When compared with that of its more spirited southern neighbour, Canada’s history seems relatively peaceful. Discounting intercolonial conflicts and the War of 1812, in which both countries played an equal part, the Great White North has seen considerably less strife and bloodshed than the southerly Land of the Free. While the American Civil War left thousands dead on the battlefields of Shiloh and Gettysburg, the combined casualty count for the Lower and Upper Canada Rebellions was a mere three hundred. Juxtaposed with the endless Sioux and Apache Wars of the 19th Century, Canada’s North-West Rebellion appears miniscule. While America’s blue-coated cavalry won the West with the carbine and the sabre, Canada’s red-coated Mounties pacified the plains with the pen and the peace pipe. And while prospectors’ disputes in California and Colorado were settled by whimsical miners’ courts with a penchant for the rope, similar disputes in the goldfields of British Columbia were arbitrated by Crown-appointed magistrates educated in old-fashioned British justice.
Despite its relative tranquility, Canadian history is marred by a sixty-year spell of terrible violence and unspeakable cruelty rivalling the goriest chapters of its southern counterpart; a time of massacre, torture, and genocide. The crimson pages on which this harrowing drama is chronicled appear in the annals of the ancient regime, set in a time when the fleur-de-lys flew over the Laurentian Valley, and King Louis XIV sat on the throne of France. In this age of extremes, when aristocratic extravagance crossed swords with Puritan austerity, and Baroque refinement linked arms with medieval brutality, the Canadian wilderness was embroiled in a bitter series of conflicts known collectively as the Beaver Wars, which pitted Catholic New France and its native allies against Protestant New England, New Netherland, and the Iroquois Confederacy. Like all great historical struggles, this contest brought into stark relief both the noblest and basest aspects of human nature, spurring some to perform heroic feats of courage and self-sacrifice, and others to commit acts of astonishing hatred and savagery. It also produced some of Canada’s strangest stories of the supernatural and the unexplained – lost tales coloured heavily by the Roman Catholicism that was the lifeblood of New France, preserved only in history books and contemporary writings. In this piece, we will explore the forgotten mysteries of the Beaver Wars.
Outbreak of the Beaver Wars
The opening scene of this historical tragedy begins in the mid-1600s, when the North Woods were a powder keg on a collision course with the open flame of war. At that time, the French controlled the valley of the St. Lawrence River, the settlements of Quebec, Trois-Rivieres, and Ville-Marie (now Montreal) forming a colony known as New France. In the frontier beyond these settlements, in the forests north of the St. Lawrence and the eastern shores of the Great Lakes, French-Jesuit missionaries – members of a Catholic religious order called the Society of Jesus – had established missions among the allied Huron, Algonkians, and Montagnais, where they worked tirelessly to convert the natives to the Catholic faith. South of the St. Lawrence, in the valley of the Hudson River, the Dutch had established the strongholds of Fort Orange and New Amsterdam – now Albany and New York City – out of which they traded with the five nations of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy: the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk. And to the east, along the Atlantic Coast, the English held a scattering of Protestant colonies, the settlements of Maine, Plymouth, Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire forming a loose agglomerate known as New England.
In their bids for furs, converts, and religious liberty, these European rivals had ensconced themselves in the midst of an ancient conflict that had raged since at least the days of Samuel de Champlain – a ferocious rivalry between the Iroquois Confederacy and the northerly Huron and Algonkians. Fought in part over prime trapping territory, beaver pelts being valuable commodities for which the French, English, and Dutch were eager to trade, this violent competition produced some of the most horrific atrocities to ever be committed on North American soil. Following a successful raid on an enemy convoy or village, native victors on both sides of the St. Lawrence carried any men, women, and children they managed to capture back to their own country. With the exceptions of those who were killed outright or selected for adoption into the tribe, the prisoners were tortured to death and cannibalized in gruesome rituals intended to appease both the heathen gods of the victors and the ghosts of their departed kinsmen. Although the natives took the greatest delight in tormenting and eating vanquished enemy warriors, neither women nor children were spared the blades, brands, and red-hot tomahawks of the triumphant torturers.
The Vision of Jean de Brebeuf
The French themselves became embroiled in this blood feud in the early 1640s when Iroquois war parties began to prowl the Richelieu River and the southern shores of the St. Lawrence, killing or capturing any Gallic hunter, labourer or missionary who fell into their clutches. Though terrifying to the settlers of New France, the predations of these painted invaders from the south were initially small and scattered affairs akin to wolves preying on lone sheep who ventured too far from the flock. In those early days of the Beaver Wars, however, one Jesuit missionary, a devout Norman priest named Jean de Brebeuf claimed to have received a divine vision indicating that the war with the Iroquois would bring unprecedented destruction to Huronia, the land of the Huron, bounded by lakes Huron, Ontario, and Simcoe, where the Jesuits had established a mission.
In February 1641, while returning to Huronia after an unsuccessful mission in the country of the neighbouring Neutral nation, Brebeuf left his campsite at night to pray in the woods. There, under the stars, he saw a vision of a huge cross in the sky, approaching from the southeast, the land of the Iroquois. The following day, he described his miraculous experience to his travelling companion, Father Pierre-Joseph-Marie Chaumonot, interpreting it as a sign of impending martyrdom. When Chaumonot asked him whether the cross was large, he replied, “Yes, large enough to crucify us all.”
The first member of the Society of Jesus to fall to the fury of the Iroquois was Rene Goupil, a lay missionary, who, with Jesuit Father Isaac Jogues and a handful of French and Huron companions, were ambushed by Mohawk warriors while travelling from Quebec to the Huron missions in 1642. Goupil was struck in the head by a tomahawk, and died after Jogues gave him absolution. Father Jogues himself was taken to the village of the Mohawk, where he was tortured, mutilated, and enslaved.
The Iroquois did not limit their Frankish predations to unarmed missionaries. Shortly after the capture of Isaac Jogues, several dozen musketeers sent to New France by Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII, were attacked by a two-hundred-man Iroquois war party while building Fort Richelieu on the banks of the Richelieu River, at the site of present-day Sorel-Tracy, Quebec. Quick thinking allowed the soldiers to secure a narrow but decisive victory in which only one of their number was lost.
Meanwhile, in the village of the Mohawk, Father Jogues endured a year of misery, broken by his rescue by Dutch traders. After a brief trip to France, he returned to the New World and resumed his work at the Huron mission. In 1646, his superiors ordered him to return to Mohawk country to ratify a shaky truce made between that nation and New France the previous year, predicated on Montreal’s merciful treatment of an Iroquois prisoner of war. Upon his return to his old wilderness prison, Jogues and his companion, lay brother Jean de Lalande, were promptly brained with tomahawks, the Iroquois having conceived the notion that the Jesuits were sorcerers who had cursed them with black magic. And thus, hostilities between the Iroquois and the French resumed.
The Iroquois’s first major act of aggression towards the French was their 1647 razing of Fort Richelieu, the palisaded stronghold on the banks of the Richelieu River. The act of arson was merely symbolic, as the French had abandoned the fort some years before, the Iroquois having adopted a circuitous route which bypassed it, slinking down a wooded trail on their northern inroads. Their next move, however, would shake the little colony to its core.
The Ghost of Antoine Daniel
The year 1649 marked the tenth anniversary of the Jesuit’s mission in Huron Country. The seat of the mission was Sainte-Marie Among the Huron, the oldest European settlement in what is now the province of Ontario, established by Jean de Brebeuf and his fellow priest, Father Gabriel Lalemant, in 1639. This fortified community was situated near what is now Midland, Ontario, on the southern shores of Georgian Bay. Nearby were a number of Huron villages which the Jesuits had renamed after Catholic saints. To the east lay the settlements of Sainte-Louis and St. Ignace. To the southwest was the village Ossossane, where the Jesuits had concentrated their early efforts. Far to the southeast, near Lake Simcoe, was St. Jean Baptiste. And in the heart of Huronia, about fifteen miles southeast of Sainte-Marie, was the fortified Huron capital of Teanaustaye, which the Jesuits called St. Joseph. It was at the latter settlement that the simmering conflict between the Huron and the Iroquois came to a boil.
In the spring of 1648, Dutch traders at Fort Orange sold about four hundred arquebuses, or matchlock muskets, to their Mohawk trading partners. Armed with these powerful new weapons, a thousand Mohawk braves left their ancestral haunts in the forests of upstate New York to deal a death blow to their Huron enemies on the eastern shores of the great lake that bears their name.
While the Iroquois were on the war path, a huge party of Huron warriors unwisely set out west to trade with the French at Trois-Rivieres, leaving their villages undefended. Aware of this intelligence, the Iroquois decided to launch an assault on the great Huron capital.
On the 4th of July, 1648, a thousand Iroquois war cries erupted from the forest outside Teanaustaye, in the chapel of which Jesuit Father Antoine Daniel was saying Mass. Knowing that martyrdom awaited him and his native flock, Daniel hastily baptized his congregation with water droplets flung from a handkerchief. That accomplished, he ordered the catechumens to flee while he himself, still clad in his priestly vestments, went out to greet the besiegers. After recovering from their astonishment at the priest’s bold actions and glorious attire, the Iroquois riddled him with arrows and lead. They then proceeded to massacre the town’s defenseless inhabitants. Before returning to their own country with the women and children they had captured, they set the town on fire, and consigned the body of Antoine Daniel to the flames of his own chapel.
In a letter to his superior in Rome, written on December 15th, 1652, Jesuit Father Paul Ragueneau, who served as the Father Superior of the Huron mission at that time, swore that an apparition of the martyred priest appeared to Father Chaumonot, the same Jesuit who had been travelling with Jean de Brebeuf at the time of his ominous celestial vision, on two separate occasions in the four years that followed his death.
“Although there are perhaps some reasons why I should be more reserved in publishing what follows,” he wrote in French, “I nevertheless thought I should give God the glory that is His due. After his death, this good father appeared to one of us on two different occasions. On one of these occasions he showed himself clothed in glory, wearing the face of a man of about thirty years of age, even though he had died at the age of forty-eight. The main thought of the person to whom he appeared was to ask him how divine goodness had allowed the body of his servant to be treated so indignantly after his death and so reduced to powder that we would not even have had the good fortune to be able to collect his ashes.”
The priestly specter replied in Latin, declaring that the Lord is worthy of praise, and stating that God rewarded the desecration of his body by allowing him to reprieve a number of souls who languished in Purgatory and bring them with him into Heaven.
“On another occasion,” Ragueneau continued, “he was seen attending a meeting we were holding on methods of advancing the faith in this country, and he appeared to be fortifying us with his courage, filling us with his enlightenment and the spirit of God with which he was completely imbued.”
This letter echoes a less detailed Latin missive addressed to the Superior General of the Jesuit Order, which Ragueneau penned on March 4th, 1649, in which he identified the eyewitness as Father Chaumonot. In his 1869 biography of Chaumonot, Jesuit writer Auguste Carayon added that the spirit of Antoine Daniel is said to have imparted another piece of wisdom to the missionary, namely to never forget his sins. In accordance with this ghostly advice, Chaumonot, to the perturbation of his confessor, made a habit of repeatedly confessing the same grave sins of his past, of which he had been long absolved, every time he received the Sacrament of Penance.
Ritual Hematophagy
The Iroquois returned to Huronia in 1649, one year after Daniel’s death, and destroyed the ragged remains of the Huron nation in a single devastating offensive. They began their assault with an attack on the mission of Saint-Louis, just east of Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons. Those whom they did not kill immediately were captured and carried off to the easterly settlement of St. Ignace, where they were ritually tortured to death. Among the slain were Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, whose gruesome fates fulfilled Brebeuf’s portentous prophecy of eight years prior in appalling fashion.
Brebeuf’s martyrdom, which we covered in horrific detail in a previous piece, consisted of a series of brutal tortures ending with the excision of the priest’s living heart. Jesuit Christophe Ragnaut, who learned the details of Brebeuf’s final moments from wounded Huron warriors who had escaped their captors and sought refuge in his cabin, wrote that one of the Iroquois, “seeing that the good Father would soon die, made an opening in the upper part of his chest, and tore out his heart, which he roasted and ate. Others came to drink his blood, still warm which they drank with both hands, saying that Father de Brebeuf had been very courageous to endure as much pain as they had given him, and that, by drinking his blood, they would become courageous like him.”
Ragnaut’s words attest to an Iroquois belief that the consumption of the heart and lifeblood of an enemy warrior, especially one who stoically endured a long and agonizing torture, would imbue the gourmand with the courage of the suffering brave. This concept appears in the memoir of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, a Frenchman who would later play an instrumental role in the formation of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who was tortured by Iroquois warriors in 1651 before being adopted into their tribe. “When they see the miserable die,” he wrote of the Iroquois, after describing the horrific tortures to which they subjected their victims, “they open him and pluck out his heart. They drink some of his blood and wash the children’s head with the rest to make them valiant.”
The notion that the lifeblood of torture victims is imbued with spirit-altering properties echoes a controversial modern theory, covered in detail in the abovementioned piece, which holds that members of certain Satanic cults drink the lifeblood of tortured children in order to benefit from a particular mind-altering chemical in which the substance is supposed to be rich.
The Miraculous Cure of Jeanne Mance
The Iroquois continued their campaign of expansion throughout the decade, wiping out the neighbouring Petun nation later that year. Among the slaughtered Petun were the Jesuits Charles Garnier and Noel Chabanel, whose deaths brought the tally of Canadian martyrs in New France to eight. All of these missionaries, incidentally, would be canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1930.
In 1651, the Iroquois destroyed the Neutral Confederacy, so-named for its failure to take sides in the war between the southern aggressors and the Huron tribes. And in 1653, the southern invaders turned their ravenous gazes on the Erie nation, whom they would obliterate in 1656.
While the Erie war raged in the west, the Mohawks pestered the French settlements on the St. Lawrence. In the spring of 1653, six hundred warriors besieged Trois Riviere, and burned the surrounding countryside when the French failed to leave the fort. That summer, two hundred Mohawk braves launched an assault on the island fortress of Montreal, but were repelled by the defenders, whom they outnumbered eight to one. The residents attributed their miraculous victory to the intercession of the Virgin Mary, to whom the settlement had been consecrated at its founding.
The following four years were characterized by a succession of shaky truces made between the French and the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, broken by treacherous raids, renewed by dangerous ambassadorial expeditions undertaken by the Jesuits, and punctuated by the notable 1656 massacre of seventy Huron on the Ile d’Orleans just downriver from Quebec. During this turbulent period, residents of Montreal wounded in raids and skirmishes were treated by a devout French laywoman named Jeanne Mance, one of the first residents of Ville-Marie.
Back in the 1640s, Mance had piously resolved to dedicate her life to France’s New World crusade, and did her part by treating Christian patients in the hospital she founded, the prototypical Hotel-Dieu de Montreal. This institution operated under the auspices of the Societe Notre-Dame de Montreal, an organization co-founded in 1639 by French priest Jean-Jacques Olier, who would establish the Sulpician Order three years later.
In January 1657, Jeanne Mance slipped on the ice of the St. Lawrence River, breaking her right forearm and dislocating her wrist. Her co-worker, Etienne Bouchard, one of the two surgeons in Montreal at that time, capably set her broken arm. Unfortunately, the doctor failed to diagnose the dislocation until six months had elapsed, by which time Mance’s wrist was beyond repair. “I remained completely deprived of the use of my hand,” Mance wrote of her resulting disability, her words appearing in an 1854 French-language biography written by Catholic historian Etienne Michel Faillon. “And what’s more, I suffered a great deal. I was obliged to carry my arm always in a sling, unable to support it otherwise. From the moment of my fracture, I could not help myself or use my hand in any way…”
She elaborated on the gravity of her condition in a letter to her friend, a Sulpician priest named Gabriel Thubieres de Levy de Queylus, writing, “Sir, my ailment is getting worse instead of better. My arm is almost completely shriveled… I can’t move it at all, and you can’t even touch it without causing me the most severe pain. This state puts me in extreme difficulty, being in charge of a hospital which I cannot support, and seeing myself obliged to remain useless for the rest of my life.”
Precluded from performing her medical duties, the frontier nurse returned to France in 1658, hoping to find assistance in recruiting nuns of the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph for Ville-Marie’s Hotel-Dieu. During her stay, a French aristocrat arranged for her to be examined by the best surgeons in Paris, who unanimously pronounced her condition utterly incurable.
Mance’s enlistment efforts were punctuated by a visit to the Saint-Sulpice Seminary, where she desired to pay her respects to her hospital’s aforementioned patron, Jean-Jacques Olier, who had died two years prior. The Sulpicians had embalmed their founder’s heart and sealed it in a lead box, which they kept in the seminary, and had treated the rest of his body in a similar manner, interring it in a lead casket. The nurse asked to see these relics, and was granted permission on February 2nd, 1659. Mance herself described what happened next, writing:
“I had wanted to see the coffin of the late Monsieur Olier, not for my own relief, but to honour him, as I considered him to be a very great servant of God. I was allowed to see him on the day of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin. I knew that during his life he had a great devotion to this day. As I was about to enter the chapel where his body was laid to rest, I thought of asking God, through the merits of his servant, to please give me a little strength and some relief for my arm, so that I could use it for the most necessary things, such as dressing myself and setting up our altar in Montreal. I said, ‘Oh my God, I do not ask for a miracle, for I am unworthy of one; but a little relief, and that I may be able to help myself with my arm.
“As I entered the chapel, I was seized with a great joy so extraordinary that I have never felt anything like it in my life. My heart was so full of it that I cannot express it. My eyes were like two fountains of tears that did not dry up. This came so gently, that I felt as if all melted, without any effort or work on my part to excite me to such a thing, to which I am not naturally disposed. I cannot express this except by saying that it was an effect of the great pleasure I felt at the happiness bestowed on me by this blessed servant of God. I spoke to him as if I had seen him with my own eyes, and with much more confidence, knowing that he now knew me much better than when he was in the world; that he saw my needs and the sincerity of my heart, which had hidden nothing from him.”
After hearing Mass, Mance was brought Olier’s excised heart, which was carried over to her in its lead box. Confident that God would heal her through this saintly relic, the nurse wrapped her skeletal right hand in a scarf. Then, picking up the box with her good left hand, she placed her withered appendage beneath the mortuary receptacle.
At the same moment,” she wrote, “I felt that my hand had become free, and that it was supporting the weight of the leaden box in which the heart was enclosed, which astonished me marvelously, and obliged me to praise and bless the Divine Goodness for the grace He deigned to show me, and the glory and merit of His holy servant. At the same time, an extraordinary warmth descended down my arm, right down to my fingertips, and the use of my hand was restored to me at that moment.” Overwhelmed by emotion, the nurse used her newfound ability to make the sign of the cross, which motion she had not performed since her fall.
Eleven days later, Mance formally declared the miracle to Alexandre Le Ragois de Bretonvilliers, Superior General of the Society of the Priests of Saint Sulpice, who asked her whether her hand was sufficiently recovered to allow her to make a written declaration of her experience. On her answering in the affirmative, she was brought a pen and two sheets of paper, on which she wrote the following words:
“Jesus, Mary, Joseph. On 2 February 1659, in the seminary chapel, after holy mass, I wrote these words with my right hand, which I had no use of for two years. In the name of the most Holy Trinity, Amen. I, Jeanne Mance, recognize and confess in the presence of my God, that I received the grace of the use of my right hand by the merits of Monsieur Olier in this manner. I declare that everything that I have written above, on these two small leaves, is true and sincere. In witness whereof I have written and signed it by the same hand that I have been given to use. In Paris, 13 February 1659. Jeanne Mance.”
The Talking Head of Jean Saint-Pere
In the autumn of 1657, more than half a year after Mance’s crippling fall on the ice of the St. Lawrence, New France and the Iroquois Confederacy entered into another precarious armistice. On October 25th, in the midst of this cease-fire, four Iroquois braves stalked into Montreal with their matchlocks primed and loaded and their wicks lit. At the time, a Norman carpenter named Nicolas Godet and his son-in-law, a pious Catholic named Jean St. Pere, were laying thatch on the roof of their house. Without any warning, one of the warriors raised his arquebus and shot St. Pere dead. Before the men of Montreal could avenge their fallen comrade, the murderers cut of St. Pere’s head and carried it with them into the woods.
In his history of Montreal, written around 1672 and posthumously published in 1868, a robust French cavalry officer-turned-Sulpician missionary, Francois Dollier de Casson, described what happened next, reproducing the story told to him Montreal residents of impeccable integrity, who heard it from the Iroquois themselves.
“Heaven found this action so black,” Casson wrote, referring to St. Pere’s murder, “that these barbarians, fleeing here too quickly to receive the punishment for their crime, punished them by reproaches which he drew from the tongue of he whom they had killed. The Iroquois say that the head of the late St. Pere, which they had cut off, reproached them in many ways, speaking in perfect Iroquois despite that the deceased had no knowledge of that tongue when he was alive, saying: ‘You kill us, you do us a thousand cruelties, you want to destroy the Franks. You will not be able to do it. One day, they will be your masters and you will obey them…’ The Iroquois say that this voice was heard by them from time to time during the day and night, that it frightened them and bothered them, so that they sometimes put it in one place, sometimes in another. Sometimes they covered it in order to muffle the sound, but to no avail. Finally, they scalped it and threw the skull away.”
Miracles of Ste. Anne de Petit-Cap
On March 23rd, 1658, almost five months to the day after St. Pere’s murder, residents of Quebec began construction on a church dedicated to St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, on the northern shores of the St. Lawrence River. The building site was located downriver from the city, north of the northernmost tip of the Ile d’Orleans, at a place known as Petit-Cap. Construction commenced with the ceremonial laying of the cornerstone, performed by the Governor of New France, Louis d’Ailleboust de Coulonge.
One of the first colonists to add to the church’s foundation was a pious habitant named Louis Guimont, who was wracked by terrible kidney pain. No sooner had the farmer laid three stones than he was instantly relieved of his affliction.
Guimont’s was the first in a litany of miraculous cures that would take place at the chapel of St. Anne. Having heard of Guimont’s experience, Marie-Esther Ramage, the crippled wife of a local sailor named Elie Godin, invoked the intercession of the chapel’s patron saint. Immediately, the ailment which had caused her to walk with a bent back for the past eight months disappeared, leaving her free to walk without the use of a cane.
Miraculous cures continued to take place at St. Anne de Petit-Cap in the decades that followed its construction. Elie Godin was cured of dropsy after a local priest had given him his last rites. A fourteen-year-old boy named Nicolas Drouin was cured of epilepsy in the chapel’s nave. A woman named Arguente Bire, whose broken leg had fused improperly, hobbled into the chapel to attend Mass and left without her crutches. A 23-year-old blind man named Jean Adam regained his sight three days after visiting the shrine. A wounded soldier named Jean Pradere, who was suffering from a serious leg infection, passed out from pain while praying in the chapel, and woke up to find his leg completely healed, bathed in sweet-smelling perspiration. In a letter to her son, Marie de l’Incarnation, a widowed mother-turned-Ursuline nun who had taken up residence in Quebec in 1639, alluded to some of these miracles, writing, “Seven leagues from here, there is a village called Petit-Cap, where there is a church of Saint Anne in which our Lord works great wonders in favour of this holy mother of the most holy Virgin. The lame walk there, the blind receive their sight, and the sick receive their health.” Many of these accounts would later be compiled by a priest named Thomas Morel and published in his 1668 book The Miracles of St. Anne.
News of the wonders wrought at Ste. Anne de Petit-Cap, now the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Baupre, spread like wildfire throughout New France. Before long, French and native pilgrims alike were flocking to Petit-Cap to worship at the holy site, and mariners and voyageurs made supplications there before embarking on their perilous journeys across the ocean or their dangerous expeditions through the wilderness.
Battle of Long Sault
The Iroquois war continued without abate for three years, reaching a fever pitch in 1660, in one of the most iconic events which the Beaver Wars produced. In April of that year, the 24-year-old commander of the garrison at Montreal, Adam Dollard (or Daulac) des Ormeaux, received permission from the settlement’s founder and governor, Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, to lead sixteen volunteer militiamen up the Ottawa River, where Iroquois warriors were known to have spent the winter. The Iroquois had a habit of attacking French settlements in the spring, and Dollard hoped to waylay one of their war parties on their way to Montreal.
On May 1st, Dollard and company arrived at an old Algonquin fort on the Ottawa River, made from trees planted in a circle, at a place called Long Sault, not far from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and decided to lay their ambush there. While fortifying the wilderness bastion with palisades, the militiamen were joined by forty Huron warriors who travelled up the Ottawa after hearing of Dollard’s intentions, eager to avenge their fallen countrymen.
Before their preparations were complete, the militiamen were set upon by a two-hundred-man Seneca war party, which they successfully repulsed, killing the chief and mounting his severed head on their parapet. The attackers headed downriver and returned with a 500-man war party which, unbeknownst to the defenders, had been formed for the purpose of destroying the French settlements on the St. Lawrence. Deceived by false promises of clemency, all forty of the Huron defenders, with the exception of their chief, surrendered to the Iroquois and were summarily executed, leaving Dollard and his sixteen men, along with four Algonquins who had joined the Huron war party, to defend the fort alone against the seven hundred besiegers.
After suffering heavy losses at the hands of the militiamen and their native allies, some of whom were armed with heavy-gauge shotgun-style musketoons, the Iroquois constructed log shields which allowed them to hack through the fort’s walls. While the defenders desperately held the breach with sword and tomahawk, Dollard attached a fuse to a keg of gunpowder and lit it with the intention of hurling this makeshift bomb into the throng of besiegers on the other side of the wall. Unfortunately for the defenders, the keg struck the ragged tips of the parapets and rolled back into the fort, killing most of the Frenchmen in its ensuing detonation and allowing the Iroquois to overpower the survivors of this French-Canadian Alamo.
The difficulty they had in taking the fort at Long Sault dissuaded the Iroquois from their planned attack on the forts of the St. Lawrence. As American historian Francis Parkman Jr. put it in his 1874 book The Old Regime in Canada, “The Iroquois had fighting enough. If seventeen Frenchman, four Algonqins, and one Huron, behind a picket fence, could hold seven hundred warriors at bay so long, what might they expect from many such, fighting behind walls of stone? For that year they thought no more of capturing Quebec and Montreal, but went home dejected and amazed, to howl over their losses, and nurse their dashed courage for a day of vengeance.”
The Haunting of Barbe Hallay
Although the Battle of Long Sault had a temporary chilling effect on Iroquois hostilities, the year 1660 remained a strange one for the French colonies on the St. Lawrence, filled with celestial omens and unnerving portents. In a letter to her son, written in September 1661, Marie de l’Incarnation described some of these celestial signs, writing that, after merchant ships set sail for France in the autumn of 1660, a comet appeared in the sky with its tail pointing towards the earth, as did a flying fiery canoe – one of the first written accounts of the famous Chasse-Galerie that would be immortalized in the literature of 19th Century Quebec. “A man was also seen in the air, wrapped in fire,” she wrote in French. “We also saw… a large ring of fire on the Montreal side. On the Ile d’Orleans, a child was heard crying in its mother’s womb. In addition, confused voices of women and children were heard in the air with lamentable cries. In another encounter, a horrible thundering voice was heard in the air. All these events were terribly frightening, as you can imagine.”
Of all the strange occurrences which Marie de l’Incarnation mentioned in her correspondence, perhaps the best known is the strange case of Barbe Hallay, a fifteen-year-old girl who arrived in the port of Quebec with her family in the year 1660, in a ship from France filled with French colonists. One of Hallay’s fellow passengers was a miller named Daniel Vuil – a former Huguenot, or French protestant, who had apparently converted to Catholicism during the voyage.
Somewhere on the Atlantic, Vuil had asked Hallay’s parents for permission to marry their daughter. Believing the former Huguenot to be morally destitute, however, the parents refused, much to Vuil’s irritation.
When they reached Quebec, Daniel Vuil and Barbe Hallay went their separate ways, the former re-establishing himself as a miller in the community of Beauport, a village separated from Quebec by a short ride through the woods, and the latter finding employment as a maid in the manor of a local aristocrat named Giffart.
In 1661, strange things began to take place in the Giffart manor. Phantom flutes began to play to the beat of an invisible drum. Stones began to fall from the manor’s walls and fly about the place with incredible velocity, miraculously failing to injure anyone in the household. It soon became clear that this poltergeist activity seemed to revolve around then-16-year-old Barbe Hallay.
Instead of accusing the girl of witchcraft, as their New English counterparts might have done, the French colonists charged Daniel Vuil with sorcery. They claimed that the miller had cast spells on Mademoiselle Hallay in order to corrupt her so that she might be more inclined to accept his marriage proposal. This accusation was largely based on Hallay’s allegation that, at night, she was often tormented by inhuman spirits visible only to herself. These demons appeared to her as men, women, children, animals, and hellish spectres, and would sometimes speak through her in a voice that was not her own. Foremost among these phantoms was a spirit bearing the likeness of Daniel Vuil.
The accused miller had done a poor job of ingratiating himself with his fellow colonists during his first year in New France. He had committed heresy in reverting to his original Protestant faith. To make matters worse, he had been caught selling brandy to local Algonquin Indians in exchange for furs – at that time, a serious offence in New France. When Barbe Hallay accused him of sorcery, Francois de Laval, the newly-appointed Bishop of Quebec, ordered that Vuil be arrested and imprisoned in the capital. In his ensuing trial, the Huguenot was sentenced to death, and on October 7th, 1661, Daniel Vuil was executed by firing squad.
Barbe Hallay, meanwhile, was locked away in Quebec’s Hotel-Dieu, a hospital run by nuns. There, she was entrusted to the care of Mother Catherine de Sainte-Augustine, a French nun venerated today by the Catholic Church. Mother Catherine knew a thing or two about hauntings; by the time of Hallay’s arrival at the Hotel-Dieu, the nun had purportedly been the victim of demonic attacks for nearly a decade.
Mother Catherine quickly diagnosed Barbe Hallay with a case of demonic possession. For two long years, she prayed for the afflicted girl. Hallay’s demons are said to have physically attacked the nun for this, leaving her with cuts and bruises. When their assaults failed to dissuade her from her purpose, the demons adopted other methods by which to put an end to her ministry. According to the aforementioned Jesuit Paul Ragueneau, in his 1671 biography of Mother Catherine, “Those unhappy demons, unable to intimidate her with all their threats, tried to surprise [her] by changing themselves into angels of light, in order to delude her.”
This ruse failed as well. Finally, through what Mother Catherine believed to be the intercession of the martyred Father Jean de Brebeuf, Barbe Hallay was cured of her affliction.
The Shroud of Lemaitre
The Iroquois resumed their raids on New France in 1661 with renewed vigour, capturing thirteen Montreal colonists in February and engaging a group of labourers in battle shortly thereafter. In March, ten more colonists fell prey to the southern marauders.
In the midst of these depredations, the settlements of the St. Lawrence remained the scene of unusual occurrences, the most interesting of which echoes the account of the talking head of Jean St. Pere. The following story appears in the writings of three contemporary historians, namely the aforementioned Dollier de Casson; Marguerite Bourgeoys, a nun who helped organize the construction of Montreal’s first permanent church, and who founded the settlement’s first public school; and Marie Morin, the first Canadian-born woman to become a nun.
On August 29th, 1661, a day which the French venerated as the anniversary of the beheading of St. John the Baptist, a priest named Lemaitre accompanied a group of labourers to a field beside the Maison Saint-Gabriel, a stone house on the outskirts of Montreal. While the farmers aerated a batch of wet wheat recently harvested, the priest took out his breviary and began to recite the prayers he was obliged to say at that hour.
While he read, Lemaitre caught a glimpse of something unusual out of the corner of his eye and looked up to see a band of Iroquois emerging from the forest. After shouting at the labourers to take cover in the house, the priest drew his sword and brandished it at the Indians. Unwilling to face the priest in hand-to-hand combat, the Iroquois shot him dead, and began firing at the farmers, who scrambled for the cover of the fortified Maison Saint-Gabriel. After killing one of the Frenchmen, the natives cut off the priest’s head, bound it in his own handkerchief, and carried it with them into the forest.
According to a Frenchman named Lavigne, who was a prisoner in the Iroquois camp at that time, the victorious warriors unwrapped their grisly trophy in order to show it to their fellow tribesmen and were astonished to discover that the cloth in which they had carried it was completely absent of blood. Emblazoned on its surface was the countenance of the murdered priest, unmistakable to all who knew Father Lemaitre in life, which, as Marie Morin put it, was rendered in “a whiteness resembling the finest wax.” According to Casson, many of the Iroquois, who were familiar with the priest and had grown to admire him, temporarily abandoned the village and retreated into the woods in shame, certain that the appearance of Lemaitre’s face on the handkerchief was a sign of God’s disapproval of his murder.
The Ghosts of Point Iroquois
The year 1662 was one of relative respite for the French colonists, whose savage adversaries suffered a number of setbacks in their wars with the nations of the Great Lakes and the Susquehannock of what is now Pennsylvania. The worst of the Iroquois’ defeats took place on the southeastern shores of Lake Superior, at the place where Michigan’s Point Iroquois Lighthouse now stands. In the spring of 1662, a hundred-strong Iroquois war party encamped on this point after successfully raiding an Ojibwa village, and made a feast of their captured prisoners. That night, while the victors lay in gluttonous stupor, gorged on the flesh of their victims, they were attacked by a much smaller band of Ojibwa warriors, who stole into their camp and dispatched them silently them with arrows, tomahawks, and war clubs. The Ojibwa killed every single Iroquois in the camp, losing only one of their own to the awl of an old Iroquois woman. Ever after, the Ojibwa referred to the site of this massacre as the Grave of the Iroquois, or the Place of the Iroquois Bones.
According to American historian Frederick Stonehouse in his 1997 book Haunted Lakes, legend has it that the ghosts of the slain Iroquois haunt the vicinity of their demise to this day, their blood eternally staining the red rocks that line the shore. One mid-November afternoon in the mid-1980s, a woman named Zelma – the sister of the no-nonsense keeper of the Point Iroquois Light, DaVerna Hubbard – was walking her dog along the lakeshore near the lighthouse when she heard a low moaning on the wind. The eerie noise resembled the sound of a host of men groaning in anguish. As she stopped to listen more closely to the unsettling wailing, she and her dog were buffeted by a powerful gust of icy wind. Its hair suddenly standing on end, the dog let out a yelp and bounded for the safety of the lighthouse, leaving Zelma with the disturbing feeling that she was being watched by a hundred angry eyes.
The Charlevoix Earthquake of 1663
Although the Iroquois predations of 1662 were not as incessant as they had been the previous year, leaving the colonists of New France to till their fields in relative peace, the Gallic settlers were beleaguered by harassments of another kind – celestial marvels which they interpreted as portents of imminent disaster. According to Jesuit Jerome Lalemant, the uncle of the martyred Gabriel Lalement, in the 48th issue of the Jesuit Relations, “Heaven and Earth have spoken to us many times during the past year, and that in a language both kind and mysterious, which threw us at the same time into fear and admiration. The Heavens began with phenomena of great beauty…”
As early as the autumn of 1661, the colonists saw fiery serpents flying through the sky “borne on wings of flame,” intertwined like those which comprise the staff of Hermes, herald of the Greek gods. “Over Quebec,” Lalement wrote in French, “we beheld a great ball of fire, which illuminated the night almost with the splendor of day, had not our pleasure in beholding it been mingled with fear, caused by its emission of sparks in all directions. This same meteor appeared over Montreal, but seemed to issue from the moon’s bosom, with a noise like that of a cannon or thunder, and after travelling three leagues in the air, it finally vanished behind the great mountain whose name that island bears.
“But what seemed to us most extraordinary was the appearance of three suns. Toward eight o’clock in the morning, on a beautiful day last winter, a light and almost imperceptible mist arose from our great river, and, when struck by the sun’s first rays, became transparent, retaining, however, sufficient substance to bear the two images cast upon it by that luminary. These three suns were almost in a straight line, apparently several toises distant from one another, the real one in the middle, and the others, one on each side. All three were crowned by a rainbow, the colors of which were not definitely fixed; it now appeared iris-hued, and now of a luminous white, as if an exceedingly strong light had been at a short distance underneath.
“This spectacle was of almost two hours’ duration upon its first appearance, on the seventh of January, 1663; while upon its second, on the 14th of the same month, it did not last so long, but only until, the rainbow hues gradually fading away, the two suns at the sides also vanished, leaving the central one, as it were, victorious.
The colonists interpreted these mysterious aerial phenomena – which the modern reader can tentatively identify as the aurora borealis, a meteor, and sundogs, respectively – as heavenly signs of impending disaster. Their suspicions were verified when, on February 5th, 1663, at about 5:30 in the evening, a tremendous earthquake ripped through the Laurentian Valley.
According to Jerome Lalement, this upheaval was predicted by two young Algonquin women. The first was a sixteen-year-old girl named Catherine, who had spontaneously recovered from a grave illness earlier that winter. The Jesuit attributed her miraculous improvement to her extraordinary trust in the cross of Christ. On the night before the earthquake, Catherine had a dream in which she and two other Algonquin girls climbed a staircase to heaven. At the top was a beautiful church in which Jesus appeared with His Blessed Mother. The Virgin Mary told the girls that “the earth would soon be shaken, trees would strike against one another, and rocks would be shattered, to the general consternation of all the people.” Terrified that she might have been visited by a demon, the girl described her vision to a priest early the next morning.
“On the evening of the same day,” Lalement wrote, “a short time before the earthquake began, she shouted in a transport of excitement; and, as if wrought upon by a powerful influence, she said to her relatives, ‘It is coming soon, it is coming soon.’ And she afterward had the same presentiments before each of the earthquake shocks.”
The second Algonquin woman to prophecy the earthquake was a 26-year-old wife whom Lalemant described as “very innocent, simple, and sincere.” Her startling premonitions were witnessed by her husband and parents, and later investigated by local priests. The following is the woman’s testimony, translated from Algonquin to French to English:
“On the night between the 4th and 5th of February, 1663, being fully awake and in full possession of my senses, while in a sitting posture, I heard a voice, distinct and intelligible, which said to me, ‘Strange things are to happen today; the Earth will tremble.’ Thereupon I was seized with great fear, seeing no one from whom those words could have come. Filled with alarm, I endeavoured, with considerable difficulty, to go to sleep; and when day broke I told my husband, Joseph Onnentakite, quite in private, what had happened to me. As, however, he rebuffed me, saying that I was lying, and wished to impose upon him, I said nothing further. At about nine or ten o’clock on the same day, on my way to the woods to gather firewood, I had scarcely entered the forest when the same voice made itself heard, saying the same thing and in the same manner as on the night before. My alarm was much greater, as I was entirely alone. So I looked all around, to see if I could catch sight of anyone, but no person was to be seen. Accordingly, I gathered a load of firewood and went home, meeting my sister on the way, as she was coming to help me; and I told her what had just occurred. She at once took the lead and, reentering the cabin before me, repeated my experience to my father and mother; but as it was all very extraordinary, they merely heard it without giving it any especial thought. There the matter rested until five or six o’clock in the evening of the same day, when an earthquake occurred, and they recognized by experience that what they had heard me say in the forenoon was only too true.”
A third woman to foretell the earthquake was the aforementioned Sister Catherine de Saint-Augustin, the pious 31-year-old nun who worked in Quebec’s Hotel-Dieu, who was tending to the ailing Barbe Hallay. On the night before the earthquake, Sister Catherine had a vision in which four demons crouched at the four corners of Quebec and shook the earth with terrible violence, as if it were a carpet, with the obvious intention of destroying the stone city perched atop it. The efforts of these devils were thwarted by a beautiful and majestic figure who appeared in their midst, who restrained them when they were on the point of reducing the city to rubble.
The so-called ‘Charlevoix earthquake’ of February 5th, 1663, is believed to have measured a whopping 7.9 on the Richter scale, making it the fifth largest earthquake in Canadian history. Writers of the day noted that it caused terrain-altering landslides, rent stone walls, and opened deep chasms in the earth. The seismic shockwaves caused the trees in the forest to slam into each other with tremendous violence, prompting the natives to fire their guns into the air, hoping to drive away whatever passing spirits they believed were causing the tumult. The water of the St. Lawrence was so churned up by the commotion that it became a muddy sludge unfit to drink for several weeks. Violent as it was, the earthquake failed to claim one human life in the Laurentian Valley, which the colonists attributed to Divine Providence.
According to Jerome Lalement, the natural disaster was attended by a variety of unexplained phenomena. “Besides the roaring which constantly preceded and accompanied the earthquake,” he wrote, “we saw specters and fiery phantoms bearing torches in their hands. Pikes and lances of fire were seen, waving in the air, and burning brands darting down on our houses – without, however, doing further injury than to spread alarm wherever they were seen. There was even heard what sounded like plaintive and feeble voices in lamentation during the silence of the night; while porpoises were heard crying aloud before the town of Trois Rivieres – a very unusual occurrence – and filling the air with a pitiful bellowing.”
Marie de l’Incarnation verified Lalement’s startling claims in a letter to her son, written on August 20th, 1663, adding that infernal voices could be heard on the air encouraging each other to wreak greater destruction. “We saw fires, torches, and flaming globes,” she wrote, “which sometimes fell to the earth and sometimes dissolved in the air. A man of fire was seen with flames pouring from his mouth… Terrible spectres were also seen, and… it was easy to believe that on this occasion [demons] had joined with the earthquakes, to increase the fear that agitated nature would cause us.”
Later in her letter, the nun detailed the disturbing account of a trio of young men who went into the woods to sell brandy to the natives in defiance of the invectives of the Church. One of the three, who departed from his comrades in search of some necessity, came face to face with a hideous spectre whose appearance nearly frightened him to death. When he returned to his comrades and told them of his experience, they began to mock him. “There’s nothing here to laugh about,” he snapped. “We are selling drinks to the natives in defiance of the Church, and God wants to punish us for our disobedience.” Humbled by these sobering words, the young men quit their enterprise and returned to their cabin. That evening, an aftershock of the earthquake ripped through their encampment, and the three men barely managed to flee their cabin before it was devoured by the earth.
The Carignan-Salieres
In the period succeeding the earthquake, European monarchs began to take a greater interest in the fate of their New World colonies. In 1663, King Louis XIV of France dissolved the Company of One Hundred Associates, an enterprise which had enjoyed a monopoly on the fur trade in New France since 1627, and made the Laurentian colony a Province of the Realm under his direct control. In March 1664, exactly one year prior to the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the English, on the orders of King Charles II, conquered New Netherland in a nearly-bloodless campaign and formed an alliance with the Iroquois, the erstwhile trading partners of the Dutch.
The following year, the French king deployed the regiment of Carignan-Salieres, a battle-hardened company of a thousand soldiers seasoned in the Thirty Years’ and Austro-Turkish Wars, to New France to eliminate the Iroquois threat. After constructing a series of fortifications along the Richelieu River, the regiment marched into Iroquois Country, launching three nearly-bloodless expeditions which culminated in the burning of several abandoned Mohawk villages. This display of French power led to a 1666 peace between New France and the Iroquois Confederacy, after which the Iroquois began to establish villages in the territories of their conquered Great Lakes enemies.
Loup-Garou
The campaign of the Carignan-Salieres is the backdrop against which 19th Century French-Canadian writer Honore Beaugrand set one of the narratives which comprise his 1900 short story “Le Loups-Garou”, or “The Werwolves”. In this tale, a French soldier discovers that his native wife, La-linotte-qui-chante, is a shapeshifter endowed with the ability to transform into a wolf at night. Though fictional, Beaugrand’s story reflects a real folktale imported from France to the New World, which holds that Catholic apostates who renounce their religion, or revert to heretical or heathen faiths, are liable to transform into werewolves after going seven years without receiving the Sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist. The werewolves of French-Canadian tradition are typically either people cursed to transform into wolves at night, whose lupine fur lies concealed beneath their human skin during the day, or hybrid-like abominations with the bodies of men and the heads and tails of wolves.
The Piasa Bird
The period of peace following the 1666 accord between New France and the Iroquois Confederacy changed the cultural landscape of the Great Lakes and the forests south of the St. Lawrence. Independent French fur traders called coureurs des bois, or “runners of the woods” – often sword-wearing gentry too proud to take up the plough – began to make long canoe journeys through the wilderness to trade knives, hatchets, kettles, and brandy for native furs, resuming an old way of life which had not been practiced in the area since the outbreak of the Beaver Wars. Many of these adventurers, whose trade was outlawed by the king, are remembered today in the names of cities and towns throughout Quebec and the American Midwest, including brothers Louis and Adrien Jolliet, for which Joliette, Quebec, and Joliet, Illinois were named; Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, the namesake of Duluth, Minnesota; and Pierre-Esprit Radisson, who gave his name to Radisson, Wisconsin.
This season of illicit traffic was also an age of exploration, in which coureurs de bois in search of new clients, and missionaries in their quests for converts, traversed distant waterways on which no European had yet set eyes. Foremost among the French explorers of the 1660s and ‘70s was a restless soul named Rene-Robert Cavalier – a Jesuit priest who, after being repeatedly denied his entreaties to be sent overseas for foreign missionary work, left France for the New World in 1667, having convinced his superiors to release him from his vows on account of his self-proclaimed “moral frailties”. Upon his arrival in Fort Ville-Marie, he purchased a seignory, or strip of farmland, from Sulpician missionaries on the island of Montreal. This transaction earned him the honorific by which posterity would remember him, namely “Lord of the Manor,” or “Sieur de la Salle.”
In 1669, while acquiring tenants for his land and developing a serviceable fluency in the dialects of the local natives, La Salle heard Iroquois rumours of a southerly river called the Ohio, which was supposed to drain into a distant ocean. Suspecting that the river might be the Northwest Passage – a legendary shipping route to China – the 26-year-old adventurer received permission from the governor, sold his seigneury back to the Sulpicians, purchased an outfit of canoes and supplies, hired a crew of voyageurs, and launched a failed expedition in search of the fabled waterway. When he returned to Montreal in the autumn of 1670 with little to show for his efforts, his former seigniory was derisively named Lachine, or ‘The China’.
Although La Salle would go on to make some of the most important geographical discoveries of the age, his early exploratory efforts were eclipsed by those of Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary who established the St. Ignace Mission and Sault Ste. Marie on both sides of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and the aforementioned Louis Jolliet, a Jesuit seminarian-turned-fur trader. In the autumn of 1672, the colony’s newly-appointed governor, a fiery battle-scarred veteran of the Cretan War and the Dutch War of Independence named Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, tasked Jolliet and Marquette with exploring the upper reaches of the great river of which the Jesuits had learned from their native congregations, namely the Mississippi. Assisted by a handful of voyageurs, the explorers paddled their canoes from the St. Ignace Mission to Green Bay in Lake Michigan. They proceeded up the Fox River, portaged overland to the Wisconsin River, and followed that waterway south to the Mississippi.
During the course of their journey down the upper reaches of the Big Muddy, the explorers came across two startling riverside pictographs depicting the Piasa Bird – a bearded, horned, scaly, winged monster of native mythology – which appeared to mark the territory of the Cahokia Illinois Indians. Marquette described these frightening chimeras in his journal, writing:
“While skirting some rocks, which by their height and length inspired awe, we saw upon one of them two painted monsters which at first made us afraid, and upon which the boldest savages dare not long rest their eyes. They are as large as calves; they have horns on their heads like those of a deer, a horrible look, red eyes, a beard like a tiger’s, a face somewhat like a man’s, a body covered with scales, and so long a tail that it winds all around the body, passing above the head and going back between the legs, ending in a fish’s tail. Green, red, and black are the three colours of which the picture is composed. Moreover, these two monsters are so well painted that we cannot believe that any savage is their author; for good painters in France would find it difficult to reach that place conveniently to paint them.”
Vanishing of Le Griffon
While Jolliet and Marquette were exploring the upper reaches of that great waterway whose multi-channeled mouth had been discovered 130 years prior by Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto, Governor Frontenac joined forces with La Salle. With the aim of stealing business away from the coureurs des bois who had established themselves in the Great Lakes, while at the same time protecting New France from future Iroquois incursions and the encroachment of the colony’s English rivals, Frontenac decided to build a joint military and fur-trading post on the shores of Lake Ontario. The establishment of such a fort would be a risky endeavor, as King Louis XIV had discouraged the construction of trading posts outside the valley of the St. Lawrence River for fear that that the manpower required to maintain it would spread New France excessively thin. Operating on the principal that it is better to ask forgiveness than to seek permission, Frontenac decided to establish the fort without the king’s approval, and recruited La Salle to assist him in achieving that end.
Throughout the 1670s, La Salle oversaw the construction of several fur trading forts throughout the so-called Pays-d’en-Haut, or Upper Country surround the Great Lakes. The first of these was Fort Frontenac, built at the junction of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence in 1673. The second, dubbed ‘Fort Conti,’ was constructed at the mouth of the Niagara River in 1678. La Salle planned to build a third fort, called Fort Miami, at the southern end of Lake Michigan. To facilitate this process and establish his company’s supremacy in the upper Great Lakes, he first decided to build a 45-ton barque, or sailing ship, on the Niagara River above Niagara Falls.
La Salle’s ship was completed in the summer of 1679 and christened Le Griffon, or the Griffin, that mythical monster being the primary ornament on Count Frontenac’s coat of arms. Its prow bore a wooden carving of the legendary half-lion / half-eagle for which it was named, and its decks bristled with seven small cannons which were fired at its christening. La Salle and his crew embarked on Le Griffon for the first time that August and sailed across Lake Erie.
After a four-day journey, during which they were beset by a ferocious gale which threatened to capsize their vessel, the explorers arrived at the Island of Michilimackinac, home to a Huron-Ottawa village and a Jesuit mission, and a haven for coureurs des bois. In early September, La Salle and his crew sailed southwest to Green Bay, where they picked up a load of furs acquired by a canoe-going advance party. La Salle ordered a handful of his men to ship the furs to Fort Conti while he and a few voyageurs explored the southern end of Lake Michigan. Le Griffon departed on September 18th, 1679, just as a storm began to brew.
The vessel and her crew would never be seen again, disappearing on their homeward voyage somewhere in the waters of Lakes Michigan, Huron, or Erie. Most assumed that the ship had foundered in the storm and was lost with all hands – a theory supported by the late 19th Century discovery of a watch chain, three 17th Century coins, and five human skeletons in a cave on Manitoulin Island at the northern end of Lake Huron. Another theory contends that the ship was boarded by hostile Indians who murdered her crew before setting her ablaze. La Salle himself suspected that the ship’s occupants had intentionally scuttled Le Griffon and made off with the furs she contained, having heard an Indian rumour which held that white men answering to the description of his lost crew were captured and killed by Indians in 1680 while paddling the Mississippi River in canoes filled with valuable goods. Whatever the case, Le Griffon’s undiscovered wreck is considered today to be the Holy Grail of Great Lakes shipwreck hunters.
End of the Beaver Wars
Immediately after the disappearance of Le Griffon, La Salle and company proceeded south into the territory of the Illinois Confederation, into the watershed of the great Mississippi River which he and his crew would later famously explore. There, he discovered that both the Illinois Indians and the neighbouring Miami people were at war with the Iroquois. Hoping to extend the French fur trade south into the vast territory he would later dub Louisiana, La Salle brokered an anti-Iroquois alliance between the Illinois and Miami. These friendly overtures to their enemies, coupled with the shortsighted policies of Frontenac’s successor, Antoine LeFebvre de La Barre, led the Iroquois to resume the war with New France in 1684.
The conflict between the French and the Iroquois would rage for another twenty years, a pair of decades which bore witness to some of the most harrowing episodes in the annals of New France. In 1687, La Barre’s successor, Jacques-Rene de Brisay, Marquis de Denonville, invited fifty chiefs of the Iroquois Confederacy to negotiate with him at Fort Frontenac. Instead of deliberating with these envoys, Denonville kidnapped them and sent them to Marseilles to be enslaved on the galleys of the French Navy. The Iroquois responded to this duplicity by massacring the residents of La Salle’s old seigneury of Lachine in the summer of 1689, committing some of the most appalling atrocities in the history of the colony.
In 1688, the Beaver Wars merged into King William’s War, the North American theatre of the Nine Years’ War, fought between France and much of the rest of Europe. This hybrid conflict bore witness to some of the most iconic events in French-Canadian history, including the 1690 Battle of Quebec, preceded by Frontenac’s defiant retort to an envoy of besieger Sir William Phips, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that the only reply he would make to his general would be from the mouths of his cannons; and the 1692 defense of Fort Vercheres in which 14-year-old Madeleine Jerret and her younger brothers, through bluff and bravado, led a miraculous defense against an Iroquois war party.
King William’s War came to an end in 1697, and the Beaver Wars followed suit four years later, its conclusion ratified by the 1701 signing of the Great Peace of Montreal. The latter years of these conflicts were largely absent of the tales of mysteries and miracles which characterized the first half of the Beaver Wars, which seem to have faded away in 1673 with the last of the Jesuit Relations. Perhaps attributable to a shift in colonial concerns from the mystical to the pragmatic, this dwindling of strange stories in the writings of the day leaves a tantalizing archival silence which, perhaps fittingly, adds another layer of mystique to our chronicle of the mysteries of the Beaver Wars.
Sources
The Jesuits in North American in the Seventeenth Century (1867), by Francis Parkman Jr.
The Old Regime in Canada (1874), by Francis Parkman Jr.
Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877), by Francis Parkman Jr.
“The Early Jesuit Missions in Western Canada,” in the January 1894 issue of The American Catholic Historical Researches
“Recit de la Mort du P. Anthoine Daniel,” by Father Paul Ragueneau, December 15th, 1652, published in Rapport de l’Archiviste de la Province de Quebec Pour 1924-1925
“Lettre du P. Paul Ragueneau au T.R.P. Vincent Carafa, General de la Compagnie de Jesus a Rome (Traduite du Lagin sur l’original conserve a Rome), de Sainte-Marie aux Hurons, le 4er Mara, 1649,” from the Premiere Mission des Jesuites au Canada: Lettres et Documents Inedites (1864), by Auguste Carayon
Le Pere Piere Chaumonot de la Compagnie de Jesus: Autobiographie et Pieces Inedites (1869), by Pierre Joseph Marie Chaumonot and Auguste Carayon
Vie de Mademoiselle Mance et Histoire de l’Hotel-Dieu de VilleMarie Dans l’Ile de Montreal, in Canada (1854), by Etienne Michel Faillon
Histoire du Montreal, 1640-1672, by Francois Dollier de Casson
“Poltergeists in Canada: Part III” from Mysteries of Canada: Volume I (2019), by Hammerson Peters
Annales de l’Hotel-Dieu de Montreal (1921), by Marie Morin
Lettres de la Reverende Mere Marie de l’Incarnation (nee Marie Guyard), Premiere Superieure du Monastere des Ursulines de Quebec (1876), by St. Marie de l’Incarnation
The Jesuit Relations: Volume XLVIII (1662-1664), by Jerome Lalemant
Haunted Lakes: Great Lakes Ghost Stories, Superstitions, and Sea Serpents (1997), by Frederick Stonehouse
La Chasse Galerie: Legendes Canadiennes (1900), by Honore Beaugrand
The Discovery of the Great West (1869), by Francis Parkman Jr.
The Fighting Governor: A Chronicle of Frontenac (1915), by Charles William Colby
Cavelier de la Salle, Rene-Robert (1966), by Celine Dupre in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography: Volume I
Imagining Ourselves: Classics of Canadian Non-Fiction (1994), by Daniel Francis
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