The White and the Gold

by Thomas B. Costain

  The unexpected withdrawal of the Iroquois came too late to save the Huron nation. Certain that the relentless warriors from the Finger Lakes would come back, and keep coming back until no one was left to oppose them, the despondent Hurons began to scatter. The Believers Village was deserted so completely that no sound was heard there save the lapping of the waves on the shore. Not knowing what to do, the homeless Christians, most of them women and children, wandered into the Petun country and begged to be taken in. Others migrated still farther south, after burning their villages and destroying their crops, to find sanctuary with the Neutrals and the Eries. The few who remained betook themselves to Ste. Marie, where the busy mission staff had to serve six thousand meals in the first few days.

  No will to remain in their own land animated the few survivors. They moved to an island off the northern tip of Nottawasaga which the French named later St. Joseph’s. It was a large island and capable of accommodating the refugees. The thoroughly demoralized Hurons, believing they would be safe there, urged the mission staff at Ste. Marie to follow them.

  With the utmost reluctance the Jesuit fathers at Ste. Marie decided they would have to move. Their charges had deserted them and they could serve no good purpose by remaining in the desolation to which this once populous land had been reduced. On May 15 they set fire to all the buildings and removed to the island, using for the purpose one fishing boat and a very large raft for the transportation of their livestock. The move was a major operation, for a large stock of possessions had accumulated at the mission headquarters over the course of the years. They had domestic animals, which could not be left behind, and a surplus of corn and vegetables; enough of a surplus, it was believed, to last for three years.

  It became apparent at once that the food surplus would be needed. The poor Hurons, who seem to have lost all energy and initiative, were subsisting on acorns and a very bitter root they called otsa, sometimes being reduced to living off garlic, which they baked under ashes. Fish abounded in the waters about the island, but they lacked boats to take advantage of this and were not attempting to build any new ones.

  The Jesuit fathers took matters in hand. They provided food for the starving refugees and they began to build a very strong fort, which they named Ste. Marie II, against the possibility of future attacks. They had the one reward for which they might have asked. The Hurons, in their despair, turned to the teachings of the missionaries. During this tragic period more than fourteen hundred were baptized and admitted to the Church.

  Thus it came about that the first objective of the forward-looking Iroquois had been achieved. The Hurons no longer existed as a nation. Scattered in all directions, they would never again draw themselves together. A few remained permanently on the islands of Georgian Bay, and more still moved westward to Mackinac Island at the northern end of Lake Huron. Those who had taken refuge with the Neutral Nations gradually lost their identity. For twenty-two years the missionaries had labored among them, and now not a single living soul was left in all of that once beautiful land. The forests were as silent as before the coming of man. The only evidences left of Huron occupation were the trails through the forest, the blackened ruins of villages, and at St. Ignace, perhaps, the charred stake where Jean de Brébeuf had given up his life.

  7

  During the summer of that blackest of years stray parties of Hurons continued to find their way to St. Joseph’s until the refugee population numbered seven thousand. This made the situation a serious one, for the resources of the island were not sufficient to feed so large a number. Despite the efforts of the Jesuit fathers, there was starvation during the winter which followed, and epidemics carried off a large part of the disorganized and disheartened Hurons. In the spring they began to scatter again, many of them going still farther west to join a kindred tribe, the Wyandots. This led to a decision which was taken later, to transport as many as possible of the Christian natives to Quebec.

  In the meantime the Iroquois had returned to the attack. The only missionaries left in the field were among the Algonquins who lived along the northern shores of Georgian Bay and in the Petun country, where three mission posts were maintained, St. Matthieu, St. Jean, and St. Mathias. The Iroquois decided to break the neutrality they had maintained up to this point with the Petun tribe and on December 7 they attacked St. Jean. It was so unexpected that no measures of defense had been taken and the inhabitants were all slaughtered, including one of the mission priests, Father Gamier. Another priest, Father Chabanel, had left St. Jean to escort a party of the homeless Hurons to St. Joseph’s, and they had progressed a short distance only when a war party closed in on them. All of the party left the priest and scattered for safety, the last to depart, a renegade Huron, killing him and disposing of his body in a stream.

  The list of martyrs was mounting fast—Jogues, Daniel, Brébeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, Chabanel—but more were to join the roll call of glory. Father Garreau was shot later while on his way to join the Algonquins, and others died as a result of the conditions which the Indian wars imposed. The Iroquois, in the meantime, continued to make war on all tribes within reach of their conquering bands, the Neutrals, the Eries, the Cat People. They became so much feared that all tribes along the eastern seaboard paid tribute to them.

  Conditions became so impossible on St. Joseph’s that it was decided finally, and after much thought and heartburning, to abandon it as a mission center. On June 10, 1650, they began the homeward trek, sixty Frenchmen and several hundred Hurons. After an arduous journey of nearly two months they reached Quebec. The following year the Hurons were moved to the island of Orleans, where, it was believed, they could live in security and peace.

  The efforts of the Jesuits had not come to an end. They were as determined as ever to accomplish the christianization of the native stock. But it was apparent that until the power of the Iroquois was broken or the war could be brought to a lasting end their work would be confined to the scattered Indians who subsisted close to the fortified centers or who had removed to the far North.

  CHAPTER XVI

  Richelieu Dies and Mazarin Takes His Place—A Troublesome Period Is Reached in the Affairs of New France—A Strange Feud in Acadia

  1

  CARDINAL RICHELIEU was dying, and the news of his impending demise was received in New France with forebodings. He had been the father of the new policy which took the control of affairs out of the hands of grasping merchants and vested it in the state. Although stern and exacting, he had striven to assist the struggling colony, even though the cost seemed far out of proportion to the slow progress being made.

  The great cardinal was now fifty-seven and his frame, always frail, was wasted with disease. His right arm was paralyzed, his body was covered with ulcers, his eyes seemed unhumanly large in the sunken framework of his face; but his intelligence burned as fiercely as ever and his will had lost none of its iron quality. He kept as closely in touch with every phase of governmental activity as he had done in his prime, even to the extent of following the campaigns in Flanders and the South. To do so the dying man had made extraordinary arrangements.

  This is how the inexorable and unforgiving churchman kept himself in the heat and pressure of things when by all the rules he should have been dying in his great bed, canopied with purple taffeta, in the Palais-Cardinal. He had a movable apartment made for his use, a truly amazing cabinet which was large enough to contain a replica of his regular bed as well as a table and a chair for his confidential secretary and a small anteroom as well. The cardinal, being a lover of color and a sybarite in general, had insisted that the cabinet be upholstered with scarlet velvet. It was carried on wheels over the roads which led to the fronts where French armies were locked in conflict with the Hapsburg forces, or on boats plying up and down the rivers. On water he would be accompanied by a fleet of river boats and barges, all carefully guarded by his own musketeers in their scarlet livery, on shore by a long cavalcade of mounted men and carriages with supplies. Such arra
ngements must have strained an income even as large as the cardinal’s three million crowns a year.

  At night it would be necessary to find accommodations for the dying statesman and his huge mobile establishment. The castle or inn selected for the honor would be adorned with hangings of rose and velvet damask and with the costly furniture which was brought for the purpose. Then the apartment would be taken off its wheels or removed from the barge, carried by a special corps of trained servants. It was usually too wide to go through doors, and a hole would be torn in a wall to admit the cardinal on his wide bed.

  Affairs of state were conducted in this way as thoroughly, if not quite as expeditiously, as though the great man had remained in his ostentatious Paris headquarters, the Palais-Cardinal. Couriers rode up on smoking horses, carrying dispatches, and others rode away with the answers. Secretaries took down the whispered instructions of the sick man; clerks scribbled and copied letters. Spies waited in the anteroom to make their reports (the cardinal was one of the ablest spy masters of history); the nobility came with haughty and withdrawn faces, but carrying their plumed hats in their hands, to pay their respects to this man they both hated and feared.

  Late in the year 1642 it became apparent that the cardinal would have to yield to his inevitable conqueror, although the star of his power was as high overhead as ever. The latest conspiracy, the famous Cinq Mars affair, had been scotched and his enemies had scuttled into their uneasy mouseholes. The main conspirators were going to the block, where so many top-ranking nobles had already been sent. The power of the nobility had been broken. The citadel at Perpignan had fallen on September 9, thus bringing the Spanish campaign to a most satisfactory conclusion. Returning home to die, the cardinal took the route of the Rhone River with all his circus-like trappings and came at last to Paris with so little life left in his emaciated body that even the light in his terrible eyes seemed to be failing. His devoted niece, the Duchess d’Aiguillon, who will be remembered as the sponsor of the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec, remained faithfully and affectionately by his side, disregarding his orders to spare herself by leaving.

  When the last rites were administered, he was asked the usual question:

  “Do you forgive your enemies?”

  There was a pause, and then the dying churchman answered, “I have no enemies but those of the state.”

  These few words summed up the guiding policy of the renowned statesman. The state, absolute in its authority, above challenge in its operations, had been his creation. The supreme power he had vested in the Crown would be maintained throughout the long reign which followed, the outwardly splendid period of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Those who opposed him were in the mind of Richelieu enemies of the state, dissenters from his dream of a triumphant France.

  When the news reached them that the cardinal had breathed his last on December 4 of that year, it seemed to the settlers of New France that they had lost their best friend. Viewing the question with the easy perspective of three centuries, it is clear that the opposite was the truth. His interest had been aggressively addressed to the growth and prosperity of the colony, but he had established the policy of control by the Crown, and the ministers thereof, so firmly that nothing thereafter could change it. He had been the architect of ultimate failure.

  Having said this, it must be granted that New France under his successor, whose attitude was one almost of indifference, came to a very bad pass indeed.

  2

  It had been understood that the cardinal’s successor would be Father Joseph of Paris. That very able man, however, had preceded his master to the grave by a narrow margin of years. The matter of a successor had become at once of paramount importance, because Louis XIII was also marked for an early translation to a realm where kings are not supposed to enjoy any privilege above their personal deserts. The fevered orbs of the determined little minister had fixed themselves, therefore, on another churchman, a Sicilian named Giulio Mazarin, who had been drafted into the French service three years before and had so distinguished himself on several diplomatic errands that his reward had been a red hat from Rome; thus becoming the famous Cardinal Mazarin of romance and history. He was a man of quite enormous ability and the equal, or nearly so, of Richelieu in diplomacy and administrative skill but not possessing the same full measure of genius.

  Mazarin was a personable man, forty years of age, with curling chestnut hair and beard, a fresh complexion and fine eyes, and a pair of hands remarkable for their whiteness and delicacy. Women were partial to him, as will become apparent later.

  Mazarin was at the bedside when the great cardinal died, and the next day King Louis XIII sent instructions to all the departmental officials to make their reports thereafter to the new chief minister. The King himself had only a few more months to live and so his acknowledgment of the succession was of the greatest importance.

  But how would the new incumbent impress the Queen, Anne of Austria? It was understood that on the King’s death she would be made Queen Regent for the minority of her young son. As things turned out, there was no need for worry on that score. That lady of gentle spirit and quiet beauty (who was becoming, alas, a little plump now) had already met the new cardinal. Authorities disagree as to where or when the meeting occurred, although it is generally believed that it took place at a court function and that Mazarin was looking resplendent in purple vestments. It was generally believed also that the warm and romantic heart of the Queen, which had been only slightly stirred by the handsome, long-legged Buckingham, began to flutter as soon as she saw the cardinal. At any rate, when the King died on May 14 of the following year, the promptly appointed Regent overlooked her own special supporters, who had expected to bound into office, and confirmed Mazarin in his post.

  New France was to suffer for many years thereafter as a result of ministerial lack of interest. Not until the new King had grown up and attained his majority and had surrounded himself with able ministers, Colbert in particular, would the handling of New France be placed on a stronger basis.

  It was not surprising that Mazarin failed to take the same interest in the colony as his illustrious predecessor. He was new to the complications and vexations of colonization, the politics within the ranks of the Hundred Associates, the greed, the fears, the continuous pressure of free traders who still rebelled against monopoly. The company had been bankrupt almost from the start. With a grandiose gesture, dictated no doubt by Richelieu, they had invested their total capital in the fleet under De Roquement and had seen it lost when the Kirkes captured all their ships. Several plans had been followed since to provide new funds, but the company had continued in a condition best described as moribund. In 1641 the directors had found it necessary to place an assessment on the members and in this way raised 103,500 livres; a measure which had caused a great deal of grumbling. The situation had become temporarily more satisfactory, however. The beaver population of North America was estimated by various authorities at ten million. The Hurons and Algonquins, released from fear by the spurious peace treaty offered by the Iroquois, began to bring beaver skins to the French trading posts in enormous quantities. In Europe every ruffling gallant and every stout burgher wanted a beaver hat. The value of the trade at this point rose to 300,000 livres a year.

  Then the Iroquois struck again, and the first result was that the Hurons as a separate race passed out of existence. The officials appointed for the colony might have been capable of providing a reasonable peacetime administration, but they were completely unfitted for the situaton which now developed.

  The men of the Five Nations were actuated by more than hate for the northern tribes. The war they waged was, in a broad sense, a beaver war; colloquially, a “castor” war, that being the name applied to the beaver skin. The heads of the Iroquois realized that, having cast their lot with the Dutch and the English, they must divert the fur trade from the French. With their usual sagacity they saw that the Ottawa River was the key to the situation and so their largest war parties patrolled
the Ottawa country, making it impossible for the northern Indians to form their giant flotillas and convey the year’s take of furs to the St. Lawrence.

  For two years after the great blow which wiped out St. Ignace and St. Louis and led to the dispersal of the Hurons the beaver trade came temporarily to an end. Not one pelt arrived at Montreal. It was then that the French began to meet the situation by going out in small parties to the source of supply. The coureurs de bois, picturesque and gallant, came into existence. The Iroquois could prevent the running of the great fleets, but they could not control all the northern rivers where these French traders, filled with a love of adventure as well as a desire for profit, began to appear. It was in recognition of this new development that the Associates relinquished their exclusive hold on the fur trade to the more powerful inhabitants of New France, the seigneurs of the St. Lawrence—Giffard, Repentigny, Godefroy, Des Chatelets. It was estimated that the profits which accrued to these traders who had the advantage of operating at close range amounted annually to 325,000 livres, laying the foundation for the wealth of the seigneurial class.