Chapter 9

Whatever was taken in the hunt, or raised in cultivation, by any member of the household--and the Iroquois were good cultivators of maize, beans, and squash--was used as a common stock for that particular household. No woman could marry a member of her own clan or kin. The marriage might be severed at the will of either party. Yet, while the Iroquois women had so much importance in the household and in the regulation of inheritance, she was almost as much a drudge as the squaw of the savage Micmacs of Acadia and the Gulf.

The tribe was simply a community of Indians of a particular family or stock, speaking one of the dialects of its language. For instance, the Five Nations or Tribes spoke different dialects of the Iroquoian stock language, but each could understand the other sufficiently for all purposes of deliberation and discussion. Each tribe was governed by its {121} own council of sachems and chiefs--the latter inferior in rank--elected by their respective clans, but invested with office by the whole tribe. For all purposes of tribal government the tribes had separate territories and jurisdiction. For common purposes they united in a confederation in which each tribe occupied a position of complete equality--the exception being the Tuscaroras--Dusgaóweh or "shirt-wearing people"--who came from the south at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and made up the "Six Nations." If a tribe made peace it would not bind the other tribes unless they had given their consent in formal council, or by the presence of their representatives. A general council of fifty sachems, equal in rank and authority, administered the affairs of the confederation. These sachems were created in perpetuity in certain clans of the several tribes and invested with office by the general council. They were also sachems in their respective tribes, and with other clan-chiefs formed the council which was supreme over all matters appertaining to the tribe exclusively. Women, too, had their clan and other councils, and could make their wishes known through the delegates they appointed to the council of the league. In the federal council the sachems voted by tribes, and unanimity was essential before action was taken or a conclusion arrived at. The general council was open to the whole community for the discussion of public questions, but the council alone decided. The council of each tribe had power to convene the general council, but the latter could not convene itself. {122} With the object of preventing the concentration of too much power in one man's hands, the federal council appointed two war chiefs, equal in authority. The council fire or brand was always burning in the valley of the Onondagas, where the central council met as a rule in the autumn, or whenever a tribe might consider a special meeting necessary. The Onondagas had also the custody of the "Wampum," or mnemonic record of their structure of government, and the Tadodä'ho, or most noble sachem of the league, was among the same tribe. The origin of the confederacy is attributed in legendary lore to Hä-yo-went'-hä, the Hiawatha of Longfellow's poem.

These are the main features of that famous polity of the Iroquois which gave them so remarkable a power of concentration in war, and was one reason of their decided superiority over all the other nations of America. In council, where all common and tribal affairs were decided, the Iroquois showed great capacity for calm deliberation, and became quite eloquent at times. Their language was extremely figurative, though incapable of the expression of abstract thought, as is the case with Indian tongues generally. The Indian--essentially a materialist--could only find his similes, metaphors, and illustrations in the objects of nature, but these he used with great skill. The Iroquois had a very keen appreciation of their interests, and were well able to protect them in their bargains or contracts with the white men. In war they were a terrible foe, and a whisper of their neighbourhood brought consternation to Indian camps and cabins, from the Kennebec {123} to the Delaware, from the Susquehanna to the Illinois. They have been well described as "the scourge of God upon the aborigines of the continent." In their political organisation, their village life, their culture of the soil, their power of eloquence, their skill as politicians as well as warriors, they were superior to all the tribes in America as far as New Mexico, although in the making of pottery and other arts they were inferior to the mound-builders of the Ohio and the Mississippi--probably the Allegewi who gave their names to the Alleghanies and are believed by some writers to have been either exterminated by a combination of Algonquin and Iroquois or driven southward where they were absorbed in other nations. At no time could the Iroquois muster more than 3000 warriors; and yet they were the scourge and dread of all the scattered tribes of Algonquins, numbering in the aggregate probably 90,000 souls, and eventually crushed the Hurons and those other tribes of their own nationality, who did not belong to their confederacy and had evoked their wrath.

The Algonquin and Huron-Iroquois nations had many institutions and customs in common. Every clan had some such totem as I have described in the case of the Iroquois. Every tribe had its chiefs as military leaders and its councils for deliberation and decision. Consequently the democratic principle dominated the whole organisation. Eloquence was always prized and cultivated as a necessity of the system of government. Some tribes had their special orators among the chiefs. Though a general {124} war was dependent on the action of the council, yet any number of warriors might go on the warpath at any time against the enemies of the tribe. They had no written records, but their memories were aided in council or otherwise by reeds or sticks and rude pictures; strings of wampum--cleverly manufactured from shells--served as annals, which the skilled men of a tribe could decipher and explain. The wampum belts performed an important part in the declaration of war or peace, and the pipe was equally effective in the deliberations of council and in the profession of amity. Murder might be expiated by presents to the family or relatives of the dead, and crime was rarely followed by death except there was a question of other nations, who would not be content unless the blood of their kinsman was washed away by blood. Charity and hospitality were among the virtues of the Indian race, especially among the Iroquois, and while there was food in a village no one need starve. The purity of love was unknown to a savage nature, chiefly animated by animal passion. Prisoners were treated with great ferocity, but the Iroquois exceeded all nations in the ingenuity of torture. Stoicism and endurance, even heroic, were characteristics of Indians generally, when in the hands of their enemies, and the cruellest insult that a warrior could receive was to be called a woman. Sometimes prisoners were spared and adopted into the tribe, and among most nations the wife or mother or sister of a dead chief might demand that he be replaced by a prisoner to whom they may have taken a fancy. After torture parts {125} of the bodies of the victim would be eaten as a sort of mystic ceremony, but this custom was peculiar to the Hurons and Iroquois only. In their warlike expeditions they had no special discipline, and might be successfully met on the open field or under the protection of fortified works. Their favourite system was a surprise or furious onslaught. A siege soon exhausted their patience and resources. They were as treacherous as they were brave. In the shades of the forest, whose intricacies and secrets they understood so well, they were most to be feared. Behind every tree might lurk a warrior, when once a party was known to be on the warpath. To steal stealthily at night through the mazes of the woods, tomahawk their sleeping foes, and take many scalps, was the height of an Indian's bliss. Curious to say, the Indians took little precautions to guard against such surprises, but thought they were protected by their manitous or guardian spirits.

A spirit of materialism prevailed in all their superstitions. They had no conception of one all-pervading, omniscient divine being, governing and watching over humanity, when the missionaries first came among them. It was only by making use of their belief in the existence of a supreme chief for every race of animals, that the priests could lead their converts to the idea of a Great Spirit who ruled all creation. In their original state of savagery or barbarism, any conception an Indian might have of a supernatural being superior to himself was frittered away by his imagining that the whole material world was under the influence of innumerable mysterious {126} powers. In the stirring of the leaves, in the glint of the sunbeam amid the foliage, in the shadow on his path, in the flash of the lightning, in the crash of the thunder, in the roar of the cataract, in the colours of the rainbow, in the very beat of his pulse, in the leap of the fish, in the flight of the birds, he saw some supernatural power to be evoked. The Indian companions of Champlain, we remember, threw tobacco to the genius or Manitou of the great fall of the Ottawa. The Manitou of the Algonquins, and the Okies or Otkons of the Hurons and Iroquois were not always superior, mysterious beings endowed with supernatural powers, like the Algonquin Manabozho, the Great Hare, the king of all animals; or a deified hero, like Hiawatha, the founder of the Iroquois confederacy, and Glooscap, the favourite of Micmac legends. The Manitou or Oki might even be a stone, a fish-bone, a bird's feather, or a serpent's skin, or some other thing in the animate or inanimate world, revealed to a young man in his dreams as his fetich or guardian through life. Dreams were respected as revelations from the spirit world. As Champlain tells us, during his first expedition to Lake Champlain, the Indians always questioned him as to his dreams, and at last he was able to tell them that he had seen in a vision some Iroquois drowning in the lake, and wished to help them, but was not permitted to do so by the Indians of his own party. This dream, in their opinion, was a portent in their favour.

A fetich became at last even the object of an Indian's worship--to be thanked, flattered, {127} expostulated with, according to the emergency. It can be easily seen that in this Indian land of mysterious agencies, of manitous and spirits, the medicine-man and conjuror exercised a great power among old and young, chiefs and women. He had to be consulted in illness, in peace, in war, at every moment of importance to individual or nation. Even in case of illness and disease he found more value in secret communications with the supernatural world, and in working on the credulity of his tribesmen, than in the use of medicines made from plants. The grossest superstition dominated every community. All sorts of mystic ceremonies, some most cruel and repugnant to every sense of decency, were usual on occasions when supernatural influences had to be called into action.

Every respect was paid to the dead, who were supposed to have gone on a journey to a spirit land. Every one had such a separate scaffold or grave, generally speaking, as Champlain saw among the Ottawas, but it was the strange custom of the Hurons to collect the bones of their dead every few years and immure them in great pits or ossuaries with weirdlike ceremonies very minutely described in the _Relations_. In a passage previously quoted Champlain gave credit to the Indians for believing in the immortality of the soul. The world to which the Indian's imagination accompanied the dead was not the Heaven or Hell of the Jew or Christian. Among some tribes there was an impression rather than a belief that a distinction was made in the land of the Ponemah or Hereafter between the great or {128} useful, and the weak or useless; but generally it was thought that all alike passed to the Spirit Land, and carried on their vocations as in life. It was a Land of Shades where trees, flowers, animals, men, and all things were spirits.

"By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews In vestments for the-chase arrayed The hunter still the deer pursues, The hunter and the deer a shade."

[1] See Horatio Hale's "Fall of Hochelaga," in _Journal of American Folklore_, Cambridge, Mass., 1894.

[2] In this necessarily very imperfect description of the organisation and customs of the Five Nations I depend mainly on those valuable and now rare books, _The League of the Iroquois_, and _Houses and Home Life of the Aborigines_, by Lewis H. Morgan. The reader should also consult Horatio Hale's _Iroquois Book of Rites_.

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IX.

CONVENTS AND HOSPITALS--VILLE-MARIE--MARTYRED MISSIONARIES--VICTORIOUS IROQUOIS--HAPLESS HURONS.

(1635-1652.)

A scene that was witnessed on the heights of Quebec on a fine June morning, two hundred and eighty-three years ago, illustrated the spirit that animated the founders of Canada. At the foot of a cross knelt the Governor, Charles Hault de Montmagny, Knight of Malta, who had come to take the place of his great predecessor, Samuel Champlain, whose remains were buried close by, if indeed this very cross did not indicate the spot. Jesuits in their black robes, soldiers in their gay uniforms, officials and inhabitants from the little town below, all followed the example of Montmagny, whose first words were, according to Father Le Jeune, the historian of those days: "Behold the first cross that I have seen in this country, let us worship the crucified Saviour in his image." Then, this act of devotion accomplished, the procession entered the {130} little church dedicated by Champlain to Notre Dame de la Recouvrance, where the priests solemnly chanted the _Te Deum_ and offered up prayers for the King of France.

The Church was first, the State second. After the service the new governor entered the fort of St. Louis, only a few steps from the sacred building, received the keys amid salutes of cannon and musketry, and was officially installed as head of the civil and military government of Canada, at this time controlled by the Company of the Hundred Associates. Then he was called upon to act as god-father for a dying Indian who desired baptism. In the smoky cabin packed with Indians Montmagny stood by the earnest Jesuit and named the Algonquin Joseph. "I leave you to think," says Father Le Jeune, "how greatly astonished were these people to see so much crimson, so many handsomely dressed persons beneath their bark roofs."

During the period of which I am now writing we see the beginnings of the most famous educational and religious institutions of the country. The Hotel Dieu was founded in 1639, by the Soeurs Hospitalières from the convent of St. Augustine, in Dieppe, through the benefactions of the Duchess d'Aiguillon, the niece of Cardinal Richelieu. Rich, fascinating, and beautiful women contributed not only their fortunes but their lives to the service of the Church. Marie Madeleine de Chauvigny, who belonged to a noble family in Normandy, married at a very early age a M. de la Peltrie, who left her a young widow of twenty-two years of age, without {132} any children. Deeply attached to her religion from her youth, she decided to devote her life and her wealth to the establishment of an institution for the instruction of girls in Canada. Her father and friends threw all possible obstacles in the way of what they believed was utter folly for a gentle cultured woman, but she succeeded by female wiles and strategy in carrying out her plans. On the first of August, 1639, she arrived at Quebec, in company with Marie Guyard, the daughter of a silk manufacturer of Tours, best known to Canadians as Mère de l'Incarnation, the mother superior of the Ursulines, whose spacious convent and grounds now cover seven acres of land on Garden Street in the ancient capital. She had a vision of a companion who was to accompany her to a land of mists and mountains, to which the Virgin beckoned as the country of her future life-work. Canada was the land and Madame de la Peltrie the companion foreshadowed in that dream which gave Marie Guyard a vocation which she filled for thirty years with remarkable fidelity and ability.

Madame de la Peltrie and Marie Guyard were accompanied by Mdlle. de Savonnière de la Troche, who belonged to a distinguished family of Anjou, and was afterwards known in Canada as Mère de St. Joseph, and also by another nun, called Mère Cécile de Sainte-Croix. A Jesuit, Father Vimont, afterwards superior, and author of one of the _Rélations_, and the three Hospital sisters, arrived in the same ship.

The company landed and "threw themselves on their knees, blessed the God of Heaven, and kissed {133} the earth of their near country, as they now called it." A _Te Deum_ followed in the Jesuits' church which was now completed on the heights near their college, commenced as early as 1635--one year before the building of Harvard College--through the generosity of Réné Rohault, eldest son of the Marquis de Gamache. The first visit of the nuns was to Sillery, four miles to the west of Quebec, on the north bank of the river, where an institution had been established for the instruction of the Algonquin and other Indians, through the liberality of Noël Brulart de Sillery, a Knight of Malta, and a member of an influential French family, who had taken a deep interest in the settlement of Canada and proved it by his bounty. Madame de la Peltrie and her companions, the Jesuit historian tells us naïvely, embraced the little Indian girls "without taking heed whether they were clean or not."

It was during Montmagny's term of office that the city of Montreal was founded by a number of religious enthusiasts. Jérôme le Royer de la Dauversière, receiver of taxes at La Flêche in Anjou, a noble and devotee, consulted with Jean Jacques Olier, then a priest of St. Sulpice in Paris, as to the best means of establishing a mission in Canada. Both declared they had visions which pointed to the island of Mont Royal as the future scene of their labours. They formed a company with large powers as seigniors as soon as they had obtained from M. de Lauzon, one of the members of the Company of Hundred Associates, a title to the island. They interested in the project Paul de Chomedey, Sieur {134} de Maisonneuve, a devout and brave soldier, an honest and chivalric gentleman, who was appointed the first governor by the new company. Mdlle. Jeanne Mance, daughter of the attorney-general of Nogent-le-Roi, among the vine-clad hills of Champagne, who had bound herself to perpetual chastity from a remarkably early age, gladly joined in this religious undertaking. The company had in view the establishment of communities of secular priests, and of nuns to nurse the sick, and teach the children--the French as well as the savages. Madame de Bullion, the rich widow of a superintendent of finance, contributed largely towards the enterprise, and may be justly considered the founder of Hotel Dieu of Montreal.

Maisonneuve and Mdlle. Mance, accompanied by forty men and four women, arrived at Quebec in August, 1641, when it was far too late to attempt an establishment on the island. Governor de Montmagny and others at Quebec disapproved of the undertaking which had certainly elements of danger. The governor might well think it wisest to strengthen the colony by an establishment on the island of Orleans or in the immediate vicinity of Quebec, instead of laying the foundations of a new town in the most exposed part of Canada. However, all these objections availed nothing against the enthusiasm of devotees. In the spring of 1642, Maisonneuve and his company left Quebec. He was accompanied by Governor de Montmagny, Father Vimont, superior of the Jesuits, and Madame de la Peltrie, who left the Ursulines very abruptly and inconsiderately {135} under the conviction that she had a mission to fill at Mont Royal.

On the 17th May, Maisonneuve and his companions landed on the little triangle of land, the Place Royale of Champlain, formed by the junction of a stream with the St. Lawrence. They fell immediately on their knees and gave their thanks to the {136} Most High. After singing some hymns, they raised an altar which was decorated by Madame de la Peltrie and Mdlle. Mance, and celebrated the first great mass on the island. Father Vimont, as he performed this holy rite of his Church, addressed the new colonists with words which foreshadowed the success of the Roman Catholic Church in the greatest Canadian city, which was first named Ville-Marie.

A picket enclosure, mounted with cannon, protected the humble buildings erected for the use of the first settlers on what is now the Custom-house Square. The little stream--not much more than a rivulet except in spring--which for many years rippled between green, mossy banks, now struggles beneath the paved street.

An obelisk of gray Canadian granite now stands on this historic ground. Madame de la Peltrie did not remain more than two years in Ville-Marie, but returned to the convent at Quebec which she had left in a moment of caprice. Mdlle. Mance, who was Madame de Bullion's friend, remained at the head of the Hotel Dieu. The Sulpicians eventually obtained control of the spiritual welfare, and in fact of the whole island, though from necessity and policy the Jesuits were at first in charge. It was not until 1653 that one of the most admirable figures in the religious and educational history of Canada, Margaret Bourgeoys, a maiden of Troyes, came to Ville-Marie, and established the parent house in Canada of the Congregation de Notre-Dame, whose schools have extended in the progress of centuries from Sydney, on the island of Cape Breton, to the Pacific coast.

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Yet during these years, while convents and hospitals were founded, while brave gentlemen and cultured women gave up their lives to their country and their faith, while the bells were ever calling their congregations to mass and vespers, the country was defended by a mere handful of inhabitants, huddled together at Quebec, at Three Rivers, and at the little settlement of Ville-Marie. The canoes of the Iroquois were constantly passing on the lakes and rivers of Canada, from Georgian Bay to the Richelieu, and bands of those terrible foes of the French and their Indian allies were ever lurking in the woods that came so dangerously close to the white settlements and the Indian villages.