Читать книгу Old Province Tales - Archibald McKellar MacMechan - Страница 7

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n the present year of grace 1912 there may be seen any day in the streets of Halifax a man of threescore and ten whom you would remember without difficulty the next time you met him. In spite of his seventy years and his thick, white, close-cropped hair and moustache, it would be a misuse of words to call him old. Over six feet tall, erect, spare, athletic, with an open-air complexion, he might easily be taken for a half-pay officer still hale and vigorous. By profession he is a lawyer still in active practice, and his name is prominent in directorates of banks and joint-stock companies. His ample means permit the pleasure of foreign travel, but he prefers to a winter in Rome a long summer in his camp beside a salmon river. His favourite reading is theology and church history. Altogether, John Y. Payzant is the sort of man you would turn round in the street to look at on his own account. If you knew how he links the present with the heroic age of Canada, you would not be content with a single glance.

His grandfather, Louis Payzant, as a boy of ten, was a prisoner in Quebec in 1759, and witnessed from the ramparts the world-famous battle on the Plains of Abraham, which decided the fate of America. Three generations span the intervening century and a half. The Payzants are a long-lived race.

The story begins in Normandy, in the ancient city of Caen, at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Payzant, as you might imagine, is a French name, and the earliest traceable bearer of it, belonging to the obnoxious faction of the Huguenots, was forced, with thousands of other good Frenchmen, to abjure his faith or flee the country. He took refuge in the Island of Jersey and there apparently prospered. In the year 1754 his son Louis, who owned three ships, sold two and betook himself in the third, with his young wife, little sons and all his worldly goods, to the new ‘boom’ town of Halifax, in Nova Scotia, just planted amid the spruce forest on the shore of Chebucto Harbour. He brought with him letters of introduction from Pownall to Governor Lawrence, the man who expelled the Acadians. Lawrence, in turn, passed him on to Colonel Sutherland, who was in charge of the German settlement of Lunenburg, farther down the coast, near the beautiful Mahone Bay, which is currently believed to have an island in it for every day in the year.

One of these islands, now called Covey’s, the newcomer selected for his home and set to work with energy to make it habitable. Two years went swiftly by. The first rude shelter for the wood-cutters, a sort of brush wigwam, had given place to a solid log cabin. Bales and boxes of goods for trading with the Indians had been brought and stored within it. But this was not sufficient for the needs of the trader and the head of a family. A large two-storey frame house had soon been begun, a clearing had been made and sown with fall wheat, and all went well until the spring of 1756. The year before, Braddock had been routed with great slaughter on the banks of the Monongahela, and the Acadians had been deported from Nova Scotia. Halifax was put in a posture of defence and her first privateers had sailed out past Thrum Cap in quest of lawful prizes. The Seven Years’ War had begun and was to drag into its fatal net this prosperous beginning of a pioneer’s home near the border of the western wilderness.

It was the eighth of May, 1756. All over the clearing among the raw stumps the wheat was springing green. The men at work on the new house had gone to their homes in Lunenburg, three miles away. Peaceful night had fallen, and the Payzant family were getting ready for bed, when they heard a strange noise not far away. What could it mean? The father thought he knew what it betokened. There had been serious disaffection in the new German settlement of Lunenburg, on the hog’s-back headland overlooking Malagash harbor just round the corner from Mahone. Unprepared for the rigours of life in the wilderness, these peasants from the Palatinate had thought themselves wronged and had risen in some sort of half-hearted, futile rebellion. Payzant, as a friend of the Government, had been warned to be on his guard, and had been given licence to fire upon any disturbers of the peace. Little dreaming that he had to do with an Indian war party, he stepped to the door with his musket and fired in the air to frighten the intruders. The flash from the muzzle in the darkness revealed his position to the enemy; in answer, a shattering volley rang out on the night and stretched him, a dying man, across his own threshold. His wife rushed out to catch him as he fell. He could only gasp out a few half-choked words in French, ‘My heart is growing cold—the Indians—,’ before the spirit passed and the rush of the whooping savages drove his wife back into the house. Somehow she managed to bolt and bar the door, which was stout enough to resist all efforts to break it in.

Without warning, in a moment of time, irreparable calamity had befallen the settler’s home; the father was dead, and the helpless widow and her children were huddled together in an inner room, unable to realize the tragedy, quaking with fear, and not knowing what minute the murderers would burst in upon them, tomahawk and scalping-knife in hand.

While they awaited their doom, the Indians, baffled at the main entrance, managed to get into the room occupied by a serving-woman and her child. Her they did to death in some horrible unknown fashion, tore off her scalp, and dashed out the baby’s brains. On the other side of the partition, Marie Payzant and her children heard the terrifying uproar of the struggle, the yells of the Indians, the agonized shrieks of the poor creature with death before her eyes, her vain appeals for help to her master and mistress: ‘Mr. Payzant! Mrs. Payzant!’

When these cries ceased, the Indians renewed their efforts to break into the last poor refuge, but apparently the stout, well-mortised logs of the cabin still defied them. At last they made ready to burn it down, and then the despairing woman gave the word to her eldest son, Philip, to unbar the door. He drew the bolt and the Indians rushed in.

At that moment the mother at least must have felt the bitterness of death, but, strange to say, the Indians spared her and her children. One would think that scalps would be as profitable as prisoners, and much easier to transport, and, further, that the savage blood-thirst would not be so soon quenched. Their hands were still red with the blood of one woman and her child; but these others they did not attempt to harm. Philip, the eldest boy, sprang on a table, shook his fist at them and defied them, and yet they did not touch him. Who can understand the workings of the savage mind? One horrid detail of this time has been transmitted. As a sort of diabolical joke, the Indians mimicked the cries of the poor serving-woman and her vain appeals to ‘Mr. Payzant! Mrs. Payzant!’ Not blood but plunder seems to have been their object, after they got into the house, and they set to work to sack the trader’s stores.

That scene of pillage and confusion was never forgotten by the boy of seven years. When he was ninety-five, his body bent and his mental faculties lulled into passivity by his great age, he was roused to intense excitement by his memories of that tragic night. Raising himself to his full height, he cried to his questioner:

‘Oh, I see them! I hear them! Hewing down the boxes, hewing down the boxes.’

The trader’s store would offer the kind of spoil most desired by the savages. They hastily ransacked the house and took their plunder to the canoes, along with their prisoners, the new-made widow and the four fatherless children.

One more victim remained to be sacrificed. Earlier in the day the war party had surprised two settlers, father and son, on Rous’ Island, at the other side of Mahone Bay. They killed the father and forced the boy to guide them among the maze of islands to Payzant’s home. Although they had promised to spare the boy’s life and let him go unharmed, they murdered him by the waterside in the sight of Marie Payzant and her children, and took his scalp. Colonel Sutherland and his rangers were in Lunenburg, only three miles away, and he might have given the alarm. When the soldiers came next morning they found the poor boy’s dead body with the hands still bound. What he must have endured that last day of his life from the hour of his father’s death till he saw the lifted tomahawks is beyond all telling. After the last murder, the Indians fired the plundered cabin and pushed off in the darkness. The last sight the captives had of their home was a mass of leaping flames against the gloom. Their feelings anyone with a heart can call up. Of Marie Payzant, widowed in an instant, stunned by the scenes she had just witnessed, carried off to an unknown fate, with the mother’s time of trial impending, it is recorded that ‘tears would not come to her relief.’

Mahone Bay is about four hundred miles from the city of Quebec, as you measure with a ruler and dividers across the map. The weary road the captives travelled to reach Quebec was well-nigh twice as long.

During the night of the 8th-9th of May the war party, with their prisoners, or ‘ransomers,’ as they were then called, paddled across the bay to where the pretty summer town of Chester now stands. From this point to the head-waters of the St. Croix is a twelve-mile stretch through the woods. The little stream known as Gold River may have shortened the portage to the Ponhook Lakes. Still, how they managed to transport their canoes, their plunder, and their captives so quickly through the forest remains something of a mystery. Evidently the road was known to them, if they were not actually returning by the way they had come, and they no longer needed a guide. It is also plain from their haste that they feared pursuit. On the following night, twenty-four hours after the descent upon the Payzant household, the canoes were gliding past Fort Edward, where the St. Croix empties into the Avon, fifty miles away. This was a British fort, on the high hill above Windsor, keeping watch over the wasted Acadian parishes from which Murray had swept the habitants the year before. As they floated by in silence, the captives could see against the sky the silhouette of the unsuspecting sentry pacing the ramparts. Friends and safety were near, but the captives dared not give the alarm. A tomahawk, flourished over their heads, warned them silently what their fate would be upon the faintest outcry. The canoes drew in close to the bank and so passed unseen and unchallenged in the darkness. When the day broke they were out of sight on their way to Cape Chignecto, fifty miles further on. Only when they reached this point did they make their first halt. They had covered a hundred miles without sleep or rest, and probably with little food. It was this extraordinary swiftness of movement that made an Indian raid so incalculable and so feared.

No record has been preserved of the time occupied by the long journey to Quebec. If the Indians succeeded in covering the fifty miles between the island of massacre and Fort Edward in the short period of twenty-four hours, they might, at this rate, have reached their ultimate destination in a fortnight. But they would not proceed at such a rate; this first stage was a forced march through an enemy’s country, where they were always in danger. When they reached French territory they would travel more slowly. They must have halted for some time at St. Ann’s, the present Fredericton, and the whole good summer season was before them.

Their route is worth considering, for they followed an ancient and well-used system of inland waterways which connected the St. Lawrence and the interior of the continent with the sea. From Chignecto, they would paddle up to Petitcodiac, past the site of busy Moncton; then they would portage from its head-waters to the source of the Kennebecasis, and, favoured by current, would soon reach its junction with the beautiful River St. John. This magnificent stream is four hundred miles from mouth to source. From its head there was an inconsiderable portage to the Chaudière, which empties into the St. Lawrence from the south bank, almost opposite the city of Quebec.

One pathetic little incident of the journey has been handed down. Among the plunder, Marie Payzant recognized the very shoes she had worn as a happy bride in far-off peaceful Jersey. She may have danced in them at her wedding. She had brought them with her across the Atlantic and treasured them with a woman’s love of keepsakes all these years. By some strange chance they had escaped the burning house; and now the widow saw them again, with what feelings may be imagined. She begged her captors for them. The Indians considered them not worth taking farther, and flung them overboard, ‘with a loud, insulting laugh.’

At the French post of St. Ann’s a new trial awaited her. Up to this time, though husbandless and a prisoner, Marie Payzant had her children with her; now she was separated from them and sent on by herself to Quebec. Some time after reaching the city her child was born, a second daughter, who was named Lizette; but months went by without word of what had befallen the others. At last news came that two were in the hands of the French, but that two were still detained by the Indians, for adoption into the tribe. The two white children were to fill the places of children who had been killed by the English. One was the mother’s namesake, Marie. Their release was effected with no little difficulty. It was only when Bishop Pontbriand, in response to the mother’s entreaties, directed the priest at St. Ann’s to refuse the Indians absolution that the obstinate savages surrendered the children.

For some months they must have run wild about the post or in the forest, and certain childish recollections of that stay in St. Ann’s have been transmitted. When asked what they were fed on, old Louis Payzant exclaimed:

‘Fed us upon! Why, sometimes bread, and sometimes nothing.’

One night his piece of bread was so bad as to be uneatable and he threw it away. No more was given him; that night he must go hungry. But the Indian’s son, of his own age, was given for supper a larger piece than he could eat. As he fell asleep, the bread slipped from his hand, and young Payzant devoured it. In the morning, the little Indian missed his breakfast and complained to his father, who was just setting out to fish. The old Indian was furious, and threatened young Payzant with some dire punishment, but he never lived to carry out his threat. That day he got drunk, fell out of his canoe, and was drowned. Louis Payzant also remembered being carried through the woods by this Indian, alternately with his own son. ‘He would take me by the shoulders and swing me round upon his back, while the other youngster trotted behind.’ He had also memories, which plainly could not have belonged to the spring season, of going in the canoe to gather berries. From all that can be learned, it seems that the Indians treated the white children like their own, no better and no worse.

Altogether, the separation of Marie Payzant from her children lasted seven months. At the end of that time they, with other luckless British prisoners, were brought in to Quebec. When Marie heard of their arrival she was eager with all a mother’s impatience to go to them at once. But this was not permitted. There were other captive women as well as she, awaiting the coming of their children. She was forced to wait at the door of her lodgings, under military guard, while the troop of little ‘ransomers’ was brought up from which to choose her own. It was no hard task, though doubtless they were an unkempt band, in sore need of a mother’s care. The tears that would not come to her relief, when the first stunning blow fell, now flowed free as she strained her darlings to her breast.

So there the family remained more than four years, until after the fall of Quebec. They lived through the times of sickness, cold, and privation, and the terrors of the English bombardment which laid the city in ruins. Apparently the women and children were not, like the men, kept in close confinement in the French soldiers’ barracks. There was no danger that they would escape. The children picked up the language and perhaps some education. When a grandfather, Louis Payzant would take his grandson on his knee and teach him the Lord’s Prayer in French. No doubt the boys had the run of the town, and with many of the citizens saw from the walls the two-hours’ fight of September 13 and the retreat of the white-coat battalions on the gate of St. Louis. A family tradition tells that a French soldier tried to prevent young Louis from getting a place on the wall, but the boy evaded him. Six days after the battle, the prison doors in Quebec opened for all the captives, and the worst of the Payzants’ troubles were over.

By August, 1761, Marie Payzant was back in Halifax with her five children, receiving official permission to dispose of the tragic island in Mahone Bay, and obtaining grants of land about Falmouth, where her descendants dwell to this day.

As soon as the news of the Payzant killing had been brought into Lunenburg, Sutherland had dispatched an officer and thirty men to make sure of the facts and, if possible, punish the raiders. They found only pitiable corpses with the scalps torn off and the smoking ruins of the settler’s home. The blow had been struck without warning and the assailants had vanished without leaving behind them the slightest trace as to whence they had come or whither they had gone. Sutherland reported to Lawrence, and the insolent daring of the Indians enraged the governor, at no time the mildest of men. Six days after the massacre he issued a proclamation, protesting indignantly against the way the Micmacs had broken their treaty of four years previous, ‘expressly against the law of arms,’ as Fluellen would say. He therefore authorised and commanded all King George’s liege subjects to ‘annoy, distress, take and destroy the Indians’ inhabiting the different parts of the Province; and, in order to make war support war, he offered the substantial sum of thirty pounds for every Indian prisoner about the age of sixteen brought in alive, twenty-five for his scalp, and the same amount for every Indian woman or child brought in alive. These bounties seem excessive, but probably they represent the current rates for such commodities on both the French and the English side. Lawrence was probably mistaken in thinking that the Indians were Micmacs belonging to the province. The fact that they needed a guide to the house of a settler who had been in the province for two years, and that the two Payzant children were detained near St. Ann’s, would indicate that the war-band were Malicetes raiding across from French territory, and that they had their hunting-grounds about the upper reaches of the St. John.

Apparently not many pounds were paid in this gruesome way suggested by Lawrence. Years afterwards, Louis Payzant recognized in his store in Halifax a member of the very war party which had descended on his home in blood and fire.

‘You are one of the Indians who killed my father,’ he said.

‘Well,’ was the reply, ‘I am, but it was war then.’

This is what an Indian raid meant. The early pages of Canadian history are fairly free from such blood-stains, but for many years the western frontier of the American colonies presented countless scenes of similar murder and rapine.

As near as can be sifted out from written record and oral tradition, this is the truth about the Payzant killing. Good old Silas Rand, the apostle of the Micmacs, took down the tale from the lips of Louis Payzant himself in his ninety-fifth year, and on this account the present narrative is mainly based. Time has raised a goodly growth of myth around the original facts. It is commonly believed that Marie Payzant was well treated during her captivity at Quebec because she was the sister of Montcalm; and in Lunenburg is still to be seen a stone, marked with an outspread bloody hand, the sign-manual of one of the murderers.