A Historical Geography of the British Colonies Part 6

[Sidenote: _Their political organization._]

It is rare to find among savages a confederacy which will outlive a single expedition or one season's war. When there is cohesion, it is usually under savage despots like the Zulu Kings, who habituate their followers to military discipline, and keep them attached partly by fear and partly by the memory or hope of successful bloodshed; but among the Five Nations the rule of one man had no place, and, though warring was their normal condition, the federation lasted in peace as well. They were doubly federated. Not only were there five nations or tribes, but there were also eight clans which included the whole of the Five Nations, members of each clan being found in each nation.

The five nations had in fact originally been one, composed of eight clans. Each clan was named after some beast or bird, which formed its totem or coat of arms, the three leading clans bearing those of the tortoise, the bear, and the wolf.[14] The {59} clan tie was a family tie; the members of each clan, to whichever nation they belonged, were as brothers and sisters, and there was no intermarrying between them. Inheritance ran in the female line, and the children belonged to the mother's clan. The clans gave the chieftains to the separate nations and to the confederacy. The highest chiefs were known as _sachems_, a civil rather than a military t.i.tle, and the Council of fifty sachems formed the princ.i.p.al governing body of the league, the place of honour being given to the head sachem of the Onondagas.

There was also a Council of subordinate chiefs, and a wider body, a Senate--in whose deliberations men of age and experience took part, irrespective of hereditary rank. The form of government was the same for each of the five nations as for the whole confederacy. There was no law but much custom, despotism was unknown, and so was anarchy.

There was something Homeric about the Iroquois. Like the Greeks of the legendary age, they were perpetually fighting in spasmodic fashion, with great cruelty, with every form of guile as well as force; and when not fighting they held innumerable councils, making many and long-winded speeches. Apart from personal bravery, the one sound element in their system and character was, strange as it may appear, some measure of what the early Greeks valued under the term [Greek: aidos] or reverence. The Iroquois reverenced long-standing customs, social position, and the voice of age. War was their trade, but the highest dignities attached to the civil chieftain more than to the successful warrior. They dealt out shameless violence to all beyond their pale, but within the ranks of their own people they recognized much more than mere physical strength or skill in butchery.

[Footnote 14: These three leading clans so put into the shade all the others that in some old writers these alone are recognized. Thus Colden says (vol. i, p. 1): 'Each of these nations is again divided into three tribes or families, who distinguish themselves by three different arms or ensigns, the tortoise, the bear, and the wolf.' A full account of the Iroquois organization is given by Parkman in the first chapter of the _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, and in the introduction to _The Jesuits in North America_. See also the chapter on Canadian and Iroquois Indians in Sir J. G. Bourinot's _Canada_, in the 'Story of the Nations' series. It will be seen from the note to the Introduction, p. lv, of _The Jesuits in North America_ (1885 ed.), that the number of the clans as given above, and their presence in each tribe, is not absolutely certain.]

[Sidenote: _The Iroquois in some respects resembled the Spartans._]

In their organization they had advanced beyond the stage {60} which is outlined in the Iliad. They were far more democratic than the Greeks of Homeric time. In savage sort they framed and kept a polity of the kind which Aristotle tells us is the most perfect type of const.i.tution, being a mixture of oligarchy and democracy. The hereditary principle was strong, but chieftainship did not pa.s.s from father to son owing to the rule of female succession. The councils of the nation found place for all whose qualifications were for the public good. High standing, age, experience, eloquence, strength of arm, all were recognized in this strange community. To Sparta Colden likens the confederacy of the Five Nations, in that, in either case, the national customs trained the minds and the bodies of the people for war;[15] but the likeness extends to other points as well. As far as a Greek state and a band of North American savages can be compared, in their social and political training, in their inflexible rules, in their recognition of merit combined with unswerving adherence to the principle of priority of families and clans, no less than in their heartless indifference to pain whether inflicted on themselves or others, the Iroquois Indians resembled the citizens of the famous Greek state. But whatever comparison may be made with either ancient or modern communities, the story of the Five Nations presents the curious problem of a group of savages of the very worst type, who yet in some sort solved the difficulties which the most civilized peoples find so great--those of reconciling democracy with hereditary privileges, and federal union with local independence.

[Footnote 15: P. 14., 'On these occasions the state of Lacedaemon ever occurs to my mind, which that of the Five Nations in many respects resembles, their laws and customs being in both framed to render the minds and bodies of the people fit for war.' Parkman, too, says of them, 'Never since the days of Sparta were individual life and national life more completely fused into one'; see _The Jesuits in North America_ (1885 ed.), Introduction, p. lx.]

[Sidenote: _Principle of adoption among the Iroquois._]

Constantly weakened by the strain of war, to some extent {61} they renewed their strength by the principle of adoption.[16] Of the prisoners whom they took, most were put to death with nameless tortures, but many were admitted to their tribes; and in one instance they incorporated a whole people. This was the Tuscaroras, a kindred tribe from the Carolinas, driven north by war with the colonists early in the eighteenth century. About 1715, they were admitted into the league as a sixth nation, though not on equal terms, and were a.s.signed a dwelling-place among the Oneidas and Onondagas.

[Footnote 16: 'They strictly follow one maxim, formerly used by the Romans to increase their strength, that they encourage the people of other nations to incorporate with them' (Colden, p. 5).]

[Sidenote: _Their sphere of influence._]

[Sidenote: _Their feud with the French._]

The tribes of the Huron Iroquois stock were agriculturists to a greater extent than the Algonquins. In other words, they had pa.s.sed out of the nomad stage and made permanent homes. Still, they lived in great measure by the chase; they were born hunters as they were born warriors, and furs and beaver skins were the products which they bartered for the white man's goods. The Five Nations hunted and raided far beyond the limits of their cantons. In 1687, Dongan, Governor of New York, wrote of them: 'The Five Nations are the most warlike people in America, and are a bulwark between us and other tribes. They go as far as the South Sea, the North-West Pa.s.sage, and Florida to war.'[17] Their interests as well as their pride demanded that on the upper St. Lawrence, as well as on Lakes Erie and Ontario, their power should be paramount. As far as other groups of Indians were concerned, they ensured their object, conquering and in great measure exterminating the Hurons, the Neutral Nation, and the Eries; but they knew well that the few Frenchmen in Canada were more dangerous to their ascendency, and possibly to their existence, than any native tribe or race, however numerous. The French began by making the Iroquois their foes. Champlain had hardly {62} settled at Quebec, when he joined the Hurons and Algonquins in an expedition against them. Thenceforward the Five Nations were the enemies of France. This result would probably have followed in any case, and it is difficult to suppose that one early action determined all succeeding history. It was rather the beginning of an inevitable struggle for the control of the upper St. Lawrence and of the Canadian fur trade. On all sides of their own country the Iroquois, like other masterful peoples, extended their sphere of influence; but their real outlet was to the north, towards the lakes and the great river. On this side the white men were most active and restless, ever sending their emissaries a little further on, ever putting themselves in evidence in some new tribe or village.[18] The French were not content to live outside the Indians; nor were they content, having found a resting-place, to stay there. To be in and among the natives, to control and to convert them, to be the recognized protectors of the land and its peoples, to be the ultimate recipients of the produce of the country, and the guardians of the channels by which the produce was conveyed--no smaller aims sufficed for the French in Canada. In the pursuit of these objects they directly competed with the Iroquois Indians. Great was the territory, few in number were the Frenchmen and Iroquois alike; but they were rivals for ascendency on the same river, and there was not room for both.

[Footnote 17: _Calendar of State Papers_, Colonial, 1685-8, No. 1160, pp. 328-9, Dongan to the Lords of Trade, March, 1687.]

[Footnote 18: 'But this justice must be done to the French, that they far exceeded the English in the daring attempts of some of their inhabitants, in travelling very far among unknown Indians, discovering new countries, and everywhere spreading the fame of the French name and grandeur' (Colden, p. 35).]

Because they were enemies of the French, the Iroquois naturally became the allies of the English; but before they had much, if any experience of the latter, they had come into contact with a third European people, the Dutch on the Hudson river.

[Sidenote: _The Dutch on the Hudson river._]

[Sidenote: _New Netherland._]

In 1609, the year after the founding of Quebec, Henry {63} Hudson, an Englishman in the Netherlands service, sailed at the beginning of September into the river which still bears his name, seeking, as he sought till his death, a North-West Pa.s.sage to Asia. The name of New Netherland was formally given to the scene of his discovery in 1614, and in 1615 a small fort was built on Manhattan Island--the first little seed of the city of New York. In 1621, the Netherlands West India Company came into being; and in the following year New Netherland, with the beaver trade, which was its chief attraction, was placed in the hands of the company. In settling on the Hudson the Dutch conflicted with English claims, and the Government of the Netherlands seem to have recognized that there was a flaw in their t.i.tle. However, the existence of New Netherland as a Dutch possession continued till the year 1664, when it was surrendered to an English force sent out by the Duke of York, who had obtained from his brother, Charles II, a grant of the territory. The English occupation was confirmed by the Peace of Breda in 1667; and though a Dutch fleet recovered the colony in 1673, in the following year, by the Treaty of Westminster, it was finally given up to the English.

New Amsterdam, afterwards New York, was the chief settlement of New Netherland; but Dutch trade and colonization extended up the valley of the Hudson, where tracts of land were obtained by _patroons_ or large landowners, who were granted exclusive privileges by the company on condition of planting families of settlers upon their holdings. The chief inland colony was Rensselaerswyck, called after an Amsterdam merchant of the name of Rensselaer, and its centre was Fort Orange, now Albany; while on the Mohawk river, about twenty miles above its confluence with the Hudson, and rather less in a direct line from Albany, was the settlement of Schenectady.[19]

[Footnote 19: For an account of the Dutch on the Hudson see _A Bibliographical and Historical Essay on the Dutch Books and Pamphlets relating to {64} New Netherland_, by G. M. Asher, LL.D. (Amsterdam, Frederick Muller, 1868), referred to above. See also Justin Winsor's _Narrative and Critical History of America_, vol. iv, chap. viii.]

[Sidenote: _Friendship between the Dutch and the Iroquois._]

Traders wherever they went, all the world over, the Dutchmen were at pains to keep peace with the Iroquois. Their dealings with them were on the same lines as the dealings of their countrymen with the Hottentots in the early days of the Cape Colony.[20] They bought and sold, and got good value for their money, paying, for instance, no more than forty florins for Manhattan Island. But the mere fact of paying for what they took was in their favour, for it was a recognition that the natives were the rightful owners of the land. In course of time they came into conflict with the Mohican Indians along the banks of the Hudson; but with the Five Nations, the nearest of whom were the Mohawks, they were ever in friendship. They were not actually in the Mohawk country, but on its borders; they were neighbours, not intruders; they took the furs which the Indians had to barter, giving in exchange European goods, and notably firearms.

Thus Albany became a friendly meeting-place between the Iroquois Indians and the white men of the Hudson colony. The two peoples did not clash with one another in any way, but met as friends and equals, and supplied each others' wants.

[Footnote 20: See vol. iv of this series, chap. ii, p. 43.]

The one object of the Dutch being to trade, and the whole people being traders, a twofold result followed, promoting friendly relations between them and the Mohawks. Not only did the Indians realize that they had nothing to fear, and much to gain, from having for their neighbours Europeans who had no views of war or conquest, and through whose agency they could arm themselves against the more aggressive Europeans on the Canadian side; but also, as we may well suppose, the Dutch traders included the best of the Dutchmen, which was not the case with either the French or the English. At any rate, we read that the Dutch in the Hudson valley 'gained the hearts of the Five Nations by {65} their kind usage',[21] and in memory of a Dutchman named Cuyler, whom the Indians held in special honour, the Iroquois in after years always gave to the British Governor of New York the t.i.tle of 'Corlaer'.[22]

[Footnote 21: Colden, vol. i, p. 34.]

[Footnote 22: Parkman's _Count Frontenac_ (1885 ed.), p. 93, note.]

[Sidenote: _The English inherited the Iroquois alliance._]

Into this kindly heritage the English entered;[23] and, though their treatment of the Indians left much to be desired, the alliance, if often strained, was, in the case of the Mohawks at any rate, never sundered; and finally, at the close of the War of Independence, many of the Five Nation Indians, after fighting for England, migrated into Canada, and were a.s.signed lands in the province of Ontario, where their descendants are still to be found. In the words of the Indian orators, a chain of friendship held together the English and the Iroquois. 'Our chain,' they said, 'is a strong chain, it is a silver chain, it can neither rust nor be broken';[24] and it would be difficult to overrate the advantage which accrued to the English colonies from their traditional alliance with the strongest natives of North America.

[Footnote 23: Colden, as above, 'In 1664, New York being taken by the English, they likewise entered into a friendship with the Five Nations.']

[Footnote 24: Colden, p. 125.]

[Sidenote: _The founding of Quebec._]

In the summer of 1608, Champlain founded the first French settlement at Quebec. A year before, the English had settled at Jamestown in Virginia. A year later, the Dutch found their way to the Hudson. Till his death, at the end of 1635, the story of Champlain is the story of Canada. His colleagues in the new enterprise were men with whom he had already worked in Acadia--De Monts and Pontgrave. De Monts had obtained from the King one year's monopoly of the Canadian fur trade, and two ships which he sent to the St. Lawrence were in charge of Pontgrave and Champlain respectively. Pontgrave, the merchant, stayed at Tadoussac through the summer, bartering with the Indians and coming to blows with Basque traders, who held {66} the French King's patent of little account. Champlain, the explorer, went higher up the river, and erected wooden buildings by the water-side, on the site of the lower town of Quebec. There he stayed through the winter, while his friend went home, and, when Pontgrave returned in the following summer, travels and adventures began which made Champlain's name great among the Indian tribes of Canada.

[Sidenote: _Champlain's explorations and collision with the Iroquois._]

His first expedition, in 1609, was to the lake which is still called after him. He went as an ally of the Huron and the Algonquin Indians against their enemies the Iroquois. Up the St. Lawrence, up the Richelieu, and on to Lake Champlain he took his way, and at the head of the lake, somewhere near the site where Fort Ticonderoga afterwards stood, the white men's firearms dispersed the warriors of the Five Nations and won a victory. The summer of 1609 ended, and Champlain went back to France, returning to Canada in the following spring.[25]

[Footnote 25: Canada was first known as New France after Champlain's return to Europe, in 1609 (Charlevoix's _Histoire Generale de la Nouvelle France_, 1744 ed., vol. i, bk. iv, p. 149).]

[Sidenote: _His difficulties in France._]

De Monts' monopoly had expired and had not been renewed, but none the less he and his a.s.sociates persevered in their enterprise, opening up the trade of the St. Lawrence, while others shared the profits. Again Champlain joined forces with the friendly Indians against the Iroquois, and a second victory was the result. Before the summer of 1610 ended, he was back in Europe, having learnt in the meantime that his friend and patron, King Henry IV, had been stabbed to death in the streets of Paris. On his next visit to Canada, in 1611, he cleared the ground for a future settlement at Montreal, having noted its advantages as a meeting-place for the Indian tribes from the Ottawa and the great lakes. The late months of that year and the whole of 1612 he spent in France, trying to devise some organization under which the work of building up the French power in Canada {67} might be successfully carried on. There was now no company in existence, there was no royal mandate; personal favour and protection had pa.s.sed away with the death of Henry of Navarre. The French court was a scene of growing priestly influence and of numberless intrigues; while New France on the St. Lawrence was a 'no man's land,' infested in summer time by crowds of fur-traders, who owned no rule and knew no law, in winter deserted by white men, except the few struggling settlers at Quebec. To form some kind of trade's union under an acknowledged authority was the one thing needful, and with a view to this end Champlain sought for and obtained the patronage of a member of the royal house. The Count de Soissons, a Bourbon prince, was appointed Lieutenant-General of the King for New France, and when he died, shortly after his appointment, the place was taken by another Bourbon, the Prince of Conde. The deputy of these princes was Champlain himself; he was given control over the Canadian fur trade, and he endeavoured to reconcile the rival interests of the western ports of France by forming a combination of traders, to which all could be admitted who had an interest in Canada. The scheme was partially carried out, but unfortunately jealousies, commercial and religious, precluded the establishment of a single united company.

[Sidenote: _The imposture of Nicolas de Vignau._]

To make money by trade for himself or others was not the first object of Champlain's life. Exploration, with the Indies as its final goal, was in his mind, and the formation of a colony which should indeed be New France. While he still sojourned in Europe, a Frenchman, Nicolas de Vignau, came back from Canada, telling a tale that up the Ottawa river and beyond its sources he had found an outlet to the sea. Early in 1613 Champlain recrossed the Atlantic, went up the St. Lawrence to Montreal Island, and thence, taking De Vignau with him, followed the course of the Ottawa as far as the ile des Allumettes. He went no further. The {68} story of a way to the sea was exposed, as a cunningly devised fable, by the Indians of the upper Ottawa, among whom the impostor had sojourned when he concocted his lies; and, but for Champlain's interposition, he would then and there have paid for his falsehood with his life. Champlain, however, spared him, retraced his steps, and went back again to France, where he spent a year and more before he again visited Canada.

[Sidenote: _The Recollet friars._]

[Sidenote: _Le Caron._]

[Sidenote: _The first mission to the Hurons._]

Towards the end of May, 1615, he reached Quebec. He brought with him this time a small band of missionaries, four friars of the Recollet branch of the Franciscan order; and now mission work began in Canada.

One of the friars, Le Caron, with twelve other Frenchmen in the company, visited for the first time the Huron country, and Champlain followed close upon his steps. Ascending the Ottawa for the second time, he pa.s.sed the point which he had reached two years before, and by the Mattawa river and Lake Nip.i.s.sing came to the sh.o.r.es of Lake Huron. Coasting southward along Georgian Bay, he found himself at length among the Huron towns, where Le Caron was already busy preaching a new faith to the heathen. An expedition against the Iroquois had been determined on, and with the Huron warriors and their allies, Champlain set out for the enemy's land. His route took him across Lake Simcoe, down the series of small lakes which feed the river Trent, and by that river to Lake Ontario, then seen by him for the first time. Crossing the lake, he landed at the site of Oswego, and marched into the midst of the Five Nations' cantons. From the military point of view the expedition was a disastrous failure, for an attack on a palisaded Iroquois town miscarried, Champlain himself was wounded, and the invaders retreated beaten and disheartened.

Among the Hurons Champlain spent the winter; next year, returning down the Ottawa, he came back to Quebec, in the midsummer of 1616, and subsequently he sailed for France.

{69} [Sidenote: _Result of the first eight years of New France._]

Eight years had now pa.s.sed since the founding of Quebec. Lakes Huron and Ontario had been reached, the Ottawa route had been explored, the friendship of the Hurons had been secured at the price of enmity with the Iroquois, missionaries were converting or trying to convert the Indians, and fur trading was briskly carried on; but colonization had made as yet little or no way. There were a few permanent residents at Quebec; but lower down at Tadoussac, and higher up at Three Rivers and Montreal, where in the summer white men and coloured foregathered to exchange their wares, in the winter no Frenchmen were to be found, unless it were one or other of the much enduring Recollet missionaries. In France it was the trade of Canada, not its settlement, that was matter of concern. As in the case of Newfoundland, the merchants of the western seaports of England set themselves to keep the island from being permanently colonized, anxious that the fishing traffic should remain in their own hands: so in the case of Canada, the merchants of the western seaboard of France regarded colonization as at best a useless expense, at worst a measure by which they might lose command of the fur trade. The climate of Newfoundland and of the St. Lawrence region was not such as to induce Englishmen or Frenchmen to make these lands their homes.

Rather they seemed places for summer trips alone, to be left in winter icebound and desolate. Trade interests and nature combined to check the colonization of Canada; that anything was done in the way of settlement in the early years of the seventeenth century was due to missionary enthusiasm and to the foresight and tenacity of Champlain.

[Sidenote: _Dispute among French traders._]