Canada - Sir John George Bourinot (thriller novels to read .txt) 📗

of other nations, who would not be content unless the blood of their kinsman was washed away by blood. Charity and hospitality were among the virtues of the Indian race, especially among the Iroquois, and while there was food in a village no one need starve. The purity of love was unknown to a savage nature, chiefly animated by animal passion. Prisoners were treated with great ferocity, but the Iroquois exceeded all nations in the ingenuity of torture. Stoicism and endurance, even heroic, were characteristics of Indians generally, when in the hands of their enemies, and the cruellest insult that a warrior could receive was to be called a woman. Sometimes prisoners were spared and adopted into the tribe, and among most nations the wife or mother or sister of a dead chief might demand that he be replaced by a prisoner to whom they may have taken a fancy. After torture parts {125} of the bodies of the victim would be eaten as a sort of mystic ceremony, but this custom was peculiar to the Hurons and Iroquois only. In their warlike expeditions they had no special discipline, and might be successfully met on the open field or under the protection of fortified works. Their favourite system was a surprise or furious onslaught. A siege soon exhausted their patience and resources. They were as treacherous as they were brave. In the shades of the forest, whose intricacies and secrets they understood so well, they were most to be feared. Behind every tree might lurk a warrior, when once a party was known to be on the warpath. To steal stealthily at night through the mazes of the woods, tomahawk their sleeping foes, and take many scalps, was the height of an Indian's bliss. Curious to say, the Indians took little precautions to guard against such surprises, but thought they were protected by their manitous or guardian spirits.

A spirit of materialism prevailed in all their superstitions. They had no conception of one all-pervading, omniscient divine being, governing and watching over humanity, when the missionaries first came among them. It was only by making use of their belief in the existence of a supreme chief for every race of animals, that the priests could lead their converts to the idea of a Great Spirit who ruled all creation. In their original state of savagery or barbarism, any conception an Indian might have of a supernatural being superior to himself was frittered away by his imagining that the whole material world was under the influence of innumerable mysterious {126} powers. In the stirring of the leaves, in the glint of the sunbeam amid the foliage, in the shadow on his path, in the flash of the lightning, in the crash of the thunder, in the roar of the cataract, in the colours of the rainbow, in the very beat of his pulse, in the leap of the fish, in the flight of the birds, he saw some supernatural power to be evoked. The Indian companions of Champlain, we remember, threw tobacco to the genius or Manitou of the great fall of the Ottawa. The Manitou of the Algonquins, and the Okies or Otkons of the Hurons and Iroquois were not always superior, mysterious beings endowed with supernatural powers, like the Algonquin Manabozho, the Great Hare, the king of all animals; or a deified hero, like Hiawatha, the founder of the Iroquois confederacy, and Glooscap, the favourite of Micmac legends. The Manitou or Oki might even be a stone, a fish-bone, a bird's feather, or a serpent's skin, or some other thing in the animate or inanimate world, revealed to a young man in his dreams as his fetich or guardian through life. Dreams were respected as revelations from the spirit world. As Champlain tells us, during his first expedition to Lake Champlain, the Indians always questioned him as to his dreams, and at last he was able to tell them that he had seen in a vision some Iroquois drowning in the lake, and wished to help them, but was not permitted to do so by the Indians of his own party. This dream, in their opinion, was a portent in their favour.

A fetich became at last even the object of an Indian's worship--to be thanked, flattered, {127} expostulated with, according to the emergency. It can be easily seen that in this Indian land of mysterious agencies, of manitous and spirits, the medicine-man and conjuror exercised a great power among old and young, chiefs and women. He had to be consulted in illness, in peace, in war, at every moment of importance to individual or nation. Even in case of illness and disease he found more value in secret communications with the supernatural world, and in working on the credulity of his tribesmen, than in the use of medicines made from plants. The grossest superstition dominated every community. All sorts of mystic ceremonies, some most cruel and repugnant to every sense of decency, were usual on occasions when supernatural influences had to be called into action.

Every respect was paid to the dead, who were supposed to have gone on a journey to a spirit land. Every one had such a separate scaffold or grave, generally speaking, as Champlain saw among the Ottawas, but it was the strange custom of the Hurons to collect the bones of their dead every few years and immure them in great pits or ossuaries with weirdlike ceremonies very minutely described in the _Relations_. In a passage previously quoted Champlain gave credit to the Indians for believing in the immortality of the soul. The world to which the Indian's imagination accompanied the dead was not the Heaven or Hell of the Jew or Christian. Among some tribes there was an impression rather than a belief that a distinction was made in the land of the Ponemah or Hereafter between the great or {128} useful, and the weak or useless; but generally it was thought that all alike passed to the Spirit Land, and carried on their vocations as in life. It was a Land of Shades where trees, flowers, animals, men, and all things were spirits.


"By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews
In vestments for the-chase arrayed
The hunter still the deer pursues,
The hunter and the deer a shade."


[1] See Horatio Hale's "Fall of Hochelaga," in _Journal of American Folklore_, Cambridge, Mass., 1894.

[2] In this necessarily very imperfect description of the organisation and customs of the Five Nations I depend mainly on those valuable and now rare books, _The League of the Iroquois_, and _Houses and Home Life of the Aborigines_, by Lewis H. Morgan. The reader should also consult Horatio Hale's _Iroquois Book of Rites_.



IX.


CONVENTS AND HOSPITALS--VILLE-MARIE--MARTYRED MISSIONARIES--VICTORIOUS IROQUOIS--HAPLESS HURONS.

(1635-1652.)

A scene that was witnessed on the heights of Quebec on a fine June morning, two hundred and eighty-three years ago, illustrated the spirit that animated the founders of Canada. At the foot of a cross knelt the Governor, Charles Hault de Montmagny, Knight of Malta, who had come to take the place of his great predecessor, Samuel Champlain, whose remains were buried close by, if indeed this very cross did not indicate the spot. Jesuits in their black robes, soldiers in their gay uniforms, officials and inhabitants from the little town below, all followed the example of Montmagny, whose first words were, according to Father Le Jeune, the historian of those days: "Behold the first cross that I have seen in this country, let us worship the crucified Saviour in his image." Then, this act of devotion accomplished, the procession entered the {130} little church dedicated by Champlain to Notre Dame de la Recouvrance, where the priests solemnly chanted the _Te Deum_ and offered up prayers for the King of France.

The Church was first, the State second. After the service the new governor entered the fort of St. Louis, only a few steps from the sacred building, received the keys amid salutes of cannon and musketry, and was officially installed as head of the civil and military government of Canada, at this time controlled by the Company of the Hundred Associates. Then he was called upon to act as god-father for a dying Indian who desired baptism. In the smoky cabin packed with Indians Montmagny stood by the earnest Jesuit and named the Algonquin Joseph. "I leave you to think," says Father Le Jeune, "how greatly astonished were these people to see so much crimson, so many handsomely dressed persons beneath their bark roofs."

During the period of which I am now writing we see the beginnings of the most famous educational and religious institutions of the country. The Hotel Dieu was founded in 1639, by the Soeurs Hospitalieres from the convent of St. Augustine, in Dieppe, through the benefactions of the Duchess d'Aiguillon, the niece of Cardinal Richelieu. Rich, fascinating, and beautiful women contributed not only their fortunes but their lives to the service of the Church. Marie Madeleine de Chauvigny, who belonged to a noble family in Normandy, married at a very early age a M. de la Peltrie, who left her a young widow of twenty-two years of age, without {132} any children. Deeply attached to her religion from her youth, she decided to devote her life and her wealth to the establishment of an institution for the instruction of girls in Canada. Her father and friends threw all possible obstacles in the way of what they believed was utter folly for a gentle cultured woman, but she succeeded by female wiles and strategy in carrying out her plans. On the first of August, 1639, she arrived at Quebec, in company with Marie Guyard, the daughter of a silk manufacturer of Tours, best known to Canadians as Mere de l'Incarnation, the mother superior of the Ursulines, whose spacious convent and grounds now cover seven acres of land on Garden Street in the ancient capital. She had a vision of a companion who was to accompany her to a land of mists and mountains, to which the Virgin beckoned as the country of her future life-work. Canada was the land and Madame de la Peltrie the companion foreshadowed in that dream which gave Marie Guyard a vocation which she filled for thirty years with remarkable fidelity and ability.

Madame de la Peltrie and Marie Guyard were accompanied by Mdlle. de Savonniere de la Troche, who belonged to a distinguished family of Anjou, and was afterwards known in Canada as Mere de St. Joseph, and also by another nun, called Mere Cecile de Sainte-Croix. A Jesuit, Father Vimont, afterwards superior, and author of one of the _Relations_, and the three Hospital sisters, arrived in the same ship.

The company landed and "threw themselves on their knees, blessed the God of Heaven, and kissed {133} the earth of their near country, as they now called it." A _Te Deum_ followed in the Jesuits' church which was now completed on the heights near their college, commenced as early as 1635--one year before the building of Harvard College--through the generosity of Rene Rohault, eldest son of the Marquis de Gamache. The first visit of the nuns was to Sillery, four miles to the west of Quebec, on the north bank of the river, where an institution had been established for the instruction of the Algonquin and other Indians, through the liberality of Noel Brulart de Sillery, a Knight of Malta, and a member of an influential French family,