The White and the Gold (43 page)

Most of the old soldiers remained in harness, and the ten companies were up to full strength when they were sent out to the New World.

The first phase of the campaign against the unregenerate Mohawks was a failure, and the blame is laid on the shoulders of Courcelle, the new governer. He was in too much of a hurry to act, leading the Carignan veterans into the land of the Finger Lakes in the dead of winter and suffering heavy losses as a result.

There were reasons for acting quickly, however, and some of them, no doubt, had seemed good to the governor. Tracy was in bad health. Men noted with alarm that he walked slowly on the way to his devotions from the Senechaussée and that some tropical disease was giving him a jaundiced look. It was clear that he would be unable to command any foray against the enemy, and so Courcelle saw his own chance to monopolize the glory. There was a much more practical reason which unquestionably was in all minds. Quebec was hopelessly overcrowded. More than two thousand people had arrived during the summer—soldiers, civic officials, settlers, mechanics, King’s Girls. Talon was proving himself a tower of strength in facing the problems thus created. That somewhat plump and genial-appearing new official, crowded with his staff into a restricted share of space in the citadel, was the busiest man in Quebec. The intendant knew what he was about, but no human being had the capacity to fit five people into space intended only for one.

The sooner the chastisement of the Iroquois was attended to, the better, therefore. Not until the redskins had been taught their lesson could the apportionment of the new inhabitants be started. New forts could then be built and the land along the St. Lawrence broken for agricultural use. It may have been ambition which actuated the impatient governor, but it was a question of expediency which won a reluctant assent from Tracy.

It should be made clear that war in Europe at this period was strictly a seasonal affair. When the rains of fall began to teem down
and the ground became boggy so that artillery could not be used, the rival armies by mutual consent would suspend operations. The troops would be moved into cantonments and the officers would seek the comforts of the home fireside. Condé, that headstrong genius, always spent his winters at court, occupied with his gallantries and the feud with his long-suffering wife. Turenne had been known to remain at the front, but there was a distinctly professional note in his approach to war-making.

It will be seen on this account that the Carignan regiment was not prepared for the test to which it would now be put. Courcelle waited until the surface of the St. Lawrence had been solidly frozen over and then started out with a force of five hundred men. It was on January 9 that the march began, straight up the river in the teeth of bitter winds and with the storm king extending a tumultuous welcome. The veterans of a stylized and relatively comfortable kind of war-making had never experienced anything like this. They suffered terribly. Marching up the sheer icy surface of the great river, they found that any part of their anatomy which was exposed to the blistering snow and numbing winds was quickly frozen. Backs bending with the weight of muskets, snowshoes, and supply bags, they staggered into Three Rivers finally and many of them were unable to proceed farther. If a good percentage of the force had not been Canadians—it was estimated that about two hundred were native-born—the project would probably have been abandoned at this point. The places of those who were physically incapable of proceeding were filled by Canadian volunteers; and so in due course they started out again, to be greeted with a blinding snowstorm. On reaching the Richelieu River, where they turned south into hostile territory, Courcelle placed the Montreal contingent in the van. Seventy strong, and under the command of that wise and courageous paladin of the woods, Charles le Moyne, the Blue Coats proceeded to show that they understood this kind of warfare. The plodding veterans were glad to follow the colonial lead.

They passed all the French forts on the Richelieu—Sorel, Chambly, and Ste. Thérèse—made their way across the blinding white of Lake Champlain and through the bitter storms which greeted them at Lake George, and came to the Hudson River after nearly eight weeks of indescribable hardship. There were few Indians about and no hint of organized resistance. As the Algonquin guides who were to direct the way had deserted at Ste. Thérèse, the army was
now lost in the wilds. Somewhere to the south and west were the Iroquois villages, but the leaders had no idea how to find them.

The chief result of this ineffectual push into enemy territory was that they encountered a party of English officers. The latter informed them that all the Dutch possessions in America had been ceded to Great Britain by treaty. They, the French, were trespassing on British territory and must be prepared to return at once.

As soon as the sadly harassed force had turned about and started back in the direction of the St. Lawrence, the Mohawk warriors put in an appearance. They hung on the flanks and rear, picking off stragglers and making the frozen woods echo with their bloodcurdling cries. Sixty men died of the cold or under the Mohawk hatchets before the unhappy band reached the shelter of Fort Ste. Thérèse.

Courcelle had been befuddled at every stage, but now he conceived the idea that the Jesuits had been at the bottom of his ill fortune. He openly charged them with having conspired to make the expedition a failure. This was the height of absurdity and can be credited to the chagrin from which the leader of the expedition was suffering and the unbalancing effect of the hardships he had sustained.

One of the junior officers, Chartier de Lotbinière, voiced the real reason for the ignominious result in the course of some doggerel verse which he wrote and which, for some curious reason, has survived:

Then he proceeds to the determining factor:

Translated quite literally, this is as follows:

But the expedition had not been entirely a failure as things turned out. The Mohawks had not liked what they had seen of the new French power. There was something uncanny about so many men dressed exactly alike. Even during the harassments of the retreat there had been times when the teachings of discipline had prevailed and the troops had marched in line. Sharp black eyes had watched from the wooded cover and had been both mystified and disturbed. Nor had they liked the looks of the many hundreds of muskets they had seen slung over the bent shoulders. There was a lesson in this which sank deeply into Mohawk minds and from which great benefit would come when the second drive was made.

Because of Courcelle’s failure there was greater need than ever for a decisive victory. Rallying from the ills which disturbed his huge frame, Tracy began to make his preparations for a major drive. The Carignan veterans received training in forest fighting and in the life of the trail. This occupied the spring and early-summer months.

In the meantime the overcrowding in Quebec continued to be a serious problem. The floor of the Ursulines’ chapel gave way on one occasion from the weight of the people who had come in for the service. Some of them fell right through into the vault, which was quite deep, but fortunately no one was seriously injured. In an effort to make life more endurable for the newcomers, the people of Quebec strove generously to introduce a gayer note into the hours of leisure. On February 4, while Courcelle was away on his ill-fated mission, a ball was held, the first to be given in Canada. A solemn note creeps into the
Jesuit Journal
in recording this event: “May God grant that it do not become a precedent.”

During the summer, realizing the might of the blow which was poised over them, the Iroquois made efforts to establish peace, depending for the most part on the forensic gifts of a half-breed chief who is never called anything but the Flemish Bastard. He seems to have been an orator of parts, this gentleman of mixed blood. The first mention of him is found in a letter to the
Relations
by Father Ragueneau. “This commander,” wrote the good father, “the most prominent among the enemies of the Faith, was a Hollander—or, rather, an execrable issue of sin, the monstrous offspring of a Dutch heretic father and a pagan woman.” The mother was a Mohawk
woman, and the son seems to have combined the cunning of the natives with the towering bulk of the Hollanders; a formidable figure with the ferocious expression of a medicine man but the possessor of a silver tongue which gave forth the most studied verbal passages.

It was the Flemish Bastard, in fact, who had eloquently described the Iroquois hegemony. “We compose but one cabin,” he said, referring to the fact that the name which the Five Nations had for themselves, the
Hotinonsionni
, meant the Completed Cabin, “we maintain but one fire, and we have from time immemorial dwelt under one and the same roof.”

Early in the summer the “Annies,” as the French had fallen into the habit of calling the Mohawks, attacked a party of Frenchmen hunting in the neighborhood of Lake Champlain. They killed one of them, a nephew of Tracy named Chasy, and carried the rest off as prisoners. Realizing at once the ill timing of this unfriendly incident, the Mohawk council sent the Bastard to Quebec to make amends, taking the prisoners with him. Unfortunately for the Mohawk cause, another chief was in the peace party, a loud-mouthed specimen named Agariata, who succeeded in nullifying the eloquence of the head envoy.

During the course of a meal at the Senechaussée, to which the heads of the Mohawk party had been invited, Agariata felt called upon to boast of the fact that he himself had killed Chasy. “This,” he declared, raising an arm in the air, “is the hand that split the head of that young man!”

The face of Tracy became suffused with an angry flush. “You will kill no one else!” he exclaimed.

On an order from the commander, Agariata was seized forthwith and taken out and hanged without a moment’s delay. The nonplused Bastard looked on as the heels of his comrade danced on thin air, for once finding no words to express his feelings. This incident seems to have ended the efforts to bring about a peaceful understanding.

Early in October the second expedition started, with Tracy himself in command. There were thirteen hundred men in the party and it took three hundred boats and canoes to carry them. Only six hundred of the regimental veterans were in the little army, the pick of the ranks. There were as many colonists, including one hundred and ten from Montreal, again under the command of that doughty interpreter, Indian fighter, and merchant, Charles le Moyne. The Sieur
de Repentigny was the leader of the Quebec contingent. One hundred Indians had been brought as scouts. Most of them were Christians and they seemed filled with as much zeal in the cause as the white men.

There was one notable recruit in the ranks of the Montrealers, a Sulpician priest who had arrived from France just a week before the expedition started. According to a regulation of the order, he had been included in the list as Monsieur Colson. Perhaps Tracy recognized the tall priest who came ashore with three other Sulpicians at Quebec. The newcomer was François Dollier de Casson, who was as tall as Tracy himself and much stronger. Born in 1620, Dollier had served with singular bravery as a captain of cavalry under Turenne. Becoming a priest because of the abhorrence he conceived for the cruelties of warfare, Dollier joined the Sulpician Order in the diocese of Nantes and had been selected for service in Canada.

Dollier de Casson was due to play a great part in the annals of New France, particularly during the years when he was Superior of the Sulpicians in Montreal. Third of the three tall men whose names are associated with this particular period, the other two being Father Brébeuf and the Marquis de Tracy, Dollier became the Samson of New France, and legends gathered about his name. On one occasion he was attacked by two “Annies” who had stolen up behind him. Lifting them up in the air, one in each hand, he crashed their skulls together and then tossed them aside, to recover later with aching heads and a respect for the brawny priest which grew as the story was told around the hunting fires.

No sooner had the French forces reached the difficult part of the journey than their leaders became incapacitated. Tracy was taken with an attack of gout, which was a most inconvenient form of seizure at such a time. He had to be carried when the need arose to leave the boats. Once he nearly lost his life when the soldier to whose back he had been strapped lost his footing in the rapid water. Courcelle suffered from cramps and had to be carried also. The Chevalier de Chaumont accumulated blisters on his back through the pressure of the load he was carrying. Altogether it was a good thing that there were French-Canadian leaders to assume the burden of command through these early stages.

The tall new priest was nearly worked to death in spite of his great strength. Food supplies were running short and he refrained
from eating so that the men would have more, with the result that his great frame became gaunt and thin. To quote his own third-person account, which appeared later in his history of Montreal, “a scoundrel of a bootmaker had left him barefoot through a villainous pair of shoes that no longer had any soles to them.” He spent his nights in hearing the confessions of the men and had little or no time for rest from his labors.

The French attacked the first Mohawk village in a dismal rainstorm. Without waiting to bring into action the cannon which had been laboriously brought along in the boats and over the portages, they rushed at once to attack the walls. It had been the intention of the Iroquois to make a stand here. The platforms back of the palisade were black with fighting men. Steam rose from the kettles of hot water which would be poured on the attacking party. Then a panic took possession of the defenders, an almost unheard-of manifestation with these doughty warriors. They vanished by the rear gates as the French came on to the attack with twenty drummers beating a loud tattoo.