To secure the use of the site, the Jesuits had to negotiate with the seigneurs, François de Chavigny de la Chevrotière and Éléonore de Grandmaison. Following their arrival in the colony a decade earlier, the couple had lived for a time in a homestead at Sillery where they were neighbours of the Algonquians of Kamiskouaouangachit. Well connected and in high standing with the colonists, Chavigny then received a seigneury some distance upstream from Quebec and the mission, but in the face of the growing Iroquois threat the couple instead chose to relocate downstream, to the Island of Orleans, in 1648. The following year, they received a second seigneurial grant corresponding to the western tip of the island. Only a few colonists had begun to clear the land here and there around the island, and Grandmaison became the first woman to take up residence among them. Discussions between the Jesuits and the couple must have begun during the winter of 1651 if not earlier, but Chavigny’s unexpected death that year left his young widow, Grandmaison, to finalize the arrangement. She agreed to cede to the missionaries and their wards the use of a plot measuring six arpents by ten, but only for the duration of eight years following the initial seeding. Some of this land had already been cleared, but most was still wooded. While compassion towards the refugees may have played a role in the decision, plainly this was a savvy business deal. After her time near Kamiskouaouangachit, Grandmaison well understood the impact of a mission settlement on the landscape. The construction of buildings by the Jesuits’ employees, and the clearing of fields by the Wendats would greatly improve the value of her land; their presence also would offer a measure of protection against the enemy. It was not unheard of for a Frenchwoman – and more specifically a widow – to do business in this way, but it was not the norm; yet for the Wendats, it would have seemed only natural for a woman to have a say in the allocation of land. In a spirit of reciprocity, they agreed to assist Grandmaison with her various household chores.69
The refugee community that the French took to referring to as the “Huron Colony” quickly made the site on the Island of Orleans its own. In the distance across the water they could see Quebec. They spent the spring and summer of 1651 clearing fields and erecting longhouses, and, though rumours of an impending Iroquois offensive that fall brought them to seek greater safety by encamping in front of Quebec’s parish church, they soon returned to the island.70 The Jesuits had “a redoubt or a sort of fort” constructed there, a wooden enclosure of dimensions comparable to the fort abandoned on Gahoendoe. Alongside the longhouses therein, they built what they described as a “rather nice” chapel and a small residence, staffed that first year by two missionaries and four domestics.71 All around, the refugees began working the preexisting fields and clearing new ones. In mid-April 1651, the lands that had already been cleared on behalf of Grandmaison and her late husband were allotted into thirty portions and distributed among them. “All were satisfied,” reported the Jesuits, “and sowing was immediately begun.” The first year on the island was not easy. Plagued by famine during their last winter in Huronia, the Wendats had brought little to no seed supply to their new location, and must have obtained some from the Jesuits, from French settlers, perhaps even from the people of Kamiskouaouangachit. The missionaries went through great expenses to feed the refugees; the latter nonetheless succeeded in harvesting “a tolerably good quantity” of maize that fall. They expanded their fields, clearing woods by controlled fire and working the ash-enriched soil. Already by the next year, they had begun “to reap as much Indian corn there as they were accustomed to reaping in their own country” – enough of a surplus, in fact, to now supply the Jesuits at Quebec and to trade cornmeal for furs with the Innu at Tadoussac. By 1656, if not earlier, the full sixty arpents set aside for their use on the island had been cleared.72
In parallel with their agricultural work, the Wendats continued to hunt, fish, and forage on a seasonal basis. This was made possible by the hospitality of the people of Kamiskouaouangachit and their neighbours, who allowed their insertion within their own territories. In 1824 the grand chief of the Wendats of Lorette, Nicholas Vincent Tsawenhohi, reported that according to the traditions of his elders, almost two hundred years earlier, their people had made “an alliance together to live in peace and in common” with neighbouring Indigenous nations, by which they “should eat with the same spoon in the same plate,” meaning that they “should hunt together on the same lands to avoid all squabbles between them.”73 The refugees’ claiming of surrounding hunting territories and reclaiming of a key position in the fur trade was as swift as their return to agriculture. Not only did this allow them to improve their material condition, it also enabled them to reciprocate the assistance that they were receiving from the French. One of the missionaries’ detractors later wrote that around these years they had managed to earn revenue of as much as ten thousand livres annually from beaver skins – representing up to two thousand pelts – obtained from the Wendats at the Island of Orleans. The Jesuits complained of their “excessive” expenses in their Relations: they had anticipated that they would need to spend three thousand livres a year to establish the Wendats near Quebec, but the first year alone it cost them about eight thousand livres to feed them and supply them with hatchets, kettles, clothing, and the other necessities of life. But in reality, such expenses were largely compensated by the neophytes.74
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As the Tionnontatés, Neutrals, and Eries in turn dispersed in the face of the Iroquois offensive through the lower Great Lakes, a number of Wendats who had initially sought refuge among these nations reoriented their hopes towards the Saint Lawrence valley. They continued to trickle into the region, some settling on the Island of Orleans, others instead remaining for a time in the vicinity of Trois Rivières and Montreal to hunt and fish, and plant a little corn. Arrivals were announced that sometimes proved premature, as when, in May 1651, messengers reached Trois Rivières reporting that some of the Tahontaenrat and Arendarhonon, who had been living with the Neutrals, were on their way – there is no evidence that they ever did reach the Saint Lawrence, the bulk relocating instead among the Senecas. By 1653, the total number of these refugees was generously estimated to be between five and six hundred individuals, a population comparable to that of a small- to medium-sized village in Old Wendake, at a time when, to reiterate, the French settlers of the Laurentian colony themselves numbered only some fifteen hundred.75
Notwithstanding the tendency of French chroniclers to lump people together under the “Huron” label, this refugee population was necessarily a heterogeneous one. It seems safe to assume that members of lineages and clan segments undertook the journey together, rather than as isolated individuals or nuclear families, but it is difficult to say what clans were more abundantly represented than others. Eight to twelve clans had existed in Old Wendake, of which the Deer, Turtle, Wolf, Bear, Beaver, Snake, Porcupine, and Hawk were the most prominent, but strikingly the clans which moved to the Saint Lawrence valley failed to capture the attention of commentators. Sometime between the middle of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth, the Wendats of Lorette abandoned traditional modes of reckoning kinship in favour of the patrilineal, nuclear family. In the middle of the eighteenth century, one Jesuit missionary, based on his time at Lorette, noted that “there are among the Natives different bandes [i.e. clans],” citing as example the Beaver, Bear, Wolf, Deer, Partridge, and Turtle. A military officer visiting a little later wrote that the community was itself divided into three “families,” those of the Turtle, the Vulture, and the Wolf. It is unclear whether the Vulture (or more accurately, Hawk) here refers to a clan proper, or if it is the result of a case of mistaken identity following from the title borne by the community’s principal chief at the time, who was called Tsaouenhohoui in reference to a bird of prey. By the nineteenth century, members of the community instead recalled affinity to the Bear, Deer, Turtle, and Wolf Clans.76 We may thus speculate that the bulk of the mid-seventeenth-century migrants belonged to these four clans, and t
hat in the middle- to long-term they absorbed lineages from the clan segments among them that were not so strongly represented. As Wendat society underwent a dramatic scaling down, traditional modes of reckoning kin were adapted to avoid strictures against marrying within one’s clan and make it possible to find mates within a small community.
The presence among the mid-seventeenth-century migrants of elements from each of the constituent nations of the Wendat Confederacy is more safely discerned, though in impressionistic rather than numerical terms. The Attignawantan appear to have predominated, as they had been the most numerous nation of the confederacy and the one which included the largest number of Christian converts. Oral tradition recorded among the Wyandots of Anderdon, Ontario, in the late nineteenth century seems to support the idea that the Attig-nawantan were numerous, for it held that the “portion of them [the Wendats] belonging to the Bear Clan [sic: nation]” had left the shores of Lake Huron to relocate near Quebec in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, returning to “their ancient homes” there. The Attigneenongnahac and Arendarhonon were also well represented among the refugee community, even if most of the Arendarhonon had apparently joined the Senecas at the same time as the Tahontaenrat.77 Though the affiliation of someone like Louis Taiaeronk, who addressed the afflicted Ursulines on behalf of his people, is unknown, the identity of a few other prominent figures is somewhat better documented: Jean-Baptiste Atironta, who travelled to Quebec in 1649–50 to ask for permission to join the French near Quebec, was Arendarhonon; Atsena, who a few years later begins to loom large among the migrants, was a principal chief of the Attignawantan.78 A handful of individuals also had roots in neighbouring nations: at least one of the leading members of the refugee community, Louis Thaondechoren was described as being “de la nation des Tionontateronons,” that is, of Tionnontaté or Petun origins.79
As Mohawk and Onondaga warriors and diplomats persisted in their efforts to pursue the fragments of the once powerful Wendat Confederacy into the Saint Lawrence valley, the significance of the old divisions between Attignawantan, Attigneenongnahac, and Arendarhonon would come to the foreground, before fading abruptly thereafter.
4
Promised Lands
Wendat Endurance in the Saint Lawrence Valley, 1651–1666
Addressing the Ursulines after the destruction of their house by fire in 1650, Louis Taiaeronk alluded to “the remnant of a country that once was flourishing and that is no more, the country of the Hurons,” and grieved that his people were now “without a country.” The same issue of the Jesuit Relations that recounted these words reported that, by the summer of the following year, the Wendats installed at the Island of Orleans already “claim[ed] to have found there their second country.” They had cleared fields, and erected their longhouses, clustered in a village within what the Jesuits described as a “sort of fort” with a “rather nice” chapel. In the distance, across a stretch of the Saint Lawrence, they could see the town of Quebec.1
How, exactly, the Wendats conceptualized this second country is difficult to say. It is possible that they understood this latest relocation as a traumatic continuity, rather than a clean break, within their social and cultural experience. Settling on the Island of Orleans may have felt particularly fitting, given that the literal meaning of their name, Wendats, was “Islanders.” In more recent times, the Wendats have known the island as Lawendawinen Tiatontarehi, “the island sliding by [sic] where the river narrows [i.e. Quebec],” or simply Ah8endoe, “the Island,” but at the time they took to calling it “the Island of Saint Mary.”2 In so doing, they emphasized the link between this latest home and the defunct missions – Sainte Marie I and II – in their ancestral homeland. The name echoed the importance of matrilineality and matrilocality within Iroquoian society, with the Virgin Mary standing in as mother to the battered Christian community. In 1653, the mission’s chapel was formally designated Visitation de Marie in her honour and the missionaries formed a sodality in order to inspire great zeal and emulation, the Congregation of Our Lady. Consisting of ten to twelve members at first, this “elite of the Christians” who deemed themselves “worthy children of the Virgin” swelled rapidly.3
The Wendat migrants may very well have considered this region to be ancestral ground, in keeping with the traditions recounted in later centuries. The homecoming, if so, was by no means a joyous one. Distant intergenerational recollections offered little solace compared to the far more vivid and painful memories of the homeland that they had occupied during their lifetime, and where more recent ancestors had lived and were buried. The uprooting had been traumatic. As Taiaeronk explained to the Ursulines, he and his people had had the misfortune of witnessing “the universal destruction by fire of all our houses, of all our villages, and of the whole of our country.”4 No doubt many entertained the idea that their displacement was a temporary circumstance, and that they could in short time return to the shores of Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe. It soon became clear, however, that a return to the old homeland – which eventually took on the name of Wendake Ehen, translated by missionaries as “La Défunte Huronie,” or the “Late Land of the Wendats” – was not an option.5
Among the Five Nations, and in particular the Mohawks and Onondagas, the ambition to incorporate the dispersed remnants of the once powerful confederacy – to “remove them […] either with their consent or by force” – was as strong as ever, and neither the palisade erected on the Island of Orleans nor the small garrison nearby at Quebec guaranteed their safety.6 The 1650s and early 1660s represented for the Wendat refugees a nadir. The Onondagas and the Mohawks turned to a formal peace with the French and the Wendats as the means by which to compel the latter’s migration, but their forceful and often secretive diplomatic overtures came to a head, giving way to a new cycle of violence and coercion. The distinction between enemies and friends was not always an easy one to make in these years. The Wendats, invariably interested in receiving news of their relatives in Iroquoia, parleyed with enemy war parties which often included some of their former countrymen. In keeping with the patterns described in the previous chapter, warriors negotiated with their adversaries as often as they attacked them, and diplomats waged a parallel campaign of seduction and intimidation. As one Mohawk deputy explained to a gathering of Wendats: “Fear not, I no longer look upon you as an enemy, but as my relative. You shall be cherished in my country, which shall also be yours.” On another occasion, an Onondaga explained to a Wendat assembly that his country “would be to them a promised land.”7
The crucial question of the decade following the dispersal would be whether the Wendats would find their land of peace and promise in the Saint Lawrence valley, as they had hoped, or rather in Iroquoia. This question was central not only to the relations of the Wendats and Iroquois, but to the whole geopolitics of the region insofar as the relationship between the French and the Iroquois through these years was largely shaped by the Wendat question.8 Colonial officials and missionaries proved incapable of offering the security that the Wendats sought, first on the Island of Orleans and, when pressured away from it, in the town of Quebec itself. The Wendats saw their numbers shrink from killings, captures, and reluctant acceptance of Iroquois invitations: the initial three hundred migrants, having swelled to five or six hundred in the decade’s first years, were whittled down to perhaps a hundred before its end. For the outstanding majority of the refugees from the shores of Georgian Bay, migration to the Saint Lawrence valley had merely delayed an inevitable exodus to Iroquoia; yet for a minority the Saint Lawrence valley indeed proved to be a land of endurance and regeneration. Under pressure from the Iroquois, families and individuals from different Wendat villages and, significantly, different constituent nations of the Wendat Confederacy, converged to form a new community and remake a new Wendake.
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After their arrival in the Saint Lawrence valley, Wendat men and women did not hide in their new village on the Island of Orleans. They could not afford to. M
any of them continued to travel up and down the Saint Lawrence valley to hunt, fish, and reach out to friends and relatives. Some did not integrate into the village community immediately, preferring instead to orbit around Trois Rivières and Montreal. Collectively, they remained extremely vulnerable to attacks and overtures. The Iroquois sent raiding parties to the Saint Lawrence valley with increasing frequency between 1650 and 1653, striking against Algonquians, Wendats, and Frenchmen alike. During these three years, a minimum of forty Wendats were captured or killed in the region, most of them in the vicinity of Montreal and Trois Rivières, representing between 5 and 10 percent of the men and women who were seeking refuge among the French. Although some of these captives managed a subsequent escape, this population loss was substantial and demoralizing.9 The Wendats responded to violence in kind when possible, tormenting and killing enemies who occasionally fell into their hands. Contrary to the Iroquois, their precarious position in the decade that followed the dispersion, coupled with the fact that their defensive operations only netted male captives, meant that adopting enemies in accordance with tradition was unfeasible.10 The distinct advantages of the Iroquois were clear on this front, and the presence of what French chroniclers variously described as “Renegade and Iroquoiscized Hurons” among the warriors who prowled about was unnerving. A note left by the Jesuit Joseph-Antoine Poncet, who in August of 1653 was seized with his lay assistant at Cap Rouge, just seven kilometers upriver from Kamiskouaouaganchit and twenty from the mission on the Island of Orleans, indicated that the war party that captured him was made up of four Mohawks and “six Hurons, turned Iroquois.”11
That summer and fall of 1653 marked a critical shift in the tactics of the Mohawks and Onondagas. The warriors who struck at Cap Rouge had detached themselves from an army of six hundred Mohawks that proceeded to surround Trois Rivières during the last week of August. While the French garrison used its cannons to keep the attackers at bay, the latter burnt houses, sacked crops, and slaughtered livestock in the outlying countryside. Soon, however, the French were perplexed to see their Wendat allies venture out of the town’s stockade to approach the enemy, “eager to learn news of their relatives and friends who had formerly been taken in wars, and had become Iroquois.” Before long “there was nothing to be seen but conferences and interviews between Iroquois and Hurons”; this continued for several days, “so that one would have said there had never been any war between them.” During the course of this mingling, the Mohawks were troubled to discover that they had lost the initiative to the Onondagas. A little over a month before, sixty of the latter had arrived at Montreal and made peace overtures to officials there “on behalf of their whole nation”; a small Oneida delegation had followed shortly thereafter, asking to be party to the Onondagas’ peace. Responding to the evolving circumstances, the leaders of the Mohawk army – among whom a man named Teharihogen appears to have been the most influential – decided that they too would turn to diplomacy. They approached the officials at Trois Rivières to express their desire to enter into peace talks, promising to free Father Poncet as proof of their sincerity. The Mohawks did not merely intend to be party to the Onondagas’ peace, however. As the latter’s ambassadors passed through on route from Montreal to Quebec, Teharihogen’s warriors intercepted them. Only after relieving the Onondagas of most of the presents of wampum and furs with which they intended to further their peace talks, and imposing on them a handful of observers, did the Mohawks let them proceed on their way.12
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