History of Oneida County, New York : with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers, Part 9

Author: Durant, Samuel W
Publication date: 1878
Publisher: Philadelphia : Everts & Fariss
Number of Pages: 920

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CHAPTER V.

FRENCH DISCOVERIES.

Champlain-The Franciscans and Jesuits-Wars with the French and Canada Indians from 1609 to 1727.

THE French were the first Europeans, according to au- thentie history, to penetrate the valley of the St. Lawrence. As early as 1534, one Jacques Cartier, a citizen of St. Malo, in France, visited the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the following year he explored the great river as far as the present site of Montreal, to which locality he gave tho name Mount Royal, from the extensive and beautiful view which he obtained from the top of the mountain situated on the island where the city stands.

Transient settlements and trading stations were com- menced from time to time at the mouth of the Saguenay and at Quebec, but it was not until 1608 that a permanent settlement was established on the site of Quebec, by Sir Samuel Champlain, and not until 1611 that the same ad- venturer founded Montreal. The latter place was merely a

# The daughter of Rev. John Williams (Euniee) remained a enptive among the Indians, and married one of them.

HISTORY OF ONEIDA COUNTY, NEW YORK.

trading-point until 1642, when the first permanent buildings were erected.

In the month of May, 1609, Champlain, who had entered into a sort of alliance, offensive and defensive, with the Hurons, Montagnais, and other Canadian nations, against the Iroquois, started up the St. Lawrence with a band of the latter nation, expecting to find a large war-party of the former, but they had not arrived up to the middle of May, and after waiting a short time, he set forward, impatient of the delay. After going a short distance up the river, he found his allies in eamp, and they, being anxious to look upon the white men's settlement at Quebec, the whole party descended the river to the latter place, where a grand feast and dance was given them, and the whole elosed with the discharge of the new and terrible firearms of the French.

When the jubilee was over, Champlain embarked in a small shallop, with eleven French soldiers clad in armor, and armed with the arquebuse, a clumsy weapon, some- what after the model of the Spanish blunderbuss, and, ac- companied by swarms of his dusky allies, proeceded up the river to the month of the outlet of Lake Champlain, since variously known as the Rivière des Iroquois, Richelieu, St. John, Chambley, St. Louis, and Sorel.

Following up this stream to the falls, he was obliged to send back his shallop with nearly all his French soldiers. His Indian allies, too, had left him in great numbers, and when he launched his canoes above the rapids he found them diminished to twenty-four, containing sixty Indians.

With this force he pushed ou up the long lake to which he gave his name, and on the morning of July 29 encamped on the western shore, near where the French long after- wards built Fort St. Frederick, subsequently called by the English Crown Point. The party had been traveling only by night since they had arrived in the vicinity of the enemy. Embarking again in the evening, they encountered a war-party of 200 Iroquois, most probably of the Mohawk nation, who immediately landed and fortified themselves. Champlain and his party remained in their canoes until the dawn, when they went on shore, and a pitched battle was fought among the giant forest-trees, in which, with the aid of the firearms of the three Frenchmen, the Canadian savages gained a great victory ; after which they re-embarked and returned to their homes, carrying numerous prisoners and trophies along with them.

This was most probably the first visit of Europeans to the country of the Iroquois, and the French long after rued the first encounter, which was but the prelude to a century and a half of warfare with these formidable children of the forest.

In September of the same year, Sir Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the employ of the Dutch, then the greatest commercial people in Europe, sailed up the majestic river which bears his name in his little vessel, the " Half-Moon," as far as the site of Albany, and sent a boat still farther. Dutch settlements followed at Fort Orange and Manhattan (Albany and New York), in 1613, and thus were two dia- metrically opposite systems of civilization introduced nearly simultaneously into the region bordering on the Iroquois Confederacy. The one representing bigotry and absolutism,

the other the most advanced principles of toleration and popular government. The former hostile to every form of religion and government which failed to recognize the " right divine" of monarchs and the tenets of the " Mother Church," the latter granting political and religious equality to all classes, without distinction of name or race.

The Dutch traders who established themselves along the Hudson very judiciously made friends of the Iroquois, and thus laid the foundation of that alliance which existed al- most unbroken from 1613 to the close of the American Revolution between them and the Dutch, and subsequently the English, a period of one hundred and seventy years.

Through their intercourse with the Dutch the Iroquois became possessed of the destructive weapons of the white man, and by means of these they were for a long period the most formidable enemies of the French in America, and took a fearful revenge for their first defeat by Cham- plain on the banks of the lake that bears his name.

In the autumn of 1615, Champlain, who had penetrated, via the Ottawa River, to Lake Huron, raised an army of between 2000 and 3000 men,-Huron-Algonquins,-and, descending the river Trent, emerged upon tlfe waters of Lake Ontario, which he erossed at its northeastern extrem- ity, and landed, most probably, in one of the numerous arms of Nuioura, or Black River Bay, whence the motley host, hiding their canoes in the forest, proceeded on foot around the southeastern extremity of the lake and fell. upon n village of the Seneca nation, probably near the outlet of Canandaigua Lake .* Accompanying this army of painted savages, besides Champlain, were about a dozen French soldiers clad in the armor and armed with the weapons of the time.

The village which this army attacked was strongly forti- fied, having a quadruple row of palisades or stockades, formed of trunks of trees, thirty feet high, set aslant in the ground, and their tops intersecting each other. Near the top of this formidable barricade was a gallery, defended by shot-proof timber, and furnished with wooden gutters for quenching fire. The lake was hard by, from which an abundant supply of water was obtained ; and the galleries were well provided with stones and implements for defense.

The Senecas made a brave defense, and the Franco-In- dian army, after spending five days in the vicinity, and having seventeen men, including Champlain, wounded, withdrew from the region, and sullenly retraced their steps towards home. Thus within the space of a little more than six years Champlain had twice attacked the Iroquois, once upon their right and once upon their left flank, making the attempts upon the two strongest and most warlike of the nations. An army of Iroquois of equal strength would probably have marched across the continent.

There was one very curious feature connected with this assault upon the Seneca town, which has not attached to any other military operations within the area of the United States and Canada. It was a feature characteristic of the early and middle ages, having been employed at least from

# The locality of this village is in dispute, but Dr. O'Callaghan locates it on Canandaigua Lake. There is little doubt but it was a Seneca town. The Ontonoronons of Champlain were undoubtedly the Senecas.

HISTORY OF ONEIDA COUNTY, NEW YORK.

the days of the Trojan war down to the beginning of the seventeenth century. This was the employment of wooden towers, upon and behind which the assault was carried on in the same manner as that employed by Alexander the Great at the siege of Tyre, three hundred years before the Christian era.

THE FRANCISCANS AND JESUITS.

The first Christian missionaries who came to Canada for the purpose of laboring among the Indians were four friars of the Recollet Order of the Franciscans, viz. : Denis Jamet, Jean Dolbeau, Joseph le Caron, and Pacific du Plessis, who arrived at Quebec in May, 1615, under the patronage of Champlain. Before the close of that year Dolbeau had commenced his labors among the Montagnais Indians about Tadoussac, and Le Caron had penetrated the wilderness along with Champlain, via the Ottawa River and Lake Nipissing, to the borders of Lake Huron. Two more members of the order were subsequently added to the mission, and the six labored in the vast field set apart for them as best they might; but their task was herculean, and, in despair at the prospect before them, they at length applied for assistance to the followers of Loyola, the Jesuits. It is a singular fact that these six Franciscan friars were sup- ported at the expense of a zealous Calvinist and Huguenot, Emery de Caen, who was no doubt of a somewhat more liberal nature than the founder of his sect, or this never could have occurred.

The powerful order of the Jesuits, strong in numbers as in discipline, at once and gladly accepted, and responded to the call, and in 1625 three of their brotherhood, Charles Lalemant, Enemond Masse, and Jean de Brebœuf were dispatched to Canada. In a very short time the entire con- trol of religious matters passed into their hands. The order was somewhat broken up and scattered during the occupancy of Quebec by the English,-1629-1632,-but upon the restoration of French supremacy they revived, and from that time carried on their mission work with a zeal and perse- verance almost unparalleled. However much we may differ with them in their principles and religious tenets, we can but admire their hervie courage, their self-denying zeal, which led them to a life of seclusion and hardship, and finally to the most terrible of deaths,-torture at the hands of the savages.

For many years subsequent to Champlain's inroad in 1615 very little was heard from the Iroquois, but the in- juries they had received on the banks of Champlain and at Canandaigua they had not forgotten, and about 1622 they made themselves felt by an attack upon the settlement of Quebec, and attempted to capture the Recollet couvent, on the river St. Charles, by assault.

Their favorite system of warfare was to lie in wait along the St. Lawrence, and capture the trading-parties of the Hurons and other Western nations, as they descended with their fur-laden canoes to Quebec, or returned with goods and trinkets to their homes in the forests of the Ottawa and Lake Nipissing.

The first visit of a Jesuit missionary to the country of the Iroquois was a compulsory one.

On the morning of Aug. 2, 1642, twelve Huron canoes,

carrying about forty persons, among whom were Isaac Jogues, the martyr missionary of after-years, and two assistants, René Goupil and Guillaume Couture, were making their way across the Lake St. Peter near its western end, where it is filled with islands. Jogues was on his return to the Huron missions with supplies. As they neared the shore they were suddenly attacked by a war-party of about seventy Iroquois, and nearly all taken prisoners. A few were killed, and a few escaped. The missionaries were among the prisoners.

The Iroquois, taking their prisoners and spoils, immedi- ately set out for their own country on the Mohawk River. Their route was up the river Richelieu (the outlet of Lake Champlain), and up the lake to the future site of Ticon- deroga, and thence via Lake George, called by the Mohawks, according to Jogues, An-di-ar-ta-roc-te (place where the lake closes), and from its southern extremity overland to the Mohawk towns or castles:

The prisoners had been terribly maltreated when first taken, the savages beating them with clubs and tearing out their finger-nails with their teeth. On the journey south they were loaded with a heavy burden at all the carrying- places, and when they arrived at Te-o-non-to geu,* which appears to have been the third or upper town of the nation, situated within the present limits of the town of Danube, Herkimer County, they were nearly exhausted; and when forced to run the gauntlet they emerged at the farther end of the double row of savages more dead than alive, and covered with blood and bruises from head to foot.

Here again they underwent the torture upon a scaffold erected so that all could see them. Couture, who in the moment of his capture had slain an Iroquois, was, after severe torturing, adopted as one of their nation on account of his bravery, and from theneeforth was comparatively safe. But Jogues and Goupil were less fortunate, and a few days after their arrival the latter was murdered, and his body thrown to the wild animals. Both had been tortured terribly, by having their thumbs cut off with a dull elam- shell, being hung suspended by the wrists, and by every hellish form of torture which could be thought of without seriously endangering life.

Jogues remained with the Indians for about a year, and during his captivity he continued to teach them the prin- ciples of his religion, and to baptize the aged and the young, and up to the last of July had baptized about seventy. He also taught them something of astronomy, in which they took a far greater interest than in his religion. He was allowed great freedom, and traveled through all their vil- lages preaching and baptizing, and quite likely may have visited the region now included in Oneida County.

At the end of July he went with a fishing-party to a place on the Hudson River about twenty miles below Fort Orange (Albany). He soon after, in company with a small party, visited the Dutch settlement, which then consisted of a miserable little log fort, standing on ground now oceu- pied by the Phoenix Hotel, t surrounded by some twenty or thirty houses, built of rough boards and roofed with thatch.

# Known in Morgan's League of the Iroquois as Gu-ne-ga-hu-ya. f Parkman's Jesuits in North America.

HISTORY OF ONEIDA COUNTY, NEW YORK.

There was also a small church where Dominie Megapolensis held forth to the people, who amounted to about one hun- dred souls, mostly farmers and tenants of the patroon of the Van Rensselaer manor. Here was the principal post of the Dutch traders, where they exchanged guns, knives, hatchets, kettles, cloth, and trinkets, at very moderate rates, for the furs of the Indians.

It is to the everlasting honor of these Protestant Dutch that, notwithstanding the persecutions they had endured in Europe at the hands of the Catholic leaders, they took compassion upon Jogues, and eventually suceceded in res- cuing him from the savages, though at great risk to them- selves, and sent him to the Governor of Manhattan, Kieft .* Here, where now stands the great commercial emporium of America, was then a small trading village, containing some 500 people. As an evidence of the religious toleration of the Dutch in that day, when toleration was the exception in both Europe and America, it may be stated that Kieft informed Jogues that eighteen different languages were spoken there; and these heterogeneous tongues represented every shade of religious belief known to the Christian world.

The distressed and ragged Jesuit was furnished with a new supply of clothing, and sent in a trading-vessel to Eng- land, from whence he sailed for France in a French ship, and reached the Jesuit College of Rennes in January, 1644.

The Iroquois continued their predatory warfare against the French and their Indian allies, and in May, 1644, Jo- seph Bressani, an Italian Jesuit, on his way to the Huron country, was captured and taken (most probably ) to one of the Mohenck towns, where he was terribly tortured and maimed, and then given over to an old squaw, who traded him to the Dutch, who, with their aceustomed generosity, clothed him and took care of him until he was able to travel, when they sent him to his own country on board a vessel bound to Rochelle.

On the 30th of March, 1644, a war-party of Iroquois attacked the fort at Villemarie, on the island of Montreal, but they were so roughly handled by the French com- mander, Chomedey de Maisonneuve, that they sullenly retreated from the vicinity, bearing the body of their chief, who had been slain by Maisonneuve, along with them. Notwithstanding their audacity and ferocity, the advantage was not always on the side of the Iroquois, and more than one Huron band returned from forage into their country loaded with spoils. Piskaret, an Algonquin, who had be- come a Christian, was a famous leader and performed wany wonderful exploits against his hereditary enemies ; at one time stealing into an Iroquois village alone and remaining for three days hid near by, and sallying from his hiding- place by night and killing and scalping the sleeping enemy.

In July, 1645, a treaty of peace was signed between the Iroquois and the French, and prisoners upon both sides were given up. Guillaume Couture, who had been taken along with Jogues, and kept a close prisoner, was among those delivered up by the Mohutoks. Ki-ot-sa-ton, a re- nowned Iroquois orator, made a famous speech, at the end

of which a grand peace-dance was engaged in by all the nations present.

In September of the same year a grand council was held at Three Rivers, at which all the nations of the north western regions of Canada and the Iroquois met together and eele- brated with pomp and ceremony the great peace which had been concluded. Couture, the missionary, who had been given up by the Iroquois, voluntarily returned with them to the forest to found a new mission, which, as Parkman ob- serves, " was christened in advance with a prophetic name," " The Mission of the Martyrs." In the spring of 1646, Jogues, who had been in Montreal for the past two years, also returned to the valley of the Mohawk. It was during his journey that he ehristencd Lake George Lac St. Suere- ment, which name it bore until Sir William Johnson, more than a century later, rechristened it, in honor of his sov- ereign, Lake George. He went this time in the capacity of an ambassador, empowered to explain the wishes of his superior, and loaded with gifts for his red allies. After the completion of his mission, Jogues returned to Fort Riche- lieu. In August he was ordered by a council of the Jesuits to repair once more to the post among the Mohawks. He returned accompanied by a young man named Lalande.

On their arrival they found a great change in the feelings of the savages. One of the tribes, that of the Bear, had become convinced that all the evils which were befalling them were brought upon them by the sorceries of these Jesuits, and they were howling for war. The other two tribes were for preserving pcaee, but the war-party, although in the minority, prevailed, and the first thing the savages did was to kill the two missionaries. Their bodies were flung into the Mohawk, and their heads set upon poles. This occurred in October, 1646.

War to the knife was now declared, and all the Mohawk tribes joined in raising men and sending them on the war- path towards Canada. They plundered and burned Fort Richelieu, on the outlet of Lake Champlain, and carried death and desolation throughout the provinces. They sur- prised an Algonquin town, whose warriors were all absent on a hunt, and captured the women and children, and partly by treachery succeeded in killing or capturing nearly the whole party of hunters, among whom was Piskuret, the famous chief before spoken of, who was met alone and slain by a sword-thrust through the body.

The terrible war now opened lasted, with little cessation, until 1650, and ended in the almost total destruction of the Canadian nations and the breaking up of all the missions of the Jesuits.

In 1654 war broke out between the Senecas and the Eries, a nation dwelling to the westward of the former, and having their council-fire at or near where the city of Buffalo now stands. ; Father Simon Le Moyne, who visited the Onondagas in August and September of that year, returned and reported that the Iroquois were all on fire with enthu- siasm, and were about to march against the Eries with 1800 warriors. A treaty of peace had been concluded only the year before, but a slight outbreak had precipitated war, which, however, in this instance, was waged against their

# Called Director-General.

The Seneca name of Buffalo is Do'- sho-wch (" splitting the fork").

HISTORY OF ONEIDA COUNTY, NEW YORK.

Indian enemies alone, who were speedily overcome and almost exterminated.

The Mohawks had in the mean time been carrying on a war against the Andastes, a powerful nation, who dwelt on the head-waters of the Susquehanna and Delaware, and who so bravely defended themselves that the Mohawks were badly beaten and reduced to the utmost straits. About this time, also, the Mohicans, from New England, were making terrible inroads into their country. But the brave An- dastes, after defending themselves for years against the four Eastern nations of the Iroquois, were finally conquered about 1675, though a remnant of them, under the name of the Couestogas, continued in existence until 1763, when they were inhumanly butchered by the white roffians known as the " Paxton Boys," who were for years the terror of the whole region of Eastern Pennsylvania.

These exhausting wars had told heavily upon the Con- federacy, whose war-force had been reduced to about 2000 men, and more than fifty per cent. of these were made up of a medley of adopted prisoners, -- Hurons, Neutrals, Eries, and various other nations. Still, their spirits were unsubdued, and they pushed their war-parties to Hudson's Bay on the north, to the Mississippi and Lake Superior on the west, and to the Tennessee on the south, and remained for yet another half-century the terror and the scourge of New France.

It is stated in the " Documentary History of New York," that in 1650 Sieur de Lauzon erected a fort on Onondaga Lake (called by the Indians Gu-nun-ta'-uh), and placed in it a garrison, and also made grants of land in the vicinity. An officer named Do Puys was placed over the garrison, and Father Dablon and three other Jesuits accompanied the expedition for the purpose of founding a mission. This seems to have been a bona fide attempt of the French to found a colony in Central New York ; but for some uncx- plained reason the settlement was entirely abandoned in the spring of 1658, and the colonists returned to Canada.

In 1665-66 occurred the expeditions of the French under De Courcelles and De Tracy against the Mohawks, which resulted in very little save in stirring np a greater hatred among the savages against the French.

Iu 1667, Rev. Etienne de Carheil was sent to Onondaga as a missionary. He soon after removed to Cayuga, where he remained until 1671, when he returned to Canada on account of ill health. -

The first Catholic missionary to the Oneida nation was Father James Bruyas, said to have been a native of Lyons, France, who established a mission in the summer of 1667, and labored for some time among the Mohawks, Onvidus, and Onondagus, but with indifferent success. He was succeeded by Father Milet in 1671. Father Bruyas was Superior of all the French missions of Canada from 1693 to 1699. He was envoy to Boston in 1700 and to Onon- daga in 1701-2. He was said to have been the best philol- ogist of the Mohawk language of his time, and compiled many valuable works in that tongue. Father Milet estab- lished the "Sodality of the Holy Family" at Oneida.

In 1668, Rev. Father Pierre Milet* was sent as a mis- sionary to the Onondagas, where he labored until 1671,

when he removed to the Oneida nation, with whom he continued until 1684. In 1689 he was captured by the Oneidas, and held a prisoner among them until 1694, when he escaped or was released, and returned to Quebec.

The missionary who continued longest with the Iroquois was Rev. Julien Garnier, who was sent among the Oneidas in 1667, and who labored among the Ouondagas and Cuyu- gas. He was also with the Senecas from 1671 to 1683. Lafitau, the historian, says he spent more than sixty years, altogether, among the missions, and was well acquainted with the Algonquin, Huron, and Iroquois languages.

Another Canadian missionary was the Rev. Father Raf- feix, in 1670-71, who, in describing the Indian country, writes as follows : " Cayuga is the finest country I have seen in America. It is situated in latitude 42}°; the needle dips there scarcely more than ten degrees. It lics between two lakes, and is no more than four leagues wide, almost continuous plains, and the timber on their borders is very fine. . . I find the inhabitants of Cayuga more docile and less fierce than the Onondagas and Oneidas."

Rev. Father Jean de Lamberville was among the Iroquois for many years subsequent to 1671, principally with the Onondagas. A younger brother, Jacques de Lamberville, was with him for a considerable time. The elder brother seems to have remained until about 1687. He often officiated as mediator between the Iroquois and the French, and was for some time Superior of the missions. He acted a prominent part in the negotiations carried on by La Barre in 1684, in conjunction with the veteran pioneer, Charles le Moyne; and again in 1687, when Denonville, while planning a gigantic expedition against the Indians, was at the same time using every diplomatic art to preserve the peace. When the Indians discovered this doable-dealing they did not blame the missionary, but sent him to Canada, lest in their wrath the young warriors should slay him.

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History of Oneida County, New York : with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers, Part 9

Author: Durant, Samuel W Publication date: 1878 Publisher: Philadelphia : Everts & Fariss Number of Pages: 920

Author: Durant, Samuel W
Publication date: 1878
Publisher: Philadelphia : Everts & Fariss
Number of Pages: 920