The fact that women made the belt and, indeed, appear to have pooled from among themselves the beads to make it, points to their gender’s importance in the coalescence of the new community. Though they lacked the institutionalized political power that Wendat and Iroquois women and clan mothers enjoyed in their matrilineal and matrilocal societies, Wabanaki women too played a powerful role in sustaining Catholicism among their people and attracting them to the mission settlements. A large number of persons belonging to the “cabin of a woman named Marguerite” (possibly Marguerite Weramihiwe or Weranmiwe) arrived at Kamiskouaouangachit beginning around 1680. By 1682, her “kindred” at the mission were said to number forty-five persons who “all lead a very exemplary life.” By its sheer size and its energetic embrace of missionary teachings, this family soon gained prominence within the community. Elsewhere, in a similar fashion, Bigot again alludes to “the Cabin of a devout Christian woman,” pointing to the authority of women over the household. Indeed, at various times of the year, women appear to have represented the majority of the mission’s residents, along with the very young and the elderly, while men went off hunting on their own.41 Bigot’s complaints about the way women quarrelled with each other hints that the process by which family groups, who did not all belong to the same subdivisions of the Wabanakis, came together was not an easy one. Many of them “on their arrival here, manifested the keenest jealousy, and indulged in slander of all kinds,” he reported, concluding that “these vices of envy and slander are not common among the men.” Although he does not go on to explain the subjects of these quarrels, it is tempting to believe that he was referring to the dynamics of people who in coming together were searching for ways to best coexist: issues were being worked out, such as where individuals and families stood with respect to Christian beliefs and rituals, and no doubt who would be allotted the best fields and house sites.42 The choice of Saint François de Sales as “father and patron” of the Wabanaki mission may have itself been a response to the perceived need for unity. Indeed, this bishop of Geneva and popular theologian, canonized less than twenty years earlier, had been especially noted for his conviction that love and gentleness were central to the relationship between God and humans, and to mending those social relationships that here on earth had been riven by the Reformation – a useful inspiration for an embryonic community in search of cohesion.43
Though the ritual and social center of the mission shifted to the new location, both sites welcomed a stream of migrants throughout the winter of 1684.44 Unhappy at having to shuttle around, Jacques Bigot complained that “it has been impossible to assemble the people here,” speaking of the mission along the Chaudière river, noting that they “are all quite far from one another, for they are mostly in the cabins in the country; some were at Coste de St. Ignace [in the seigneury of Gaudarville, immediately upstream from that of Sillery], others at St. Michel [in the seigneury of Sillery], others at the fort very near me.”45 The relocation of the heart of the mission on the Chaudière River, from fifty kilometers upriver to just below the falls at the river’s mouth, may have occurred around this time in an effort to assemble this population, though it may also have taken place a few years later. In either case, the first palisaded enclosure of the fort to which Bigot was alluding was completed in the spring of 1685, and some families proceeded to build substantial lodges (“grandes cabanes”) there. The bark chapel was destroyed in the spring floods, and that summer Bigot oversaw the construction of a new one in the fort’s centre as well as of a residence for his use and for that of his assistant and lay servant. But that this second chapel was built “in a fortnight” suggests it was not much more elaborate than the first one. The census that year reported the presence of seventeen dwellings at the mission.46 Arriving in October of 1689, Jesuit missionary Sébastien Rasle described a mission settlement located just three leagues or fifteen kilometers from Quebec, thus close to the falls, “in a forest” with cornfields nearby, with conical bark wigwams arranged “more or less like houses in cities” within a palisade of “tall and tight stakes.” Significantly, in a dictionary of the Wabanaki language that Rasle compiled over the course of his career, he seems to indicate that the name of the mission at some point shifted from Msakkikkan to Néssawakamighé, with its inhabitants coming to be known as Ounessawakamighéwiak. The new name appears to have meant “double place” or “second place,” a logical reference to this site’s relationship to the principal mission at Kamiskouaouangachit.47
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War with the Iroquois loomed large in the minds of the Wabanakis who came to the Saint Lawrence valley. Given the longstanding antagonism between the two groups, Governor Frontenac’s demand that the refugees arriving in 1675–76 were not to fight the Iroquois “on the territories of the French” reflected both the need for avoiding the reopening of hostilities with the Five Nations and the necessity of preventing within the French alliance violence of the sort that might involve the people of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake.48 As the relationship of the French and the Five Nations began to sour, rumours started to spread among the Wabanakis of Kamiskouaouangachit and Msakkikkan. In the summer of 1682, it was heard that “some Iroquois were to make a raid upon our cabins while our men were away hunting,” wrote Father Bigot who felt it necessary to “get up at night, to soothe the minds of the women, and to dispel the fear that they felt on seeing an Iroquois or two in the woods.”49
The prospect of war became more concrete in the fall of the following year when, at the request of Intendant De Meulles, the people of Kamiskouaouangachit and those of Lorette were asked to start building as many birchbark canoes as possible.50 La Barre’s expedition against the Senecas provided officials and missionaries with an unparalleled opportunity to capitalize on the recent wave of newcomers, both to expand the colony’s military strength and to enlarge the mission community. With the assistance of Father Bigot, the governor made an appeal to the men of Kamiskouaouangachit and its newly formed satellite settlement of Msakkikkan, tugging at their pride by urging only the most courageous and loyal among them to join his campaign. What is more, he called on them to reach beyond the Saint Lawrence valley and secure the active participation of their relatives and friends in Acadia. Etienne Nekoutneant, the second son of the Marguerite alluded to earlier, was tasked with carrying presents and at least one wampum belt, inviting “all the Abnaquis who remain in Acadia” to join the residents of the twinned mission settlements and “march to war with the French against the Iroquois.”51 Nekoutneant’s staunch opposition to drunkenness and his strict observance of missionary teachings had earned him, with the approval of the mission’s two captains, the appointment of dogique in 1682. In this capacity, he presided over public prayers and was responsible for religious indoctrination at Kamiskouaouangachit. It is also likely that he undertook regular proselytizing journeys to Acadia. That he was one of the most sought-after godfathers among catechumens of Kamiskouaouangachit during the 1680s is an indication of his importance as a key intermediary between Christians and non-Christians, between the mission’s regulars and its newcomers.52
Whereas La Barre’s call to arms represented for the Christian Iroquois of Kahnawake and Kanehstakake a reconfiguration of traditional alliances, for the Wabanakis it was merely a new expression of longstanding animosities. It may very well have come at the perfect moment: rumours, beyond those that had circulated at the mission two years earlier, had just a few months before spread among the settlers of northern New England to the effect that the Penobscots and Kennebecs were preparing to attack them, and that Governor Dongan of New York had responded by promising to incite the Mohawks to crush them.53 Whereas the Christian Iroquois made distinctions between each of the Five Nations, the Wabanakis do not appear to have made much if any differentiation between the Mohawks and the more distant Senecas. It is plausible that news of these developments reached Wabanaki ears, and that this steeled their resolve to strike first against the Iroquois or at the very least to strengthen th
eir defensive alliance with the French. Several Eastern Wabanaki warriors and their families responded positively to La Barre and Nekoutneant’s call. The influential Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie, Baron de Saint-Castin, a former officer of the Carignan-Salières regiment who had taken up the trading post at the Penobscot River in the mid-1670s, ingratiated himself with the locals and married a chief’s daughter, certainly placed his own weight behind the French invitation, though he was unable to personally accompany the warriors because English interlopers had recently summoned him to abandon his trading post.54 Mobilization would follow a similar pattern in the spring of 1687, when Governor Denonville would lead another army against the Senecas: once again, an invitation was sent to Acadia, though this time Jacques Bigot accompanied the community’s emissaries to muster support; and once again, rumours that the English were inciting the Iroquois to war against the region’s inhabitants likely contributed to the appeal of the joint expedition.55
In the summer of 1684, Father Bigot estimated that it was a total of eighty or a hundred Wabanaki, Algonquin, and Sokoki warriors (but certainly including a few Innu and perhaps even some Mi’kmaq) who went to war from or through Msakkikkan and Kamiskouaouangachit.56 The fact that the campaign ended with a humiliating truce no doubt aggravated these warriors, much as it did those from the nations of the Great Lakes, given their displays of anti-Iroquois fervor and the fact that many had travelled a great distance to take part in the expedition.57 A mysterious illness, characterized by intermittent fevers and imputed to a variety of outlandish causes by French observers, proved to be an ever-greater source of grief. While an outburst of smallpox may have compounded its effects, it is likely that the culprit was malaria, which until the nineteenth century was endemic in the wetlands of the upper Saint Lawrence and Lake Ontario. There are no indications that the Christian Iroquois were affected, doubtless because their population was more frequently exposed to malaria parasites in this area and had as a result a degree of immunity to them, but French soldiers and militiamen were plagued by these fevers. The warriors who had come from the east, too, were particularly hit. Several of the Sokokis who had established their encampments on the Saint François River, a short distance from its mouth, died during the winter as a result of the fever. From Kamiskouaouangachit and Msakkikkan, Jacques Bigot wrote that only one or two of all those who had gone to war “escaped the attack of a malignant fever,” all the rest having fallen “dangerously sick.”58
Bigot found that this ordeal had awakened in the Wabanakis an interest in Christian teachings but was left to worry about the effect that news of the sickness would produce in their homeland, “whether that will not prevent those from coming who already have some design of leaving Acadia to come here.” It was in vain that he tried to convince those who showed inclinations to return there to instead remain, or to otherwise come back in the spring with friends and family. “[T]he rumour went around Acadia that all the Natives [of the missions] were dead,” and as a result few came.59 Among those who did die was Michel Tekouerimat – the man who under the name Pirouakki had arrived in 1676 and had inherited the title and legacy of Noël and Charles Tekouerimat as first captain of the mission. Falling ill in January of 1685 while he was away hunting around Beaupré, he died within a few days – it may have been a recrudescence of malaria contracted during the previous years’ expedition, an unrelated infection of smallpox, or something else altogether. Father Jacques Bigot rushed to the scene, but the time of year made it unfeasible to bring his body back to Kamiskouaouangachit and lay him to rest among the other “captains of Sillery.” The memorial service held in the French parish of Château Richer was nevertheless, by Bigot’s reckoning, the most solemn that he had yet witnessed during his years in the colony, a testament to the fact that the deceased was deemed an exceptionally fervent and indeed model Christian by his countrymen and colonists alike.60
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In 1686, the Jesuits purchased a small and as of yet unimproved lot of land at the falls of the Chaudière River, with fifteen arpents of frontage on the Saint Lawrence River and forty arpents deep stretching across a bend in the Chaudière River – this may correspond to the heavily wooded lot which the Jesuits seemed to have acquired, or attempted to acquire, as early as 1679. Presumably this was a more convenient site of encampment for the mission’s inhabitants.61 The years 1683–87 marked for the mission of Kamiskouaouangachit a final peak: during this period more baptisms were recorded in the combined registers there than during any other five-year period in the mission’s fifty-year history, reflecting both the zeal of the brothers Jacques and Vincent Bigot and the dynamism of Wabanaki migration. However, early census records for the twinned missions of Sillery and Saint François on the Chaudière River point to what the missionaries were not quick to spell out: that though several hundreds passed through, the core community remained relatively small. The 1685 census tallied 488 residents but only seventeen houses, and the one which was conducted three years later reported 512 individuals and twenty-seven houses – numbers which, in light of average Wabanaki house capacities, suggest a semipermanent population perhaps closer to 85 and 135 individuals respectively.62
Not all of the newcomers embraced the Christian faith either. In keeping with their dedication to the gentle ways of Saint François de Sales, the Bigot brothers were unusually tolerant, allowing the unconverted newcomers to take part in religious ceremonies with the neophytes.63 But the missionaries were more guarded with respect to the Western Wabanaki bands who roamed between the mouth of the Richelieu River and Trois Rivières, and for whom the Crevier seigneury appears to have constituted a pole of attraction. Citing the Sokokis’s “inconstant nature” and their reputation for being “much inclined to drunkenness,” Jacques Bigot thought it wise not to admit any to his mission without careful selection. “[O]ur mission is not yet sufficiently established in Christian piety,” he declared, “to admit that sort of mixture.” He entertained the idea of easing them into civility by means of an occasional “flying” (itinerant) mission, but he was kept too busy to undertake such trips himself and his superiors do not appear to have deemed this population sufficiently important to assign anyone else.64 This small and nomadic population, while cherished by the local fur traders with whom it developed a close relationship, failed to capture the interest of the missionaries or colonial authorities. The census of 1692 was the first to allude to an Indigenous presence near the mouth of the Saint François River, and it tallied only twenty-five individuals.65
Figure 7.1 Mission settlements occupied by the Wabanakis, and lands acquired for their use by the Jesuits. Some uncertainty persists as to the precise location of the mission during the 1680s. (Map by Andrée Héroux)
The authorities in New York, to the contrary, began during these years to actively court this very population. Anxieties about the northward flow of Indigenous peoples away from the English orbit and into that of the French were not generated only by the Iroquois, as outlined in the previous chapter, but also by those Algonquians whose ancestral territories lay to the east of the Hudson-Richelieu axis, namely Mahicans, Sokokis, Pocumtucks, and others, whom the English tended to vaguely lump together under the rubrics of “River Indians” (those who lived closer to the Hudson) and “North Indians” (the more distant ones to the north and west). Already in 1678, officials in Albany thought that the French were trying to attract not only the Mohawks, but also these “North Indians with the River Indians,” who it was said were being given “great encouragement” in the form of “land and forts.”66 In 1684, a delegation of “north Indians […] come from Canada” conferred with Governor Dongan at Albany, at the conclusion of which encounter they promised that they would resettle closer to the English town. During the summer of 1685, fifty-six men accompanied by about one hundred women and children indeed returned from Canada under the leadership of a certain Sadochquis. They revealed that they had gone to Canada “to live there” and had been embraced “as children” by its governor. N
ow, however, they declared to the Albany magistrates that “our thoughts and inclinations when we rose in the morning were always to come hither and to live at Skachkook” among their relatives.67
This village of Schaghticoke, on the Hoosick River near its confluence with the upper reaches of the Hudson River, forty kilometers northeast of Albany, had in a sense been New York’s answer to Canada’s mission settlements. During the First Anglo-Wabanaki War, the people of Albany and New York’s provincial officials had grown worried about the Algonquians’ northward exodus and sensitive to the need to strengthen their frontier. In August of 1678, Governor Andros ordered that these refugees should be directed to a convenient site and took the Albany magistrates’ suggestion that the mouth of the Hoosick River, on the east bank of the Hudson, offered such a site. The village welcomed two hundred persons in its first year. It is likely that the area’s Mahicans formed a substratum to the village’s population, but they were soon joined by a variety of Sokokis, Pocumtucks, Norrwotucks, Woronokes, Agawams, Pennacooks, Narragansetts, Nipmucks, Wampanoags, and others. They retained close connections with their Wabanaki relatives. These identities are generally confused in period sources, reflecting a melding process: the community’s inhabitants became known among the English as “Schaghticokes” or “River Indians,” but the French continued to describe them as “Loups.”68
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