THE LIFE AND TIMES

OF

KATERI TEKAKWITHA,

1656-1680.

BY

ELLEN H. WALWORTH,

AUTHOR OF "AN OLD WORLD, AS SEEN THROUGH YOUNG EYES"

BUFFALO:
PETER PAUL & BROTHER.

1891.

Copyright, 1890,
By Ellen H. Walworth.

PETER PAUL & BRO.,
PRINTERS AND BINDERS,
BUFFALO, N. Y.

To my Uncle,
THE REV. CLARENCE A. WALWORTH,

RECTOR OF ST. MARY'S CHURCH,
ALBANY, N. Y.,

THIS VOLUME IS MOST AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED.

PREFACE.

The life and surroundings of "The Lily of the Mohawks," as an undeveloped theme in literature, was first suggested to me by my uncle, the Rev. Clarence A. Walworth. My interest and enthusiasm were at once aroused. The thought of a mere Indian girl reared in the forest among barbarians, yet winning for herself such titles as "The Lily of the Mohawks" and "The Genevieve of New France," recurred to my mind again and again, until it led me to a fixed determination to explore so tempting a field of romance and archæology. The fact that it lay amongst the hills and valleys of my native State, and was little known except to solitary scholars and laborious historians, incited me still more to the task. I became ambitious to gather from the records of two centuries ago every detail relating in any way to my Indian heroine. While engaged in this work unexpected opportunities opened to gather exact information about her, and more especially concerning the localities connected with her early childhood, and her conversion and baptism in the Mohawk Valley.

If this book, embodying the result of my researches, should fail to interest the reader, it will not be for any lack of enthusiasm on my part, or of kind encouragement and competent assistance from others.

When beginning the work my first call for advice was upon Dr. John Gilmary Shea, so well versed in Indian annals, as also in the general history of this country. I found him full of interest in my subject. Guided by the information received from him, and also by the directions of the Rev. R. S. Dewey, S. J., who has long been familiar with the missionary and Indian traditions of the Mohawk Valley, I went to Montreal and secured from the courteous kindness of Father Turgeon, S. J., rector of the Jesuit College there, the use of all the manuscripts I desired. The Sisters of the Hôtel Dieu furnished me with a room in their hospital, to which the good Rector allowed me to transport the entire CARTON O. This contained all the unprinted materials relating to my subject that belonged to the college library.

There, at the Hôtel Dieu, delightfully located with the sisters of an order whose history is closely bound up with that of Montreal, I copied at my leisure the manuscripts most valuable to me.

In Montreal, also, my good fortune gave me interviews with M. Cuoq, the distinguished philologist of St. Sulpice, whose Indian dictionaries and grammars I had already seen in my uncle's library. Much I owe besides to Soeur St. Henriette, librarian and keeper of the archives at the Villa Maria. It was on the boat which shoots the Lachine Rapids that I met Mr. Hale of Philadelphia, the learned author of the "Iroquois Book of Rites," and enjoyed a long conversation with him on matters of deep interest to us both and to my work. My first visit to the Iroquois Village at Caughnawaga, P. Q., occurred at this time. Here my uncle and I found hospitable entertainment for several days at the Presbytery of the church, presided over by the Rev. Père Burtin, O. M. I. Besides the valuable information acquired from the library of books and manuscripts in his possession, I gathered much from the acquaintance then established with the Iroquois of the "Sault" and in particular with their grand chief, Joseph Williams.

La Prairie was only nine miles distant, with its scholarly curé, Père Bourgeault, and his valuable collection of ancient maps; and about half way between Caughnawaga and La Prairie lay the grave of Tekakwitha, with its tall cross looking over the rapids of the St. Lawrence. An author with a theme like mine in such localities and with such guides was, indeed, in an enchanted land.

In Albany I received valuable assistance and advice from Mr. Holmes and Mr. Howell, of the State Library, also from Mr. Melius, of the City Clerk's Office, and others.

I have reserved for a most especial and grateful acknowledgment the name of Gen. John S. Clark, of Auburn, N. Y. My work is indebted to him for a treasure of information which he alone could give. In the knowledge of Iroquois localities in New York State, particularly those of two centuries ago, and the trails over which missionaries from Canada travelled so painfully to villages where they labored so hard and yet successfully,—he is the undoubted pioneer. Almost all we know in this branch of archæology is owing to him. It was my privilege in company with my uncle, and with Gen. Clark for pilot, to spend a memorable week in search of Indian localities along the Mohawk, from the mouth of Schoharie Creek to the farthest castle of the wolf clan opposite Fort Plain. We visited and verified, under the General's direction, no less than eleven sites in this one week. An account of the most important of these sites can be found in the contributions of Gen. Clark, as explanatory footnotes, to "Early Chapters of Mohawk History." This work consists of translations into English of selected letters from the Relations Jesuites. For these translations we are indebted to the lamented Dr. Hawley, late pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Auburn. Guided by the wise advice of General Clark, I was able afterwards to make other independent journeys, and familiarize myself with Indian trails passing near my native town, above all those followed by Tekakwitha in her escape to the "Sault." I owe to Gen. Clark's kindness the valuable map of Mohawk Castle Sites, to be found in this book and drawn expressly for it by his hand.

Lastly, I recall with pleasure a conversation with the Rev. Felix Martin, S. J., a well known authority in Canadian and Indian archæology. To this venerable author, the editor of the famous "Jesuit Relations," the biographer of Isaac Jogues, of Chomonot and of Tekakwitha, I owe a large debt of gratitude. His biography of her, entitled "Une Vierge Iroquoise," is still in manuscript, never having been published. He was the first to gather and keep together all the manuscripts extant giving contemporary accounts of the Iroquois maiden. He laid a foundation of accumulated facts for others to build upon. I sought him out in Paris in 1885, and found him with some difficulty. The hiding place of this learned old man was in an obscure corner of the city. The schools of his order all broken up, separated from his companions, his books and his manuscripts, and from his old beloved home in the New France, which he would never see again,—how his eyes glistened when I came to him from the western world, a child of the Hudson and Mohawk, to speak to him of Tekakwitha, bringing him even the latest news of archæological discoveries in those valleys! His face beamed with delight at every new detail. It pleased him much to know that Dr. Shea was, at that very time, translating into English his (Martin's) French Life of Jogues, and to learn that I was writing, and hoped soon to have published a full account of Kateri Tekakwitha for my own countrymen of the United States. He gave his blessing to me and to my work, a blessing which I prize most highly. His hearty approval is especially gratifying, since I have had occasion to use much of the material he had gathered for publication in French under his own name. Alas! scarcely had I recrossed the Atlantic, when the news of his death reached me.

In conclusion, let me say: I am conscious of many defects in this work. Others may yet be found better able than I to do justice to my theme, but not any one, I think, who will come to the task more anxious to make known to all the whole truth of history concerning the rare and beautiful character of this lily of our forest.

Albany, N. Y., January 2, 1891.

CONTENTS.

APPENDIX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

TEKAKWITHA'S SPRING.

THE LIFE AND TIMES

OF

KATERI TEKAKWITHA.[1]

[1] Pronounced Kat'-e-ree' Tek-a-quee'-ta. Kateri is the Iroquois form of the Christian name Katherine. The meaning of Tekakwitha is given in Chapter IV. For various ways of spelling the name, see [Appendix, Note B.]

CHAPTER I.

TEKAKWITHA'S SPRING.

IN the valley of the Mohawk, near the present great highways of the State of New York, is a quiet forest nook, where a clear, cold spring gurgles out from the tangled roots of a tree. Connected with this spring is the story of a short girl-life, pure, vigorous, sorrow-taught. It is written out in authentic documents; while Nature, also, has kept a record of an Indian maiden's lodge beside the spring. There on the banks of the Mohawk River, at Caughnawaga, now called Fonda, in Montgomery County, dwelt the Lily of the Mohawks two centuries ago, when the State had neither shape nor name. She saw her people build a strong, new palisaded village there. She saw, though at rare intervals, the peaceful but adventurous traders of Fort Orange, and the blackgowns of New France pass in and out on friendly errands. Mohegans came there also in her day to lay siege to the village, but only to be met with fierce defiance and to be driven back. Marks of that very Indian fort can still be found at Fonda, where the Johnstown Railway now branches from the New York Central, and turns northward along the margin of the Cayudutta Creek. The smoke of the engine, as it leaves the town of Fonda, mounts to the level of a plateau on which the Mohawk Castle [2] stood. The elevated land, or river terrace, at that point is singularly called the "Sand Flats."

A rude fort of palisades, well equipped for defence, was completed about the year 1668 on a narrow tongue of this high terrace, between the Mohawk River and the creek. The approach to it is very steep; but in one place a wagon-road winds up the hill to what is now a field on Veeder's farm. Here unmistakable signs of Indian occupation are to be found. A spring is close at hand in a clump of trees. The castle at that spot was known as "Caughnawaga," meaning "At the Rapids,"—a name still applied to the eastern part of the present town of Fonda. The Mohawk River runs swiftly as it passes this spot, and large stones obstruct its course. The spring at the castle site on the west side of the creek is Tekakwitha's spring; for there beside it she grew to maidenhood, behind the shelter of the palisades, and beneath the shadow of the overarching forest. Tekakwitha was the Lily of the Mohawks, and afterwards known as "La Bonne Catherine."

In the Mohawk Valley, the great artery of our nation's life, the tide of human travel now ebbs and flows with ever-swelling force; here the New York Central Railway levels out its course of four broad tracks; here the great canal bears heavy burdens east and west; here the West Shore Railway skirts the southern terrace; here the Mohawk River winds and ripples, smiling in an old-time, quiet way at these hurrying, crowded highways. They have wellnigh filled the generous roadway, cut through high plateaus and mountain spurs in ages past by this same placid river. That was in its younger, busier days. Now it idles on its way from side to side, among the flats or bottoms, with here and there a rapid, till at last it gathers force at far Cohoes for one great plunge before it joins the Hudson. Then the mingled waters of the two rivers sweep on past the stately Capitol, where once the Indian trading-post, Fort Orange, stood. From Albany, the broad-bosomed Hudson bears floating palaces and long lines of canal-boats strung together like great beads of wampum. Let its current move them southward, while we turn back to the valley whence these strings of wampum came. Let us follow up the windings of the Mohawk River westward. At Schenectady it lingers among islands in pretty, narrow ways, where college boys can take their sweethearts rowing. Right playfully it kisses the feet of the old Dutch town in summer, and in winter its frozen bosom sounds with the merry thud of the skater's steel. Farther west the valley narrows, and on a height near Hoffman's Ferry, Mohawk and Mohegan fought their last fierce battle. Tekakwitha heard their war-whoop at the castle of Caughnawaga, just before the final conflict came; but she never saw Fort Johnson, which is higher up the river. Old Fort Johnson is too modern for our story. Amsterdam now looms up an important factor in the valley. Two centuries ago a joyous stream cascading down to meet the Mohawk was its only landmark. Tekakwitha knew the spot, however, and had good reason to remember it, as we shall see. Westward still, and up the valley from Fort Johnson, a broader gleam of water comes in sight. It is where the Schoharie River creeps in from the south between the dripping archways of a bridge, over which canal-boats pass. Here the Mohawk shows its teeth in a ridge of angry rapids; and here we enter what was once the home country of its people, the fierce Mohawks. We are near the spot where brave Father Isaac Jogues, the discoverer of Lake George, was killed, in 1646. In the southwest angle of the Mohawk and Schoharie Rivers, on the upper terrace, higher than the modern hamlet of Auriesville, was the eastern castle of the Mohawks, known to Jogues as Ossernenon. [3] Here three times the hero-hearted blackgown came; first, a mangled, tortured captive, dragging out the weary months in slavery until the Dutchmen at Fort Orange ransomed him; next, as an ambassador of peace, bearing presents, making treaties; and lastly, as envoy of the Prince of Peace, and wedded to his "spouse of blood,"—for so Jogues styled his Mohawk mission. Never was a truer bridegroom, never stranger wedding rites. Bits of his flesh were cut off and devoured, while the savage high-priest cried, "Let us see if this white flesh is the flesh of an otkon [spirit or devil.]" "I am but a man like yourselves," said Jogues, "though I fear not death nor your tortures." His head was placed on the northern palisade, looking toward the French frontier, and his body thrown into the stream; but his blood and his earnest words sank deep into the land and the hearts of its people. From Jogues' mystic union with the Mohawk nation, trooping from the "Mission of the Martyrs," came the Christian Iroquois. One of these—a bright soul in a dusky setting, and a flower that sprang from martyr's blood—was Tekakwitha. She grew up, says one who knew her, "like a lily among thorns." Ten years after Ondessonk [4] had shed the last drop of his blood to make these Mohawks Christians, she was born among the people who had seen the blackgown die, in the Village of the Turtles,—some say in the "cabin at the door of which the tomahawked priest had fallen."

This same stronghold of the Turtles was rebuilt higher up the river during Tekakwitha's lifetime. Near Ossernenon, the earliest known site of the Turtle Castle, there is a great bend or loop in the Mohawk River and Valley. It extends from the mouth of the Schoharie River on the east to the "Nose" near Yost's and Spraker's Basin on the west. The Nose is at a point where river, railways, and canal are crowded in a narrow pass between two overlapping ridges of high land. "Two Mountains approaching," or Tionnontogen, the Indians called it; and there behind the shelter of the hills, they built their largest and best fortified town, the Mohawk capital or Castle of the Wolves. Other villages and their central Castle of the Bears, called Andagoron, they also built and rebuilt within the great bend. At its northern point, where the river now flows between the high-perched Starin residence and the town of Fonda, the next important railway-station west of Amsterdam, are the rapids and the large stones in the water which gave rise to the name of Caughnawaga. From the hills at Fonda one can see for miles both up and down the river.

Here, as has already been said, just west of Fonda, on the north side of the Mohawk is the Indian village site where Tekakwitha lived. Here is the beautiful hill that was once crowned by the palisaded castle of Caughnawaga. It is a spot that any one who lived there must have loved. To-day the plough turns up the rich soil where long Indian cabins stood, and what we see are only darkened patches left to tell us where the hearthfires of the Mohawks burned two hundred years ago. These patches of dark soil still glisten with the pearly mussel-shells brought up by the Mohawks to their village from the river that still bears their name. The pipe-stems sold to them by the Dutch are strewn in fragments through the field. From graves near by, thrown out on the roadside by the spades of workmen loading their carts with sand, the author has seen Indian bones, more crumbled than the silly beads and rusty scissors buried with them, which they bought so dearly. In a wood near by, on the brow of a ravine, there is a row of hollow corn-pits where the Caughnawaga people stored their charred corn. Low down in the fertile river-flats, southward from the ancient village site, a sunburned farmer, owner of both hill and valley, still works with horses and with iron implements the very corn-fields that the squaws hoed with clumsy bone-tools. This once castled height breaks abruptly on its eastern side to let the Cayudutta Creek wind through. It hurries by on its way to meet the Mohawk, and then lags through the flat, lost to sight just long enough to pass round the skirts of the Ta-berg, or Tea Mountain. This in a grassy cone topped with pines, and so named by Dutch settlers who there in wartimes made a tea from a wild plant. It partly blocks the entrance to the pretty Cayudutta valley, and separates it from the modern town of Fonda; but the farmers' daughters and the village people who now live in sight of Fonda Court House know well the little valley of the Cayudutta. Any one of them can point out its brightest gem, the never failing spring that issues from a set-back in the hill and so regular in shape as to suggest an amphitheatre. This spring wells out from under an old stump hidden in a clump of trees, whose topmost branches are below the level of the castle site. Its waters rest a moment in a little shady pool, a round forest mirror; then brimming over, break away and wander down the steep descent to the creek. The path to the spring leads downward from the higher ground above it, known as the Sand Flats. The field where the castle stood is now often planted thick with grain; but when this has been cut and the ground again ploughed, the Indian relics are readily found. At any season of the year, however, the limpid spring that has not ceased to flow for centuries will serve to indicate the spot.

THE MOHAWK VALLEY FROM FONDA, N. Y.
(Tekakwitha's Birthplace in the Distance.)

Standing then, at the brink of this spring in the Mohawk Valley, let the reader cast a look backward, and over the intervening space of two hundred years, to the days of Tekakwitha. Let it be understood, however, that while the imaginative faculty is thus to be called into play, it is not for the contemplation of an imaginative but of a real character. For whatever side lights may color the narrative, they are used to bring out, not to impair, the picture. Many details of time and place, of manners and customs, of dress and the arts of industry, will be woven into an actual scene, rather than given in a tedious enumeration.

The scene about to be described and others which follow depicting the early life of Tekakwitha are not to be found actually recorded in so many words in the history of her life and times, yet they must have occurred; for they are based on the known facts of her life as related in various official and private documents, together with such inferences only as may fairly and reasonably be drawn from those facts when brought under the strong light of contemporaneous records.

Above the spring at Fonda, on the high plateau where is now the well-tilled farm, stood, two centuries ago, the log-built palisades of ancient Caughnawaga. In tall and close-set ranks they serve to hide from view and shield from ambush the long, low Indian houses, twenty-four in number. "Double stockadoed round, with four ports," as when the traveller Greenhalgh saw the place in 1677, "and a bow-shot from the river," stands the strong Mohawk castle. The blackened stumps that now dot the sunny hillside of the Cayudutta change into the old-time, mighty forest, and present a scene that is full of life; for down a well-worn footpath come the Indian girls to fill their jugs at the spring,—afterwards to be known as Tekakwitha's Spring.

These dusky Caughnawaga maidens have the well-known Indian features strongly marked,—the high cheek bones, the dull red skin, and soft dark eyes; but Tekakwitha shields hers with her blanket from the light. Unlike the rest, there is an air of thoughtfulness about her and a touch of mystery. Excessive shyness in the Lily of the Mohawks is strangely blended with a sympathetic nature; and with a quiet force of character she leads their chatter, half unconsciously, to channels of her own choosing.

"A manuscript of the time," says Shea, "describes the Indian maiden with her well-oiled and neatly parted hair descending in a long plait behind, while a fine chemise was met at the waist by a neat and well-trimmed petticoat reaching to the knee; below this was the rich legging and then the well-fitted moccasin, the glory of an Iroquois belle. The neck was loaded with beads, while the crimson blanket enveloped the whole form."

This, in general, is the costume of the merry group with Tekakwitha at the spring. The upper garment, however, is a kind of tunic or simple overdress; nor can it be said that all are equally neat in their appearance. Some have their dark, straight hair tied loosely back and hanging down, or else with wampum braided in it. A few are clothed in foreign stuff, bought from the Dutch for beaver-skins and worn in shapeless pieces hung about them with savage carelessness. On their dark arms the sunlight flashes back from heavily beaded wrist and arm bands, begged or borrowed from their more industrious companions. Not like theirs is Tekakwitha's costume. It is made of deer and moose skins,—all of native make, and stitched together by a practised hand, as every one of the pretty squaws well knew. Her needle was a small bone from the ankle of the deer, her thread the sinews of the same light-footed animal, whose brain she mixed with moss and used to tan the skins and make the soft brown leather which she shaped so deftly into tunic, moccasins, and leggings. Her own skirt was scarce so richly worked with quills of the porcupine as that of her adopted sister there beside her, though both were made by Tekakwitha's hands.

The Indian girls about her like her for her generous nature and her merry, witty speeches. She makes them laugh right heartily while she stands waiting for her jug to fill up at the trickling spring.

These daughters of the Iroquois are bubbling over with good spirits, and their pottery jugs with water, when all at once they spy a band of hunters coming homeward down the Cayudutta valley from the Sacondaga country. Knowing there is one among them who but waits his chance to lay his wealth of beaver-skins at Tekakwitha's feet and take her for his wife, they turn girl-like to tease her; but the quick and timid orphan, dreading the license of their tongues, has bounded up the hill, and hastens to her uncle's cabin with her jug, leaving her companions to bandy words with the young hunters as they stop beside the little pool for a draught of refreshing water.

Of all the people in the ancient Caughnawaga village, the only story that has been written out in full and handed down in precious manuscript, brown with age, is the story of her who bounded up the hill and left her comrades at the spring. In a double sense she left them. She was far above them. She stands to-day upon a mystic height; and many, both of her race and our own in these our days, do homage to her memory.

May her home at Caughnawaga, high above the stones that lie imbedded in the Mohawk River, and close beside the spring that trickles downward to the Cayudutta,[5] soon become familiar ground to all who honor Tekakwitha!

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The Indian forts or palisaded villages, called "castles" by the early Dutch settlers of New York State, were stoutly built of logs and bark, and were effectual barriers of defence until the artillery of the white men was brought to bear upon them.

[3] Megapolensis, the Dutch dominie at Fort Orange, who befriended Jogues, the French Jesuit, in his captivity, writes the name of this Mohawk town or castle, Asserue or Asserne. It was just at the spot where a shrine has been recently elected to honor the memory of Isaac Jogues and of his companion Réné Goupil, both of whom were tomahawked in that vicinity by the Mohawks.

[4] Jogues' Indian name.

[5] [See Appendix, Note A], where in a letter dated March 3, 1885, Gen. John S. Clark, of Auburn, N. Y., the well-known archæologist, mentions this spring as marking the site of Gandawague (or Caughnawaga) on the Cayudutta Creek, northwest of Fonda, N. Y. For date of the removal from Auriesville to that site, see his [letter of June 29], 1885, also given in Note A, with other proofs as to the location of Mohawk villages at the time of Jogues and Tekakwitha.

CHAPTER II.

THE MOHAWK VALLEY AND THE MOHAWKS AT THE TIME OF TEKAKWITHA'S BIRTH

FATHER Jogues was put to death in the year 1646, on the south side of the Mohawk River, a few miles to the eastward of Fonda, and not far from the mouth of the Schoharie River. Close to the shrine which has been erected at Auriesville in his memory, is the very ravine in which, during his captivity there, he buried his friend and only companion, Réné Goupil.

Réné, it will be remembered, was cruelly murdered for signing an Indian child with the sign of the cross. The description of the place where this occurred is very explicit in Father Jogues' published letters, and there is no other spot in the whole Mohawk Valley to which it can well be applied. He mentions a certain river which was a quarter of a league distant from the Indian town of Ossernenon, where he was held captive; this was undoubtedly the Schoharie. There in that same vicinity, after he had escaped from captivity and returned to the Mohawks as a missionary, he met his own tragic fate, or rather the glorious reward of his zeal. There, too, or very near there, ten years after his death, Tekakwitha was born. The exact location of her birthplace has not been determined. It was either at the Turtle Castle of Ossernenon described by Jogues, the name of which was afterwards changed, or at a later village site near Auries Creek, to which the people of that castle moved, and to which they gave the name of Gandawague.[6] In either case her birthplace was less than a mile from the present hamlet of Auriesville.

There Kateri Tekakwitha was born in the year 1656. Her father was a Mohawk warrior, and her mother a Christian Algonquin captive, who had been brought up and baptized among the French settlers at Three Rivers in Canada. The Iroquois, or People of the Long House, including the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, were enemies of the Algonquin tribes and hostile to the French.

The Mohawks especially were accustomed to make frequent raids on the settlements in Canada, leaving desolation behind them on the St. Lawrence, and bearing with them to their own valley rich booty, and also captives to be tortured and burned, or else adopted into the Five Nations of Iroquois to swell their numbers. If Frenchmen, these captives were often held as prisoners of war, and haughty terms made for their ransom. It happened on one of these raids into Canada that Tekakwitha's mother, the Algonquin, was thus captured. Torn suddenly from a peaceful home and the French friends who were teaching her "the prayer," she was hurried through the lakes and woods of a strange country, along the great war-trail that leads from the St. Lawrence to the Mohawk through north-eastern New York. Fast following in the path of Jogues, the light canoe that bore her came southward with the braves, and their trophies of war, through Lake Champlain and then Lake George, the newly christened Lake St. Sacrament. Little did the captive dream that ever a child of hers would take that same long journey back again, an exile from the home that she was then approaching, all unconscious of her fate. A home, indeed, awaited her coming in the land of the Mohawks. She was saved from the torture and the fire by a fierce, pagan Mohawk warrior, who took the young Algonquin for his wife. The gentle girl had captured the heart of her conqueror.

Their family consisted of one son and an infant daughter, known later as Kateri Tekakwitha. Père Claude Chauchetière, who wrote in 1695,[7] tells us that they dwelt at "Gandawague, a little village of the Mohawks." There they must have occupied one section of an Iroquois long-house, other kindred families filling up its entire length on both sides of an open space and passage-way through the centre. The occupants of every four sections or alcoves in these houses, two families being on each side of the passage, shared a common hearthfire,[8] with a hole above it in the roof to let in the daylight and let out the smoke. There were usually five of these fires and twenty families in a house about a hundred feet in length. These united households gave name and meaning to the Iroquois League of Kanonsionni, or People of the Long House.

There is reason to believe that Tekakwitha's father took an active part in the affairs both of the Mohawk nation and the Iroquois League. We are told, indeed, that after his death her uncle, who seems to have taken her father's place and responsibilities, was one of the chief men of the Turtle Castle, whose deputies ranked higher in council than those of the Bear and Wolf Castles, Andagoron and Tionnontogen. This was because the turtle was created first, according to their genesis of things. These three palisaded strongholds and their outlying hamlets made up the Mohawk (or Canienga) nation. It was likened, in the beautiful figurative language of the Iroquois, to a group of families gathered round a hearth or council fire, and filling up one end of the Long House or Great League of the Five Nations, founded by Hiawatha and his friends. The duty of the Caniengas of the Mohawk Valley was to guard the eastern entrance of the Long House, or the door which looked out on the Hudson. Their privilege was to furnish the great war-chief that should lead the people of the League to battle.

The proud Senecas, whose portion of the house extended from Seneca Lake to Niagara, were the western doorkeepers of this household of nations, waging fierce war on their neighbors near Lake Erie. The wily Onondagas, wise old politicians, in the middle of the Long House, at Onondaga Lake, led in council. Their leading chief, the elected president of this first American republic, lit the central council-fire and sat in state among the fifty oyanders (sachems) who formed the Iroquois senate. Ten of these were always Caniengas (or Mohawks), and fourteen were Onondagas. These two nations and the Senecas were called brothers; while the intermediate Oneidas and Cayugas were always spoken of as nephews, because they were younger and less important nations, with fewer oyanders.

Tekakwitha's father may have been one of the ten Mohawk oyanders, but there is more reason to believe that he belonged to a class of war-chiefs who took part only in councils of war. In 1656 these war-chiefs were very influential, for the Iroquois had set out on a wild career of conquest, the warlike Mohawks as usual taking the lead. The very same year that the little Mohawk-Algonquin was born in their land, they swept like a tornado over Isle Orleans, near Quebec. They carried off to their castles the last remnant of the Huron people, who, far from their own land, had gathered near the French guns for protection. These Hurons from the shores of Lake Huron belonged to the Iroquois stock, as distinguished from the Algonquin races. In very early times they had come down to the settlements on the St. Lawrence to trade with the French, and zealous Jesuit missionaries had accompanied them on their return to their own country. After great hardships these missionaries had succeeded in making them Christians, when, as the final result of an old feud, these Huron-Iroquois, as they are often called, were driven from their homes in the Northwest by the Iroquois of the League, and wiped completely out of existence as a nation. Six of the Jesuits who dwelt among them, and whose strange isolated lives have furnished the theme for Parkman's glowing pages, were massacred, while others were cruelly tortured by the ubiquitous Mohawks during the period of ten short years that elapsed between Jogues' last captivity and Tekakwitha's birth. Could the father of the Mohawk Lily have reddened his hands in their blood? It is more than likely; for though Ondessonk or Jogues was the only one of these martyrs who had reached the Mohawk Valley, they were all slain by Mohawk braves,—Jogues, Daniel, Brebeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, and Garreau; nor is this a complete list of the victims. To use once more the words of John Gilmary Shea, historian of these and their fellow pioneers,—

"Fain would we pause to follow each in his labors, his trials, and his toils; recount their dangers from the heathen Huron, the skulking Iroquois, the frozen river, hunger, cold, and accident; to show Garnier wrestling with the floating ice, through which he sank on an errand of mercy; Chabanel struggling on for years on a mission from which every fibre of his nature shrunk with loathing; Chaumonot compiling his grammar on the frozen earth; or the heroic Brebeuf, paralyzed by a fall, with his collar-bone broken, creeping on his hands and feet along the road and sleeping unsheltered on the snow when the very trees were splitting with cold," and later, "as a martyr, one of the most glorious in our annals for the variety and atrocity of his torments."

This last-mentioned blackgown, John de Brebeuf, called Echon by the Hurons, was a writer of valuable works on the Indian language and customs. He belonged to a noble family of Normandy; and on account of his great natural courage and soldierly bearing, his agony was prolonged by the savages with fiendish ingenuity, till finally, failing to wring a sigh of pain from his lips, they "clove open his chest, took out his noble heart, and devoured it," as a medicine to make them fearless-hearted.

The fortitude of a brave man under torture was a spectacle as keenly appreciated by the Iroquois as were the gladiator fights and martyrdoms of old by the Romans. The women in this case, however, instead of decreeing death by turning down their own thumbs, were granted the less fatal and less dainty privilege of sawing off the thumb of the victim, as in the case of Jogues at Ossernenon. The human torches of Nero, who had the early Christians wrapped in straw and placed in his garden on the Palatine Hill, then set on fire to illuminate his evening revels, are vividly recalled by the death of Brebeuf's companion, the delicate and gentle Gabriel Lalemant. He was wrapped in pieces of bark which were put in a blaze. His writhing frame and quivering flesh contrasted finely with the stoic endurance of Brebeuf, and the Iroquois kept him alive till morning, leaving his body at last a black and shapeless mass.

These gifted men living and dying in the wilderness were not without devoted followers, as can well be imagined; and many of their converts, the Christian Hurons, a now conquered race, dwelt with their old foes in the Long House. With the capture of those of the Hurons who had taken refuge at Isle Orleans the long struggle ended between two branches of a great Indian family or stock,—the Huron-Iroquois and the Iroquois of the League. Once victorious, it was the policy of the Five Nations of the League to quit all enmity, and to give the vanquished a home in their midst. Though the Hurons lost their national existence when thus adopted into the League, they did not lose their Christian faith. They clung to it in the midst of all the wild superstitions of their conquerors. They explained it to others as well as they could, and they welcomed with glad hearts any blackgown who was brave enough to tread in the footsteps of Jogues.

Such an one was Father Lemoyne, who came and went five times among the Onondagas and the Mohawks between the years 1653 and 1658, even while they were at war with his countrymen on the St. Lawrence. On a hurried visit to Fort Orange, the nearest colony of Europeans, he told the people there of the salt springs which are now a source of wealth at Syracuse; but the worthy burghers were incredulous and put it down in their records as "a Jesuit lie." These early settlers of our State, in spite of such occasional indications of prejudice, were a kind-hearted and a peace-loving people, always ready to do friendly offices for men who, unlike their rivals the Canadian traders, seemed to value the souls of the Indians more than their beaver-skins. They had already rescued two Jesuits, Jogues and Bressani, from captivity; and they afterwards sent Father Lemoyne a bottle of wine with which to say Mass at Onondaga. This last missionary the Indians now called Ondessonk, in memory of Jogues. He visited the Mohawks in 1656 to console the Huron exiles from Isle Orleans, and at the same time he reproached the Mohawk warriors for their cruelty.

This, of course, was little to the taste of Tekakwitha's pagan father, who took care, no doubt, that the blackgown should have no intercourse with his Algonquin wife, for in his opinion she was already too fond of the French Christians. He did not wish her to have his tiny, new-born daughter signed with the ill-omened cross, and to have the water of baptism poured on her head. So Ondessonk came and went, passing near, but not finding Tekakwitha's mother, who still cherished the Christian faith in her heart. When she knew that he was gone, it must have been with many a sigh and many a thought of her northern home, that she tied her baby to its cradle-board, all carved and curtained after the Indian fashion, and then loaded with the precious burden, went off as usual to her work in the corn-fields. From time to time she would pause for a moment to smile at her little breathing bundle as it swung from the branch of a tree near by, and we may be sure, too, that as she gathered in the harvest for the winter, she whispered many a prayer for peace and for the coming of the blackgown to dwell in the land, that her child might grow up a Christian. Let us hope some distant echo reached her in the Mohawk corn-field from the shores of Onondaga Lake. For there, where the city of Syracuse now sits among the hills, a crowd of Iroquois were gathered at that very time into the rough bark chapel of St. Mary's of Ganentaha, listening to the Christian law of marriage preached then for the first time in their land. Quick to understand the new dignity it gave them, the Onondaga women silently made up their minds to learn "the prayer," by which they meant Christianity. All the while that the blackgown was speaking, the captive Hurons who were in the throng gazed with pent-up joy at the face of their beloved Echon (Chaumonot, the namesake of Brebeuf), whose voice they had often heard at the mission forts in their own country. Soon after Echon's visit other fathers came among the Iroquois nations with a colony of Frenchmen; these last had been cordially invited to Onondaga. The reason for this invitation was that its people, hard pressed by their savage enemies, wanted peace with Onnontio, the French governor, and thought to secure it in this way; the Mohawks, however, took no part in this temporary peace. They were angry with the Onondagas for claiming their captives from the Isle Orleans, and they continued their raids on the French frontier regardless of a treaty made by their brother nation. It must be remembered, though, that these Indians, while warring with the French were then and always at peace with the Dutch of Fort Orange. From them they obtained the fire-arms that were used so effectively in their warfare in Canada.

The wife of the Mohawk warrior at Gandawague may have heard rumors of the treaty made with Onnontio; but she saw the great kettle prepared as usual in the Turtle village for the annual war-dance, and all hope of a peace with the French died out once more from her heart.

It was the custom of the Mohawks to set this kettle to boil in the early winter; and from time to time each warrior dropped something in to keep it going and thus to signify his intention of joining the next expedition. By February all was in readiness for the great dance of the nation. A war-dance among the Indians is conducted in some such way as this: Stripped of all but the breech-cloth, gay with war-paint and feathers, the dried head of a bear, if that be the totem of his clan, fastened on head or shoulder, and with rattling deer-hoofs strapped to his knees, each warrior springs to his place, and the wild dance begins, accompanied by the beating of a drum. Wilder and wilder grow their antics, and more boastful the words of their chant, as they catch the spirit of the dance, till at last they seem the very incarnation of war. With all the vividness of Indian pantomime, they act out the scenes of battle before the eyes of the crouching women and children gathered in silent awe to witness this great savage drama. At first the warriors seem to be creeping along the forest trail with every faculty alert; and then with fearful whoops they whirl their tomahawks through the air at a senseless post, springing back as if in self-defence, falling again upon the imaginary foe, hacking with violence, and mingling shrieks with their victorious shouts, till in the flickering light of the fire and the weird shadows of surrounding objects, the assembled crowd, completely carried away by the vividness of the pantomime, see human victims falling beneath their strokes.

During the progress of the annual war-dance at Gandawague a group of Indian boys stand gazing with wide-open eyes at the heroes of the Kanienke-ha-ka whose past and future deeds are thus pictured before them. With swelling hearts they listen to the wild refrain, "Wah-hee! Ho-ha!" that comes at intervals. Among the smallest of the group we have in view is Tekakwitha's little brother, and her father is taking part in the dance. His voice, as it leads a louder swell of the war-song, startles her from her baby dreams, and she nestles close in her mother's arms. Later she hears the same voice in the lodge,—a few brief words rolling from the tongue[9] of the warrior in the low musical tones of the Mohawk language; and it only lulls her into sounder sleep. The dance is over, and the crowd scattered; but still we linger about to see what will happen next. A death-like silence reigns in the village. There is not one sentinel on watch. It would be well if they were more vigilant, but for the present they are safe. Their foes are far away, and the high palisade keeps off the prowling beasts. The darkness of night has closed over them. It is the hour for dreams, and dreams are the religion of the red-man. They are treasured up and told to the medicine-man or sorcerer, the influential being who is both priest and doctor in the village. When the excitement of the war-dance has subsided and the people are all sleeping soundly, this mysterious personage with stealthy tread may be seen to issue from the silent cluster of houses, and by the light of the moon he gathers his herbs and catches the uncanny creatures of the night with which to weave his spells. He knows that the young warriors will be coming to him for some inkling of their fate on the war-path, and besides he must supply a certain cure for their wounds. When he has found it for them he will gather them all in the public square at Gandawague, and after other exhibitions of his skill will perhaps cut his own lip, and when the blood is flowing freely, will stanch it and cure it in a moment by applying his magic drug. It will be well for his fame if there be not the keen eye of a French Jesuit in the crowd to watch him as he quickly sucks the blood into his mouth. He knows that the warriors are easily duped by his cunning, and will probably buy his mixture. Happy in its possession, they will fear no evil effects from their wounds. Their sweethearts too seek the sorcerer to have their fortunes told, and the old men and women come to him with their ailments. Even the orators are glad of a hint from his fertile brain; and the oyander or matron of rank who is about to nominate a new chief may perhaps consult him. If her choice has been already made, however, it is no easy task to persuade her to change her mind.

With the month of March comes the Dream-Feast, and then the medicine-man is in his glory. For three days the town is in a hubbub, given up to every freak of the imagination. All the dreams of its people, no matter how foolish and unreasonable, must be fulfilled in some way to the dreamer's satisfaction. The wiser heads among them have to tax their ingenuity to the utmost to prevent the worst excesses of this crazy celebration. The Christian Indians, above all, dreaded its coming for if the sorcerer's interpretation pointed in their direction, they were sure to suffer. During the celebration of the Dream-Feast the Algonquin captive would not fail to hide herself and her children in the darkest corner she could find. She had a better chance to pass unnoticed, however, than the more numerous Huron Christians, who, like herself, had been captured by the Iroquois. Against these there was a growing enmity encouraged no doubt by the sorcerers, who profited least of all by their presence among the people. Some months after the time of the Dream-Feast the gathering storm burst over their heads. On the 3d of August, 1657, the Hurons, who dwelt at Onondaga, were suddenly massacred. The party that had been advocating friendship with the French, and which had taken the lead in establishing the French colony at Onondaga, headed by Garacontié ("The Sun that advances"), were fast losing ground. The situation, even of the French colonists who were there, was becoming critical; and in April, 1658, when Tekakwitha was in her second year, strange things happened in the Long House of the Five Nations.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] See [Appendix, Note B],—the words "Gandawague" and "Tekakwitha."

[7] Chauchetière's manuscript, "La Vie de la B. Catherine Tegakouita, dite a present La Saincte Sauuagesse," is still extant. It was copied by the author of this volume at Montreal in 1884, and was first printed in 1887: "Manate, De la Presse Cramoisy de Jean-Marie Shea."

[8] See Vol. IV., Contributions to American Ethnology, by Lewis H. Morgan, LL.D., giving description and ground plan of an Iroquois long-house.

[9] "The Mohawk language is on the tongue; the Wyandot is in the throat."—Schoolcraft's Red Race.

CHAPTER III.

A CRADLE-SONG.—CAPTIVES TORTURED.—FLIGHT OF THE FRENCH FROM ONONDAGA.—DEATH IN THE MOHAWK LODGES.

LET the reader, in imagination, look into Tekakwitha's home at Gandawague on the Mohawk, as it appeared in the month of April, 1658, and learn if the news that is spreading from nation to nation has yet reached there. To find the lodge he wishes to enter, he will follow a woman who is passing along the principal street of the village with an energetic step. The corners of a long blanket, that envelops her head and whole form, flap as if in a breeze from her own quick motion, for the air is quite still. It is early spring-time. There are pools of frozen water here and there; but the dogs of the village have chosen a sunny spot to gnaw at the bones they have found near the cabin of a fortunate hunter, who gave a feast the night before to his more needy neighbors. All shared in his good cheer. So long as there is food in the village, no one is allowed to go hungry. Such is the Indian law of hospitality.

Tegonhatsihongo, who will be better known by and by under the name of Anastasia, gathers her blanket about her, and with the usual greeting, "Sago!" she passes a matron at a neighboring doorway, who withdraws the heavy bear-skin curtain she has placed there for keeping out the cold, in order that she may see where to put away the snow-shoes, now no longer needed. She stores them high above her head among the poles that support the snug bark roof. The keen eye of Tegonhatsihongo notes at a glance what the matron is about; and as she turns her head for a second look, one can see by the lines in her face that she is already on the downward slope of middle age. She passes on through an open space where a scaffold is prepared for the exhibition of any captives the warriors may chance to bring back from their raid on Montreal. Tegonhatsihongo scarcely notices these familiar preparations for the torture, but directs her steps to the lodge of a chief opening on the square. She is about to visit her friend the Algonquin, whose brave is away on the war-path. The quiet ways of this younger woman have attracted her and won her friendship. As she lifts the hanging skin to enter, she pauses a moment. Surprised, perhaps, and well pleased too to find the Algonquin in a merry mood, romping with her baby, now more than a year old, she stands and watches her. Catching the child from the clean-swept earthen floor, the mother holds it laughing and struggling in her lap, while she sings the Algonquin "Song of the Little Owl."[10] A pretty picture she makes, seated by the nearest fire of faggots, in the dim, smoky light of the long-house; and these are the words of her cradle-song and their literal translation:—

Here the young mother looks up, as if she really saw the eyes of the little white owl glaring from among the rustic rafters or through the hole in the roof. The dark eyes of the dark little baby, which follow the direction of hers, are opening wide with wonder at this sudden break from song to pantomime; and now the Algonquin answers her own questions, assuming all at once the tone of the little screech-owl:—

With the last words, meaning "Dodge, baby, dodge!" she springs towards the child, and down goes the little head. This is repeated with the utmost merriment on both sides, till their laughter is interrupted by the entrance of Tegonhatsihongo, who seats herself near her friend, their talk soon taking a serious turn. Now for the first time the Algonquin notices that others in the same cabin are putting their heads together and talking in low voices. The very air seems full of mystery. The busy ones have dropped their accustomed occupations, and the idle ones have ceased their noisy talk and their games. All are wondering at the strange news from the Indian capital, telling of the unaccountable disappearance of the Frenchmen who formed the little colony at Onondaga. Mohawks who were there on a visit have returned with marvellous tales. The few facts of the history are soon known, but there is no end to the surmises that are afloat among the Iroquois. This is what they are all talking about. This is what happened. The French colonists whom we have already mentioned, fifty-three in number, had given a great feast at their small block fort on the east bank of Onondaga Lake.[11] All the Onondagas and their guests from other nations who chanced to be there at the time, were invited. Some of Tegonhatsihongo's friends from the Mohawk Valley were present among the rest, and knew all about it. They were completely carried away with admiration for their French hosts, who gave them a right royal feast. When it was over they fell into slumber and dreamed strange dreams. Then, awaking when the sun was high, the bewildered guests went about half dazed. Some of them, straggling near the French enclosure, heard the dogs bark and a cock crow within. As the day wore on, they gathered into groups and wondered why the foreign inmates slept so long. None of them were to be seen going to work; no voices were heard. Could they be at prayer or in secret council? No one answered when they knocked at the door. By afternoon there were strange whisperings and much misgiving among the Onondagas, till at last their curiosity outgrew their dread, and nerved a few to scale the palisade. With cautious step they entered, fearing some treacherous snare. The Frenchmen could not be asleep, they thought, for the noisy barking of the dog would almost wake the dead. Could they have slain one another in the night? No; all was peaceful as they entered,—no signs of a struggle, and the sunlight danced playfully in through utter vacancy. Every corner of the house and fort was searched; no human being, dead or living, was found, yet noisy and more noisy grew the barking of the fastened dog, and frightened chickens fluttered about. The Indians looked at one another, shuddering. What had happened? With guilty consciences they thought of their deep-laid treachery here brought to naught; for as the Algonquin now learned from the talk in the long-house, they had planned to massacre the colony invited to their land from policy. Having subjugated their savage foes of the Cat nation, they were ready to turn their arms once more against the French. They had felt quite sure of their prey; for even if warned, the colonists and missionaries could not have escaped, they thought, as the rivers were still frozen. Besides, it was out of the question to suppose they had gone by water, as no boat was missing. Had they taken to the woods, they would soon have perished in the cold, having no guides, or else they would have fallen again into the hands of their enemies, who could easily track and overtake them in the forest. No trace of them, however, was anywhere to be found. Never were the red men more completely baffled. Tegonhatsihongo and the others who talked it all over had two favorite explanations of the mystery,—either the Frenchmen had a magic power of walking on the lakes, or else strange creatures, seen by Onondagas in their dreams, had flown through the air bearing the pale-faces with them.

While Tekakwitha's mother was still wondering at this unaccountable story, the Mohawk braves returned from their raid on Montreal, and the people of the village were soon hurrying out with little iron rods, to take their stand on either side of the path that led up the hill to the principal opening in the palisade. There they were, ready to beat the prisoners as they approached, "running the gauntlet." Then the crowd eagerly watched the progress of the tortures on the scaffold, after which the prisoners were handed over, bound hand and foot, to the tender mercies of the children. These juvenile savages amused themselves by putting red-hot coals on the naked flesh of the captives, and tormented them in every way their mischief-loving brains could devise. Thus early did the warrior's son begin his education.

But this side of the Indian nature is too horrible to dwell on; let it pass. At times the Iroquois were like incarnate devils; and yet each tale of frightful cruelty that history preserves for us brings with it some redeeming trait, some act of kindness or humanity done in the face of savage enmity. There were always a few among them ready like Pocahontas to avert the threatened blow or to relieve the sufferers whenever it was possible. One of these in days gone by had administered to Jogues; and one of these in days now soon to come will prove to be our Tekakwitha.

There is little more to say about her parents. Her mother may have learned from some of the captives brought to Gandawague from Canada the true ending of the French colony at Onondaga. At all events, the following explanation of their sudden disappearance has been given by Ragueneau, who shared the fate of the adventurous little band. He says in one of his letters:—

"To supply the want of canoes, we had built in secret two batteaux of a novel and excellent structure to pass the rapids; these batteaux drew but very little water and carried considerable freight, fourteen or fifteen men each, amounting to fifteen or sixteen hundred weight. We had moreover four Algonquin and four Iroquois canoes, which were to compose our little fleet of fifty-three Frenchmen. But the difficulty was to embark unperceived by the Iroquois, who constantly beset us. The batteaux, canoes, and all the equipage could not be conveyed without great noise, and yet without secrecy there was nothing to be expected, save a general massacre of all of us the moment it would be discovered that we entertained the least thought of withdrawing.

On that account we invited all the savages in our neighborhood to a solemn feast, at which we employed all our industry, and spared neither the noise of drums nor instruments of music, to deceive them by harmless device. He who presided at this ceremony played his part with so much address and success that all were desirous to contribute to the public joy. Every one vied in uttering the most piercing cries, now of war, anon of rejoicing. The savages, through complaisance, sung and danced after the French fashion, and the French in the Indian style. To encourage them the more in this fine play, presents were distributed among those who acted best their parts and who made the greatest noise to drown that caused by about forty of our people outside who were engaged in removing all our equipage. The embarkation being completed, the feast was concluded at a fixed time; the guests retired, and sleep having soon overwhelmed them, we withdrew from our house by a back door and embarked with very little noise, without bidding adieu to the savages, who were acting cunning parts and were thinking to amuse us to the hour of our massacre with fair appearances and evidences of good will.

"Our little lake,[12] on which we silently sailed in the darkness of the night, froze according as we advanced, and caused us to fear being stopt by the ice after having evaded the fires of the Iroquois. God, however, delivered us, and after having advanced all night and all the following day through frightful precipices and waterfalls, we arrived finally in the evening at the great Lake Ontario, twenty leagues from the place of our departure. This first day was the most dangerous; for had the Iroquois observed our departure, they would have intercepted us, and had they been ten or twelve it would have been easy for them to have thrown us into disorder, the river being very narrow, and terminating after travelling ten leagues in a frightful precipice where we were obliged to land and carry our baggage and canoes during four hours, through unknown roads covered with a thick forest which could have served the enemy for a fort, whence at each step he could have struck and fired on us without being perceived. God's protection visibly accompanied us during the remainder of the road, in which we walked through perils which made us shudder after we escaped them, having at night no other bed except the snow after having passed entire days in the water and amid the ice.

Ten days after our departure we found Lake Ontario, on which we floated, still frozen at its mouth. We were obliged to break the ice, axe in hand, to make an opening, to enter two days afterwards a rapid where our little fleet had well-nigh foundered. For having entered a great sault without knowing it, we found ourselves in the midst of breakers which, meeting a quantity of big rocks, threw up mountains of water and cast us on as many precipices as we gave strokes of paddles. Our batteaux, which drew scarcely half a foot, were soon filled with water, and all our people in such confusion that their cries mingled with the roar of the torrent presented to us the spectacle of a dreadful wreck. It became imperative, however, to extricate ourselves, the violence of the current dragging us despite ourselves into the large rapids and through passes in which we had never been. Terror redoubled at the sight of one of our canoes being engulfed in a breaker which barred the entire rapid, and which, notwithstanding, was the course that all the others must keep. Three Frenchmen were drowned there; a fourth fortunately escaped, having held on to the canoe and being saved at the foot of the sault when at the point of letting go his hold, his strength being exhausted....

"The 3d of April we landed at Montreal in the beginning of the night."

This escape, so wonderful to the Indian mind and so successful, made a profound impression at Gandawague as among all the Mohawks, and produced most important results in the neighborhood of Tekakwitha's home, interrupting the work of the missionary there.

Ondessonk or Lemoyne, the namesake of Jogues, who made a third visit to the Mohawk Valley in the fall of 1657, was no longer even tolerated by its people. He was held half a hostage, half a prisoner, at Tionnontogen, during the time that the French colony were in peril at Onondaga, and was finally sent back to Canada. He left the Mohawk country for the last time, just after Onondaga was abandoned by the French. He reached his countrymen on the St. Lawrence in May, 1658, to be greeted there with a glad welcome and many inquiries from the newly arrived refugees from Onondaga, concerning his experiences among the Mohawks; they were anxious to hear whether he had fared any better than themselves.

Not one blackgown was now left among the Five Nations of Iroquois. The Algonquin mother at Gandawague had been unable to profit by their brief stay in the land, and her life grew ever sadder towards its close. She was finally laid low by a terrible disease, the small-pox, which spread like wild fire through the Mohawk nation in 1659 and 1660. Her brave, an early victim to this redman's plague, soon lay cold in death, and with aching heart she too bade good-by to the world, leaving her helpless children alone and struggling with the disease in a desolate lodge in a desolate land.

Chauchetière relates what he learned long afterwards from Anastasia Tegonhatsihongo,—that in leaving her two little children the mother grieved at having to abandon them without baptism; that she was a fervent Christian to the last, and that she met death with a prayer on her lips.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Schoolcraft's Red Race.

[11] The site of this fort is still pointed out between Salina and Liverpool, near the "Jesuit's Spring," or "Well," as it is called. For a plan of the fort made by Judge Geddes in 1797, from remains of it then in existence, see Clark's "Onondaga," p. 147. See also "Relations des Jésuites," and translations of the same in the "Documentary History of New York," vol. i., for a full account of the Onondaga Colony in 1658.

[12] Onondaga Lake.

CHAPTER IV.

TEKAKWITHA WITH HER AUNTS AT GANDAWAGUE.

TEKAKWITHA'S brother shared the fate of her parents. All three died within the space of a few days. Overshadowed by death and disease when she was only four years old, the little Indian child alone remained of the family. How she won her name is not known, though Indian names have always a meaning. They are never arbitrarily given. The word "Tekakwitha," as M. Cuoq, the philologist, translates it, means "One who approaches moving something before her." Marcoux, the author of a complete Iroquois dictionary, renders it, "One who puts things in order."[13]

It has been suggested in reference to M. Cuoq's interpretation, that the name may have been given to her on account of a peculiar manner of walking caused by her imperfect sight; for it is related that the small-pox so injured her eyes that for a long time she was obliged to shade them from a strong light. It is possible that in groping or feeling her way while a child, she may have held out her hands in a way that suggested the pushing of something in front of her, and thus have received her name. On the other hand, the interpretation of M. Marcoux, as given by Shea, is thoroughly in keeping with her character. She indeed spent a great part of her life, as the record shows, in putting things in order.

On the death of Tekakwitha's father, her uncle, according to the Indian laws of descent, would fall heir to the title of chief, after having been chosen by the matron or stirps of the family,[14] and then duly elected by the men of the Turtle clan. Tekakwitha then became an inmate of her uncle's lodge,—which was quite natural, for indeed she was likely to prove a valuable acquisition to the household. This uncle was impoverished, no doubt, by the plague and also by the custom of making presents. A chief is expected to dispense freely, and is generally poor in spite of his honors. But daughters were always highly prized by the Iroquois; as they grew up they were expected to do a large part of the household work; and later, when wedded to some sturdy hunter, the lodge to which a young woman belonged, claimed and received whatever her husband brought from the chase. So the aunts and the uncle of Tekakwitha acted quite as much from worldly wisdom as from humanity when they decided to give the young orphan a home. Forethought was mixed with their kindness, and perhaps also a bit of selfishness. They had no children of their own, but they adopted another young girl besides Tekakwitha, thus giving to their niece a sister somewhat older than herself. The home of this family, after the small-pox had spent its force and when the distress it caused had forced the Mohawks to make a treaty of peace with the French, was at Gandawague,[15] on a high point of land in the angle between Auries Creek and the Mohawk River.

Sites of Mohawk Castles 1642 TO 1700, as located by John S Clark, Auburn NY

Here on the crest of the hill, in a wheat-field west of the creek, there still are signs of an Indian village, and just outside of the fence in a patch of woods Indian graves and corn-pits are to be seen. Well does the writer remember a bright summer day when that village site where Tekakwitha must have spent her early childhood was visited and examined for traces of Iroquois occupation. Three of us had driven over from the spring and castle-site of Caughnawaga at Fonda to the west side of Auries Creek. Leaving our carriage, we mounted the steep bank of the stream, eager to find the exact site of Gandawague, to which the people of Ossernenon moved before they crossed the river to Caughnawaga. We stood at last on the hard-won summit, and there lay the landscape in its tranquil beauty,—the Mohawk Valley, the river, a wheat-field against a dark wood, and off in the distance the court-house of Fonda, and dim Caughnawaga, all bathed in a glory of sunshine. Nearer at hand and toward the east, a little white steeple gleamed through the trees, marking the site of the modern village of Auriesville. We stood high above it, on the upper river terrace, where old Gandawague had once been; and though the rude Indian castle at that spot had long ago been trampled out of existence, we seemed to see it rise again from the ashes of its ancient hearthfires. Then, looking off toward the Schoharie, in our mind's eye we plainly saw on the broad, grassy plateau the still older village of Ossernenon, with its high palisade, that once upheld the ghastly head of the martyred Jogues. The scene was before us in all its details. The past had become like the present that day, and what was then present, all blended with sunshine that blotted out the tragic and left the heroic parts of the picture, has since become past. Those glorious hours at the castle-sites near Auriesville, so rich in awakened thought, contagious enthusiasm, and newly acquired information, are only a memory now; and mention is made of them here in the hope that others may feel a stir of interest in their hearts, and be roused to visit the Mohawk Valley, and the places so closely linked to the names of Jogues and Tekakwitha,—Ossernenon, where the shrine is built; Gandawague, on the bank of Auries Creek; and Caughnawaga,[16] five miles farther up the river.

Tekakwitha was only a little girl when she lived at Gandawague. It could hardly have been a large castle, on such a small bit of high land. They had little need at this time of a large castle, for many had died of the small-pox. The old Dutch records of the time relate that the Turtles, or people of the lower castle, were building a new palisade, in the latter part of the year 1659,—a task which would necessarily accompany a removal from Ossernenon; and they asked the Dutchmen, their neighbors, to help them. The friendship of these settlers for the Mohawks was put to rather a queer test when they proposed that the Dutch should not only furnish them with horses, but should drive them themselves, and drag the heavy logs up the hill for the palisade.[17] They were not used to such work; and it better became the settlers to do it, they thought, than Mohawk warriors!

Some Dutchmen of Fort Orange were at the Turtle Castle on an embassy when this unpleasant proposal was made to them, and they thus shirked it. "Do you not see we are tired?" they said. "We have travelled far through the forest. Our men are few and weary; besides you have no roads. Our horses could never get up there. You must excuse us, our friends, and manage to do it without us. See, as a token of friendship, we have brought you fifty new hatchets." Then, giving the Indians knick-knacks and weapons, they bade them farewell and departed, journeying back in haste to their homes on the Hudson.

Thus the Indians were left to finish their own palisade, or stockade, whichever one may choose to call it; and the uncle of Tekakwitha doubtless worked with the rest. When it was finished, it stood and protected them well for six uneventful years; that is to say, they were uneventful for Indians, though during the whole of that period they were making and breaking treaties of peace with the French, and were warring with other tribes. During this time, while the fighting was all carried on at a distance from the Mohawk castles, Tekakwitha lived in the greatest seclusion. She was cared for and taught by her aunts, in one of the cabins closed in by the palisade. She was learning the arts of the Indians, doing the daily work, and shrinking from all observation. This unsociable habit of hers (for so it must have seemed to her neighbors) was due in part to her own disposition,—modest, shy, and reserved,—but more than all, perhaps, to the fact that the small-pox had injured her eyesight. As she could not endure much light, she remained indoors, and when forced to go out, her eyes were shaded by her blanket. Little by little she grew to love a life of quiet and silence. Besides, she showed a wonderful aptness for learning to make all the curious bark utensils and wooden things that were used in the village. Much to her aunts' satisfaction, she had an industrious spirit. This they took care to encourage, as it made her very useful. These aunts were exceedingly vain; and a child of less sense than the young Tekakwitha would soon have been spoiled by their foolishness.

Chauchetière has told us quaintly, in old-fashioned French, "what she did during the first years of her age." We cannot do better here than to follow his account, translating it almost word for word:—-

"The natural inclination which girls have to appear well, makes them esteem very much whatever adorns the body; and that is why the young savages from seven to eight years of age are silly, and have a great love for porcelaine (wampum). The mothers are even more foolish, for they sometimes spend a great deal of time in combing and dressing the hair of their daughters; they take care that their ears shall be pierced, and commence to pierce them from the cradle; they put paint on their faces, and fairly cover them with beads when they have occasion to go to the dance.

"Those into whose hands Tegakoüita fell when her mother died, resolved to have her marry very soon, and with this object they brought her up in all these little vanities; but the little Tegakoüita, who was not yet a Christian, in truth, nor baptized, had a natural indifference for all these things. She was like a tree without flowers and without fruit; but this little wild olive was budding so well into leaf that it promised some day to bear beautiful fruit; or a heaven covered with the darkness of paganism, but a heaven indeed, for she was far removed from the corruption of the savages,—she was sweet, patient, chaste, and innocent. Sage comme une fille française bien élevée,—As good as a French girl well brought up,—this is the testimony that has been given by those who knew her from a very young age, and who in using this expression gave in a few words a beautiful panegyric of Catherine Tegakoüita. Anastasia Tegonhatsihongo said of her that 'she had no faults.'

"Her occupation was to carry little bundles of wood with her mother, that is to say, her aunt, the matron of the lodge, to put wood on the fire when the mother told her, to go for water when those in the cabin had need of it; and when they gave her no further commands she amused herself with her little jewels,—I mean she dressed herself up in the fashion of the other young girls of her age, just to pass the time. She would put a necklace about her throat; she would put bracelets of beads on her arms, rings on her fingers, and ear-rings in her ears. She made the ribbons and bands which the savages make with the skins of eels, which they redden, and render suitable for binding up their hair. She wore large and beautiful girdles, which they call wampum belts."

[These decorations not only adorn the person, but they also show the rank of the maiden who wears them.[18]]

"There was a sort of child-marriage in vogue among the Iroquois. Certain agreements of theirs were called marriage, which amounted to nothing more than a bond of friendship between the parents, rendered more firm by giving away a child, who was often still in the cradle; thus they married a girl to a little boy. This was done at a time when Tegakoüita was still very small; she was given to a child. The little girl was only about eight years old; the boy was hardly older than herself. They were both of the same humor, both very good children; and the little boy troubled himself no more about the marriage than did the girl."

It was a mere formality; but it shows how early Tekakwitha's relatives began to think of establishing her in life.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] So cited by Shea in his translation of Charlevoix's "History of New France," vol. iv. For different ways of spelling Tekakwitha's name, see [Appendix, Note B], where the grammatical explanation of it by M. Cuoq is also given.

[14] Among the Iroquois descent was never reckoned through the male line, the stirps being always a woman. A chief, therefore, derived his title from his mother. To her family, not his father's, he belonged; and back to her or to her mother at his death the title was referred, to be transmitted through her to some other descendant.

[15] See [General Clark's map] herewith printed.

[16] The castle of Caughnawaga at Fonda was also called Gandawague, long after its removal from Auries Creek. But it prevents confusion to give it always its more distinctive name of Caughnawaga.

[17] See [Appendix, Note A], Letter of June 29, 1885.

[18] See Cholenec, who mentions this fact in the "Lettres Édifiantes," translated by Kip in his work entitled "Early Jesuit Missions." What is said concerning child-marriage is from Chauchetière's manuscript.

CHAPTER V.

TEKAKWITHA'S UNCLE AND FORT ORANGE; OR THE BEGINNINGS OF ALBANY.

CHOLENEC, the more concise of the two contemporary biographers of Kateri Tekakwitha, in speaking of her early life says: "She found herself an orphan under the care of her aunts, and in the power of an uncle who was the leading man in the settlement." This brief expression gives us an intimation both of the character and the rank of Tekakwitha's formidable Mohawk uncle. He was stern, unbending, fierce; and like many another chief reared in the Long House, was proudly tenacious of the customs of his race. He was often on the worst of terms with the French blackgowns because they interfered with the beliefs and manners of his people; but always on the best of terms with the Dutch traders, who, in exchange for the rich furs brought in so plentifully to Fort Orange, supplied the Mohawks of Gandawague (or, as the Dutch wrote it, Kaghnuwage) with muskets, iron tomahawks, pipes, tobacco, copper kettles, scissors, duffels, strouds for blankets, and more than all, the keenly relished, comforting "fire water."

The influx of liquor to the Iroquois castles led to reckless debauches, fast following in the track of the small-pox, which stalked with unchecked violence through the Long House in 1660. During the course of the following year an important transaction took place between the white settlers on the Hudson and the Indians along the Mohawk, or Maquaas Kill. "A certain parcel of land," to use the words of the old deed, "called in Dutch the Groote Vlachte (Great Flatt), lying behind Fort Orange, between the same and the Mohawk country," was sold by Mohawk chiefs—Cantuquo (whose mark was a Bear); Aiadane, a Turtle; Sonareetsie, a Wolf; and Sodachdrasse—to Sieur Arent van Corlaer, July 27, 1661. "A grant under the provincial seal was issued in the following year, but the land was not surveyed or divided until 1664." The Indian name of the Great Flatt was Schonowe, and the new village of white settlers which soon sprang up on the south bank of the Mohawk was called Schenectady by the Dutch and English; though the French, who did not for some time learn of its existence, first knew this little outpost of Fort Orange by the name of Corlaer,[19] the earliest settler.

This founding of Schenectady was an event of deep interest to the Mohawks of Gandawague. It brought the dwellings of the white race closer than ever before to their own stronghold, almost in fact to the very door of the Kanonsionni, or People of the Long House. The settlers began at once to rear their wonderful wooden palaces, for such they must have seemed to the simple children of the forest. The wild banks of the Maquaas Kill had hitherto shown no prouder architecture than the long bark houses of the Mohawks, which nevertheless were much in advance of the wigwams or tents of the roving Algonquin tribes. The Indians of Gandawague must have hastened down in their canoes to watch the building of Schenectady, and listened with interest and curiosity to the strange buzz of the newly erected sawmill. These were already familiar sights and sounds, however, to Tekakwitha's uncle, for he had long been in the habit of trading with the Dutch and knew their ways. He often journeyed as far as their trading-house at Fort Orange. Let us follow in the footsteps of this Mohawk chief as he starts once again on the trail that leads eastward from Gandawague with furs he has been hoarding for some new purchase. Let us pass hurriedly on beyond the new abode of his friend Corlaer, and we shall then see the sights that greet him as he approaches the homes of the traders who dwell beside the Hudson,—or Cahotatea, as the chief of the Turtle Castle would call the great North River in his own language. He has other Indians of his nation with him. These Mohawks, says the first Dutch dominie, in the account he gives of them, have good features, with black hair and eyes, and they are well proportioned; they go naked in summer, and in winter they hang loosely about them a deer's, bear's, or panther's skin, or else they sew small skins together into a square piece, or buy two and a half ells of duffels from the Dutchmen. Some of them wear shoes and stockings of deer's skins; others of plaited corn-leaves. Their hair is left growing on one side of the head only, or else worn like a cock's comb or hog's bristles standing up in a streak from forehead to neck; some of them leave queer little locks growing here and there. Their faces are painted red and blue, so that they "look like the devil himself," continues the worthy Megapolensis. They carry a basket of bear's grease with which they smear their heads, and in travelling they take with them a maize-kettle and a wooden spoon and bowl. When it is meal-time they get fire very quickly by rubbing pieces of wood together; and they cook and devour their fish and venison without the preliminary cleaning and preparing considered necessary among civilized folks. When they feel pain they say, "Ugh! the devil bites," and when they wish to compliment their own nation they say, "Really the Mohawks are very cunning devils." They make no offerings to their good genius or national god, Tharonyawagon; but they worship the demon Otkon or Aireskoi, praying in this way, "Forgive us for not eating our enemies!" and in hot weather, "I thank thee, Devil, I thank thee, Oomke, for the cool breeze." They laugh at the Dutch prayers, the dominie tells us, and also at the sermon. They call the Christians of Fort Orange cloth-makers (assyreoni) and iron-workers (charistooni).

These uncouth travellers from Gandawague, among whom is the uncle of Tekakwitha, are fast nearing the homes of these same cloth-makers and iron-workers. Let us hasten to overtake them, and find our way with them into the settlement of Rensselaerwyck. You who dwell in New York State and you who travel through it, come with us now to visit old Fort Orange and the little town of Beverwyck! You above all who love to trace your lineage to the staid old Dutchmen of New Netherlands, come! Let us see the homes of these grandsires whose names appear so often in the record and ancient annals of our oldest chartered city. Come, too, you sons of English colonists, and see the flag of England float strangely in the Hudson River breezes while they are still loaded with the cumbrous sounds of the Low Dutch language! We will stay and see the laws of England put an end to queer old wordy wars between the stately Dutch patroon Van Rensselaer and Peter Stuyvesant, the doughty old Director-general, last and greatest of the four Dutch governors,—the one called "Wooden Leg" by Indians, and "Hard-headed Pete" by Dutchmen; though the poets say he had a silver leg, and the artists love to paint him with a gallant flourish as he stumped it down the street beside some pretty, quaintly dressed colonial belle. His were the days of knee-breeches and gigantic silver buckles, of ruffles and queues, of broad, short petticoats bedecked with mighty pockets, and of scissors and keys that hung from the belt,—the days of demure tea-parties and hilarious coasting-parties, of negro slaves and of sugar-loaf hats. As for weapons of war, the muskets they carried were strange and clumsy arms, with long, portable rests and "two fathoms of match," which the soldier must needs have with him, besides the heavy armor and the queer tackle for ammunition. No wonder that the wearers of such gear dreaded wars with the nimble savages!

Rip Van Winkle, after sleeping twenty years, awoke to painful changes; he was sadly out of date. It would surely then be cruel, even if we had the power, to wake old Peter Stuyvesant and the people of his day from full two hundred years of slumber in our graveyards just to criticise their dress and talk. Let us rather go to sleep ourselves and dream about them. Take a good strong dose of unassorted, crude, colonial history interspersed with annals, and the necessary drowsiness will surely follow. Have you tried it? Are you sure the spell is not upon you now, having stopped to look at Stuyvesant, and heard the dominie describe the Mohawks? The smoke of pipes and chimneys is at hand, for here we are at old Fort Orange in the times of Tekakwitha. Let us look about, before the power to do it fails us out of very sleepiness. We find ourselves within a wall of stockadoes. The chief and his friends from Kaghnuwage are undoing their packs of furs near the northern gate of the town. We stand in Albany, at the corner of Broadway and State Street,—but no! those names are not yet in vogue. We are in Beverwyck, at the point where the long, rambling Handelaer Street, running parallel with Hudson's River, crosses the broad, short Joncaer Street, which climbs some little distance up the hill. Before us is the old Dutch church. It stands by itself, at the intersection of the two streets, fronting south. It is a low, square, plain stone building, with a four-sided roof rising to a central summit surmounted by a small cupola or belfry containing the famous little bell just sent over from Holland by the Dutch West India Company; on this belfry is upreared a saucy little weathercock. The south porch or vestibule is approached by a large stone step before the principal door. If the church were not locked, we might take a look inside at the carved oaken pulpit with its queer little bracket for the dominie's hourglass. The burghers subscribed twenty-five beaver-skins to buy that pulpit, and a splendid one it was. It soon came sailing over the sea in a plump Dutch ship. The patrons of the colony finding the beaver-skins much damaged when the package was opened at Amsterdam had added seventy-five guilders themselves towards the purchase, besides presenting the bell outright. When Dominie Megapolensis first arrived in the colony, "nine benches" were enough to seat the whole congregation; but that was a generation ago. Now it has increased; and the church, which was then a wooden structure near the old fort by the river, has been rebuilt. The Van Rensselaers, the Wendels, the Schuylers and the Van der Blaas have the leading pews; they have already sent to Europe for stained glass windows blazoned with their family arms. Having seen the church, let us walk up Joncaer (State) Street to the dominie's. We pass through the market-place, which is out in the middle of the open, grassy space, on a line with the church. We stop a moment to look at the house of Anneke Janse, the heiress, and then move on to Parrell (Pearl) Street. There, on the northeast corner of Parrell and Joncaer Streets, gable end foremost, stands the comfortable abode of Dominie Schaats, which is the pride and envy of the town. Every part of this, the first brick house in the New World, is said to have been imported from Holland,—bricks, woodwork, tiles, and also the ornamental irons with which it is profusely adorned,—all expressly for the use of the Rev. Gideon Schaets (or Schaats), who came over in 1652. The materials of the house arrived simultaneously with the bell and pulpit in 1657.[20]

From Schaats' house we see, instead of a solitary "old elm-tree" on the opposite corner, many trees of different kinds, one in front of each of the straggling houses on either side of Joncaer Street; and by the age of the tree one can tell pretty well the order in which the different settlers arrived and began to domesticate themselves. This was no sooner done than the inevitable shade-tree was planted to overshadow the dwelling, and beneath this tree they bring the cow each evening to be milked. Around every house is a garden with a well; and the stoop at the front door is supplied with wooden seats or benches. There old and young gather in the evening when the day's work is over.

The upper half of the front door remains open all day in summer, while the lower half bars out the stray chickens and dogs. It is opened now and then, however, to let the children in and out, and once in a while a buxom vrouw leans out to chat with a passer-by, or perhaps to scold the little ones or to bid them beware of straying near the trading-house for fear of encountering a tipsy Indian. This trading-house is outside the wall of stockadoes, or upright posts, encircling the town. The traders of Beverwyck are all obliged "to ride their stockadoes,"—that is to say, to furnish the pine posts, thirteen feet long and one foot in diameter, for repairing the wooden wall. This duty falls alike on every inhabitant, at the command of the burgomasters and schepens. They are furthermore bound to take turns in drawing firewood to the trading-house for the use of the Indians when they come there from the Maquaas country loaded with packs of furs.

OLD ALBANY.—DOMINIE SCHAATS' HOUSE.
(Corner of Joncaer and Parrell Streets.)

Above Dominie Schaats' house and on the same side of Joncaer Street is the Corps de Garde, a small block fort where a few soldiers are stationed. There the progress of our walk is checked by the stout wall of stockadoes. One of the six gates or openings, however, is near at hand, leading out on to the road to Schenectady. We wish to see more of the place, and are at a loss to find our way; so we accept the kindly offered guidance of a little Schuyler lad, named Pieter, who stands talking to one of the soldiers. Already in his boyish days this public-spirited Albanian takes an active interest in the military defence of the place. He knows where all the cannon are placed, and can tell us how they propose to improve the fort and barracks on Joncaer Street. He takes us out by the Parrell Street gate to a road leading southward toward the hamlet of Bethlehem. After the boy has shown us the mills on the Bever Kill (Buttermilk Creek) from which the village of Beverwyck was named, he takes us down to old Fort Orange by the river-side.[21] It has been a snug little fort in its day, built of logs with four bastions, each mounted by two guns for throwing stones, while in the enclosure stands a large cannon on wheels close to the old trading-house of the West India Company. Since the new one has been built, this is used as the vice-director's house. It is twenty-six feet long, two stories high, constructed of boards one inch thick, with a roof in the form of a pavilion covered with old shingles. The space on the second floor is one undivided room directly under the roof without a chimney, to which access can be had by a straight ladder through a trap-door.[22] Here the magistrates administer justice. This is for the time being the court-house of Beverwyck.

Fort Orange at the time of our visit is falling to decay; Fort Willemstadt, on the contrary, the military post at the head of Joncaer Street, is increasing in importance. Near Fort Orange is the great pasture or common where the cows of the burghers are grazing, and there, a short distance below the fort, we see the ferry-boat travelling slowly across the river to Greenbosch. We have caught sight of several deer and wild turkeys on the outskirts of the town, and we have passed several patriarchal "negers" (as the magistrates of Fort Orange spell the word): and here comes the special property of Pete Schuyler in the shape of a black boy of his own age, who is followed by a troop of sturdy children, some of whom are the brothers and sisters of our young guide. There, to be sure, are Guysbert, and Gertrude (who is destined to wed Stephanus van Cort) Alida (who will add to her own name of Schuyler the name of Van Rensselaer and afterwards Livingston);[23] while toddling after these juvenile belles of Fort Orange come Brant and Arent, their brothers, and still there are others to come. These are the numerous children of Philip Pietersen Schuyler, who came over in 1650, and of his fair vrouw Margritta van Slichtenhorst. This good couple were married with great formality before Dominie Schaats arrived, by Antoni de Hooges, the secretary of the colony, whose nose has been immortalized in the Highlands of the Hudson. Their son Pieter, our little guide, is to be the first mayor of the city of Albany; while the distinguished Philip of a later date will carry the name of Schuyler to a height of glory that will linger round the shaft of the Saratoga monument at Schuylerville for ages to come, and make it glow with an added beauty!

But while our thoughts are thus running away with us from Fort Orange, a farmer, Teunis van Vechten, coming from Greenbosch with supplies for the Beverwyck market, offers the children a ride into the town, which they accept with a shout. This rouses us from our reverie, and we follow the merry load as they jog along the country road from Fort Orange to the nearest gate in the stockade (about where the street now called Hudson Avenue crosses Handelaer Street, or Broadway). With a crack of the farmer's whip they drive rapidly down into a sort of ravine, cross the Rutten Kill[24] on a bridge, and ascend the opposite slope. The farmer soon passes the door of the Dutch Reformed Church, where our ramble began, and turning into Joncaer Street pulls up his horses at the market-place. The children scamper back across the Rutten Kill to the Schuyler store on Handelaer Street, opposite Beaver Street, and pass on down to the grassy river-side behind it, where a sloop is moored. Their father is there overseeing the men who are loading it with beaver-skins and other goods. The day's work is nearly over. The sunlight is fading from the hill-tops across the river. All will soon go in to supper. If we were not too tired we might in a few moments walk the whole length of Handelaer Street towards the north gate. In that case we would have a peep now and then through the half-open curtains of the scattered houses; for see! they are beginning to light up for the evening meal. In passing along we would probably startle the dogs from their kennels in the gardens, and hasten the farewells of the lovers who linger on the front stoops in the gathering dusk. Then issuing by the north gate (where Steuben Street comes into Broadway), we might go by moonlight to the Patroon's house, between which and Beverwyck are corn-fields where the burghers grow corn for their slaves and also for their horses, pigs, and poultry. We would then be not far from the Patroon's mills, where all the settlers are in duty bound to go, and not elsewhere, to have their sawing and grinding done. These mills are on the Fifth, or Patroon's Kill, counting from the Norman's Kill near Kenwood.

We must not leave the neighborhood of Fort Orange and Beverwyck until we have been to a trading-house just outside of the stockade (Pemberton's was used for such a purpose at one time, and also the Glenn House). There we shall have an opportunity to listen to some such conversation as the following between a Dutch trader and an Indian.[25] Let us suppose that the trader on this occasion is one of the enterprising burghers whom we encountered during our walk on Joncaer Street, and the Indian a Mohawk warrior in the company of Tekakwitha's uncle, who, as we have seen, travelled from Gandawague for the purpose of bartering his furs at Beverwyck.

"Indian. Brother, I am come to trade with you; but I forewarn you to be more moderate in your demands than formerly.

"Trader. Why, brother, are not my goods of equal value with those you had last year?

"Indian. Perhaps they are; but mine are more valuable because more scarce. The Great Spirit, who has withheld from you strength and ability to provide food and clothing for yourselves, has given you cunning and art to make guns and provide scaura (rum), and by speaking smooth words to simple men, when they have swallowed madness, you have by little and little purchased their hunting-grounds and made them corn-lands. Thus the beavers grow more scarce, and deer fly farther back; yet after I have reserved skins for my mantle and the clothing of my wife, I will exchange the rest.

"Trader. Be it so, brother; I came not to wrong you, or take your furs against your will. It is true that the beavers are fewer and you go farther for them. Come, brother, let us deal fair first and smoke friendly afterwards. Your last gun cost fifty beaver-skins; you shall have this for forty; and you shall give marten and raccoon skins in the same proportion for powder and shot.

"Indian. Well, brother, that is equal. Now, for two silver bracelets, with long pendent ear-rings of the same, such as you sold to Cardarani in the sturgeon month last year,—how much will you demand?

"Trader. The skins of two deer for the bracelets and those of two fawns for the ear-rings.

"Indian. That is a great deal; but wampum grows scarce, and silver never rusts. Here are the skins.

"Trader. Do you buy any more? Here are knives, hatchets, and beads of all colors.

"Indian. I will have a knife and a hatchet, but must not take more. The rest of the skins will be little enough to clothe the women and children, and buy wampum. Your beads are of no value; no warrior who has slain a wolf will wear them.[26]

"Trader. Here are many things good for you which you have not skins to buy; here is a looking-glass, and here is a brass-kettle in which your woman may boil her maize, her beans, and above all her maple sugar. Here are silver brooches, and here are pistols for your youths.

"Indian. The skins I can spare will not purchase them.

"Trader. Your will determines, brother; but next year you will want nothing but powder and shot, having already purchased your gun and ornaments. If you will purchase from me a blanket to wrap around you, a shirt and blue stroud for under-garments for yourself and your woman, and the same for leggings, this will pass the time, and save you the great trouble of dressing the skins, making the thread, etc., for your clothing, which will give you more fishing and hunting time in the sturgeon and bear months.

"Indian. But the custom of my fathers!

"Trader. You will not break the custom of your fathers by being thus clad for a single year. They did not refuse those things which were never offered to them.

"Indian. For this year, brother, I will exchange my skins; in the next I shall provide apparel more befitting a warrior. One pack alone I will reserve to dress for a future occasion. The summer must not find a warrior idle.

"The terms being adjusted and the bargain concluded, the trader thus shows his gratitude for liberal dealing.

"Trader. Corlaer has forbid bringing scaura to steal away the wisdom of the warrior, but we white men are weak and cold; we bring kegs for ourselves, lest death arise from the swamps. We will not sell scaura; but you shall taste some of ours in return for the venison with which you have feasted us.

"Indian. Brother, we will drink moderately.

"A bottle was then given to the warrior by way of a present, which he was advised to keep long, but found it irresistible. He soon returned with the reserved pack of skins, earnestly urging the trader to give him beads, silver brooches, and above all scaura, to their full amount. This, with affected reluctance at parting with the private stock, was at last yielded. The warriors now, after giving loose for a while to frantic mirth, began the war-whoop, and made the woods resound with infuriate howlings.... A long and deep sleep succeeded, from which they awoke in a state of dejection and chagrin such as no Indian had felt under any other circumstances. They felt as Milton describes Adam and Eve to have done after their transgression."

The news of a massacre of white settlers at Esopus (Kingston), by the River Indians or Mohegans, June 7, 1663, when Tekakwitha was seven years old, caused great excitement both at Gandawague and at Beverwyck. Fort Orange was put in a thorough state of defence, the treaty with the Mohawks was renewed, and three pieces of artillery, loaned by Van Rensselaer for the protection of Beverwyck, "were placed on the church." "Nevertheless so great was the alarm that the out-settlers fled for protection to the fort called Cralo, erected on the Patroon's farm at Greenbush, where they held night and day regular watch."

A year later, in 1664, at the time when the juvenile betrothal of Tekakwitha, already mentioned, took place at Gandawague,—that having occurred, as we are told, when she was eight years old,—an entirely new order of things was brought about in the Dutch colony. The new settlement of Arent van Corlaer at Schenectady, the house where her uncle traded at Fort Orange, and the hamlet of Beverwyck, together with the whole of the New Netherlands, passed over into the hands of the English. Henceforth, instead of appealing to their High Mightinesses the Lords States General of Holland for redress of grievances, the settlers of the State of New York were to bow to the decisions of his Majesty King Charles II., who then sat securely on the throne of England, four years having elapsed since the downfall of the Commonwealth.

This change in the colony from Dutch to English rule was accomplished quietly and peaceably, to the great disgust and indignation of the warlike governor, Peter Stuyvesant, who was ready to buckle on his heavy armor, take up his sword, and fight the "malignant English," were they as ten to one. But the settlers were matter-of-fact farmers and traders, lovers of peace, caring little for glory and not overmuch for their far-away fatherland. So long as their commercial, domestic, and religious rights were respected, they were willing enough to do homage to King Charles. So in 1664, New Amsterdam, into whose harbor, said a boastful inhabitant, as many as fifteen vessels were known to have anchored in the course of one year, became New York, taking its name from the title of the king's brother, afterward James II. Beverwyck, which had grown up under the guns of Fort Orange, was henceforth to be called Albany; and an English governor took the reins of colonial government from the hands of Peter Stuyvesant. The British flag floated gayly over fort and vessel, and before many years had passed it was found necessary to employ an English schoolmaster in Albany, and later to build an English church[27] on Joncaer Street.

When young Pieter Schuyler was still learning his lessons in Dutch at Fort Orange, and the little Tekakwitha was stringing her wampum beads at Gandawague,—while her uncle journeyed frequently back and forth from the Mohawk castle to the trading-post on the Hudson, stopping sometimes at Schenectady to see his friend Corlaer, and taking his family with him now and then to fish at the mouth of the Norman's Kill (near the place called Tawasentha[28]),—unsuspected preparations for a surprise were going forward in Canada. A war-cloud was gathering in the north, soon to break with terrible effect on the three Mohawk castles, and to startle the Governor of the Province of New York into a protest against the advance of armed troops of King Louis XIV. of France into the colonial dominions of his Majesty Charles II. of England. These dominions had been so recently acquired by the English King that the French at Quebec thought they still belonged to the States General of Holland.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Corlaer, or Van Curler, a brave and worthy man, was the most influential settler at Schenectady, and on excellent terms with the Mohawk Indians. He had visited them in 1642, on purpose to secure, if possible, the ransom of Father Jogues, and had manifested great sympathy for him in his captivity.

[20] See Annals of Albany, vol. i. p. 288. The dominie's house here mentioned has since given place to the shop which is on the north-east corner of Pearl and State Streets. The house used by Megapolensis, who was at Beverwyck from 1642 to 1649, and who concealed Father Jogues from the Indians, was where Shield's tobacco-factory now stands, close to the site of old Fort Orange, and a little south of it. It was built entirely of oak, and was purchased on the arrival of Megapolensis for a hundred and twenty dollars.

The patroon's first dominie wearied of his frontier work at Fort Orange, and went to live at New Amsterdam in 1649. Dominie Schaats was appointed to succeed him in the ministry of the church at Beverwyck, where he officiated from 1652 to 1683.

[21] Fort Orange stood on Broadway, close to the modern steamboat landing of the "People's Line." A bi-centennial tablet, surrounded with iron pickets, marks its northeast bastion. It extended back (across the freight-tracks that now mar its site) to Church Street.

[22] See O'Callaghan's History of New Netherland, vol. ii.

[23] Alida married Robert Livingston, who was "secretary of Albany" under Pieter Schuyler, the first mayor; she was the great-grandmother of Robert R. Livingston, the first Chancellor of New York State.

[24] This creek, with its ravine, has entirely disappeared in the grading of the modern street.

[25] The dialogue here given is from Mrs. Grant's "Memoirs of American Lady." Mrs. Grant describes a later period of Albany history; but the way of trading with the Indians was about the same her day as at the time of Tekakwitha.

[26] "The Indians have a great contempt, comparatively, for the beads we send them, which they consider as only fit for those plebeians who cannot by their exertions win anything better. They estimate them, compared with their own wampum, as we do pearls compared with paste."

[27] This first English church was not far from the spot where St. Peter's Episcopal Church, on State Street, now uprears its beautiful square tower with projecting gargoyles. The original structure, however, stood out in the centre of the street, while the site of the present church was occupied by the earthworks and buildings of the second fort.

[28] See [Appendix, Note C].

CHAPTER VI.

AN ARMY ON SNOW-SHOES.

THE year 1666 was, indeed, an eventful one. It opened with a heavy snow-storm, and others followed until the whole Mohawk Valley was covered with a depth of feathery whiteness. At its eastern end a dark pool lay at the foot of Cohoes Falls, where the frosty spray of the roaring cataract glistened on every tiny bush, and the black cliffs on either side frowned from under their snowy caps at the silent meeting of two frozen rivers; off to the west, at the distant Mohawk castle of Tionnontogen, the "Nose" lay frost-bitten at a sudden turn of the valley, its long, stiff point thrust down into the ice, and fastened there as if held in a vice. Throughout the length of the glittering, smooth depression between these two points, the Mohawk seemed to be fast asleep beneath its thick mantle of snow.

In the whole valley there was only one hamlet of quiet Dutchmen, who had settled themselves at Corlaer (or Schenectady), while in the great bend were nestled the snug bark huts of the Indians with their surrounding palisades. A chain of Mohawk castles lay on the south side of the river, linked together by a single trail,—a narrow footpath through the snow along the lower terrace, which is now occupied by the West Shore Railway. This trail connected the lodges of the three great Mohawk clans,—the Bears of Andagoron in the centre, with the Turtles of Gandawague and the Wolves of Tionnontogen on either side. Then it extended eastward through dreary solitudes to Schenectady and, on the other hand, far westward through lonely passes to the castles of the Oneidas; thence on to the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and, last of all, to the Senecas. How cold and yet how secure those Iroquois Indians of the Five Nations felt in their fastnesses! For hundreds of miles to the north and to the south of them lay the all-covering snow, unmarked by other human footprints than their own in search of game. The lands of their Algonquin foes, though bordering their own domain, were long journeys off. The Dutch settlers at Schenectady and Albany were right within their grasp, should they choose to distress them; but they had solemnly pledged their friendship to them in the Tawasentha Valley ("At the Place of many Dead"), and they meant to keep their word. The French, however, they delighted to torment. The settlements at Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal were separated from the Five Nations by the great pathless Adirondack wilderness of mountains and forest, and yet two ways were open by which they might reach the French. One of their war-paths led from Onondaga Lake along the Oswego River and Lake Ontario; then through the Thousand Islands and down the rapids of the St. Lawrence River. The reverse of this route was taken by the venturesome French colonists who, as we have seen, endeavored to make a settlement in the heart of the Iroquois country about the time of Tekakwitha's birth. Their hairbreadth escape from Onondaga soon after by the same route put an end to all thought of settling what the French considered a part of New France. This was the region now known as Onondaga County, which the Onondaga Indians themselves have claimed from prehistoric times as their birthright, and hold yet under the name of the Onondaga Reservation; and here, now, in the heart of this great State, in spite of the encroachments of two hundred years of civilization, in spite of the teachings of Christianity all about them, in spite of the covetous longings of many a white man, they still keep a foothold, and maintain the practice of their old pagan rites and customs.

The great western route through the Oswego and St. Lawrence rivers to Canada, belonging by first right to these Onondagas, was travelled many times during Tekakwitha's childhood by the Onondaga statesman Garacontié. He frequently restored captives to the French at Quebec, and tried often but in vain to keep peace between them and his own race.

The second and more direct of the two great war-paths to Canada was the route of the Mohawks. No wonder the Caniengas tormented the French settlements on the St. Lawrence. Starting from their castles in the Mohawk Valley, and taking any one of three or more trails that crossed or skirted our present Saratoga County, they had but to strike Lake George, follow the lake to its outlet, traverse the length of Lake Champlain, and thence pass through the Richelieu, Sorel, or Iroquois River (it was known by all these names), and they were ready to destroy the grain, and tomahawk or take captive the wives and children of the Canadian settlers. The French had built three forts on this Richelieu (or Iroquois) River to check their inroads,—Fort Richelieu, Fort St. Louis, and Fort St. Thérèse,—and were now only waiting till spring opened to erect a fourth, to be called Fort St. Anne, on an island at the northern end of Lake Champlain.

Samuel de Champlain, the first Frenchman who set foot on New York soil, was chiefly responsible for the long-continued wars between his countrymen and the Iroquois, he having fired without provocation on a band of Iroquois warriors, probably Mohawks, when he first sailed into the lake which bears his name. By repeated outrages on the Canadian frontier the Mohawks had amply revenged themselves for that first affront; and by the end of the year 1665 they had goaded the French into a determination to brave unheard of risks and frightful sufferings, that they might punish their savage enemies in a manner that would for once and all humiliate and subdue them. Thus it was that on the 9th of January, 1666, a heroic army composed of three hundred regular French troops of the regiment Carignan-Salières, veterans who had seen service in Turkey in the wars of Louis XIV., together with two hundred habitans, or hardy volunteers from the Canadian colony, all under the command of M. de Courselle, Governor of Canada, were fairly started on a march from Quebec to the Mohawk castles. They intended to push on without delay to their destination through snow and ice, over rivers and lakes, by the great Mohawk route. It had been travelled hitherto only by Indians, captives, and a few missionaries, with now and then perhaps a solitary adventurer; rarely, indeed, by any even of these in the depth of winter. This army of De Courselle's was the very first of a great succession of pale-face armies that have come tramping over the same route during the last two centuries. If Burgoyne's march to the Saratoga battle-field was the most famous of all these, De Courselle's march to the Mohawk was certainly the first and the most heroic in its struggle with unparalleled difficulties.

"This march could not but be tedious, every one having snow-shoes on his feet, to the use of which none were accustomed; and all, not excepting the officers or even M. de Courselle himself, being loaded each with from twenty-five to thirty pounds of biscuit, clothing, and other necessaries."[29] It did, indeed, require a French courage to undertake such an expedition. "Many had, as early as the third day, parts of the body frozen, and were so benumbed by the cold that they had to be carried to the place where they were to pass the night." The 25th of January was especially severe, and many soldiers were obliged to be taken back to the settlements, "of whom some had the legs cut by the ice, and others the hands or the arms or other parts of the body altogether frozen." The ranks were filled up again at Forts St. Louis and St. Thérèse, on the Richelieu River, where the troops assembled on the 30th of the same month; and being still five hundred strong, they pushed bravely on over the snow that lay so level and smooth on the frozen bosom of Lake Champlain. Here the route lay plainly before them, and they were counting on Algonquin guides to show them the way to the Mohawk castles after they got to the southern end of Lake St. Sacrament (Lake George). The snow was "hard frozen, though in most places four foote deep; and besides using Indian snow-shoes, which hath the very form of a Rackett tyed to each foote, whereby the body and feet are kept from sinking into the snow, ... the Governor caused slight sledges to be made in good number, and laying provisions upon them drew them over the snow with mastive doggs."

The shivering troops wrapped their blankets tightly round them as they lay down to sleep on the snow at the foot of Mount Defiance, or threaded the narrow valley leading to Lake George. The awkward soldier striding over the snow fumbles with frost-bitten fingers in his knapsack for the last of his biscuits. As one might have foretold, he has stepped on the snow-shoe of his comrade, and both go plunging head-foremost into the snow. The dogs jogging on beside them, unchecked for a moment, run wildly on, barking aloud and scattering the load of the toboggan to which they are attached. The articles are rescued piecemeal by the soldiers all along the line. There is no time to stop, however,—they must march on or starve; so, giving their fallen comrades momentary help to set them on their feet again, they are left to fall into line as best they may and just in time to bring up the rear.

As the army passes over Lake George, in the shadow of Black Mountain, how eagerly De Courselle looks back at his staggering column of men! Were he in a less serious mood, he might be inclined to smile at the efforts of the gallant troops of the regiment Carignan-Salières to maintain an orderly march on the unaccustomed snow-shoes; but the anxious commander has other thoughts than these. Where are his Algonquin guides? Have the rascals failed him? Calling the Jesuit chaplain, Father Raffeix, to his side, a consultation ensues. They are already nearing the future site of Fort William Henry, and there the trails divide. They scan the shores of the lake and search the islands, but neither Algonquin friend nor Iroquois foe is in sight. They know that if they march on until they reach the Hudson and follow it down, they will find the Dutch at Fort Orange, but that is not their object. They long for a chance to strike a decisive blow at the Mohawk castles. If they can once convince the Mohawks that they are not secure in their forest homes from the armies of France nor the strong revengeful arm of Onnontio,[30] a treaty will afterwards be of some value. The Jesuit Father who talks with De Courselle dreams already of a mission established among them as the result of that future treaty. With ardent enthusiasm he sees in anticipation an army of Jesuits march to a spiritual attack on the citadel of Satan upreared in the Iroquois country. His heart thrills at the thought of reaching the spot where Isaac Jogues was martyred. Father Lemoyne, the second Ondessonk, has died since then. The Onondagas that very year sent presents to Quebec to wipe away the tears shed for his death, thus expressing their sorrow and their admiration for his character. Father Raffeix cheers with zealous words the drooping spirits of the soldiers, then kneels amid the snows of Lake St. Sacrament, and in the true spirit of his order, prays in his heart for a share in the glorious work of continuing Ondessonk's mission.

The army of De Courselle at the southern end of Lake George was uncertain which trail to follow. At the Turtle Castle on the Mohawk the Indians had no knowledge of the march of their enemies, else there would have been great alarm at Gandawague; for all the ablest warriors of the three castles, in company with the Oneidas, were making war on the tribe called Wampum-makers. Only boys and helpless old men were left in the lodges with the women. They knew nothing of De Courselle and his army so near at hand, but, like their Dutch neighbors at Schenectady, were earnestly fighting their nearer and more pitiless foe the bitter winter. All the fuel near their lodges had been burned long ago; and now they are searching the snow-drifts for fagots and branches fallen from the trees. The cold is intense. The wind that whistles through the palisades of the Turtle village is the same sharp blast that is pinching De Courselle's army.

At Gandawague, outside of the palisade is a little girl on snow-shoes, only nine years old, who with imperfect sight is groping her way through the blinding storm. The snow is drifting wildly about. The one whom she calls mother is only an aunt, and the aunt is cold and cross to-day. She sits by the dying embers there in the lodge of the absent chief, and by turns she shivers and scolds. The other women beside her are equally cheerless. The little niece, who has missed the kindly look she knows well how to win from her Mohawk uncle by welcome services when he is there in the lodge, has taken it into her head this comfortless day to surprise her cross old aunts and her adopted sister. So she has quietly tied on her snow-shoes and ventured out. She is in the forest, alone, searching for fagots. On her forehead is a burden-strap, made from filaments of bass-wood bark, the ends twisted into a kind of Indian rope. With it she fastens the fagots together, bearing them on her back. Her hands are tingling with cold; but she plunges them deep into the snow in an effort to break the larger twigs, while she hurries on to increase her load. She is happier now in the howling storm than she was in the pent lodge, and smiles as she thinks of the blazing fire she will make to warm the feet and thaw the heart of her morose old aunt. Ah! Tekakwitha, that grim old squaw is training you, without knowing it, for heroic things. But after all, the aunt is not a neglectful guardian. After a while she misses the child, and questions all in the lodge; then peers out into the storm and shrinks back, shuddering. Has she indeed allowed Tekakwitha to wander out and perish in the cold? In that case what will she be able to say to the uncle when he returns; what will become of her own plans for the girl? As time goes on, there comes a faint scuffling at the door; the heavy curtain is lifted a little and falls again. No one has entered. Hurrying to the door, the old squaw thrusts the curtain aside, and there she beholds the child staggering under her load of wood, stiff and helpless from the cold. Leaving the fagots at the door, she lifts her gently in her arms and takes her to the fire, which is soon blazing brightly, fed by the new supply of wood quickly thrown upon it. But the glow of the fire, round which they all gather, is not half so cheering to the heart of the frostbitten child as the glow of love she has awakened in the lodge by her sweet unselfish care for their comfort. This once, at least, they give her the warmest seat, and fill her bowl brimful with the freshly made sagamite; then they question her about her walk, and wonder how she escaped being buried in the snow. Tekakwitha smiles with happy content, and answers their questions with a ready wit. She makes them laugh as she tells them a merry story of how the north-wind slapped her in the face and bound her fast to the hickory-tree against which she stumbled in the storm. In her heart she is saying all the time, as she watches the cheery light of the fire, "I will do it again."

But where is De Courselle now and his army on snow-shoes? We left them at the southern end of Lake George. There they took the trail that met the Hudson at its great bend to the southward near Glenn's Falls. Then after crossing the river they followed a straight trail leading a little west of south, and passed between Saratoga Lake and Owl Pond or Lake Lonely. Next they followed up the valleys of Kayaderosseras Creek and the Mourning Kill to Ballston Lake; but there, happily for Tekakwitha's people, they made a mistake.[31] Instead of taking the trail that branched off to the west at the northern end of Ballston Lake, and led directly to the Mohawk castles, they followed the straight trail southward; so instead of surprising the Mohawks, they themselves were indeed surprised to find that it brought them to a hamlet, not of Indians, but of Dutchmen,—not subjects of Holland at all, but colonists subject to England. They were greatly bewildered. We are told in an old London document[32] at M. de Courselle encamped—

"upon the 9th of February within 2 myles of a small village called Schonectade, lying in the woods beyond fort Albany in ye territoryes of his Royall highness, and 3 dayes march from the first castle of the Mohaukes.

"The French suposed they were then come to their designed place, and the rather because y^t evening they did rancounter w^th a party of the Mohaukes who made appearance of retreating from the French, whereupon a party of 60 of their best Fuzileers after them, but that small party drew the French into an ambuscade of neare 200 Mohaukes planted behind trees, (who taking their advantage as it fell into their hands) at one volley slew eleuen French men whereof one was a Lieuten^t wounded divers others, the french party made an honorable retreit to their body, w^ch was marching after them close at hand, w^ch gave the Mohawkes tyme and opportunity to march off w^th the loss of only 3 slaine upon the plaice and 6 wounded, the report whereof was soone brought to Schonecktade by those Indians, with the heads of 4 of the ffrench to the Commissary of the Village who immediately despatched the newes to Fort Albany, from whence the next day 3 of the principle inhabitants were sent to Monsier Coursell the Governo^r of Canada to inquire of his intention to bring such a body of armed men into the dominions of his Ma^tie of Great Brittaine, w^thout acquainting the Governo^r of these parts w^th his designes. The Governo^r reply^d that he came to seeke out and destroy his ennemyes the Mohaukes without intention of visiting their plantations, or else to molest any of his Ma^ties subjects, and that [he] had not heard of the reducing those parts to his Ma^ties obedience, but desired that hee and his soldiers might bee supplied with provisions for their money, and that his wounded men might be sucoured, and taken care for in Albany; To all which the Emissaryes freely consented and made a small but acceptable present of wine and provisions to him, further offering the best accommodations y^e poore village afforded, w^ch was civilly refus'd, in regard there was not accommodacón for his soldyers, with whom he had marcht and campt under the blew canopye of the heavens full six weekes, but hee prudently foresaw a greater inconvenience if hee brought his weary and half starv'd people within the smell of a chimney corner, whom hee now could keepe from stragling or running away, not knowing whither to runn for feare of y^e Indians; The next day Monsieur Corsell sent his men to the village where they were carefully drest and sent to Albany, being seaven in number, the Dutch bores carryed to the camp such provisions as they had, and were too well payd for it; Especially peaz and bread, of w^ch a good quantity was bought; y^e Mohaukes were all gone to their Castles, with resolution to fight it out against the ffrench, who being refresht and supplyed w^th the aforesaid provisions made a shew of marching towards the Mohaukes Castles, but with faces about and great sylence and dilligence return'd towards Cannada.... Those who observed the words and countenance of Monsieur Coursell, saw him disturbed in minde that the king was Master of these parts of the Country, saying that the king of England did graspe at all America.... Two prisoners taken by the Mohaukes in the retreate tell them y^t this summer another attempt will be made upon their country, with a greater force and supplyes of men, the truth or success of which I shall not now discourse upon, having given the trew relation of what past from ye 29^th December to the 12^th of February."

Another and larger force did attack the Mohawk castles in the year 1666, as hinted at in the lines just quoted, but not until late in the autumn; and at that time Tekakwitha was disturbed and distressed far more than she had been by the misdirected march of the "army on snow-shoes."

FOOTNOTES:

[29] See O'Callaghan's "Documentary History of New York," vol. i. for papers relating to this expedition of Governor de Courselle to the Mohawk River.

[30] A name which the Indians gave to the Governor of Canada.

[31] These facts are to be found in a note by Gen. J. S. Clark, given in the [Appendix, Note D], "Mohawk Trails."

[32] See O'Callaghan's "Documentary History," vol. i., from which are quoted all the passages here given referring to De Courselles and De Tracy's expeditions.

CHAPTER VII.

DE TRACY BURNS THE MOHAWK CASTLES.—FALL OF TIONNONTOGEN.

IN the summer following De Courselle's expedition, ten deputies from the nations of the Iroquois League met at Quebec, and signed a treaty of peace. In addition to strange pictures which were the marks of the Indian chiefs, the document bears the signature of Daniel de Courselle, Governor of Canada, and that of "Lord de Tracy, member of his Majesty's councils and Lieutenant-General of his armies both in the Islands and mainland of South and North America." The treaty is also signed by the Jesuits, Le Mercier and Chaumonot, as interpreters of the Iroquois and Huron languages. It states that the orator and chief, called Soenres, announced "the object of the Embassy by ten talks expressed by as many presents," and also that he brought letters from the officers of New Netherland. The substance of his harangue was that the Indians wanted peace, and they asked that blackgowns might be sent to teach them. They promised to listen to their preaching and to adore the God of the French. They also offered to trade with the Canadians by way of Lake St. Sacrament, and assured them of a welcome in their lodges. What more could be desired? But, alas! scarcely were the ambassadors two or three days' journey from Quebec, when news came of the surprisal by the Mohawks of some Frenchmen belonging to Fort St. Anne who had gone to the chase, and of the murder of a captain in the Carignan regiment.

The time for peace had not yet come. The Mohawks had not been fairly represented in the embassy; they were far from being awed by the fruitless march of De Courselle to the Mohawk Valley. The French had yet to strike the decisive blow. M. de Tracy resolved, "despite his advanced age, to lead in person against these Barbarians an army composed of six hundred soldiers drafted from all the companies, and of six hundred habitans of the country," to which were added one hundred Huron and Algonquin savages. This was more than twice the number of the original army of De Courselle, who, still bent on victory, determined to accompany this second expedition. The general rendezvous was at Fort St. Anne, newly built, as had been planned, on an island in Lake Champlain. On the 3d of October, 1666, all were ready to start. Three hundred vessels were there to bear them over the placid bosom of the lake, whose wooded shores were now aglow with October coloring. The vessels were light batteaux and bark canoes, which could be carried from lake to lake and from stream to stream. There was great difficulty at the carries, however, with two small cannon which they took with them for the purpose of forcing the Iroquois fortifications. Grown wiser by experience, they also made sure of their guides.

The expedition moved forward as secretly and noiselessly as possible through Lake Champlain and then Lake George; but the quick eye of an Iroquois hunter, high on a mountain, espied the fleet of batteaux on the lake, and bounding through the forest to the first, or Turtle, castle on the Mohawk, his cry of alarm startled the people of Gandawague, and Tekakwitha among the rest, from their accustomed occupations. Hastily gathering together their treasures, they fled at once to Andagoron, the Castle of the Bears. Thence, after spreading the alarm through the outlying hamlets and holding a hurried consultation, they all retired to Tionnontogen, the third, or Castle of the Wolves, hidden behind the Nose. There they stored an abundant supply of grain, and prepared to defend themselves. This castle of Tionnontogen was the strongest of their fortifications. It had a triple palisade. The spot where it stood can easily be found at the present day. One has but to leave the West Shore Railway at Spraker's Basin,—a small station on the south side of the Mohawk River, just east of Canajoharie and Palatine Bridge,—then follow a road which winds up the hill to a farm a few rods distant, which was owned in 1885 by Mitchell. Like the other village-sites, already described, it is on high ground, or the upper-river terrace. Near the farm-house is a large spring, surrounded by shade-trees, in the centre of a meadow. It is now frequented principally by thirsty cows; but it was once the chief water-supply of the Mohawk castle. Behind the house is a perfectly level plateau; from it the land descends on its northern side by steep terraces to the Mohawk, and to the west it sinks rapidly into a picturesque ravine, where strawberries, wintergreen berries, rare ferns, and little pink flowers grow in abundance. Flat Creek flows through the ravine. On this plateau many iron hatchets and wagon-loads of Indian relics of various kinds have been found.[33]

There the castle of Tionnontogen stood at the time of De Tracy's expedition. The view up the river at that point is extensive and beautiful; but in the opposite direction, or down the river, a sharp turn of the valley shuts out from sight the narrow opening or pass between the Nose and the other similar mountain on the south side of the river, which, as one travels round the bend, seems to approach and finally to overlap it. The name of the castle was significant,—Tionnontogen, or "Two Mountains approaching." Where else could it possibly have been in the whole valley but right there by the Nose? Their friends, the Oneidas, lay to the westward of them, and their enemies mostly to the eastward; it was but natural, then, that they should build their principal fort far enough up the river to bring it behind the overlapping mountains. In order to reach Tionnontogen the army of De Tracy had to come through that narrow pass. The people who were lying in wait at the castle, though on high ground, would not therefore be able to see their enemies approaching till they had rounded the Nose, and were close upon them.

After disembarking at the head of the lake, De Tracy led his army, by way of an Indian trail, southeasterly about nine miles to Glenn's Falls,[34] where he crossed the Hudson, thence passing south of Moreau Pond and east of Mount McGregor, through Doe's Corners, near Stiles Hill, and then near Glen Mitchell to Saratoga Springs, following substantially the present highway along the base of the ridge of hills south of Mount McGregor. From Saratoga the expedition passed near Ballston, and thence slightly curving seems to have proceeded in a very direct course to the Mohawk castles, which lay off to the westward. One of the trails leading in that direction struck the Mohawk River at Kinaquariones, or Hoffman's Ferry, and another at Amsterdam. From this latter point, a short march up the Mohawk Valley brought De Tracy to Gandawague. One after another, he captured the deserted towns of the Mohawks without striking a single blow. First Gandawague, then Andagoron,—both on the south side of the river,—with possibly one or more smaller towns, fell into his hands; and on he went to Tionnontogen, marching proudly up the valley with his two cannon, brought with such difficulty from Canada, and his Algonquin allies, who had faithfully guided him into the very heart of the Mohawk country, and his brave army of twelve hundred picked men, armed cap-a-pie in all the panoply of civilized warfare. Never before was anything like it seen in that wild region. Only three or four hundred Mohawk warriors, all told, were gathered behind the palisades of Tionnontogen to oppose him. There was no time to summon their allies, the Oneidas, to their assistance. The movements of the French had been too rapid. They had only time to crowd together the women and children into their strongest fortress of defence, and there await the result, whatever it might be.

Could the Mohawks soon forget the ruin that the French soldiers wrought on their way from Gandawague? Even the child Tekakwitha must have been stirred with a feeling of indignation and a cruel sense of wrong, as that foreign army came nearer and nearer to her place of refuge, moving steadily on through her own fair valley, with a march like the march of fate,—destroying all that came in its way, wreaking its vengeance on corn-field and cabin, in baffled fury at finding no foe to slay. With ever increasing horror and anxious bewilderment, she watched and waited with her people in the castle of Tionnontogen. Her uncle and all the Canienga warriors had staked everything they possessed on its defence. They had stored their provisions for the winter carefully away inside of its stout palisade. It was, as already mentioned, a triple palisade, twenty feet in height, and flanked by four bastions; that is to say, there were three distinct rows of upright posts encircling the town. [35] The main or central wall of thick-set overlapping palisadoes had an inner and an outer platform, or scaffolding, near the top, running all the way round. These platforms, being nineteen or twenty feet above the ground, extended horizontally from the central to the inner and outer walls of palisadoes. The latter were higher, and not so compact as the central wall. These outside palisadoes, reaching almost to a man's height above the platform, were set short spaces apart, and covered near the top with a solid surface of thick bark. This protected the warriors when they stood high on the outer platform to fire their guns and aim their arrows at the enemy over the top of this bark breastwork. Just behind them, on the inner and adjoining platform, were numerous bark tanks containing an abundant supply of water to be used in extinguishing any fire that might be started at the base of the palisade. This was the form of attack they most dreaded. To make the approach more difficult, they also dug trenches between the walls of palisadoes, and especially on the outer side, heaping up the earth at the base of the fortifications. Then, too, before the enemy could get at the palisade at all, they had to break through a low bark fence which stood some distance outside of the triple wall, built there for the purpose of breaking the force of an attack. If the foe succeeded in starting a fire at the base of the main wall, a flood of water was poured down at once through holes in the high platform by the warriors who were defending the castle. In cases of this kind the women assisted by keeping up the supply of water. Such were the methods of defence in use at Tionnontogen in 1666. They had proved effectual against all the efforts of savage foes. But let us see if they prove equally so against the skilful manœuvres of De Tracy's civilized army, now close at hand? Tekakwitha's uncle may have had his doubts as to this; but nevertheless the bark tanks were well filled, and all was made ready to give the foe a defiant reception. The warriors were in fighting gear, and hourly waiting the attack.

It was just at this time that several Indian captives of other tribes held by these Mohawks were brought out to be tortured and burned with solemn rites in the public square of Tionnontogen; thus they hoped to propitiate their war-god, Aireskoi. Tekakwitha would not on any account show herself during this ceremony, as she never had the cruel spirit which the savage women often showed. Chauchetière tells us that she could not endure to see harm done to any one, and that she thought it a sin to go to see a man burned.

This heathen rite was scarcely over, when the women and children were suddenly withdrawn from Tionnontogen Castle; a council of war, it seems, had changed the plans of the braves. Those who could not fight were hurried off to the higher hills behind the fortified plateau, and concealed in the woods; the warriors alone remained in the town. As the advancing army of De Tracy came within reach of their bullets and arrows, they kept up a sharp fire from the palisade; but they no sooner saw the French soldiers deliberately pause, plant their cannon, and prepare to attack their wooden castle in regular form, than the utter hopelessness of the contest dawned fully upon them. Without waiting to receive the opening fire of the French cannon, they quickly deserted their primitive fortifications, leaving behind them a few helpless old men who did not wish to move and the half-roasted victims of the demon's sacrifice. De Tracy lost no time in taking possession of this last stronghold of the Canienga nation; without loss of life he and his army entered Tionnontogen Castle in triumph.

The child Tekakwitha, concealed in the forest near at hand, must have heard the solemn swell of the Te Deum as it rose with one accord, full, rich, and clear, from the ranks of the conquering army. Never before had she heard that strange, sweet chorus of sound. The Mohawk Valley had often echoed with the war-whoop and the shriek of the tortured captive; it had rung at times with the harvest-song, and had caught up the wailing chant of the League over many a dead chief's body. But the solemn music of the Te Deum which now reached her ears was unlike any of these, and the tall cross that the soldiers of France raised over the ashes of Aireskoi's fire in the public square of Tionnontogen cast unfamiliar shadows on the long Mohawk cabins clustered silent and empty within the triple wall. Father Raffeix, the chaplain, said Mass there, thinking perhaps of Isaac Jogues, and praying for the heathen Indians who were hiding in the forest. He did not then know how soon the rustic chapel of St. Mary of the Mohawks would be standing there with open door to welcome them to prayer. While this first Mass was being said at Tionnontogen, the Mohawk warriors, moody and sullen, were gathered near their families. A low and mournful wail from the women called the attention of all to the blazing palisades of Tionnontogen. The crackling fire kindled by their enemies lit up with a lurid glare the now retiring army of De Tracy, for he speedily retraced his steps, and was soon hidden from view behind the mountains at the Nose. As he moved on down the valley whence he came, the armor of his twelve hundred men flashed back again and again the blaze of a ruined Mohawk town; all their castles were burned. At the "Fort of Andaraque,"—to use the words of an old document (probably meaning Gandawague),—De Tracy paused on the 17th of October to take solemn possession of the conquered country in the name of the King of France. In token thereof, he planted another cross, and near it a post, to which he affixed the arms of Louis XIV. Tekakwitha, with her aunts and her mother's friend Tegonhatsihongo, must have seen these emblems at the door of the smoking palisade when they went back to find what was left of their blackened lodges on the bank of Auries Creek.

De Tracy, the gray-haired conqueror, now returned to Canada; and the unhappy Mohawks, in straggling bands, sought out their desolated homes,—secure in life and limb, to be sure, but bereft of all provisions for the winter. No golden ears of corn hung, as usual, from their lodge-poles. They had no furs, no beans, no nut-oil. They were forced to live in temporary huts, and to wait in hunger and cold for the coming of the spring-time. Thus, in sorrow and destitution, Tekakwitha passed a dreary winter among the ruins of Gandawague, doing her best as usual to put things in order. During this time she lived on what roots and berries could be found, and a scant allowance of the game her uncle caught. Spring came at last; and a busy one it was for the houseless Mohawks. With the genial warmth that quickly followed, there came also a strange, new gleam of light to the young Tekakwitha.

FOOTNOTES:

[33] The most interesting of these are in the collection of Mr. Frey, of Palatine Bridge.

[34] The march of De Tracy as here given was traced out by General Clark from a copy which he has of a map relating to the expeditions of De Tracy and De Courselle. The original map is preserved in the Paris archives.

[35] See [Appendix, Note E], "Indian Defensive Works."

CHAPTER VIII.

TEKAKWITHA'S CHRISTIAN GUESTS.—RAWENNIIO.

THE year 1667 found Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas at peace with the Canadian settlers. This blessed peace crowned with success the persevering efforts of Garacontié, and brought the long-deferred answer to the prayer of Tekakwitha's mother. Onnontio was appeased; Frenchmen and Iroquois could now clasp hands, and the lovers of peace on either side—an ever increasing party—came boldly forward, asserting their claim to be heard, and holding all turbulent spirits in check. There was nothing to be lost, and much to be gained on both sides by peace. The French could now increase their trade, and the Iroquois were glad once more to turn their arms against aggressive Indian neighbors. The Mohegans, or Loups, on the Hudson, uniting with those of New England, were growing haughty and insolent to the Mohawk people, making raids on their hunting-grounds, and taking advantage of their temporary distress to settle old scores; this trouble, however, was still a side issue. It caused just uneasiness enough to make the Mohawks anxious for the speedy return of their deputies from Quebec, with full assurance of a permanent peace with the French. All through the spring of 1667, Tekakwitha's people were clearing new corn-fields on the north side of the Mohawk, and choosing new sites for their castles. Tionnontogen, the capital, claiming their first share of attention, was hastily rebuilt higher up the river and still on the south side, being now a quarter of a league from its old site. The populations of Gandawague and Andagoron were divided; some remained at the old half-ruined castles, and others moved across the river as rapidly as they could build cabins for themselves. This they began to do "after the bark would peel;"[36] that is, as soon as the season was far enough advanced for them to make use of that all-important material, in the use of which they were so expert. The task of building a palisaded Indian castle was slow and tedious,—the work of many long months, with their primitive methods. While they were in this transition state, the Mohawk deputies, having agreed on the terms of peace, returned from Quebec. They left that city in July, 1667, accompanied by three Jesuit Fathers.

The story of the Jesuit Father and his work crowds the pages of our early history. Wherever the red man plays an important part, there close at hand is the blackgown with his crucifix and his works on the Indian language,—becoming a linguist that he may make known to the Indian, whatever his tribe, the "good tidings of great joy;" using the artist's brush that he may in some way represent to his neophytes the Christ; even taxing his ingenuity in the invention of games by means of which to hold the attention of the savages and teach them the simplest laws of morality; striving always to lead them step by step to a better understanding of the duties of a Christian life. Such were the men now on their way to the Mohawk from Quebec.

Earnest, zealous, with a firm determination to overcome all the obstacles before them in their spiritual combat with the demons of paganism, came the three Fathers, Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron, with the Mohawk deputies. They had been chosen by the French authorities from the ever ready ranks of Jesuit volunteers, who never lost an opportunity to gain the ear of the red man. Already they had acquired some knowledge of the language; Father Fremin, of the three, understood it best. Then, too, it was well known by all that the presence of French blackgowns in the Iroquois country, sent by the Governor of Canada, would be in itself a guarantee of peace. They were made the bearers of presents to insure them a welcome in the Mohawk lodges. On their journey to the castles they were delayed for a time by reports that the forest was alive with Mohegan war-parties; but when, in course of time, they did fall in with a band of warriors, it turned out to be a scouting-party of Mohawks, who, alarmed by the long absence of their deputies, began to suspect another French invasion. They were therefore well pleased to see the missionaries, and willingly led them from the vicinity of Lake George to the northern bank of the Mohawk. There they crossed the river in canoes, probably from the place now occupied by the De Graff house. Above them, on the crest of a hill, stood all that was left of Gandawague, the Turtle Castle, where Tekakwitha and her uncle the chief still dwelt. They had not yet moved to the new site "at the Rapids," near Fonda. The three French guests of the nation were conducted up the steep ascent to the town with great formality and many ceremonies of welcome, not with the strokes of iron rods and the bitter taunts with which some of these same old men and women when in their prime had received Father Jogues at their former castle of Ossernenon, a little more than twenty years before. But why were not Fathers Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron at once conducted up the valley to be welcomed by the Bears, and thence on to the westward to be lodged in state by the Wolves at Tionnontogen, the capital, as had invariably been the custom of the Caniengas in receiving distinguished guests, or even important captives? The answer that history gives is simple enough. The Fathers "happened to arrive at a time when these people are accustomed to plunge into all kinds of debauchery, and found no one, therefore, in a fit state to receive them." A drunken riot of several days' duration was going on within the newly built palisades of Tionnontogen. The Mohawks had chosen to celebrate in that way their returning prosperity.

So the Fathers were detained three days in the lodge of Tekakwitha's uncle at the Turtle Castle. Chauchetière and Cholenec, and all who have written of Tekakwitha find in this seemingly simple incident only one of many mystic links that make up the chain of her Christian life,—a sure effect of a potent cause,—the all-conquering love of the Spirit of God reaching toward its spirit-child, though clothed in the humble form of an Indian girl. Unknown, and therefore as yet unloved by her, the Great Father and Source of our spirit natures saw "His own image and likeness" expanding pure and fair in the untaught soul of Tekakwitha. All-knowing, all-powerful, planning the course of events without effort, He chose the surest way and the aptest time to make Himself known, thus securing at once the answer of love that was destined to lift and shield from all blemish this wondrous opening "Lily." He sent His messengers into the Mohawk Valley when Tekakwitha alone of her nation was ready and fit to receive them. Hers, then, was the privilege of lodging and entertaining them.

At that time the Iroquois were thorough pagans, and practised a species of devil-worship. They believed in Tharonyawagon, the "Holder of the Heavens," a good genius of the Kanonsionni, who bestowed on them their hunting-grounds and fisheries,—a harmless deity, to whom they were grateful in a vague way for past favors; but they do not seem to have worshipped him with any formality. They reserved their sacrifices and solemn rites for Aireskoi, a demon of war, whom they greatly feared. Hiawatha, the "Wampum-Seeker,"[37] though sometimes confused with Tharonyawagon, was undoubtedly a real personage. He was one of the founders of the Iroquois League of Nations, which is called to this day the "Great Peace." He is said to have lived about fifty years, as nearly as can be reckoned, before the earliest white settlers came to America. His aspirations and his teachings prepared the Iroquois to some extent for the reception of Christian ideas, but the original teachings of Hiawatha seem to have been very soon distorted and strangely mingled with myths. The League of Nations which he labored to establish, with the grand idea of eventually uniting all men in a common bond of brotherhood and peace, became on the contrary, in the hands of the Iroquois chiefs who followed him, a great engine of war, crushing all tribes that refused to come under its laws. Just enough of its original spirit remained to cause the Iroquois thoroughly to incorporate and make one with themselves the captives of all those peoples whose separate existence they destroyed. Tharonyawagon, Aireskoi, and Hiawatha were all familiar words in the ears of the Mohawk girl. But Rawenniio, the true God[38] was still unknown to her.

Charlevoix, the learned author of the "History of New France," who wrote an account of Kateri Tekakwitha about the year 1732, after mentioning the fact that "as soon as she was able to work she undertook the entire charge of the household," continues thus:—

"The first knowledge she received of Christianity was given her by the Jesuit missionaries who were sent to the Iroquois nations by M. de Tracy. They passed on their way through the town where she lived, and lodged in her cabin. She was charged with their entertainment, of which she acquitted herself in a manner which surprised them. She had herself been struck at the sight of them, and felt in her heart strange sentiments.... The fervor and recollectedness of these Jesuit Fathers at their prayers inspired her with the desire to pray with them; this desire she expressed to them; indeed they quickly divined it from her actions, and instructed her in the great truths of Christianity as well as their short stay in the town permitted, and quitted her with a regret fully reciprocated on her part."

There are those, as we have said, who believe that the prayer of Tekakwitha's dying mother had guided the steps of these missionaries straight to the lodge of her child, and left them there three days to be waited on and cared for by the shy but capable little Mohawk housekeeper, the niece of the chief at Gandawague. His people, as we already know, were away on a debauch at Tionnontogen,—a revel too disgraceful for the admission of guests whom they wished to honor. The Mohawks must have been hard pushed indeed when they handed over the envoys of the Canadian Governor whom they were anxious just then to conciliate, to the care of a mere child, even though she were high in rank; but Tekakwitha's uncle knew she could be trusted to do her part well. How well she did it Cholenec tells us in the following words:—

"She was charged with the task of lodging the missionaries and attending to their wants. The modesty and sweetness with which she acquitted herself of this duty touched her new guests; while she on her part was struck with their affable manners, their regularity in prayer, and the other exercises into which they divided the day."

Had they remained longer in the village, she would probably have asked for baptism.

As it was, she stole silently out of the lodge in the dusk of evening to bring water for the simple Indian repast she was preparing for her guests, and all the while her thought was alive with God,—the God she had never known, the God of the pale-face and of the Mohawk as well (for this much they had told her in their broken utterance of her own language); he was the God, too, of their Mohegan enemies. Here, indeed, was a new idea to the Mohawk girl. She had heard her people mention the God of the French, no doubt, and had wondered if he were kind like Tharonyawagon or cruel like Aireskoi; but this God whom the blackgowns told her of, was not their Lord and "Master of Life" any more than hers. He was the God of all men, whether they worshipped him or not,—of pale-face and redskin, of Mohawk and Mohegan. He loved them all with a father's love,—alas! Tekakwitha knew what that meant, if only from observation and from the very lack of it in her own life. This Rawenniio, this true God, was everywhere; he could hear the whispered prayer of the blackgown there in the lodge, and he could speak to her inmost heart even if she were quite alone in the forest. How she was stirred at the thought! "Will he speak to me now?" she said. "Does he know I am thinking of him?" She stopped at the foot of a great tree, poising her jug on her shoulder, and listened with innocent simplicity. "God of the blackgown! God of my mother! Rawenniio!" was the cry of her heart,—"speak to me, here in the forest,—speak to me, if it is true what the blackgown says!" Lifting her hand and her eyes, she looked up through the branches of the giant tree, far beyond what her dim eyes saw, far as her simple thought could reach; and though Tekakwitha heard no audible voice in the forest answering to her new-found cry, there was a dim but rapturous hope in her heart, cheering with happy omen her budding faith and her growing love for something more than the world of Tharonyawagon could give her,—something more than fruitful corn-fields, sunshine on the running water of the Mohawks, a strong, true brave to love her, and the Happy Hunting-Grounds beyond. They could not be much fairer, after all, than were the hunting-grounds of her nation at Saratoga, where Father Jogues had cut a cross deep into the bark of a tree, and had almost perished with hunger because he would not eat the meat that was offered to Aireskoi. Tekakwitha was not long in choosing between Aireskoi and Rawenniio.

While her mind was dwelling on such thoughts as these, she must have sought out the ravine near the Turtle Village where Isaac Jogues had buried his friend Réné Goupil. This young martyr was killed, as we have said, for making the sign of the cross on an Indian child. She may have knelt to pray on the very spot where Jogues himself was tomahawked at the door of the Bear Chief's deserted lodge. There she could ask Rawenniio most fervently for strength of will to follow the gleam of light that beckoned to her. The Mohawks of Gandawague had not forgotten these places so near at hand, nor how it had all happened. The Fathers Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron, during their stay in the lodge with Tekakwitha, thought often of Jogues, and must have mentioned his name in her presence, as they afterwards did in their journal;[39] then, to be sure, Tegonhatsihongo would know of the murdered blackgown, so Tekakwitha could not fail to learn his story. She probably knew it already, but she thought of it now as she never had done before. Surely that first of the blackgowns who came to their village had something important to tell them. Why else had he laid down his life by coming among them a second and even a third time after his cruel captivity? Why else had he exerted himself to learn their language? The voice of Ondessonk's blood cried out to her from the ground, and besought her to hear what these others said who came to her now with his name on their lips, and the name of a greater than he,—of the One who was nailed to a cross, whose image they carried. A host of questions rose to her lips when she saw them again, but she had neither time nor courage to utter them. Only three days, and the blackgowns were gone. Tekakwitha was left alone once more with her aunts and her uncle, who had received these guests not from love, but policy.

During their short visit an alarming incident had occurred. A band of Mohegans, dashing down upon the village, had scalped a wretched squaw at the very gates. "Fremin was one of the first to hasten to her, eager to save a soul where life was in so great peril; but she spurned his offers. Four times she turned away in scorn;" but the patient zeal of the missionary won her at last, and she died a Christian.

There was another squaw in the town who had asked for baptism, an Iroquois woman of rank. We are not told whether this was Tegonhatsihongo, or some other, though we know that she did in time become a Christian. To test this woman's sincerity, Father Fremin gave her the thankless, unpopular task of calling to prayer, with a little bell, the Huron and Algonquin captives at Gandawague, who were already Christians. She did not shrink from this ordeal, but still her baptism was deferred till the missionaries should finish their embassy and return again to the town. In the mean time she wearied of their prolonged delay, and followed them to Tionnontogen, gaining from them there the necessary instruction for receiving the sacrament. The young Tekakwitha, on the contrary, either through natural timidity or by the express command of her uncle (we know not which, most likely both), waited with sealed lips for eight long years. During all that time she gave no sign or token, that has ever been recorded, of a wish to become a Christian; and yet the missionaries thenceforth were at work continuously in one or another of the Mohawk villages. Let us, then, follow the hurrying course of events in which the life of Tekakwitha was involved during these eight years of dim but dawning light, not forgetting that the seed which the Fathers had scattered in passing lay hidden yet treasured deep in the innermost heart of the Mohawk maiden.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] See [Appendix, Note A], Letter of June 29, 1885.

[37] Or "Peace-Maker," as wampum was the emblem and token of peace. For an interesting account of Hiawatha, or Hayenwatha, as founder of the League, and for other rare and valuable information concerning the people of the Five Nations, see Hale's Iroquois Book of Rites.

[38] See M. Cuoq's Lexique de la Langue Iroquoise. This word "Rawenniio," also written "Hawennyiu," came into use when Christianity was first preached among the Iroquois. It is still used by them to designate the "Great Spirit," or "Father of all Men." The last part of the word, "niio" or "nyiu" (God), is said to be derived from the French word "Dieu."

[39] See "Early Chapters of Mohawk History," no. xv., by Dr. Hawley, of the Cayuga County Historical Society, printed in the "Auburn Advertiser," and also to be issued in book form. These "Early Chapters" consist chiefly of translations from the Jesuit "Relations," with valuable notes and comments.

CHAPTER IX.

CAUGHNAWAGA ON THE MOHAWK.—FATHERS FREMIN AND PIERRON.

AFTER Tekakwitha had lodged Fathers Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron for three days at Gandawague, on the bank of Auries Creek, they went to the castle of Tionnontogen, which it must be remembered had been hastily rebuilt some little distance west of its former site near the Nose, though still on the south side of the river. There, when the pagan festival and debauchery was over, a grand public reception of these ambassadors took place. The people of all the Mohawk villages were assembled for the occasion, Tekakwitha probably among them. In due time, after a most ceremonious welcome, Fremin rose to address them. To render his speech to the nation more impressive, he set up in their midst a great pole forty or fifty feet in height, from the top of which a wampum belt was suspended. He then declared, on the part of Onnontio, that in like manner would hang the first Iroquois who should come to kill a Frenchman or any one of their allies. At this all the Mohawks—men, women, and children—bowed their heads in silent awe, not venturing to look at such an extraordinary gift, nor to speak, until the most accomplished of their orators, having recovered his senses, rose and went through all imaginable mimicries to show his astonishment. As if ignorant of its meaning, he gesticulated and declaimed in the liveliest manner, though a man of more than sixty years of age. Then discovering its true significance, he seized his throat "with both hands in a frightful way, grasping it tightly to represent and at the same time impress upon the multitude about him the horror of this kind of death. After he had spoken, and at length, with a surprising eloquence, exhibiting flashes of wit by no means common, he finished," as the leading ambassador-priest tells us, "by delivering up the captives we demanded, and giving us the choice of the place where we would build our chapel, in the erection of which they proposed to go to work with all despatch. They, moreover, delivered up to us a Frenchman whom they had held captive for some time, and promised us the liberty of twelve Algonquins, partly of the nation of the Nez Percés, partly of that of the Outaouacs [Ottawas]."

Thus at Tionnontogen the labors of Father Fremin began. He was left quite alone among the Mohawks for nearly a year, at the mission of St. Mary's as it was henceforth called. He struggled earnestly during that time to maintain peace and establish Christianity. His companion, Bruyas (whose Mohawk dictionary is exceedingly valuable to students of the Indian language), soon went west to the Oneidas, among whom, little by little, he learned the Oneida dialect. Pierron, on the other hand, after a short stay with Fremin, bent his steps eastward to Schenectady. He visited the English and Dutch at Albany to renew the friendly intercourse of former days; and then this messenger of peace in the early part of the year 1668, travelled back over the great Mohawk war-trail, leading northward. He returned to Quebec to report to Governor de Courselle the progress of the embassy.

Fremin, left entirely to his own devices in the Mohawk Valley, gathered together the captive Christian Hurons, and then went steadily on, preaching, teaching, and baptizing. Once when the young warriors were torturing an Ottawa captive and preparing to burn him, contrary to the articles of peace, the Father by frantic efforts succeeded in saving him; but it was only by dint of rushing through the streets of the village with cries, threats, and entreaties. They could not withstand his zeal. He scattered the assembled crowd. He called down the vengeance of Rawenniio and Onnontio upon their castle of Tionnontogen, if they persisted in thus breaking the peace. The older men, roused at last by his words and actions, put a stop to the outrage. The unhappy victim was rescued from a fiery death, but he fell into a lingering fever brought on by the fright and the sufferings he had endured. In course of time he died, but it was not till he had been fully instructed and baptized by the courageous Father, who thus had the gratification of saving both body and soul.

On the 7th of October, 1668, Pierron returned from his journey to Quebec, and again passed through the lower Mohawk villages on his way to the bark chapel of St. Mary's, which had been erected at Tionnontogen during his absence. If Tekakwitha saw her former guest at that time, it was only as one among a group of Mohawk villagers who watched the missionary as he passed through the streets of the Turtle Castle. He was hurrying on to meet and to replace Father Fremin. This spirited and eloquent founder of the mission now went westward beyond Bruyas at Oneida, in order to make a missionary opening among the Senecas, who also desired a blackgown. This left Father Pierron alone in his turn in charge of the Mohawk mission. His graphic letters to his superiors in Canada during the next few years give many a vivid picture of what was transpiring at that time in the valley.

He was something of an artist. Before he succeeded in mastering the language, he spent much of his time in painting. He found that his pictures stimulated the curiosity of the Mohawks. In their efforts to get at the meaning of them and to explain them to one another, they learned, without realizing it, the very things he wanted to teach them; while he, by listening to their explanations, quickly acquired their language. As the blackgown's pictures were much talked about in the Mohawk villages at this time, and must have influenced the minds of Tekakwitha and her relatives, it will be worth while to give Pierron's description of one of his own productions. "Among these representations I have made," he says, "there is one contrasting a good with a miserable death. What led me to make this was that I saw the old men and the old women would stop their ears with their fingers the moment I began to speak to them of God, and would say to me, 'I do not hear.' I have therefore represented on one side of my picture a Christian who dies a saintly death, with the hands joined as of one holding the cross and his rosary; then his soul is carried by an angel to heaven and the blessed spirits appear awaiting it. On the other side, I have put, lower down, a woman broken with age, who is dying, and unwilling to listen to a missionary Father who points her to paradise; she holds both ears closed with her fingers; but a demon from hell seizes her arms and hands, and himself puts his fingers in the ears of the dying woman. Her soul is carried by three demons; and an angel who comes out of a cloud, sword in hand, hurls them into the bottomless pit. This representation," he continues, "has furnished me an occasion to speak of the immortality of our souls, and of the good and the bad of the other life; and when they once catch the import of my picture, no one presumes to say any more, 'I do not hear.'"

The "Relation" of the same year[40] tells us that Father Pierron accompanied this saintly skill with severe labors making regularly each month a visitation of the seven large villages, over a space of seven and a half leagues in extent, in order that no infant or adult sick person should die without receiving baptism.

Father Boniface now arrived at Quebec from France, and was immediately selected to go to the Mohawk Valley to second Pierron's zeal. We learn further, from the "Relation," that a bitter strife was then in progress: "The war [between the Iroquois and the nine nations of the Loups] humbles them by the loss of their people; but by preventing their permanent stay in one place, it also multiplies obstacles to the conversion of the warriors, who divide up into numerous bands to go singly against the enemy. The Agniers [Mohawks] and the Loups [Mohegans] have brought the war even close to New Orange; and when taken captive they burn and eat one another." The Mohegans and their allies had certain advantages over the Mohawks. They were more numerous; then, too, they were a roving people, difficult to attack, whereas the Mohawks lived in villages and had permanent homes. These last, in order to defend themselves, took care thoroughly to fortify the castles they were then building on the north side of the Mohawk River. As they seem to have had seven villages at this time, which is an unusual number, it is probable that they either had not entirely abandoned their old sites, or else had recently added several villages of captives.

It was while affairs were still in this unsettled condition that Tekakwitha went to live on the north bank of the Mohawk River, near the Cayudutta Creek at Caughnawaga, or Fonda, a few miles west of her earlier home. The French writers continued for some time after this to call the new castle of the Turtles on the north bank by its old name of Gandawague;[41] to prevent confusion, however, we will henceforth call it Caughnawaga, meaning "At the Rapids." That name still clings to a part of the present town of Fonda. The rapids of the Mohawk still ripple there as of old under the sharp-cut hill where, as proved by relics and historic references, the once famous castle stood. The Indians who went forth later from this Caughnawaga in the Mohawk Valley to Canada, carried with them the familiar word. Settling down beside the great rapids of the St. Lawrence River, the sound of rushing water boomed louder than before in their ears, and the name Caughnawaga grew into history there, as well as here. But there it is still a living name, and is passed from mouth to mouth as the well-known home of half the Canienga race; for Caughnawaga in Canada holds to-day that part of the Mohawk nation which in the wranglings of the white men—that is to say, the old French and Indian wars—sided with the French. Brantford, also in Canada, contains the other half of the same nation,—the descendants of Sir William Johnson's Mohawk followers, who were stanch friends of the English. To us Americans, falling heir to their lands, these Mohawks have left no living trace of themselves, though some of their brothers, the Onondagas and Senecas, still dwell in our midst. The Mohawks have gone from us, indeed, leaving us only a memory, all inwrought in a thick array of Indian names. Let us try at least to understand and to preserve these names, in honor of the brave race that once peopled our hills and valleys, our forests and streams.

In the Mohawk Valley, side by side with the name of Fonda, which comes to us from the days of the early white settlers, there lingers the still older name of Caughnawaga, which is dusky with the shadows of two hundred years, and even more. The mere name in partial use there at the present day has served to throw some light on the hill and the spring near the Cayudutta,—enough, at least, to have called to our minds a vision of Mohawk girls with their water-jugs, and to point in a misty way to the almost forgotten home of the Lily of the Mohawks. It is owing, however, to long, careful, critical research, and not to surmise, that the haze of many years has been cleared away at last from the actual site of Caughnawaga Castle. The map of Gen. John S. Clark (page 38) gives its position relative to other Mohawk villages. The plan here given, which was drawn by Rev. C. A. Walworth, shows more especially where this Indian fortress stood in reference to Fonda, on what are now called the "Sand Flats," west of the Cayudutta Creek. The spring which supplied the Mohawks with water is seen, distinctly marked in its cove, half-way down the hill from the castle, towards the Cayudutta. With this plan before us it is needless here to repeat the details of this locality already given in the chapter entitled "Tekakwitha's Spring." In our opening pages we journeyed all the way up the Mohawk Valley from Albany, with here and there a passing glimpse at the scenery, till we reached the castle site at Fonda, which was then fully described. Since that time we have travelled together through the highways and in the byways of history over about thirteen years of Tekakwitha's life. Here we are again at Caughnawaga; and now that we are following up the course of events in regular order from the birth of Tekakwitha, we find that she also has but recently arrived here, having just come to her new home from Gandawague. She can scarcely be called a child any longer, since she takes upon herself so much of the household care, and yet she is quite young. Her life is a busy one. She has taken an active part with the women of her family and their neighbors in building the new bark house which they occupy within the enclosure of palisades at Caughnawaga. Now, at last, they are quite comfortable.

SITE OF CAUGHNAWAGA CASTLE.
(Also called the "Mission of St. Peter's" of the Mohawks, where Tekakwitha was baptized in 1676.)

This is the way the Mohawks were accustomed to build their permanent lodges. They first took saplings, and planted two rows of them firmly in the ground. Then they bent the tops of them over across the intervening space, and tied them together. The shape of the house when finished was not unlike the top of an ambulance wagon. These arched ribs were supported and held in place by poles put in horizontally across the house, near the top. The whole was then neatly covered with square, overlapping pieces of bark, held in place by poles that were tied down over them. The holes in the roof for chimneys and windows were not forgotten, nor the loose pieces of bark to pull over them in case of rain. The Jesuits often found these cabins smoky and dark,—a severe test of their patience when engaged in literary pursuits, or even in reading their breviaries; but for the Mohawks, who had no such tastes, they were good enough.

When the house was finished on which Tekakwitha worked with her aunts and her neighbors, it made a secure shelter for a score of families, all lodged under the same roof and all on one floor. That floor was the bare ground. When the dwelling was fitted up into compartments on either side, with spaces down the centre for fires alternating with spaces for family gatherings at meal-time; when the matrons had assigned to each and every member of the household certain lodge-seats; when mats of rushes had been prepared, and robes of skins were in their places for bed-clothes on bunks along the sides of the house; when plenty of dried corn and smoked meat hung from the ridge-poles of the roof for instant use; when the heavy wooden mortar and pestle were made and stood ready for pounding the corn; when nice little dishes of bark and wooden bowls were at hand, while tucked away in corners were baskets of wampum beads all ready to be strung into belts at the proper time,—when all these things were in order, then at last, after the move from Gandawague on Auries Creek, Tekakwitha felt free to rest and breathe easily. Then she might glance leisurely at the patch of sunlight falling on the floor of the lodge through the doorway at the far end, and decide in her own mind how much time she had before the next meal was to be prepared. Perhaps she would go out to take a look at the strong new palisade that her uncle and the warriors had planned so carefully for defence against the dreaded Mohegans; or she may have preferred to sit quietly by the spring for a while in the beautiful little cove. Being so near the castle, it was comparatively safe from the lurking enemy, who might attack them at any time.

Wentworth Greenhalgh, an Englishman, who went from Albany to Caughnawaga in 1677, thus describes the castle: "Cahaniaga is double stockadoed round; has four forts [ports?] about four foot wide apiece; conteyns about twenty-four houses, and is situated upon the edge of an hill, about a bow shott from the river side." He then gives the situation and size of the other Mohawk towns at that time, and closes his remarks by stating that their corn grew close by the river. The Mohawks chose the flats or river-bottoms for corn-fields because they were fertile, and besides, they were natural openings, with no trees to be cut down and cleared away.

Much of Tekakwitha's time at certain seasons of the year was spent in these corn-fields; and she must have witnessed, if not taken part in, some of the exciting scenes described by Pierron, who was then making his periodical rounds through the Mohawk villages. He frequently gives incidents of Mohawk women who were waylaid and scalped or captured by desultory bands of Mohegans and other tribes with whom they were at war. The constant fear of death that overhung them gave to the minds of these Mohawk squaws a serious turn, and made them more willing than they would otherwise have been to listen to the warning words of the blackgown. More than one of them, haunted perhaps by the remembrance of his pictures and his morality games, which were no less ingenious for gaining their attention, came and asked for baptism. Pierron succeeded also in rousing the chiefs to a sense of the degradation into which the constant purchase of brandy and rum at Albany was sinking them. He reminded them that when once under its influence they were in no condition to repel the attacks either of Satan or the Mohegans. Both he and Fremin had themselves been sufferers during the drunken riots of the Indians. While the two Fathers were together at Tionnontogen, they wrote:—

"It seems sometimes as if the whole village had run mad, so great is the license they take when they give up to drinking. They have hurled firebrands at our heads; they have thrown our papers into the fire; they have broken open our chapel; they have often threatened us with death; and during the three or four days that these debaucheries last, and which recur with frequency, we must suffer a thousand insults without complaint, without food or sleep. In their fury they upset everything that comes in their way, and even butcher one another, not sparing relative, friend, countryman, nor stranger. These things are carried to such excess that the place seems to us no longer tenable; but we shall leave it only with life.... When the storm is over, we are left to go on with our duties quite peaceably."

This state of things continued for some time, as did also the raids of their enemies. It was in the midst of such bristling savage thorns as these that the Lily of the Mohawks grew up from childhood into womanhood. In her new home at Caughnawaga, during these stormy times she lived a sweet, pure life, all uncontaminated. At last the Mohawk chiefs, won by Pierron's reiterated arguments, began to realize that they had among them, in intoxicating drink, "a foreign demon more to be dreaded than those they worship in their dreams." They were induced to take measures against this excess in public council, "and, advised by Father Pierron that the most effectual means would be themselves to make their appeal to the Governor-General of Manhattan, the more prominent among them presented a petition which they had drawn for the purpose." This is the answer which the Governor gave to the request of the Mohawks and the letter of the Father which accompanied it:—

Father,—By your last, I am informed of your complaint, which is seconded by that of the Iroquois chiefs, the Sachems, the Indians, as appears more openly by their petition enclosed in yours, respecting the large quantity of liquors that certain ones of Albany have taken the liberty to sell to the Indians; as a consequence, that great excesses are committed by them, and the worst is feared unless we prevent it. In response, know that I have taken, and will continue to take, all possible care, under the severest penalties, to restrain and oppose the furnishing any excess to the Indians. And I am delighted to see such virtuous thoughts proceed from heathens, to the shame of many Christians; but this must be attributed to your pious instructions, for, well versed in strict discipline, you have shown them the way of mortification both by your precepts and practice.

Your very humble and affectionate servant,
Francis Lovelace.

At Fort James, 18th of Nov. 1668.

Fremin and Pierron, during the two years 1668 and 1669, baptized one hundred and fifty-one Indians, of which more than half were children or aged persons who died shortly after baptism. Says the "Relation":—

"This should be considered a sufficiently abundant harvest in a waste land, and we may hope for much from such beginnings. We owe, under God, the birth of this flourishing church to the death and blood of the Reverend Father Jogues. He shed it at the very region where the new Christian church begins to arise; and it seems as though we are to see verified in our days, in his person, the beautiful words of Tertullian: 'The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians.'"

That Pierron was fired with the spirit of Jogues, who founded this Mohawk mission in his blood, is proved by the following words, which he wrote in a moment of discouragement:—

"I have attacked drunkenness and lewdness, which are divinities of the country, so madly are these people devoted to them. I have combated these vices.... I have employed gentleness and vigor, threats and entreaties, labors and tears, to build up this new church and to convert these poor savages. There remains nothing more than to shed my blood for their salvation, that which I long for with all the desires of my heart. But after all, I have not yet observed in them those marked amendments which the Holy Spirit effects in those of the heathen whom he would put in the number of the faithful."

FOOTNOTES:

[40] An English translation of this "Relation" is given in the "Early Chapters of Mohawk History," by Dr. Hawley.

[41] See [Appendix, Note B].

CHAPTER X.

THE MOHEGANS ATTACK THE NEW CASTLE.—BATTLE OF KINAQUARIONES.—THE FEAST OF THE DEAD.

IN the year 1669, in one of the long bark-houses at Caughnawaga on a summer morning before the dawn, Tekakwitha is turning uneasily in her sleep. Suddenly her aunt springs up beside her and speaks in a startled voice. In an instant all in the lodge are on the alert. Sharp, wild cries are heard; bullets pierce the stout palisade, and come whizzing through the bark sides of the new house. The warriors, roused from sleep, seize their nearest weapons, be they guns, war-clubs, tomahawks, or arrows. A hurried word to the women, a loud whoop, a few bounding steps, and they are on the platform of the palisade hurling defiance at an assaulting army of Mohegans. Before them are hundreds of the foe in war-paint and feathers, led by a stout man of middle age,—the wise and gallant Chickatabutt, the great sachem of the Massachusetts. His bearing makes him conspicuous among a score of famous sagamores who are leading the assault. In the motley ranks that follow are Hudson River Indians, mingled with the red-skin neighbors of the Puritans, grim old warriors of the Massachusetts tribe. There are also Narragansett braves and other New England Indians,—all united in a desperate attempt to crush the Mohawks, and thus break in through the eastern door of the Long House of the Five Nations. The assailants seek, now by open attack and now by strategy, to dislodge the defenders of Caughnawaga from their lofty scaffolds, and to fire the palisade. Four Mohawks drop from their places dead, and two are wounded; but the Mohegans make no perceptible headway against the defensive works of the Castle. The struggle continues with unabated fury. Among those who fall on the side of the enemy are pupils of the English missionary Eliot, who know something of the Bible which he has translated for them. Five of these converts to Puritanism are engaged in this expedition, of whom but one escapes with his life. They too, like the ever increasing neophytes of Pierron, are called "praying Indians." Their chief Chickatabutt—or Josiah, as he is often called—was himself a "praying Indian" once. That was when he lived with his pious uncle Kuchamakin, one of Eliot's favorite pupils. "He kept the Sabbath several years," says Gookin; "but after turned apostate, and for several years last past separated from the praying Indians, and was but a back friend to religion." Indeed the English, who had a good opinion of him in his early days, now thought him "a very vitious person," though all acknowledged he was as brave as brave could be.

The Puritans had tried in vain to dissuade their Indian neighbors from accompanying this chief on his adventurous march to the Mohawk Valley. In spite of every drawback, however, Chickatabutt, whose name means "A-house-afire," had succeeded in bringing his army all the way from the vicinity of Boston to the castle of Caughnawaga. After they were joined by their allies, they numbered six or seven hundred men.[42] True, they had spent much of their ammunition on the march,—"shooting away their powder in the air, ... boasting, vapouring, and prating of their valour," at the Indian villages where they had stopped for foraging purposes. It was their consequent lack of ammunition which determined them to carry the Mohawk Castle, if possible, by assault. But the brave Caniengas, or "People of the Flint," though taken by surprise in their sleep, were quick to grapple with the daring Mohegans, and fought like panthers. They were not to be easily overcome, by any roving Indian foe, in defence of their women and their homes. The squaws of Caughnawaga, with the well-known courage of their race, realized their perilous situation at the first alarm, and were "arming themselves with knives and defensive weapons in case a breach should be made." The youths of the village were, many of them, fighting their first important battle on this occasion. The sight of the Mohawk women and young girls, arming themselves as best they could to resist the Mohegan attack, was in itself an irresistible appeal to their tribesmen to exert themselves to the utmost in defending them against the well-known horrors of captivity, which would undoubtedly come upon them if the castle fell into the hands of the enemy. Many a young brave was nerved to desperate feats of valor on that morning and during the days that followed. Beginning with the sudden attack at dawn, the struggle continued for a long time with uncertain issue. News was carried to Tionnontogen that the whole country was lost; that Caughnawaga was besieged by an army of Mohegans; that all the youth had already fallen, and perhaps Gandagaro, the adjacent fort, was in extremity. These reports, though exaggerated, caused the Mohawk warriors of the other castles to gather as fast as possible at Caughnawaga. Even had they been all there at the very first, they would still have been fewer in numbers than the enemy; but before the sun was high, enough of them had assembled to warrant a sally on the foe. Father Pierron was now at the castle, and a witness of the stirring events taking place there. Tekakwitha, too, was taking her part among the young girls, whose fate now hung in the balance. The missionary thus describes what followed:—

"By eight o'clock in the morning our warriors without confusion promptly arrayed themselves with all they have of greatest value, as is their custom in such encounters, and with no other leader than their own courage went out in full force against the enemy. I was with the first to go to see if, amid the carnage about the palisades of the village, where so many unbelieving souls would perish, I might not be able to save some one. On our arrival, we heard only cries of lamentation over the death of the bravest of the village. The enemy had retired after two hours of most obstinate fighting on both sides. There was but a single warrior of the Loups [Mohegans] left on the ground; and I saw that a Barbarian, after cutting off his hands and feet, had flayed him, and was stripping the flesh from the bones for a hateful repast."

This was to honor Aireskoi! Tekakwitha, ever helpful and ready to assist others, would probably be where she was most needed at that time,—with the bereaved women who were seeking their dead, and with those who ministered to the wounded. No heart so quick as hers to turn with loathing from the hideous human sacrifice that was being prepared outside the castle walls. With the good deeds of the blackgown Pierron hourly before her, and the sound of his voice often in her ears,—for this missionary could doctor as well as preach,[43]—she must have had constantly in her mind the thought of Rawenniio during this time of peril and anxiety, and would not fail to call in spirit on the God of the Christians for assistance against the foe.

The Mohegan army sat down before the castle, besieging it for some days without effect, though there was much firing back and forth. The provisions they had brought with them were about exhausted and their munition well spent. Some of their people were sick, and they saw the impossibility of getting the stronghold by assault. So they broke up the siege, to the great relief of the imprisoned Mohawks, and retreated twenty miles in the direction of the Dutch settlements. This brought them to Kinaquariones,[44] now called Towereune, a steep rocky hill on the north side of the Mohawk River. It is just above Hoffman's Ferry, nine English or three Dutch miles west of Schenectady; there they temporarily entrenched themselves. The Mohawks, who did not know of this camp, though secure for the time being in their castle, felt that in any case no time should be lost in following up the enemy as soon as they could make the necessary preparation. The women of Caughnawaga, having laid aside their weapons, began at once to assist the warriors in making ready the supply of meal which according to custom was to be carried on the war-path. This was soon done, as they had but to add a little maple-sugar or other seasoning to the pounded corn, which they had already twice charred or dried for use on just such expeditions. The warriors of the Mohawk nation were now all assembled to go in pursuit of the Mohegans. Every man was fully armed and equipped, and their deerskin pockets were well filled with the crushed corn. They put themselves under the leadership of the brave warrior Kryn, surnamed the "Great Mohawk." His home was at Caughnawaga, and his valor and good management on this expedition won for him a new title, that of "Conqueror of the Mohegans." He and his fellow tribesmen now hastily bade adieu to their families, who, together with the blackgown Pierron, were to remain at the castle; then they embarked in canoes on the Mohawk, and aided by the force of the current soon disappeared around the great bend of the river in the direction of old Ossernenon on the route to the pale-face settlements. Anxious eyes and thoughts followed them. The bravest of two warlike races were now likely at any moment to meet in a decisive conflict, and who dare foretell the result? Not Tekakwitha, who waited in silence and concern; nor her more voluble companions, whose anxiety took the form of restlessness. Having all done their share in defending the castle, they could now only watch and wait, looking often in the direction of the vanished braves, and hoping for news of the expedition from chance stragglers. In the mean-time the women were free to go back and forth to the spring, to care for the wounded, and to prepare the bodies of the dead for burial.

The day after the departure of the warriors there were rumors of a desperate battle in progress about twenty miles away; and on the following day at three o'clock in the afternoon, came certain news of victory. It was a great triumph for the Mohawks or Caniengas, bravest of the bold Kanonsionni. Chickatabutt, the sachem of the Massachusetts, was slain. The noblest of the Mohegan warriors fell at his side. Those who escaped fled away to their distant kindred humbled and ashamed, with lamentations and mourning for the loss of most of their chief men. The Mohawks were greatly elated. The gloom that hung over Caughnawaga was changed to glad excitement. All prepared to welcome home the heroes of the battle of Kinaquariones. Father Pierron started at once and alone in the direction of the battle-field to visit the wounded. He wished also to manifest to the warriors his interest in their victory. He arrived on the spot before nightfall. The warriors were glad to see him, and eager to relate all the particulars of the fight. This proved to be the last great battle between the Mohawks and the Mohegans. Its deeds of valor were told and retold for many a day at the Turtle Village and in Tekakwitha's hearing with all the usual boastfulness of the Indian. Pierron wrote a full account of all that happened from the time the Mohawk war-party set out from the castle in their canoes till they returned to their homes in triumph. It is here given in his own words:—

"Night overtaking them [the Mohawks] in their pursuit, they sent in advance certain of their number in quest of the enemy, and quietly to discover the place where he was encamped. As the scouts came within sight of the spot, desiring a better view of the situation, they drew still nearer. But notwithstanding their great caution, one of the Loups on guard close by, hearing a noise, gave the customary challenge, Koue, koue (this is the 'Who comes there?' of the savages); as there was no response and he saw nothing, he did not deem it necessary to give the alarm.

From the report given by the spies on their return of the condition of the enemy, it was determined not to attack him in his lodging-place, where he appeared too well entrenched, but to prepare an ambush on the route it was believed he would take. In the execution of this plan, the Iroquois made a wide détour to lay their ambuscade in a cragged and most advantageous pass which commanded the only route in the direction of the Hollanders. In the morning the Loups decamped; and as they marched in single file, after the Indian custom, twelve of them fell unexpectedly into the ambuscade. A shower of balls of which they were all at once made aware, immediately put to flight those that the casualty had spared. Frightful cries at once rang through the forest, and the Loups rallied at the same place where they had encamped. The Iroquois pursued them with vigor. On overtaking them, they made a fierce assault. The Loups at first made a stout resistance; but the cowardice of some among them forcing the main body to recede before the fury of the Iroquois, ten of the whole band made a stand within their works to defend themselves unto death. This new entrenchment greatly harassed our Agniés [Mohawks] but as they are an indefatigable and brave people, they did not lose courage nor the hope of driving out the enemy; and to succeed in this with the least peril, they made use of an old tree, which they found there, and which they carried in front of them for protection. This they were able to do, instead of going up one by one to the place where the enemy was fortified. Their skill however did not avail them; for notwithstanding this device, the Loups did not omit to open a heavy fire from all sides, killing and wounding a number of our people; and the fight without doubt would have been still more disastrous if night had not terminated it. Our Indians captured at the outset four women of the twenty-four who accompanied the expedition, and six men subsequently in the heat of the combat.

The next morning as they were ready to renew the attack, they found that the enemy had made their escape during the night, and that they were left masters of the battle-field. The victors, following the custom of the savages, tomahawked and scalped the Loups left on the place, and then took care to bury those of their own people who had been slain in the fight."

The Mohawks declared that nearly a hundred warriors on the side of the enemy had perished, either by the sword in the fray or by water in flight. "This was probably an exaggeration," continues Pierron, "as only nineteen scalps were secured."[45] According to the story of the Mohegan captives, they lost fifty men on their side, thirteen falling on the field of battle; while they killed altogether nearly forty of the Mohawks.

Pierron thus describes the triumphal march back to Caughnawaga from the field of action:—

"We left two days after the combat, in company with a large number, both those who had taken part in the fight and those who had come to look on. The victors bore the scalps well painted, at the end of long batons made to support their trophies. The captives, divided into several bands, marched with singing; and as I perceived that one of the women had a sick infant which she carried at the breast, I thought I would do well to baptize it, seeing it was about to die."

The blackgown accordingly took occasion to approach the mother as they were crossing a stream, caught up a handful of water, and saying the short baptismal words, poured it on the little head, which soon drooped in death. He had already instructed some of the captives, and in the course of a few days all of them asked for baptism. On first reaching the castle, the Mohegan prisoners of war were received and tortured in the usual manner. Pierron could do nothing for them while the heat of passion and enmity toward the victims lasted; but watching his chance he saw that they were left alone for a time on the torture scaffold, before being killed, surrounded still by the ghastly scalps of their companions. He at once led them down from the hateful platform, and took them into a cabin near by, to prepare them, if possible, for a Christian death. While he was speaking to them earnestly of their salvation, some of the Iroquois came and stood near, saying to one another, "Do you see how he loves our enemies?" Some among them added, "He ought to leave them to burn in hell,—people who have done us so much evil." Pierron, overhearing this, turned about, and seeing that a crowd of the villagers had assembled, caught up the words of the discontented Mohawks, and taking them for his text, explained so well and so forcibly the teaching of Christ on the Mount, that in a little while the Indians who had gathered about him were all of one mind, and declared that he did well to teach the captives. They no longer interfered with his self-imposed task, but gave him ample time to instruct them. Before the doomed Mohegans were finally put to death, they all received baptism; among them, we are told, was "one of the bravest and most celebrated warriors of that nation, who in the combat had slain with his own hand several Iroquois." Submitting to Pierron's influence, the fierce Mohawks did not grudge even to this warrior whatever happiness he might be able to secure, through the blackgown's ministrations, in another world. Little by little these Mohawks were veering round in the direction of Christianity, under the firm and steady but gentle guidance of their devoted missionary. Whether or not they were willing to listen, his stirring voice still rang in their ears; and whether or not they realized the fact, it was certainly true that he was treated every day with more and more of respect and trust.

The next important event that took place at Caughnawaga was the Feast of the Dead. Here again, though Tekakwitha was certainly present and must have known all that was going on, her biographers have given no account of it. Pierron, however, has taken care to write out a full description of this great feast; it occurred only once in ten years. He, of course, in his important position as the representative among them both of Christianity and of his French countrymen, deals only with what concerned the whole Mohawk nation. He had little or no time to note the changes that were taking place in the young Tekakwitha; no word had passed between the two since his return from Quebec. If she had aught to say to him, she was forbidden to say it. Likely enough he did not even recognize her when he saw her, though he may have remembered the appearance of a little maiden who some years before had lodged him at Gandawague.

We who have followed the course of her life more closely, can easily single out Tekakwitha from the crowd that has gathered to witness the strange ceremonies that are taking place in the woods not far from the castle. The bones of all the friends and relations of these people who have died within the last ten years have been carefully and reverently cleaned, scraped, and collected together to be deposited in a common pit prepared for their reception. The best and richest of beaver-skins and other furs are freely brought forward, that the pit may be lined with their beautiful warm surfaces. It is at night, amid the wailing chants of the women and the flaming of torches, that the relics of the dead, with many a last caressing touch, are deposited in the great pit; they are encased in separate robes with precious gifts. There are many tragic demonstrations of grief. A weird, pathetic scene it is; and it makes a strange and lasting impression on the minds of the young people who witness it for the first time. After the pit has been filled and covered over, the women are to be seen trudging back and forth to the village with hampers of food, to be deposited on the gigantic grave for the use of their departed friends. It is only after the Feast of the Dead is over that the soul is supposed to take its final journey to the spirit-land. Previous to this celebration they believe that it hovers near the body, which they expose on a bark scaffold, or else put in a sitting posture in a temporary grave covered lightly with bark or twigs.

During the progress of this feast quite a dispute arises among the assembled chiefs concerning the treatment received by Pierron. He has been cordially invited to be present, and now stands among the dignitaries of the Mohawk nation in company with Tekakwitha's uncle and other chiefs. The blackgown lets no part of the ceremony escape his notice. Distinguished guests from Oneida and Onondaga have placed themselves in separate groups, according to custom. An Onondaga chief has risen to make a speech. Near enough to see and hear what is going on are the women of Caughnawaga, who so lately took part in the defence of the castle. Tekakwitha's blanket partly conceals her face, but she is quite as richly dressed as the other young squaws. What she does not see or hear directly she can quickly gather from the talk of those about her. When the Onondaga has finished speaking, the Mohawk chiefs recount in turn the leading superstitions and fables of the nation; they are well known already to most of the people, who only half listen to what is being said. Presently there is a stir among the Mohawk dignitaries, which centres the attention of all within earshot on the group. Pierron, it seems, has ceased to be a silent listener to what passes. He begins in his turn to tell fables, giving them here and there an extremely ridiculous turn. In the midst of it he is abruptly ordered by one of the chiefs to be silent. All are now eager to get at the truth of what has occurred. Some loudly upbraid the chief for his discourtesy; others bitterly accuse Pierron of an untimely interference with their customs. They say that he has been openly ridiculing their beliefs; his mouth must be stopped at once. But Pierron, knowing full well his influence with the people, and judiciously appealing to their love of fair play, boldly addresses the offending chief in these words, now distinctly heard by the listening throng: "Dost thou know, indeed, that thou hast given me the keenest affront I could have received? But who art thou to order me to be silent, and am I here to obey thee? If I had treated thee after this sort at Quebec, wouldst thou not have had cause to complain; but in what have I spoken evil, that my mouth should be closed? And if I speak the truth, why art thou not willing to hear?" The chief replied that it was their custom on these occasions to keep up their fables. Pierron stoutly rejoined: "It is your custom to get intoxicated; honestly, is it a good custom, and ought I to approve it? It is your custom to violate every law of reason, and to live as the beasts; think you it is not my duty to reprove you for all these vices? And yet you impose silence upon me when I would speak to you. Is this reasonable?" As Pierron and the chief could come to no agreement, the blackgown withdrew from among the Mohawks when the singing began, and took his place in the group of Onondaga guests, who received him with marked respect.

The ceremony lasted five hours. When it was over Pierron returned at once to Caughnawaga village, leaving the Mohawks still in the forest on the spot where the solemnity was conducted. A rumor was circulated there to the effect that the blackgown meant to return to Quebec. It was not long before the brusque Mohawk chief who had given offence came to him in the village to offer an apology for his conduct, saying: "My brother, up to this hour we have acted toward each other as the two best friends in the world." Then placing his hand on his heart, he added: "Tell me then, frankly, in what humor is thy soul? They say that thou goest to Quebec, and will no more come to live with us. If this be so, I implore thee not to get us into difficulty with Onnontio; for this would bring trouble upon thyself, if so many, both old and young, who greatly love and honor thee, should for this reason receive ill-treatment. Tell me, then, what is in thy heart, and what are thy sentiments?"

Pierron, in a grave and serious manner seldom assumed by him, replied: "It has been told thee that I have an irritated mind and a heart full of grief. This is true, and thou knowest well that thou art the cause; thou hast treated me with the greatest indignity. Thou hast even presumed to impose silence when I would speak of the faith, which is the thing of all else, as thou art not ignorant, I have most at heart. Did it not confuse thee to see me so well received by the Onondagas, whom I did not know, driven out by those who professed to be our friends?"

After listening patiently till he was through, the chief said with earnestness: "My brother, I see what is at the bottom of this quarrel; it is that we are not yet Christians. But if thou wilt leave this important affair to me, I promise thee success. This is what thou must do: First convoke a council, and then having given three belts to our three families, at each present speak out thy mind. After this, leave me to act, and I trust all will go well."

All did go well, to the great delight of Father Pierron. The old chief, who was high in authority, went to work so energetically, sending his nephews out in every direction, that he soon assembled all the grandees of the Mohawk nation in the cabin of Pierron. The blackgown did indeed speak out his mind with such decided effect that his words were received with loud cries of applause. He threw down a fathom of wampum, saying: "Agnié, my brother, if it is true that thou art willing to hear me, there is my voice, which warns thee and entreats thee wholly to renounce Agreskoue, and never speak to him, but to adore the true God and follow His law."

He threw down a second fathom of wampum, to oblige the medicine men no more to invoke demons for the cure of diseases, but to use natural remedies. Again and again the speaker was applauded; even the medicine men who were present in the assembly showed their good will on this occasion. The last present to destroy the superstition of the dances was received with no less acclamation than the other two. It was Pierron's moment of triumph, the reward of his unceasing efforts in their behalf! The whole Mohawk nation seemed ready to do his will. The council which met some days after, included the delegation from Onondaga. These distinguished strangers had just returned from the visit they made to the Dutch after taking part in the Feast of the Dead.

Garacontié, the chief of the Onondagas, himself soon to become a Christian, now raised his powerful voice in support of Pierron, saying to the people, "Take his word, for he has sacrificed all for you." The blackgown triumphed at last. The sorcerers of the village cast their turtle-shell rattles into the fire, the women no longer called in the medicine men to cure their diseases, no dances were allowed which were not approved by Pierron, and the oyanders (or nobles) brought their youth in crowds to the chapel to be instructed. What more could the blackgown wish? Alas! he knew the Indians too well; and he adds in the moment of his success, "Their natural inconstancy still divides my heart between fear and joy."

So far as Tekakwitha was concerned, no fear as yet disturbed the calm content of her spirit. The Lily of the Mohawks, quite unnoticed in the retirement of her lodge, was taking note of all these things, and was waxing fairer every day in the sunny light of Rawenniio's presence in the land. The true God, the Great Spirit, they tell her, is now to be worshipped by all the people. She hears them cry out through the village, "Hail to Rawenniio! Down with sorcery! Down with Aireskoi!" These words are like sweet music in the ears of Tekakwitha. She is in a dream of happiness, a day-dream of the spirit. Her busy fingers drop their work, unconscious of this unaccustomed idleness; her thoughts are all of God. Tekakwitha's first and last and only love is Rawenniio. She hears his voice, she feels his presence in the purer air she breathes, for Aireskoi has fallen from his throne. In the quiet and seclusion of the long-house, all alone, she hears the noises of the crowd outside, like distant murmurs; but the name of "the true God" echoes in her ears, and she is happy. Why not leave her so? Let us not disturb her. Why should she be roused to suffer? Must the Lily droop her head and thirst and die, like the rest of Rawenniio's flowers? Alas! it must be so. But let us not forget that this Lily of the Mohawks has a soul, though it is still like a little bird that breathes and just begins to move, but has not tried its strength. In sorrow the wings of the soul are developed. When once they have grown strong, it will be easy for Tekakwitha to fly away through the door of death to Rawenniio.

FOOTNOTES: