CHAPTER III.

THE SIX NATIONS AND THE LONG HOUSE.

THE military nerves of the continent of North America lie in the water-ways bounding, traversing, or issuing from the State of New York. Its heart is the region between the Hudson and the Niagara. In these days of steam-traction, when transit is made at right angles to the rivers, and thus directly across the great natural channels of transportation, New York may be less the Empire State than in the days of canoes and bateaux. Yet even now its strategic importance is at once apparent. In the old days of conflict, first between the forces of Latin and Teutonic civilization, and later between British king-craft and American democracy, it was the ground chosen for struggle and decision.

Before the European set foot on the American continent, the leading body of native savages had discovered the main features of this great natural fortress and place of eminent domain. Inventors of the birch-bark canoe, the red man saw that from this centre all waters of the inland ocean made by the great lakes, the warm gulf, and the salt sea, could be easily reached. With short land-portages, during which the canoe, which served as shelter and roof at night and house and vehicle by day, could be carried on the shoulders, the Indian could paddle his way to Dakota, to Newfoundland, or to Hudson’s Bay on the north, or the Chesapeake and the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico on the south. In his moccasins he could travel as far. From New York State the pedestrian can go into twenty States and into two thirds of the territory of the United States without leaving the courses of valleys. No other State can so communicate between the east and the west without overcoming one or more mountain ridges. The T-shaped Hudson-Mohawk groove in the earth’s crust unites the valleys east of Massachusetts. With such geographical advantages, added to native abilities, the Iroquois were able to make themselves the virtual masters of the continent of North America.

Here, accordingly, was built the Long House; that is, was organized the federation of the Five Nations. Like the Pharaohs, Sultans, Mikados, and European princes of the world which we call old, because of its long written history, these forest sovereigns named their government after their house. The common edifice of the Iroquois was a bark structure fifty or more feet long, and from twelve to twenty feet wide, with doors at either end. In each dwelling lived several families.

So also, in the Great Long House, stretching from the Hudson to the Niagara, dwelt at first five families. The Mohawks occupied the room at the eastern end of the house, in the throat of the Mohawk Valley, the _schenectady_, or “place just outside the door,” being on the “mountain-dividing” or Hudson River. More exactly, the place of “Ye treaties of Schenectady” was at the mouth of Norman’s Kill, a little south of Albany. Here was the place of many ancestral graves, where multitudes of the dead lay, and where Hiawatha, their great civilizer, dwelt.

Of all the tribes the Mohawks were, or at least in England and the colonies were believed to be, the fiercest warriors. It was after them that the roughs in London in the early part of the eighteenth century were named, and the term was long used as a synonym with ferocious men. The tea-destroyers in Boston Harbor in 1774 also took this name. Next westward were the Oneidas, inhabiting the region from Little Falls to Oneida Lake. The Onondagas at the centre of the Long House, in the region between the Susquehanna and the eastern end of Lake Ontario, had the fireplace or centre of the confederacy. The Cayugas lived between the lake named after them and the Genesee Valley. The Senecas occupied the country between Rochester and Niagara. The evidence left by the chips on the floors of their workshops, show that their most ancient habitations were on the river-flats and at the edges of streams. Later, as game became scarcer, they occupied the hills and ledges farther back. On these points of vantage their still later elaborate fortifications of wood were built. As the rocks of New York make the Old Testament of geology, so the river-strands and the quarries are the most ancient chronicles of unwritten history, in times of war and peace.

How long the tribes of the Long House lived together under the forms of a federated republic, experts are unable to tell. It is believed that they were originally one large Dakota tribe, which became separated by overgrowth and dissensions, and later united, not as a unity, but as a confederation. The work of Dr. Cadwallader Colden, who in 1727 published his “History of the Five Nations,” has been too much relied upon by American and English writers. It was one of the very first works in English on local history published in the province of New York. Utterly ignoring the excellent writing of the Dutch scholars, Domine Megapolensis, De Vries, and the lawyer, Van der Donck, who wrote as men familiar with their subject at first hand; ignoring also the personal work of Arendt Van Curler,—Colden compiled most of his historic matter from French authors.

According to the tradition of the Algonkin Indians of Canada, which Colden gives at length, the Iroquois were at first mainly occupied in agriculture, and the Algonkins in hunting. The various wars had developed in the Iroquois the spirit of war and great powers of resistance, so that they held their own against their enemies. Another of the many bloody campaigns was to open on the shores of the lake named after Champlain, when Europeans appeared on the scene, and trustworthy history begins. Champlain, it seems, did not desire to join in the Indian feuds, but was compelled to do so in order to retain the friendship of the Hurons. This first use of fire-arms in Indian warfare meant nothing less than revolution in politics, in methods of war, in the influence of chiefs, and in other elements of Indian civilization. What gunpowder began, alcohol completed.

This much seems certain, that at the opening of the seventeenth century the whole continent was a dark and bloody ground, in which war was the rule and peace the exception; in which man hunted man as the beasts and fishes destroy and devour one another. The Iroquois, speaking substantially one language, were as an island in a great Algonkin ocean. Unlike mere fishermen and hunters they were agriculturists, and many hundred square miles were planted with their maize, squashes, pumpkins, beans, tobacco, and other vegetables, edible or useful. They were able to store up corn for long campaigns and to brave a season of famine. The streams furnished them with fish, and they hunted the deer, elk, bison, and smaller animals for flesh or furs; but their noblest game was man. To kill, to scalp, to save alive for torture, to burn his villages and houses, to wreak vengeance on his enemies, was rapture to the savage.

Before they knew gunpowder, the Iroquois, equipped with flint weapons and clothed in bark armour, often fought in the open field and with comparative personal exposure. Their battles were by masses of men who were led by chiefs, and their tactics and strategy resembled those of white men before the introduction of fire-arms. One famous field in the open ground near Schenectady was long pointed out in Indian tradition as the place where the great battle between the Iroquois and the Algonkins had been fought before the coming of the whites. For the defence of their villages they built palisades with galleries for the defenders to stand on, and with appliances at hand to put out fires, or to repel assaults and drive off besiegers. Theirs was the age of stone and wood; but their civilization was based on agriculture, which made them superior to that of their neighbours, whom they had compelled to be tributary vassals.

The apparition of the white man and the flash of Champlain’s arquebus, vomiting fire and dealing death by invisible balls, changed all Indian warfare and civilization. Gunpowder wrought as profound a revolution in the forests of America as in Europe. Bark or hide shields and armour were discarded; bows and arrows were soon left to children; the line and order of battle changed; fighting in masses ceased; the personal influence of the chiefs decreased, and each warrior became his own general. Individual valour and physical strength and bravery in battle counted for much less, and the dwarf was now equal to the giant.

An equally great revolution in industry took place when the stone age was suddenly brought to a close and the age of metals ushered in. The iron pot and kettle, the steel knife, hoe, hatchet, and the various appliances of daily life made more effective and durable, almost at once destroyed the manufacture of stone and bone utensils. The old men lost their occupation, and the young men ceased to be pupils. This loss of skill and power was tremendous and far-reaching in its consequences; and its very suddenness transformed independent savages into dependents upon the white man. In time of famine or loss of trade, or interruption of their relations with the traders caused by political complications, the sufferings of the Indians were pitiable.

Champlain’s shot dictated the reconstruction of Indian warfare; but the Iroquois took to heart so promptly the lesson, that the Algonkins north of the St. Lawrence were able to profit little by their temporary victory. Full of hate to the French for interfering to their disadvantage, the Mohawks at once made friends with the Dutch.

Both Hudson and Champlain had visited Mount Desert Island, and thence separating had penetrated the continent by the great water-ways, both reaching the heart of New York within a few miles of each other. While the French founded Quebec, and settled at Montreal, the Dutch made a trading settlement on the Hudson at Norman’s Kill, Tawasentha. This “place of many graves” and immemorial tradition was the seat of their great civilizer and teacher, Hiawatha, who had introduced one phase of progress. It was now destined to be the gateway to a new era of change and development. As in Japan, at the other side of the globe, at nearly the same time white men, gunpowder, and Christianity had come all together.

It was not out of disinterested benevolence that the confederate savages sought the friendship of the Hollanders. They came to buy powder and ball, to arm themselves with equal weapons of vengeance, and to protect themselves against the French.

But if Champlain was a mighty figure in the imagination of the red man of the Mohawk Valley, there was coming a greater than he. This new man was to impress more deeply the imagination of all the Iroquois, and his name was to live in their language as long as their speech was heard on the earth. Champlain was a bringer of war; “Corlaer” was an apostle of peace.

Arendt Van Curler is a perfectly clear figure in the Indian tradition, and in the history and documentary archives of the Empire State. Having no descendants to embalm his name in art or literature, he has not had his monument. Yet he deserves to have his name enrolled high among the makers of America. The ignorance, errors—and there is a long list of them—of writers on American and local history concerning Arendt Van Curler, have been gross and inexcusable. It were surely worth while to know the original of that “Corlaer” after whom the Indians named, first the governors of New York, and later the governors of English Canada, and finally Queen Victoria, the Empress of India. To the Iroquois mind, Corlaer was the representative of Teutonic civilization. Other governors of colonies and prominent figures among the pale-faces, they called by names coined by themselves, just as they named their own warriors from trivial incidents or temporary associations. Even the King of Great Britain was only their unnamed “Father;” but as our ablest American historian, Francis Parkman, has said: “His [Van Curler’s] importance in the eyes of the Iroquois, and their attachment to him are shown by the fact that they always used his name (in the form of Corlaer) as the official designation of the governor of New York, just as they called the governors of Canada, Onontio, and those of Pennsylvania, Onas. I know of no other instance in which Iroquois used the name of an individual to designate the holder of an office. Onontio means ‘a great mountain;’ Onas means ‘a quill or pen;’ Kinshon, the governor of Massachusetts, ‘a fish.’”[4]

Rev. I. A. Cuoq, in his “Lexique de la Langue Iroquoise,” also remarks that the title Kora, the present form of [Van] Curler, given even yet to the kings and queens of England and to the English governors of Canada, is a purely Iroquois creation; while that of Onontio, used of the French king and governors, was given for the first time to Montmagny, the successor of Champlain. Quite differently from their method in the case of Van Curler, they translated, with the aid of the French missionaries, Montmagny’s name, rendering it freely by Onontio, which means, strictly speaking, “the beautiful mountain,” rather than “the great mountain.” The term Onontio was used until the end of the French dominion in America, whereas Kora [or Corlaer] is still in vogue; Queen Victoria being to the Canadian Indians Kora-Kowa, or the great Van Curler.

As first-cousin of Kilian Van Rensselaer, Arendt Van Curler, a native of the country near Amsterdam, but probably of Huguenot descent, reached America in 1630, and became superintendent and justice of the colony at Rensselaerwyck. From the very first he dealt with the Indians in all honour, truth, and justice. He was a man of sterling integrity, a Dutch patriot, and a Christian of the Reformed faith, but also a man of continental ideas, a lover of all good men, and a Catholic in the true sense of the term. He rescued from death and torture the Christian prisoners in Mohawk villages; and his first visit into, or “discovery” of the Valley as far as Fonda in September, 1642, was to ransom Father Jogues. His description of “the most beautiful land on the Mohawk River that eye ever saw,” and the journal of his journey, probably sent with his letter of June 16, 1643, to the Patroon, form the first written description of the Valley. He mastered the vernacular of the savages, visited them at their council-fires, heard their complaints, dealt honestly with them, and compelled others to do the same. The first covenant of friendship, made in 1617, between the Dutch and the Iroquois, and its various later renewals, he developed into a policy of lasting peace and amity. The scattered links of friendship between the Dutch and the confederacy of Indians he forged into an irrefragable chain, which, until the English-speaking white men went to war in 1775, was never broken. In 1663 he saved the army of Courcelles from starvation and probably destruction. Winning alike the respect of the French in Canada, and of their enemies, the Mohawks, he was invited to visit the governor, Tracy, in Quebec. On his journey thither in 1667, he was drowned in Lake Champlain near Rock Regis, the boundary-mark between the Iroquois and Algonkin Indians. This lake, like the Mohawk River, and the town of Schenectady which he founded, the Indians and Canadians called Corlaer.

Rarely, if ever, was a council held in Albany or at Johnson’s house or at the Onondaga fireplace, that Corlaer’s name was not mentioned, and their “covenant chain” with him referred to under the varied figures of rhetoric.

Van Curler’s policy was continued and expanded by Peter Schuyler, a son of Van Curler’s warm personal friend, Philip Schuyler. As the Iroquois in speaking never closed the lips, but used the orotund with abundance of gutturals, they were unable to pronounce properly names in which labial consonants occurred. They could not say Peter; so they called their friend “Quider.” The policy of Johnson was simply a continuation and expansion of that of these two Hollanders, Van Curler and Schuyler. There was no name of any white man that Johnson heard oftener in the mouths of the Indians than that of Corlaer; and yet, in the index of seventy thousand references to the Johnson manuscripts in Albany there is no reference to this founder of the Dutch policy of peace with the Indians.

In their political and social procedures, in public discourse, and in the etiquette of councils, no denizens of European courts were more truly bond-slaves to etiquette and custom than these forest senators. In certain outward phases of life—especially noticed by the man of hats, boots, and clean underclothing—the Indian seems to be a child of freedom, untutored and unsophisticated. In reality he is a slave compared to the enlightened and civilized man. He is by heredity, training, and environment fettered almost beyond hope. His mind can move out of predestined grooves only after long education, when a new God, new conceptions, induced power of abstract reasoning, and an entirely new mental outlook are given him. First of all, the savage needs a right idea of the Maker of the universe and of the laws by which the creation is governed; and then only does his mental freedom begin. So far from being free from prescribed form, he is less at liberty than a Chinese or Hindu. His adherence to ceremonial runs into bigotry. The calumet must be smoked. The opening speech must be on approved models. The wampum belts are as indispensable in a treaty as are seals and signatures in a Berlin conference or a Paris treaty. To challenge tradition, to step out of routine, to think for himself, and to act according to conviction, is more dangerous and costly to him than to one who has lived under the codes of civilization.

To gain his almost invincible influence over these red republicans of the woods, Johnson, like his previous exemplars, had to let patience have her perfect work. He had to stoop to them in order to lift them up. He even learned to outdo them in ostentation of etiquette, in rigid adherence to form, in close attention to long speeches without interruption, in convincing eloquence, in prolixity when it was necessary to subdue the red man’s brain and flesh by the power of the tongue, and in shine and glitter of outward display. Like a shrewd strategist, this typical Irishman knew when to exercise his native gift of garrulity in talking against time, and when also to condense into fiery sentences the message of the hour.

One chief reason, however, why the Iroquois preferred to talk with him more than with the average colonial grandee, was because they were not when before him at the mercy of interpreters. Despite the fact that time was of little value to the savage, it was rather trying to an Indian orator, after dilating for an hour or two in all the gorgeous eloquence of figurative language, to the manifest acceptance of his own kinsmen at least, to have an interpreter render the substance of his oration in a few sentences. Unaccustomed to abstract reasoning, the Indian was perforce obliged to draw the images of thought entirely from the environment of his life on land and water. Hence his speech superabounded with metaphors. He thoroughly enjoyed the discourse of one of his pale-faced brothers whose flowery language, while insufferably prolix to his fellow-whites, ran on in exuberant verbosity. In such a case, as Johnson soon learned to know, the sons of the forest felt complimented and flattered. Rarely was a speaker interrupted. Extreme rigidity of decorum was the rule at their councils. On great and solemn occasions the women were called as witnesses and listeners to hold in their memory words spoken or promises given.

There were other resources of human intercourse besides words. The wampum strings that reminded one of rosaries, or the belts made of hundreds and thousands of black and white shells, served as telegrams, letters missive, credentials, contracts, treaties, currency, and most of the purposes in diplomacy and business. The principal chief of a tribe had the custody of these archives of State. A definite value was placed upon these drilled, polished, and strung disks or oval cylinders of shell. The Dutch soon learned to make a better fabric than the Indian original, and they taught the art to the other colonists. Weeden, in his “Economic History of New England,” has shown how great an aid to commerce this, the ancient money of nearly all nations, proved in the early days when coined money was so scarce. The belts used as newsletters, as tokens of peace or war, as records of the past, or as confirmations of treaties, were often generous in width and length, beautifully made, and fringed with coloured strings. Schenectady was a famous place of wampum or seewant manufacture; and Hille Van Olinda, an interpreter, received in 1692 two pounds eight shillings for two great belts. Two others of like proportions cost three pounds twelve shillings. A large quantity of this sort of currency was always carried by the French to win over the Indians to their side. The same commercial and diplomatic tactics were also followed by the English, and especially by Johnson.

The Iroquois had also a rude system of heraldry. A traveller over the great trails or highways, or along the shores of the great water-ways most often traversed, would have seen many tokens of aboriginal art. The annals of the Jesuit missionaries and of travellers show that besides the hideously painted or carved manitou or idols found at certain well-known places, the trees and rocks were decorated with the totem signs. The wolf, the bear, the tortoise, were the living creatures most frequently seen in effigy on tent, robes, or arms. Or they were set as their seal and sign-manual on the title-deeds of lands bartered away, which the white man required as proofs of sale and absolute alienation, though often the red man intended only joint occupancy. In the Iroquois Confederacy there were eight totem-clans, which formed an eight-fold bond of union in the great commonwealth. Less important symbols were the deer, serpent, beaver, stone pipe, etc. In their drawings on trees or rocks there were certain canons of art well understood and easily read. A canoe meant a journey by water; human figures without heads, so many scalps; the same holding a chain, as being in alliance and friendship; an axe, an emblem of war, etc. A rude fraternity, with secrets, signs, and ceremonies,—the freemasonry of the forest,—was also known and was powerful in its influence. In family life, inheritance was on the female side; and on many subjects the advice of the women was sought and taken, and as witness-auditors they were a necessity at solemn councils, as well as made the repository of tradition.

Exactly what the religion of the Indians was it would be hard to say. To arrange their fluctuating and hazy ideas into a system would be impossible. Whatever the real mental value of their words “manitou” and “wakan,” or other terms implying deity, or simply used to cover ignorance or express mystery, it is evident that the blind worship of force was the essence of their faith. Living much nearer to the animal creation than the civilized man, they were prone to recognize in the brute either a close kinship or an incarnation of divine power. Extremes meet. The current if not the final philosophy of the scientific mind in our century, and that of the savage, have many points in common. All animated life was linked together, but the red man saw the presence of the deity of his conception in every mysterious movement of animate or inanimate things. Even the rattlesnake was the bearer of bane or blessing according as it was treated. Alexander Henry, the traveller from Philadelphia, relates that on meeting a snake four or five feet long, which he would have killed, the Iroquois reverently called it “grandfather,” blew their tobacco smoke in puffs toward it to please the reptile, and prayed to it to influence Colonel Johnson “to take care of their families during their absence, to show them charity, and to fill their canoes with rum.” When, afterward, they were on the lake and a storm arose, Henry came very near being made a Jonah to appease the wrath of the rattlesnake-manitou, but fortunately the tempest passed and it cleared off.

The Indians invented the birch or elm bark canoe, the racket or snow-shoe, the moccasin, all of which the white frontiersmen were quick to utilize when they saw their value. They also taught the settlers the use of new kinds of food, and how to get it from the soil or the water. To tread out eels from the mud, catch fish with the hand or with fish-hooks of bone, and to till the ground, even in the forest, for maize, squashes and pumpkins, were lessons learned from the red man. Frontier and savage life had many points in common, and not a little Indian blood entered into the veins of Americans. There were hundreds of instances of women as well as men rescued from their supposed low estate as captives who preferred to remain with the Indians in savage life. Often white settlers were saved from death by starvation by friendly red men or half-breeds; while half the plots of the savages failed because of the warnings given by friendly squaws, or boys who were usually not full-blooded.

Great changes took place within the Iroquois Confederacy after the advent of the white man. His fire-arms, liquor, fences, and ideas at once began to modify Indian politics, hunting, social life, and religion. The unity of interests was broken, and division and secession set in, as steady currents, to weaken the forest republic. Large numbers of the Iroquois emigrated westward to live and hunt in Ohio and beyond, and joined the Ottawa confederacy. Others left in bands or groups, and made their homes in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or the Southwest, to get away, if possible, from the white man’s fences and fire-water. Others followed their religious teachers into Canada, and made settlements there. These losses were only in a measure made good by the addition to the Long House of a whole tribe from the South, the Tuscaroras, whose ancestral seats had been in the Carolinas.

North Carolina was one of the majority of the original thirteen States first settled by a variety of colonists,—French, German, Swiss, Scottish, and Irish, as well as English. At first red and white men lived at peace; but soon the inevitable “question” came, and the Indians imagined that they could show themselves superior to the pale-faces. Making what white historians call a “conspiracy,” but striking what they believed to be a blow for home and freedom, they rose, and in one night massacred in or near Roanoke alone one hundred and thirty-seven of the white settlers. Their murderous act at once drew out the vengeance of Governor Craven of South Carolina, who sent Col. John Barnwell, an Irishman, who marched with a regiment of six hundred whites and several hundred Indian allies. Without provision trains, but subsisting as Indians do in a wilderness unbroken by villages, farms, or clearings, Barnwell struck the Tuscaroras in battle, and reduced their numbers by the loss of three hundred warriors. Pursuing them to their fortified castle, he laid siege and compelled surrender. By successive blows, this “Tuscarora John,” by death or capture, destroyed one thousand fighting men, and compelled the remainder of the tribe to leave the graves of their fathers, and emigrate northward. Only a remnant reached New York. The Tuscaroras joined the Iroquois Confederacy in 1713, and the federated forest republic then took upon itself the style and title of the Six Nations.

Nearly a century afterward, when the Iroquois Confederacy was a dream, and the Southern Confederacy beginning to be woven of the same stuff, the descendant of “Tuscarora John,” who had added a new tribe to the Long House, gave at Montgomery, Alabama, the casting vote that made Jefferson Davis President of a new one in the many forms of federation on the North American continent. About the same time the great English historian, Freeman, neglecting for the nonce the distinction between history and prophecy, began his work on the “History of Federal Government, from the Achaian League to the Disruption of the United States of America,” only one volume of which was published, the events of 1863–1865 compelling the completion of the work to be indefinitely postponed.

How far the various attempts of the red man to combine in federal union for common strength or defence, and especially those in the stable political edifice in New York, were potent in aiding the formation of the American Commonwealth, is an interesting question worthy of careful study. That it was not without direct influence upon the minds of those constructive statesmen like Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, who came so numerously from States nearest the Long House, and most familiar with Iroquois politics, cannot be denied. The men of the English-speaking colonies which had been peopled from continental and insular Europe, were inheritors of classic culture. They naturally read the precedents furnished by Greece and Rome; but they were also powerfully affected by the living realities of the federal republics of Holland and Switzerland, as well as in the aristocratic republic of Venice, while in the one nearest England many of them were educated. It is not too much to affirm, however, that the power of this great example at home, on the soil and under their eyes, was as great in moulding opinion and consolidating thought in favour of a federal union of States, as were the distant exemplars of the ancient world, or in modern Europe. Though we give him no credit, and spurn the idea of political indebtedness to the red man, with almost the same intolerant fierceness that some of the latter-day New England Puritans deny obligations to the Dutch Republic that sheltered and educated their fathers, yet our government is in a measure copied from that of the forest republicans, whose political edifice and conquests shaped the history and civilization of this continent. In still retaining the sonorous names given to our mountains, valleys, and rivers, and in transferring these to our ships and men-of-war; in giving the effigy of the Indian a place on our municipal coats of arms and seals of State, we are proving that in our memory at least of the aboriginal dwellers on the soil they are not wholly forgotten. These graphic symbols are, indeed, but shadows; but beyond all shadow is substance.

While the white man’s gunpowder and bullets, war, diseases, fire-water, and trade wrought profound changes for better or worse, usually the latter, the Indians were not stolid or unreceptive to his religion. Both the Roman and the Reformed teachers won many disciples in the Long House. Almost as soon as the learned Domine Megapolensis arrived at Fort Orange, he began to learn the language of the Mohawks. He was soon able to preach to them and to teach their children. This was three years before John Eliot began his work in Massachusetts. The pastors at Schenectady did the same, translating portions of the Bible and of the liturgy of the Netherlands Reformed Church, and of the Book of Common Prayer. The missionary efforts of the Dutch Christians soon bore definite and practical results. The Reformed Church records show large numbers of Indians baptized or married or buried according to Christian rites. There are also frequent instances of adult communicant membership in the Mohawk, Hudson, Raritan, and Hackensack Valleys. Hundreds of Indian children were trained in the same catechetical instruction, and in the same classes with those of the whites. As a general rule, the Hollanders and other peoples from the Continent lived in kindness and peace with their red brethren. The occasional outbreaks of the savages in massacre, fire, and blood were not by those of New York, but from Canada. The Indians were set on like dogs by the French, who stimulated the thirst for blood by political and religious hatreds; and the English repaid in kind. Rarely was the peace broken between the people of New Netherlands and New York except by causes operative in, and coming from Europe.

The first Roman Catholic who entered the bounds of the State of New York was Isaac Jogues, who was captured by the Mohawks while ascending the St. Lawrence River. One of the sweetest spirits and noblest characters that ever glorified the flesh he dwelt in, Isaac Jogues was brought captive into the Mohawk Valley to be reserved for fiendish torture. Ransomed by Arendt Van Curler, and assisted to France by Domine Megapolensis, these three men of the Holy Catholic Church became ever after true friends. The surface discords of church names were lost in the deeper harmonies of their one faith and love to a common Saviour. Bressani was later assisted in like manner. Returning willingly, by way of Quebec, after his fingers, once chewed to shapeless lumps between the teeth of the Mohawks, had been kissed by nobles and ladies in the court at Versailles, Jogues reached, four years later (1647), the scene of his martyrdom and nameless burial. His severed head, mounted upon one of the palisades of the Indian castle, was set with its face to Canada, whence he came, in insult and defiance.

Nevertheless, the French Jesuit missionaries, with unquailing courage and fervent faith, persevered; and Poncet, Le Moyne, Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron passed to and fro through Albany to continue the work in what they had already named as the Mission of the Martyrs. In 1667 St. Mary’s Chapel was established at the Indian village which stood on the site of Spraker’s Basin. In 1669 St. Peter’s Chapel was built of logs on the sand-flats at Caughnawaga near Fonda, by Boniface. Here in 1676 the Iroquois maiden Tegawita—the White Lily of the Mohawks, the now canonized saint—was baptized by James de Lamberville. From 1642 to 1684 was the golden age of early missions of the Roman form of the Christian faith in New York. Then it was abruptly brought to a close, not because of Indian animosity or Protestant opposition, but by the Roman Catholic Governor Dongan in the interests of British trade.

Perhaps this interruption was not wholly dictated by greed, but was strongly influenced by political interests. This fact must be noted. When Catharine Ganneaktena, an Erie Indian woman adopted into the Oneida tribe, was led to serious thought by Bruyas, to whom she taught the language in 1668, and with her Christian husband was persecuted by the pagans, the couple left for Montreal. Here she was baptized and confirmed by Bishop Laval. Instructed by Raffeix, who was somewhat of a statesman, Catharine invited several of her family in New York to Canada, and early in 1670 they founded the Indian village of La Prairie, where members of the Iroquois Confederacy might come to settle. According to the code of laws established in this Christian community, every one must renounce belief in dreams, polygamy, and drunkenness. This settlement was destined to be a powerful influence, not only in the Christianization of the Indians, but upon the politics of New York. In 1674, the wife of Kryn, “the great Mohawk,” who had conquered the Mohegans, became a Christian, and her husband abandoned her. Happening in his wanderings to visit the Christian village of La Prairie, Kryn was impressed with the peace and order reigning in it, and after a time became a Christian.

Returning to his home on the Mohawk, Kryn told what he had seen, and persuaded forty of his fellows from Caughnawaga (now Fonda, New York) to follow him. They reached La Prairie on Easter Sunday, 1676. From this time forth Kryn was an active missionary, on one occasion talking over a whole party of sixty Mohawks sent by Dongan on a raid against the French, and converting four of them to Christianity. He also persuaded the Oneidas and Onondagas to keep peace with the French, and in this was aided by the remarkable influence of Garakonthie, the Christian protector of “the black coats.” It was Kryn who led, and it was these “praying Indians” from Canada who with the French were sent by Frontenac to destroy Schenectady in 1690; and it was he who just before the attack harangued them to the highest pitch of fury. His especial pretext for revenge was the murder of sixty Canadian Indians by the Iroquois about six months previously.

For many years La Prairie was the gathering-place of seceders from the confederacy who had adopted the religion of their French teachers. In 1763 the village had three hundred fighting men; during the Revolution the number increased, and at present the Indian reservation at Caughnawaga, about twenty miles from Montreal, contains about thirteen hundred Roman Catholic Indians. These facts explain why the Mohawks and others of the confederacy had so many relatives fighting for the French, and why the political situation in New York, until the fall of French dominion, was so complex. As a rule, the Iroquois preferred the more sensuous religion of the French, while eager also for the strouds, duffels, guns, and blankets of the Dutch. Under Gallic and British influences, their hearts were as often divided as their heads were distracted. They were like tourists from Dover to Calais, when in the choppy seas which seethe between the coasts of England, France, and Holland.

In 1684 Jean de Lamberville, the last Jesuit settler in New York among the Iroquois, departed for Canada amid the lamentations of the Onondagas who escorted him. In a few generations all traces of the work of the French missionaries had vanished from the Mohawk Valley. In our days, when under the farmer’s plough or labourer’s pickaxe, the earth casts out her dead, the copper rings with the sign of the cross tell the touching story of the Indian maiden’s faith. Under the eloquent pen of John Gilmary Shea the thrilling story of labour and martyrdom glows. The Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs at Auriesville shows that even modern piety can find fresh stimulus in recalling the events which have made the Mohawk Valley classic ground to devout pilgrims as well as to the scholar and patriot.

For over a century—from 1664 until 1783—the diplomatic, military, and eleemosynary operations of British agents and armies among the Iroquois were actively carried on. These were prolonged and costly, and had much to do with making the enormous public debt of England, still unpaid. The effect was to affect powerfully the imagination of the British public. It was not merely the fiction of Cooper which created the tendency of the Englishman just landed at Castle Garden to look for painted and feathered Indians on Broadway. The author of “Leatherstocking” did but stimulate the imagination already fed by the narratives of returned veterans. Thousands of soldiers, who had heard the war-whoop in forest battles, told their stories at British hearthstones until well into this century. They, with Cooper, are responsible for the idea that forests grow in Philadelphia. The fear still possessing English children that American visitors, even of unmixed European blood, may turn red or black, is one prompted by tradition as well as by literary fiction.

[4] Letter to the writer, Feb. 7, 1890.