# The Red Man and the White Man in North America/Chapter 5

CHAPTER V.
THE FRENCH AND THE INDIANS.
The theme of this chapter has been so appropriated, indeed so richly and even exhaustively treated, by the most eminent and gifted of American writers of American history, that only the necessary recognition of it in its place in this volume could require a reference to it. Mr. Francis Parkman was favored in finding waiting for his taste and genius, for his attraction to it before reaching early manhood, and for his especial qualities for dealing with it, a rich and profoundly interesting subject for the pen of the scholar and historian. For more than thirty-five years he has given to it deep and quiet thought for apprehending its full significance; wide travel and exploration of the scenes of the great drama; the most keen, extended, and thorough research for documents and maps in print or manuscript in this country and in Europe, in public archives and in private cabinets; a skilled inquisition for any hidden and secret sources of information, and a most comprehensive range of reading and study in every field of intellectual work which would complete his mental furnishing for his subject. His pen has wrought in a style which in vigor, vivacity, richness, and marvellous adaptation to the scenery, the incidents, and the persons with which he has to deal, so engages the interest, sympathy, and understanding of his readers as to make them his companions along his way. He has a skill in woodcraft, in the science of the forest, in describing scenery and life, travel ​and sojourn, in the vast wilderness, — on lake, river, and cataract, — and in the interpretation and description of Indian character, habits, and experience, which have never before left such marks in our literature of Nature and barbarism. And with equal facility he can pass from these wild scenes and men to interpret for us the passions and the intrigues, the schemes and the rivalries, of courtiers and politicians, the lofty motives of heroic and dauntless spirits who on equally unknown seas and lands could seek glory and empire for their monarch without other ambition for themselves; and also to penetrate to the deep workings of spiritual exaltation which moved the soldiers of the Company of Jesus, of gentle nurture and of scholarly training, in utter self-abnegation to bury themselves in the woods that they might circumvent the Enemy of souls in his sweeping claim for the hordes of heathenism.
The fruits of Mr. Parkman's labors appear at present — as they are happily not closed — in a series of seven volumes, distinct in subordinate titles, but comprehensive of one vast subject, dramatic and tragic in its sweep of destiny, but with brilliant, thrilling, romantic, and even lightsome episodes to break its sombreness of rehearsal. The meditation and the toil, the trained judgment and the conscience which have gone into those volumes that they might be critically faithful in their narrations, just to the patrons and actors in their enterprises, and attractive and instructive to the readers, must be left to the estimate of appreciative and grateful students.
Mr. Parkman's full theme extends through just two centuries of time, and relates to historical incidents covering the whole of this northern continent between Florida and Canada. The whole region, when he takes up the story, was called, by the Spanish discoverers and claimants under monarch and pope, New Spain, or Spanish Florida. Mr. Parkman deals with the region as New France. His stint of task and purpose was to rehearse in its completeness ​and in its episodes the enterprise and aim of Frenchmen — by their own private resources, the help of noble and devout patrons, men and women, and the sanction of monarchs guided by prime ministers, through patents and vast territorial grants and vice-royal privileges — to lay in the New World the foundations of a colonial empire. Mr. Parkman grasps his whole theme with a comprehensive hold of its contents necessarily exceeding that of Mr. Irving as the biographer of Columbus and his successors in the service of Spain, and in their exploring and ravaging a section of the New World. The aim of the French was a loftier and in some sense a nobler one than that of the Spaniard. It did not, in its objects or its intended or absolutely necessary methods, involve oppression or any form of injury, still less of exterminating warfare, against the natives. It might have been pursued and accomplished in the interests of peace, of profitable commerce and of trade, with a more hopeful progress in that process of Christianizing the savages which satisfied the religious standard of those who undertook it. Mr. Parkman has to present to us, in portraiture and in conspicuous achievement, high-souled men with lofty aims, — ardent, heroic, patient in all buffetings with thwarting foes and overwhelming disasters, and sinking all self-ends to secure an enviable prize for their monarch and their country; though not all of his characters exhibit these high traits, free of meannesses. He brings before us on his animated and picturesque pages a succession of mariners whose prowess and self-reliance made them dauntless over unknown seas, through fog-banks, shoals, icebergs, and rocky barriers of granite harbors; explorers who learned to thread their way through forests, rivers, lakes, and cataracts, for thousands of miles, stripped of all their wonted resources as civilized men, and cast upon their quick skill to become adepts in those of the woods; viceroys, governors, magistrates, with conflicting commissions and bitter rivalries fomenting jealousies and discord; and ​priests whose lives and experiences were a lengthening ingenuity and variation of all the elements of martyrdom for soul-service and self-abnegation.
Mr. Parkman draws for us, in deep and radical terms of contrast, as entering into the very initiatory and controlling principles respectively of the French and the English aims and methods of colonization, the ruling spirit which guided them, resulting in absolute failure and disaster for the one, and in marvellous success and prosperity for the other. The French enterprise, as represented by him, was inspired and guided by and was wholly in the interest of feudalism, monarchism, and spiritual despotism. The English enterprise found its vigorous life and animating spirit in working towards democracy, civil liberty, and soul-freedom. The French came here as soldiers, priests, and free-traders, with the range of the woods for their goods, and the natives as hunters in their service. But they wholly lacked that sturdy class — the bone and sinew of a community planting itself for new empire on virgin soil — of patient toilers on a reclaimed farm, with rights of severalty for homesteads; individuals in their efforts and success, but members of a commonwealth for mutual help and security. The king, the noble, and the priest combined to make New France a realm of reconstructed and revivified feudalism. There was but a single class or caste of men and women in New England. Every one belonged to it; it included the whole; it was called The People. It did not look to a foreign monarch for commissions to office or power; it sent back no report to king or minister; asked for no foreign soldiery, no cargoes of supplies, even when in dire extremity. It rooted itself independently of patronage, and transferred to the soil the muscle by which it was afterwards held. As Mr. Parkman draws the contrast, France in the New World was all head, without a body; New England was all body, without a head.
​The scope of this volume makes us concerned with but a single element in the comprehensive purpose of Mr. Parkman's brilliant and most instructive volumes. Every one of their pages, either in the character or incident which fills it, or in the graphic style or the rich and beautiful rhetoric of the writer, adds to our national literature some of the characteristic qualities to which the most discriminating criticism will assign a high encomium. In those pages men of foreign birth are naturalized to our soil and history; they become Americans because their energies, toils, and sacrifices, which might have been latent in their veins, would never in the Old World have been developed, even to the consciousness of their possessors. Champlain, Frontenac, La Salle, Marquette, — their peers, associates, and brethren, — have their baptismal records in the Old World, but their life-record is here.
I have made this reference to the results of nearly forty years of diversified and concentrated literary toil and intellectual power of the historian of New France in America, because in all his volumes the theme of this chapter of the present work is more or less distinctly recognized. I must limit my own rehearsal strictly to the relations of the French with our native tribes, in what was common or distinctive in its bearing upon their fortunes as resulting from their intercourse with Europeans.
What would have been the later and the long results of the exclusive or predominant sway of the Spanish power had it extended and rooted itself over our whole continent may be inferred from the history, the experiences, and the present condition of those portions of it which have from the first conquest remained under the crown of Spain, or have had entailed upon them Spanish influence and institutions.
The poet Cowper, in his moralizing strains, nearly a century ago, gave voice to the triumph which one of the Mexican or Peruvian chieftains in the realm of shades ​might pour forth over the humbled pride of the nation which had devastated his lands and people: —
* Oh, could their ancient Incas rise again,
* How would they take up Israel's taunting strain!
* ‘Art thou too fallen, Iberia? Do we see
* The robber and the murderer weak as we?
* Thou, that hast wasted earth, and dared despise
* Alike the wrath and mercy of the skies,
* Thy pomp is in the grave, thy glory laid
* Low in the pits thine avarice has made.
* We come with joy from our eternal rest,
* To see the oppressor in his turn oppressed!’ ”
The stupendous and still unfinished drama of which this continent, as involving the fate of its original peoples, has afforded the vastly extended stage, with all its grandeur, richness, gloom, and sombreness of scenery and incident, conforms to the severest principles laid down for tragic art. There is unity in the plot; and its development through changing characters, with their entrances and their exits, shifting in garb and dialogue as they act their parts, leads on to what we still wait for as the event of destiny. The drama has five acts. The first, which we have rehearsed, is that of Spain and the natives of this continent. The second act brings the French on the stage, with a milder and more genial spirit and purpose, though still as the agents of much misery to the red men alike as their allies or their enemies. The third act is filled with the conflicts between the French and English, — the natives and their lands being the stake at hazard. The fourth act presents Great Britain in the war for independence or subjection with her colonies, each of the contesting parties arraying on its side hostile bands of the savages. The fifth act, still drawing out its movement, quickened in earnestness and activity rather than growing wearisome and lagging after centuries of progress, exhibits our National Government, with the legacy of struggle in its hands, charged to ​bring the drama to its close. It is with the second act as it was in progress, and with its actors and incidents, that we now study the fortune of our aborigines under one of its developments.
The prizes which the New World opened to European enterprise and adventure proved very soon to offer temptations to all the maritime powers of the Old World. The Papal Bull which conferred the whole continent on the crown of Spain was treated as if it were a simple pleasantry, even by monarchs who avowed themselves docile and faithful subjects of his Holiness; and as soon as some of the princes and people of Europe had broken from the bonds of the old Church, any claimed prerogative of the Pope to confer rights or jurisdiction here was utterly, and as if by common consent, discredited.
So the next act in the tragic history of our aborigines opens with the events which first acquainted them with the fact that the race of pale-faces coming from across the sea were not all of one nation, subjects of the same sovereign, having common interests; but, in fierce and bloody rivalry, were transferring to this new soil jealousies and hostilities of foreign dynasties. The earliest lesson of this sort which our Southern Indians had a chance to learn, if their understandings could take it in, was that some difference in the religion of the invaders — as that of the French Huguenots and the Spanish Catholics in Florida — could add an embitterment to the raging passion of their strife.
Beginning as early as the year 1504, we find a constantly increasing number of fishermen from European ports, almost exclusively French, resorting to the banks near Newfoundland for the profitable catch of cod. There were markets for vast quantities of this product of the sea, as a cheap food for which there was a large demand for the Lenten period and the frequent Fast days of the Church, before its unity was riven by the Reformation. It is observable, too, that during the first outburst of the rage and ​commotion in France, when the doctrines of Luther, or rather of Calvin, were finding their adherents, and even in the civil war of dynasty and heresy and against the League, which soon followed, the fishing trade was pursued with ever increasing vigor. There seemed to be a truce over the briny treasure, and even at the French seaports out of which sailed the cranky crafts which multiplied their venturesome voyages. The truce was first broken by piratical plunderings of the earliest cargoes of peltry. It was the familiarity with foreign seas thus acquired that prompted many of the French and English voyages of discovery and enterprises of colonization. The kings of France based their claims to transatlantic territory upon the sighting of the coast of Florida by Verrazano in 1524, and upon the voyages of Cartier to Canada ten years later. To all but the venturous mariners themselves these were easy terms for the acquisition of territorial rights over this present realm of human thrift and prosperity now called our “National Domain,” in succession to its previous titles of New Spain, Spanish Florida, New France, and (to a certain extent) New England.
The Frenchman then followed the Spaniard in his voyages of pelf and conquest to the new-found world. The rude and simple minds of the bewildered savages were to be exercised with further perplexities as to the realms beyond the great sea, whose restless adventurers, with rival aims, seemed to be flocking to these wildernesses to fight out the battles which had begun in the Old World. It was in Florida, as is soon to be related, that our natives had the first occasion to know that Europe contained rival nationalities, and to have an opportunity to compare representatives of each of them. In some very important qualities, the difference of which the natives of this continent could appreciate, their first French guests proved themselves less hateful and less blasting in their presence and errand than were the Spaniards. Their chivalry was of a reduced and ​varied spirit. The ruthlessness and inhumanity and grasping greed of those who came only for gold and conquest, whose rushing mail-clad and mounted warriors spread a panic terror among the natives, had prepared the red man to expect only aggravations of cruelty and outrage from each reinforcement of the invaders. Happily in some respects for our aborigines, their first European visitors, the Spaniards, exhausted upon them the possibilities of a wild and desperate fury, without one relieving element of pity or the incidental transfer to the natives of a single blessing of civilization.
But whatever of mitigation in the ferocity and cruelty of invaders the natives here might have noted in the French, as compared with their Spanish visitors, must have been of slight relief to them when they came to realize that, while they themselves and their wild domains were to be the common spoil of the mysterious adventurers, the spoil at stake would find them embroiled with the quarrels of the rivals. Matter of speculation might be found in raising the question whether it would have fared better or worse for the natives had only a single one of the European nationalities at the time maintained the exclusive right of commerce, conquest, and occupancy on the new continent. It is conceivable, though hardly probable, that if the Spaniards had for even a century been permitted to hold and improve the sole territorial right here which the bull of the Pope conferred upon their sovereign, they might even have found it for their advantage to have conciliated the natives, to have put them to some other use than slaughter or even slavery, and to have established with them relations of mutual service. It was not, however, the temper or the aim of the chivalric age of Spain to seek for any work of peaceful colonization.
The enterprises of French adventurers and colonists which brought them into contact with our natives began, with a considerable interval of time between them, on both ​the southern and northern borders of our domain. We are concerned with these enterprises solely as they bear on our single subject, — the relations of Europeans with the aborigines. The story is essentially the same in all its chief incidents and colorings from whichever of the nationalities of the Old World the intruders came. We have feeble companies of sea-worn adventurers sounding their way for a harborage, bewildered by the strangeness of their experience, but wrought to fever-heats of passion for adventure or rapidly acquired wealth; we note the same kindly reception and hospitable entertainment by the amazed and awe-stricken savages; and we have to repeat the humiliating record of treacherous returns in fraud and outrage by the whites. In each and every case, too, we find the whites availing themselves of intestine feuds and hostilities among the native tribes in every locality, to form alliances setting Indian against Indian; putting themselves, often unnecessarily, into fierce antagonism with one party, and beginning the entail of the successive calamities brought on the lower by the superior race. It is well for us repeatedly to recognize the disturbed, acrimonious, and embittered relations which the Europeans found existing among the aborigines, as the fact has always been alleged as palliating the intervention of the whites as only introducing one new party to the conflict.
It seems to have been but a wanton provocation, or at least an unwise anticipation of a vengeful jealousy from the Spaniards, when, as the only nationality of the Old World, they were flushed with their pride of monopoly in the new continent, that the first French enterprise for transatlantic colonization should have led its adventurers into the very jaws of the proud pioneers of American empire. Had the French made their first attempts in the North, as they did less than a half century afterwards, it is probable that they would have spared the record of history the narration of what is, on the whole, its most blood-curdling episode on ​this continent. It may well be believed that there is hardly a single square mile of now occupied territory on its once virgin soil which is not stained with the life-current of the common humanity of the red man and the white man, in their deadly strifes. If there be any such spaces where the veins of the red men have not flowed, the whites, in their own feuds and wars, have supplied the stains. Over all these busy realms of thrift have floated the wails of human agony. But the region where the concentrated and direful rage of passion and savagery waxed most fiercely is now one of the fairest and most favored in our land. There in Florida, “the Land of Flowers,” whither the invalid and the feeble, the worn and the weary, from our Northern cities, flee from wintry airs and storms to seek recuperative vigor, are the scenes of the most appalling record in our history. A lavish luxuriance of verdure and of beauty has re-wreathed those scenes in peace. Prolific Nature, covering its stately forests with vines and mosses, duplicates its own growths. Rapid and lazy streams, impenetrable glades, abounding creeks and bays, oozy marshes, make the region, like many of its own animal products, as it were amphibious. There the opening enterprises of European civilization on this continent first spent and exhausted themselves in the devastation and havoc alike of scenery and of humanity. Christians were represented there, after the first sundering of their former unity, in a collision which swelled and fired all the alienations of passion and hate. The natives for the first time saw the rage and the weapons, of which up to that time they alone had been the victims, turned by the white men who had come among them from across the seas against each other's breasts, while new cursings and imprecations of scorn and malignity entered into the frenzies of the conflict.
The spirit of the reform in religion was drawing its fires over France, inflaming the madness of civil strife, glowing in the zeal of cruel bigots and in the fervent constancy of ​early converts. Monarchs and courtiers were to hesitate for an interval as to the side which was to win, and therefore to be espoused. Intense and deadly was the suspended issue, which at last found its diabolical solution amid the horrors of St. Bartholomew.
The spirit of reform in Central Europe had reached Spain only to raise to white heat the rage of bigotry. The part which Spain played in the wars of the League might well give forewarning as to how she would deal with heretic trespassers on her American shores. Here, then, near the sea-coast of Florida, on the banks of its majestic river, which, running parallel with the ocean, almost severs the length of the land, was to be the battle-field between Catholics and heretics, — the natives by no means being quiet lookers-on or umpires.
Gaspar de Coligny, Admiral of France, the peer of the mightiest and noblest of the realm, was by dignity, constancy, and fervor of conviction the most signal representative of the Huguenots. Bigotry, malice, and all other spiteful passions might frown and rage against him, but they could not reach him. He prompted Charles IX. of France to give his royal sanction to a colonial enterprise of the Huguenots in America, in 1562. The English reader may best and most easily acquaint himself with the deplorable venture on the pages of Parkman's “Pioneers of France” and in the admirable biography of Jean Ribault, by Sparks. With this royal commission, and while France and Spain were at amity, Ribault first, and then Laudonnière, sought to lay a foundation of French empire in the New World. Entering what they called the River May, now the St. John, in Florida, they raised a pillar of hewn stone, inscribed with the King's arms, which was afterwards wreathed by the natives with flowers and surrounded with donative offerings, as if it had been an altar. The gushings and overflowings of sentiment, and all the wealth of admiring phrases and ​epithets, are exhausted by the sea-tossed roamers in describing the lavish loveliness, the exceeding fertility and glory of the scene. With equal fondness and exuberance they rehearse the mild and generous behavior and munificence of the natives in their peaceful welcome, in their wild delights over their visitors, and their heaped donations of the best of their food. After building a fort, which they named Caroline, Ribault returned to France, leaving thirty colonists — as Columbus had done at La Navidad, on going back from his first voyage — to plant a permanent colony. The result of this second good intention, as had been that of its precedent, was but woful disaster. The colony was reinforced the next year by Laudonnière. The new comers, in response to the magnanimity of the chieftain of the tribe within whose bounds they had settled, had hastily entered into a pledge of amity with him, which included an alliance with him against his native enemies. It proved that he was weaker than one of his neighbor chieftains with whom he was at war. The colonists perfidiously made terms with the stronger party; and their perfidy, with their arrogance, their exactions, and their outrages against their first friends, brought them into complications of mischief. This, with a mutinous spirit among themselves, their laziness, wastefulness, and self-abandonment, crowned the fate of their enterprise. They were about abandoning it, in despair of help from France, by having recourse to a leaky craft of their own making, when temporary relief came.
A strange episode cheered these forlorn exiles when at their lowest depths in mutiny and starvation among the exasperated natives. On a fair morning in August, 1565, four vessels, one of great bulk, were sighted on the horizon. They might be a supply fleet from France; they might be a vengeful company of cutthroats from Spain. They were neither. On board the largest vessel, named “Jesus,” was the commander Sir John Hawkins, of world-wide fame for ​prowess, but known under another title now, as “the father of the English slave-trade.” With his other three vessels, the “Solomon,” the “Tiger,” and the “Swallow,” he had just sold at Hispaniola cargoes of slaves which he had kidnapped at Guinea. Thus England, by her ships and mariners, was represented, in character, as the third of the great European nationalities on a scene which was to open the lengthening struggle between what we call civilization and barbarism. Hawkins as a Protestant took pity on the wretched remnant of the Huguenots, relieved their immediate distresses, sold them a vessel, taking payment in cannon and stores, and courteously offered to transport them all free to France. This offer honor and scruples compelled the French commander to decline.
At length Ribault, long looked for, having been delayed by troubles in France, arrived with reinforcements and supplies. Hardly, however, had his vessels reached a harborage, when more ominous sights upon the waters of the sea revealed the arrival of the dispensers of vengeance against trespassers under the more hateful guise of heretics, to whom was due only death and damnation. Some of the Spanish vessels ran down the coast, chased by some of Ribault's, when a fierce and prolonged tempest raging on land and water dispersed and wrecked many of both fleets. The fiery and zealous Menendez, the Spanish commander, with the company of such of his followers as had reached and entered an inlet on the south, near what he soon afterwards founded as the city of St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States, resolved on immediate vengeance. Knowing that Fort Caroline was dilapidated and weakened, he roused a body of five hundred of his quailing and reluctant followers, exhausted and famished, to make a forced march by night and day, through tempest and drenching rain, across swamps, forests, and jungles, sleepless and unfed, to surprise the heretic hive. He was guided by a renegade Frenchman and some Indians, — ​being ferociously and atrociously speeded in his diabolical work. The victory was complete, unredeemed by a single relenting of human pity, but blackened by breach of faith and by every enormity of barbarity to those whom he boasted that he had given to slaughter — one hundred and forty-two in number — “not as Frenchmen, but as heretics.” The prisoners, with their hands tied behind them, in groups of four, were led to the massacre and hewn down with axes. Their bodies were dismembered, transfixed on spears, and hung upon the trees.
Enough of the destined victims escaped, by well-nigh superhuman effort and endurance, to leave for history full and harrowing narratives of the appalling tragedy, made so, not by its bringing human beings to the inevitable lot, but by its circumstances and aggravations of horror. How does it shock and stagger our conscious sentiment of what is, of what belongs to, and what should be wrought by, religion to contemplate a scene like that upon a garden panorama of Nature, the pines, the palms, and the flowers dressing it and wreathing it in gorgeous beauty! And how stands the doctrine and hope of an immortal life for the animating essence of being in humanity — whether Catholic or heretic, Christian or heathen — amid such a wrack of raving passions and agonies? A few escaped, returning to France, some of them to England, to tell the tale. They had rushed from the fort under the knives, the spears, and the blunderbusses of the Spanish devils. Crawling through the woods, wading up to their arm-pits in the marshes, lacerated by thorns, tripped by vines, famished and despairing, warned off even by the Indians who feared to protect them, some of them, including Laudonnière, were finally rescued by the boats of their friends and taken on board their vessels. And what meanwhile was the meaning of the scene for the natives, who were to be blessed and saved by the gospel of the white men?
Hakluyt has given us narrations of the colony by Ribault, ​who perished in the massacre, and by Laudonnière who escaped it. There is another interesting record of it. Among those who escaped was the artist of the enterprise, Le Moyne, engaged by Laudonnière in 1564 to accompany the expedition as draughtsman of sea-coast maps and scenes, and to make soundings. He spent some years after his escape in England, where he died. Here he wrote, in French, his “Brief Narration” of the occurrences of which he had been an eye-witness in Florida, and drew from memory (for in his flight he took nothing with him into the woods) many drawings of the natives, in costume, in war parties, village life, games, etc. These drawings are spirited, and give many evidences of fidelity and accuracy in representation and detail. De Bry made the acquaintance of Le Moyne in London, in 1587, and soon after, on his decease, purchased of his widow his manuscript and drawings, translating the former into Latin, and publishing it in his “Great Voyages.”
When intelligence of this Spanish massacre reached France, though the victims of it as heretics could look for no avenging from the then all-powerful priestly party, a deep and bitter indignation was roused in the realm. More than even for its barbarous inhumanity was the stinging insult of it realized as perpetrated by the subjects of a king at amity with a brother monarch, who had at least sanctioned the Huguenot enterprise. But the French king was in the toils of the priestly and Spanish intrigues, and could not be roused to resentment. One of his chivalric subjects, untitled, and it is not positively known whether he was a Catholic or a Protestant, Dominique de Gourgues, resolved to clear the honor of the realm from the foul stain by a signal reprisal. Concealing his ultimate object, and ​wholly at his own charges, with three vessels and a bold company who knew not their errand, he obtained a commission from the king, nominally for other enterprises. After devious cruisings and adventures, he made known to his company the intent of his schemes. Appealing to them, after their silence and surprise, by the honor and glory of France, to avenge the bitter insult to its dignity, he roused their wildest enthusiasm and impatience to an unsparing wreaking of vengeance. Sailing by the scene of the massacre, where Menendez had strengthened his defences, his vessels exchanged salutes with the batteries of the suspicious foe. Making a landing fifteen leagues above the fort, he found vast numbers of the natives, under the wildest excitement, rushing and foaming in warlike array, and profusely welcoming the strangers as soon as they were known to be Frenchmen. For ruthlessly as the former Huguenot colonists had treated the natives, their behavior and deeds had been gentle compared with the incessant exasperations, outrages, and ingenuities of cruelty endured by them from the Spaniards, against whom their rage had become infuriate.
An alliance was soon formed for joint vengeance between De Gourgues and a countless horde of the painted and yelling natives. The strife was prepared for and the covenant ratified by the fierce pantomime of feast and dancing. The avenging stroke was overwhelming; victory was complete. The hero gave utterance to his scorn and disdain of the butchers, whose own deeds, after they had listened to his invectives, he proceeded to re-enact in summary and sweeping carnage. Imitating with change of terms the inscription which Menendez had raised over his Huguenot victims, De Gourgues burned into a wooden tablet this legend: “Not as to Spaniards, but as to traitors, robbers, and murderers.” Menendez was then in Spain; and as it was no part of De Gourgues' design to meddle with the Spanish fort at St. Augustine, he returned in chivalric triumph to ​France, to enjoy the plaudits of its nobler people, and the secret approbation of the monarch who dared not express it, while the Spanish ambassador at the court demanded the head of the hero. He lived to do splendid service for his country against the Spaniards.
Here closed till a much later period the relations between the French and the natives near our Southern bounds. We must now shift the scene to the North, where Spanish Florida was to be converted into New France. Still holding to the claim of territorial right by the discoveries of Verrazano, the French monarch became as lavish as he was inconstant and inconsistent in granting patents, seigniories, and monopolies of dominion and trade to such of his subjects, glowing with zeal and love of adventure, as could make interest to secure them. These royal gifts, however, as the event proved to the discomfiture and ruin of the receivers, were held on an uncertain tenure, often forgotten, annulled, or overridden by influence and favoritism. Beginning from the years 1534-35, with the voyages of Jacques Cartier to the Gulf and up the River St. Lawrence, there was a series of tentative enterprises on the islands and in Acadia, running on to the actual foundation of Quebec, by Champlain, in 1608. After the taking of the cod and the whale on the coast had secured enormous profits, a yet more enriching traffic followed. Paris offered a steadily extending market for the peltries of the wilderness, — the beaver, the otter, the marten, the fox, the lynx, and the larger robes of the moose, the deer, the caribou, and the bear. The king and his patentees found it as difficult to secure a covenanted monopoly in this traffic as it would have been to exhaust the supply of these precious spoils spread over the vast and limitless expanse of a mighty continent. Sixty-eight years after the first voyage of Cartier, and fifteen years before the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, the noble Champlain — a hero in every nerve and muscle, a saint too in some of his lofty and generous ​qualities — first appears upon the scenes of ocean and land in the New World. He had sailed into and skirted the shores of Massachusetts Bay, where he had seen vast numbers of the natives in 1605, thus confirming the uniform story of a destructive plague having ravaged the region and nearly exterminated the savages just previous to the coming of the English colonists. Champlain entitled his first publication (1604), “Les Sauvages.” The abortive and long-baffled enterprises at Acadia at last became secondary to that of a strong and firm though at times imperilled hold of established French sway in Canada. A passing notice is here prompted of the curious fact, that, while the first collision between rival European nationalities on this continent — that between the French Huguenots and the Spaniards — took place at the scene of modern pleasure-resort in winter for a summer climate, the next encounter — that between rival claimants, Englishmen and Frenchmen — occurred in 1613 at the favorite summer-haunt, Mount Desert. Frenchman's Bay still preserves the memory of the onslaught by Captain Argall, of Virginia, upon the settlement made near by, by Saussaye, with a French commission. The latter was charged with “an invasion of British territory,” made such by the sighting of the coast by Cabot. The incident was a significant prognostication of what was to follow through a century and a half of embittered civilized and savage warfare.
It does not appear that any other than amicable relations had existed betweeen the natives in and around Acadia, and the successive French adventurers there. Some curious incidents of missionary experience in those regions will claim notice in the subsequent chapter assigned to that subject. Cartier, in his first voyage, in 1584, was most kindly and hospitably treated by the natives. He requited this kindness by kidnapping two young Indians, whom he carried to France, bringing them back to the St. Lawrence the next year to serve him as interpreters. It is ​noteworthy that in every instance reported to us in which natives of any age, by fraud or voluntarily, were carried either to Spain, England, or France, none of them wished to remain abroad, but all pined for their wilderness homes. It was thought that their amazement, curiosity, and interest, engaged in foreign scenes by court pageantry and all the sights and splendors of civilization, — castles, churches, machinery, — would wean them from their rude habits and associations. But it proved quite otherwise. Exile was to them misery; and when after expatriation they returned, they were like uncaged birds or wild beasts escaped from the toils. This fact, as we shall note, has a bearing upon the question of the capacity and aptitude of the Indian for civilization.
Before Cartier returned from his second voyage up the St. Lawrence, in 1535, by a mean artifice he entrapped on board his vessel Donnacona and other chiefs, from whom he had received a hearty welcome and much food. Most of the captives died of home-sickness in France, though rich amends, it was presumed, had been made to them by the privilege of baptism. When these kidnapped chiefs were afterwards inquired for by their kinsfolk, Cartier told them that Donnacona had died, but that others of them had made high marriages in France, and lived in state like lords.
It might have seemed, as has been said, that the French colonists could have lived at peace with the natives, and indeed have found their interest in so doing, especially as their main object was not so much, or scarce at all, the clearing and occupancy of large spaces of land, but the enriching fur-trade. The example may be cited of the companies and brigades of Scotchmen and Englishmen who, in the employ of the Hudson Bay Company for nearly two centuries, carried on a vastly lucrative trade with the savages, being at perfect amity, and indeed in most cordial relations, with them. But, as we shall see, the scheme ​which Champlain had conceived from the first, or which very soon matured itself in his views, and the constraint of the circumstances amid which he found himself, immediately involved him in a warfare which, once begun, was to find no end till the dominion of France was extinguished on the continent. Champlain might at first have been fully content to have one or more tribes of Indians as friends. But he found that he could not secure this end without having more tribes as enemies, because they were the foes of his allies. He was all too readily, however, drawn into what he regarded as the compulsion of necessity for taking a side, — only, without intending it, he took the weaker side.
Champlain passed his first winter in Quebec, in 1608. It was a terrific and a seasoning experience for him and his associates. Of the twenty-eight men of the company, only eight were alive in the spring: cold, exposure, lack of comfort, enforced idleness in a rigid climate, land and water heaped in mountain piles of snow and locked in icy fetters, with the loathsome havoc of the scurvy, had so reduced them. The spring brought reinforcements to Champlain. His friends among the natives were not of his own choosing. They were Algonquins, — large remnants then of once numerous and powerful tribes, Montagnais and Hurons. The confederated, thrifty, and imperious Five Nations, or Iroquois, in central New York, were at deadly feud with them, and had annually swept and desolated their cornfields and villages with fire and slaughter. On the first year of his sojourn at Quebec Champlain became a party to this savage feud. Why did he so? He was of an almost ideal loftiness and grandeur of spirit. With a manly devoutness to consecrate his heroism he preserved a strict moral purity, inexplicable by his lax Indian hosts, which preserved him from the sensuality so freely indulged, with large opportunities, by his volatile countrymen. For twenty years he made almost annually a spring and ​autumn transit of the seas, alternating between the court of France—where he defended, or drew friends to, his colony—and the depths of sombre wildernesses, patient under all buffetings and privations. More than any other white man he awed and won the confidence and love of the natives. He could command, threaten, and sway them; and, though with scowls and murmurs they might hesitate, they generally yielded to his mastery. He held in equal poise in his aims two great objects not inconsistent each with the other, but mutually helpful as he viewed them,—the commercial interests of New France, and the conversion to the Church of its debased, imbruted, and benighted natives. Beside these was the lure of finding a water-way to China and the East. Mr. Parkman well says of this grand visionary: “Of the pioneers of the North American forests, his name stands foremost on the list. It was he who struck the deepest and boldest strokes into the heart of their pristine barbarism.” Whether from the first he had matured a plan, that which guided him to the end of his career is strongly defined by Mr. Parkman as follows. It was “to influence Indian counsels, to hold the balance of power between adverse tribes, to envelop in the network of French power and diplomacy the remotest hordes of the wilderness.” At some commanding position on the line of water-transit from the vast interior to the sea, he would plant a fort that should secure the mastery for all trade and intercourse.
But here at the North, as on the Southern bounds of our present domain, the Europeans found the native tribes in deadly strife together. As soon as they were able to apprehend the facts and the traditions of these tribes,—still existing in strength, or in exhausted and subjugated remnants,—they learned that the strife, with its varying fortunes, ferocious and pitiless, had been going on for undated time. The French could but take part in it. It was not ​for them to ask as to the right or wrong in any case where moral distinctions were inapplicable, between tribes of wild heathens. They must make terms with their nearest neighbors, and hold their enemies common enemies. Over and over again did discomfitures and calamities, in dismal variety, threaten absolute failure of enterprises. But again and again fresh spirits — nerved by an iron resolve, and fired by greed, the love of adventure, fanaticism, and the restlessness of a fermenting age — renewed the venture. The retrospect of the fortunes of the red race, which has been yielding and fading before this persistent and lion-hearted endeavor, is prevailingly melancholy, as it presents imbecility and incapacity succumbing to the potency of skill and energy. But from the earlier enterprises of the white race on this continent, especially as represented by the French, we are made to know what there is in the reserved resources of human nature for endurance and buffeting, for persistency and patience of all hardships. This nature of ours is not susceptible only to the blandishments of ease and fulness of pleasure: it is furnished with its own armor for perils that have been courted, and for straits of experience which line the way to all consummate ambitions.
Mr. Parkman rightly tells us that “in one point Champlain's plan was fatally defective, since it involved the deadly enmity of a race whose character and whose power were as yet but ill understood, — the fiercest, the boldest, the most politic, and the most ambitious savages to whom the American forest has ever given birth and nurture.”
Champlain initiated the policy which all his successors representing French dominion here felt themselves compelled to follow. With allies, some of whom wholly failed him at the time and place of concourse, and all of whom, by their turbulence, their laggardness, and incompetency of discipline, were as much a torment as a help to him, he rashly drew upon himself the rage of the Iroquois by an ​invasion of their well-defended territories. Not always did his arquebuse and his armor secure him awe and a charmed immunity. He found the fortified towns of the Iroquois, with their triple rows of strong palisades, with galleries for bowsmen and water-gutters for extinguishing fires, were not to be mastered by a handful of Frenchmen and five hundred yelling Hurons. He was signally baffled and disappointed. He was severely wounded, so that he had to be borne off in a basket on the back of an Indian, and so lost his prestige with friend and foe. He was initiated in all the atrocities of torture and burning, and his remonstrances were vain as addressed to those who had no word nor any sense for humanity.
Very soon after the settlement of Dutch farmers and traders on the Hudson River, in 1614, the powerful tribes of central New York, with whom they had established amicable and very profitable relations, were furnished by them with fire-arms and ammunition, in express violation of the prohibition of the authorities of the Dutch colony. But as some of these authorities were themselves the traffickers who dealt in the forbidden weapons, the traffic was winked at. Guns and strong waters soon became the most coveted articles of trade and barter with the natives. The charmed weapon, one discharge of which, as it belched forth its flame and sped its deadly bolt, had spread such dismay and fright as to disperse an army of Iroquois warriors on Champlain's first encounter with them when he discovered the magnificent lake which bears his name, had now become familiar to the savages. It lost its terror as a part of heaven's artillery for those who could themselves wield it. They very soon became experts in its use; indeed they taught the white man how to make it more serviceable in forest warfare, by breaking up the lines of an orderly military array, and by skulking with it behind a tree or a bush, and, after its deadly aim had had effect, creeping or crawling to another ambush to reload.
​When the colonists of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, after 1620, began to go on their fishing and trucking expeditions to the coast of Maine and Acadia, they too surreptitiously sold arms to the Indians and entered into precarious covenants with them. Though the French had been at deadly feud with the Mohawks, the allies of the Dutch, they claimed the protectorate of the territory of the Eastern Indians, and alliance with them. Here, then, — between the French on the one part, and the Dutch and English on the other, — began a series of collisions in rivalry and hostility for territorial and colonial power, and rights to exclusive traffic with the natives, which, prolonged for a full century and a half, closed in 1763 by the English conquest of Canada. Several distinct periods in that sweep of time are historically designated by special names, as defining a particular war, — as, for instance, Queen Anne's War. But these were only concentrations and culminations of a never wholly intermitted hostility. Even when one or another monarch, or minister of a foreign crown, proposed that the quarrels between their subjects at home should not be transferred to these forests, the pacific privilege was not accepted. Leaving for further notice these complications between Europeans at the North, we must glance at the enterprises of the French on other parts of the continent.
Nearly a century and a half after the region had been ravaged by De Soto, the French appeared in Alabama, to open a new series of European lessons in conquest and cruelty with what remained there of the Indian race. Marquette had floated down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Arkansas in 1673, and La Salle had descended to the mouth of the river in 1682, taking possession in the name of the French king, and returning to Canada. But on his sea voyage for the purpose, three years afterwards, that noble and intrepid adventurer, baffled in his attempt to find the mouth of the river in the Gulf, disembarked ​on the coast of Texas. Soon after, in his wanderings, his assassination by one of his dastard companions put a tragic close to the first French attempt to colonize Louisiana.
After the peace of Ryswick, in 1697, and in spite of the Spanish claim, Iberville — one of seven remarkable brothers, of a Canadian family — renewed the effort in Louisiana in 1699, accompanied by his brother Bienville, who was governor of the colony (and the actual founder of Louisiana) for forty years. He made a fortification in the Bay of Biloxi, on the Mississippi. The enterprise was attended by a continuous series of strifes, quarrels, fights, and disasters. His men were utterly unwilling to perform any labor of planting or tillage on the land, even when starvation threatened them as the alternative; they preferred to spend all their time and strength on their feuds, and on venturesome predatory roamings. All their supplies of every kind, including most of their food, were brought from France. Such labor and menial work as was indispensable was put upon their abounding negro slaves. The region was steadily contested between the French and the Spaniards. The actual French settlement of Louisiana was made by the French in and around Mobile, in 1718. The remnant of the friendly tribes, harassed and exhausted by the havoc wrought by their successive tormentors, came much under the influence of the missionary priests, and became merged among the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The Natchez Indians, said to have wandered from Mexico, had settled on and around the bluff on the Mississippi that bears their name. Here, in 1729, they destroyed a French garrison, with its red allies; the incident being marked in our history as one of those vengeful visitations called, distinctively, massacres, — the title being generally reserved for those not rare experiences in which the savages had the mastery. A direful slaughter attended the catastrophe, which was complete, except as some of the women and ​children and negro slaves escaped its fury. So, by repetitions of the first and continuous methods of European devastation on the continent, the French enacted their history. Five years after the Natchez massacre, the French, in 1733, under Perrier, with Choctaws for allies, took vengeance for this slaughter, and broke the power of the Natchez tribe by death and devastation. Four hundred and twenty-seven of the wretched savage survivors were sent by Perrier to St. Domingo, to be sold as slaves.
Meanwhile, after the year 1726, when Louisiana began to give some signs of hope as a colony, enterprising and dauntless English traders, with pack-horses laden with goods, had begun to penetrate the wilderness from Carolina and Georgia, driving a brisk traffic with the Chickasaws. Those Chickasaws, in opposition to the Choctaws, had come into alliance with the scattered fragments of the Natchez Indians, and harried the French. The French, under Bienville, with their Choctaw allies, made a rush upon the Chickasaws in 1736, but the Chickasaws secured a bloody victory. By this time the hostile rivalry between the French and the English for trade and territory extended up from Louisiana to Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. And so through all these feuds, battles, and massacres, involving the Indians in the struggles between the representatives of three European nationalities, — the Spaniards, the French, and the English, — the natives felt the iron scourge weighing on and crushing them alike from the dealing of temporary friends and foes.
Beginning then from the first collision between the French and the English colonists here down to the English conquest of Canada, the Indians found themselves between the upper and the nether millstone, either as allies or foes of the one or the other European combatant. Nor did the hard fate by which they always suffered, whichever party temporarily prevailed, find any relief when the English sway became complete here; for as we shall have ​full occasion to note, in our own colonial war with Great Britain the same crushing power of fate did not make the Indians umpires in the struggle, but simply victims. We give full credit to the natives, if not for skill, yet for ability, cunning, and ferocity, in the great art of warfare before they had known any white foes. But it seems as if they must have learned something from their training under their new enemies. They certainly did learn that they had no monopoly of that class of passions which infuriate combatants and inspire guile, treachery, and breaches of the most solemn covenants. In the Old World, in the most embittered wars between Christians, some arrests and recognitions of what stood for humanity were coming to assert themselves as promising to introduce rules for what is called civilized warfare. Such rules have never yet crossed the sea to be of service to our natives.
We pause at this point in the rehearsal of only painful and shocking deeds, to reflect upon a fact which must forcibly present itself to one who, in reviewing the strife of European nationalities on this continent, contemplates the distribution of the awards from it.
The pages of human history and fortunes on the scenes of this distracted world present to us many conclusions and results in the struggles for the greater prizes of empire which violate our highest conceptions of right, our judgment of what ought to have been. And perhaps the most signal instance of the seemingly inequitable disposal of the great issues of policy among nations is the significant fact, that France, either as empire or republic, has not now any territorial foothold on this continent; nor indeed any memorial of her old colonial enterprise and sway, save in the names borne by lakes and rivers, forts and missions, cataracts and portages, in the regions of her wilderness heroism, and in the mixture of her blood and lineage in the descendants of nearly every aboriginal tribe. The allotments of fortune, or the fatuity of destiny, or the arbitrament of treaties built upon ​the issues of battles, have extinguished upon this vast continent every territorial right of the Frenchman. There is in existence a map of New France, engraved by the French king's cartographer, on which a very considerable portion of our present national domain is included under that complacent title, while the English colonies are crowded into a narrow seaboard strip. The more than complete inversion of those inscribed titles which appear on every map engraved for more than a century past, presents a theme over which we can but deeply moralize. We call up the image of the dauntless and generous-hearted Champlain, planning for an empire for his beloved France over these unmeasured ranges of lands, rivers, and inland seas. We note how in his journals and on his maps he attaches a name from his mother tongue to every natural object and phenomenon in his course, — bay, island, promontory, creek, or inlet, cascade, carrying-place, or camping-ground, level or swell of land, — and sometimes a word or phrase drawn from the quiet or the conflict of his experience for the moment. Happily many of these names are retained to secure fragments of history by their associations. We follow the weariful but ever-patient trampings of the missionary with only red companions, learning from them their own names of places, and entering them with a French alias in his memory or his notes. We accompany in thought those intrepid and agile coureurs de bois, penetrating the deepest wilds, in absences of years from their own kin and fellows. They bore with them remembrances of their village life and sports in their ever dear old home, and left many of its words and phrases as their own epitaphs or legacies. These French names and epithets keep watch only over the shadows of the past.
On three grounds, each of them obvious and strong in reason and validity, France might advance claims for permanent and representative rule on this continent, beyond those of English nationality now in possession.
​1. French adventure and enterprise had precedence in the actual colonization of the northern half of this continent. Spain was long content with conquest without colonization. She has in Mexico and in South America all that can be said to be rightfully hers in the perpetuation of her language, in exclusive privileges of commerce, in the mixture of Spanish with native blood, and in the still effective, though strained and fretting, ties of traditional loyalty recognized by her transatlantic subjects on main and island. But France had won something more than these, and has less, indeed nothing, here. Her navigators had given her the basis of what was then a rightful claim, in discovery. This was followed by actual occupancy, almost simultaneously, of the Peninsula of Florida, of the bays, islands, and shores of Acadia, of the St. Lawrence, of Canada, and afterwards of Louisiana and Mississippi. From the moment France had her foothold on our soil, there began in her interest that marvellously romantic and heroic work of exploration, discovery, and description of the features and scenes of this continent which made the title of New France as justly applicable to the whole of it as that of New England was to a small section of it. And this work of French colonization and exploration was pursued, not by the scant resources and ventures of a few expatriated outlaws and exiles, but under the patronage of one of the greatest of monarchs, through his ministers and viceroys, with the outlays and vigorous energies of the nobles of the realm, and the mighty prestige and the benediction of the Church, through Pope and cardinals, priests and missionaries.
2. A century and a half ago, France — though from fundamental mistakes in policy she had not strengthened herself in numbers, nor in the sure hold of the soil which comes from its improvement by agriculture and by industry — had actual possession of the inner strongholds of this continent. A line of forts, with mission chapels and trading ​posts, stretched along the strategic points on the great lakes and at the confluence of the first series of large rivers beyond the Alleghanies. Marquette had discovered the Mississippi, and La Salle had traced it to the salt sea. A Frenchman was the first white man to thread his way to the Rocky Mountains. These lakes and posts had for the most part been occupied by the consent, or at least the tolerance, of the natives, because they supposed that the convenience and benefit of them as trading or mission stations were shared by both races. In strength of muscle, in the strain upon endurance, by which the implements for building and defence were introduced into these depths of the primeval wilderness, was exacted harder toil from the French than the English colonists expended at contemporary periods of their enterprises. As soon as the English by the fortune of war afterwards got possession of these strongholds, they obliterated the names given by their predecessors. Indeed we might say, that, up to the period of our Revolutionary war, the English colonists on the seaboard had done scarce anything in the severer enterprises of exploration. They had, so to speak, used the French trails, and had the benefit in many ways of that experience won by others which is so much cheaper, and often more valuable, than that won by ourselves. The moment now that the modern traveller gets beyond the first ranges of our Western valleys and mountains, air and earth and water, history and tradition, are redolent of the memories of explorers and adventurers who called the monarch of France their sovereign.
All this toil and task-work of exploration and discovery, pursued by dauntless and intrepid men, — men whose life began in the luxuries of courts, and who yet proved themselves equal to an almost superhuman effort and endurance, — was undergone for a purpose: it was in the service of their beloved France, her adored glory and sanctity as a servant of the Church. If a passing glance of a ​coastline of a country which has had no place on a seaman's chart, establishes by the law of nations the right of discovery, and so of possession, for the monarch from one of whose ports the vessel sailed bearing the navigator who caught that glance, what shall we say of rights and claims assured by early and continued French enterprise on this continent? While the levity and hilarity of spirit which characterize that people, and the easy abandon of their morals in the temptations of a wilderness, may have lightened and cheered their ventures of exploration, some stiffer sinews, some firmer fibres, some loftier pitch of spirit were needed by them in that perilous work. They had at least leaders of a dauntless heroism, of pluck, energy, and endurance unmatched in adventure. I would include the French with the Indians, as having been spoiled of their inheritance here.
3. But what is more directly to our purpose, in our theme of the red man in his relations with Europeans on this continent, is to note the paramount claim of France, through her colonists here, to sway and influence over the savages. It is but fair, and fully conformed to historic truth, to say that of all the colonists who entered the New World, for whatever ends involving trespass upon or dispossession of the native tribes, Frenchmen were the most friendly, the most serviceable, and, we may add, the most just toward them. Of course, in affirming this we may still recall with all their aggravations the fierce and bitter wars with the Indians, the raids and devastations and massacres which so deeply stain with woe and horror the dominion of New France in America. The French brought many miseries upon tribes which they could not win to friendship; and they aggravated the darkest and direst penalties visited upon their allied tribes by subjecting them to the common vengeance of the English as being the bloody tools of their rivals. But, notwithstanding this, France might claim to-day a hold upon some of this ​territory simply on the ground of kinder, more sympathizing, and, so to speak, more wise and reasonable courses in her treatment of the savages. Indeed, her influence does survive through her old affiliations with them. The history of French enterprise and adventure on this continent draws some of its most romantic and picturesque elements for narrative and for quiet musing from the men already referred to under the titles of “Voyageurs” and “Coureurs de Bois.” Often they were identical in traits, character, and habits. For whoever had the inclination, skill, and other qualities for one of these capacities could easily conform himself to the other. So far as the characters were distinguishable, the voyageur might be regarded as the expert in canoe navigation, while the coureur found his principal occupation in coursing the wilderness. The voyageur was commonly in the employ of some association of traders or individual traders. The coureur de bois acted on his own account. The same person often combined both characters. How readily a large number of a large class, too, of Frenchmen took to these airy, free, and hazardous ways of spending their existence, and how soon they became adepts and experts in their wild life, needs no comment here. They took Indian wives, at their discretion or ability to pay for them. They have left behind them a numerous progeny of half-breeds, who, while sometimes troublesome, have proved largely serviceable to hunting and trapping parties of whites, to private and Government explorers, and officers at our posts, as scouts and interpreters, and as needful go-betweens for the two races. They led a reckless and lawless life, often with dubious loyalty to either party. They ministered to the Indian's passion for strong drink. They became often so troublesome, intractable, and lawless in their occasional returns to civilized spots, and in their bad influence over the natives, that the local and foreign governments made many though always vain efforts to restrain and suppress them. The historian Charlevoix ​covers the whole truth, and its explanation too, in this frank statement: “The savages did not become French, but the French became savages.”
There was a root difference, complete and characteristic in all its workings and manifestations, between the ways in which the English and the French felt towards the Indians, looked upon, and treated them. On being brought into relations either friendly or hostile with the savages, the English felt for them dislike, contempt, loathing even; and they seldom took the pains to conceal these feelings. At any rate the Indians needed not to exercise their keener penetration to become perfectly aware that their treatment by the English was characterized not only by a show and assumption of superiority, but by disdain and hauteur. There was a line which the English never allowed to be crossed, or even blurred, between them and the savage, — the line which forbade real intimacy, or any concession of familiarity on equal terms. Roger Williams and the Apostle Eliot may be said in the full sincerity of their hearts, in pity, sympathetic yearnings, and heroic, patient, devoted efforts for the redemption and welfare of the Indians, to have exceeded all Englishmen; but their own avowals are evidence that their English stomachs, as they said, loathed the habits and the viands of the savage.
It would be difficult in one single point of unlikeness or contrast to offer a more striking illustration of the variance of tastes, temperaments, scruples, and other natural proclivities distinguishing the Frenchman and the Englishman, as exhibited here more than two centuries ago, than in this matter of affiliating with or loathing the Indian. Nor did the difference lie in the fact merely that the former pitied the Indian for his heathenism and the latter did not. Both agreed in acknowledging that deplorable condition and exposure of the natives, though the Englishman's method of securing them deliverance from it, even if he thought it worth the while, was more difficult and ​exacting than that of the Frenchman. But antipathy, disgust, absolute contempt for — and if there be any stronger word for expressing the feeling — repelled the Englishman from the Indian; while the Frenchman, in an easy, tolerant, rollicking, or even in an affectedly sympathizing way, “took to” his red companion. The whole contrast is presented by setting before the imagination two pictures, strictly drawn to the fact. One gives us the Jesuit priest (and he was not in this distinguished by his religious character from his countrymen) occupying the same filthy lodge, sleeping on the same flea-infested skins, and ladling out his abominable dinner from the same caldron with a whole family of humanity and dogs. The other picture shows us the careful wife of the Apostle Eliot doing up for him a wallet of clean, however frugal food, as he mounted his horse for his eighteen miles' ride to Natick, where when hungry he ate it in his own private sitting and sleeping apartment in a loft of the Indian meeting-house.
But the French really assimilated with the Indians, neither raising nor recognizing any barrier of race, habit, or antipathy between them. They even seem to a large extent to have been actually attracted to and won over by the features of the wild life, and the wild free ways of those who led it. The easy adoption of this kind of life by vast numbers of Frenchmen, including daily habits, dress, food and the revolting ways of preparing it, love of roving and adventure in hunting and trapping, ability and endurance in rough and daring enterprise and exposure, — all goes to prove that this assimilation with savagery was of natural prompting and proclivity. There were charms and joys for thousands of the light-hearted, pliable, and reckless rovers from old France — its peasants, its soldiers, its convicts and criminals, and none the less for its nobles and courtiers — in the range and lawlessness and wild indulgences of their forest companions. Of course the savages heartily responded to and genially accepted all this accordancy and ​abandon of their once civilized visitors. The French thus from the first won an influence over their savage intimates which the English never in the slightest degree attained, nor even seem to have desired to win. I have noticed many slight but most significant tokens of the fact, that, when in some occasionally critical emergencies it was quite important for the English to conciliate or draw into action with them any one conspicuous individual, party, or tribe of the Indians, the work was set about in a blundering, dictatory, or harsh way, which would seem likely to defeat the object aimed for. “Brothers,” or “Children,” was the term constantly on the lips of the French in addressing the natives. I do not find the words as ever employed by the Puritan fathers of New England. The French priests were always more than willing to unite a Frenchman and an Indian woman in Christian wedlock. I cannot conceive that John Eliot would have approved or sanctioned the relation between one of his own countrymen and the most pious woman among his native converts. The few lingering remnants of the old tribes in New England are all of them of blood mixed from the African. Not many, if indeed any, specimens of this mixture could be found among the half-breeds of the North and the West. Had it ever been desirable or likely that the solution of the problem of two races on this continent should have been sought or found in their assimilation, the French would have been the most likely medium for securing the result. They had, indeed, made considerable progress towards it, and many every way respectable and flourishing families in Canada and the Red River region attest its degree of success.
If ever, in any case under the stress of circumstances and exigencies, the French felt a distrust or dread of the Indians, or were watchful of their craft and treachery, they took pains to conceal all tokens of the sort. When strolling Indians or chiefs on business errands visited the French trading-posts or forts, they were made much of; ​they were allowed to strut with full complacency in their forest bravery and toggery; their conceit and dignity were not reduced; the meal, the camp-fire, and the bed were shared with them on a footing of perfect equality; they were cajoled and feasted; and, coming and going, were greeted with military salutes, as princely visitors. Quite otherwise was it between the English and the Indians: the distance, often wide and deep in reserve, was never overcome. By this natural — and if at some times assumed — assimilation with the natives, the French won a vast prestige with them. On a signal occasion the French Governor Frontenac, much to the admiration of his barbarous spectators and friends, put himself in Indian array, feathered, greased, and painted, while he howled and yelled and gesticulated in the war-dance in rivalry of any native braves. He has an extraordinarily daring imagination who can present to himself a sober governor of any New England colony in that guise. Sir William Johnson, the British Indian Agent, said, however, that on some occasions he had worn their garb.
The representatives of France among our Indian tribes from her earliest enterprises on the continent were composed of three classes, — priests, fur-traders, and soldiers; but little account being made of colonists, in the full sense of the word, as planters, attaching themselves to spaces of cleared land, from which they intended to draw their full subsistence. The soldiers are no longer here, though they hold such a place in the history of the contests for rival empire on the continent. The priests and the fur-traders have kept themselves in living activity, though with a wasting and less significant hold and range in the developments of the last century.
The traffic of the traders in Canada — distinguishing them from those in Acadia and off the coast as fishermen — was almost exclusively confined to peltry. The trade was a source of constant vexation, annoyance, rivalry, and ​quarrelling among the adventurers and settlers. A monopoly of it had been given successively to different individuals, who utterly failed to secure its privileges. Then a joint company of adventurers sought to control it by a partnership in expenses and profits. But they were openly defied by single persons, whose common plunderings interested them so strongly that they had substantially the influence of a banded fellowship acting without a charter. In the spring or early summer the Indians, from the far-off scenes where they had been patiently gathering the coveted peltry, would congregate in clamorous hordes near Montreal with their laden canoes, to barter their cargoes. Scenes of blood, of riot, and of drunkenness ensued, and the once quiet wilderness heard every sound of a Babel of tongues vociferous in passion and imprecations. This bartering of the coverings of animals for the lives of men, skin for skin, was beyond measure demoralizing. Soon the most dauntless of the French would stroll off, alone or in couples, to distant beaver dams and forest treasuries, or rival traders would waylay an incoming party and anticipate the regular market. The brandy traffic, too, flourished with a vigor that defied police, military, and spiritual threats and prohibitions.
It might be debated whether such sway as France once had here should in its predominance be assigned to the priests or the traders. Repeatedly and emphatically was it affirmed by the principal promoters of the first colonizing of New England, that the chief and paramount end of their coming hither was religion. By their own interpretation of the scope of their meaning, we understand them to have included in this avowal the enjoyment of their own religion and the conversion to it of the heathen tribes. But practically viewed, the relative place of interest which the religious prompting proved to have, in comparison with mundane schemes of thrift, trade, and commerce, will depend upon the severity or the leniency of the judgment ​which we visit upon the New England colonists. No candid student of our history, however, can fail to allow and affirm that the founders of New France in America, in their zeal and heroic toil and endurance for the conversion of the savages, present us on the records examples of nobleness and devotion which Puritan history cannot parallel. True, the words “religion” and “conversion” signified very different things — in substance, in processes, in methods, in tests, and results — to the Puritan and the Jesuit; and it is no breach of charity to say that the Jesuit was fully satisfied with tokens of success which the Puritan regarded as utterly insignificant, and even mockingly futile and false. We may but incidentally anticipate here a subject which will later engage a chapter in this volume, in an examination of the priestly and Protestant aims, methods, and results in the attempts for Christianizing the Indians. The Jesuits present themselves for brief notice at this point as one of the three first representatives of France in the New World. The Jesuit's method was by ritual, with an altar, however rude, with scenic demonstrations, a procession in the woods following the cross, if but just cut from the forest, and graced by a flock of naked savages bearing their bayberry torches. The Puritan's method was by doctrine, — a body of divinity, didactic teaching, and experimental cases of conscience. The good Apostle Eliot put the Indian vocabulary to a severe strain in opening to them high Calvinism, — with adoption, election, reprobation, justification, etc. But the Jesuits were not the first of the Roman priesthood in New France.
The measures for the introduction into New France of religion and its missionaries, to secure the avowed object of the conversion of the savages, were at first wholly lacking in zeal, and were soon sadly complicated by the mixture of Catholics and Huguenots, alike worldly in their enterprises, and by rivalries between the Franciscan and Jesuit orders. Father Gabriel Sagard, a Récollet, of the ​Franciscan Friars, is the faithful historian of the struggles and contentions involved in this missionary work. The editor of Sagard says it was difficult to quicken any zeal for the work in France. He makes light of the assumption of the Pope in giving over the whole continent to the Spaniards and the Portuguese, and thinks the Papal oracle as absurd as if it had affirmed that America did not exist, and had excommunicated any one who might say that the earth had two hemispheres. The editor also quotes the “fine raillery” of Francis I. about these grasping claimants: “Eh, how is this? They quietly divide between them the whole of America, without allowing me to share in it as their brother. I wish much to see the item in Adam's testament which bequeaths them this vast heritage.” The Huguenot Sieur De Monts, while the patent for Acadia was in his hands, brought over with him in 1604 a minister and a priest, besides a miscellaneous company of convicts and ruffians, the sweepings of the prisons and purlieus. The two divines not only quarrelled in their arguments, but came to fisticuffs. Sagard tells us that soon after coming to land they both died, near the same time, and that the sailors, who buried them in a common grave, wondered if, having been in such strife in life, they could lie peacefully together in the pit.
Two Jesuit priests came to Acadia in 1611, but did not long remain. One of them, Father Biard, was taken with Saussaye in Argall's raid at Mt. Desert. He narrowly escaped the halter in Virginia, and the being thrown overboard off the Azores, lest he should betray there to the Catholic authorities the deeds of his Protestant captors. But he was snugly hidden under deck while the vessel was searched, and getting back to France might have resumed ​his professorship of theology at Lyons. The other Acadian Jesuit, Father Enemond Masse, was afterwards a missionary in Canada. The first missionaries to Canada were four of the Franciscan friars who arrived in Quebec in May, 1615. Sagard is their faithful eulogian. His last editor reflects on the Jesuit historians Garneau and Charlevoix for their neglect and light esteem of Sagard's work. The friars appeared in their monkish garb of rope-girdled and hooded robes, and bare feet shod with heavy wooden sandals, — not a very fitting foot-gear for the egg-shell canoes in which they were to pass to their missions. They celebrated the first mass in Canada on June 25, 1615, in a little chapel which they built at Quebec. The first burial there with holy rites Sagard records as that of “Michel Colin,” March 24, 1616. One of the friars, Father Dolbeau, went with a band of the Montagnais up the Saguenay in December. Reduced, after two months, near to blindness and much agony from the smoke of the filthy lodges, he prudently judged, says Sagard, that our Lord did not require of him the loss of his sight, but that he ought carefully to guard what was so essential to him for his great enterprise. Another of the brethren, Father Le Caron, bravely accompanied a band of Hurons returning up the Ottawa, from their voyage down with furs to Montreal. He wisely had a lodge of his own on the outskirts of their village, where he wintered. He celebrated the first mass there Aug. 12, 1615. He wrote frankly to a friend of all the disagreeables, the disgusts, and terrible hardships of his new mode of life. But he cheerily adds: “Abundant consolation I found under all my troubles; for when one sees so many infidels needing nothing but a drop of water to make them children of God, he feels an inexpressible ardor to labor for their conversion, and sacrifice to it his repose and his life.”
​Sagard was himself a missionary for many years among the Hurons; and, besides a Dictionary of their language, he wrote a very interesting book upon the country and its people.
He seems to have been a guileless and simple-hearted man, homesick at times, but zealous in his work. His credulity was extreme, and he was greatly disturbed by the demoniacal vaporings and tricks which were thought to infest the land and the people. He was adopted by an Indian family, and was finally reconciled to make his principal food of sagamite, the Indian maize.
The mission of the Récollets was superseded by the coming of Jesuit Fathers to Canada in 1625. Henceforth none but faithful disciples of the Roman Church were to be allowed to abide there.
As a reader of the sources of history for the time and place muses over the record, he pauses to ask whether these spiritual guides found their own countrymen or the savages the more tractable and hopeful subjects of their ghostly charge. A rough set alike they were for such oversight. One contrasts in thought and fancy the work of teaching and discipline there with that contemporaneously going on in the meeting-houses and homes of the New England Puritans. We may be sure that the Canadian was far lighter and most easy where that of the Puritans was most austere and grim; yet what verdict has time and trial set upon the long results of the two methods! The whole influence and example of Champlain and of a few devout men and women were given to encourage the priests within their own holy functions. But they had a restive, wild, and unregenerate crew around them, and it was not easy to bring them even to outward reverence for the ritual. Occasionally, after years of lawless and wholly ungirt roaming ​in the wilderness, a coureur de bois or a voyageur, under some prickings of conscience, would come into the settlement that he might obtain shriving, at least for the past. If he made a clean breast of it, a guileless-hearted priest must have felt a heavier burden lying upon him than that which the penitent hoped to throw off.
A more favorable character is given by a good authority of some of the descendants of this race of men. The Earl of Dufferin, late Governor-General of Canada, on his return way from his interesting overland visit to British Columbia, in September, 1877, in addressing a meeting at Winnipeg, made the following laudatory reference to this class of men, of whose character and influence he had had opportunities of observation: —
" There is no doubt that a great deal of the good feeling subsisting between the red men and ourselves is due to the influence and interposition of that invaluable class of men, the half-breed settlers and pioneers of Manitoba, who — combining as they do the hardihood, the endurance, and love of enterprise generated by the strain of Indian blood within their veins, with the civilization, the instruction, and the intellectual power derived from their fathers — have preached the gospel of peace and good-will and mutual respect, with results beneficent alike to the Indian chieftain in his lodge and to the British settler in his shanty. They have been the ambassadors between the East and the West, the interpreters of civilization and its exigencies to the dwellers on the prairie, as well as the exponents to the white man of the consideration justly due to the susceptibilities, the sensitive self-respect, the prejudices, the innate craving for justice of the Indian race. In fact they have done for the colony what otherwise would have been left unaccomplished; and they have introduced between the white population and the red man a traditional feeling of amity and friendship, which but for them it might have been impossible to establish."
These remarks of the Earl gave high gratification to his auditors, many of whom were of the class to whom he ​referred, though generally of a mixture of other than French blood. Some of these half-breeds in the Northwest are called “Metis.”
Nor did the priests wholly escape the jealousies and reproaches of the more intelligent of their flock, whose rivalries in trade, whose intrigues and quarrels, either as rebuked or espoused by the Jesuits, brought upon some of the latter the imputation of having an interest in the peltry and even in the brandy traffic. A study of the work of these French priests will occupy a subsequent chapter.
We must note, not only the difference, but the fundamental and radical antagonism between the motives, agencies, and principles under which French and English enterprise and colonization began upon this continent, so far as they have a bearing upon their relations with the natives. The French, who had by some fifty years the start in their earliest tentative voyages for prospecting and trade, came here with royal grants and privileges, with the patronage of court nobles, and the sanction and zeal of powerful ecclesiastical orders. They retained an unbroken connection with the primary sources of power and authority at home. Viceroys of France were the governors of the colony, reporting to and receiving orders from the chief cabinet minister, and frequently directly to and from the sovereign. Military sway, with martial vigor and appliances, controlled the administration of the colony. But, by an intricate and confused method in the supreme supervision of the enterprise, there was introduced an element of constant irritation and quarrelling in the direction of affairs, by the appointment, under the title of Intendant, of a sort of civil officer whose functions and powers, not sharply distinguished from those to be exercised by the viceroy or the governor, were ever bringing the two heads into quarrelling over cross purposes, rights, and dignities. The Governor and the Intendant kept a jealous watch on each other, conciliated and won their respective ​partisans and abettors, set traps and played intrigues for mutual annoyance, and by separate channels of intercourse through rival parties at court did what was in their power to make mischief for each other. Self-dependence, independence of foreign oversight, authority, and aid were what was never for a moment meditated or desired by the French here, at any stage or period of their colonization. New France was not only as much a part of the empire as any portion of the realm, but it was to be, so far as circumstances would allow, administered as a home province, with a transfer of feudal institutions, seigniories, bishoprics, proprietary rights, noble and privileged orders, and stingy allotments for common people. As the event proved, these distinctive and primary characteristics of French dominion in America, so widely contrasted with the course and principles of the English colonists, could not be transferred from the Old World so that they would take root here. They were uncongenial with, disastrous to, any hopeful enterprise. And we are to find in this fundamental quality of French dominion, with all the zeal and heroism engaged in it, the reason for the fact that France has no heritage here.
By no means, however, is it to be inferred that the French were in all cases politic, humane, or just towards the Indians. On the contrary, there were tribes, the Iroquois especially, to whom the French were from the first and always a scourge, relentless and destructive. Raid after raid was made from Canada, beginning with Champlain, into the domains of the Five Nations; and when the savages fled from the armed hosts, their pleasant villages were wasted and their granaries and cornfields destroyed to bring them to starvation. One act of shameful atrocity, with dark treachery, was perpetrated by the French, in 1687, on some peaceful and confiding Iroquois at Cadarakui, the captives from which, La Potherie says, forty in number, were sent to France to work in the galleys. Charlevoix ​tells us that Louis had written to the Governor of Canada, La Barre: “As it is of importance to the good of my service to diminish as much as possible the number of the Iroquois, and that as these savages, who are strong and robust, will serve usefully in my galleys, I desire that you will do everything in your power to make as many of them as possible prisoners of war, and send them over to France.” Some of the survivors were afterwards brought back to Canada.
How unlike were the way, the means, and the intent of the first English colonists on the Atlantic seaboard! The most resolute, the most successful of them, — those the fruits of whose enterprise have been the richest and the most permanent, — stole away, we may say, from England, under a covert. The New England colonists asked no royal patronage beyond that going with their parchment charters, the main intent and value of which were to secure their territorial rights and jurisdiction against foreign rivals and jealous intruders of their own stock. They neither borrowed nor begged supplies in ships, armaments, or subsistence. They sent home no reports of progress or failure to the officials of the mother country, nor received from her any challenge to return a reckoning to her. No civil or military function was discharged among them by commission or appointment from abroad; but their magistrates, judges, and captains were elected from among themselves. Occasionally, under the sharp pressure of their poverty or misfortunes, or in the apprehension of some collision with the Dutch or the French, a suggestion was dropped by one or another of the less sturdy of the New England stock, that they should look to the mother country for counsel or help. But the timid purpose was at once repudiated, on the ground that the call upon England for the slightest favor, or even the acceptance of one unasked, would afford a pretext to her for intermeddling in the affairs of her exiled offspring, whose spirit and direction of self-management ​indicated from the first that same sense of virtual independence as asserted itself in the fulness of time in our Revolutionary War. So while the Old-World feudalism and despotism underlaid the colonization enterprise of New France, and sought to reproduce and reconstruct itself among these forests on our North and West, a pure and rejuvenated democracy was rooting itself and rearing its popular institutions and sway among the hard-working farmers of New England when their settlements were still on the seaboard. Possibly if France had allowed and encouraged, instead of expressly prohibiting, her heretic Huguenots to represent her in her New-World colonization, she might still have had provinces and dominion here. But a Puritan democracy, inoculating the system of Englishmen, proved to be the right spirit and constituency for securing a heritage in the New World. Whether, indeed, the Huguenot faith and blood transported hither might not have adapted itself to and improved for noble uses this free opportunity for colonial empire, is a question which might be differently answered. No great statesman suggested this method for disposing of that ever-increasing body of heretics which no edicts, disabilities, threatenings, or aggravation of cruelty could suppress, and which was not exterminated by the shocking massacre on St. Bartholomew's day. Both England and New England were glad to welcome such of the hounded exiles from France as sought in them a refuge. Those who found in either place a new home, with fields and workshops for their industry and thrift, and causes to engage their patriotism for the places of their adoption, have incorporated their descendants into the most honored ranks of society. But if Old France had opened New France even only as a place of enforced banishment for the Huguenots, leaving them without threatening or burdens to make the best of new homes in the wilderness, two results worthy of the exercise of a nation's wisdom in council and foresight would have ​followed. France would have been saved from some dreadful stains of persecution now on her annals, and the affinity between the Huguenots and the Puritans of New England would have greatly modified that century and a half of warfare which was waged by two sovereignties and their subjects here. If France had none the less been despoiled of all her territory here, she would have been more largely represented by Frenchmen all over the continent.
What effect, if any, this possible transfer hither of a large French population, with political and religious proclivities in accord with those which have gained the mastery here, would have had upon the fortunes of the Indian tribes, it might be difficult to decide. So far as the substitute in Canada of a Protestant for a Roman Catholic people would have qualified the hostility of Puritan New England (that it would have largely done so is altogether probable), there would have been less occasion for and embitterment of the rivalries and jealousies which brought in the Indians, — never in the dignified position of umpires, hardly even in the equality of allies, — to find themselves losers in every case, whichever of the principals claimed the advantage. Certain it is that the contentions between the English and the French, engaging their respective Indian allies, were intensely aggravated by the differences in religion of the principal combatants. It was at a time when the hatred of the Papacy and the Papists was aggravated for all Englishmen by the policy and diplomacy which entered into the intrigues of European peoples engaged in the rival ecclesiastical systems. Massachusetts followed the statutes of England in sharp legislation against the Papists. In the view of the French Canadian Government it was but an axiom of natural reason, a prompting of common-sense, that they should engage and employ Indian allies. But this obvious suggestion did not at all relieve the matter in the view of the Puritans. It was enough for them, — in their amazement, protests, and ​groans, — that Papists, calling themselves Christians, should engage the tomahawks and firebrands against even heretics, who also, after a sort, were Christians. There was a region between Acadia and the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers which was always in controversy as a boundary between the European claimants, while the Indians insisted that they had never parted with its ownership. This region was the scene of desperate encounters, of pillagings, slaughter, and burnings; the English being the chief, though by no means the only, sufferers. Nor did the savages confine their warfare of ambushes and night surprises to that region, but they came alarmingly near to Boston. The Puritans were maddened by the suspicion, often assured by positive knowledge, that the French priests inspirited, indicated, and directed these assaults, and sometimes accompanied the war-parties of the savages. This complaint was hardly a consistent one, coming from those whose ministers were an equal power in military and civil as in religious affairs. The English also were wont to take chaplains on their expeditions. There is on record a graphic sketch of a vigorous conflict between a minister and a priest, on a spot of contested territory, to assume the spiritual charge of a band of heathen, already nominal disciples of the Roman Church. Indeed religion, in anything but name, keeps itself well out of this fearful strife. In the melancholy relation now to follow, the Roman priests stand charged with a most odious agency.
A tragic incident in the long struggle between the French and English, with their respective Indian allies, on our northern bounds, connects itself with the forcible removal, in 1755, of a people in Acadia, known as the “French Neutrals.” The theme has been wrought by the pen of genius, with all the richest charms of romance and tender sentiment, into the exquisite narrative and descriptive poem “Evangeline.” In the interests of ​hard, historic truth, with all its stern, acrimonious, and distressing aggravations, we must read that incident in sober and saddening prose. Acadia, or Nova Scotia, the oldest French colony in North America, had been for near a century and a half occupied by that people, and had always been a scene of distraction and destruction. The peninsula, in the fortunes of rivalry and war, besides passing by royal patent from one to another French proprietary, had been transferred some half-a-dozen times by treaty negotiations alternately to the English and French crowns. That single statement tells the tale of what sea and shore had witnessed. The treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, closing one of the paroxysms of strife, had ceded it to England. It was never to be transferred again; but the tenure of it was long at risk, and the possession of it was worse than of doubtful value to the English. There were at the time about twenty-five hundred French inhabitants. There was, of course, an uncertainty, keeping open a dispute, as to what were its bounds. The English soon found that it was the purpose of the French to restrict these as narrowly as possible. The English drew the boundary line as east from the mouth of the Kennebec to Quebec, including the southern shore and islands. The latter insisted that the St. John and the lands north of the Bay of Fundy were not included in the cession, and that Acadia signified only the southern part of what is now Nova Scotia. It was provided by the treaty that the subjects of the King of France in Acadia might, within a year, move away at their pleasure, disposing of their real and personal property; or, if they chose to remain, might retain their religion and their priests, and be as free in all respects as British subjects under British laws. As successive British sovereigns came to the throne, orders were sent over that these so-called Neutrals should take the oath of allegiance, while not required to bear arms against the French or for the ​English. Under the influence of their priests, threatening them with ecclesiastical penalties, they were warned not to transfer their allegiance, but to keep their loyalty to France, and to refuse the required oath. The priests in Acadia were under the pay of the French Government, and received secret counsels from the authorities in Canada. Of course there was a state of restlessness, insubordination, and not even concealed lawlessness and rebellion, — waiting for another cast of the dice of warfare or diplomacy. There was a continual series of aggressions, inroads, assaults, and slaughters upon the English settlers on the outskirts of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts. These were instigated from Canada, and the Acadian priests were believed to be engaging their flocks in open or secret connivance.
The Indians claimed as theirs the lands on the Kennebec, on which the English were steadily intruding. In reprisal the latter enlisted and sent their war-parties for punishment and vengeance. On a second attack, made in 1724, by the English and some Mohawk allies, upon the Indian village of Norridgewok, during the sack and burning of the houses and the church Father Ralle was killed and scalped. He was then sixty-seven years old, enfeebled by twenty-six years of hard service in the woods, and much beloved by his red disciples. He was a devoted missionary and a scholar. His dictionary of the language of his Indians is preserved in the Library of Harvard College. The English rejoiced over his violent end, as they regarded him as a crafty enemy, and believed from his papers which they rifled that the evidence was complete of his evil machinations from instructions received from Canada. In an ambush in one of the raids of the savages Captain Josiah Winslow was killed. He was a brother of General John Winslow, who on this account might have thrown warm will into his charge of removing the Neutrals from Acadia.
​After thirty years of a qualified sort of peace between France and England, trouble again opened in 1743, which of course signified a renewal of open conflict between the Europeans and the red men here. The great and enormously costly stronghold of Louisburg, into which the constructive skill and the lavish outlay of France had been wrought for thirty years, was taken by a colonial and English army and fleet, and having capitulated on June 15, 1745, its vast stores and defences were removed. After this first capture it was restored to the French by treaty. It was again taken by the English in 1758, when its walls were dismantled, and all the toil and money spent upon it showed a heap of wreck. Another interval of rage and havoc followed. French fleets and armies were to sweep the coasts and destroy Boston, as well as drive out the English from all their Eastern strongholds; but tempests and deadly pestilence thwarted the enterprise. This war was closed by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.
If one could search the depths and the soundings of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and of all the coasts of northern New England and the British Provinces, what harrowing secrets would be revealed of wrecks of heavily armed frigates, and of vessels of every name and size, which have gone down there in storm and battle, carrying with them their human freight sinking to death in the rage of passion or in the dreads and horrors of the method of their end! What engines of havoc, what implements, fabrics, and fruits of peaceful ingenuity and industry are buried in those dank chambers of the ocean, the watery trophies of the victory of the elements over the common spoilings of humanity!
After the English had held Acadia for thirty years, they had nothing to show for it except the cost of the charge. Many schemes and attempts were devised to bring in English settlers and residents. Here arose the troubles with the uncongenial and hostile people then in occupancy, the French Neutrals, who insisted upon remaining as French, ​refusing the oath of allegiance to Britain, though at times threatening to remove from their lands. The evidence is sufficient and undeniable that they were under the influence of a priest, Le Loutre; and it was but to be expected that he should exercise that influence in the French interest. This priest was to the English especially odious, as not only intermeddling with civil affairs out of his clerical province, — as did all his brethren, much to the disgust and annoyance even of the French magistrates when they controlled Acadia, — but as a most crafty and treacherous and vicious man, engaged also in profitable trade. He was Vicar-General of Acadia under the ecclesiastical rule of Quebec, and was the agent of all disaffection and mischief. He threatened to withhold the sacraments from all his flock who succumbed to the English, and to set the Indians upon them.
Orders came from the English Government that these Neutrals who would not come under allegiance should be removed. We all know how romance and poetry invest them. What were they in condition, character, temper, and naked reality to those who had to deal with them in earnest?
The Abbé Raynal seems to have been the first to introduce into literature the ideal view of the Acadians, as a gentle, loving, peaceful, pastoral people, in sweet innocence and home delights sharing the joys and prosperity of a simple, guileless life. He mistook Acadia for Arcadia. He had a purpose in his essay: it was to set in contrast the prosperity and happy condition of these transatlantic villagers with that of the peasants of France before the Revolution. So he heightens every element and coloring of that contrast. He says the Acadians had no quarrels, no lawsuits, no poverty. Their loved and unworldly priests settled all their variances, made their wills, and guided their affairs. With mutual sympathy and generosity they relieved each other's misfortunes. Early marriages averted celibacy and ​vice. Their houses were as substantial and comfortable as those of European farmers. With their flocks and fields and cattle and fruits and laden barns they filled the round of a happy existence.
Those who had to deal with these Neutrals as neighbors, magistrates, military officers, report them to us very differently. We must let reason and candor mediate for us as we hesitate between romance and reality. The records of governors of Acadia, both French and English, with official and other papers, are preserved in abundance and of full authenticity. Alike these complain of the mischievous and malignant influence of the priests over the people as arbitrary and treacherous, and tending always to alienation and strife, and urging to a resistance of government. The people are described as idle, restless, roaming as bush-rangers, dissolute among the Indians, leading a squalid and shabby life. The council at Quebec and the English courts were worried with their petty and constant litigation. Their dwellings were “wretched wooden boxes,” dilapidated and filthy, and without cellars. Nor was this all that was alleged to their reproach and offence: they were called “neutrals;” but parties of them had been known to have prompted and engaged in the bloody raids of the Indians on the English settlements, to have done many acts of violence and treachery, to have acted as spies and informers, and to have supplied the French with cattle and grain while refusing such trade with the English garrison. The great Seven Years' War between France and England was then threatening across the water, the direst rage of which was to be felt by the colonies of England here, Braddock's defeat in 1755 opening the series of catastrophes. The French monarch was working his own Huguenot subjects in the galleys, while the English masters of Acadia covenanted to the Neutrals their own religion and priests. The English said that they would gladly have had the Acadians remain if they could have been relied ​upon as merely harmless. They were not oppressed by any burden, or subject to any tax save that which their own priests exacted of them. It is believed that they would have been content, and would have come under British allegiance, had it not been for the malign and defiant influence of those priests. The English affirmed that they were at great charge for keeping up garrisons; that for forty years they had had no benefit from their treaty possession; that they could not induce their own countrymen to come in as colonists, unwelcomed by such uncongenial neighbors; and that the professed Neutrals were among them an ever-threatening element, ready to turn to most active enmity as military or diplomatical complications might afford the opportunity. A thousand of the Acadians had indeed moved away voluntarily in 1750, leaving their houses and barns to be destroyed by the Indians. Nearly double the number that were soon to be forcibly removed by the English, had been induced or compelled by the French to withdraw from the end of the peninsula to the north of it, and were there a threatening power.
Under this condition of things the English governor, Lawrence, acting by instructions from the King through Lord Halifax, after disarming many of the remaining Neutrals, made most deliberate and persistent efforts, but all in vain, to induce them to take the oath of allegiance. Deputies sent from their different villages positively refused to do so. In counsel with the Governor and two English admirals, who advised the measure, it was decided that those thus recusant should be removed with their families, taking with them their money and household effects, and that they should be supplied with provisions and distributed over the southern provinces at distances which would prevent any concert between them. Additional reasons were found for this measure in charges that the Neutrals were idle and improvident, and had neglected field labor and fishing, as most naturally would be the case ​under the uncertainties and anxieties of their condition. The proffer of French authorities to transport the Neutrals to France was rejected, as not likely to be fairly and fully carried out.
The measure having been decided upon, steps were at once taken to effect it, and different agents were appointed to complete the design at the different villages. The inhabitants of Chiegnecto fled into the woods and kept out of the way. All who could affirm that they had not been in arms against the English, and would at last take the oath, were at liberty to remain. Colonel John Winslow, of Massachusetts, in command at Mines, did his work with resolution and completeness. Of the inhabitants, four hundred and eighteen unarmed men were enticed into their church, on Sept. 5, 1755, as if to listen to a message from the King of England. By a bold ruse they were seized and borne to the waiting vessels. Nearly two thousand were removed from Mines, and eleven hundred from Annapolis. A party of two hundred and twenty-six Acadians seized the vessel in which they were conveyed, made off with it, and were not recovered. About three thousand in all were removed. They were distributed over the provinces, of course as a public charge, a burden and a nuisance to those who were compelled to receive them, forlorn, homeless, wretched, and sick at heart themselves. At intervals of between a few months and several years about two thirds of them, in various ways, got back to their loved Acadia.
Such is the rehearsal of this tragic story as it stands on the pages of authentic history. No morbidness of ​sentiment, no tricks of fancy, are needed to enhance its sadness; for it is indeed a most piteous story. Allowing it to stand in every fact, detail, argument, and vindication as related and urged by the English, it still records one of the most distressing outrages which either military or diplomatic policy or necessity has instigated and carried out amid civilized scenes of the earth. We may in measure and degree exculpate the English, and perhaps affirm that there was no alternative course for them under their annoyances, perplexities, and aggravations; but still we can put ourselves into such sympathetic and appreciative relations with the victims — if of necessity and circumstance — as to see only what they saw, to feel as they felt, and to confess that their course would most likely have been our own. They were a rude and simple peasant race. Their priests represented to them the law of their highest reverence and allegiance. Their home had been amid the forests and fields and ocean shores of their peninsula for four or five generations. In spite of fog and ice and long, dreary winters, they had prospered by the farm, the fishery, and the hunt: they had flocks and herds. They had perpetuated among them the characteristics of the peasant life of France when their ancestors came hither. Their range of existence was narrow; their habits were mean and earthy, with much that was merely animal and sordid. All the more was what they had of joy and good and opportunity, and associated fellowship in interest and pleasure, very precious to them. They loved to hold dear the tie to their beloved France. They might yet come again under its protection. They had no reason to respect or to succumb to the English: loyalty and religion drew their hearts another way. They had to witness and mourn over the wreck of their domestic life. They were scattered, unwelcome, and only as objects of dislike and disgust among uncongenial scenes and strangers. Often — but not with intent, or heartlessness of cruelty — families among them were parted never ​to be knit together again. We acknowledged, in entering upon this narration, a conflict between its rehearsal as history and its drapery in romance. But there is no need of admitting this. Amid all the stern or disagreeable aspects of this prose tragedy, there are elements from which poetry may work its richest, fairest, and tenderest wreathings of sentiment, with the human heart to prompt and to respond to its melancholy images of devastated scenes and tortured affections. Evangelines and Gabriels are the representatives of a large fellowship of parted, seeking, and hopelessly saddened sufferers.
The tragedy at Mines and Grand Prè, with its exasperating effect upon the French, might well introduce the series of horrors and catastrophes of the seven years which followed. The incidents of this closing stage of a continuous struggle must be left for summary notice in the next chapter, as belonging more strictly to the general theme of the European colonial relations with the Indians. New actors came into those distressing scenes. The whole power of Great Britain — with competent and incompetent leaders, with councils of various degrees of wisdom and weakness — was engaged in that decisive campaign of a protracted strife of rivalry for supreme sway in the New World. I have already plainly expressed the shock which it gives to our idea of justice in the disposal of the issues on which the honor and destiny of empire depends, that France — after all her heroism of toil, enterprise, and exploration on this continent — should have no heritage here. On those rocky cliffs, those high-raised ​plains of Quebec, those island grandeurs overlooked by the Royal Mount, — where Champlain and Frontenac laid, in noble purpose, the foundations for empire and glory of transatlantic France, — the sentence of destiny was pronounced. It was fitting that Wolfe and Montcalm, leading the ranks of the combatants in the last struggle, should mingle their life-blood on the rocky field. The treaty of Paris, in 1763, left to France a little group of fishing islands, Miquelon and St. Pierre, off the coast of Newfoundland.
The close of the long and bloody conflict between Great Britain with the aid of her colonies and the French with their Indian allies, which insured the conquest of Canada, by no means put a period to the presence and influence of the French on the continent, especially their influence over the Indian tribes. By their sagacious policy in dealing with the savages, their domestic and social affiliation with them, and their generosity, they had conciliated the larger number of the nearest tribes, and drawn some of them under bonds of strong friendship, which hold even to this day; so that the subjection of the French by no means secured that of the Indians to the English control. In fact, by a curious retributive working, the French left precisely the same after-penalty of savage warfare to the English which the English, ​twenty years afterwards, left to us when our ties of allegiance and dependence were severed. The formidable conspiracy which that greatest of Indian chieftains, Pontiac, organized among the native tribes, at the date when the triumph of British power was established on this continent, was prompted, as he alleged, by sympathy with the French, whose supremacy he hoped to see re-established here. He said he was willing to regard the King of England as his uncle, but not as his superior or sovereign. The idea had dawned upon his master mind that the sovereignty of the wilderness rested with the red men. His intelligent casting of the horoscope of the lowering future for his race led him to seek boldly and consistently to sap the very roots of the threatening calamity for them, by advising them to be no longer dependent on the white man's goods or to cherish any lurking partiality for the white man's habits of life. The peace, the security, the old pristine heritage and prosperity of the savage depended on his reversion to, his content with, his bold defence of, his forest domain, unviolated by the intrusion of the white man, however plausible or profitable his errand. Pontiac had doubtless carefully, and with discrimination, weighed in the scale of his own calm judgment the gain and loss to his race of their intercourse with foreigners. In his view the loss predominated in sum and in particulars. He inherited the policy and the sagacity of King Philip of Pokanoket, and added to them a philosophy which was his own. We are yet to read of the methods and stages of his success in organizing a dark conspiracy among the Indians, which came only so far short of full success that it stopped with the glutting of vengeance, the English colonists quailing before its wreakings of rage.
And just here it was that England trifled with her opportunity, and intensified all the toil and peril of the end she had in view. All through the previous hundred and fifty ​years the French had gained great advantages by showing themselves to be far more sagacious and politic in conciliating and winning power, influence, and absolute sway over the savages than the English. The Indians were keenly observant of the difference in its full import and in all its details. The French, as has abundantly appeared, flattered, cajoled, and assimilated with them. And they were also generous, even lavish, towards few or more of the red race who represented its good or bad traits. The English took no pains to conceal their haughty and insolent contempt of the savages. They were also stingy and niggard in the bestowment of the gifts, the receiving of which the savages had come to expect in all their intercourse with the whites; for the savages were to the last degree mercenary. The very proudest of them was ready to become an importunate beggar, and would barter all his dignity for a trinket, a blanket, or a draught of fire-water. At this critical time, when the agents of England under the heavy expenses already incurred were trying to practise a penurious economy, the savages would tauntingly remind them how generous their French Father had been in clothing and arming them while they had been his allies. It was natural, too, that the tribes which had been long in contact with the whites through the fur-trade, and in alliances, should have come to depend upon the implements and conveniences of civilization, even to the extent in many cases of disusing their old bows and stone tools and skin robes. Nor could even Pontiac wean them from these flesh-pots. The French had never asked of the savages the formal cession of their territory, and had represented that the strongholds built within it did not signify a formal possession. Stoutly, too, had the savages repudiated the idea of their being under obligations of allegiance in any full sense as subjects even to the King of France: though he was their father, he was only a brother to the chiefs. Bluntly did English officers announce to them, that, being conquered, they were subjects ​of the British king, that their land had become his, and that the forts in their old domain were to represent his Majesty's sovereignty. Even after the force of the conspiracy of the tribes for rooting out the English had been broken, Colonel Bradstreet, in his camp, in a preliminary council with some of the abettors of Pontiac, had the folly to require of them, as the first condition of peace, that they should submit themselves as subjects of the King of Great Britain and own his sovereignty of their domain. As the Indians were never subjects of their own chieftains, and never were in allegiance, it is not probable that they had any ideas answering to the import of those terms.
One other very important fact is to be taken into account in connection with that fiercest struggle with the savages and the English which took place on the continent on the cession of Canada and the Ohio Valley. Embittered and humiliated Frenchmen, traders, half-breeds, and a very busy and pestilent class of vagabonds and renegades in their interest, took pains to nerve the exasperated Indian tribes with rumors and positive assertions that their French Father had merely fallen asleep, but was awake again, and that fleets and armies were already on their way, with mighty resources, through the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, to crush the English interlopers, to protect and reinstate the natives in their rights, and to renew the now halting trade, under the suspense of which they were suffering. Miscreant deceivers were on the alert to rally the faltering vigor of the enraged savages all through the stages of their bloody work, by reiterating this falsehood. The delusion was ruinous to those who trusted in it. At no period in our Indian history, including that of the war of 1812 and those of recent years, has there been extended among the tribes such a wrathful spirit, such desperate resolve, such fired malignity of rage against the whites. The native chiefs, according to the measure of their intelligence, their forecast, and their wild and fervent patriotism, seem ​then first to have fully realized their impending doom, and to have summoned all their resources of barbarous rage, ferocity, cunning, and prowess, with something of real skill and concentration in their wilderness tactics, to avert that doom. Intelligent, fervid, pathetic pleading and remonstrance were not wanting from them; but hate and exasperation infuriated them.
Then came upon the scene that ablest and most daring and resolute savage chieftain known in our history. There have been three conspicuous men of the native race, — the towering chieftains of the forest, signal types of all the characteristics of the savage, ennobled, so to speak, by their lofty patriotism, — who have appeared on the scene of action at the three most critical eras for the white man on this continent. If the material and stock of such men are not exhausted, there is no longer for them a sphere, a range, an occasion or opportunity in place or time here. The white man is the master of this continent. An Indian conspiracy would prove abortive in the paucity or discordancy of its materials. What the great sachem Metacomet, or King Philip, was in the first rooting of the New England colonies, which he throttled almost to the death throe; what Tecumseh was in the internal shocks attending our last war with Great Britain, — Pontiac, a far greater man than either of them, in council and on the field, was in the strain and stress of the occasion offered to him after the cession of Canada. Pontiac conceived, and to a large extent effected, the compacted organization of many of the most powerful of the Western tribes, in a conspiracy for crushing the English as they were about to take possession of unbounded territory here in the name and right of the British crown. Pontiac, the chief of the Ottawas, and the recognized dictator of many affiliated tribes, as well as an able reconciler of hostile tribes, was a master of men. Then in the vigor of his life, he exhibited signally that marked characteristic of all the ablest, bravest, and most dangerous ​of the native chiefs who have most resolutely resisted successive European encroachments on their domain: namely this, that while especially well informed and familiar with the resources and appliances, and supposed advantages of a state of civilization, they have most passionately repelled and scorned it, and stubbornly avowed a preference for their own wild state of Nature, — the forest and lake and river, with their free range, — and the simple nakedness of its indolence and activity.
We must allow Pontiac, by anticipation, this mention here, because he represented France, among the savages, as its avenger. When he first encountered small detachments of the English forces penetrating the lake and wilderness highways to establish themselves in the strongholds to be yielded up by the French, he seemed for a brief interval disposed to reconcile himself to the change of intruders, and to receive the new comers with a real or a feigned tolerance. But his stern purpose, if not before conceived, was soon wrought into a bold and far-reaching design, with a plan which, as a whole, and in the disposal of its parts and details, exhibits his own great qualities. His plan was to engage all the Indian tribes in defying the hated intruders and keeping the heritage of their fathers inviolate for their posterity. So far as he could impart to or rouse in other native chieftains his own sad prescience of their doom, or stir in them the fires of their own passions, he could engage them in that plan. He roamed amid the villages of many scattered tribes, and to others he sent messengers bearing the war-belt and the battle-cry. He held councils, the solemn, meditative silence of which he broke by impassioned appeals, sharpened with bitter taunts and darkened by sombre prophecies, in all the fervent picture-eloquence of the forests, to inflame the rage of his wild hearers and to turn them on the war-path. He found inflammable spirits. Jealousy and hate, and what tried to be scorn, had already ​nerved many chieftains and their tribes to attempt what to them doubtless appeared a possible enterprise, if they entered upon it pledged to triumph or to death. An Iroquois sachem, at a conference in Philadelphia in 1761, referring to the traps already set by the French, about to be re-baited by the English, said: “We are penned up like hogs. There are forts all around us: we feel that death is coming upon us.” The conspiracy, the whole aim of which from the first was futile and impossible, was nevertheless successful in many of its details, and in the sum and shape of the horrors attendant upon that success. The siege and destruction of the lake and river forts, and then a ruthless rage of slaughter, havoc, and burning on the whole belt of frontier settlements, were the elements of that savage campaign against civilization. The forts at Detroit and at the present Pittsburg, on the forks of the Ohio, alone held out, and then only through sharp straits of peril and almost superhuman endurance, against the Indian foe, lurking everywhere with a lynx-eyed glare and a crimson ferocity. The pent-up garrisons in these two defended posts, starved and sleepless, listened as messengers, like those to Job, brought tidings of woe from all the rest.
In the mean time the adventurous settlers who had scattered themselves on either side of the Alleghanies, accepting the rough conditions of frontier life and well matched in resource and forest skill with the natives, were subjected to the fury of the wily and sanguinary foe. The horrors of those appalling scenes and events, in ghastly butcherings, tortures, and mutilations, with the sack and burning of the rude homesteads, and the hunting in the woods for the wretched, starving fugitives, have left records in our history of the most dismal and dreary tragedies. It was then and there that — midway in our country's history — men, women, and children came to know the meaning and character of Indian warfare. Then and ​there were scorched into the hearts of agonized and maddened beings, themselves only in a crude stage of civilization, though under Christian nurture, a hate and rage such as only fiends in their diabolic ravings might be supposed to fire in a human breast. We can well understand, as we read the records and heed the traditions of that wasted border, that for years afterwards white men (who alone survived in their families, orphaned or solitary by those dire woes) lived only for revenge, to prowl in the woods like wildcats, and deal the death-blow to every one of the red race — man, squaw, or pappoose — that they could bring within range of the rifle or under the keen edge of the knife. A thousand families were broken up, with here and there survivors, trying, through a treacherous wilderness, to find their way back to the settlements. From one to two thousand of the whites were slain. Sir William Johnson, the Indian Commissioner for Indian affairs in New York, by the firm control which he had acquired over the tribes of the then Six Nations, succeeded by wise management in holding back all but a strong party of the Senecas from joining in the wide-spread conspiracy. Had those well-trained and ferocious savages joined in the work of desolation, doubtless English dominion here would have encountered a staggering peril. As it was, the exposed colonists were racked with dread uncertainty as to the constancy of these restrained fiends, who might at any moment prove treacherous, and who were held only by flatteries, gifts, and promises. When we note, as often we may, the assertion that Britain has always been more fair and humane than our Government in dealing with the savages, we cannot but pause upon certain facts on record in that fearful crisis which look quite in a contrary way. The British commander-in-chief, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, anticipated the ​project of some of the most desperate spirits in our own civil war, by favoring the dispersion among the Indians of blankets infected with the small-pox, and the sending for bloodhounds to be used in hunting the scalpers. The campaign of the bold and gallant Colonel Bouquet, with a strong body of provincials, put a period to these border massacres, and brought the conspirators to sue for peace. Pontiac, raging under the failure of his first prospering enterprise, made one desperate effort to enlist the tribes farther West, on the Illinois. Orders had come from France, in 1763, to the French officers to surrender to the English the strongholds which they still held here. The French traders openly and covertly abetted the futile effort of Pontiac to change the scene of the same struggle, by embarrassing and delaying the formal occupation of the territory by the English; but there was only delay, with the mutterings and threatenings of the discomfited French and their Indian partisans. The triumph on the side of colonization and civilization for that line of frontier longitude was secure. The great chief, heartbroken and worsted in his schemes, was treacherously killed in the woods near Cahokia by a drunken Indian, bribed by an English trader, in 1769.
* ↑ Cowper's "Charity."
* ↑ A translation into English of the “Narration” of Le Moyne, from De Bry's Latin version, with heliotypes taken in London from the author's original drawings, was published in Boston, in 1875, at the charge of Mr. William Appleton, by James R. Osgood & Co.
* ↑ Pioneers of France, etc., p. 345.
* ↑ Ibid., p. 309.
* ↑ Pioneers of France, etc., p. 362.
* ↑ Histoire du Canada, et Voyages que les Frères Mineurs Récollets y ont faits pour la conversion des Infidèles, depuis l'An 1615: par Gabriel Sagard Deodat. Ed. par H. Émile Chevalier. Paris, 1866.
* ↑ Vol. i. p. xi.
* ↑ Vol. i. p. 26.
* ↑ Sagard, vol. i. p. 40.
* ↑ Parkman: Pioneers, etc., p. 364.
* ↑ Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons, situé en l'Amerique vers la Mer douce, és derniers confins de la nouvelle France, dite Canada, etc. A Paris, 1632.
* ↑ Speeches and Addresses of the Earl of Dufferin. London, 1882. pp. 237-238.
* ↑ In dealing with this painful episode, I have been greatly indebted to and have gladly followed the lead of Mr. James Hannay, in his “History of Acadia, from its First Discovery to its Surrender to England by the Treaty of Paris. St. John, N. B., 1879.” The author, most thorough and comprehensive, in his documentary research shows also a judicial and most candid spirit, seeking to present both sides in a harrowing historical incident, and affording his readers of different sympathies the means of strengthening their own from the full and calm statements which he sets before them.
* ↑ The next in the series of volumes which Mr. Parkman has promised, as relating to the close of French dominion on this continent, is waited for with much interest. The theme is one which will engage all his talents and rich resources. Especially will his faithful researches add to our accurate knowledge of the tragic story of the removal of the Neutrals from Acadia. It is understood that he has possessed himself of a mass of original documents, which will throw much light upon the intrigues and secret movements of that incident.
* ↑ There is now in course of publication, in Paris, a series of volumes under the following title: “Découvertes et Établissements des Français dans L'Ouest et dans Le Sud de L'Amerique Septentrionale (1614-1754) Memoires et Documents Originaux, Recueilles et Publies par Pierre Margry, etc.” Four volumes of the series have already appeared, — the first covering the period 1614-1684, in 1875; the fourth, 1694-1703, in 1880. These Memoirs and Documents are of the highest historical value and authenticity. They are printed without any accompanying note or comment, from manuscripts, and present a noble memorial of French enterprise on this continent. Their interest to us as a nation very properly prompted the patronage of our Government in their publication. Congress subscribed for several hundred copies, which are to be improved by exchanges for other valuable publications, for the benefit of the Congressional Library.
* ↑ When, in 1776, General Amherst was raised to the peerage, he chose as one of the supporters “on the sinister a Canadian war Indian, holding in his exterior hand a staff argent, thereon a human scalp, proper.” Collins's Peerage, vol. viii. p. 176.