Champlain continued with the Indians and twelve Frenchmen. On July 3, they passed Trois-Rivières, “a very beautiful country,” and sailed on to Lac Saint-Pierre, twenty miles long and nine miles wide, with beautiful meadows that held more game and fish than any other part of the great valley. They were in a no man’s land between the Iroquois and the northern nations, a place “where no Indians live, by reason of the wars.”23 By July 5 or 6, they reached the mouth of what Champlain called the Rivière du Yroquois, today’s Richelieu River. Here they stopped for two days and refreshed themselves with venison, birds, and fish that the Indians gave the French as gifts. While they rested they began to reflect on the difficulties that lay ahead for them. Champlain and his allies were about to enter “the country of the Iroquois.”24 They were marching on the Mohawks, one of the most powerful of the Iroquois people, and “keepers of the eastern door” to Iroquoia. Their territory ran as far east as the Hudson River and the lakes above it. In the Iroquois League the Mohawk were the “eldest brother,” first among equals. The unwritten laws of Iroquoia gave them a special place of honor. They were also among the most successful fighters in North America.25
As Champlain’s companions absorbed these thoughts, some of them suddenly remembered urgent reasons why they had to be somewhere else. Champlain wrote that “only one part resolved to continue with me, and the others returned to their own country with their wives and the trade goods they had bartered.” He had started with three or four hundred warriors and more than a hundred canoes. Within a few days, only sixty men remained in twenty-four canoes. Champlain was undaunted. Without hesitation he led his small force forward from the St. Lawrence Valley, and sailed up the river of the Iroquois. He wrote, “No Christians but ourselves had ever penetrated this place.”26
The river of the Iroquois was handsome but hard going for the French shallop. All hands had to row against the current. They went thirty miles and came to a lake (today’s Chambly Basin). Beyond it Champlain was surprised to meet rapids that the shallop could not pass. He wrote, “We trusted to the assurances of the Indians that the way was easy.” So it was for canoes, but not for the larger French vessel.27
Champlain thought for a moment about abandoning the mission, but he was determined to see it through. The shallop would have to be left behind. The only way forward was to join the Indians in their canoes, and some of the French had no stomach for that. Champlain ordered them back to Quebec where he hoped “with God’s grace, I should see them again.” He wrote, “I took with me two men who were eager to go.” One of them was probably François Addenin, a veteran soldier who had been sent by the king as a bodyguard for the sieur de Mons in Acadia. He had remained with Champlain at Port-Royal. Addenin was a soldier of long experience, a crack shot, and the most skillful hunter in the French colony.28
This Iroquois club of fire-tempered hardwood was called by the French a casse-tête, skull smasher. It was a weapon of war, and an instrument of execution by a single stunning blow called the coup de grâce, which was sometimes an act of mercy to a captive in this violent world.
Champlain turned to the Indians and told them that “with two others I would go on the war path with them in their canoes; for I wished to show them that for myself I would not fail to keep my word to them, even if I went alone.” They were pleased with his spirit and “promised to show him fine things.” Champlain was about to challenge hundreds of Mohawk warriors on their own turf, with only sixty Indians and two Frenchmen at his side. It was a courageous decision. Others would have called it foolhardy to the point of madness. Champlain was usually very prudent, but he was capable of risking everything at a critical moment. A factor in his thinking may have been his recall by the sieur de Mons. This could be his last chance.
Champlain and his allies made a portage of about a mile around the rapids on the Richelieu River, and came to pine-covered Sainte Thérèse Island. Now they were well into Iroquois country, and the Mohawk were renowned for having “always sentinels along the approaches taken by their enemies.”29 The allies changed their method of advance. At the end of each day, they built a semicircular fort on the edge of the river. Some took bark from trees to make wigwams, while others felled big trees to make an abatis of tangled branches around their camp, leaving only the riverbank open as a line of retreat. Champlain observed that the Indians were able to complete a forest fort in less than two hours, and they did it so well that “500 of their enemies would have had difficulty in driving them out without losing many men.” They sent forward a party of three canoes and nine men to search four or six miles ahead. The scouts found nothing, and all retired for the night.30
This was one of the first occasions when a European soldier traveled with a large Indian war party in North America. Champlain studied their ways. He was impressed by the skill with which they improvised forts, but he was troubled by their lack of attention to patrols. He urged them to place sentinels at listening posts, “to keep watch as they had seen us do every night.” The Indians explained patiently that they had different customs. Their parties normally divided into three groups: one for hunting, another always under arms, and a third scouting ahead for signs “by which the chiefs of one nation reveal themselves to another.”31
On July 14, 1609, they reached the large lake from which the river flowed. Champlain exercised his right to name it Lake Champlain on his map, as he and his two French companions may have been the first Europeans to see it.32 The Indians had not exaggerated its size and beauty. Champlain reckoned its length at 80 to 100 leagues, and later corrected his estimate to 50 or 60 land leagues, which is roughly right. Lake Champlain is 125 miles long.33 He was fascinated by its fine woods, beautiful islands, open meadows, and vast abundance of “game stags, fallow deer, fawns, roebuck, bears and other animals” that swam from the mainland to the islands. Champlain observed that one reason for this plenty was that no Indians lived there, “on account of their wars.” He explored both sides of the lake, saw the Green Mountains of Vermont to the east, and to the west sighted the Adirondacks, which are visible from the eastern shore. With delight he studied the flora and fauna of this very beautiful region. On all his many maps, this lake was the only place where he put his name on the land.34
Champlain was able to spend two weeks studying the lake because the Indians suddenly changed the pace of their advance. They began to move very slowly, probably because of the phases of the moon. They had reached the lake one day before a full moon, which would have made them highly visible on the surface of the water to enemies who were hidden in the woods. While the moon was full and bright, they remained in the upper reaches of the lake and on its eastern shore. At last, on July 26, the moon was reduced to a small crescent and the nights were dark again. Champlain’s explorations were interrupted by his Indian allies, who told him that it was time to move forward. The Indians reckoned that they were “within two or three days’ journey of the enemy’s homeland.”35
They changed their routine again and began to advance only at night, all in a body except their scouts. As dawn approached they retreated into deep woods, rested without a fire, and ate only cold corncakes and water. They consulted with their wizards (pilotois or ostemoy, Champlain called them) and modeled their attack with small sticks in the ground. All warriors engaged in these discussions, and they rehearsed the attack again and again. Champlain was impressed by their planning. He wrote: “They arrange themselves in the order which they had seen these sticks. Then they mix themselves up, and again put themselves in proper order, repeating this two or three times, and go back to camp, without any need of a sergeant to make them keep their ranks, which they are quite able to maintain without getting into confusion. Such is the method they observe on the warpath.” Each night the Indians were quickly on the trail again. Champlain was impressed by their expertise in woodcraft and their uncanny skill as trackers.36
In these hidden camps, tension began to mount as they moved deeper into Mohawk country. The Indians looked f
or signs from their medicine men, who performed many rituals and “superstitious ceremonies in order to know what was to happen to them.” They also studied their dreams, which they regarded as an ultimate reality. Again and again, they asked Champlain if he “had dreams, and had seen their enemies in them.” Champlain’s answer was always the same. “I would tell them, that I had not, but nevertheless continued to inspire them with courage and good hope.”37
The next night they made another hard journey, and as dawn approached they made secret camp deep in dense woodland. After the fortifications were complete, Champlain made his rounds, always on the alert. About ten or eleven o’clock in the morning he took a rest and fell asleep on the forest floor. When he awoke, the Indians asked him again if he had dreamed. Champlain said yes, and they gathered around, eager for a sign. He told them: “I dreamed that I saw in the lake near a mountain, our enemies the Iroquois drowning before our eyes. I wanted to rescue them, but our Indian allies told me that we should let them all die, for they were worth nothing.” The Indians recognized the place in Champlain’s dream as a site that lay just ahead, and they were much relieved. He wrote, “This gave them such confidence that they no longer had any doubt as to the good fortune awaiting them.” To Champlain’s Indian allies, dreams not only revealed the future. They controlled it. The next night the allies moved forward in a new spirit.38
The date was July 29, 1609. When evening came they broke camp, moved silently to the edge of the lake, and put their canoes in the water. Champlain admired the Indians for their astonishing control of sound. They paddled “without making any noise,” not the smallest splash or the slightest touch of a paddle against a canoe. Sixty Indians and three Frenchmen glided like spirits across the still waters of the silent lake. The night was dark but very clear, and the stars were bright in the northern sky. Champlain looked upward at the constellations rotating around Polaris and reckoned the time at ten o’clock. They were coming near the southern end of the lake, deep in Mohawk country. On their right they passed a low peninsula with willow trees, and a sandy beach below a steep eroded bank. Beyond the beach Champlain saw a promontory projecting into the water. He called it a cap, which in his old French meant “a point of land often elevated.”39
In the distance, silhouetted against a star-filled sky, Champlain was astonished to see the mountain of his dream. His Indian allies knew it well. The Iroquois called it “the meeting place of two waters,” tekontaró:ken or, to European ears, Ticonderoga. The name came from two big and very beautiful lakes. Lake George to the south and west was two hundred feet above Lake Champlain, and drained into it from a height greater than Niagara Falls. The water flowed downward through a run of falls and rapids which the French called a chute, and entered Lake Champlain at Ticonderoga.40 For many generations, Ticonderoga was one of the great strategic places in North America. It was the key to a long chain of lakes and rivers that ran from the St. Lawrence to the Hudson.41 For the Mohawk, it was also a sacred and magical place. They believed that the promontory with its high limestone face and rocky caves was inhabited by spirits. The sandy beach to the north near Willow Point was thought to be visited by invisible artisans who lived at the bottom of Lake Champlain and brought up fragments of stone arrowheads and spear points, which they left as gifts for the Mohawk, who in turn left gifts of tobacco. Many stone shards can still be found there today.42
In the night of July 29, Champlain and his allies approached this fabled place in their canoes. As they rounded the promontory of Ticonderoga, their bow paddlers saw shadows stirring on the water ahead of them. They stared intently into the darkness, and the shadows began to assume an earthly form. They were boats of strange appearance, larger than northern birchbark canoes, and filled with men. The Indians instantly identified them. Mohawk!43
Each group sighted the other at about the same time, and both were taken by surprise. “At the extremity of the cape,” Champlain wrote, “we met the Iroquois…. Both they and we commenced to make loud cries, and each warrior made ready his arms.” Both sides turned away and moved in opposite directions. “We retreated into the middle of the lake,” Champlain wrote. The northern Indians had an advantage on the water. Their birchbark canoes were nimble, and very fast. The Mohawk boats were made of thick elm bark, often from a single tree. They were big and strong, but slow and clumsy. The Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron could control the terms of engagement on the lake.44
The Mohawk chose not to challenge them afloat, and turned toward the land, which they knew very well. They came ashore on a sand beach between the promontory of Ticonderoga and Willow Point to the north, where a fringe of willow trees still flourishes near the water’s edge. They pulled their boats close together, then climbed a low bank and gathered in an area of cleared ground with the forest just beyond. On the edge of the forest they began to fell trees and made a fort or barricade. In this work they were as skillful as Champlain’s allies and, in his words, “fortified themselves very well.”45
Champlain and his allies remained afloat on the lake and lashed their canoes together with poles so as not to become separated in the night. To his surprise a parley took place in the darkness. The Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron sent two canoes “to learn from the enemy if they wished to fight.” The Mohawk replied that “they had no other desire, but for the moment nothing could be seen and it was necessary to wait for daylight to distinguish each other.” They proposed that, “as soon as the sun should rise, they would attack us.” “To this,” Champlain wrote, “our Indians agreed.”46
“We were on the water,” he wrote, “within bow-shot of their barricades.” Songs and cries pierced the night. The Mohawk shouted insults at their enemies. “Our side was not lacking in repartee,” Champlain recalled, “telling them that they would see feats of weaponry that they had never known before, and a great deal of other talk such as is usual at the siege of a city.”47
As dawn approached, both sides prepared for battle.48 In the darkness before first light Champlain’s Indian allies paddled around the promontory and landed in a secluded spot where they were not under observation. “My companions and I were always kept carefully out of sight, lying flat in the canoes,” he wrote. His Indian allies sent scouts ahead to watch the Mohawk fort. The rest assembled in their fighting formation, and moved forward toward the Mohawk barricade.
The three Frenchmen remained carefully hidden behind them. Each prepared his weapon, a short-barreled, shoulder-fired arquebus à rouet, Champlain’s highly developed wheel lock weapon that did not require a smouldering matchlock, which might have betrayed their position. Champlain loaded four balls in the barrel of his arquebus. It was a dangerous thing to do. On Cape Cod in 1605, Champlain’s weapon had exploded in his hands and nearly killed him. But overloading was highly effective in close combat, and he accepted the risk.49
A few Montagnais warriors crept close to the Iroquois barricade, using their highly developed hunting skills. At first light a Mohawk scout emerged from the fort, and looked warily around. A Montagnais archer drew his bow, and the scout fell silently to the ground, probably transfixed by an arrow through his throat.50 The Mohawk warriors mustered quickly and came out of the fort, many of them wearing wooden armor that was proof against stone arrowheads. Both forces assembled in close formation on opposite sides of a clearing between the water and the woods.51
A Huron warrior girded for war. Champlain wrote that they and the Iroquois wore armor and carried shields of “wood woven with cotton thread, as proof against their arrows.” They fought in close order—until they met Champlain and his arquebusiers in 1609. The battle at Lake Champlain wrought a revolution in Indian warfare.
Champlain peered through the ranks of his allies and studied the Mohawk as they emerged from their barricade. He counted two hundred warriors, “strong and robust men in their appearance,” and he watched as “they advanced slowly to meet us with a gravity and assurance that I greatly admired.” The Mohawk were in tight ranks—a disciplined c
lose-order forest-phalanx that had defeated many foes. Their wooden armor and shields covered their bodies. In the lead were two Mohawk leaders, each wearing three high feathers above their heads. Champlain’s Indians told him that the men with the big feathers were chiefs, and “I was to do what I could to kill them.”52
Champlain’s Indian allies were now about two hundred yards from the Mohawk, and began to move forward also in close formation. Once again Champlain was kept in a position behind them, where he could not be seen by the other side. The other two Frenchmen, on Champlain’s orders, slipped silently into the forest and crept forward around the right flank of the Mohawk. Their orders were to stay out of sight until Champlain discharged his weapon. Then they were to advance and fire into the flank of the Mohawk formation.
Champlain remained hidden as his Indian allies advanced. When they were about fifty yards from their enemy, Champlain remembered that they “began to call to me with loud cries.” Suddenly they divided in two parts, and Champlain was revealed to the Mohawk. He strode forward alone, twenty yards to the front of his friends and about thirty yards from the enemy. Champlain’s burnished steel cuirass and helmet glittered in the golden light of the morning sun.
The Mohawk stopped in amazement and studied this astonishing figure who had suddenly appeared before them, as if he had risen out of the ground. They observed him for a moment that must have seemed an eternity. Then a Mohawk leader raised his bow. Champlain tells us, “I put my arquebus against my cheek and aimed straight at one of the chiefs.” As the Indians drew their bowstrings, Champlain fired. There was a mighty crash and a cloud of white smoke. Two Mohawk chiefs fell dead, and another warrior was mortally wounded—three men brought down by one shot. Champlain’s Indian allies raised a great shout, so loud that “one could not have heard the thunder.”53
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