Читать книгу Canada: the Empire of the North - Agnes C. Laut - Страница 38

On July 29, as the invaders were stealing silently along the west shore near Crown Point at night about ten o'clock, there were seen by the starlight, coming over the water with that peculiar galloping motion of paddlers dipping together, the Iroquois war canoes. Each side recognized the other, and the woods rang with shouts; but gathering clouds and the mist rising from the river screened the foes from mutual attack, though the night echoed to shout and countershout and challenge and abuse. Through the half light Champlain could see that the Iroquois were working like beavers erecting a barricade of logs. The assailants kept to their canoes under cover of bull-hide shields till daylight, when Champlain buckled on his armor—breastplate, helmet, thigh pieces—and landing, advanced. There were not less than two hundred Iroquois. Outnumbering the Hurons three times over, they uttered a jubilant whoop and came on at a rush. Champlain and his two white men took aim. The foremost chiefs dropped in their tracks. Terrified by "the sticks that thundered and spat fire," the Iroquois fell back in amaze, halted, then fled. The victory was complete; but it left as a legacy to New France the undying enmity of the Iroquois.

When Champlain came out from France in 1610, he would have repeated the raid; but a fight with invading Iroquois at the mouth of the Richelieu delayed him, and the expiration of De Monts' monopoly took him back to France.

In 1611 trade was free to all comers. Fur traders flocked to the St. Lawrence like birds of passage. The only way to secure furs for De Monts was to go higher up the river beyond Quebec; and ascending to Montreal, Champlain built a factory called Place Royale, with a wall of bricks to resist the ice jam. This was the third French fort Champlain helped to found in Canada.

Presently, on his tracks to Montreal, came a flock of free traders. When the Hurons come shooting down the foamy rapids—here, a pole-shove to avoid splitting canoes on a rock in mid-rush; there, a dexterous whirl from the trough of a back wash—the fur traders fire off their guns in welcome. The Hurons are suspicious. What means it, these white men, coming in such numbers, firing off their "sticks that thunder"? At midnight they come stealthily to Champlain's lodge to complain. Peltries and canoes, the Indians transfer themselves above the rapids, and later conduct Champlain down those same white whirlpools to the uneasy amaze of the explorer.

It is clear to Champlain he must obtain royal patronage to stem the boldness of these free traders. In France he obtains the favor of the Bourbons; and he obtains it more generously because the world of Paris has gone agog about a fabulous tale that sets the court by the ears. From the first Champlain has encouraged young Frenchmen to winter with the Indian hunters and learn the languages. Brulé is with them now. Nicholas Vignau has just come back from the Ottawa with a fairy story of a marvelous voyage he has made with the Indians through the forests to the Sea of the North—the sea where Henry Hudson, the Englishman, had perished. As the romance gains the ear of the public, the young man waxes eloquent in detail, and tells of the number of Englishmen living there. Champlain is ordered to follow this exploration up.

May, 1613, he is back at Montreal, opposite that island named St. Helen, after the frail girl who became his wife, preparing to ascend the Ottawa with four white men—among them Vignau. What Vignau's sensations were, one may guess. The vain youth had not meant his love of notoriety to carry him so far; and he must have known that every foot of the way led him nearer detection; but the liar is always a gambler with chance. Mishap, bad weather, Indian war—might drive Champlain back. Vignau assumed bold face.

The path followed was that river trail up the Ottawa which was to become the highway of empire's westward march for two and a half centuries. Mount Royal is left to the rear as the voyageurs traverse the Indian trail through the forests along the rapids to that launching place named after the patron saint of French voyageur—Ste. Anne's. The river widens into the silver expanse of Two Mountains Lake, rimmed to the sky line by the vernal hills, with a silence and solitude over all, as when sunlight first fell on face of man. Here the eagle utters a lonely scream from the top of some blasted pine; there a covey of ducks, catching sight of the coming canoes, dive to bottom, only to reappear a gunshot away. Where the voyageurs land for their nooning, or camp at nightfall, or pause to gum the splits in their birch canoes, the forest in the full flush of spring verdure is a fairy woods. Against the elms and the maples leafing out in airy tracery that reveals the branches bronze among the budding green, stand the silver birches, and the somber hemlocks, and the resinous pines. Upbursting from the mold below is another miniature forest—a forest of ferns putting out the hairy fronds that in another month will be above the height of a man. Overhead, like a flame of fire, flashes the scarlet tanager with his querulous call; or the oriole flits from branch to branch, fluting his springtime notes; or the yellow warbler balances on topmost spray to sing his crisp love song on the long journey north to nest on Hudson Bay. And over all and in all, intangible as light, intoxicating as wine, is the tang of the clear, unsullied, crystal air, setting the blood coursing with new life. Little wonder that Brulé, and Vignau, and other young men whom Champlain sent to the woods to learn wood lore, became so enamored of the life that they never returned to civilization.

Presently the sibilant rush of waters forewarns rapids. Indians and voyageurs debark, invert canoes on their shoulders, packs on back with straps across foreheads, and amble away over the portages at that voyageurs' dog-trot which is half walk, half run. So the rapids of Carillon and Long Sault are ascended. Night time is passed on some sandy shore on a bed under the stars, or under the canoes turned upside down. Tents are erected only for the commander, Champlain; and at day dawn, while the tips of the trees are touched with light and the morning mist is smoking up from the river shot with gold, canoes are again on the water and paddle blades tossing the waves behind.

The Laurentian Hills now roll from the river in purpling folds like fields of heather. The Gatineau is passed, winding in on the right through dense forests. On the left, flowing through the rolling sand hills, and joining the main river just where the waters fall over a precipice in a cataract of spray, is the Rideau River with its famous falls resembling the white folds of a wind-blown curtain. Then the voyageurs have swept round that wooded cliff known as Parliament Hill, jutting out in the river, and there breaks on view a wall of water hurtling down in shimmering floods at the Chaudière Falls. The high cliff to the left and countercurrent from the falls swirl the canoes over on the right side to the sandy flats where the lumber piles to-day defile the river. Here boats are once more hauled up for portage—a long portage, nine miles, all the way to the modern town of Aylmer, where the river becomes wide as a lake, Lake Du Chêne of the oak forests. Here camp for the night was made, and leaks in the canoes mended with resin, round fires gleaming red as an angry eye across the darkening waters, while the prowling wild cats and lynx, which later gave such good hunting in these forests that the adjoining rapids became known as the Chats, sent their unearthly screams shivering through the darkness.

Somewhere near Allumette Isle, Champlain came to an Indian settlement of the Ottawa tribe. He camped to ask for guides to go on. Old Chief Tessouat holds solemn powwow, passing the peace pipe round from hand to hand in silence, before the warriors rise to answer Champlain. Then with the pompous gravity of Abraham dickering with the desert tribes, they warn Champlain it is unsafe to go farther. Beyond the Ottawa is the Nipissing, where dwell the Sorcerer Indians—a treacherous people. Beyond the Nipissing is the great Fresh Water Sea of the Hurons. They will grant Champlain canoes, but warn him against the trip. Later the interpreter comes with word they have changed their minds. Champlain must not go on. It is too dangerous. Attack would involve war.

"What," demanded Champlain, rushing into the midst of the council tent, "not go? Why, my young man, here"—pointing to Vignau—"has gone to that country and found no danger."

What Vignau thought at that stage is not told. The Indians turned on him in fury.

"Nicholas, did you say you had visited the Nipissings?"

Vignau hems and haws, and stammers, "Yes."

"Liar," roars the chief. "You slept here every night, and if you went to the Nipissings, you went in a dream." Then to Champlain, "Let him be tortured."

Champlain took the fellow to his own tent. Vignau reiterated his story. Champlain took him back to the council. The Indians jeered his answers and tore the story he told to tatters, showing Champlain how utterly wrong Vignau's descriptions were.

That night, on promise of forgiveness, Vignau fell on his knees and confessed the imposture to Champlain. When the fur canoes came down the Ottawa to trade at Montreal, Champlain accompanied them to the St. Lawrence, and sailed for France. His exploration had been an ignominious failure.

Champlain was ever Knight of the Cross as well as explorer. He longed with the zeal of a missionary to reclaim the Indians from savagery, and at last raised funds in France to pay the expense of bringing four or five Recollets—a branch of the Franciscan Friars—to Quebec in May of 1615. With the peaked hood thrown back, the gray garb roped in at the waist, the bare feet protected only by heavy sandals, the Recollets landed at Quebec, and with cannon booming, white men all on bended knee, held service before the amazed savages.

Of the Recollets, it was agreed that Joseph le Caron should go west to the Hurons of the Sweet Water Sea. Accompanied by a dozen Frenchmen, the friar ascended the Ottawa in July, passed that Allumette Island where Vignau's lie had been confessed, and proceeded westward to the land of the Hurons. Nine days later Champlain followed with two canoes, ten Indians, and Etienne Brulé, his interpreter. In order to hold the ever-lasting loyalty of the Hurons and Algonquins in Canada, Champlain had pledged them that the French would join their twenty-five hundred warriors in a great invasion of the Iroquois to the south. It was to be a war not of aggression but of defense; for the Five Nations of the Iroquois in New York state had harried the Canadian tribes like wolves raiding a sheep pen. No Frenchman cultivating his farm patch on the St. Lawrence was safe from ambuscade; no hunter afield secure from a chance war party.

Any tourist crossing Canada to-day can trace Champlain's voyage. Where the rolling tide of the Ottawa forks at Mattawa, there comes in on the west side, through dense forests and cedar swamps, a river amber-colored with the wood-mold of centuries. This is the Mattawa. Up the Mattawa Champlain pushed his canoes westward, up the shining flood of the river yellow as gold where the waters shallow above the pebble bottom. Then the gravel grated keels. The shallows became weed-grown swamps that entangled the paddles and hid voyageur from voyageur in reeds the height of a man; and presently a portage over rocks slippery as ice leads to a stream flowing westward, opening on a low-lying, clay-colored lake—the country of the Nipissings, with whom Champlain pauses to feast and hear tales of witchcraft and demon lore, that gave them the name of Sorcerers.

In a few sleeps—they tell him—he will reach the Sweet Water Sea. The news is welcome; for the voyageurs are down to short rations, and launch eagerly westward on the stream draining Nipissing Lake—French River. This is a tricky little stream in whose sands lie buried the bodies of countless French voyageurs. It is more dangerous going with rapids than against them; for the hastening current is sometimes an undertow, which sweeps the canoes into the rapids before the roar of the waterfall has given warning. And the country is barren of game.

As they cross the portages, Champlain's men are glad to snatch at the raspberry and cranberry bushes for food; and their night-time meal is dependent on chance fishing. Indian hunters are met—three hundred of them—the Staring Hairs, so named from the upright posture of their headdress tipped by an eagle quill; and again Champlain is told he is very near the Inland Sea.

It comes as discoveries nearly always come—his finding of the Great Lakes; for though Joseph Le Caron, the missionary, had passed this way ten days ago, the zealous priest never paused to explore and map the region. You are paddling down the brown, forest-shadowed waters—long lanes of water like canals through walls of trees silent as sentinels. Suddenly a change almost imperceptible comes. Instead of the earthy smell of the forest mold in your nostrils is the clear tang of sun-bathed, water-washed rocks; and the sky begins to swim, to lose itself at the horizon. There is no sudden bursting of a sea on your view. The river begins to coil in and out among islands. The amber waters have become sheeted silver. You wind from island to island, islands of pink granite, islands with no tree but one lone blasted pine, islands that are in themselves forests. There is no end to these islands. They are not in hundreds; they are in thousands. Then you see the spray breaking over the reefs, and there is its sky line. You are not on a river at all. You are on an inland sea. You have been on the lake for hours. One can guess how Champlain's men scrambled from island to island, and fished for the rock bass above the deep pools, and ran along the water line of wave-dashed reefs, wondering vaguely if the wind wash were the ocean tide of the Western Sea.

But Champlain's Huron guides had not come to find a Western Sea. With the quick choppy stroke of the Indian paddler they were conveying him down that eastern shore of Lake Huron now known as Georgian Bay, from French River to Parry Sound and Midland and Penetang. Where these little towns to-day stand on the hillsides was a howling wilderness of forest, with never a footprint but the zigzagging trail of the Indians back from Georgian Bay to what is now Lake Simcoe.

Between these two shores lay the stamping grounds of the great Huron tribe. How numerous were they? Records differ. Certainly at no time more numerous than thirty thousand souls all told, including children. Though they yearly came to Montreal for trade and war, the Hurons were sedentary, living in the long houses of bark inclosed by triple palisades, such as Cartier had seen at Hochelaga almost a century before.

Champlain followed his supple guides along the wind-fallen forest trail to the Huron villages. Here he found the missionary. One can guess how the souls of these two heroes burned as the deep solemn chant of the Te Deum for the first time rolled through the forests of Lake Huron.

But now Champlain must to business; and his business is war. Brulé and twelve Indians are sent like the carriers of the fiery cross in the Highlands of Scotland to rally tribes of the Susquehanna to join the Hurons against the Iroquois. A wild war dance is held with mystic rites in the lodges of the Hurons; and the braves set out with Champlain from Lake Simcoe for Lake Ontario by way of Trent River. As they near what is now New York state, buckskin is flung aside, the naked bodies painted and greased, and the trail shunned for the pathless woods off the beaten track where the Indians glide like beasts of prey through the frost-tinted forest.