At War With the Mohawk, 1609–10
They were sick and tired of the wars they have had with one another for more than fifty years…. They have spoken to me about it many times, and have often asked my advice, which was that they should make peace with one another, and we would assist them.
—Champlain on Indian Wars1
ON JUNE 5, 1609, Champlain’s Indian allies reported a sail on the St. Lawrence River, heading upstream toward Quebec. The settlers ran to the water’s edge and saw a small shallop with a big French ensign flying bravely from her masthead. She worked her way past the Île d’Orléans, turned inward to the landing, and a young French captain sprang ashore. He introduced himself as the sieur Claude Godet des Maretz, a high-spirited nobleman from the province of Perche, and another son-in-law of the prolific Pont-Gravé. With him were master Pierre Chauvin de la Pierre, pilot Jean Routier, and a crew of French matelots, who began to unload provisions.2
The handful of survivors rejoiced in their arrival. They were relieved to hear that Pont-Gravé was in Tadoussac, with men and supplies to replace their heavy losses through the winter. “This news made me happy,” Champlain wrote with his usual understatement. “It brought the relief that we had hoped.” Instantly he flew into action. Godet des Maretz was asked to take over as acting commander at Quebec. Champlain commandeered the shallop and sailed downstream as fast as the wind and current could carry him.3
In Tadoussac harbor he met Pont-Gravé and heard the latest news from France. It was very mixed. As expected, the company’s one-year monopoly of the fur trade had not been renewed and a swarm of free traders was expected on the river. The investors had raised money for supplies and settlers, but only enough to increase the population at Quebec to sixteen for the next winter, a dangerously small number. The sieur de Mons also sent a small detachment of soldiers to keep order in the settlement.4
Then came the bad news. Pont-Gravé delivered a private letter from de Mons. Champlain tore open the seal and was shocked to read its tidings. He was to be relieved of command! De Mons ordered him to return to France in the fall of 1609 and report on Quebec. Pont-Gravé was instructed to work at Tadoussac through the summer, and take command in Quebec through the following winter. The letter fell on Champlain like a blow. What did it mean? After Duval’s conspiracy and the execution of the ringleader, had de Mons lost confidence in his young lieutenant? Or did he merely mean to rotate his leaders and give him a well-earned leave? Either way, Champlain was to be replaced.5
Other leaders would have been shattered by this news. Some might have resigned on the spot, but Champlain responded in a different way. He was still in command, and could not return to France until the trading ships went home at the end of the summer. In the meantime he decided to center his thoughts on the next several months.
Champlain had a very large purpose in mind. During the winter, when the settlement at Quebec was near collapse, he had made an ambitious plan for the next season. A major threat to his design for New France was incessant warfare among Indian nations in the St. Lawrence Valley. Much of it pitted the Iroquois League, and especially the Mohawk nation, against the Algonquin and Montagnais to the north, the Huron to the west, and the Etchemin to the east.6 The consequences of this endemic warfare were profoundly hostile to Champlain’s vision for North America. As long as it continued, there could be no peace in the St. Lawrence Valley, no security for trade, and no hope for his dream of American Indians and Europeans living together in peace.
Champlain proposed to deal with the problem in several ways. He believed that a major cause of war was fear, and his remedy was to seek peace through diplomacy. To that end he built alliances among the Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron, and other nations in Acadia and Norumbega. But a major problem remained with the Iroquois League, the Mohawk in particular. One historian of the Iroquois observes that by the start of the seventeenth century they were “at odds with all their neighbors—Algonquin and Huron to the north, Mahican on the east, and Susquehannock to the south.” Many Indian nations in the northeast were at war with some of their neighbors; the Iroquois were at war with nearly all of theirs. They had a reputation for skill in war, among many warrior nations. And they were also known for cruelty, in a very cruel world.7
In 1608, Champlain had promised to aid the Indian nations of the St. Lawrence Valley when they were attacked by the Iroquois. At the same time, he was aware that the Iroquois were victims as well as aggressors, and he sent peace feelers to them through a captive woman of the Mohawk nation whom he had protected in Quebec with that purpose in mind. These overtures went nowhere. Mohawk war parties continued to attack the St. Lawrence Indians.8
Champlain’s sketch of an Indian ally “showing the dress of these people when going to war,” and the “way they arm themselves,” with a bow in one hand and a war club in the other. He often showed Indian women with paddle and papoose, and wrote that Algonquins and Montagnais “both great nations,” appeared much the same that way.
By the spring of 1609, Champlain had come to the conclusion that peace could be achieved only by concerted military action against the Mohawk. He did not intend a war of conquest. Rather, he was thinking of one or two sharp blows by a coalition of Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron, with French support. The object was to deter Mohawk attacks by raising the cost of raiding to the north. In that way Champlain hoped to break the cycle of violence and bring peace to the great valley.9
At the same time, Champlain also hoped to expand trading relations with many Indian nations, not primarily for trade itself but for a larger purpose. He thought of trade as an instrument of peace. American Indians also shared that belief. Ethnographer Bruce Trigger writes that “in historical times, all neigh boring tribes either were at war or traded with one another.” Historian William Fenton quotes an Indian who said, “Trade and peace we take to be the same thing.”10
Champlain was determined to move forward with this plan in the spring of 1609, despite his heavy losses. After a cruel winter, he commanded a grand total of four able-bodied survivors in Quebec, but Pont-Gravé had brought more men. When the two French leaders met at Tadoussac on June 7, Champlain laid out a bold plan for “certain explorations in the interior,” and made clear his intention to enter “the Iroquois country,” with “our allies the Montagnais.” Both men knew that this plan would mean a fight with some of the most formidable warriors in North America. It was an act of breathtaking audacity, considering the small size of Champlain’s force. But what Champlain lacked in mass, he made up in acceleration. He also had the arquebus, and the Mohawk did not. The sieur de Mons had sent him a few good men who were trained in the use of that difficult weapon. Champlain also had many Indian allies, with hundreds of warriors.
Pont-Gravé listened to the proposal and gave his full support. These two old shipmates were always able to work together. They agreed that Champlain would take a shallop and twenty men—a large number for exploration, but very small for a military campaign against the Mohawk nation. He would gain the numbers that he needed from Indian allies in the St. Lawrence Valley.11 Champlain hurried back to the shallop. “I left Tadoussac at once,” he wrote, “and went back to Quebec.” For two weeks the crew of the shallop were busy ferrying men and supplies for the settlement and for the mission to the country of the Iroquois.12
On June 18, 1609, all was ready. Champlain left Quebec with his twenty men, and pointed the bow of his shallop upstream. A large body of Montagnais warriors followed in their canoes. From the start he combined boldness with prudence—the secret of his long career. “As for the river,” he wrote, “it is dangerous in many places, on account of the shoals and rocks which lie in it.” The shallop sailed slowly against the strong spring current, and he kept leadsmen constantly at work, sounding the depth of the river. Champlain probably rigged a crow’s nest for himself and studied the river with close attention. He discovered its main channel on the south side, about a mile from shore.13
The great river never ceased to fascinate Champlain. Beyond the narrows of Quebec, he wrote, “it begins to broaden, in some places to a league or a league and a half [three to five miles] across. The banks of the river were very handsome … the countryside becomes more and more beautiful as you advance … covered with great high forests.” He sampled the soil and found it deep, soft, and fertile. When he worked ashore, some of the crew went fishing and caught “great varieties of fish, both those we have in France, and others we do not have.” The best were saved as specimens for the king’s collection. The rest went into the pot.14
Indian canoes were adapted to local conditions. This seventeenth-century manuscript shows an Inuit sealskin kayak with a covered deck, and birchbark canoes of the Montagnais (lower St. Lawrence), Têtes-de-Boule (St. Maurice River), Amiakoues (Ottawa), and Algonquin (upper St. Lawrence). The Iroquois made big, heavy elm canoes.
Thirty miles upstream from Quebec, Champlain came to a place that he called Sainte-Croix, and he found two or three hundred Indians, mostly Huron and Algonquin of the Petite-Nation, who were coming down the river to meet him. They were interested in Champlain, and were thinking about the possibility of going with him to the “country of the Iroquois,” but they were not sure about this extraordinary Frenchman, and they wanted to know more.15
Champlain went ashore and presented himself to two leading chiefs: Iroquet of the Algonquin Petite-Nation and Ochasteguin of the Arendarhonon Huron. What followed was a meeting that combined spontaneity and ritual in high degree. The French and Indian leaders exchanged visits and smoked ceremonial pipes together. Champlain explained his plan to enter the Iroquois country, and left the two Indian leaders to talk it over. They did so, and returned his visit. The two Algonquin and Huron leaders came out to Champlain’s shallop in the river and climbed aboard, while hundreds of Indian warriors gathered along the water’s edge and watched intently. Many had never seen a European before.16
On board the shallop, more words were spoken. The two chiefs brought out their pipes again and began “smoking and meditating” in silence. Suddenly they stood up, turned to the warriors on the riverbank, and shouted that Champlain had come to help them against their blood-enemies. The chiefs proposed that everyone should sail downstream to Quebec.
The Indians wanted very much to observe Champlain himself and judge the strength of his vital spirit, which the Huron called orenda. They believed that all natural things had orenda in different degrees. It was a form of spiritual power that could be used for good and evil. Good hunters had strong orenda, more so than the animals they killed. Great warriors had very strong orenda. An important question for Iroquet and Ochasteguin was about the quality of Champlain’s orenda. Was it strong? Was it good?17
The chiefs made a surprising request. They asked Champlain to order the firing of arquebuses. It was done, and the Indians responded with “loud shouts of astonishment.” One ethnohistorian has written of the Indian belief that “orenda can reside in an object, and clearly guns had power.”18 After the firing of the weapons, Champlain made a speech, urging the Indians to observe that he and his companions came as warriors, not traders. They brought weapons, not trade goods. With a broad gesture of hospitality, he invited all the Indians to visit Quebec as his guest. It was an act of extravagant generosity—and a splendid display of orenda.19
All parties quickly agreed, and off they went downstream to Quebec. Together they made a brave sight on the beautiful river: Champlain and the French in their shallop with their arquebuses, burnished armor, plumed helmets, feathered hats, bright ensigns, streaming banners, and all the panoply of European warfare. Around them were Indians of many nations, three or four hundred Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron in an armada of more than a hundred war canoes. Some of the canoes were stained in bright colors. Others were marked with vivid symbols of enemies killed and scalped.20
When they reached Quebec, Champlain sent an urgent message to Pont-Gravé at Tadoussac, urging him to come quickly with all the strength he could muster and as much food as he could spare. A few days later Pont-Gravé appeared with two shallops “filled with men.” Everyone joined in a large feast and five or six days of ritual dancing. Every element of this event was a test of Champlain’s orenda. He and Pont-Gravé were well aware that rituals were centrally important in these affairs, so they stinted at nothing. The tone of Champlain’s account suggests that these two gregarious French leaders vastly enjoyed themselves and delighted in the bonhomie of their Indian allies.21
After the dancing was done, the French and Indians departed together from Quebec on June 28, 1609. Two French shallops were now filled with heavily armed men, and many canoes were crowded with hundreds of Indian warriors. Champlain was pleased with the numbers, but he worried about the calendar. Time was getting away from him. By July 1, they were only thirty miles upstream at the place called Sainte-Croix. Pont-Gravé could not stay much longer. He was running a trading post at Tadoussac, and Quebec had to be protected. At Sainte-Croix the French leaders had a conference. They agreed that Pont-Gravé should go back to Tadoussac, and some of the soldiers should return to Quebec.22
Champlain continued with the Indians and twelve Frenchmen. On July 3, they passed Trois-Rivières, “a very beautiful country,” and sailed on to Lac Saint-Pierre, twenty miles long and nine miles wide, with beautiful meadows that held more game and fish than any other part of the great valley. They were in a no man’s land between the Iroquois and the northern nations, a place “where no Indians live, by reason of the wars.”23 By July 5 or 6, they reached the mouth of what Champlain called the Rivière du Yroquois, today’s Richelieu River. Here they stopped for two days and refreshed themselves with venison, birds, and fish that the Indians gave the French as gifts. While they rested they began to reflect on the difficulties that lay ahead for them. Champlain and his allies were about to enter “the country of the Iroquois.”24 They were marching on the Mohawks, one of the most powerful of the Iroquois people, and “keepers of the eastern door” to Iroquoia. Their territory ran as far east as the Hudson River and the lakes above it. In the Iroquois League the Mohawk were the “eldest brother,” first among equals. The unwritten laws of Iroquoia gave them a special place of honor. They were also among the most successful fighters in North America.25
As Champlain’s companions absorbed these thoughts, some of them suddenly remembered urgent reasons why they had to be somewhere else. Champlain wrote that “only one part resolved to continue with me, and the others returned to their own country with their wives and the trade goods they had bartered.” He had started with three or four hundred warriors and more than a hundred canoes. Within a few days, only sixty men remained in twenty-four canoes. Champlain was undaunted. Without hesitation he led his small force forward from the St. Lawrence Valley, and sailed up the river of the Iroquois. He wrote, “No Christians but ourselves had ever penetrated this place.”26
The river of the Iroquois was handsome but hard going for the French shallop. All hands had to row against the current. They went thirty miles and came to a lake (today’s Chambly Basin). Beyond it Champlain was surprised to meet rapids that the shallop could not pass. He wrote, “We trusted to the assurances of the Indians that the way was easy.” So it was for canoes, but not for the larger French vessel.27
Champlain thought for a moment about abandoning the mission, but he was determined to see it through. The shallop would have to be left behind. The only way forward was to join the Indians in their canoes, and some of the French had no stomach for that. Champlain ordered them back to Quebec where he hoped “with God’s grace, I should see them again.” He wrote, “I took with me two men who were eager to go.” One of them was probably François Addenin, a veteran soldier who had been sent by the king as a bodyguard for the sieur de Mons in Acadia. He had remained with Champlain at Port-Royal. Addenin was a soldier of long experience, a crack shot, and the most skillful hunter in the French colony.28
This Iroquois club of fire-tempered hardwood was called by the French a casse-tête, skull smasher. It was a weapon of war, and an instrument of execution by a single stunning blow called the coup de grâce, which was sometimes an act of mercy to a captive in this violent world.
Champlain turned to the Indians and told them that “with two others I would go on the war path with them in their canoes; for I wished to show them that for myself I would not fail to keep my word to them, even if I went alone.” They were pleased with his spirit and “promised to show him fine things.” Champlain was about to challenge hundreds of Mohawk warriors on their own turf, with only sixty Indians and two Frenchmen at his side. It was a courageous decision. Others would have called it foolhardy to the point of madness. Champlain was usually very prudent, but he was capable of risking everything at a critical moment. A factor in his thinking may have been his recall by the sieur de Mons. This could be his last chance.
Champlain and his allies made a portage of about a mile around the rapids on the Richelieu River, and came to pine-covered Sainte Thérèse Island. Now they were well into Iroquois country, and the Mohawk were renowned for having “always sentinels along the approaches taken by their enemies.”29 The allies changed their method of advance. At the end of each day, they built a semicircular fort on the edge of the river. Some took bark from trees to make wigwams, while others felled big trees to make an abatis of tangled branches around their camp, leaving only the riverbank open as a line of retreat. Champlain observed that the Indians were able to complete a forest fort in less than two hours, and they did it so well that “500 of their enemies would have had difficulty in driving them out without losing many men.” They sent forward a party of three canoes and nine men to search four or six miles ahead. The scouts found nothing, and all retired for the night.30
This was one of the first occasions when a European soldier traveled with a large Indian war party in North America. Champlain studied their ways. He was impressed by the skill with which they improvised forts, but he was troubled by their lack of attention to patrols. He urged them to place sentinels at listening posts, “to keep watch as they had seen us do every night.” The Indians explained patiently that they had different customs. Their parties normally divided into three groups: one for hunting, another always under arms, and a third scouting ahead for signs “by which the chiefs of one nation reveal themselves to another.”31
On July 14, 1609, they reached the large lake from which the river flowed. Champlain exercised his right to name it Lake Champlain on his map, as he and his two French companions may have been the first Europeans to see it.32 The Indians had not exaggerated its size and beauty. Champlain reckoned its length at 80 to 100 leagues, and later corrected his estimate to 50 or 60 land leagues, which is roughly right. Lake Champlain is 125 miles long.33 He was fascinated by its fine woods, beautiful islands, open meadows, and vast abundance of “game stags, fallow deer, fawns, roebuck, bears and other animals” that swam from the mainland to the islands. Champlain observed that one reason for this plenty was that no Indians lived there, “on account of their wars.” He explored both sides of the lake, saw the Green Mountains of Vermont to the east, and to the west sighted the Adirondacks, which are visible from the eastern shore. With delight he studied the flora and fauna of this very beautiful region. On all his many maps, this lake was the only place where he put his name on the land.34
Champlain was able to spend two weeks studying the lake because the Indians suddenly changed the pace of their advance. They began to move very slowly, probably because of the phases of the moon. They had reached the lake one day before a full moon, which would have made them highly visible on the surface of the water to enemies who were hidden in the woods. While the moon was full and bright, they remained in the upper reaches of the lake and on its eastern shore. At last, on July 26, the moon was reduced to a small crescent and the nights were dark again. Champlain’s explorations were interrupted by his Indian allies, who told him that it was time to move forward. The Indians reckoned that they were “within two or three days’ journey of the enemy’s homeland.”35
They changed their routine again and began to advance only at night, all in a body except their scouts. As dawn approached they retreated into deep woods, rested without a fire, and ate only cold corncakes and water. They consulted with their wizards (pilotoisorostemoy, Champlain called them) and modeled their attack with small sticks in the ground. All warriors engaged in these discussions, and they rehearsed the attack again and again. Champlain was impressed by their planning. He wrote: “They arrange themselves in the order which they had seen these sticks. Then they mix themselves up, and again put themselves in proper order, repeating this two or three times, and go back to camp, without any need of a sergeant to make them keep their ranks, which they are quite able to maintain without getting into confusion. Such is the method they observe on the warpath.” Each night the Indians were quickly on the trail again. Champlain was impressed by their expertise in woodcraft and their uncanny skill as trackers.36
In these hidden camps, tension began to mount as they moved deeper into Mohawk country. The Indians looked for signs from their medicine men, who performed many rituals and “superstitious ceremonies in order to know what was to happen to them.” They also studied their dreams, which they regarded as an ultimate reality. Again and again, they asked Champlain if he “had dreams, and had seen their enemies in them.” Champlain’s answer was always the same. “I would tell them, that I had not, but nevertheless continued to inspire them with courage and good hope.”37
The next night they made another hard journey, and as dawn approached they made secret camp deep in dense woodland. After the fortifications were complete, Champlain made his rounds, always on the alert. About ten or eleven o’clock in the morning he took a rest and fell asleep on the forest floor. When he awoke, the Indians asked him again if he had dreamed. Champlain said yes, and they gathered around, eager for a sign. He told them: “I dreamed that I saw in the lake near a mountain, our enemies the Iroquois drowning before our eyes. I wanted to rescue them, but our Indian allies told me that we should let them all die, for they were worth nothing.” The Indians recognized the place in Champlain’s dream as a site that lay just ahead, and they were much relieved. He wrote, “This gave them such confidence that they no longer had any doubt as to the good fortune awaiting them.” To Champlain’s Indian allies, dreams not only revealed the future. They controlled it. The next night the allies moved forward in a new spirit.38
The date was July 29, 1609. When evening came they broke camp, moved silently to the edge of the lake, and put their canoes in the water. Champlain admired the Indians for their astonishing control of sound. They paddled “without making any noise,” not the smallest splash or the slightest touch of a paddle against a canoe. Sixty Indians and three Frenchmen glided like spirits across the still waters of the silent lake. The night was dark but very clear, and the stars were bright in the northern sky. Champlain looked upward at the constellations rotating around Polaris and reckoned the time at ten o’clock. They were coming near the southern end of the lake, deep in Mohawk country. On their right they passed a low peninsula with willow trees, and a sandy beach below a steep eroded bank. Beyond the beach Champlain saw a promontory projecting into the water. He called it a cap, which in his old French meant “a point of land often elevated.”39
In the distance, silhouetted against a star-filled sky, Champlain was astonished to see the mountain of his dream. His Indian allies knew it well. The Iroquois called it “the meeting place of two waters,” tekontaró:ken or, to European ears, Ticonderoga. The name came from two big and very beautiful lakes. Lake George to the south and west was two hundred feet above Lake Champlain, and drained into it from a height greater than Niagara Falls. The water flowed downward through a run of falls and rapids which the French called a chute, and entered Lake Champlain at Ticonderoga.40 For many generations, Ticonderoga was one of the great strategic places in North America. It was the key to a long chain of lakes and rivers that ran from the St. Lawrence to the Hudson.41For the Mohawk, it was also a sacred and magical place. They believed that the promontory with its high limestone face and rocky caves was inhabited by spirits. The sandy beach to the north near Willow Point was thought to be visited by invisible artisans who lived at the bottom of Lake Champlain and brought up fragments of stone arrowheads and spear points, which they left as gifts for the Mohawk, who in turn left gifts of tobacco. Many stone shards can still be found there today.42
In the night of July 29, Champlain and his allies approached this fabled place in their canoes. As they rounded the promontory of Ticonderoga, their bow paddlers saw shadows stirring on the water ahead of them. They stared intently into the darkness, and the shadows began to assume an earthly form. They were boats of strange appearance, larger than northern birchbark canoes, and filled with men. The Indians instantly identified them. Mohawk!43
Each group sighted the other at about the same time, and both were taken by surprise. “At the extremity of the cape,” Champlain wrote, “we met the Iroquois…. Both they and we commenced to make loud cries, and each warrior made ready his arms.” Both sides turned away and moved in opposite directions. “We retreated into the middle of the lake,” Champlain wrote. The northern Indians had an advantage on the water. Their birchbark canoes were nimble, and very fast. The Mohawk boats were made of thick elm bark, often from a single tree. They were big and strong, but slow and clumsy. The Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron could control the terms of engagement on the lake.44
The Mohawk chose not to challenge them afloat, and turned toward the land, which they knew very well. They came ashore on a sand beach between the promontory of Ticonderoga and Willow Point to the north, where a fringe of willow trees still flourishes near the water’s edge. They pulled their boats close together, then climbed a low bank and gathered in an area of cleared ground with the forest just beyond. On the edge of the forest they began to fell trees and made a fort or barricade. In this work they were as skillful as Champlain’s allies and, in his words, “fortified themselves very well.”45
Champlain and his allies remained afloat on the lake and lashed their canoes together with poles so as not to become separated in the night. To his surprise a parley took place in the darkness. The Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron sent two canoes “to learn from the enemy if they wished to fight.” The Mohawk replied that “they had no other desire, but for the moment nothing could be seen and it was necessary to wait for daylight to distinguish each other.” They proposed that, “as soon as the sun should rise, they would attack us.” “To this,” Champlain wrote, “our Indians agreed.”46
“We were on the water,” he wrote, “within bow-shot of their barricades.” Songs and cries pierced the night. The Mohawk shouted insults at their enemies. “Our side was not lacking in repartee,” Champlain recalled, “telling them that they would see feats of weaponry that they had never known before, and a great deal of other talk such as is usual at the siege of a city.”47
As dawn approached, both sides prepared for battle.48 In the darkness before first light Champlain’s Indian allies paddled around the promontory and landed in a secluded spot where they were not under observation. “My companions and I were always kept carefully out of sight, lying flat in the canoes,” he wrote. His Indian allies sent scouts ahead to watch the Mohawk fort. The rest assembled in their fighting formation, and moved forward toward the Mohawk barricade.
The three Frenchmen remained carefully hidden behind them. Each prepared his weapon, a short-barreled, shoulder-fired arquebus à rouet, Champlain’s highly developed wheel lock weapon that did not require a smouldering matchlock, which might have betrayed their position. Champlain loaded four balls in the barrel of his arquebus. It was a dangerous thing to do. On Cape Cod in 1605, Champlain’s weapon had exploded in his hands and nearly killed him. But overloading was highly effective in close combat, and he accepted the risk.49
A few Montagnais warriors crept close to the Iroquois barricade, using their highly developed hunting skills. At first light a Mohawk scout emerged from the fort, and looked warily around. A Montagnais archer drew his bow, and the scout fell silently to the ground, probably transfixed by an arrow through his throat.50 The Mohawk warriors mustered quickly and came out of the fort, many of them wearing wooden armor that was proof against stone arrowheads. Both forces assembled in close formation on opposite sides of a clearing between the water and the woods.51
A Huron warrior girded for war. Champlain wrote that they and the Iroquois wore armor and carried shields of “wood woven with cotton thread, as proof against their arrows.” They fought in close order—until they met Champlain and his arquebusiers in 1609. The battle at Lake Champlain wrought a revolution in Indian warfare.
Champlain peered through the ranks of his allies and studied the Mohawk as they emerged from their barricade. He counted two hundred warriors, “strong and robust men in their appearance,” and he watched as “they advanced slowly to meet us with a gravity and assurance that I greatly admired.” The Mohawk were in tight ranks—a disciplined close-order forest-phalanx that had defeated many foes. Their wooden armor and shields covered their bodies. In the lead were two Mohawk leaders, each wearing three high feathers above their heads. Champlain’s Indians told him that the men with the big feathers were chiefs, and “I was to do what I could to kill them.”52
Champlain’s Indian allies were now about two hundred yards from the Mohawk, and began to move forward also in close formation. Once again Champlain was kept in a position behind them, where he could not be seen by the other side. The other two Frenchmen, on Champlain’s orders, slipped silently into the forest and crept forward around the right flank of the Mohawk. Their orders were to stay out of sight until Champlain discharged his weapon. Then they were to advance and fire into the flank of the Mohawk formation.
Champlain remained hidden as his Indian allies advanced. When they were about fifty yards from their enemy, Champlain remembered that they “began to call to me with loud cries.” Suddenly they divided in two parts, and Champlain was revealed to the Mohawk. He strode forward alone, twenty yards to the front of his friends and about thirty yards from the enemy. Champlain’s burnished steel cuirass and helmet glittered in the golden light of the morning sun.
The Mohawk stopped in amazement and studied this astonishing figure who had suddenly appeared before them, as if he had risen out of the ground. They observed him for a moment that must have seemed an eternity. Then a Mohawk leader raised his bow. Champlain tells us, “I put my arquebus against my cheek and aimed straight at one of the chiefs.” As the Indians drew their bowstrings, Champlain fired. There was a mighty crash and a cloud of white smoke. Two Mohawk chiefs fell dead, and another warrior was mortally wounded—three men brought down by one shot. Champlain’s Indian allies raised a great shout, so loud that “one could not have heard the thunder.”53
The Mohawk were stunned. Champlain wrote that they “were much astonished that two men should have been killed so quickly, even though they were provided with shields made of cotton thread woven together and wood which was proof against their arrows. This greatly frightened them.” Even so, the Mohawk fought back bravely. Both sides fired clouds of arrows and Champlain reloaded his weapon. As he did so, his two French companions emerged on the edge of the forest. They appear to have been veteran soldiers—skilled arquebusiers, and highly disciplined men. Using the trees for cover, they knelt side by side, steadied their weapons, and took aim. Champlain wrote, “As I was reloading my arquebus, one of my companions fired a shot from the woods.” This second blow was delivered into the flank of the Mohawk formation and it had a devastating effect. A third chief went down. The tight Mohawk formation shuddered in a strange way and suddenly came apart. Champlain wrote, “It astonished them so much that, seeing their chiefs dead, they lost courage, took to their heels, and abandoned the field and their fort, fleeing into the depth of the forest.” Champlain led his Indian allies in a headlong charge. “I pursued them, and laid low still more of them,” he wrote.
These Mohawk warriors, famed for valor in battle, were shattered by that sudden turn of events. It was a victory for the Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron allies. Champlain noted, “Our Indians also killed several, and took ten or twelve prisoners. The remainder fled with the wounded.” Altogether the Mohawk were thought to have lost about fifty warriors. On the other side, Champlain and his arquebusiers were unscathed. His Indian allies suffered “fifteen or sixteen arrow wounds, which soon healed.”54
Champlain may have been the first European to join a battle between two North American Indian armies. What he observed was very different from what he expected. In 1609, these northern Indians fought major engagements in tight formations. They wore hardwood armor and carried shields, which Champlain observed to be highly effective against stone-age spears and arrows. In those massed battles, casualties were not heavy.
All that changed when Champlain and his two arquebusiers went into action. Wooden armor and shields offered no protection against firearms, and the close formation of the Mohawk made them vulnerable to French marksmen with quadruple-loaded weapons. In this battle, Europeans fought in open order and used forest cover effectively. The Indians fought in close formation. In the face of a new reality, the Indians learned quickly, and changed to what would later be called a “skulking way of war.” This was a pivotal event in the history of Indian warfare.
After the battle, Champlain’s allies looted the Mohawk camp, and took “a large quantity of Indian corn and meal belonging to the enemy, as well as their shields, which [the Mohawk] left behind, the better to run.” Then there was the ritual feast, with singing and dancing to propitiate the spirits of the living and the dead.55
While the Indians conducted their sacred ceremonies, Champlain returned to his role as explorer. He got out his astrolabe and calculated the latitude of the battlefield at 43 degrees and several minutes.56 His allies had told him of the chute where water flowed from Lake George into Lake Champlain.57 It was very near the battlefield, and he seized the opportunity to go there. In only a few hours, he followed the shore of the lake, found the chute, and explored part of it.58
Indians also told him of a mighty river beyond the lakes, flowing to the south. Champlain quizzed the Mohawk captives “with the help of some Algonquin interpreters who knew the Iroquoian language.” The prisoners said that they could reach that river by canoe in two days.59 By coincidence in that high summer of 1609, while Champlain was moving south on the lake that bears his name, the English seaman Henry Hudson was sailing north on the river named in his honor. Hudson reached the present sites of Albany and Troy on September 19, 1609. These two great explorers came within a few miles and a few months of meeting each other on the ground between Lake Champlain, Lake George, and the Hudson River.60
All this exploring, looting, and feasting was crowded into a few busy hours after the battle. Champlain and his allies wanted to be away as quickly as possible, knowing that the Mohawk could muster a much larger force against them. Three hours after the battle, the victors climbed into their canoes and departed at high speed with their Mohawk captives securely bound.61 They went about sixteen miles from the battlefield, heading north on the lake toward the river of the Iroquois that would carry them home. As night fell, they made camp, probably on the eastern shore of the lake where they would be safe from pursuit. The victors turned to their captives and began a “harangue,” in Champlain’s word, about the cruelty of the Iroquois toward their prisoners. They made it clear that the same fate was in store for them, and ordered one of their captives to sing. Champlain remembered that “it was a very sad song.”62
Everyone knew what was coming. A fire was built and Champlain watched in horror as many warriors came forward and claimed the victor’s role of torturer. He wrote: “Each took a brand and burned this poor wretch a little at a time, so as to make him suffer more torment. They stopped from time to time, and threw water on his back. Then they tore out his nails and applied fire to the tips of his fingers and his penis. After that, they scalped him, slowly poured very hot gum on the crown of his head, pierced his arms near the wrists, and with sticks they tried to pull out his sinews by brute force. When they could not get them out, they cut them off. This poor wretch uttered strange cries, and I felt pity to see him treated in this way. Still he bore it so firmly that sometimes one would have said that he felt scarcely any pain.”63
The Indians invited Champlain to join in. He refused. “We do not commit such cruelties,” he responded, but “if they wished me to shoot him with the arquebus I would be willing to do so. They said no, that he would not feel pain. I went away from them as if angry to see them practice so much cruelty on his body. When they saw that I was not pleased, they called me back, and told me to shoot him with my arquebus. I did so without his perceiving anything, and with one shot caused him to escape all the tortures he would have suffered, rather than see him brutally treated.”64
Even that was not the end of it. Champlain wrote: “When he was dead they were not satisfied. They opened his body and threw his entrails into the lake. After that they cut off his head, arms and legs, which they scattered about, but they kept the scalp, which they flayed, as they did with the scalps of all the others whom they had killed in their attack. They committed another atrocity, which was to cut his heart in several pieces and to give it to his brother to eat, and to other companions who were prisoners. They took it and put in their mouths but would not swallow it. Some of the Algonquin Indians who were guarding the prisoners made them spit it out and throw it into the water. This is how these people act with regard to those whom they capture in war…. When this execution was over, we set out upon our return with the rest of the prisoners, who went along continually singing, without any expectation other than to be tortured.”65
Champlain sketched this scene of Indian torture (1619). Women appear among the torturers, and he observed they were the most ingenious in their cruelty. He tried in vain to stop torture and wrote that Indian nations had no true system of law—only a customary lex talionis, which punished a wrongful act by a greater wrong.
Torture and cannibalism of captives was an ancient custom among these nations. Not all Indians in the northeast practiced it. Acadian nations did not usually treat warrior-captives that way. But the evidence of archaeology indicates that the Iroquois and their northern neighbors had used torture for centuries. Scholars have explained this ancient custom as a ceremony or ritual, rooted in cultural practice and religious belief. Everyone was required to play a role: the audience, the torturers, and most of all the victim, who was expected to endure his torment with courage, dignity, and stoic calm. Many did so with amazing strength and resolve.66
Champlain understood this ritual atrocity better than some ethnographers have done, and he refused to accept any part of it. He hated Indian torture. It offended his deepest ideals and created a major obstacle to his grand design. He observed that the explicit purpose of torture was to commit an act of vengeance and retribution, designed to exceed the horror of tortures past.67 This was the foundation of Champlain’s judgment that the Indians had no law. He meant that their conception of justice was to punish a wrong by a greater wrong. That way of thinking was very different from an idea of law and justice as the rule of right.
He also recognized that Indian torture was also rational and functional in a very dark way. In the warrior cultures of North America, the continuing practice of torture was a way of guaranteeing a state of perpetual war. It meant that the work of retribution would always need to be done, and warriors would be needed to do it. For Champlain it was utterly destructive of peace and universal justice.
After the torture, Champlain and his allies resumed their journey, heading north on the river of the Iroquois. He wrote that they moved with “such speed that each day we made twenty-five or thirty leagues,” at least fifty or sixty miles.68 The Indians were driven by their fear, which appears to have been deepened by the torture of their captive. In the dark nights along the lake, the torturers dreamed terrible dreams. Then in the morning they acted upon them. Champlain wrote: “When we reached the entrance to the river of the Iroquois, some of the Indians dreamed that their enemies were pursuing them. This dream made them shift their camp, and they spent the entire night among the high bulrushes in Lac Saint-Pierre, because of the fear that they had of their enemies.”69
At last they made their way down the Rivière des Iroquois and reached the St. Lawrence. The Algonquin and Huron warriors went west to their country with some of the captives. Champlain and the Montagnais turned east, running down the river. They made incredibly good time, and reached Quebec in two days. The Montagnais insisted that Champlain go with them to their villages for more ceremonies of another kind. They decorated the scalps of their victims and put them on sticks in their canoes. As they approached their villages, singing a victory song, Champlain watched as the Montagnais women “stripped themselves quite naked, and threw themselves into the water, swam out to the canoes, took the scalps of their enemies which were at the end of long sticks in the bows of the canoes.” The women hung the scalps around their necks, “as if they had been precious chains, and they sang and danced.” They made Champlain a present of a scalp and a pair of shields, “to show the king.” Champlain wrote with a hint of shame, “to please them I said I would.”70
Once back in Quebec, Champlain obeyed his orders from the sieur de Mons, and made ready to pass his command to Pont-Gravé and return to France. But a problem arose. Pont-Gravé was not in good health, and too ill to spend the winter in America. Together he and Champlain decided to leave two officers in command at Quebec: Captain Pierre Chauvin de la Pierre, a seaman and soldier of Dieppe, was to remain until the sieur de Mons could “give orders on the subject.” With him was another very able young nobleman, Jean de Godet du Parc.71
Champlain left the colony in their good hands and departed for home. He made a fast eastward crossing, and reached France by October. Henri IV and the sieur de Mons were both at the palace of Fontainebleau, fifty miles southeast of Paris. Champlain instantly “took post” there, in his phrase, and was admitted to the presence of the king. As always, he had quick access to the Crown. “I at once waited upon His Majesty, to whom I told the story of my expedition wherein he took pleasure and satisfaction.” Champlain presented the king with gifts that were fit for a monarch. He brought a pair of scarlet tanagers, beautiful little birds with spectacular red and black plumage. He also gave the king a belt of porcupine quills, “very well woven, according to the fashion of the country, which His Majesty liked very much.”72
Equally successful was Champlain’s report of his adventures. The king offered encouragement and strong support. At Fontainebleau, Champlain began to flourish in another role, as a promoter of New France. He had a flair for that task, and a skill at the brutal blood sport of court politics. At the same time, he had a talent for reaching others through his maps and books. Champlain did not think in our terms of manipulating images, mainly because his generation did not separate images from objects. His efforts at promotion centered on the substance of the thing, not its shadow. His world was very distant from ours that way.73
At Fontainebleau Champlain also talked with the sieur de Mons. If there was any lingering concern about the younger man’s leadership, it left no traces in the record. Champlain wrote: “I informed him in detail of all that had taken place in the winter, and also the new explorations. And I spoke of hope for the future, touching the promises of the natives called Ochateguins [Huron].” Champlain called them the “good Iroquois.” “The other Iroquois, their enemies, live farther south,” he explained. “The former understand and do not differ much in language from the people recently discovered, and who hitherto had been unknown to us.”74
After their audience at Fontainebleau, Champlain and de Mons hastened to meet their investors at Rouen. They talked with two leading backers, le sieur Collier and Lucas Le Gendre, “in order to consider what they were to do the following year.” The meeting went well. Champlain tells us that both investors continued to support the settlement of Quebec and the exploration of the country. They also approved the alliance with the Huron, and supported Champlain’s promise “to assist them in their wars.” They agreed that Le Gendre would “take charge of the purchase of goods and provisions, and of the hiring of ships, men and other things necessary for the voyage.”75
Then de Mons and Champlain went back to Paris, where they tried to obtain a monopoly of the fur trade “in the parts newly discovered by us.” On this question the king’s judgment went against them—one of the few instances when that happened.76 De Mons decided to stay at court and keep trying. “Although he saw it was hopeless to obtain this commission, he did not cease to pursue his project, from his desire for the welfare and honor of France.” Champlain also noted: “During this time the sieur de Mons had not yet informed me of his wishes concerning myself…. He left the entire question a matter of my choice.” Once more Champlain would continue as commandant in Quebec.77
Champlain remained in France for six months. In the spring of 1610, he returned quickly to New France, eager to pursue his plans there. He sailed from Honfleur in early March, and reached Tadoussac by April 26. There he found other ships that had arrived at the start of the season. With the new system of free trade, Basque, Norman, and Breton trading ships were lying at anchor in the little harbor, and Tadoussac was full of activity. The Montagnais were there in strength and in good health. The winter had been mild, with little ice in the harbor. Old men told him that such a thing had not been seen for sixty years.78
Champlain hurried upriver to Quebec. He met the leaders Pierre Chauvin de la Pierre and young Jean de Godet du Parc, who are little remembered in the history of Quebec but were vital to its survival. They told him that the entire garrison was well, and “only a few had been slightly ill.” Champlain wrote, “Having fresh meat, one’s health is as good there as in France.”79
Soon after Champlain arrived at Quebec a war party of sixty Montagnais appeared. They reported that many Basques and “Mistigoches” (Malouins and Normans) had said they would join them on the warpath.
“What do you think of that?” the Montagnais asked. “Do they speak the truth?”
“No,” said Champlain. “I know well what they have at heart. They say this only to get your goods.”
“You speak the truth,” the Montagnais replied. “They are women, who wish only to make war on our beavers.”80
Champlain assured the Montagnais that he would join them in a second campaign against their enemies the Iroquois as he had done before, and he asked something in return. He reminded the Montagnais that they had promised to help him explore the rivers to the north and west as far as the large sea, which we know as Hudson Bay. He also made another agreement with the Algonquin and Huron: that he would help them in their wars if they would take him to their own country and to the great lake beyond (Lake Huron), and show him copper mines and other things they had mentioned. “Hence,” Champlain wrote, “I had two strings to my bow; if one failed, the other might stay taut.”81
Champlain left Quebec on June 14. He had gone about forty miles up the river when he met a canoe with an Algonquin and a Montagnais who were looking for him. They urged him to push on as quickly as possible. Two hundred warriors were already waiting at the River of the Iroquois, and two hundred more would be coming.82 He moved on to Trois-Rivières where he found the Montagnais waiting for him. The date was June 19, 1610, a moonless period when Indian attacks were likely to happen.83
Suddenly a canoe approached at high speed. The paddlers shouted that the Algonquin and Huron had already arrived, and moved up the river of the Iroquois without waiting for the rest. They had run into a Mohawk war party of about a hundred men, who had “barricaded themselves well,” near the River of the Iroquois. A battle was in progress and the message was urgent: come quickly.
The Indians begged Champlain and the French to come with them. Champlain agreed, and climbed into a canoe with four French arquebusiers.84 They went about a mile, then hauled their canoes on the bank and gathered up their weapons. Some carried bows and arrows. Others had clubs and spears that Champlain described as swords fixed to long handles. They plunged into the forest and moved very quickly. Champlain and his four Frenchmen were wearing breastplates, backplates, and helmets. They could not keep up, and the Indians disappeared ahead. Champlain tried to follow their track, and often went astray. He and his French soldiers struggled through thick woods, marsh, and swamp, knee deep in water, weighed down with “a pikeman’s corselet which bothered us greatly.” They were assaulted by “hosts of mosquitoes, a strange sight, so thick that we could barely draw breath, so severely did they persecute us.”85
Champlain’s second battle with the Mohawk, June 19, 1610, on the Iroquois River (now the Richelieu River), in the city of Sorel. He and his allies attacked a log fort and killed nearly all defenders. This victory brought seventeen years of peace between the French and the Mohawk. He is marked by the letter D, with five arquebusiers.
The French lost the trail, then found two Indians and called out to them. Farther on, they met an Algonquin chief. He urged them to make haste. The Algonquin and Montagnais had tried to force the Mohawk barricade and had been repulsed. Some of the bravest Montagnais warriors had been killed and wounded. “You are our only hope,” they told Champlain.86
The French went another quarter mile and began to hear “howls and shouts of both parties, flinging insults at one another, and continually skirmishing while waiting for us to come up.” At last they reached the battlefield in deep woods on the bank of the River of the Iroquois, about three miles from the St. Lawrence River. Champlain wrote, “As soon as the Indians saw us they began to shout.”87
He ordered his four arquebusiers to stay with him, and they reconnoitered the Mohawk barricade, which was “made of strong trees, placed one upon the other, in a circle, which is the ordinary form of their forts.” The Montagnais and Algonquins also approached the barricade. Champlain and his men began to fire through the branches of the barricade, but “we could not see them as they could see us.” As Champlain fired his first shot, he was hit by a Mohawk arrow that split the tip of his ear and pierced the side of his neck, barely missing his carotid artery by a fraction of an inch. He was lucky it did not kill him.
Champlain tells us that he “seized the arrow which was still in my neck and pulled it out.” Even as he did so in the heat of battle, he admired the craftsmanship of the Iroquois arrowhead. “The point was tipped with a very sharp bit of stone,” he wrote, but added, “my wound did not interfere with my duty, and our Indian allies also did theirs.” Once again he admired the courage of his Mohawk opponents. “The enemy fought well,” he observed, “so much so that one could see arrows flying on all sides as thick as hail.”88
The French arquebusiers began to take a toll. They triple-loaded their weapons, rested them on the logs of the barricade, and fired carefully at close range. Champlain observed that the Mohawk in the fort were “astonished at the reports of our arquebuses,” and “frightened at the execution done by the bullets, having seen many of their companions fall dead and wounded, thinking these shots to be irresistible.” When they heard the report of a firearm, the Mohawk threw themselves on the ground, then rose again, and kept fighting. “We hardly missed a shot, and fired two or three balls each time,” Champlain wrote.89
The arquebusiers began to run low on ammunition. Champlain turned to his Indian allies and told them that they must take the fort by storm—using their shields to get close enough to put ropes around the upright posts that held the barricade together. Champlain also urged the Indians to cut down several large trees near the barricade, “in order to make them fall on the enemy and crush the walls of the fort.” Others were instructed to use their shields to protect the axmen, “all of which they carried out very promptly.”90
Just as they were about to assault the fort, more Frenchmen arrived from the barques on the river three miles away, with weapons and ammunition. They had heard the arquebusades, and some of them hurried to the sound of the battle. In the lead was a trader named Des Prairies, “a young man full of courage,” in Champlain’s words, who “said to those who had stayed behind that it was disgraceful of them to see me fighting in this way with savages without going to my aid, and as for himself he held his honor too high for anyone to reproach him with such a thing.”91
Champlain advised the Indians to stop work on the barricade. The French reinforcements began firing into it and brought down more Mohawk. Then Champlain and the Indians moved forward with arquebusiers on their flanks, and made a breach in the barricade. Champlain shouted a command: “Ne tirez plus! Cease fire!” In a moment twenty or thirty Indians and Frenchmen leaped into the breach “without meeting much resistance.” In this way, he wrote, “by God’s grace victory was won.”92
A few Mohawks tried to get away, but “they did not get far,” Champlain wrote, “for they were laid low by those about the barricade, and any who escaped were drowned in the river.” Nearly the entire Mohawk force of about a hundred warriors was killed, except fifteen unfortunates who were taken alive. Of the Montagnais and the Algonquin, three were dead and fifty wounded. Champlain and the French arquebusiers suffered two men wounded, including their commander. The French traders appear to have been unscathed.93 To the disgust of those who had done the fighting, more French traders arrived, “just in time to carry off the booty, which was not much.” They found “only a few beaver skins of the dead, covered with blood, which the Indians did not take the trouble to pick up, and made sport of those who did so.”94
Champlain went aboard a shallop in the river and had his wounds dressed by a French surgeon named de Boyer. His neck and ear were severely scarred. For the next twenty-five years, the Indians of the St. Lawrence Valley recognized the scar on his ear and touched it as if it were a talisman. After the two victories over the Mohawk, Champlain became a mythic figure among them. The victorious Montagnais and Algonquin “went home singing.” With them went their captives, tightly bound. Everyone knew what was in store. Champlain intervened, and asked the Indians to give him a Mohawk prisoner, which they did. Champlain wrote, “It was no small service I did him.” By degrees, Champlain allowed his captive more liberty in hope of gaining an emissary for peace, but he “escaped out of fear and terror.”
Two days after the battle, the Indians began to torture their captives by fire and water, burning them with birchbark torches. Champlain wrote that the victims, “feeling the fire, would utter such loud cries, that it was awful to hear.” Then the torturers would “throw water over their bodies to make them suffer more,” and went to work with the torches again, “in such a way that the skin would fall from their bodies, and the captors would continue with loud shouts and whoops, dancing about, until these poor wretches fell dead.”95
Some of the captives were kept alive so that they could be tortured by wives and daughters. Champlain observed that the women “greatly surpass the man in cruelty, for by their cunning they invent more cruel torments, and take delight in them. Thus they cause the captives to end their lives in deepest suffering.” After these events the victors went to an island in the St. Lawrence River and feasted for three days. The Huron, Algonquin, and Montagnais celebrated their victory. The French and Indians exchanged young men to learn languages, and then they parted.96
Many historians have criticized Champlain for going to war with the Iroquois. Some have written that he started hostilities which would continue for two centuries. In the late twentieth century, ethnohistorians studied this question in a new spirit and came to a different conclusion. Most agreed that Champlain did not start these wars. The fighting had been going on between the Mohawk and their neighbors to the north long before he arrived.
Further, Iroquois ethnologist William N. Fenton writes, “Nineteenth-century historians to the contrary, this incident did not precipitate a hundred years of Mohawk vengeance against New France.”97 It put a stop to major fighting between the Mohawk and the French for a generation. An ethnologist of the Huron agrees. Bruce Trigger writes of the two battles: “This was the last time that the Mohawks were a serious threat along the St. Lawrence River until the 1630s. Having suffered serious losses in two successive encounters, they avoided armed Frenchmen.”98
Champlain’s two campaigns in 1609 and 1610 cost the Mohawk between 150 and 250 warriors. Their total population was between 5,000 and 8,000, of whom less than a quarter were warriors, perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 men. They probably lost between 10 and 20 percent of their fighting strength at a time when they were also waging war against Indian nations to the south and east. Small wonder that they steered clear of another collision with the French for many years.99
After the battles at Ticonderoga and the Rivière des Iroquois, the Mohawk made several peace overtures to the French. Champlain tried similar approaches to them, but he could not find a way to make lasting peace with the Iroquois without alienating the Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron. Even so, he hoped for a modus vivendi between the French and the Mohawk, and he achieved it. A very fragile quasi-peace was won by force of arms, and it continued for a generation, until 1634. The leaders who followed Champlain in Paris and Quebec were unable to keep it going. They used too much force, or too little. Champlain’s policy was a middle way of peace through the carefully calibrated use of limited force. We are only beginning to understand how he did it.