USA > New York > Franklin County > The north country; a history, embracing Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Oswego, Lewis and Franklin counties, New York, Volume 1 > Part 5
USA > New York > Jefferson County > The north country; a history, embracing Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Oswego, Lewis and Franklin counties, New York, Volume 1 > Part 5
USA > New York > Lewis County > The north country; a history, embracing Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Oswego, Lewis and Franklin counties, New York, Volume 1 > Part 5
USA > New York > Oswego County > The north country; a history, embracing Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Oswego, Lewis and Franklin counties, New York, Volume 1 > Part 5
USA > New York > St Lawrence County > The north country; a history, embracing Jefferson, St. Lawrence, Oswego, Lewis and Franklin counties, New York, Volume 1 > Part 5
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Moyne and his companion pushing their way through the dense forests. The entire journey from the St. Lawrence to the Salmon River appears to have been made overland, through the heart of what is now Jefferson County and into Oswego County.
From the mouth of the Salmon River, there were well defined trails to Ononontage, the chief village of the Onondagas, about two miles from the present village of Manlius on Indian Hill. The Jesuit remained there two days in his character of an ambassador from the French governor of Canada and then proceeded homeward. First, however, he visited the salt springs at Onondaga, the first white man to see them, and then paddled to the lake by way of the Oneida River and eventually into the Oswego River and the lake. From this point, turning eastward, he coasted along the shore, past the Salmon River, Sandy Creek and Stony Creek, until he arrived at a place "which is to become our dwelling place and the site of a French settlement." Le Moyne was enthusiastic about the location. "There are beautiful prairies here and good fishing; it is the resort of all nations," he writes. Here the wind detained the Jesuit and his party two days and finally on the third day when they embarked, one of their canoes sprang a leak and they nearly drowned. They succeeded, however, in getting to an island and there dried themselves.
Where this place, which was to become the dwelling place of the French, was located, is not clear. It has been placed at the Salmon River, Sandy Creek and Sackets Harbor by various writers. Probably it was somewhere within Black River Bay. If it had been at either the mouth of the Salmon River or at Sandy Creek, Le Moyne would undoubtedly have mentioned the mouth of the river. Nor are there islands at either of these places, while Black River Bay is plentifully supplied. So the likelihood is that somewhere within Henderson, Black River or Chaumont Bays, the Jesuits planned the settlement that was to win the great Iroquois country south of the St. Lawrence to France. It was a settlement, however, which never materialized.
The following year, two more Jesuits, Fathers Dablon and Chau- monot, left Montreal to ascend the St. Lawrence to the land of the People of the Long House. They, too, paddled in and out of the maze of the Thousand Islands. Says Father Dablon: "Such a sight of awe-inspiring beauty I have never beheld-nothing but islands and huge masses of rocks, as large as cities, all covered with cedars and
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firs." Just as they reached the lake, they met a party of Seneca hunters who regaled them with Indian corn and beans, soaked in clear water without seasoning. On October 29th, they reached the Otihatangue River, or, as we know it today, the Salmon. Dablon described it as narrow at the mouth but wide as a rule for the rest of its course. From here they followed the usual trail to Onontague.
The two Jesuits spent the winter with the Onondagas but im- patience on the part of the Indians because the French had not sent the promised colony, decided them to start back for Montreal the following March. They followed the Salmon River route to the lake and then struck eastward towards the St. Lawrence. There is no more graphic page in the entire Jesuit Relations than the story of that trek from Northern New York to Quebec. The North Country had experienced a March thaw. The snow was wet and soggy, the ice spongy and unsafe. Sometimes the Jesuits followed their Indian guide through icy water up to their knees, their worn cassocks caught up about their waists. They slept in a swamp, probably in the vicinity of Sandy Creek. They proceeded across a pond, probably either Six Town pond or Stony pond. And then they came to the mouth of the Black River, the ice of which was too weak to support them. For three hours they stood, trembling with cold, undecided what to do. A cold, dismal rain started to fall and they were com- pelled to spend the night in the forests.
The next day they went a mile or so up the river until they found the ice firm enough to cross and then proceeded over what they de- scribed as a vast prairie, their feet wet from the half-melted snow. They waded through numerous small streams and found that by night they had gone scarcely six miles. Rain again fell and when they attempted to sleep they found themselves lying in the water. "Under such circumstances," writes the doughty missionary, "a night would seem long indeed did not God illuminate the gloom." Bad weather detained them two days and three nights and then again they headed northward. They stopped to hunt and succeeded in killing a deer and some wild cats. After several days of experiences of this kind they finally reached the St. Lawrence and encamped on a rock oppo- site Otondiata, now Grenadier Island, near the mouth of the Oswegatchie.
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After the Le Moyne and the Dablon-Chaumonot expeditions we find the first maps showing with any degree of accuracy the territory now comprised within Northern New York. The Jesuits were par- ticularly fitted by both education and training for recording observa- tions. They usually had compasses and a cross-staff, a device for ascertaining latitude. On Father Raffeix's map of 1688 we find a rude indentation to signify Black River Bay but no sign of the river. There was little attempt to map the interior but the eastern shore of the lake was now becoming fairly well known. Quaint, French names, now all but forgotten, were fashioned on river and bay, island and point. Stony Point was la Pointe de la Traverse, Stony Creek was de Assumption, Big Sandy was des Sables and Little Sandy, de la Planche. The Salmon River was de la Grande Famine, while Grindstone Creek was named La Petite Famine and Black River Bay, Niaoure. Stony Creek was the river of M. de Comte, Grenadier Island, Isle au Renard, the Galloups, Isle aux Galots and the present Carlton Island, Isle aux Chevreuils. With the exception of the Galloups Island, a corrupted spelling of the old French word, not a single one of these old geographical names have survived to this day.
LA FAMINE AND THE GREAT CONFERENCE
Back in those shadowy days when the French were first charting the lake shore line, no place in what is now Northern New York was famed so widely as La Famine. It was a landing place for In- dian war parties from time immemorable. Here missionaries on their way to the Iroquois country would camp for a time. It was a place where wars began and ended. At La Famine the famous Huron war chief, the Rat, made the attack on the Iroquois ambassadors which brought about the bloody war of 1689. At La Famine, too, de la Barre, the governor of Canada, held his famous council of peace with the Iroquois tribes. It was to La Famine that the Iroquois insisted that the council fire be moved from Fort Frontenac. From here Pierre Francois Xaxier de Charlevoid, the noted French trav- eler, wrote one of his letters to Madame de Lesdiguieres in which he spoke of La Famine as "one of the worst places in the world."
And yet today we do not know with certainty where La Famine was. It seems to have got its name about 1656. A French colony
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left Quebec that year, escorted by Onondagas, Senecas and Hurons. There were four Jesuit fathers and two brothers in the party and between fifty and sixty colonists and soldiers. Hunger pressed the party but they hoped for relief at Otiatonnehengue, an Indian fishing village. No one was there, the fishing season being over, and from their distress the place appears to have been known as La Famine.
The habit of the old French chart-makers in transferring names of rivers and streams at will has made the location of many of the places spoken of in the old records a matter of guess work. Some writers, among them the late Robert Lansing, wartime secretary of state, have believed La Famine to be located at the mouth of Sandy Creek. So it would appear from Father Raffeix's map of 1688 and from the much later Sauthier map in which Sandy Creek is desig- nated the Riviere La Famine. But the weight of evidence would seem to be in favor of the mouth of Salmon River in Oswego County. It is the Salmon River which on most of the old maps is designated la Grand Famine. Clearly Charlevois understood the mouth of the Salmon to be La Famine and certainly from here radiated numerous trails to the Onondaga villages.
At La Famine occurred one of the most important events in the pre-settlement history of Northern New York. Here the great con- ference between Le Febru de la Barre, governor general of Canada, and the ambassadors of the Five Nations was held in 1684. To under- stand the purpose of this conference it is necessary to know some- thing of the general history of the period. The peace between the Iroquois and the French was more a matter of record than of actual fact. The English colonists had just concluded a treaty with the Iroquois at Albany and a hole had been dug in the court yard of the council hall and five hatchets thrown in and buried. The Iroquois had conquered after a long and stubborn war their southern neigh- bors, the Andastes, and were now ready to turn the full force of their power against the Illinois and the Hurons of the Lake. That the Confederacy of the Five Nations would be able to conquer these western tribes, no one doubted, but if they did it meant a death blow to Canada since it would ruin the French fur trade and furs from the west would be diverted to the English. Obviously there was but one thing for the French to do and that was to strike the Senecas, the strongest tribe of the Five Nations, before the Senecas could
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invade the Illinois country. Even de la Barre, but half a soldier at best and with no traits of leadership and little courage, apparently realized it and got ready for an invasion of the Iroquois country.
No such army had ever ascended the St. Lawrence up to that time as the force led by de la Barre. There were three companies of regulars, a motley horde of Canadian militiamen, many of them as wild as the Indians, themselves, and several hundred red allies- half-naked Abenakis and Algonkians from Sillery, Hurons from Lorette and converted Iroquois from the region of Montreal. In flat boats and bark canoes, the French and their allies painfully moved up the St. Lawrence, until finally they arrived at Fort Fron- tenac, the site of the present city of Kingston, Ontario, and here de la Barre again wavered.
As a matter of fact the French commander wanted war only as a last resort. If he could accomplish anything at all by peace, it was peace he desired. In this idea he was encouraged by the Jesuit, Jean de Lamberville, who had long lived in the Onondaga capital. De Lambertville feared the horror of an Indian war. He knew the strength of the Iroquois and respected it. Perhaps, too, he feared a war, coming at this time, would end any chance of Christianizing the Iroquois. So from Fort Frontenac de la Barre sent Charles Le Moyne, a veteran colonist, whom the Iroquois had known in peace and war for twenty-five years, in the hope that he and de Lambertville could persuade the Iroquois to meet the French in conference. Then de la Barre and his force, many of them sickened from fever, crossed over to La Famine. Undoubtedly they took the old route, skirting the coast line to Chaumont Bay, then dragging the heavy flat boats across the carry at La Traverse and following the coast to Sandy Creek or the mouth of the Salmon, as the case might be. There they encamped to await news from Le Moyne and de Lamberville.
And La Famine justified its name. Provisions fell short. Sick men lay in their blankets. September had come, bringing the first touch of fall to the northern woods but the marshes were unhealthy and the men grew discontented and hungry. Finally, when it seemed that there was no possibility of negotiations, Le Moyne appeared at La Famine and with him came fourteen envoys of the Iroquois, led by no less a personage than the famous Big Mouth, chief orator of the Five Nations. De la Barre, pleased at the unexpected appearance of
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the Iroquois, caused a banquet to be spread, and the Indian ambas- sadors feated upon bread, wine and salmon trout. Then the confer- ence started.
There is a painting hanging upon the walls of the Roswell P. Flower Memorial Library at Watertown that portrays vividly that celebrated conference of 250 years ago. In an arm chair, decked in his finery, sits the French governor, a little weary looking and probably frightened, too, if the truth be known. Besides him stands his interpreter, the Jesuit, Bruyas, and ranging on right and left, his officers. French soldiers and Canadian colonials form two of the remaining sides of the square, while the fourth side is made up of the Indian envoys in their rich beaver skins, squatted on their heels, calmly smoking their pipes.
The council was conducted with all the imagery and pomp so dear to the Indian heart. There was the strutting too and fro, the impas- sioned oratory and the giving of presents. De la Barre recounted the injuries done by the Iroquois, how they had maltreated and robbed French traders in the country of the Iroquois, how they had intro- duced the English into the lakes "which belong to the king, my master," and how the Iroquois had invaded the territory of the Illi- nois and made captives there. He demanded immediate satisfaction, saying that if he did not receive it, he had express orders to wage war. All of this was duly interpreted.
But de la Barre failed utterly to make the impression he had hoped. Scarcely had the interpreter finished than Big Mouth of the Onondagas was on his feet and with measured tread walked twice around the hollow square. Then, pausing before the governor, he stretched forth a long arm and delivered a speech which is as finished a piece of satire and open defiance as has come down to us from our colonial history. He openly taunted the French on their sickness and helplessness, justified the pillage of the French traders and acknowl- edged that the Iroquois had conducted the English traders to the Great Lakes. "We are born free," he said. "We neither depend on Onontio (the Canadian governor) or on Corlear (the governor of New York). We have a right to go with whomsoever we please, to take with us whomever we please, and buy and sell of whomever we please."
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Thus ended the first conference. De la Barre retired to his tent in a rage while Big Mouth entertained the rest of the French at a feast which he opened in person with a dance, an accomplishment in which he was reported as adept as he was at oratory. However, there was another meeting in the afternoon at which the Indians were not quite so defiant and terms were proposed which de la Barre in his desperation felt he must accept. Amends were promised for the traders who had been pillaged, a pledge, which, by the way, was never kept; de la Barre promised in turn not to attack the Senecas, but the Iroquois still insisted that they would war on the Illinois to the death, and insisted, too, that the council fire be removed from Fort Frontenac to La Famine. To these humiliating terms de la Barre agreed to the disgust of all Canada, and hurriedly departed from La Famine with his sick and famished army. The honors went to Big Mouth. He had out-talked, out-maneuvered and out-bluffed the French. Even the king was disgusted when he heard of it and promptly recalled de la Barre to Paris.
Other famous visitors came to Northern New York during the last decade or two in the seventeenth century and the lily flag of France was often to be seen at the mouth of the Oswegatchie or on the shores of Henderson Bay. The great La Salle was a frequent visitor during the time he was stationed at Fort Frontenac and Louis Hennepin, the friar, explored part of Black River in the dead of winter. Then there was the expedition of the Marquis Denonville, that "pious colonel of dragoons," as Parkman calls him, in 1687. He with his 1,700 troops and Indians crossed the lake in batteaux and canoes from Fort Frontenac. His boats were wrecked on the Galloups, or the Galots, as they were then called, and the Frenchmen were marooned there two days until the weather cleared. Then they went on to La Famine where a temporary post was established. It is interesting to note that in command of the converted Iroquois with Denonville on this expedition was the famous chief, Kryn, who two years later was to lead the terrible attack on Schenectady.
COUNT FRONTENAC'S EXPEDITION.
Then, finally, just at the turn of the century, came the expedition of Count Frontenac, that battered, old soldier whose qualities as a
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leader and whose fiendish temper won him the respect of the Iroquois to the extent that no French governor of Canada ever secured. Fron- tenac moved up the St. Lawrence in July, 1696, with 2,200 men. In canoes and flat boats, the army, the greatest number of armed men ever to pass up the St. Lawrence to that time, entered the Lake of the Thousand Islands and reached Fort Frontenac on July 26th, exactly twenty-two days after the departure had been made from Montreal. The first camp was made on Deer Island and the next day the army reached a point within three leagues of Sandy Creek. The following day the mouth of the Oswego River was reached.
Fifty scouts marched ahead on either side of the river. Indians and trained woodsmen they were. The aged count was taking no chances on an ambush. The batteaux were dragged up the portage paths on rollers. Far into the night the strangely assorted groups worked, the great, dark vaults of the forests lit up grotesquely by the blazing torches. What a sight it must have been in the flickering light, naked bodies, glistening with bear grease pressed closely to the rich uniforms of the French officers.
By the first of August the army had reached Lake Onondaga and a few days later the heavens were aglow from the blazing log houses of the Onondaga capital. The Indians, themselves, had fired their village before retreating. The French, not finding any warriors, con- tented themselves with destroying the corn, burning to the stake an old Onondaga who had been left behind, and then moved on to the Oneida capital which was likewise destroyed with all the growing crops. A few prisoners were taken, no battle of importance was fought, but the old count, carried now in an armed chair and now in a canoe, by destroying the crops had inflicted a severe blow on the Onondagas and the Oneidas.
The Iroquois were now definitely arrayed against the French. True the Jesuits had made some converts in the Onondaga missions and a number of the Iroquois had moved to Canada and allied them- selves with the French. But the Five Nations never seriously wavered in their allegiance to the English. The French had hoped to gain a foothold in the Iroquois country through the Onondaga missions. They failed. Father Simon Le Moyne had dreamed of a flourishing French settlement to be located on Black River Bay. It never came into being. Not only did the Iroquois guard the back
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door of the British colony of New York, but the power of the People of the Long House constituted a perpetual threat to the French fur trade with the western nations.
The French held the St. Lawrence; the British, through their Iroquois neighbors, the Mohawk. Between lay a great empire of brooding forests, the Northern New York of today. Both nations claimed it; neither had more than the vaguest idea of its geography. Within fifty years it was to be a major battleground in a war to decide the destinies of a great continent.
CHAPTER II.
BORDER WARFARE
THE ABBE PICQUE AND THE FOUNDING OF LA PRESENTATION-OLD FORT OSWEGO-THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR IN THE NORTH COUNTRY- CARLETON ISLAND AND THE REVOLUTION.
Oswego and Swegatchie-magic names these in the days when England and France battled for empire on the North American con- tinent. Oswego, thorn in the side of France, the peep hole through which the British spied upon the French fur-traders on their way to and from the western posts. Swegatchie, described aptly by Arthur Pound, as one end of the French pinchers intended to pull the Iroquois away from the British. The other end, Mr. Pound adds, was wherever the half-breed trader, Joncair, happened to be at the moment. There was a time in our colonial history when the very mention of Abbe Picquet's Indian colony at Swegatchie, the present Ogdensburg, was enough to send a shiver up the smug backs of the British Lords of Trade. It symbolized the French effort to tear away from Britain one of her dearest possessions, the Six Nations of the Iroquois. And even the rake of Versailles was willing to inter- rupt his revels when his ministers hastened to him to report the latest news from that menace to all French aspirations, Oswego.
LA PRESENTATION
In the early part of the last century when the crumbling stone walls of the old "garrison" at Ogdensburg were being torn down, the wreckers came upon a stone bearing the roughly chiseled Latin words: "In nomine Dei omnipotentis huic habitationi initia dedit Frans. Picquet 1749," which being translated reads : "Francis Picquet laid the foundation of this habitation, in the name of the Almighty
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God, in 1749." Today that stone is carefully preserved at Ogdens- burg as a lasting memorial to Abbe Picquet, the Sulpitian, sometimes called the Apostle to the Iroquois, the founder of La Presentation, a valiant warrior for France and an earnest missionary of his church.
Abbe Picquet had been for some time in a mission at the Lake of the Two Mountains on the Ottawa river where he had gathered to- gether a large number of Hurons, Outaouais and even Iroquois, and had thoroughly familiarized himself with Indian habits and customs. Undoubtedly Father Picquet was a man fervently fired with the mis- sionary spirit, but by instinct he was a pioneer and a soldier. His biographer, Jerome de Lalande, assures us that during the inter- colonial war he did not sleep four nights in a bed and that he saved La Presentation twice. "He was constantly on the watch," writes Lalande. "He could be seen sleeping in the forests and on the snow; he walked entire days in winter, often in the water; he was the first to cross rivers in the midst of floating ice in order to set a good example to his warriors." Parkman does not go so far. "An enthusiastic schemer, with great executive talents, ardent, energetic, vain, self-confident and boastful," is the way he sums up his character.
For twenty years now the English had been maintaining a strong post at Oswego. It was a wise move that Governor Burnet had made in 1727 to build that fort. With the construction of the blockhouse at the mouth of the Oswego river came trade. Within twelve years after the erection of the fort Col. William Johnson was able to report that there were 150 traders at Oswego. Gradually the Oswego trade became the most important on the Johnson books. Boat after boat, loaded with rich furs, came up the Oswego river, headed for John- son's warehouses. On the beach at Oswego traders waved bottles of rum to attract the attention of bronze paddlers who had escaped the enticement of bottles of brandy similarly waved by French traders at Fort Frontenac. Oswego became a growing threat to France's lucrative fur trade with the west. The French waited thirty years to capture it and never ceased to fret about it all during that period.
Father Picquet well realized the menace of Oswego. He con- ceived the idea of building a mission near enough to the Iroquois country to be accessible to them and which could readily be turned into a fort and used as a base in case of an attack upon Oswego. His
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project receiving the support of Count de la Galissonniere, the French governor general, Picquet, lost no time in proceeding up the St. Lawrence on a tour of exploration. The spot at the junction of the St. Lawrence and the Oswegatchie river where Father Poncet, the Jesuit, had emerged from the Iroquois country nearly a hundred years before, at once attracted his attention and here he decided to plant his mission. It was on November 21st, 1748, that Father Picquet first sighted this spot, and the day being the one of the Pres- entation of the Blessed Virgin, he forthwith named it La Presentation and so the French always called it but to the English it was simply Swegatchie.
A more strategic situation would have been hard to find. The French fur traders had been paddling up the Oswegatchie for many years. They knew it to be on one of the main Iroquois routes to Canada. From La Presentation the trail went all the way to Col. William Johnson's house at Johnstown. It was near enough to Oswego to provide an excellent base, could be made a stopping off place between Montreal and Fort Frontenac and might, if a strong post were established there, in time win away from the English much of the Iroquois fur trade. It is clear that Father Picquet was far-sighted enough to see this. In his letter to the governor general, speaking of the location, he says: "Such a center is easily reached by all Indians who desire to be converted to Christianity being able to come here from Lake Ontario and the Iroquois river (Black river), from the Frontenac river and the Country of the Mississagues, through the St. Lawrence river, from the Mohawk Valley, Corlar (Schenectady), Onondaga, the capital of the Five Nations, and through the River La Presentation (the Oswegatchie) ."
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