Canada: the Empire of the North Part 22

"My G.o.d! My G.o.d! Our marquis is slain!" they screamed.

"It is nothing,--nothing,--good friends; don't trouble about me,"

answered the wounded general as he pa.s.sed for the last time under the arched gateway of St. Louis road.

"How long have I to live?" he asked the surgeon into whose house he had been carried.

"Few hours, my lord."

"So much the better," answered Montcalm. "I shall not live to see Quebec surrendered."

Before daylight, he was dead. Wrapped in his soldier's cloak, laid in a rough box, the body was carried that night to the Ursuline Convent, where a bursting bomb had scooped a great hole in the floor. Sad-eyed nuns and priests crowded the chapel. By torchlight, amid tears and sobs, the body was laid to rest.

Both generals had died as they had lived,--gallantly. To-day both are regarded as heroes and commemorated by monuments; but how did their governments treat them? Of course there were wild huzzas in London and solemn memorial services over Wolfe; but when his aged mother pet.i.tioned the government that her dead son's salary might be computed at 10 pounds a day,--the salary of a commander in chief,--instead of 2 pounds a day, she was refused in as curtly uncivil a note as was ever penned. Montcalm had died in debt, and when his family pet.i.tioned the French government to pay these debts, the King thought it should be done, but he did not take the trouble to see that his {274} good intention was carried out. It was easy and cheaper for orators to talk of heroes giving their lives for their country. There are no better examples in history of the truth that glory and honor and true service must be their own reward, independent of any compensation, any suffering, any sacrifice.

Though the panic retreat continued for hours and Quebec was not surrendered for some days, the battle was practically decided in ten minutes. The campaign of the next year was gallant but fruitless. In April, before the fleet has come back to the English, De Levis throws himself with the remnants of the French army against the rear wall of Quebec; and as Montcalm had come out to fight Wolfe, so Murray marches out to fight De Levis. Both sides claimed the battle of Ste. Foye as victory, but another such victory would have exterminated the English.

Levis outside the walls, Murray glad to be inside the walls, each side waited for the spring fleet. If France had come to Canada's aid, even yet the country might have been won, for sickness had reduced Murray's army to less than three thousand able men; but the flag that flaunted from the ship that sailed into the harbor of Quebec on the 9th of May was British. That decided Canada's fate. De Levis retreated swiftly for Montreal, but by September the slow-moving General Amherst has closed in on Montreal from the west, and up the St. Lawrence from the east proceeds General Murray. De Levis and Vaudreuil had less than two thousand fighting men at Montreal. September 8th they capitulated, and three years later, by the Treaty of Paris, Canada pa.s.sed under the dominion of England. Officers, many of the n.o.bility, Bigot and his crew, sailed for France, where the Intendant's ring were put on trial and punished for their corruption and misrule. Bigot suffered banishment and the confiscation of property. The other members of his clique received like sentences.

Spite of the hopes of her devoted founders,--like Champlain and Maisonneuve,--spite of the blood of her martyrs and the prayers of her missionaries, spite of all the pathfinding of her {275} explorers, spite of the dauntless warfare of her soldier knights,--like Frontenac and Iberville and Montcalm,--New France had fallen.

Why?

For two reasons: because of England's sea power; because of the unblushing, shameless, gilded corruption of the French court, which cared less for the fate of Canada than the leer of a painted fool behind her fan. But be this remembered,--and here was the hand of overruling Destiny or Providence,--the fall of New France, like the fall of the seed to the ready soil, was the rebirth of a new nation.

Henceforth it is not New France, the appendage of an Old World nation.

It is Canada,--a New Dominion.

To-day wander round Quebec. Tablets and monuments consecrate many of the old hero days. Though the British government rebuilt a line of walls in the early eighteen hundreds, you will find it hard to trace even a vestige of the old French walls. Mounds tell you where there were bastions. A magnificent boulevard tops the most of the old ramparts. An imposing hotel stands where Castle St. Louis once frowned over the St. Lawrence. Of the palace where the Intendant held his revels there are not even ruins. If you drive out past Beauport, you will find at the end of a nine-mile forest path the crumbling brick walls of Chateau Bigot, the Hermitage, half buried, in the days when I visited it, with rose vines and orchard trees gone wild. That is all you will find of the court clique whose folly brought Canada's doom; but as you drive back from Beauport there towers the city from the rocky heights above the St. Lawrence,--chapel spire and cross and domed cathedral roofs aglint in the sunlight like a city of gold. The church, baptized by the blood of its martyrs, is there in pristine power; and the fruitful meadows bear witness to the prosperity of the habitant on whom the burden fell in the days of the ancient regime.

Who shall say that habitant and church do not deserve the place of power they hold in the government of the Dominion?

{276}

CHAPTER XIII

FROM 1763 TO 1812

English law and Quebec--French rights guarded--Pontiac's war--Siege of Detroit--Fight at b.l.o.o.d.y Run--Michilimackinac falls--How Bouquet wins victory--Return of captives--The peddlers--Methods of Nor'westers--Traders invade the Up Country--Disaffection in Canada--Canada invaded--Quebec invested--Montgomery's fight--"Rats in a trap"--Relief at last--Tricks of ringsters--Coming of Loyalists--Life in the backwoods

Quebec has fallen. As jackals gather to feast on the carca.s.s of the dead lion, so rallies a rabble of adventurers on the trail of the victorious army. Sutlers, traders, teamsters, riffraff,--soldiers of fortune,--stampede to Montreal and Quebec as to a new gold field. When Major Robert Rogers, the English forest ranger, proceeds up the lakes to take over the western fur posts,--Presqu' Isle, Detroit, Michilimackinac,--he is followed by hosts of adventurers looking for swift way to fortune by either the fur trade or by picking the bones of the dead lion. Major Rogers, beating up Lake Ontario and Lake Erie with two hundred bushwhackers, pausing in camp near modern Sandusky, meets the renowned Ottawa warrior, Pontiac, who had fought with the French against Braddock and now wants to know in voice of thunder what all this talk about the French being conquered means; how _dare_ the French, because _they_ have proved paltroons, deed away the Indian lands of Canada? How dare Rogers, the white chief of the English rangers, come here with his pale-faced warriors to Pontiac's land? How Rogers answered the veteran red-skinned warrior is not told. All that is known is--the French gave up their western furs with bad grace, and the English commandants forgot to appease the wound to the Indians'

pride by the customary gifts over solemn powwow. At Detroit and Michilimackinac the French quietly withdraw from the palisades and build their white-washed cottages outside the limits of the fort--2500 French habitants there are at Detroit.

If the four or five hundred English adventurers who swarmed to Canada on the heels of the English army thought to batten on the sixty thousand defeated French inhabitants, far otherwise thought and decreed the English generals, Sir Jeffrey {277} Amherst, and Murray, who succeeded him. "You will observe that the French are British subjects as much as we are, and treat them accordingly," ruled Amherst; and General Murray, who practically became the first governor of Canada on Amherst's withdrawal, at once set himself to establish justice.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MAJOR ROBERT ROGERS]

No more forced labor! No more carrion birds of the official cla.s.ses, like Bigot, fattening on the poor habitants! British government in Canada for the next few years is known as the period of military rule.

At Quebec, at Three Rivers, at Montreal, the commanding officers established martial law with biweekly courts; and in the parishes the local French officers, or seigneurs, are authorized to hear civil cases. By the terms of surrender the people have been guaranteed their religious liberty; and the Treaty of Paris, which cedes all Canada to England in 1763, repeats this guarantee, though it leaves a thorn of trouble in the flesh of England by reserving to France for the benefit of the Grand Banks fishermen the Islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, as well as sh.o.r.e rights of fishing on the west coast of Newfoundland.

Also, the proprietary rights of Jesuits, Sulpicians, Franciscans, are to remain in abeyance for the pleasure of the English crown. The rights of the sisterhoods are at once confirmed.

{278} One of General Murray's first acts as governor is to convey gentle hint to the Abbe Le Loutre, now released from prison and come back to Canada, that his absence will be appreciated by the government.

Within a few years there are five hundred English residents in Montreal and Quebec; and now trouble begins for the government,--that wrangle between English and French, between Protestant and Catholic, which is to go on for a hundred years and r.e.t.a.r.d Canada's progress by a century.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NORTH AMERICA AT THE CLOSE OF THE FRENCH WARS, 1763]

Being British-born subjects, the few hundred demand that the Governor call an a.s.sembly,--an elective a.s.sembly; but by the laws of England, Roman Catholics must abjure their religion before they can take office, and by the Treaty of Paris the Catholics of Canada have been guaranteed the freedom of their religion. To grant an elective a.s.sembly now would mean that the representatives of the five hundred English traders would rule over 70,000 French. When accusing the French Catholics of Quebec of remaining a solidarity so that they may wield the balance of power, it is well to remember how and when the quarrel began. Murray sides with the French and stands like a rock for their right. He will have no elective a.s.sembly under present conditions; and he puts summary stop to the business English magistrates and English bailiffs have hatched against the rights of the habitant,--of seizing lands for debt at a time when money is scarce, summoning the debtor simultaneously to two different courts, then charging such outrageous fees that the debtor's land is sold for the fees, to be bought in by the rascal ring who have arranged the plot. Ordinances are still proclaimed in primitive fashion by the crier going through the streets shouting the laws to beat of drum; but as the crier {279} shouts in English, the habitants know no more of the laws than if he shouted in Greek.

As Murray opposes the clamor of the English minority, the English pet.i.tion the home government for Murray's recall. In the light of the fact that there were no schools at all in Canada except the Catholic seminaries, and that of the five hundred English residents only two hundred had permanent homes in Montreal and Quebec, it is rather instructive to read as one of the grievances of the English minority "_that the only teachers in Canada were Catholics_."

The governor-generalship is offered to Chatham, the great statesman, at 5000 pounds a year. Chatham refusing the position, there comes in 1768 as governor, at 1200 pounds a year, Sir Guy Carleton, fellow-soldier and friend of Wolfe in the great war, who follows in Murray's footsteps, stands like a rock for the rights of the French, orders debtors released from jail, fees reduced, and a stoppage of forced land sales. Bitter is the disappointment to the land jobbers, who had looked for a partisan in Carleton; doubly bitter, for Carleton goes one better than Murray. For years the French government had issued paper money in Quebec. After the conquest seventeen millions of these worthless government promissory notes were outstanding in the hands of the habitants. Knowing that the paper money is to be redeemed by the English government, English jobbers are now busy buying up the paper among the poor French at fifteen cents on the dollar. Carleton sends the town crier from parish to parish, warning the habitants to hold their money and register the amounts with the magistrates till the whole matter can be arranged between England and France.

The first newspaper is established now in Quebec, _The Quebec Gazette_, printed in both English and French. Also the first trouble now arises from having ceded France the two tiny islands south of Newfoundland, St. Pierre and Miquelon. By English navigation laws, all trade must be in English ships. Good! The smugglers slip into St. Pierre with a cargo. By night a ship with a white sail slips out of St. Pierre with that {280} cargo. At Gaspe the sail of that ship is red; at Saguenay it is yellow; at Quebec it is perhaps brown. Ostensibly the ship is a fishing smack, but it leaves other cargo than fish at the habitant hamlets of the St. Lawrence; and the smuggling from St. Pierre that began in Carleton's time is continued to-day in the very same way.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GENERAL MURRAY, FIRST GOVERNOR OF QUEBEC]

And Guy Carleton, though he is an Englishman and owes his appointment to the complaints of the English minority against Murray, remains absolutely impartial. Good reason for the wisdom of his policy. There are rumblings from the New England colonies that forewarn the coming earthquake. For years friction has been growing between the mother country and the colonies. The story of the Revolution does not belong to the story of Canada. For years far-sighted statesmen had predicted that the minute New England ceased to fear New France, ceased to need England's protection, that minute the growing friction would flame in open war. Carleton foresaw that to pander to the English minority would sacrifice the loyalty of the French. Thus he reported to the home government, and the Quebec Act of 1774 came to the relief of the French. By it Canada's boundaries were extended across the region of the Ohio to the Mississippi. French laws were restored {281} in all civil actions. English law was to rule in criminal cases, which meant trial by jury. The French are relieved from oaths of office and enabled to serve on the jury. Also, the Catholic clergy is ent.i.tled to collect its usual t.i.the of one twenty-sixth from the Catholics. An elective a.s.sembly is refused for reasons that are plain, but a legislative council is granted, to be appointed by the crown. For the expense of government a slight tax is levied on liquor; but as the St.

Pierre smuggling is now flourishing, the tax docs not begin to meet the cost of government, and the difference is paid from the imperial treasury. However badly the imperial government blundered with the New England colonies, her treatment of Quebec was an object lesson in colonizing to the world. Had she treated her New England colonies half as justly as she treated Quebec, British America might to-day extend to Mexico. Had she treated Quebec half as unjustly as she treated her own offspring of New England, the United States might to-day extend to the Arctic Circle. The man who saved Canada to England, in the first place by wisdom, in the second place by war, was Sir Guy Carleton.

While the English and French, Protestant and Catholic, wrangle for power in Quebec there rages on the frontier one of the most devastating Indian wars known to American history. Not for nothing had Pontiac drawn himself to his full height and defied Major Rogers down on Lake Erie. From tribe to tribe the lithe coureurs ran, naked but for the breechcloth, painted as for war, carrying in one hand the tomahawk dipped in blood, in the other the wampum belt of purple, typifying war.

The French had deeded away the Indian lands to the English! The news ran like wildfire, ran by moccasin telegram from Montreal up Ottawa River to Michilimackinac, from Niagara westward to Detroit, and southward to Presqu' Isle and all that chain of forts leading southwestward to the Mississippi. Was it a "Conspiracy of Pontiac," as it has been called? Hardly. It was more one of those general movements of unrest, of discontent, of misunderstanding, that but awaits the appearance of {282} a brave leader to become a torrent of destruction. Pontiac, the Ottawa chief, was such a leader, and to his standard rallied Indians from Virginia, from the Mississippi, from Lake Superior. Of the universal unrest among the Indians the English were not ignorant, but they failed to realize its significance; failed, too, to realize that the French fur traders, cast out of the western forts and now roaming the wilds, fanned the flame, gave presents of gunpowder and firearms to the savages, and egged the hostiles on against the new possessors of Canada, in order to divert the fur trade to French traders still in Louisiana. Down at Miami, southwest of Lake Erie, Ensign Holmes hears in March of 1763 that the war belt has been carried to the Illinois. Up at Detroit, in May, Pontiac is camped on the east side of the river with eight hundred hunters. Daily the French farmers, who supply the fort with provisions, carry word to Major Gladwin that the Indians are acting strangely, holding long and secret powwow, borrowing files to saw off the barrels of their muskets short.

A French woman, who has visited the Indians across the river for a supply of maple sugar, comes to Gladwin on May 5 with the same story.

From eight hundred, the Indians increase to two thousand. Old Catherine, a toothless squaw, comes shaking as with the palsy to the fort, and with mumbling words warns Gladwin to "Beware, beware!" So does a young girl whose fine eyes have caught the fancy of Gladwin himself. Breaking out with bitter weeping, she covers her head with her shawl and bids her white lover have a care how he meets Pontiac in council. Gladwin himself was a seasoned campaigner, who had escaped the hurricane of death with Braddock and had also served under Amherst at Montreal. In his fort are one hundred and twenty soldiers and forty traders. At the wharf lie the two armed schooners, _Beaver_ and _Gladwin_. When Pontiac comes with his sixty warriors Gladwin is ready for him. In the council house the warriors seat themselves, weapons concealed under blankets; but when Pontiac raises the wampum belt that was to be the signal for the ma.s.sacre to begin, Major Gladwin, never moving his light blue eyes from {283} the snaky gleam of the Indian, waves his hand, and at the motion there is a roll of drums, a grounding of the sentry's arms, a trampling of soldiers outside, a rush as of white men marching. Pontiac is dumfounded and departs without giving the signal. Back in his cabin of rushes across the river he rages like a maniac and buries a tomahawk in the skull of the old squaw Catherine.

Monday, May 9, at ten o'clock he comes again, followed by a rabble of hunters. The gates are shut in his face. He shouts for admittance.

The sentry opens the wicket and in traders' vernacular bids him go about his business. There is a wild war yell. The siege of Detroit begins.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SETTLEMENTS ON THE DETROIT RIVER]

The story of that siege would fill volumes. For fifteen months it lasted, the French remaining neutral, selling provisions to both sides, Gladwin defiant inside his palisades, the Indians persistent as enraged hornets. Two English officers who have been out hunting are waylaid, murdered, skinned, the skin sewed into powder pouches, the b.l.o.o.d.y carca.s.ses sent drifting down on the flood of waters past the fort walls. Desperately in need of provisions from the French, Gladwin consents to temporary truce while Captain Campbell and others go out to parley with the Indians. {284} Gladwin obtains cart loads of provisions during the parley, but Pontiac violates the honor of war by holding the messengers captive. Burning arrows are shot at the fort walls. Gladwin's men sally out by night, hack down the orchards that conceal the enemy, burn all outbuildings, and come back without losing a man. Nightly, too, lapping the canoe noiselessly across water with the palm of the hand, one of the French farmers comes with fresh provisions. Gladwin has sent a secret messenger, with letter in his powder pouch, through the lines of the besiegers to Niagara for aid.

May 30, moving slowly, all sails out, the English flag flying from the prow, comes a convoy of sailboats up the river. Cheer on cheer rent the air. The soldiers at watch in the galleries inside the palisades tossed their caps overhead, but as the ships came nearer the whites were paralyzed with horror. Silence froze the cheer on the parted lips. Indian warriors manned the boats. The convoy of ninety-six men had been cut to pieces, only a few soldiers escaping back to Niagara, a few coming on, compelled by the Indians to act as rowers. As the boats pa.s.sed the fort, whoops of derision, wild war chants, eldritch screams, rose from the Indians. One desperate white captive rose like a flash from his place at the rowlocks, caught his Indian captor by the scuff of the neck and threw him into the river; but the redskin grappled the other in a grip of death. Turning over and over, locked in each other's arms, the hate of the inferno in their faces, soldier and Indian swept down to watery death in the river tide. Taking advantage of the confusion, and under protection of the fort guns, one of the other captives sprang into the river and succeeded in swimming safely to the fort. Terrible was the news he brought. All the other forts south of Niagara, with the exception of Fort Pitt,--Miami, St. Joseph, Presqu' Isle,--lay in ashes. From some not a man had escaped to tell the story.

That night it was pitch-dark,--soft, velvet, warm summer darkness.

From the fort the soldiers could see the sixty captives from the convoy burning outside at the torture stakes. Then as gray morning came mangled corpses floated past on the river tide. June 18 another vessel glides up the river with help, but {285} the garrison is afraid of a second disaster, for eight hundred warriors have lain in ambush along the river. Gladwin orders a cannon fired. The boat fires back answer, but the wind falls and she is compelled to anchor for the night below the fort. Sixty soldiers armed to the teeth are on board; but the captain is determined to out-trick the Indians, and he permits only twelve of his men at a time on deck. Darkness has barely fallen on the river before the waters are alive with canoes, and naked warriors clamber to the decks like scrambling monkeys, so sure they have outnumbered their prey that they forget all caution. At the signal of a hammer knock on deck,--rap--rap--rap,--three times short and sharp, up swarm the soldiers from the hatchway. Fourteen Indians dropped on the deck in as many seconds. Others were thrown on bayonet points into the river. It is said that after the fight of a few seconds on the ship the decks looked like a butcher's shambles. Finally the schooner anch.o.r.ed at Detroit, to the immense relief of the beleaguered garrison.

So elated were the English, one soldier dashed from a sally port and scalped a dying Indian in full view of both sides. Swift came Indian vengeance. Captain Campbell, the truce messenger, was hacked to pieces. By July 28, Dalzell has come from Niagara with nearly two hundred men, including Rogers, the famous Indian fighter. Both Dalzell and Rogers are mad for a rush from the fort to deal one crushing blow to the Indians. Here the one mistake of the siege was made. Gladwin was against all risk, for the Indians were now dropping off to the hunting field, but Dalzell and Rogers were for punishing them before they left. In the midst of a dense night fog the English sallied from the fort at two o'clock on the 31st of July for Pontiac's main camp, about two miles up the river, boats rowing upstream abreast the marchers. It was hot and sultry. The two hundred and fifty bushrangers marched in shirt sleeves, two abreast. A narrow footbridge led across a brook, since known as b.l.o.o.d.y Run, to cliffs behind which the Indians were intrenched. Along the trail were the whitewashed cottages of the French farmers, who stared from their windows in their nightcaps, amazed beyond speech at the rashness of the {286} English.

On a smaller scale it was a repet.i.tion of Braddock's defeat on the Ohio. Indians lay in ambush behind every house, every shrub, in the long gra.s.s. They only waited till Dalzell's men had crossed the bridge and were charging the hill at a run. Then the war whoop shrilled both to fore and to rear. The Indians doubled up on their trapped foe from both sides. Rogers' Rangers dashed for hiding in a house. The drum beat retreat. Under cover of Rogers' shots from one side, shots from the boats on the other, Dalzell's men escaped at a panic run back over the trail with a loss of some sixty dead. In September came more ships with more men, again to be ambushed at the narrows, and again to reach Detroit, as the old record says, "b.l.o.o.d.y as a butcher's shop." So the siege dragged on for more than a year at Detroit. Winter witnessed a slight truce to fighting, for starvation drove the Indians to the hunting field; but May saw Pontiac again encamped under the walls of Detroit till word came from the French on the lower Mississippi in October, definitely and for all, they would not join the Indians. Then Pontiac knew his cause was lost.

Up at Michilimackinac similar scenes were enacted. Major Etherington and Captain Leslie had some thirty-five soldiers. There were also hosts of traders outside the walls, among whom was Alexander Henry of Montreal. Word had come of Pontiac at Detroit, but Etherington did not realize that the uprising was general. June 4 was the King's birthday.

Shops had been closed. Flags blew above the fort. Gates were wide open. Squaws with heads under shawls sat hunched around the house steps, with that concealed beneath their shawls which the English did not guess. All the men except Henry, who was writing letters, and some Frenchmen, who understood the danger signs, had gone outside the gates to watch a fast and furious game of lacrosse. Again and again the ball came bounding towards the fort gates, only to be whisked to the other end of the field by a deft toss, followed by the swift runners. No one was louder in applause than Etherington. The officers were completely off guard. Suddenly the crowds swayed, gave way, opened; . . . {287} and down the field towards the fort gates surged the players. A dexterous pitch! The ball was inside the fort. After it dashed the Indians. In a flash weapons were grasped from the shawls of the squaws. Musket and knife did the rest. When Henry heard the war whoop and looked from a window he saw Indian warriors bending to drink the blood of hearts that were yet warm. For two days Henry lived in the rubbish heap of the attic in the house of Langlade, a pioneer of Wisconsin. Of the whites at Michilimackinac only twenty escaped death, and they were carried prisoners to the Lower Country for ransom.

From Virginia to Lake Superior such was the Indian war known as Pontiac's Campaign. Fort Pitt held out like Detroit. Niagara was too strong for a.s.sault, but in September twenty-four soldiers, who had been protecting _portage_ past the falls, were waylaid and driven over the precipice at the place called Devil's Hole. More soldiers sent to the rescue met like fate, horses and wagons being stampeded over the rocks, seventy men in all being hurled to death in the wild canyon.

Amherst, who was military commander at this time, was driven nearly out of his senses. A foe like the French, who would stand and do battle, he could fight; but this phantom foe, that vanished like mist through the woods, baffled the English soldier. In less than six months two thousand whites had been slain; and Amherst could not even find his foe, let alone strike him. "_Can we not inoculate them with smallpox, or set bloodhounds to track them_?" he writes distractedly.

By the summer of 1764 the English had taken the war path. Bradstreet was to go up the lakes with twelve hundred men, Bouquet, with like forces, to follow the old Pennsylvania road to the Ohio, both generals to unite somewhere south of Lake Erie. Of Bradstreet the least said the better. He had done well in the great war when he captured Fort Frontenac almost without a blow; but now he strangely played the fool.