabelle, Demuratre de Clerin and de Gemerais, and others, besides a host of fine fellows of the common rank; with fresh food that meant life to us.

Of all who came that April day, it was the Father Milet who did the most. The very morning that he landed, we knelt about him at mass; and scarce had he rested in his cabin than he marked a spot in the midst of the square, where a cross should stand, and bade as many as could, get about the hewing of it; and although I was yet feeble and might rest as I liked, I chose to share in the work, for so I found my pleasure. A fair straight oak was felled and well hewn, and with infinite toil the timber was taken within the palisades and further dressed; and while the carpenters toiled to mortise the cross-piece and fasten it with pins, Father Milet himself traced upon the arms the symbols for the legend:

Regnat, Vincit, Imperat Christus.

And these letters were well cut into the wood, in the midst of them being the sign of the Sacred Heart. We had it well made, and a place dug for it, on a Thursday; and on the next morning, which was Good Friday, the reverend Father placed his little portable altar in the midst of the square, where we all, officers and men, and even some of the Miamis who were yet with us, assembled for the mass. Then we raised the great cross and planted it firmly in the midst of the little square. The service of the blessing of it lay hold of my mind mightily, for my fancy was that this great sign of victory had sprung from the midst of the graves where De Troyes and four score of my comrades lay; and being in this tender mood (for I was still weak in body) the words which the Father read from his breviary seemed to rest the more clearly in my mind.

"_Adjutorium nostrum in nomine Domini._" Father Milet had a good voice, with a sort of tenderness in it, so that we were every one disposed to such silence and attention, that I could even hear the little waves lapping the shore below the fort. And when he began with the "_Oramus_"--"_Rogamus te Domine sancte Pater omnipotens_,"--I was that moved, by the joy of it, and my own memories, that I wept--and I a soldier!

It may be believed that the Sunday which followed, which was the Paschal, was kept by us with such worship and rejoicing as had never yet been known in those remote parts. Holy men had been on that river before, it is true; but none had abode there for long, nor had any set up so great a cross, nor had there ever such new life come to men as we knew at Fort Denonville that Easter.

For a space, all things went well. What with the season (for spring ever inspires men to new undertakings) and the bitter lessons learned in the great pinch of the past winter, we were no more an idle set, but kept all at work, and well. Yet the Iroquois pestered us vastly, being set on thereto by the English, who claimed this spot. And in September there came that pilot Maheut, bringing his bark La General over the shoal at the river's mouth all unexpected; and she was scarce anchored in the little roadstead than Desbergeres knew he was to abandon all. It was cause of chagrin to the great Marquis, I make no doubt, thus to drop the prize he had so tried to hold; but some of us in the fort had no stomach for another winter on the Niagara, and we made haste to execute the orders which the Marquis de Denonville had sent. We put the guns on board La General. We set the gate open, and tore down the rows of pales on the south and east sides of the square. Indeed the wind had long ago begun this work, so that towards the lake the pales (being but little set in the earth) had fallen or leaned over, so they could readily have been scaled, or broken through. But as the order was, we left the cabins and quarters standing, with doors ajar, to welcome who might come, Iroquois or wolf, for there was naught within. But Father Milet took down from above the door of his cabin the little sun dial. "The shadow of the great cross falls divers ways," was his saying.

Early the next morning, being the 15th of September, of the year 1688, being ready for the embarkation, Father Milet summoned us to the last mass he might say in the place. It was a sad morning, for the clouds hung heavy; the lake was of a somber and forbidding cast, and the very touch in the air forebode autumnal gales. As we knelt around the cross for the last time, the ensign brought the standards which Desbergeres had kept, and holding the staves, knelt also. Certain Miamis, too, who were about to make the Niagara portage, stayed to see what the priest might do. And at the end of the office Father Milet did an uncommon thing, for he was mightily moved. He turned from us toward the cross, and throwing wide his arms spoke the last word--"Amen."

There were both gladness and sorrow in our hearts as we embarked. Lake and sky took on the hue of lead, foreboding storm. We durst carry but little sail, and at the sunset hour were scarce a league off shore. As it chanced, Father Milet and I stood together on the deck and gazed through the gloom toward that dark coast. While we thus stood, there came a rift betwixt the banked clouds to the west, so that the sun, just as it slipped from sight, lighted those Niagara shores, and we saw but for an instant, above the blackness and the desolation, the great cross as in fire or blood gleam red.

With Bolton at Fort Niagara.

WITH BOLTON AT FORT NIAGARA.

One pleasant September day in 1897 it was my good fortune, under expert guidance, to follow for a little the one solitary trail made by the American patriots in Western New York during the Revolutionary War, the one expedition of our colonial forces approaching this region during that period. This was the famous "raid" led by Gen. John Sullivan in the summer of 1779. Our quest took us up the long hill slope west of Conesus Lake, in what is now the town of Groveland, Livingston Co., to a spot--among the most memorable in the annals of Western New York, yet unmarked and known to but a few--where a detachment of Sullivan's army, under Lieut. Boyd, were waylaid and massacred by the Indians. It was on the 13th of September that this tragedy occurred. Two days later Gen. Sullivan, having accomplished the main purpose of his raid--the destruction of Indian villages and crops--turned back towards Pennsylvania, returning to Easton, whence the expedition had started. He had come within about eighty miles of the Niagara. "Though I had it not in command," wrote Gen. Sullivan in his report to the Secretary of War, "I should have ventured to have paid [Fort] Niagara a visit, had I been supplied with fifteen days' provisions in addition to what I had, which I am persuaded from the bravery and ardor of our troops would have fallen into our hands."[10] This was the nearest approach to any attempt made by the Americans to enter this region during that war.

The events of Sullivan's expedition are well known. Few episodes of the Revolution are more fully recorded. But what is the reverse of the picture? What lay at the other side of this Western New York wilderness which Sullivan failed to penetrate? What was going on, up and down the Niagara, and on Buffalo Creek, during those momentous years? We know that the region was British, that old Fort Niagara was its garrison, the principal rendezvous of the Indians and the base from which scalping parties set out to harry the frontier settlements. The most dreadful frontier tragedies of the war--Wyoming, Cherry Valley, and others--were planned here and carried out with British cooeperation. But who were the men and what were the incidents of the time, upon our Niagara frontier? So far as I am aware, that period is for the most part a blank in our histories. One may search the books in vain for any adequate narrative--indeed for any but the most meager data--of the history of the Niagara region during the Revolution. The materials are not lacking, they are in fact abundant. In this paper I undertake only to give an inkling of the character of events in this region during that grave period in our nation's history.[11]

In 1778, Colonel Haldimand, afterward Sir Frederick, succeeded Gen. Guy Carleton in the command of the British forces in Canada. He was Commander in Chief, and Governor of Canada, until his recall in 1784. Lord North was England's Prime Minister, Lord George Germaine in charge of American affairs in the Cabinet. Haldimand took up his residence at Quebec, and therefrom, for a decade, administered the affairs of the Canadian frontier with zeal and adroitness. He was a thorough soldier, as his letters show. He was also an adept in the treatment of matters which, like the retention by the British of the frontier posts for thirteen years after they had been ceded to the Americans by treaty, called for dogged determination, veiled behind diplomatic courtesies. The troops which he commanded were scattered from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to Lake Michigan; but to no part of this long line of wilderness defense--a line which was substantially the enemy's frontier--did he pay more constant attention than to Fort Niagara. There were good reasons for this. Fort Niagara was not only the key to the upper lakes, the base of supplies for Detroit, Michillimackinac and minor posts, but it had long been an important trading post and the principal rendezvous of the Six Nations, upon whose peculiarly efficient services against the American frontiers Sir Frederick relied scarcely less than he did upon the British troops themselves. It was, therefore, with no ordinary solicitude that he made his appointments for Niagara.

I cannot state positively the names of all officers in command at Fort Niagara from the time war was begun, down to 1777. Lieut. Lernault, afterwards at Detroit, was here for a time; but about the spring of '77 we find Fort Niagara put under the command of Lieut. Col. Mason Bolton, of the 34th Royal Artillery. He had then seen some years of service in America; had campaigned in Florida and the West Indies; had been sent to Mackinac and as far west as the Illinois; and it was no slight tribute to his ability and fidelity, when Haldimand put the Niagara frontier into his hands. Here, for over three years, he was the chief in command. In military rank, even if in nothing else, he was the principal man in this region during the crucial period of the Revolution. He commanded the garrison at Fort Niagara, and its dependencies at Schlosser and Fort Erie. Buffalo was then unthought of--it was merely Te-hos-e-ro-ron, the place of the basswoods; but at the Indian villages farther up Buffalo Creek, which came into existence in 1780, the name of Col. Bolton stood for the highest military authority of the region. And yet, incredible as it may seem, after all these years in which--to adapt Carlyle's phrase--the Torch of History has been so assiduously brandished about, I do not know of any printed book which offers any information about Col. Mason Bolton or the life he led here. Indeed, with one or two exceptions, in which he is barely alluded to, I think all printed literature may be searched in vain for so much as a mention of his name.

Other chief men of this frontier, at the period we are considering, were Col. Guy Johnson, Superintendent of Indian Affairs; Sir John Johnson, son of the Sir William who captured Fort Niagara from the French in 1759; Col. John Butler, of the Queen's Rangers; his son Walter; Sayenqueraghta, the King of the Senecas; Rowland Montour, his half-breed son-in-law; and Brant, the Mohawk hero, who, equipped with a New England schooling and enlightened by a trip to England, here returned to lead out scalping parties in the British interests.