Some of the Western Wabanaki bands which came to the Saint Lawrence valley were no doubt among the same who frequented the village on the Hudson. Several factors explain why, in the summer of 1685, a certain number of these people chose to return there. Schaghticoke was located much closer to the traditional homelands and hunting territories of this heterogeneous population. French willingness to go to war against the Senecas and by extension the Five Nations may also have worried – instead of thrilled – these Western Wabanakis who, as the Mohawks’ closest and most vulnerable neighbours to the east, had much more to lose in a renewed war than their more distant Eastern Wabanaki counterparts. The fact that, like the people of Kamiskouaouangachit and Msakkikkan, the Western Wabanakis living near the Saint Lawrence valley had recently “been sick even to death,” would have been viewed by them as yet another indication that alliance with the French and residence near them were not auspicious.69
At this juncture, the Schaghticokes’ head sachem, Wamsachko, had proven a charismatic champion of rapprochement with Albany and New York. “[W]e are now come and are one body with him,” explained the newcomers’ speaker, “[…] we are fully resolved to live and die at Skachkook and there to be buried.” They would “not be North Indians any longer but all River Indians […] and behave our selves like River Indians.” The speaker asked that colonial officials not worry if any of their people should absent themselves temporarily from the village. At the same time, he requested that “the path be shut” between there and Canada, for fear that the French governor “will maybe come here to look for us.”70
The Albany magistrates welcomed these North Indians and requested that they send a belt of wampum to the rest of their nation still in Canada so that they too might come. A month later it was learnt that the people for whom this wampum was intended had themselves gone to Pennacook, on the Merrimack River, to be with their “brethren and friends.” Though the invitation was redirected there, its appeal was lost amidst new rumours of impending Mohawk aggression against the Wabanakis.71
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Of the approximately 350 Indigenous warriors who took part in Denonville’s offensive in the summer of 1687, alongside 1647 soldiers and militiamen, 76 were reported to be from “Sillery” but likely consisted mainly of Eastern Wabanakis from Saint François de Sales and Acadia, and another 57 were said to belong to “Hertel’s band” – these were Algonquins and Sokokis from the Trois Rivières government among whom the trader and officer Joseph-François Hertel de La Fresnière, the brother-in-law of Jean Crevier, had a credit comparable to that of fur trader and interpreter Charles Le Moyne and his family among the Christian Iroquois.72 We can be sure that many of the Wabanakis, especially those who had journeyed all the way from Acadia, rejoiced at the destruction of the Seneca villages. For others, especially among the Western Wabanakis who in recent decades had ranged along the Lake Champlain axis, the campaign instead gave cause to reconsider their alignment with the French.
Indeed, in the months preceding the campaign, the interception and seizure of a convoy of Albany traders headed for Odawa country had exposed the heightened state of intercolonial tensions.73 Several men described by the English as “River Indians” and the French as “Loups,” possibly from Schaghticoke, were among the interlopers arrested. In recognition of cultural affinities and perhaps of bonds of kinship, they were handed over to the expedition’s Wabanakis who treated them with “a great deal of kindness” and who at the campaign’s end granted them their freedom and enough provisions for the journey to a short-lived “Castle [i.e. village] of Pennekook Indians,” apparently located somewhere between Montreal and Albany, possibly along Lake Champlain, from which they returned home. At Albany these River Indians reported that the Wabanakis to whom they had been given had “declared their great dislike of the French warring with the Sinnekes” and for the French’s mistreatment of the traders. These Wabanakis, they claimed, had also let them know that “it would be no hard matter to persuade them to come here.”74
Thrilled by such assurances, Albany mayor Peter Schuyler and the town’s commissioners of Indian Affairs resolved at once to send some of those they called “our Indians” with belts of wampum to that Penacook village, so that its inhabitants might in turn send some of their people as messengers to the Wabanakis in Canada. However, upon further reflection they decided to give a full report of the affair to Governor Dongan in New York, and await his instructions.75 Though there is no evidence that Dongan acted on this report, it is likely that the River Indians pursued their attempts to win over their acquaintances and relatives in Canada. In early 1688 some of the Loups who had been spending time in the vicinity of Trois Rivières (quite possibly near the mouth of the Saint François River) packed up and left to resettle near Albany (probably at Schaghticoke). According to French accounts they were motivated by the desire to escape the debts they had incurred in town. In July they returned for a brief period in the company of other Loups, likely with the intent of convincing others to follow them. Out of frustration with the Canadian traders and colonists, or with the relatives and acquaintances who proved unwilling to accompany them back south, they caused havoc in the parishes of Sorel and Boucherville, looting and setting fire to homesteads, going as far as to cause the death of one colonist.76
French officials and missionaries made remarkably little fuss about this incident, which they appear to have understood merely as a result of the colony’s brandy trade and the volatility of intoxicated Indigenous people.77 More preoccupying was the activity of eleven warriors led by a Penacook named Wampolack. Early that summer, he had approached Governor Denonville to request the permission to raid Schaghticoke. His party of eleven warriors consisted mainly of Penacooks, but also included one Nashua, one Pocumtuck, one Wappinger, and two probable Nipmucks; several of them had formerly lived at Half Moon, a seasonal encampment site at the junction of the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers, just north of Albany (now Waterford, New York). One of their aims, it is likely, was to contribute to the reunion of elements of a scattered community – through persuasion or if necessary capture. Denonville, wary of rupturing the peace between the colonies, denied the warriors the permission to set out on the warpath but allowed them to go on a reconnaissance mission. Suspicious of the party’s true intentions, he cautioned two visitors from Albany who happened to be in Montreal at the time that Wampolack’s party had left the colony. “[W]hen they are in the woods,” he explained of the Wabanakis and Algonquian neighbours, washing his hands of the matter, “they do what they will.”78
Denonville’s misgivings had been justified. Near the Connecticut River, Wampolack’s party encountered a band of Schaghticoke hunters and claimed to them that they were “going to fight by order of the Governor of Canada” against Native or English alike in response to recent Mohawk depredations. At a place called Spectacle Pond they killed five Algonquian allies of the English before moving on to Northfield, the uppermost settlement on the Connecticut River, where they killed six settlers. They may have gone on to Penacook to visit their relatives before returning to the Saint Lawrence valley with seven scalps and an Algonquian woman captive. When an angry Denonville confiscated these prizes, the warriors are said to have fled Canada.79
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Everywhere the tenuous peace that existed between Wabanakis and New Englanders was cracking. The Penobscots were alarmed by Massachusetts’ repeated raids on Saint-Castin’s post at Pentagouet. To Massachusetts’ requests for a pledge of submission, they opposed refusal. The Pigwackets were in the meantime frustrated by a decade of encroaching English settlement, fisheries, and ranging livestock along the mouth of the Saco River. Attacks on cattle during the summer devolved into interpersonal violence, with casualties on both sides. The seizure of prominent Pigwacket leaders suspected of having caused the unrest was reciprocated by the capture of several colonists during a raid on New Dartmouth in September. When a group of settlers began building a fort at Casco, they were attacked by a party of Wabanakis.
Having killed several, the warriors moved on to attack at Merrymeeting Bay and Sheepscot. Meanwhile, although several Pennacook leaders approached New England officials with pledges of continued friendship, most of their people were choosing to resist colonial intrusions.80 Soon the Second Anglo-Wabanaki War would weave itself into the broader conflict that is remembered in history books as the War of the League of Augsburg or King William’s War. With it, the Wabanakis would acquire an unprecedented strategic importance in the eyes of the French.
During the final year of his mandate, Denonville had grown particularly sensitive to the place of the Wabanakis of Kamiskouaouangachit and Msakkikkan in the grand scheme of colonial defence. While he appears to have been either unaware or unmoved by New York’s recent efforts to attract the Loups away from the Saint Lawrence valley, New England’s attempts to lure the Eastern Wabanaki of Acadia away from the French alliance were more difficult to ignore. Informed that Governor Edmund Andros of the Dominion of New England had made great presents to the Penobscots to conciliate them and retain them on lands claimed by the English, Denonville dispatched Father Jacques Bigot on his behalf to incite the Penobscots “to make new villages on the lands of the King” and warned the Secretary of State for the Navy that it would be necessary to offer them presents for that purpose.81
Though French officials in Acadia feared that this relocation would undermine their trade and defences and made their reservations known, Denonville was adamant. In October of 1688, to focus their efforts at Saint François de Sales on the Chaudière River, the Jesuits closed the sacramental registers of their Sillery mission, bringing it to an end fifty years after its foundation.82 But the tract of land at Msakkikkan was not located conveniently enough, and the plot of land acquired near the falls in 1686 near the mouth and falls had not turned out to be as ideal as it first seemed. Responding in October of 1689 to Bigot’s pleas that the people of his mission “would not be able to subsist at that site for long if they did not have a greater expanse of land,” Denonville and Intendant Champigny granted an addition to it, narrow but stretching far inland, cutting through the seigneury of Lauzon and roughly following the winding course of the Chaudière River, almost linking with the tract further upriver at Msakkikkan.83 Later that fall, the pair advised the Crown of the need to draw the Wabanakis who inhabited New England and were “disposed to make themselves Christians” to the mission on the Chaudière River, from where they might shield Quebec, and stressed the advantages of “sustaining them” with provisions and gifts of clothing, powder, and lead.84
The Pennacooks who had moved to Canada in recent years – “all” of the Pennacooks, claimed one report – had by the summer of 1689 returned to their ancestral lands on the Merrimack.85 It is likely that some of these return migrants were among the Wabanakis who carried out the attack on Dover that June, in what became the first major incident of the Second Anglo-Wabanaki War. In describing the assault on the English settlement at Pemaquid in early August of that year, Intendant Champigny reported that the attackers were “for the most part of the mission of Sillery” (a misnomer, as the mission had by this time completed its relocation to Néssawakamighé at the falls of the Chaudière).86 Wabanaki warriors also played a crucial role in Frontenac’s three-pronged offensive during the following winter. The party that departed from Trois Rivières on 28 January was led by none other than Joseph-François Hertel de la Frenière, Jean Crevier’s brother-in-law, and included the latter’s son, Louis, as well as one of the seigneury’s more prominent inhabitants, Jacques Maugras. The twenty French soldiers and volunteers were accompanied by five Algonquins and some twenty to twenty-five Sokokis. That the warriors who acted as the party’s “principal pilots” had links to the Pennacooks is suggested by the fact that its initial target was Dunstable on the Merrimack. It was only after “often vary[ing] in their opinions about what place to fall upon,” and being joined along the way by another party of ten warriors that they instead made up their minds to attack the New Hampshire frontier settlement of Salmon Falls on the Piscataqua River – closer to where that second group, led by a certain Wohawa or Wayhamoo, whom the English knew as Hope Hood, had their own roots. Striking there on the morning of 18 May, they achieved a resounding success. Taking minimal casualties of their own – Louis Crevier being among the few to lose his life – they carried away fifty-four persons and killed thirty-four more.87
Hertel and the bulk of his party joined up with a larger force which, leaving Quebec had in the meantime travelled up the Chaudière River to the Kennebec. Consisting initially of fifty Frenchmen led by the officer René Robinau de Portneuf and sixty Wabanaki warriors from Néssawakamighé, it was also reinforced by warriors from the area and by others brought from the Penobscot by Saint-Castin. This small army took the fort at Casco on 29 May before going on to destroy Pemaquid and Falmouth, achieving successes as resounding as those of Schenectady and Salmon Falls.88 Some of the men who had accompanied Hertel had in the meantime been heading back to the Saint Lawrence valley to carry news of the first victory. It was with them that, on 4 June, Togouirout had his fatal run in. The confusion and violence of the incident is readily understandable. When asked why even women and children numbered among those killed at Salmon Falls, a French soldier captured shortly after the battle provided an explanation that evoked at once injuries that were recent and ancient: the warriors had killed them “to be revenged of the Mohacks, who had rosted & eaten off the fingers of theyr relations and had confessed to them that the English sett them on.”89 Puzzlingly, it was reported in Boston that Wohawa alias Hope Hood too died “by a strange mistake,” after being ambushed and killed by a group of “French Indians” who mistook him for an enemy. While it is possible that the New Englanders mistook echoes of one feared fighter’s demise as referring to the other, the coincidence is not impossible, and it is certainly tempting to imagine that both deaths occurred during the same incident.90
The discovery that there had been a great misunderstanding did little to soothe tempers. The event had reopened old wounds. It had after all been while fighting against Algonquians from New England that Togouirout had achieved initial fame as the “Great Mohawk” twenty years earlier. The conflict between the Iroquois of the missions and those of the League was, after all, a relatively new and uncertain development compared to the conflict which for over a century had pitted the Algonquians against the Iroquois. Even though traditional enemies now found themselves united by their alliance with the French and their joint occupation of the Saint Lawrence valley, mutual misunderstanding and distrust persisted. The joint participation of Christian Iroquois and a variety of Wabanakis and Sokokis in the expeditions of 1684 and 1687 had evidently not resulted in a perfect union. New relationships did not supplant old ones so quickly. Incensed by the death of their famous leader, the Kahnawake warriors refused categorically to free those whom they had captured in the scuffle. The Wabanakis in turn remained unwilling to free the few whom they had seized, and both groups parted ways.91
The crisis within the alliance dragged on until the fall of that year when, with the help of their missionary Jacques Bigot, the Wabanakis of Saint François submitted a written petition and a wampum belt to Frontenac asking that he use his influence to obtain the liberation of their people who were still being kept against their will at Kahnawake. At the same time, the Wabanakis sent a second wampum belt directly to their “Brother Praying Iro-quois.” The event, which was chronicled by Frontenac’s secretary, is of particular interest because it is the earliest documented exchange between the inhabitants of the Saint Lawrence valley’s Iroquois and Wabanaki missions. The tone of the Wabanaki overture was conciliatory. Had the incident, after all, not been a tragic misunderstanding? Was the accidental killing of a friend not merely one “of the misfortunes attendant on war, and which it is impossible to avoid”? While the Wabanakis assured their Christian Iroquois brothers that they bore them no ill will for the death of two of their own men, they reasoned that “you
would have an ill-disposed heart, if after having mistaken my relatives, your allies, for enemies, after having carried them prisoners to your village, you would persist in detaining them when you are aware of your error.” Though the Wabanakis partook in the Kahnawakes’ grief over the death of Togouirout, they begged them to move on. “Let us weep for the brave who are dead, without allowing their deaths to upset our minds and estrange our hearts which prayer and friendship so long unite.”92
The Kahnawakes offered only a partial response to these entreaties, releasing the principal chiefs of the Wabanakis and a few women. They promised to send the others over once they saw the Wabanakis of Acadia “all disposed to join their brethren who are settled here at the Sault de la Chaudière.”93 Perhaps this was a bluff, a pretext to retain prisoners whose incorporation in the community would compensate the recently departed in accordance with time-honoured traditions. But it is likely that at the same time the Kahnawakes sought to use this opportunity as leverage to strengthen the growing Franco-Indigenous family and to assert their community’s preeminence within it. The missionaries, who hoped to strengthen their missions in the Saint Lawrence valley, may very well have encouraged them to adopt this stance.
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Governor Frontenac, who had returned to the colony to replace Denonville in the fall of 1689, concurred with his predecessor that “of all the Natives,” the Wabanakis “are the bravest and most formidable to the English.” Yet, typically loathing of the Jesuits and all of their endeavours, he did not share Denonville’s esteem for the missions of Sillery and Saint François. He dismissed, not unreasonably, his predecessor’s argument that a strong Wabanaki settlement on the Chaudière would defend Quebec from English or Iroquois insults, reasoning that it was in Acadia that the Wabanakis could be of most use to the colony. “It is believed to be much more important to leave them in their old abodes, much more within range of waging war against the English,” explained a memorandum on the state of affairs in Canada penned within a month of Frontenac’s return to the colony, “than to attract them to Quebec to domesticate [sic] them there.”94
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