By mid-1697, it was becoming abundantly clear that in spite of diplomatic maneuvering and shows of force of recent years only a minority of Oneidas and Mohawks were in reality ready to join their relatives and acquaintances near Montreal. Contrary to Otacheté’s hopes and efforts, at Oneida it was resolved by the “general vote of old and young men and women” that none of their village “should again go to live at Canada.”46 A momentarily entertained hope of large-scale Mohawk resettlement was similarly dashed. In June, the Kahnawakes received an underground wampum belt by which the headmen of the Mohawk villages informed “their Brothers of the Sault that they were weary of fighting and had resolved to come and reside with them.” But when a Kahnawake delegate reached the Mohawk villages to pursue the discussion, he was informed that there had been a miscommunication: the Mohawks had not implied a “willingness to come and settle among us,” but merely desired to discuss peace; once peace was achieved, then “they would see what they should do.”47 When Oneida and Onondaga delegates appeared before Frontenac in the company of Otacheté in November of 1697, they discussed peace and went so far as to show an interest in adopting the Christian faith, but significantly made no allusion to the question of migration.48
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No wholesale relocation from Mohawk or Oneida country occurred in these years, but through the incorporation of migrants and war captives the mission settlements compensated the losses from emigration and war that they had sustained during the previous decade, and grew beyond them. Between 1692 and 1698, the two years during which a census of the colony was taken, the population of Kahnawake increased by a full third, from 509 individuals to 790.49 After its brief stay within the walls of Montreal, the community had established its village on a new site situated a short distance west of the previous one. By the nineteenth century, tradition held that it had been situated along a tumultuous stretch of river and was accordingly known as “Kahnawakon,” meaning “in the rapids” (as opposed to Kahnawake, which meant “at the foot of the rapids”). However, this view is challenged by Governor Callière and Intendant Champigny’s report to the minister of the Navy that the village was inland, “very far” from the river itself. In the eyes of these colonial officials, this location was proving inconvenient and, most worryingly, too exposed to enemy attacks. In 1694, the palisade that had been built there three years earlier was rebuilt and expanded upon at the Crown’s expense, but by the following spring it was still in a ramshackle state. Callière, called upon to remedy the situation, travelled in person to inspect the fortifications and judged that, in spite of the recent work, they were “no longer worth anything.” Rather than rebuild on the same site, a new “more convenient and advantageous” one was selected, a short distance west and this time directly on the Saint Lawrence River, at the juncture of a small creek and on a slight elevation. The building of a fort, church, and cabins took up the remainder of the year, and the mission’s residents moved there in 1696.50
The separate village requested by Otachété for the newcomers from Oneida was never established. They joined the people of Kahnawake, where Father Millet was himself posted in 1698, no doubt in an effort to accommodate them. While the French records dwell on the interventions of men like Otacheté and Taréha, they also allow us to gain a glimpse of the ongoing influence of Suzanne Gouentagrandi, the Wolf Clan mother. She had shown herself the most receptive to the French alliance at Oneida, and it is likely that the male figures who loom large in the sources were merely carrying out policies that she was instrumental in shaping. She was among those who moved to Kahnawake with her extended family, following up on the pledge that she had made during the invasion of 1696. She lived out the rest of her life there, passing away there circa 1740 “in a happy old age,” wrote Father Charlevoix who saw her in her final years, “after long edifying that town by the constant practice of all Christian virtues.” The creek flowing into the Saint Lawrence next to the new village became known as “La Susanne” or the Suzanne River – a testament to her importance within her new community.51
Kanehsatake too was evolving as a result of the interplay of conflict, subsistence, and missionary politics. That mission did not attract nearly as many newcomers as did Kahnawake during these years, likely owing to its smaller core population, its lesser military and diplomatic importance, and the heterogeneity of its origins. By the decade’s end, the population of the village on the slope of Mount Royal had diminished, from 212 in 1692 to 160 at the time of the 1698 census. However, this was due to a partial relocation of the community to a second site, that of Sault au Récollet, on the Rivière des Prairies, which ran along the north of the Island of Montreal – by 1698, that second site was home to 113 persons.52 This outcome was the result of a much different process than the one which, some fifteen years before, had resulted in the split of Kentake into two distinct communities, Kanehsatake and Kahnawake. As Bacqueville de La Potherie phrased it, it was a single “mission […] divided in two,” rather than two fully distinct communities.53
The new mission settlement at Sault au Récollet had been a long time in the planning. Upon assuming the direction of the mission at Kanehsatake, Sulpician priest François Vachon de Belmont had been prompt to arrive at the conclusion that relocation away from La Montagne was necessary. Its proximity to Kahnawake – ten kilometers to the south in a straight line – preoccupied him. The people of that mission, he complained, undermined the cohesion of his own by periodically trying to induce its residents to join them. More specifically, he noted that young men came to seduce women away – an interesting detail, in light of what we know about Iroquoian matrilineality and matrilocality, suggesting that the lineages at Kanehsatake may have been less solid than those that existed at Kahnawake. Most problematic, however, was the proximity of the French. While the presence of Montreal, less than two kilometers away, was one of the features that, in Belmont’s phrase, “much charm[ed] and attract[ed] the Natives,” along with the richness of the soil, it also made intoxicating beverages readily available.54
Since 1668, by decree of the Sovereign Council of New France, it had been legal to sell and trade liquor to Indigenous persons within certain restrictions: it was prohibited to incite their drunkenness, for example, or to peddle liquor to them in the woods or in their villages. But such regulations, as well as the clergy’s insistence that engaging in this commerce remained a mortal sin, were commonly flaunted by tavern keepers, traders, and ordinary habitants eager to turn a profit. Owing to the mission’s proximity to the town of Montreal and to Lachine, the latter of which served as the launching point for all traders’ voyages into the interior, abusive drinking indeed appears to have become somewhat more prevalent at Kanehsatake than in other mission settlements, with the mission’s “drunkards” causing regular disturbances and grief to Vachon de Belmont and his fellow missionaries. The Jesuit Bruyas, visiting that mission, declared that “no one could be saved there.” Belmont was nevertheless shrewd in grasping the opportunity that, in spite of its great dangers, the neighbourhood of the French offered. As settlement spread through the Island of Montreal, the demand for good agricultural land was rapidly rising, and as seigneurs of the island, the Sulpicians stood to make a profit. Reallocation to colonists of the acreage cleared for the Indigenous community had the potential of making a valuable contribution to the Montreal seminary’s coffers, and to help ensure the mission’s long-term financial autonomy from its Parisian parent and from the Crown. Vachon de Belmont was thus intentionally careful not to recognize by contract the neophytes’ ownership of their fields, lest this title complicate the eventual business of relocation.55
Vachon de Belmont’s superiors only slowly came around to his views. Louis Tronson, superior of the Sulpician Seminary in Paris, reasoned that the mission had obtained the Crown’s favour and financial support in large part because it served as a defensive bulwark for Montreal. To transfer it to a more remote location, he feared, would diminish its strategic significance and undermine f
uture lobbying efforts. Then, there would be the expense of relocation and the risk of alienating the mission’s residents.56 The context of war made relocation impractical. Belmont himself appears to have realized all of this, for even as he continued to periodically advocate the idea of transferring the people of Kanehsatake away from the slopes of Mount Royal, he threw himself into the improvement of its structures and landscape. Combining his great personal wealth with the Crown’s more modest grants, he built an impressive missionary compound – the “Fort de la Montagne” – consisting of a stone residence enclosed within a rectangular masonry wall, of one hundred by two hundred feet, cornered with round towers topped with elegant conical roofs. Unsatisfied with the wooden chapel that existed in the adjoining village, he oversaw the construction of a new stone chapel within this compound, a palisade of sawed timber around the village, and over the years had houses in the French style to add to its residents’ Iroquoian longhouses: by 1694, the village contained 43 of the latter and 13 of the former. To the north of the fort and village he laid out large orchards, vineyards, and gardens, and even a regularly landscaped yard to its east – all with the view, it seems, of making Kanehsatake into a model mission and of eventually repurposing it as comfortable country estate for the Sulpicians.57
As the seminary grew more receptive to the possibility of relocating the mission, Vachon de Belmont’s sights turned to the Rivière des Prairies, running along the north of the Island of Montreal, and honed in on the previously mentioned site of Sault au Récollet, which took its name from the adjacent rapids, themselves named after the drowning of a Recollet priest there sixty years earlier. The idea of a mission settlement along the Rivière des Prairies was not new. The Jesuits, who had been seigneurs of Île Jésus just across from it, had considered the area before deciding to establish themselves at Kentake. Father Claude Dablon, who had visited the area with the Wendat Louis Thaondechoren in July 1667, had reported on it “with great satisfaction.” Though the Jesuits were forced to relinquish their title to Île Jésus five years later, having failed to exploit it, in 1674 another one of their own, Antoine Dalmas, was asked to investigate the potential of the area for “some project” involving “a settlement of Natives” – a site for the relocation of Kentake, it is likely. Nothing came of it, though from time to time during the late 1680s a Sulpician priest, Michel Barthélémy, ministered to the Algonquin family bands who hunted through the area.58 In July of 1689, Vachon de Belmont put his plan for the Sault au Récollet in motion by leasing a plot of 180 arpents there in his personal name. Over the next few years, he hired French workers to clear the site and build several structures, including in 1691 a stone fort of dimensions comparable to the one at La Montagne.59 However, the moment was not yet convenient for a migration, for, in light of the threat posed by the escalation of the conflict with the Iroquois, it was difficult to make a case for depriving Montreal of one of its outlying defences. Then, on 11 September 1694, a great fire spread through Kanehsatake, destroying all of its forty-three cabins, its thirteen timber houses, its chapel, and its palisade – leaving intact Belmont’s fort and the buildings within it, as they were made of stone. The culprit had not been enemy raiders, but rather a man from the community who, inebriated, had shot at the house of another man with whom he had been quarelling. The shot had sparked a fire which, on account of it being a windy day, engulfed the village in the span of three hours. The role that alcohol had played in this disaster provided Vachon de Belmont with his strongest argument yet in support of the relocation, furthering its idea in both the minds of the community and in those of his superiors.60
The Sulpicians finally agreed amongst themselves that the wisest way forward for the immediate future was to divide the community between the old and new sites, and drawing from the imagery of the gospel, to “separate the goats from the sheep.” In light of the fact that a solid core of the mission’s residents were reluctant to abandon it, such a division, rather than a full-scale relocation, was safest. A segment of Kanehsatake’s population appears to have agreed with this course of action, as suggested by Bacqueville de La Potherie’s claim that “the chiefs having noticed that debauchery [libertinage] had begun to corrupt the manners of the young warriors,” and that it was these chiefs who asked Belmont “to make a second one at the Sault-au-Récollet.”61 A division of the mission had several other advantages. Maintaining a Sulpician missionary foothold at La Montagne averted the potential danger of being forced by the Crown to turn the site over to their Jesuit competitors. Dividing the mission was also advantageous for the Sulpicians in terms of personnel management: it meant that Robert Gay, who had grown unhappy as an assistant to Vachon de Belmont at La Montagne, could be entrusted with his own site and thus dissuaded from returning to France as he had been threatening to do. In the spring of 1696, Tronson at last gave his approval to the project. That September, upon their warriors’ return from the summer campaign against the Onondagas, a first group of people relocated to the new site, accompanied by Gay.62
The Rivière des Prairies was called Skawenati by the Iroquois, meaning “on the other side of the Island,” and the name came to designate the mission at Sault au Récollet. Belmont initially referred to it as “fort Nazareth,” but it was soon renamed “Nouvelle-Lorette,” or “Notre-Dame-de-Lorette,” or “Petite [small] Lorette” to distinguish it from the other mission of that name. This evocation of the Holy Family and of the devotion to Our Lady of Loreto in particular, rather than a mere personal penchant on the part of the missionary, may very well have been designed to make the site more attractive to the Wendats and former Wendats of the community who, having moved from that other Lorette to Kanehsatake two decades earlier, had maintained old devotions – even though by this time they had by and large disappeared from the record as a distinct ethnic component of the mission’s population.63 La Potherie observed that Sault au Récollet was, of the two sites, “where the most debauched [libertins] reside.” This implies that the Sulpicians, and perhaps the community’s leadership itself, pushed towards that site certain members of the community – particularly young men – deemed too unruly and given to drink. The fact that responsibility for the second site was entrusted specifically to Gay is also suggestive of the way age dynamics were at play: he had earned a reputation for being an uncommonly daring chaplain on the warpath, and at the time of the relocation was, at the age of thirty-three, himself still a young man.64 All of this said, there was not a sharp division between the residents of the two missions: for example, a certain Theonogarra, of Onondaga origin, could thus be described in court records as a “Native residing at La Montagne and at Sault des Recollets.”65
The community leaders’ lack of enthusiasm for a complete relocation to Skawenati is evidenced by the fact that the process would stretch out for almost a decade, with a second wave of villagers relocating in 1699, and the last of them only in 1704–5. Almost a century later, a chief recalled to a British official: “The Priest settled amongst us, and other clergy of this island […] exhorted us strenuously to remove farther off from the Town where we would be more quiet and happy, and pointed out to us Sault au Recollet.”66 Indeed, Belmont, Gay, and a third Sulpician priest, Joseph Mariet, held several great feasts and distributed presents to influential members of the community in an effort to convince them to move to the new site. Tronson and the Sulpician superior in the colony, François Dollier de Casson, both advised caution to the missionairies, lest the people feel vexed. “The best of all means to fix them at Lorette [Sault au Récollet] and to attract them there,” advised the former, was not to constrain or chase them, but “to ensure that they can find more conveniences there than elsewhere.” The sisters of the Congregation de Notre Dame relocated their school from the first site to the second, and contributed funds to the building of the chapel there. Though his superiors did their best to discourage Belmont from investing too much at La Montagne, lest those who had left would feel compelled to return, the missionary continued
to pour his heart and money there. By the time Bacqueville de La Potherie visited La Montagne at the decade’s end, he described its chapel has having lavish “walls […] covered in panelling on which there are some ornaments, such as urns, niches, pilasters and pedestals, finished to look like red marble veined with white.”67
In 1696, perhaps upon learning that the people of Kahnawake and Kanehsatake had established new villages, the Wendat leaders of Lorette approached Governor Frontenac and Intendant Champigny with the support of their missionaries to ask for a site of their own. Few if any of migrants from Iroquoia had joined the community during the previous two decades – the community remained small, numbering 152 persons in 1695 – but the fact that it had occupied the same site meant that fields had become less productive and more tightly hemmed-in by settlers. They asked for permission to settle in an area that they had identified themselves, between the seigneuries of Neuville and Gaudarville, on a stretch of land that had not yet been granted as a seigneury. Frontenac was not in a position to refuse, having been in the past chastized by the Crown for unreasonably opposing missionary endeavours – and indeed, he and Champigny agreed to grant land to the Jesuits at the Sault de la Chaudière for the use of the Wabanakis in March 1697, extending the grant made eight years earlier. But as far as the Wendat project was concerned Frontenac found a way to sideline the missionaries by offering the title to the Indigenous community itself. The terms that he offered were not particularly favourable, stipulating among other things that the latter would have to begin paying rents like any colonists after twelve years of occupation. Frontenac appears to have seen this as an opportunity to impose the model of settlement which he had always held dear, by which Indigenous peoples would be forced to integrate more thoroughly into colonial society. In light of these onerous terms, the Wendats never availed themselves of the grant. Instead, the Jesuits made arrangements for the community to relocate within the same seigneury of Saint Gabriel to a site further north along the Saint Charles River, purchasing back for that purpose a lot that they had previously granted to a French habitant. This new site, to which the Wendat community moved in 1697, became known as Jeune Lorette – the abandoned one henceforth acquiring the name of Ancienne (Old) Lorette.68
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