Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1686 to 1698, part 2

Such a seigniory was Verchères, some twenty miles from Montreal, on the south side of the St. Lawrence.

M.

de Verchères was an officer in one of the regiments, and chanced to be absent from home during October of 1696, doing duty at Quebec.

Madame de Verchères was visiting in Montreal.

Strange as it may seem, the fort and the family had been left in charge of the daughter, Madeline, at this time only fourteen years of age.

At eight o'clock on the morning of October 22 she had gone four hundred paces outside the fort gates when she heard the report of musket firing.

The rest of the story may be told in her own words: I at once saw that the Iroquois were firing at our settlers, who lived near the fort.

One of our servants call out: "Fly, Mademoiselle, fly!

The Iroquois are upon us!"

Instantly I saw some forty-five Iroquois running towards me, already within pistol shot.

Determined to die rather than fall in their hands, I ran for the fort, praying to the Blessed Virgin, "Holy Mother, save me!

Let me perish rather than fall in their hands!"

Meanwhile my pursuers paused to fire their guns.

Bullets whistled past my ears.

Once within hearing of the fort, I shouted, "To arms!

To arms!"

There were but two soldiers in the fort, and they were so overcome by fear that they ran to hide in the bastion.

At the gates I found two women wailing for the loss of their husbands.

Then I saw several stakes had fallen from the palisades where enemies could gain entrance;

so I seized the fallen planks and urged the women to give a hand putting them back in their places.

Then I ran to the bastion, where I found two of the soldiers lighting a fuse.

"What are you going to do?"

I demanded.

"Blow up the fort," answered one cowardly wretch.

"Begone, you rascals," I commanded, putting on a soldier's helmet and seizing a musket.

Then to my little brothers: "Let us fight to the death!

Remember what father has always said,--that gentlemen are born to shed their blood in the service of God and their King."

My brothers and the two soldiers kept up a steady fire from the loopholes.

I ordered the cannon fired to call in our soldiers, who were hunting; {170} but the grief-stricken women inside kept wailing so loud that I had to warn them their shrieks would betray our weakness to the enemy.

While I was speaking I caught sight of a canoe on the river.

It was Sieur Pierre Fontaine, with his family, coming to visit us.

I asked the soldiers to go out and protect their landing, but they refused.

Then ordering Laviolette, our servant, to stand sentry at the gate, I went out myself, wearing a soldier's helmet and carrying a musket.

I left orders if I were killed the gates were to be kept shut and the fort defended.

I hoped the Iroquois would think this a ruse on my part to draw them within gunshot of our walls.

That was just what happened, and I got Pierre Fontaine and his family safely inside by putting a bold face on.

Our whole garrison consisted of my two little brothers aged about twelve, one servant, two soldiers, one old habitant aged eighty, and a few women servants.

Strengthened by the Fontaines, we began firing.

When the sun went down the night set in with a fearful storm of northeast wind and snow.

I expected the Iroquois under cover of the storm.

Gathering our people together, I said: "God has saved us during the day.

Now we must be careful for the night.

To show you I am not afraid to take my part, I undertake to defend the fort with the old man and a soldier, who has never fired a gun.

You, Pierre Fontaine and La Bonte and Galet (the two soldiers), go to the bastion with the women and children.

If I am taken, never surrender though I am burnt and cut to pieces before your eyes!

You have nothing to fear if you will make some show of fight!"

I posted two of my young brothers on one of the bastions, the old man of eighty on the third, and myself took the fourth.

Despite the whistling of the wind we kept the cry "All's well," "All's well" echoing and reëchoing from corner to corner.

One would have imagined the fort was crowded with soldiers, and the Iroquois afterwards confessed they had been completely deceived; that the vigilance of the guard kept them from attempting to scale the walls.

About midnight the sentinel at the gate bastion called out, "Mademoiselle!

I hear something!"

I saw it was our cattle.

"Let me open the gates," urged the sentry.

"God forbid," said I; "the savages are likely behind, driving the animals in."

Nevertheless I _did_ open the gates and let the cattle in, my brothers standing on each side, ready to shoot if an Indian appeared.

At last came daylight; and we were hopeful for aid from Montreal; but Marguerite Fontaine, being timorous as all Parisian women are, begged her husband to try and escape.

The poor husband was almost distracted as she insisted, and he told her he would set her out in the canoe with her two sons, who could paddle it, but he would not abandon Mademoiselle in Verchères.

I had been twenty-four hours without rest or food, and had not {171} once gone from the bastion.

On the eighth day of the siege Lieutenant de La Monnerie reached the fort during the night with forty men.

One of our sentries had called out, "Who goes?"

I was dozing with my head on a table and a musket across my arm.

The sentry said there were voices on the water.

I called, "Who are you?"

They answered, "French--come to your aid!"

I went down to the bank, saying: "Sir, but you are welcome!

I

surrender my arms to you!"

"Mademoiselle," he answered, "they are in good hands."

I forgot one incident.

On the day of the attack I remembered about one in the afternoon that our linen was outside the fort, but the soldiers refused to go out for it.

Armed with our guns, my brothers made two trips outside the walls for our linen.

The Iroquois must have thought it a trick to lure them closer, for they did not approach.

It need scarcely be added that brave mothers make brave sons, and it is not surprising that twenty-five years later, when Madeline Verchères had become the wife of M. de La Naudière, her own life was saved from Abenaki Indians by her little son, age twelve.

But to return to Count Frontenac, marching up the steep streets of Quebec to Château St. Louis that October evening of 1689, amid the jubilant shouts of friends and enemies, Jesuit and Recollet, fur trader and councilor,--the haughty Governor set himself to the task of not only crushing the Iroquois but invading and conquering the land of the English, whom he believed had furnished arms to the Iroquois.

Now that war had been openly declared between England and France, Frontenac was determined on a campaign of aggression.

He would keep the English so busy defending their own borders that they would have no time to tamper with the Indian allies of the French on the Mississippi.

This is one of the darkest pages of Canada's past.

War is not a pretty thing at any time, but war that lets loose the bloodhounds of Indian ferocity leaves the blackest scar of all.

There were to be three war parties: one from Quebec to attack the English settlements around what is now Portland, {172} Maine; a second from Three Rivers to lay waste the border lands of New Hampshire; a third from Montreal to assault the English and Dutch of the Upper Hudson.

The Montrealers set out in midwinter of 1690, a few months after Frontenac's arrival, led by the Le Moyne brothers, Ste.

Hélène and Maricourt and Iberville, with one of the Le Bers, and D'Ailleboust, nephew of the first D'Ailleboust at Montreal.

The raiders consisted of some two hundred and fifty men, one hundred Indian converts and one hundred and fifty bushrovers, hardy, supple, inured to the wilderness as to native air, whites and Indians dressed alike in blanket coat, hood hanging down the back, buckskin trousers, beaded moccasins, snowshoes of short length for forest travel, cased musket on shoulder, knife, hatchet, pistols, bullet pouch hanging from the sashed belt, and provisions in a blanket, knapsack fashion, carried on the shoulders.

[Illustration: QUEBEC, 1689] The woods lay snow padded, silent, somber.

Up the river bed of the Richelieu, over the rolling drifts, glided the bushrovers.

{173} Somewhere on the headwaters of the Hudson the Indians demanded what place they were to attack.

Iberville answered, "Albany."

"Humph," grunted the Indians with a dry smile at the camp fire, "since _when_ have the French become so brave?"

A midwinter thaw now turned the snowy levels to swimming lagoons, where snowshoes were useless, and the men had to wade knee-deep day after day through swamps of ice water.

Then came one of those sudden changes,--hard frost with a blinding snowstorm.

Where the trail forked for Albany and Schenectady it was decided to follow the latter, and about four o'clock in the afternoon, on the 8th of February, the bush-rovers reached a hut where there chanced to be several Mohawk squaws.

Crowding round the chimney place to dry their clothes now stiff with ice, the bushrangers learned from the Indian women that Schenectady lay completely unguarded.

There had been some village festival that day among the Dutch settlers.

The gates at both ends of the town lay wide open, and as if in derision of danger from the far distant French, a snow man had been mockingly rolled up to the western gate as sentry, with a sham pipe stuck in his mouth.

The Indian rangers harangued their braves, urging them to wash out all wrongs in the blood of the enemy, and the Le Moyne brothers moved from man to man, giving orders for utter silence.

At eleven that night, shrouded by the snowfall, the bushrovers reached the palisades of Schenectady.

They had intended to defer the assault till dawn, but the cold hastened action, and, uncasing their muskets, they filed silently past the snow man in the middle of the open gate and encircled the little village of fifty houses.

When the lines met at the far gate, completely investing the town, a wild yell rent the air!

Doors were hacked down.

Indians with tomahawks stood guard outside the windows, and the dastardly work began,--as gratuitous a butchery of innocent people as ever the Iroquois perpetrated in their worst raids.

Two hours the massacre lasted, and when it was over the French had, to their everlasting discredit, murdered in cold blood thirty-eight men (among them the poor inoffensive dominie), ten women, {174} twelve children; and the victors held ninety captives.

To the credit of Iberville he offered life to one Glenn and his family, who had aided in ransoming many French from the Iroquois, and he permitted this man to name so many friends that the bloodthirsty Indians wanted to know if all Schenectady were related to this white man.

One other house in the town was spared,--that of a widow with five children, under whose roof a wounded Frenchman lay.

For the rest, Schenectady was reduced to ashes, the victors harnessing the Dutch farmers' horses to carry off the plunder.

Of the captives, twenty-seven men and boys were carried back to Quebec.

The other captives, mainly women and children, were given to the Indians.

Forty livres for every human scalp were paid by the Sovereign Council of Quebec to the raiders.

[Illustration: FRENCH SOLDIER OF THE PERIOD] The record of the raiders led from Three Rivers by François Hertel was almost the same.

Setting out in January, he was followed by twenty-five French and twenty-five Indians to the border lands between Maine and New Hampshire.

The end of March saw the bushrovers outside the little village of Salmon Falls.

Thirty inhabitants were tomahawked on the spot, the houses burned, and one hundred prisoners carried off;

but news had gone like wildfire to neighboring settlements, and Hertel was pursued by two hundred Englishmen.

He placed his bushrovers on a small bridge across Wooster River and here held the pursuers at bay till darkness enabled him to escape.

But the darkest deed of infamy was perpetrated by the third band of raiders,--a deed that reveals the glories of war as they {175} exist, stripped of pageantry.

Portneuf had led the raiders from Quebec, and he was joined by that famous leader of the Abenaki Indians, Baron de Saint-Castin, from the border lands between Acadia and Maine.

Later, when Hertel struck through the woods with some of his followers, Portneuf's men numbered five hundred.

With these he attacked Fort Loyal, or what is now Portland, Maine, in the month of June.

The fort boasted eight great guns and one hundred soldiers.

Under cover of the guns Lieutenant Clark and thirty men sallied out to reconnoiter the attacking forces ambushed in woods round a pasturage.

At a musket crack the English were literally cut to pieces, four men only escaping back to the fort.

The French then demanded unconditional surrender.

The English asked six days to consider.

In six days English vessels would have come to the rescue.

Secure, under a bluff of the ocean cliff, from the cannon fire of the fort, the French began to trench an approach to the palisades.

Combustibles had been placed against the walls, when the English again asked a parley, offering to surrender if the French would swear by the living God to conduct them in safety to the nearest English post.

To these conditions the French agreed.

Whether they could not control their Indian allies or had not intended to keep the terms matters little.

The English had no sooner marched from the fort than, with a wild whoop, the Indians fell on men, women, and children.

Some were killed by a single blow, others reserved for the torture stake.

Only four Englishmen survived the onslaught, to be carried prisoners to Quebec.