Officials in Acadia, including the acting governor Joseph Robinau de Villebon, had long been of the same mind. In response to Villebon’s lobbying and to Frontenac’s apathy, in 1691 the Crown ordered that the annual presents to the Wabanakis henceforth be shipped directly to Acadia, rather than Quebec.95 Jesuit petitions, supported by Champigny, that the funding allocated by the Crown to the allies be extended to the “Christian Abenakis” of Sillery (sic: Néssawakamighé, as the old mission was closed by this time) appear to have had no effect.96 In this uncertain context, Jacques Bigot travelled to France to support the mission and find patrons, leaving his brother Vincent on site. Sailing in the fall of 1691, he brought with him an address written in Wabanaki intended for the chapter of Chartres Cathedral. This document, carried inside a tin box inscribed “Votum Abnaquiorum,” curiously does not appear to have been accompanied by a wampum belt. At any rate, in reaching out to the canons of Chartres, Bigot certainly hoped to elicit attention and assistance of a sort that Saint François de Sales’s shrine at Annecy had failed to offer in response to the wampum the community had sent it in 1684. Chartres certainly had a strong track record in its dealings with the people of Lorette. Sure enough, its canons responded by a letter in 1692, which announced the gift to the Wabanakis of a silver reliquary similar to the one which had been sent to the Wendats. The gift arrived with Jacques Bigot when he returned to the colony in 1694, with the “holy union” that had been thus contracted, “charming” the community. It bears noting that the cult of the Virgin Mary was not nearly as meaningful to the Wabanakis as it was to matrilineal Wendats and Iroquois. Nonetheless, subsequent correspondence between the mission and the canons of Chartres speak of a “union of adoption,” by which the canons were acknowledged by the Wabanakis as “our lords and our fathers” and, more obliquely but perhaps more meaningfully, as “brothers.” In 1699, Jacques’s brother Vincent, who was by that time responsible for the mission, followed up by overseeing the preparation of a wampum belt for these patrons, inscribed “Matri Virgini Abnaquaei D.D” (Gift of the Abenaquis to the Virgin Mother), which was again reciprocated with an impressive silver reproduction of Chartres’s famous statue of the Virgin.97
More abundantly supplied in Acadia than along the Saint Lawrence through the decade, Eastern Wabanakis tended to return or remain there. By 1692, when officials took the next census of the colony, the mission of Néssawakamighé on the Chaudière was home to 336 persons.98 Upon his return from France in 1694, Jacques Bigot reported with enthusiasm that the community seemed to be growing. Most of the newcomers came from Acadia, where his brother Vincent had begun ministering. Others came from an area some forty leagues away, where Jacques had journeyed on three or four occasions in past years – in the vicinity of Trois Rivières and further upriver to the south shore of the Saint Lawrence near the Saint François River. Some of the newcomers Bigot encountered at Néssawakamighé had indeed come from this direction. Among them was a man whom Bigot described as one of the “principals of that nation,” who had declared that, whereas Frenchmen made liquor so readily available in the place that he had left, the place to which he had come, i.e. the mission, “had made him wise.” Though Bigot does not spell it out, the timing of the interest is also suggestive of another cause. The Iroquois had struck at the mouth of the Saint François River regularly since the outbreak of war: in the fall of 1689 they had burnt down the chapel that had been built for the colonists two years before, and during the most recent attack, in August of 1693, they had taken Jean Crevier, the seigneur himself, who had died shortly thereafter from the wounds he had sustained during his captivity. Though his widow Marguerite Hertel had taken over the duties of seigneuresse and the fur trade business, the death of this key interlocutor, in addition to the persistent danger posed by the Iroquois, may have pushed the Sokoki and Western Wabanaki family bands which orbited around the area to search elsewhere for safety and subsistence.99
The man who had come from that vicinity to Néssawakamighé and met with Bigot had told the traders who sought to retain him that “he would do everything in his power to engage the rest of the nation to withdraw with him and benefit from the [religious] instruction that he was receiving.” That prospect had alarmed the French traders so much that they had lodged a complaint to their district governor at Trois Rivières, Claude de Ramezay, begging that he find ways of halting this migration and of forcing those who had already undertaken it to return. The identity of the complainants is not revealed, but it is quite probable that they included members of the Crevier and Hertel families. As a result of these deliberations, it was proposed to the families that usually orbited around that vicinity that a fort be built for them and staffed with a missionary. Two wampum belts were sent to the mission at Néssawakamighé in the fall of 1694 to invite those who had moved there to return to their former abodes nearer to Trois Rivières. Upon their reception, on 7 October, the neophytes resolved to refuse on the grounds that liquor was too abundant in that region and that its disorders made it unlikely that a missionary would stay there for long. None of the few who had visited them in the past had been able to stay, noted their chief, no doubt in allusion to Jacques Bigot himself, but also to Louis André, another Jesuit who in-between postings in the Great Lakes and the Saguenay had briefly, from November 1689 to March 1691, handled “parish duties for the French and the Natives” at Saint François. Although Bigot told the neophytes that he left them “complete freedom” on this matter, he was privately optimistic that this minor crisis would force the officials to pay more attention to the instruction of the Indigenous peoples in the Trois Rivières government who had until that point been “almost abandoned.”100
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The fifty to seventy warriors of Néssawakamighé, and those who in uncertain numbers habitually resided between the mouth of the Richelieu River and Trois Rivières, were active throughout the decade. References to them are rare in the official French accounts of the intermittent raiding on the New England frontier, but this is easily explained by the fact that they acted in concert with relatives and friends who remained in the borderlands of Wabanaki country, in a way that made it impractical for colonial observers to distinguish one from the other. Indeed, on the year of his return to the colony, Jacques Bigot reported that the warriors of his mission on the Penobscot River,“joining those of the mission of which my brother has the care,” (meaning Néssawakamighé on the Chaudière) were continually on the warpath against the English. Between that spring and fall of 1694 they had formed three or four war parties that appear to have been involved in the resounding victories against the settlements at Oyster River, New Hampshire, and Groton, Massachusetts.101 In parallel, the Wabanakis from Néssawakamighé and the Algonquins and Sokokis from the vicinity of Trois Rivières also campaigned against the Five Nations. They were cited as taking part in the defence of the Montreal region against enemy raids, as well as in the campaigns against the Mohawks in 1693 and Onondagas in 1696; in 1695, men from Néssawakamighé were also among those who accompanied Frontenac when he travelled to Cataraqui with a small army to rebuild the fort that had been abandoned there a few years earlier.102
The Sokoki, Loup, and Algonquin bands who occupied the Lake Champlain and Richelieu axis had the most to fear from the Iroquois, as the region was exposed to the latter’s raiding parties through the 1690s.103 Franco-Iroquois accommodation towards the end of the decade consequently represented an opportunity for growth. Towards July 1697, “Joseph, Chief of the Soquokis residing among us [i.e. the French],” was returning from a raid during which his party had killed an Englishman when on the way he encountered a party of “Loups.”104 Whether or not this Joseph was the same man whose intention to move to the Chaudière had been noted in 1694 cannot be ascertained. For their part, the Loups may very well have been from Schaghticoke, which had borne the brunt of New York’s war effort and suffered considerable demographic decline as a result of disease, military losses, and outmigration. As one of them explai
ned to their neighbours, using the common idiom of war in the seventeenth-century northeast, they had “become a small nation, the flesh taken from our bodies”.105
The Schaghticokes’ alienation from their English neighbours had recently been heightened by the killing and imprisonment of some of their number, falsely accused of murder, at Hatfield in January of 1697. According to a Schaghticoke complaint, this had occurred for no other reason “than the hatred and malice that the English of that colony has against us.”106 The fact that a resolution to the Franco-Iroquois conflict, and with it of the war between the Wabanakis and the Iroquois, was in sight, also must have contributed to the appeal of alignment with the French and migration to the Saint Lawrence valley. Indeed, during the final ratifications of the Franco-Iroquois peace of 1701, the orator of the Wabanakis of Saint François, a certain Haouatchouath, declared that his people had been at peace with the Five Nations since 1697, at which time Frontenac had apparently removed the metaphorical hatchet from their hand.107
At any rate, in July of 1697, Joseph spent two days in discussions with the Loups. As a result, they authorized him to inform Frontenac “that they would return to settle among us [the French], as in former times, were they not apprehensive of his displeasure and merited to be chastised for the blow they struck on us at Saint François” – an apparent reference to an attack on the French homesteads at the mouth of that river seven years earlier. Upon reporting this to the governor, Joseph was permitted to tell them “that they would be willingly received, on condition that they should behave themselves and bring in their wives and children.”108
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When news of the Peace of Ryswick reached Canada towards the close of January 1698, the colonial war effort ground to a halt. Frontenac purportedly took measures to prevent the inhabitants of the mission settlements from continuing hostilities against New England, but mischievously approved that the Wabanakis of Acadia pursue the war until they could reach a peace settlement of their own with their English neighbours. The fact that the two groups had tended to fight alongside each other during the past decade makes it plausible that some of the warriors from the missions were among those relatives and friends from Acadia who struck at Andover, Haverhill, and Spruce Creek in Massachusetts through the late winter and spring of 1698. Only in January of 1699 did Penboscot, Kennebec, Androscoggin, and Saco leaders manage to negotiate with New England an end to the Second Anglo-Wabanaki War.109
These new circumstances – the imperial, Anglo-Wabanaki, and Franco-Iroquois peace settlements – coupled with the death of Frontenac, that adversary of the Jesuits and their missions, prepared the ground for a major shift in the importance and location of the Wabanaki missions in Canada. The Jesuit lands along the Chaudière, reserved for the use of the Wabanakis, had been expanded considerably over the past two decades, but they still proved inadequate. In 1697, the Jesuits petitioned Governor Frontenac and Intendant Champigny for yet another extension, again on the grounds that “the said Natives cannot subsist there any longer if they do not have a greater stretch of land.” They were granted an additional piece of land along the Chaudière that March, which completed the link between the concession received in 1689 and that received in 1683 at Msakkikkan.110 Still, the setting of the mission settlement continued to prove inadequate, and it was decided that it would be relocated up the Saint Lawrence to a site a short distance from the mouth of the Saint François River. The embryonic community established there had, under the leadership of two unbaptized captains, one of whom may have been the aforementioned Joseph, and possibly owing to the arrival of some of the Loups who in the summer of 1697 had shown an inclination to come, reached proportions that made it impossible for the missionaries to keep ignoring.111
Enumerating the Jesuit missions in a letter to the Secretary of State for the Navy in the fall of 1699, Intendant Champigny alludes not only to the Wabanaki mission on the Chaudière, but also another “at Saint-François above Trois-Rivières of Socokis” that was in the process of becoming reality.112 It was only in August 1700, however, that the seigneuresse Marguerite Hertel, in her own name and as trustee of their minor children, as well as her eldest son, Joseph Crevier de Saint-François, an ensign of the colonial troops, officially gave the land to the “Sauvages Abenakis and Socokis and the Reverend Father Jacques Bigot of the Comp[any] of Jesus, [their] missionary.” That the notarial contract which sealed the agreement was signed in the presence of Governor Callière and Intendant Champigny, at the former’s residence in Montreal, suggest the way in which the transaction was expedited by the intervention of the highest authorities. The land in question consisted of a half league frontage at the end of their seigneury of Saint François, on both sides of the river and to the back of the seigneury, including the islands therein. It was granted free of the usual rents and obligations that linked seigneurs to their habitant tenants throughout the Saint Lawrence valley. That for the widow Crevier and her son the advantage of this arrangement lay in the business opportunities that it guaranteed them is borne out by the presence in the contract of a series of clauses by which they reserved certain rights: the right to build a house near the Wabanakis’ “fort” where they could bake and sell bread and other foodstuffs (and certainly trade); to mow hay “for their profit” on portions of the land unused by the Wabanakis; and to appropriate any field cleared by them if it was ever abandoned. All of this to the exclusion of other colonists, the missionaries being the only others allowed to build a house on this stretch of land.113 That this relocation was also a sound financial decision for the Jesuits, who could go on to sell the missions’ cleared lands along the Chaudière to colonists, may also have factored in their decision – as it appears to have done in the relocation of other mission settlements evoked in previous chapters.
The governor’s and the intendant’s belief that the relocation of the mission was needed “for the service of the King and the advantage of the Colony” was stated at the outset of the contract. Viewed as burdensome interlopers in the Saint Lawrence valley through the 1640s, then helpless refugees in the late 1670s, the Wabanakis had thus come to be understood as crucial military allies during the 1680s and even more so during the intercolonial war of the century’s final decade. The new location promised to dissuade Iroquois or Loups from undertaking any raids in the immediate area, as they had been prone to occasionally carry out in years past.114 The relocation was also strategic because it promised to consolidate the mission community at a time when peace with the English and soon with the Iroquois was making it tempting for its members to return to their ancestral homelands. As of yet, only about one hundred French settlers in fifteen households lived on the seigneury of Saint François, while that of Lauzon was already populated by over four times that number.115
Like the old one, the new mission was placed under the patronage of Saint François de Sales, whose name conveniently matched that which the French had given the river half a century before. The name Néssawakamighé was meanwhile supplanted by the local appellation of Arsikantegouk (“empty cabin river” or “empty camp river,” thought by some to be a reference to the area’s reduced population as a result of disease and Iroquois attacks in the 1690s), though the renderings San Plassowa (Saint François) or Plaswa Ksal (Saint François de Sales) were also occasionally used by Wabanaki speakers – the current name of Odanak, meaning simply “the village,” only dates to the nineteenth century.116 While the transfer of the missionary infrastructure appears to have been straightforward, the merging of the people of Néssawakamighé with those already living at Arsikantegouk was by no means spontaneous. While a portion of the people of the former mission, including “some Loups and some Sokokis” accompanied Bigot to the Saint François River in the fall of 1700, those Wabanakis who maintained stronger ties to the Kennebec and Penobscot basin chose instead to withdraw fifteen leagues or fifty kilometers up the Chaudière, to the lands which corresponded to Msakkikkan, and from there many returned to Acadia, to be reabsorbe
d into their parent populations.117 At the new mission settlement on the Saint François River, the two captains who already occupied the site responded differently to the arrival of the newcomers who did their best to convince them to embrace their religion. One rejected Christianity, provoking a crisis in leadership. Within a year or so of the mission’s foundation all of its Christians “were on the verge of ceasing to recognize him as chief, unless he adopted better thoughts at the earliest.” On the contrary, the other captain and his wife gave some of their fields to the newcomers and displayed much fervor in preparing themselves for baptism, which both received on Christmas day of 1701.118 Several other “Sokoki” and “Abenaki” heads of bands, including many deemed to be reprobates, followed suit by paying a newfound attention to the missionary’s preaching, publicly renounced drinking, and declaring that they “wished absolutely to remain here.” By attracting surrounding bands of Sokokis and other Wabanakis – as well as a small number of Algonquins – who had until then travelled the woods and farms between Trois Rivières and Montreal, the mission rapidly swelled, increasing within a year the founding core of maybe 100 to 150 migrants from the Chaudière to perhaps three hundred.119
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