The White and the Gold

by Thomas B. Costain

  The priest realized that this was the end, for the village, for his flock, and for him. He went back to the front and baptized the panic-stricken people who crowded about him, pleading for protection. Then, in his white alb and red stole, and carrying a large cross in front of him, he strode out again to the entrance.

  By this time the Iroquois were in almost complete possession and the work of butchery had begun. The screams of the victims mingled with the bestial cries of the attackers. It is said that the Iroquois paused when they first glimpsed through the furious confusion the figure of the fearless priest emerging from the chapel with unhurried steps, raising the cross high above his head. If they did, it was for a moment only. They surged about him, and an overzealous arrow (the accurate aim robbing them of what they desired most, a Black-Gown as a captive) struck him down.

  The town was set on fire and for a day and night thereafter a heavy pall of smoke rose above the treetops to tell the rest of the Huron country that the foul hand of aggression had struck. The victors then made off as fleetly and silently as they had come, taking with them seven hundred terrified prisoners. The mind recoils from contemplation of the orgies which followed when they reached their villages among the Finger Lakes.

  The summer passed with no more than small and sporadic attacks, but in the fall a second Iroquois party made its way up the Ottawa to winter in the woods of the North. This meant another attack, and the Hurons had no difficulty in deciding where it would fall. The eastern frontier was open to attack and the enemy might be expected to cross the Severn and, putting the North River and the Coldwater behind them, fall upon St. Ignace and St. Louis and the nest of smaller villages scattered about them. An idea of the compactness of the Huron country is supplied by the fact that St. Ignace, which was regarded as dangerously exposed, was in reality no more than eight miles east of the stone ramparts of Ste. Marie.

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  Had a little more time been granted, the village of St. Ignace would have been made impregnable to any attack the Iroquois might launch. It was situated on a high flat ridge, six acres in extent, which protruded from the wooded hills behind it like the blunted head of an arrow. The sides of this elevated ground were so steep that they could not be scaled. To defend the relatively level approach, the elder statesmen of the community had planned strong fortifications across this strip, which was no more than one hundred yards wide. There were to be triple palisades with bastions extending out far enough to cover all approaches, and the main entrance was to be massive. It was intended, in fact, to make St. Ignace an outer fort of great strength for the whole of the Huron country. The extensive archaeological investigations carried on here by Mr. Jury indicate that many buildings of considerable size were under construction when the blow fell which wiped out the village for all time. Two of them were long houses, one hundred feet long and thirty wide. These were the largest, but of the twenty-six houses which made up the community many were of major size. Several of these were not finished, and some which seemed to have been ready for occupation gave no indication of having been lived in. Obviously the village was not feeling the need for such extensive additional accommodation to meet normal growth. It was being readied for a purpose, which quite clearly was the protection of the vulnerable eastern flank of the country; to become a garrison town to meet the first shocks of Iroquois aggression.

  Such was the plain. There had been much procrastination during the winter months, however. The men of St. Ignace had hugged their fires according to custom and had done little. This must have dismayed the two priests who were responsible for the welfare of the nest of villages which lay behind St. Ignace. Father Brébeuf, who has been mentioned often, had this part of the country in his charge, with the assistance of Father Gabriel Lalemant, a nephew of Jerome Lalemant.

  St. Louis lay halfway between St. Ignace and Ste. Marie, and here the two priests had established themselves. Often during the long winter the brave pair left their small fire at St. Louis and tramped over the rolling hills to the outpost village to urge that the work be continued. They presented a marked contrast, these two faithful shepherds. Father Brébeuf was a massive man, far above the average in height and strongly built. Father Lalemant was small and of uncertain health. The older man always strode ahead, his puny assistant following at his heels. The Hurons had great respect for each of them, but nothing could stir them out of their apathy, not even the prospect of an attack when the snows melted.

  Jean de Brébeuf was, without a doubt, the best loved of all the missionary priests. A Norman by birth and of good family, he had joined the Society early. He had now been twenty-two years in the mission field and during that time he had been unfailingly kind and brave, bringing to his work the devotion of a sublime faith. As the years rolled on and the shoulders of the tall priest became a little bent and his dark hair and beard turned to gray, the Hurons grew so attached to him that his absence would seem the greatest of misfortunes. They called him affectionately Echon. Once he had been away from them on a long journey, and when his tall figure in its tight black soutane was seen approaching through the woods, they rushed out to greet him.

  “Here is Echon come again!” they shouted.

  Everyone in the village saluted him, touching his hand and saying over and over, “Echon, my nephew, my brother, my cousin, hast thou then come again?”

  It is pleasant to think of them flocking about him, the sober brown children fearing to touch so much as the hem of his garment, their elders nodding their heads and throwing their usual taciturnity to the winds as they assailed him with questions. In all the villages where duty took him, they knew the sound of his solid footstep, they loved the deep notes of his voice.

  He was, above everything else, a modest man. On joining the Society he had been so conscious of what he deemed his shortcomings that he asked to be no more than a brother coadjutor instead of a full member. On the trail he always took the heaviest loads at the portages and made the most frequent trips. He rowed or paddled without stopping from the start to the finish of the day.

  “I am an ox,” he would say, referring to his name, “and fit only to bear burdens.”

  He would speak at times with great power and even eloquence, but ordinarily he was inclined to slowness of thought and speech. When men of quicker perceptions goaded him with their sharpness, he never lost his dignity or benignity; his answers would be kindly and fair, and to the point.

  Because he often said, “God has treated me with so much mildness,” it was in his thought that he would die by violence. At times he had been visited by a recurring vision, Death attached to a post with hands bound behind. Because of this, it was clear in his mind that death would come to him through the instrumentality of those insatiable conquerors, the Iroquois.

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  The blow fell on the morning of March 16 of this sanguinary year, 1649. Although they were prepared in Huronia for an attack from the war party wintering in the North, there was no thought that the attack would come as early as this. The ice had not yet broken up on the rivers; there was still heavy snow on the ground; the winds from the north still blew with relentless vigor. The elder statesmen at St. Ignace drowsed over their pipes, and the permanent palisades had not been raised over that hundred-yard strip. There was still some time of peace to be enjoyed: let the inevitable tragedy be faced at its appointed time! So many of the able-bodied men were hunting in the woods that most of the houses were unoccupied except for the very old and the very young.

  The Hurons had never been blessed with much imagination and even less initiative. They never understood the deep cunning of the Iroquois mind nor prepared themselves for the new methods of surprise which those fertile military brains devised.

  The tall priest and the puny one were at St. Louis, having walked over together the night before from a week end of retreat and contemplation at Ste. Marie. The community was roused before dawn by the frantic cries of three Hurons who came racing through the woods, their faces filled with terr
or. The Iroquois had struck St. Ignace, scaling the makeshift walls before anyone in the doomed village was awake. These three alone had been able to get away, and the answers they gave to the hysterical questions showered on them contained no grain of comfort. The men of the Long House were as numerous as the empty shells on the shore (there were, it developed, a thousand Mohawk and Seneca warriors in the party) and they were all armed with guns. They would soon be swarming through the woods to add the destruction of St. Louis to the sacking of St. Ignace.

  The terrified trio were right on the last point. As the sun came up over the trees with the promise of a day which would be clear and fresh and untainted with evil, save the evil that men would do, the topknot of the first Mohawk was seen in the woods; and in a matter of seconds the space around the palisades of the village was filled with terrifying figures. The Iroquois had smeared the blood of the dead at St. Ignace over their heads and faces and they were screeching with great frenzy for more victims.

  There were only eighty Huron warriors in St. Louis, but with a courage which amounted to rashness they had decided to stay and fight it out instead of seeking sanctuary behind the stone walls of Ste. Marie. Stephen Annaotaha, one of the bravest of Huron chiefs, was there and had been firm in the resolution to fight. The sick and the old had been routed out and sent to Ste. Marie.

  “My brothers, save yourselves!” the chief had said to the two priests. “Go now, while there is time!”

  Father Brébeuf must have known that at last the fate he had apprehended had found him out, but he knew also how great would be the need for him before this day of blood was over. He would not leave. Father Lalement, whose delicacy of constitution had made life in the wilds an incredible hardship, was equally determined to remain with the doomed flock.

  It did not take long for the attacking party to make a breach in the walls. They swarmed into the village, a thousand strong; and the eighty Hurons, fighting doggedly and repelling the first thrusts, were soon killed or captured. Brébeuf and his companion were in the thick of it, tending the wounded and administering the last rites to the dying. Unfortunately for them they were not killed as Father Daniel had been. They were captured and led away when the screeching horde decided to enjoy their victory orgies at St. Ignace.

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  Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were led out to the platform which had been raised for the torturing of the prisoners, raised up high so that all of the bloodthirsty mob could watch and take delight in the “caressing” of the victims. The two priests had been stripped to the skin, and the younger man, conscious of the boniness of his frame and filled with a sense of shame, quoted to his companion the words of St. Paul, “Truly, this day, Father, we are made a spectacle to the world, and to angels and to men.”

  Father Brébeuf was to die first; Lalemant, for a time, was to watch. The tall priest kissed the stake before they chained him to it, and in a loud voice he exhorted his companions in misfortune to keep stout hearts. He was first scorched from head to foot with blazing torches and all the nails were torn from his fingers. A Huron renegade, who had been baptized by the good priest, cried out, “Echon, thou sayest that the sufferings of this life lead straight to paradise: thou wilt go soon, for I am going to baptize thee.” The renegade then took kettles filled with boiling water and poured them over the gray head which was held so high, crying out with a mad delight, “Go to heaven, for thou art well baptized.”

  The most frightful of all the tortures practiced was the application of the collar. This was not new. It had been used often enough by the Hurons and Algonquins as well as the Iroquois, and it seems to have been with all of them their favorite refinement of cruelty. This was how it was done: they took a large withe of green wood and attached to it six hatchets which had been heated white-hot over the flames. This they hung over the shoulders of the man at the stake. If the victim leaned forward to rid his chest of the excruciating pain of this diabolical necklace, the sizzling iron sank deeper into the back; and so every move, every instinctive shrinking of the flesh, added to the torment. There was intense excitement, a depravity of slavering jowls, among the capering, jeering braves when this infernal instrument was placed around the neck of Father Brébeuf. The smell of scorching flesh could be detected at once, but that indomitable man disappointed them by making no move, by uttering no sound.

  Then they proceeded to encase his mutilated body in a bark weasand belt which had been made inflammable with pitch and resin, and to this they set fire. His flesh, already torn and scalded, began to roast in this sheath of fire, but his deep voice never faltered or broke as he then began to exhort the watchers and to beg forgiveness for them. To stop that brave voice the angry tribesmen cut off both his lips and part of his tongue. Then they stripped the flesh from his thighs and arms, roasting it in the fire which was consuming him and eating it before his eyes, in which a faint spark of consciousness still burned.

  Father Brébeuf had been the most conversant of all the priests with the native tongues, and one of his labors had been the translation of the Lord’s Prayer into Huron. Perhaps the strange words came back into his tortured mind and, while his lips still held a power of utterance, he began to pronounce them; a final act of devotion as the shades closed about him:

  “Onaistan de aronhise istare. Sasin tehon …”

  Father Brébeuf, the much-loved Echon, was tortured from noon of that red and wrathful day until four in the afternoon. When his heart had been torn from his body and eaten—it was scrambled for because he had died so bravely—they threw his broken body into the flames; but the embers were dying down about the stake, and what was left of him, resolute even in death, refused to be consumed.

  The frail body of Father Lalemant, who was called by his flock Atironta, resisted death for eleven hours.

  Huron survivors of the deviltries of St. Ignace, one of them with an arrow in his eye, reached Ste. Marie and told what had happened. When the Iroquois war party made an unexpectedly sudden departure, as will be recounted later, the sorrowful fathers went to the smoking ruins of St. Ignace and found there the bodies of the two martyrs. The condition of the remains confirmed everything the eyewitnesses had told of the tortures to which the brave veteran and his frail companion had been subjected.

  Included in the party was one of the donnés, Christophe Regnaut, who served as bootmaker at Ste. Marie. He made a report on what they found, which read in part as follows: “We buried these precious relics on Sunday, the twenty-first day of March, 1649, with much consolation.… When we left the country of the Hurons, we raised both bodies out of the ground and set them to boil in strong lye. All the bones were well scraped, and the care of drying them was given to me. I put them every day into a little oven which we had, made of clay, after having heated it slightly; and, when in a state to be packed, they were separately enveloped in silk stuff. Then they were put into two small chests, and we brought them to Quebec, where they are held in great veneration.”

  Thus Christophe Regnaut was much privileged. He had made the shoes in which the great tall priest and the brave small one had gone about their duties in the rolling slopes of the forest about St. Ignace and in which, no doubt, they walked that day to their deaths; and in the end he was allowed to tend what the fires had left of that devout pair.

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  Following the capture of St. Louis and the killing of the two priests, Huron warriors from other parts of the country came up to assist in repelling the attacks. The largest band came from the populous village of Ossossané, the headquarters of the family of the Bear. Ossossané was a little less than nine miles south and west of Ste. Marie and most picturesquely located on the shores of Nottawasaga. It was here that the mission of La Conception had been so successful that it came to be called “the Believers Valley,” and it followed that the rescue party was made up very largely of Christians. They passed the southern tip of Lake Isaragui (now called Mud Lake) and struck due east, the sooner to reach the scene of the fighting. They we
re three hundred strong and at first they took the upper hand. They drove the invaders who had remained at St. Louis back into the smoking ruins of the stockade. Iroquois scouts carried the word to St. Ignace, where, after his long hours of torture, Father Lalemant had finally found escape in death. The men of the Five Nations, glutted with blood and their victory feast, turned savagely to meet the attack. The Bear warriors found themselves outnumbered three to one and were surrounded in turn. They fought bravely and the struggle lasted for the better part of a day. In the end, of course, numbers prevailed and all but thirty of the Hurons were killed.

  This bold effort, without a doubt, saved Ste. Marie. Since the tragic moment when the smoke of St. Ignace had first been visible above the treetops, the Frenchmen had stationed themselves on guard on the stone walls, forty in all. They expected to be attacked at any moment and had small hope of withstanding a siege by such a large band. At one stage they sighted Iroquois scouts in the edge of the forest, and they looked well to the priming of their guns, thinking that the moment had come. At this point, however, the rescue party from Ossossané struck at St. Louis, and the struggle there engaged the full attention of the invaders until the brave Christians had been subdued.

  It was then that a strange misapprehension took possession of the Iroquois leaders. They had everything in their own hands. Only a few small Huron parties remained at large in the woods. Somehow the invaders became convinced that large forces were gathering to hem them in, and a sense almost of panic showed itself in their councils. It was decided that they had accomplished as much as they could hope to and that the time had come to retire to their own country. They moved with extraordinary speed to carry out the withdrawal. At one moment their advance scouts swarmed in the woods, and the only question seemed to be where the blow would be struck; the next, seemingly, all was silence in the forest and the smoking ruins of the villages were deserted. It was hard for the weary men who had been standing guard on the walls of Ste. Marie for so long to believe that fate, or an ever-watchful Providence, had stretched forth a hand to save them. Finally they became convinced that the enemy had disappeared. The Iroquois were racing eastward again and would cross the Coldwater and North rivers in a mad haste to reach the neutral country which lay beyond the Severn. With savage temper they were driving their prisoners before them, dispatching any who showed physical weakness or an inability to hold the pace.