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Employees, Martyrs, and Four Hundred Rifles
ON AUGUST 9, 1934, at the invitation of a committee of citizens of Green Bay, President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke to commemorate the man credited with having “opened up” Wisconsin to Europe. His name was Jean Nicolet. Few Americans had heard of him. Before 1852, when a handful of antiquarians poked around the history of the Green Bay area, no one even knew that he had wandered into what became Wisconsin. It is no wonder that President Roosevelt (or one of his New Deal speechwriters) had to dig with a broad shovel to connect Nicolet to much of anything that seemed truly significant in a Depression-burdened nation that couldn’t see much further back than October 1929, when the stock market collapsed.
FDR proclaimed Nicolet the first of “the men and women who established civilization in Wisconsin and in the Northwest” at the very beginning of what would become the United States of America. This launched the president on the theme announced in the title of the speech—“A Wider Opportunity for the Average Man”—and, thus launched, FDR sailed his subject through narrative seas that had been thoroughly charted by popular historians and Hollywood. Nicolet, he said, was a “pioneer” who had to “fight against Nature” in order to “fight for his rights,” which included living “a life … less fettered by the exploitation of selfish men.” The pioneers “shared a deep purpose to rid themselves forever of the jealousies, the prejudices, the intrigues and the violence, whether internal or external, that disturbed their lives on the other side of the ocean.”
In only his second year in office, having ushered through Congress in his first “Hundred Days” sheaves of social legislation and now flogging even more, FDR saw history through the lens of the New Deal, and it was important to him that others should see it this way, too. The New Deal was new, and Roosevelt understood that people were at once drawn to and frightened by whatever was new. He took every opportunity to connect the New Deal with American history, American traditions, the old, familiar “American way.” So he appropriated Jean Nicolet, took him from the past, and used him for his own present purposes, transforming him into the New Dealer as Pioneer/Pioneer as New Dealer.
The president was hardly the first person to tailor history to suit a special interest. A few times before, Nicolet had been the subject of civic oratory. At the dedication in July 1915 of a tablet commemorating Nicolet’s 1634 passage through the Straits of Mackinac, a senator spoke of his “deeds of valor and knightly heroism,” a judge pronounced Nicolet an “intrepid explorer and Christian hero,” and another speaker defined him as a “fearless and heroic pioneer of Christian civilization.” The tablet itself described him as “the first white man to enter Michigan and the Old Northwest.”
So Jean Nicolet, of whom few Americans had heard in 1934 or 1915 or today, was variously proclaimed a hero of the common man, a knight, an avatar of Christian civilization, and a pioneer of white hegemony in the Old Northwest. Another speaker at the 1915 dedication, present to flesh out the historical record, was Father Thomas J. Campbell, SJ. He dutifully noted that Nicolet’s Jesuit contemporaries wrote admiringly of the man, but Campbell, no less admiringly, brought him down to earth. “Jean Nicolet was not a great explorer, like Champlain … [not a] picturesque Governor, like Frontenac,… daring fighter, like Iberville,… successful discoverer, like Marquette,… martyr, like his [Jesuit missionary] friends Brébeuf, Jogues, Daniel, Garnier, and Garreau.” He was, Campbell declared, “simply an employee in a trading post; an Indian interpreter.”
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Campbell had hit upon a key truth of early American civilization. It was the product of trade. While Nicolet was an employee, however, he was not just any employee. He was a highly motivated employee. No small part of his value to the trading enterprise was his willingness to learn the language of the local Indians, to become “an Indian interpreter.” Those Europeans willing to engage Native culture were, by and large, motivated by their desire to engage Native commerce, to sell and to buy, whether it was trade goods for beaver fur or Christian dogma for Indian souls.
Jean Nicolet de Belleborne was born about 1598 in the Norman port city of Cherbourg, where his father, Thomas, served as “messenger ordinary of the King between Paris and Cherbourg.” In other words, Jean was a mailman’s son. When, at nineteen, the young man signed with the Compagnie des Marchands, which sent him to Quebec, it was not as an explorer but as a clerk, who subsequently agreed to train as an interpreter. As his father served the king but was a humble mailman, so Jean Nicolet served a trading monopoly that was owned by French lords but was himself their humble minion. Almost immediately on his arrival in Quebec, they sent him to Allumette Island, a fur-trading outpost on the Ottawa River, to learn the language of the Algonquians. He remained there for two years, accompanying his Indian hosts on their travels. Clearly, he won acceptance among them; around 1622, they put him at the head of a delegation of four hundred of their number to negotiate a peace treaty with the Iroquois.
Apparently, the negotiation was a success; however, on July 19, 1629, when Quebec fell to the Kirke brothers, who seized it for England, Nicolet was either instructed to move or moved of his own volition northwest, to the Lake Nipissing area, between the Ottawa River and Georgian Bay in present-day Ontario, where he lived for more than eight years among the Huron (also called the Nipissing) tribe.
He lived in what contemporary records describe as a “cabin apart,” engaging in fishing and trading. That he was, however, adopted by the tribe is evident in two facts. First, he took full part in all tribal councils. Second, he lived with a Huron woman he (or those who wrote about him) called Sauvagesse Nipissing. The couple had a daughter, Madeleine Euphrosine Nicolet. In this, there was also nothing unusual. Many, probably most, French traders took Indian wives. There was no moral stigma for either the Natives or the French colonists, and the children produced by such unions were generally accepted. Men like Nicolet were creating a hybrid civilization. The trading relationship was sufficiently valued by both sides that the Indians accepted the French into their community, and the French embraced such integration.
From a Huron or someone of a neighboring tribe, Nicolet learned of a people known as the Winnebago. Today, this tribe has shed “Winnebago,” a name bestowed by Fox, Sauk, and Ojibwa neighbors, and calls itself by its original name, the Ho-Chunk. The French translated “Winnebago” as “people of the stinking water” or “people of the smelly water,” which Nicolet (perhaps along with other Frenchmen of the period) chose to interpret as “people of the sea,” reasoning that saltwater smelled bad.
After the 1632 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye returned New France to French control and restored Samuel de Champlain as its governor, Nicolet was summoned back to Quebec, where he served as an interpreter and mediator between the Indians and French secular and religious authorities. At this time, Champlain announced his intention to press his exploration of North America westward, both to claim more territory for France and to find the ever-elusive Northwest Passage, the through route to Asia. This was Nicolet’s cue to tell Champlain what he had learned about a “people of the sea,” and he persuaded the governor that these Indians either had knowledge of or actually controlled the Northwest Passage, which, he reasoned, must be hidden along the vast shore of the unexplored western Great Lakes. Champlain named him his right-hand man for an expedition of exploration.
Two fleets of canoes left Quebec on July 1, 1634, and ascended the St. Lawrence River, to what is now Trois-Rivières, Quebec. Here Nicolet diverted onto the Ottawa River, paddling as far as a portage with the Nipissing River, which empties into northern Lake Huron. In company with seven Huron warriors, he coasted along the Lake Huron shore until he reached the straits leading into Lake Superior. From here, he ventured to Sault Ste. Marie (today a city at the eastern end of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula opposite the Canadian city of the same name), rested, then crossed to the top of Lake Michigan at Michilimackinac, the Straits of Mackinac, then pushed southward along the western shore of Lake Michigan and into Green Bay, home of the Winnebago.
Reportedly—though the report is subject to historical dispute—Nicolet had prepared himself for the meeting with the people he believed commanded a direct route to China by arraying himself in fine Chinese silk robes and firing ornate pistols into the air (for he knew that the Chinese had long possessed gunpowder). The Winnebago were reasonably impressed, though doubtless not for the reason Nicolet had intended. They feted Nicolet for weeks, lavishing food upon him, including feasts of beaver, and they agreed to live in peace with the French.
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Nicolet apparently ventured farther and is believed to have been the first European to see not only Wisconsin but Illinois and the site of what would become Chicago. He spent the winter of 1634–35 with Indians along the Fox River before returning in the fall of 1635 to Trois-Rivières. He announced that he had been plying a river that surely would have taken him to the Pacific—had he kept on it just three days longer. This, of course, would prove to be an illusion, but what he did bring back with him was the establishment of French influence over extensive Native populations, which gave the French a firm foothold in North America and opened a way to the vast beaver peltries of the West, a prize more than one contender would covet and be willing to spill blood to obtain.
His Sauvagesse Nipissing notwithstanding, Nicolet, on October 7, 1637, married Marguerite Couillard, Champlain’s goddaughter and the daughter of William Couillard, who had come to New France back in 1613 as a carpenter and now prospered as a farmer. In 1642, the couple had a daughter, Marguerite. She barely had time to get to know her father, however. In October of that year, Nicolet was named to an important administrative post in the Compagnie des Marchands and in this capacity set off for Trois-Rivières to intervene on behalf of a captive Indian friendly to the French but allied with the Iroquois. Nicolet hoped to prevent his death at Huron hands, but en route he himself was swept into the swift currents of the St. Lawrence when his canoe capsized. The very last words this intrepid river man managed to utter were the sad news that he did not know how to swim.
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Nicolet drowned seven years after his patron Samuel de Champlain died. Champlain had been the dominant driver of French colonization in North America. That process may be traced back to 1523, when the Italian Giovanni da Verrazano (1485–1528) persuaded King Francis I of France to fund an expedition to find—what else?—the Northwest Passage to China. The king said yes, but he didn’t give Verrazano much. The Italian sailed from Dieppe later in the year with a crew of only fifty-three in a caravel of modest dimensions. He coasted along the Carolinas early in 1524, working his way north, probing for any inlet that promised to convey him to the Pacific. He got as far as the Narrows of New York Bay, becoming the first European to lay eyes on what is today New York, which he named Nouvelle-Angoulême to honor Francis, formerly the count of Angoulême. Although Verrazano failed to find the Northwest Passage, his discovery moved the king to establish a colony on the territory between New Spain (Mexico and the American Southwest) and Newfoundland, which England had already claimed. This vast tract Verrazano dubbed Francesca and Nova Gallia.
A full decade passed before Francis acted on his own colonizing impulse by sending Jacques Cartier to America. This navigator planted a cross in the Gaspé Peninsula and took possession of the land in the king’s name, making it the first province of New France. Yet colonization efforts were desultory at best, and it was only thanks to French fishermen, who not only worked the waters off the North Atlantic coast but sailed inland via the St. Lawrence River, that trading alliances were made with the Indians. This was the start of the French beaver trade, which finally gave some impetus to colonization, though it wasn’t until well into the 1580s that trading companies were set up and ships were regularly contracted to bring back beaver and other furs to the European markets.
Fishermen and traders were not writers. So all we know for certain about the last twenty years of the sixteenth century in New France is two things. First, trading relations were established between the Europeans and the Indians; although sufficiently cordial to produce profit, they evidently did nothing to promote colonization. This brings us to the second thing. What paltry gestures were made toward establishing permanent French settlements failed. A trading post was established on Sable Island, off the coast of Acadia, in 1598 but was soon abandoned. Two years later, another trading post was built at Tadoussac. By the end of the winter, only five emaciated settlers were left alive. Bad weather and intense want, not Indians, had killed their comrades. Four years passed before another attempt at settlement was made. In 1604, a little “Habitation” was set up at St. Croix Island on Baie François—today the Bay of Fundy—which was moved (not a very big job) to Port-Royal in 1605.
This time, Champlain intervened. Determined to create a community, he decided to found a jolly social club, the Ordre de Bon Temps (Order of Good Cheer), with the object of raising morale and building a sense of communal fellowship even as he fostered healthy eating, which, he reasoned, was what was most needed to get his settlers through the coming winter of 1606–07. Every few days, the Ordre organized a feast, to which colonists and their Micmac Indian neighbors were invited. Only the Indian men were welcome; the women and children, along with the poorest of the French settlers, were offered naught but leftover scraps. In addition to food, festivities included strong drink and a good show. Something called The Theater of Neptune in New France by one Marc Lescarbot (lawyer by vocation, explorer by circumstance, playwright by avocation) was staged on November 16, 1606, becoming the first dramatic work both written and performed in North America.
It was all a promising beginning, and high time at that. In 1607, however, King Henri IV suddenly revoked the trading monopoly he had granted Port-Royal’s founder, Pierre Dugua, which forced everyone to pack up and return to France that fall. Dugua left the Micmac sakmow (grand chief) Henri Membertou to look after the Habitation, which he did until 1610, when another Frenchman, Jean de Biencourt de Poutrincourt et de Saint-Just (1557–1615), arrived. Biencourt oversaw the conversion of Membertou and other local Micmacs to Catholicism, a move that allied him with the Jesuits and was designed to secure government finance ostensibly to promote the dissemination of the Catholic faith in New France.
As for Champlain, he turned away from Port-Royal and, with twenty-eight men, founded in 1608 the city of Quebec, the second permanent French settlement in New France. It hardly took off. The climate and disease did their usual work, so that by 1630 Quebec had grown from 28 to just 103 settlers. By the time of Nicolet’s death, the population had slightly more than tripled, to 355. Despite the unimpressive numbers, Champlain was aggressive in his effort to ally himself and his settlement with the local Hurons and Montagnais, taking advantage of their enmity with the Iroquois to make common cause with them against those tribes, as explained in chapter 1.
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Champlain’s persistence kept Quebec from following Port-Royal into a long indolence, but he was nevertheless unable to awaken royal enthusiasm for the colony until the ascension of Louis XIII and his powerful adviser Richelieu. The Company of One Hundred Associates Richelieu founded to invest in New France, unlike the earlier Compagnie des Marchands, was not primarily a trading cartel but an enterprise to promote colonization. Richelieu promised land to hundreds of new settlers in the hope of accelerating the growth of the colony. Thanks to Richelieu’s influence, too, the king named Champlain governor of New France.
Financially, Richelieu wanted to use the resources of New France to add to his wealth and power. Politically, for France, he wanted to create a colony as important as those of the English. Religiously, as a man of the Church, he sought to propagate the faith and, toward that end, barred non–Roman Catholics from living in New France. Those few Protestants who already lived in the colony were given a stark choice: Convert to Catholicism or leave. Most left, and thereby the Protestant English colonies grew larger.
Not only did Richelieu’s theocratic ambitions retard the political and commercial growth of New France, they also caused the driving power behind the colony to shift from motives of secular empire and commerce to religion—although religion was hardly divorced from either empire or commerce. When Champlain died in 1635, he was replaced not by another entrepreneurial explorer but by an army of Jesuit and Recollect missionaries. As if this weren’t a sufficient retreat from the Enlightenment trends then beginning to sweep through Europe, Richelieu also transported New France back into the Middle Ages by instituting a quasi-feudal seigneurial system in which lords owned great tracts of land, which were farmed by a peasantry exported from France.
It was Richelieu who enthusiastically sanctioned the missionary presence in New France, but the Jesuit mission began on October 25, 1604, well before the cardinal’s ascension, when Father Pierre Coton, SJ, made a request of the Jesuit superior general, Claudio Acquaviva, for a pair of missionaries to be sent to North America.
Born in Atri, Italy, in 1543, the youngest son of the Duke of Atri, Acquaviva was one of those singularly ruthless religious entrepreneurs who made the Jesuit Order universally envied, feared, and despised. In 1559, he gained appointment as papal chamberlain to Pius IV, then, after Cardinal Francisco Borja engineered the murder of Diego Laynez, the second superior general of the Jesuits, early in 1566, Acquaviva supported Borja’s succession to the vacant generalship, attached himself to Borja, and, in the fullness of time, became the fifth superior general in 1581.
By all rights, Acquaviva was a servant of the pope, the earthly pontiff—the “bridge”—to God. In actuality, he served first and foremost King Philip II (1527–98) of Spain and, in the nearly thirty-four years he was the Jesuits’ superior general, was responsible for the poisonings of no fewer than six popes who proved less than wholly pliable to Philip’s will. In addition to his iron alliance with the secular prince of Spain, Acquaviva transformed the Society of Jesus into a commercial powerhouse. Besides North America, he set up missions in South America, England, Germany, France, Flanders, Spain, and Japan, growing the Jesuit society from five thousand to thirteen thousand members and increasing the number of Jesuit schools from 124 to 371 and of “provinces” (as Jesuit parishes or territories were called) from twenty-one to thirty-two worldwide.
It was in Japan that Acquaviva saw his greatest opportunity for creating a mighty engine to drive the worldly expansion of his spiritual order. In 1579, he transferred the Neapolitan Jesuit Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606) from the recently established mission in Macau, China, to Nagasaki, Japan. Operating through one of his priests, Father Vilela, Acquaviva had negotiated the purchase of the port of Nagasaki from a local Japanese warlord. Valignano understood that his job was not so much to advance the Christian faith in Japan as to establish Jesuit cultural and financial power there. Accordingly, he developed a strategy of adaptation to Japanese customs, drawing up in 1581 the remarkable handbook Il Cerimoniale per i Missionari del Giappone, which instructed missionaries to liken their own Jesuit hierarchy to that of the Zen Buddhists and to behave like Buddhist priests of the highest class. Thus, the missionaries transformed themselves into daimyo, striding through city streets in magnificent robes and in company with bodyguards and manservants. Beyond this, Valignano encouraged his priests to become the equivalent of Japanese warrior monks in a city that was now the headquarters of a Jesuit commercial enterprise.
Under Acquaviva and Valignano, Nagasaki became one of the most profitable centers of trade in Asia. The Society of Jesus enjoyed a monopoly on taxation of all goods that came into Japan via Nagasaki while also engaging in the Japanese silver trade, using the silver to purchase Chinese silk from Canton, the Chinese port city in which its missions were also extensively established.
With his neatly trimmed beard and thin lips typically set in a benign smile, Acquaviva looked more like a prudent merchant than he did a priest, a murderer, or a rapacious entrepreneur, let alone a military commander. However when the Portuguese, responding to Jesuit encroachment on their Asian trade, armed pirates to prey on Jesuit-financed vessels—many of them Dutch—going in and out of Nagasaki, Acquaviva made an alliance in 1595 with the Dutch States General (government) to aid in the defense of their ships. Protestant England responded by chartering the powerful East India Company in 1600 as a mercantile and mercenary pirate enterprise. Two years later, Acquaviva was instrumental in negotiating a twenty-one-year exclusive charter from the States General to create the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), the United East India Company—popularly known as the Dutch East India Company—to compete directly with the English firm. The VOC was history’s first international corporation with shares, though the controlling interest was always Jesuit. The VOC traded in all the goods of the East but made some of its best money in opium and may be seen as creating another first: the first international drug cartel.
Given the magnitude of the Jesuits’ Japanese enterprise, Father Coton’s request for a modest mission presence in New France may have struck Acquaviva as small potatoes. In any case, he put off attending to the request for a long time, and it was not until 1611, seven years after the request had been made, that Acquaviva finally dispatched just two Jesuits, Pierre Biard and Enemond Massé, to Port-Royal in Acadia. Two years later, the struggling mission they erected was raided by Englishmen from Virginia and wiped out, the missionaries eventually making their way back to France. Acquaviva made no further attempts to establish missions in North America before he died in 1615.
A decade passed before the Jesuit Order sent Massé and Fathers Charles Lalemant (as superior), and Jean de Brébeuf, along with assistants François Charton and Gilbert Buret, to set up a new mission in 1625 on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. This one lasted four years, folding when the English occupied Quebec in 1629.
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Paul Le Jeune (1591–1664), a native of the French Champagne, was ordained a priest in the Jesuit Order in 1624 and named superior of the Jesuit mission in New France in 1631, arriving in Quebec the following year. It was with his arrival that the main phase of Jesuit mission work in New France began.
Le Jeune’s approach in North America was very different from that of Acquaviva and Valignano in Japan. A priest first and foremost, Le Jeune did not integrate his missions seamlessly with French commercial enterprise, as was the case in Japan. Although Le Jeune insisted that his missionaries learn the languages and customs of the Indians—he himself became a linguist and ethnographer of prodigious achievement—he and the forty-six Jesuit fathers he sent out to establish missions were by no means anthropologists. Even less were they “adaptationists” in the mode of Father Valignano. They would learn the local languages and customs not for the purpose of fitting in, but the better to transform heathens into Christians—and not just Christians, but European Christians. For it was not Native religion per se that disturbed the missionaries, but the absence of hierarchical government among the Hurons and Montagnais. Perhaps this, more than a difference between the philosophy or character of Valignano and that of Le Jeune, is responsible for the very different approaches of the Jesuits in Japan and those in America. Valignano was quick to appreciate the hierarchy of Japanese society and was culturally prepared to adapt to it and co-opt it. Nothing, however, could prepare Le Jeune and his priests for the utter flatness of tribal organization, which was beyond their social experience and seemed to them simply chaotic. Confronted by chaos, compromise and adaptation were out of the question; therefore, Le Jeune instructed his priests to undermine the influence of the traditional medicine men, or shamans, whom they regarded as the sources of all this chaotic egalitarianism. Le Jeune’s object was to replace them with other teachers, Jesuit teachers who would impose on the villages and tribes the proper hierarchical reality of the seminary, which embodied the true hierarchy of the Christian universe. Key to this transition out of chaos was book learning, for the Indians’ oral tradition provided no central organizing authority. Indians had to be taught to read so they could read the Bible, the book.
Le Jeune’s Jesuits took on the shamans, village by village. In contrast to the free invention of the shamans’ oral traditions, the priests were able to present with an air of absolute authority the Word. Their ultimate goal was to reach the minds of the Indian children. Education had always been the chief instrument of Jesuit religious indoctrination. To get to the children, though, Le Jeune knew he had first to win over the adults. Accordingly, he and his priests fanned out to challenge and debate the shamans in the midst of every village. They staged plays in the language of the people. They overwhelmed the tribes with information and demonstration—and the better to do this, they sought to organize and consolidate the Indians into fewer and larger villages, villages in which a permanent mission, with a church and a school, could be built. To add to the cohesion and attractiveness of such villages, the Jesuits encouraged the establishment of trade. Here at last, the religious and commercial impulses that had coexisted so effectively in Japan came together in North America. However, whereas in Japan and elsewhere the Jesuits looked upon trade as a source of power and finance, working among the Indians of New France it was an aid to conversion, a means of attracting more Indians to the faith by creating a rationale for their settlement in mission towns.
As is well known, the Europeans brought with them to the New World more than their trade goods and their religion. They brought their epidemic diseases. The virulence of smallpox and the measles, two infectious agents especially devastating among Native Americans, who had never been exposed to them before contact with the outsiders, was doubtless intensified by the new order the Jesuits brought—life lived in the relatively dense population of mission towns centered on church, school, and trading post. For the missionaries, the diseases carried an unexpected dividend. Indians saw that their shamans were powerless to prevent the epidemics or to treat the sicknesses when they came. The Jesuits, who had been instrumental in bringing the diseases in the first place, had at least marginally greater success in dealing with the ailments.
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Of all the Jesuit mission towns, Sainte-Marie-au-pays-des-Hurons—St. Mary Among the Hurons—at Wendake, near modern Midland, Ontario, was considered the jewel. When it was established in 1639, it was the first non-Indian settlement in what is now Ontario, and it served as the center for Jesuit missionary operations throughout the region.
The eighteen men who first arrived in November 1639 raised a roof of birch bark upon pillars of cypress, then built up interior walls with clay. Soon, other buildings went up, including a chapel, a Jesuit residence, a kitchen, a smithy, and buildings that served traders in furs and other commodities. It was a place to preach, but it was also a living lesson to the Hurons, an example of the ordered life of a European village. Here, traders and Indian fur hunters met, and here, from time to time, soldiers were quartered.
As time went on, the mission, adjacent to a Huron village called Quieunonascaranas, led by Chief Auoindaon, drove a wedge between those Hurons who, attracted to what the mission had to offer, converted to Christianity and those who clung to traditional beliefs. Among some Hurons, the outbreak of the same diseases that undermined the reputation of the shamans also led to accusations against the missionaries. From outside the tribe, however, Sainte-Marie-au-pays-des-Hurons seemed evidence of a full alliance between the French and the Hurons—the alliance Champlain had initiated in 1609. When Iroquois—first Seneca, then Mohawks—attacked with increasing frequency and intensity during the 1640s, the Hurons, divided by the missionaries, were vulnerable. So were the missionaries. Eight of them would die in warfare between the Hurons and Iroquois, and so Sainte-Marie would become something more than a mission and trading post. It would become a center of martyrdom. Eight priests headquartered in the village, Jean de Brébeuf, Noël Chabanel, Antoine Daniel, Charles Garnier, René Goupil, Isaac Jogues, Jean de Lalande, and Gabriel Lallemant, would be made saints.
Of these, one, Isaac Jogues, earned the distinction of two martyrdoms, becoming a “living martyr” before he became a dead one.
It happened like this. A native of Orléans, France, Jogues joined the Jesuits in 1624 and in 1636 was sent to New France. In 1642, while he was en route to a Huron village, he, along with lay missionary Guillaume Couture, Father René Goupil, and some converted Hurons, was captured by Mohawk Iroquois. All suffered gruesome tortures. Goupil succumbed, earning his sainthood that very day, but Jogues, according to his own account, was treated “as a Captain—that is to say, with more fury than the rest.” One of the Indians exclaimed “that the Frenchmen ought to be caressed.”
Sooner done than it is said,—one wretch, jumping on the stage, dealt three heavy blows with sticks, on each Frenchman, without touching the Hurons. Others, meanwhile drawing their knives and approaching us,… treated me as a captain.… An old man takes my left hand and commands a captive Algonquin woman to cut one of my fingers; she turns away three or four times, unable to resolve upon this cruelty; finally, she has to obey, and cuts the thumb from my left hand; the same caresses are extended to the other prisoners. This poor woman having thrown my thumb on the stage, I picked it up and offered it to you, O my God! Remembering the sacrifices that I had presented to you for seven years past, upon the Altars of your Church, I accepted this torture as a loving vengeance for the want of love and respect that I had shown, concerning your Holy Body; you heard the cries of my soul.
It was a moment as extraordinary as it was horrific. Thinking to derive religious meaning from what was happening to him—somehow to make spiritual sense of it all—Jogues picked up his amputated thumb and offered it to God as a kind of reverse Eucharist. In celebrating Mass, he had often offered his congregants the body and blood of Christ; now he offered his body and his blood to God. Then—
One of my two French companions, having perceived me, told me that, if those Barbarians saw me keep my thumb, they would make me eat it and swallow it all raw; and that, therefore, I should throw it away somewhere. I obeyed him instantly.
The Indians would have forced Jogues into sacrilege and blasphemy, compelling him to eat his own body and blood; therefore, he ended up consecrating his sacrifice not to God, as he had intended, but to the dark void of the wilderness.
Jogues nevertheless survived both physically and spiritually. After living as a slave among the Mohawks for a time—during which he dutifully attempted to preach to them—he escaped and threw himself on the mercy of some Dutch traders (allies of the Iroquois, rivals of the French), who conveyed him to their settlement at Manhattan. He sailed from here back to France, where he was pronounced a living martyr and received from Pope Urban VIII extraordinary dispensation to continue saying Holy Mass, even though he could no longer handle the Eucharist as prescribed—with thumb and forefinger only.
Jogues soon returned to New France, and in 1646 he and Jean de Lalande deliberately ventured into the Mohawk country to serve as ambassadors among them during a time of tenuous peace between Iroquois and Huron.
Champlain had tried to integrate French traders into Indian society. The Jesuits had tried to inject French priests into that same society. The Iroquois had a different aim. They wanted to absorb other peoples. The five Iroquois tribes, especially the Mohawks, made it a practice to “adopt” those they conquered. In this way, they intended to spread their own power ever westward. By the 1640s, the Mohawks were firm trading partners with the Dutch, who had guns and other goods they wanted. What the Dutch most wanted from them was beaver. However, the beaver were all but gone from the eastern lands, the Mohawk lands, and so the Mohawks turned to the west, to the land of the Hurons, where beaver were still plentiful and were being traded by the Hurons to the French.
By the 1640s, the French were standing in the way of the Mohawks. French traders and missionaries were protecting the Hurons, keeping the Mohawks from adopting and absorbing them. The missionaries laid claim to their souls. All the Mohawks wanted was their land, but in order to hold on to the souls of the Hurons, the missionary French were unwilling to give up the bodies and the land that went with them. Isaac Jogues’s ambassadorial task, in 1646, was to reinforce the peace that had been established the year before. This meant effectively splitting up the tribes of the Iroquois, so that one tribe would not permit another to use its well-worn trails as routes by which the other might attack the Hurons. In his high-handed Jesuit way—the way Le Jeune had taught: affirmative, authoritative, absolute—Jogues lectured his Mohawk hosts and thereby, little by little, irritated them.
Maybe this alone was not sufficient to provoke them to violence, but there was more.
The crop that spring was poor, but sickness was plentiful. Jogues busied himself trying to turn Mohawk clans who were inclined to stay friendly with the French against those that wanted to break the peace. The dissension this created, combined with the air of doom caused by crop failure and epidemic disease, united the Mohawk factions on one fatal point: Jogues was obviously a witch.
On October 18–19, 1646, Fathers Isaac Jogues and Jean de Lalande were beaten to death with clubs and then beheaded by their Mohawk hosts near what is today Auriesville, New York.
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There was an attempt to preserve the peace, despite the assassination of these Jesuit ambassadors. Indeed, the Hurons hoped that the other Iroquois tribes would split with and turn against the Mohawks for what they had done. Father Paul Ragueneau, at Sainte-Marie, believed it possible that the Cayuga, Onondaga, and Oneida, the three Iroquois tribes that occupied the land between the easternmost Mohawks and the westernmost Seneca would break with both, leaving only those two tribes to contend with.
It was not an unreasonable hope. Ragueneau was aware that the so-called Iroquois League had cracks in it. The other tribes, especially the middle ones, coveted trade with the Dutch and greatly resented the monopoly the Mohawks exercised over it. The Mohawks arrogantly controlled access to the main trading post, Fort Orange (modern Albany, New York). Even so, it was not French intervention that nearly succeeded in preserving the peace. Another tribe, the Susquehannocks, who occupied the areas adjacent to the Susquehanna River in what is now New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, had a remarkable, pan-tribal vision of reaching an agreement with the Iroquois and the Hurons to end the competition in trade and open it up equally to all the tribes of the region. The Susquehannock idea was to join into a kind of cartel that would dictate terms not just to the Dutch (trading partner of the Iroquois) or the French (trading partner of the Hurons) or the Swedes on Delaware Bay (trading partner of the Susquehannocks), but to all Europeans who sought trade.
Essentially, the Susquehannocks presented the Mohawks with an ultimatum: Open up access to Fort Orange or be excluded from the cartel and count the Susquehannocks along with the French and the Hurons as enemies.
The Mohawks listened. Then again, so did the Dutch.
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The Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie (GWIC)—the Chartered West India Company, more familiarly known as the Dutch West India Company—was founded on June 3, 1621, on the very model of the VOC, the Dutch East India Company, in which the Society of Jesus played so central a role. The GWIC, however, was independent of the Jesuits and answerable only to its investors and directors, who saw in the Susquehannock threat against the Mohawks a golden opportunity to usurp trade from the French. On April 7, 1648, the directors at Fort Orange reversed their long-standing policy against arming the Indians and suddenly traded to the Mohawks some four hundred rifles. They knew full well that the warriors would use them against the French-backed Hurons and the French themselves, and because they knew this, it would be accurate to say that the GWIC employed the Mohawks as proxy troops and instruments of terror against the French and the tribe that traded with them. By July 4, 1648, a thousand Mohawks had cut their hair for war, scalps bare save for a strip down the middle, three finger widths across, running from forehead to nape.