The White and the Gold

by Thomas B. Costain

  This threat did nothing to check the turbulence of the intendant. The squabbling grew even more intense, and Versailles heard stories of violence in Quebec which shocked the King and even ruffled the composure of Colbert. Frontenac, it was claimed, had summoned the sixteen-year-old son of Duchesneau to the château to explain his part in a street brawl and had struck the boy in an excess of rage and had torn his coat, making it necessary for the intendant to barricade his house in order to protect his offspring against the wrath of the governor. Frontenac seems to have ignored this story, but his friends denied it loudly and bitterly, claiming that it had been invented.

  In 1681 Colbert placed the affairs of the French colonies in the hands of his son, the Marquis de Seignelay. In order to gain the favor of the new incumbent, both sides promptly bombarded him with great masses of memoranda bearing on all phases of the long dispute. This seems to have precipitated a decision on the part of the King. He had long since wearied of the endless bickerings in Canada and the barrage of charges and countercharges. There might be different levels of guilt, but both men, clearly, were at fault. Instead of deciding openly between Frontenac and Duchesneau, he again straddled the issue. He recalled them both.

  On May 9, 1882, the King sent his order of recall to the governor, saying in part, “Being satisfied with the services you rendered me in the commandement I entrusted to you in my country in New France, I am writing to you this letter that you are to return to my court on the first ship which will leave Quebec for France.”

  A gentle form of dismissal, indeed, but one that could not be misunderstood.

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  The Mistakes of Frontenac’s Successor—The Death of Colbert—La Barre Is Recalled—Meules Makes a New Kind of Money

  1

  WHILE man-made storms kept the little colony in unhappy agitation, a real storm was brewing which threatened the very existence of New France. Its rumblings could be heard in the teeming villages of the Senecas and in the council house at Onondaga. Every wind from the south carried whispers of war. The first muffled thunderings of the trouble had reached the ears of France’s allies, and so great was the dread they felt that the tribes along the Ottawa had been thrown into abject inactivity. Even in the Illinois country, so far away, the warriors scowled in fear and their women raised supplications to their ineffective gods. The evil wind blew about the ramparts of the Château of St. Louis at Quebec and carried its message of uncertainty and unrest through the narrow, sloping streets of the town.

  Frontenac had known of the Iroquois unrest before his cantankerous quarrels with Duchesneau resulted in his recall. He had striven to continue and consolidate the peace by his usual methods of persuasion, summoning the Five Nations rather haughtily to a conference with him. The Iroquois held off at first. They were willing to confer with Onontio, they said, but he must come to them. He had sought the meeting, not they. Finally a great Iroquois chief named Tegannisoriens met the governor at Fort Frontenac to extend a formal invitation for talks to be held at Oswego, which lay well within the territory of the Long House. Frontenac succeeded in buttering up this brave warrior with a great wampum belt and a scarlet and gold jacket and a silken cravat. He seems to have succeeded in convincing the delegation that the proposed meeting at Oswego was now unnecessary. At any rate, he returned to Quebec confident that he had stifled the discontent. Soon thereafter he returned to France under the cloud of dismissal.

  But his hopes of peace had been built on a false optimism. Tegannisoriens had been honestly convinced of the wisdom of peace, but he was only one of many. The bitter chiefs who had no scarlet jackets or silken cravats to wear were still in favor of digging up the hatchet again after its long period of sequestration.

  To succeed Frontenac and to avert the storm there now came the Sieur de le Febvre de la Barre, accompanied by a self-satisfied man named Jacques de Meules, Sieur de la Source, who was to act as intendant. With the colony rent into factions and the mutterings of war all along the rivers and the forest trails, they were indeed a sorry pair to gather up the reins of office. La Barre was sixty years old and had been a lawyer most of his life. Translated to the French West Indies in charge of the military and naval forces, he had won quite a reputation for himself in some trouble with the English (who must have been most incompetently led indeed) and had begun to swagger and demand the title of Monsieur le Général. He seems to have accepted the post with the intention of making a rich man of himself.

  It is not surprising that evil days soon fell upon Canada. Frontenac, with all his faults, had been the possessor of a conscience for his responsibilities. La Barre was a boastful and greedy fraud.

  La Barre proceeded to make a series of grievous mistakes. He had come to Canada with a preconceived dislike for his predecessor and a determination to stand in the way of La Salle. When he received a letter from the latter, informing him of the discovery of the mouth of the Mississippi, he openly expressed his disbelief and even wrote to the King, voicing his opinion that the matter was of small consequence. He succeeded in persuading the King of this and received a letter in which Louis said, “I am convinced like you that the discovery of the Sieur de la Salle is very useless and that such enterprises ought to be prevented in future.” Certain now that he had royal support, the new governor proceeded to detain the men La Salle had sent east for supplies and to refuse all requests for assistance against Iroquois aggression in the West. He even went to the extreme step of seizing Fort Frontenac and impounding all La Salle’s property on the pretext that the latter had not fulfilled the terms on which it had been granted to him. Finally he sent an officer, the Chevalier de Baugis, to take possession of the fort that La Salle had erected to serve as his headquarters in the Illinois country.

  His next false step was to set himself up in business with a coterie of Canadian merchants and to establish a great store of trade goods at Michilimackinac. The syndicate thus formed operated fleets of canoes and ships on the Great Lakes, and it was a matter of necessity for them to have peace. La Barre accordingly sent Charles le Moyne, the good old standby who could always be depended upon to accomplish whatever was demanded of him, to visit the Iroquois leaders at Onondaga and invite them to a conference at Montreal. As usual, Le Moyne succeeded in his efforts, and in course of time a delegation of over forty chiefs came to meet the new governor at a council held in the church of Bonsecours.

  La Barre cut a poor figure in the negotiations that followed. He lacked the easy dignity of Frontenac and seemed to be very ill at ease under the unflinching scrutiny of forty pairs of intent black eyes. He showered the chiefs with presents to the value of two thousand crowns and urged them in return to respect the peace with France and at the same time refrain from attacks on the Indians of the upper lakes without notifying the French first. The chiefs agreed on both points, but in view of what happened later it is clear they had no intention of keeping their promises. The question of the western tribes was then introduced and La Barre demanded to know why the Iroquois had attacked the Illinois without provocation.

  “Because they deserved to die,” declared the chief Iroquois spokesman.

  The issue having thus been introduced, the delegation from the hostile tribes complained that La Salle had been supplying the Illinois with guns and powder; as he had indeed, that being the only way to hold the western confederacy together. La Barre had no hesitation in declaring that La Salle would be punished. He is even supposed to have disclaimed all responsibility for the actions of the great explorer and to have left the impression with the Iroquois that they had carte blanche to deal with La Salle as they saw fit.

  It was soon apparent that the tongues of the Iroquois had been in their cheeks all the time. One of the first proofs of amity they supplied was to attack and capture a convoy of French boats on their way to the upper lakes. It so happened that the boats belonged to La Barre and his associates and that they were filled with goods for trading with the northwestern tribes. The goods were valued at fif
teen thousand livres and the governor was furious at this costly breach of the peace; a condition of mind which was not improved when the explanation was forthcoming that the Iroquois had thought the shipment belonged to La Salle, who could be attacked with impunity. La Barre seems to have been convinced by this episode that war with these belligerent and insolent people was inevitable.

  On first arriving in Canada, Monsieur le Général had written to the King: “The Iroquois have twenty-six hundred warriors but I will attack them with twelve hundred men. They know how roughly I handled the English in the West Indies.” Now the strain of bombast disappeared from his official communications. He did not like the situation at all and he wrote repeatedly to the King and to Seignelay, urging that trained soldiers be sent out to strengthen his hand.

  2

  The situation at home was not favorable for the carrying out of a strong and consistent policy. The great Colbert had died in 1683. During the last stages of his tenure of office and of his life he had been an unhappy man. Always a believer in peace, he had seen the warlike ambitions of Louis the Victorious mount as he listened to his war minister, the Marquis de Louvois. The funds which Colbert had accumulated by his sound policies over the long years were being handed to Louvois for use in the building of a great war machine. After a victory at Strassburg, the sun of Louvois rose high in the heavens and that of Colbert declined until it could hardly be discerned on the horizon. His spirit seems to have been crushed by a comparison the King made between what he, Colbert, was accomplishing about the rebuilding of Versailles and the success of Louvois with some construction work in Flanders. The great minister took to his bed and in a rankling of spirit refused thereafter to receive any message from the fickle King.

  The news of his death was joyfully received by the public, and he had to be buried in secrecy to avoid hostile demonstrations. The French people had always hated him. They seem to have had a habit, in fact, of resenting the collectors of taxes while at the same time they took to their hearts the unscrupulous spendthrifts who dissipated the revenue in showy ways.

  With Colbert gone and his much less capable son in the colonial ministry, it was difficult to get things done. Finally, however, the piteous appeals of La Barre resulted in the dispatching of three companies of regular soldiers to Canada, each being made up of fifty-two men. They were veterans of the Dutch wars, tired and disillusioned fellows who had no stomach left for further fighting and who embarked without enthusiasm. Nevertheless, they were welcomed at Quebec with the utmost acclaim, the shouts of the relieved populace merging with the not too brisk rat-tat of the army drums.

  La Barre had no excuse now for postponing the punishment he had promised to mete out to the insolent Iroquois. He began to organize his forces for a drive against the Senecas, the most numerous and powerful of the Five Nations. As a first step he wrote to the English governor at New Amsterdam, which was now called New York because the colony had been handed over to the Duke of York, afterward James II, by his brother Charles II. He informed the English that he intended to attack the Iroquois and that no guns were to be supplied them in the meantime. This bit of absurdity was tantamount to saying to a fencing opponent, “Monsieur, my next thrust will be straight at your midriff, so place yourself on guard.” The English governor answered that the Iroquois were subjects of King Charles and that he, La Barre, must not set foot on English territory. The threat had the result also of inciting the Iroquois to furious preparations. They were delighted, being sure they could cope with this new French leader who had failed so lamentably to impress them. Father de Lamberville, who was still at his post in the Iroquois country, saw what was happening at first hand and he sent a gloomy letter to La Barre, advising him to exercise caution. He declared that the Senecas were filled with joy and that they expected to strip, roast, and eat every Frenchman in the country.

  The Iroquois front was better organized at this stage than it had ever been. The costly wars with the Andastes were ended and so the heavy drain on their man power had ceased. For years they had been enrolling the youngest and strongest men of the tribes they had attacked and beaten, training them in Iroquois philosophy and drilling them in new ways of fighting. The alliance with the English had been cemented, and the latter had a shrewd and aggressive leader in Colonel Thomas Dongan as governor at New York. Dongan was a realistic Irishman who saw that conflict between the English and the French was inevitable and that it behooved him to take full advantage of the strength of the Five Nations.

  La Barre, having deprived himself of all the advantages of a surprise move, set out for Fort Frontenac with the army he had gathered about him. In addition to the hundred-odd soldiers from France, he had seven hundred Canadian volunteers and a few hundred mission Indians. The regulars had not fully recovered from the rigors of the voyage across the Atlantic and were as soft as putty. The mission Indians had about as much martial ardor as could be brewed at an afternoon tea party. “My purpose,” wrote Monsieur le Général to the King, “is to exterminate the Senecas.”

  The governor proceeded to handle the affair with all the military skill that might have been expected from a leader who had spent most of his life in a law office. After encountering great difficulties on the way, the troops reached Fort Frontenac, and La Barre selected a damp stretch of ground for pitching his camp. The mosquitoes made the nights miserable for the unhappy French soldiers, and noxious mists rose from the dank soil and the stagnant water, spreading malarial fevers. Many of the men died, and the governor himself was reduced to a sickly condition. The supplies of food proved inadequate, and in a very short period of time the force was reduced to a condition of martial impotence. La Barre saw no way out of it but to invite the Onondagas to a peace conference, sending the ever-reliable Charles le Moyne to arrange it, hoping that they would induce the Senecas to join the proceedings. To await their coming, the governor selected the most healthy-appearing of his men and moved them to the other side of the water, stopping at a spot most appropriately called La Famine.

  The Onondagas responded to the invitation by sending a delegation headed by an orator whose fame had almost obscured the memory of the Flemish Bastard. He was called Big Mouth and he had such a flow of words that white men fell under his spell as readily as his own people.

  Squatting in a dignified semicircle with his fellow chiefs, Big Mouth listened to the speech with which La Barre opened the discussions. When the governor had finished, the spellbinder rose to his feet. For a few moments he paced up and down in silence, then he stopped, struck an attitude, and began to speak. His manner exuded confidence; and well it might, because there had been fraternizing between the rank and file on each side and it had not needed much craft on the part of the red men to discover the weakness of the French force.

  “Listen, Onontio,” orated Big Mouth in a voice as deep and full as the chords of an organ. “I am not asleep. My eyes are open; and by the sun that gives me light I see a great captain at the head of a band of soldiers who talks like a man in a dream. He says he has come to smoke the pipe of peace with the Onondagas; but I see that he came to knock them on the head, if so many of his Frenchmen were not too weak to fight.… Listen, Onontio. My voice is the voice of the Five Tribes of the Iroquois.” On and on it went. Every sentence, punctuated with sweeping gestures, was an attack on the pride of the French.

  La Barre retired to his tent in a rage. There was no answer he could give. He was too weak to fight. He had no strength to fall back upon, no tricks up his sleeve. The next day there was a shorter session and a peace of sorts was patched up. There was to be a cessation of hostilities between the French and the Iroquois. The latter would pay for the damage they had done to French trade (they later refused to do this). The red men asserted their determination to fight the Illinois to the death; and La Barre could find no words to say in support of the allies who were thus condemned to extinction. As a final gesture of defiance the Five Nations demanded that any future talks be held at La Famine, on Iroquo
is soil, and not on the French side. Frontenac would never have assented to such a humilition as this; he would have hurled the suggestion back in their teeth with fitting scorn. La Barre weakly agreed.

  This concluded the open talks. La Barre returned to Quebec, leaving his forces to negotiate the long water trip as best they could. His great gesture had done no more than avert an open breach for a short spell. The peace had been purchased at too high a price, as subsquent events would show. Big Mouth had flaunted the power of the Iroquois and had told the French leader that he was too weak to attack them. There had been no thunderbolts from the skies to punish him for his audacity, and for many moons thereafter laughter would be heard about campfires where the orotund passages of the daring orator were repeated.