USA > New York > Monroe County > Landmarks of Monroe County, New York : containing followed by brief historical sketches of the towns of the county with biography and family history > Part 3
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Sent arches
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THE EXPLORERS AND THE JESUITS.
perplexity is greatly increased by the persistent habit of the missionaries of giving religious appellations to the various stations and causing con- fusion by the frequent repetition of some favorite name, such as that of St. Mary. In the first half of the seventeenth century Franciscan and Recollet friars had penetrated to the west of this region and had reached the Niagara river, but they probably went by the way of Canada, not crossing the Genesee river or the lake. In May, 1656, the French colony and Jesuit mission of St. Mary's of Ganentaa was established among the Onondagas, near Syracuse, and in August of that year a sub-mission was planted among the Senecas, under the control of Father Chaumonot, one of the most eloquent of the Jesuit priests, whose powers of oratory went far toward producing an appar- ent effect upon his susceptible auditors. The principal station of this mission was at Gannagaro (otherwise Gandagaro, and called by the Jesuits the mission of St. James), in Ontario county, but Chaumonot traveled over the whole canton of the Senecas, preaching and baptising in different parts of it. He may not have effected many conversions, but his ministrations were very comforting to the Christian Hurons, captive and adopted, and in some cases, though not always, he and other priests were permitted to solace, with the consolations of religion, the last moments of the prisoners who perished in the flames. Two years later all the missionaries of the region were called in to the head- quarters at Onondaga, in consequence of the revelation of a conspiracy to destroy them, and it was with the utmost difficulty and the exercise of a cunning that undermined that of the savages themselves, that all the members of the French colony, priests and laymen alike, were able to escape under cover of the darkness and make their way back to Canada.
From this time war raged intermittently for several years, and, though there were occasional skirmishers of the faith, it was not till 1669 that the Christian posts were again established among the Senecas. At the very close of 1668 Father Frémin, the superior of the Jesuit missions, came to this vicinity, but precisely where he was located at the outset is uncertain. His own statement, in the Relations of 1670, is that "we then began to preach the gospel at Tsonnontouan," but, while he may have meant to indicate thereby the village of Totiakton, in this
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LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.
county, which the missionaries generally called by the name of Tsonnontouan, the probability is that he intended the word to apply to the whole country of the Senecas, in which sense it was often used. Wherever he may have been, he was very successful, for he baptised, in his first year, more than one hundred and twenty, nearly all adults, most of whom died soon afterward, of a contagion that was then raging there. This it was that caused him to summon Father Garnier to his aid, who came and took charge of the town Gandachiragou, the smallest of the Seneca villages and located four miles south of Totiakton, at the present site of Lima, in Livingston county. Frémin then passed to Gandougarae, which was in the present town of East Bloomfield, in Ontario county, and there, as he says, he was received with every demonstration of public joy. This was owing to the fact that it was the village to which the name of St. Michael's had been given by Chaumonot, peopled almost entirely by captives, principally Hurons, most of whom were already Christians, and they were, naturally, de- lighted with the presence of one so well qualified to strengthen them in the faith which they seem to have preserved, in this adverse environ - ment, with extraordinary fidelity.
No better illustration of the inclination of the human mind to materialise the conception of the future life can be found than is con- veyed in a story told by Father Frémin. Having baptised a young woman, who died on the following day, the missionary found the mother to be inconsolable over the condition of her daughter. The reason for this was that the girl, having, during her lifetime, had control over more than twenty slaves, had never known what it was to do the slightest work, and she must therefore be sore put to it to perform the labor devolved upon her in heaven, where she could certainly have no assistance, as she was the only member of the family who had been a Christian, and so of course none of her relatives could be in that place. The request was therefore made that a female slave, apparently near the point of death, should be converted and baptised, in order that she, too, might go to heaven, so that she could wait upon her mistress in the next world. This petition was complied with, but the slave, whether fortunately or otherwise, recovered, and the mother, prompted less by religious conviction than by unselfish maternal love, became herself converted, that she might join her daughter.
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THE EXPLORERS AND THE JESUITS.
Father Frémin was recalled to Montreal in 1669, and Father Garnier was left in sole charge of the four Seneca villages, a perilous position, but his courage was equal to the task, and he never faltered in the presence of death, which constantly menaced him in every form, by fever or by fire, the uplifted hatchet or the invisible arrow. From his incessant labors he was in part relieved by the advent of Father Raffeix, who came in 1670, and of Father Pierron, who arrived somewhat later. Father Raffeix was stationed, during the seven years of his work here, at Tsonnontouan-on which the name of La Conception was conferred -and he may, therefore, be considered, peculiarly, the missionary of Monroe county. He was better balanced in his judgment than most of his co-laborers; far from anticipating a wholesale change of faith, he wrote that " to expect that a whole ,tribe will be converted at once, or to hope to make Christians by the hundred or thousand, is to deceive one's self. It is not a land of flowers; to find one you must walk far, through thorny paths." Elsewhere he writes : " God has his predes -. tined everywhere, but this good grain is still very rare in this country. It will be for fervent and zealous missionaries, who come here often to cultivate this ungrateful and sterile land, to make the seed yield a hundredfold. Of the number of these predestined, are especially the little children, whom we endeavor never to allow to die unbaptised. I have conferred it on a great number this year. Fourteen of them died after receiving it. As they are our surest gain, they are also our great- est consolation." This was in allusion to the fundamental belief that any dying infant, unconscious of right or wrong, would, if baptised, go straight to eternal bliss; if not baptised, to hopeless perdition. In the case of adults the fathers would be very reluctant to administer the rite till death seemed approaching, lest the convert should relapse, which would make him worse than before. Father Pierron left in 1677 and Father Raffeix was recalled in 1680, leaving Father Garnier again alone till 1684, when, as war seemed imminent, he made his escape in a French vessel on the lake, embarking probably at Irondequoit. From that time the missions languished till the close of the century, when the colonial legislature at Albany passed a law excluding all Catholic priests from the province after 1700; finally, in 1708, the few laborers that remained in the dusky vineyard were called back to Canada, and the
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LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.
attempt of the society of Jesus to convert the Iroquois came to an end, leaving a record of self-sacrifice, of devoted heroism, of voluntary martyrdom, that has never been surpassed.
This long campaign of religion was interspersed with other visits from the Frenchmen, some following the paths of exploration, others on errands of war. In 1669 Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, on his way from Lachine to discover, as he thought, the route to China, but really to open to the world the vast territory of the West, came through Lake Ontario to Irondequoit bay. Being kindly received by the Senecas, he and his companions followed, on invitation of the savages, one of the well marked trails that led from the sand-bar through this county and into Ontario, to the village of Gannagaro. At that place he was de - tained a month by the lack of guides, and during that time he had an opportunity of witnessing some of the usual cruelties of the Senecas toward their prisoners, which he was powerless to prevent. His expe- dition not proving successful, he set out again and nine years afterward he was at the same village. So was Father Hennepin, who accompanied La Salle and who wrote the first description of Niagara falls, though the great cataract had been mentioned before that by Father Ragueneau and other writers who had not seen it. On this occasion La Salle spent much of his time on the Niagara, building a vessel called the Griffon, with which to navigate the upper lakes. To quell the suspicions of the savages, which had been excited by the construction of this craft, the Sieur de la Motte, accompanied by Father Hennepin, went to Totiakton to hold a council with the Seneca sachems. Father Garnier was present at first, but La Motte, who had no love for the Jesuits, demanded his withdrawal, which was conceded, after which the council proceeded to a satisfactory termination.
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WARS WITH THE FRENCH.
CHAPTER III.
WARS WITH THE FRENCH.
Jealousy between Canada and New York -- The Iroquois Incline to the English -- Expe- dition of Governor Denonville -- His Landing at Irondequoit -- The March to the Interior -The Fight at Boughton's Hill -- A Pyrrhic Victory.
The next scene is of a different character. Most of the governors of Canada, while favoring the missions and even promoting them, were much more anxious to destroy the bodies than to save the souls of the New York Indians, being moved thereto, very naturally, by the instinct of self-preservation. The Marquis de Denonville,1 who ruled the province for four years, distinguished his short administration by the invasion of the Seneca country in 1687. To this he was impelled by a desire to retrieve the disgrace of his predecessor, De la Barre, who had made a somewhat humiliating peace with the Iroquois, and by the hope of bringing to a final issue the contest between the French and English for the supremacy over the Five Nations. On both sides that was but a sentimental claim, for these conquerors of all barbarians had no fear of King Louis and they acknowledged only a verbal allegiance to the British sovereign, but the desire of each power was to prevent the other from obtaining the preponderating control. Each wanted the mastery of the West, with all the wealth that would be brought to its possessor from the fur trade and other lines of barter, and the channel for all this commerce lay through the lands of the Iroquois.
The claim of the French was based upon the right of discovery, that of the English upon royal charters disposing of all the country south of the great lakes, and also, as far as the right to New York was concerned, upon conquest from the Dutch. France, certainly, had no real rights
1 This name has so frequently been given wrongly, as De Nonville, in American writing upon this general subject, that it is worth while to call attention to its true form, which is as it appears above. In the original manuscript, now in the archives of the old ministry of the Marine and Colonies, at Paris, the governor signs his name in that manner, and Louis XIV. always addresses him and mentions him as the Marquis de Denonville or as Monsieur de Denonville.
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LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.
of possession in this state, whether England had or not, and the only just grounds that the former had for interfering were the right of pro- tection for its Canadian colony, and of retaliation for the hostility of the savages, to which they had, no doubt, been incited by the English governors. The Iroquois occasionally coquetted with the French and sent embassies to Quebec to make treaties of peace with " Onontio," as they called the governor of Canada, whoever he might be. Much more, however, did they incline, at heart, to the Dutch and afterward to the English, when the latter came into possession of the colony in 1664. After that time their attitude toward "Corlaer," as they called the gov- ernor of New York, was invariably one of friendship and respect, and they frequently admitted, in councils held by both races jointly, the overlordship of the British sovereign. In all this they may have been guided by the deepest wisdom, an appreciation of the lasting hostility between the two European nations, and a prevision of the final success of the English. It is, however, more probable that their policy was actuated by the memory of Champlain's firearms and by the undying hatred thus kindled. On the other hand, in spite of occasional quarrels and instances of individual injustice, the English colonists generally treated the Iroquois well, and sometimes used them as temporary allies against the New England Indians.
From 1684, when Denonville became governor of Canada, there was a continual correspondence, usually acrimonious in character, between him and Col. Thomas Dongan, the governor of New York, in which each accused the other of unwarrantable acts. While the controversy was raging, Denonville prepared to strike a blow that should bring the Five Nations to a realising sense of the greatness of France and the advisability of submission to its authority. In 1687 he got together from all sources as large a force as possible for an invasion of the Seneca country, preluding his advance by seizing a number of peaceable Iro- quois, most of them Onondagas, who were in Canada, and sending them to France, to be put at work in the galleys, among criminals and Huguenots. As some of these captives were chiefs of high rank, no greater degradation could be conceived of, and the action excited far more rage among the friends of the deported than if they had been burned at the stake. On the 10th of July Denonville arrived at Iron-
23
WARS WITH THE FRENCH.
dequoit bay, with an army consisting of more than eight hundred French regulars, a somewhat larger number of the Canadian militia, and several Huron and Algonquin Indians. Almost at the very hour of his arrival he was joined at that point by a force that had been raised in the neigh- borhood of Michillimackinac, and had come by the way of Niagara to meet him. This force comprised nearly two hundred coureurs des bois -those "runners of the woods," French by nationality, but Indian in habit, who, though rebellious to discipline, were the most effective of all fighters against the savages-and twice as many Sioux, Ottawas and Illinois, so that the whole combined army amounted to nearly three thousand men. A landing being made without resistance, a fort was erected on the sand bar, hastily built of palisades during the morning of July 12, to insure the safety of the boats and of such stores as could not be carried
Leaving about a seventh of his force to guard this structure, Denon- ville set out with the rest of his army, marching nine miles in the after- noon of that day. Pushing onward the next day, through the southern part of the county, where they met three or four Seneca women in the corn-fields, they passed into Ontario county, and approached the place for which they were destined, Gannagaro,1 the principal village of the tribe. Just before they should have reached it they had to pass through a defile, on both sides of which was a dense forest of beech trees, where three hundred Senecas lay in ambush. Scarcely had the van of the army entered this dangerous place, when the war-whoop was sounded. Amid the babel of yells and the din of musketry, the forward portion of the troops, ignorant of the strength of the enemy, were surprised into a temporary panic. Many of the old soldiers, who had stood firm under Condé and Turenne on European battle fields, threw themselves on the ground, in terror of these unknown savages. The heathen Ottawas turned and ran, shrieking, but the Christian Hurons, inspired by hate rather than by love, answered yell by yell; their courage and fidelity saved the honor of the day, and, when the rest of the army came on the scene, the Senecas, surprised in their turn, fled from the field, carrying with them their wounded and many of their dead.
1 The exact location of the village was a matter of uncertainty until within a few years, but it is now known to have been identical with the present Boughton's Hill, two miles from the village of Victor,
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LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.
It was not a French victory-far from it. A hundred white men were killed, many were wounded; on the side of the Senecas the loss was, perhaps, equally great. Denonville rested that night on the place of combat, while his Indian allies boiled and ate the bodies of their slain enemies, and the next day he burned the lodges in the village of Gan- nagaro, which he found entirely deserted. Ten days were spent in destroying the growing corn of the fields and killing all the swine that could be found in the four villages, so that destitution might be felt during the coming winter. Before his return Denonville took formal possession of the whole country by reading, at Totiakton (Honeoye Falls), a procès verbal to that effect-a futile action, under the circum- stances, but it may have served to cool his wrath, which was excited by seeing in one of the smaller settlements the arms of England, which had been placed there by Governor Dongan in 1684. On the 24th of July he returned to Irondequoit bay, tore down his palisades and pro- ceeded to Niagara, where he built a fort, and then went back to Quebec. His campaign was productive of no benefit. He had inflicted great injury upon the Senecas, but their loss was made up to them by the confederacy, and their fighting strength suffered but little depletion. A dreadful revenge was taken in the following year, when the Iroquois invaded Canada, slaughtered a thousand of the French, and drove the colony to the brink of ruin, from which it was rescued only by the energy of Frontenac, who succeeded as governor a year later.
J. J. BAUSCH.
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THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY.
CHAPTER IV.
THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY.
The Commission of Governor Andros -- Extensive Cession from the Indians -- The Fort des Sables -- Charlevoix's Travels -- His Description of the Genesee River -- At- tempts at Settlement -- Other Indian Cessions -- General Prideaux's Expedition -- Pou- chot's Work.
English control assumed steadily a more tangible form, and King James the Second's commission to Sir Edmund Andros, in 1688, stated distinctly that his jurisdiction extended to the Pacific ocean. Never- theless, there was evidently a tacit acknowledgment that the French claims had a certain force, and Irondequoit bay was for some time a dividing line, beyond which neither party could go without resistance from the other. Thus, Lieutenant-Governor Nanfan reported to the lords of trade, in 1701, that the Five Nations had recently executed an instrument " whereby they conveyed to the crown of England a tract of land eight hundred miles long and four hundred broad, including all their beaver hunting, which tract began at Jarondigat." The boundary lines described in that deed of cession, which is found among the co- lonial documents, are rather vague, but they seem to indicate, in the main, the Huron country, embracing the land in the neighborhood of Georgian bay and extending to the head of Lake Michigan, the words being " all that tract or colony of land beginning on the northwest side of Cadaracqui [Ontario] lake, and including all that vast tract lying be- tween Lake Ottawa [Huron] and the lake called by the natives Cahi- quage and by the Christians the lake of Swege [the early English name for Lake Erie], including the great falls of Oakinagaro." In this deed the expectation was expressed that the donors and their descendants were to have free hunting in that tract for all time, but it was distinctly stated that they were to be "utterly excluded and debarred forever from all action, right, title, interest and demand of, in or to the prem-
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LANDMARKS OF MONROE COUNTY.
ises." The document was signed by twenty sachems of the different tribes. It was declared that this was a tract which they had conquered from the Hurons fifty years before, but, as they had never occupied it and no one but themselves had ever acknowledged their title to it, the French were no more bound to recognise the validity of an Iroquois cession of land in Canada than the English would be to admit the force of a Huron grant to the territory of New York.
A few years later the French, apparently without opposition from any one, erected on the west side of Irondequoit bay, just where the land comes to a point and the Sea Breeze hotel was built in our time, a structure that they called the Fort des Sables (or Fort of the Sands), a precursor of the name of " the sand-bar," by which we know the spot to-day. It was the term " fort," rather than the building itself, that excited the attention of the English, and when Governor Hunter inquired about it from the Senecas, in 1717, they told him that it was not a fort but a trading-house, put there by the French to supply the Indians with goods in exchange for peltry. This was doubtless true, for the Rev. John Durant, who was at Irondequoit the next year, reported that only one store-keeper and two soldiers were left at the fort during the winter. Even that was finally objected to and two years later a messenger was sent to the French fort at Niagara to enter a formal protest against their encroachments on the lands of the Sen- ecas, even by permission of the latter.
In May, 1721, an observant traveler passed that way, the Jesuit Father Charlevoix, who, in a series of delightful letters to the Duchesse de Lesdiguières, gives a full description of his travels in North America. The part relating to this immediate locality has been so often quoted in full that it is not worth while to give more than a summary of it here. Having made a stop at Irondequoit bay, which he seems to have mistaken for a river, as he calls it la Rivière des Sables, he sailed directly to Braddock's bay,1 which he speaks of somewhat extrava- gantly, as a charming place with the finest point of view in the world. Not till he reached Niagara did he learn that he had inadvertently
1 He calls this the bay of the Tsonnontouans. That was the name that was often applied by the Frenchito the Senecas, to the land that they occupied and, more specifically, to the valley of the Genesee. It does not seem to have been adopted by the English for any of those desig- nations,
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THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY.
sailed past the Genesee river (or the Casconchiagon, as he says it was named), an omission which he regrets greatly, on account of the singu- larity of the stream. He then gives, as communicated to him by Cap- tain Joncaire, who had been there the year before, a fairly correct ac- count of the river, with all its cataracts, of which there were then four, the last being at Portage, and he also tells, on the same authority, of two " fountains " near the source of the Ohio river, which were like oil, with the taste of iron, and which the savages used to appease all man- ner of pain. This is the first mention made in writing of the oil springs in Allegany county and is the earliest description given of the Genesee falls and of the river itself, which, till about a hundred years ago, occu- pied, in the eyes of both white and red people, a position insignificant in importance compared with the bay.
Strenuous efforts were made by one governor after another to estab- lish a permanent English settlement in this locality, but without suc- cess. The provincial assembly in 1721 appropriated five hundred pounds sterling to secure the friendship and adhesion of the savages, and most of this was expended by Governor Burnet in planting a sta - tion at the Indian landing on the eastern side of Irondequoit creek. A trading-house was built there, which Capt. Peter Schuyler occupied, with a company of volunteers, for a year, when it was abandoned, and the enterprise came to nothing. Additional grants of land on an ex- tensive scale were made by the Indians soon after this. On the 14th of September, 1726, in a council held at Albany, the sachems of the Sen- ecas, Cayugas and Onondagas ratified the deed of 1701, above referred to, but without making it any clearer than it was before, and also gave to King George the First a tract sixty miles wide running back from the lake shore and extending from Niagara eastward through the lands of those nations, including all their castles and all the rivers and lakes within those limits, which territory, as well as all the other lands of those three nations, were to be protected by his majesty and his heirs and successors. As no pecuniary consideration was expressed in this document it was about as worthless as its predecessor. That it was considered of little value is shown by the fact that in 1741 Lieutenant- Governor Clarke, by the payment of one hundred pounds, obtained from the three principal Seneca sachems a deed, running to King
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