The White and the Gold (37 page)

The second attack was launched from all sides and with the suddenness and weight of a thunderbolt. The men of the Long House rushed boldly out from the cover of the trees, leaping in the air as they ran and screaming in hate and rage. They strove to build a fire against the stockade, using for fuel the bark of the French canoes. Inside the fort there was no trace of panic. Dollard’s voice in directing the defense was clear and confident and amazingly cool. The Frenchmen at their small loopholes poured a devastating fire into the close ranks of the enemy. The Iroquois, failing to set the wall ablaze, retreated in a sudden confusion. Their chiefs rallied them and they came back a second time; with the same result. A third attack was broken and repulsed, and then the chagrined warriors returned to their own rude fort for a second council of war.

The result of the Iroquois debate was proof of the bewilderment and dismay they were feeling as a result of the unexpected firmness of the French stand. They came to the conclusion that their strength was not sufficient to clear the path unassisted. Messengers were sent off to the main concentration, asking for reinforcements.

For five days there was a lull, but this did not mean that the Iroquois were idle. They kept a close watch on the stockade, sniping with matchlock and bow from behind the trees, maintaining at all times a threat of attack so that the defenders were never permitted a moment’s ease. This was typical of Iroquois methods. Equally typical was the plan they carried out to split the defense forces. Renegade Hurons in the attacking force kept up a constant verbal assault on the followers of Anahotaha. The whole of the Iroquois strength was coming, they shouted gleefully, they were coming in their hundreds and thousands. The water would be black with their canoes, the loud roar of the rapids would be lost in the great battle cry of the Long House.

“Come!” they cried. “Save yourselves while you have the chance. Come over to us!”

The gallant Frenchmen behind the earth-chinked logs had no
illusions. Death faced them, swift and inexorable. They had one consolation left: that they still had it in their power to make the Iroquois victory a costly one. In the hope of diverting attack from the vulnerable little town at the meeting place of the rivers, they would fight on. But their Indian allies had no such consolation, and it is not surprising that the followers of Anahotaha began to hearken to this invitation dinned so insistently into their ears. If there was a shred of hope left for them, it was in heeding the forked tongues of the renegades. One by one the Hurons began to climb the barricade.

The Indians who remained jeered as the deserters sprang over the top and scuttled across the open space, which was now heaped high with the bodies of the dead. This, as it turned out, was sheer bravado. None of the Hurons caught in this deathtrap had any stomach left for fighting. Even as they jeered they were edging up to the barricade in order to join the exodus. In the end the brave Anahotaha was the only member of his party who remained. The four Algonquins, to whom no promise of clemency had been held out, remained with their chief when the last of the Hurons had vanished. But they were a badly shaken lot.

The position of the small remnant was a desperate one. Rest was denied them, for the foe maintained the threat of attack through the hours of darkness. They had no water, and their thirst became so great that they could not force down their throats the dry rations which remained. Hungry, thirsty, unnerved by lack of sleep, the gaunt young men stood at the loopholes and prayed constantly to the God in Whom they placed their trust.

On the fifth day the warriors from the Richelieu concentration arrived, more than five hundred in all. The din of their arrival, the triumphant war whoops which echoed through the woods, the formidable massing on all sides accentuated the hopelessness of the odds; seven or eight hundred trained fighting men, filled with hate and rage, against seventeen weary Frenchmen and six native allies. The defenders were starved, maddened with thirst, their nerves raw. The end, it was only too clear, could not long be delayed.

But in an area as restricted as the ground over which the small redoubt could be attacked, the law of diminishing returns came into operation. Eight hundred Iroquois could do little more, when it came to a frontal attack, than two hundred, save to assure replacements
and an unrelenting persistence. The first attack, delivered to the eldritch clamor of hundreds of threats, was no more successful than the earlier ones. The desperate defenders treated the charging tribesmen to such a welcome of lead that the Iroquois charge curled back like a spent wave, broke, and receded. This check was so unexpected that an Iroquois council was held immediately after, and the suggestion of abandoning the contest was seriously debated.

Second thoughts prevailed, however. The Unbeatable Men, the
Ongue Honwe
, as they still proudly called themselves, could not concede their inability to break down the resistance of a mere handful. The stockade must be carried, no matter at what cost in lives. For three days they busied themselves with preparations, keeping up an incessant all-day and all-night aggression. The white of complete exhaustion began to show under the two weeks’ accumulation of beard on the faces of the defenders. Staggering from lack of nourishment, they were barely able to keep their positions at the loopholes.

The Iroquois chiefs then produced the packages of sticks. This was always a solemn moment in the Spartan ritual of war which the men of the Five Nations observed. The sticks were strewn on the ground near the simmering food kettles. No exhortation was delivered, no form of compulsion employed. Each man willing to attack in the van was expected to come forward and pick up one of the sticks.

There was no delay, no holding back. The tall, proud volunteers stepped up and each selected his stick. These bold spirits were then given shields which had been fashioned out of the trunks of trees during the three days of preparation. Behind these they crouched, waiting for the signal to advance, another Birnam Wood ready to move on Dunsinane.

The charge was delivered from all quarters. Nothing could exceed the dread and horror of the scene on which the eyes of the little white handful rested. First came the Men of the Sticks, bold, vengeful, crouching like tigers behind their rough shields, lighted torches in their hands to be applied to the logs of the barricade; behind this vanguard the less bold spirits, fierce nevertheless in their war paint, wildly vocal. If the defenders cast despairing glances upward, they were robbed of a last glimpse of the sun, for the smoke of the torches and the burning fuel, which was being dragged forward, had already mounted above the tops of the trees. It was impossible
to exchange a word, for the air was filled with the wild screeching of the embattled braves. Only one consolation was left, and each of the gallant young men took advantage of it, without a doubt, to say a brief prayer. Perhaps each made a special intercession, “O God, in Thy mercy, let me die in the fighting!”

The charge did not succeed at once, so stoutly were the loopholes manned. It was the recoil of an experiment which gave the Iroquois their chance. Dollard had crammed a musketoon with powder and bullets, intending to toss it over the barricade so that it would explode in the close ranks of the attacking redskins. His aim was not good; the handmade grenade struck the top of the logs and fell back into the enclosure. The explosion which followed killed several of the defenders and nearly blinded the rest. In the confusion thus created, the Iroquois gained possession of some of the loopholes and began to fire through them at the surviving members of the little band.

It was soon over then. The Men of the Sticks climbed the barricade, tomahawks out and ready, scalping knives bare in their belts, screeching in triumph. Dollard was one of the first killed. In the hand-to-hand fighting which ensued the Frenchmen were soon cut down. All but four died in the struggle, and of the survivors, three were so close to death that the savages dispatched them where they lay. The fate of the fourth has never been determined definitely. He may have succumbed to his wounds before he could be carried away to die on a torture platform; and even after a lapse of three centuries it is impossible to suppress a shudder at the thought of the terrible retribution which may have been exacted of one unfortunate man.

The Men of the Sticks tossed their improvised shields on the fire which licked at the barricade of logs. They had gambled with death and now they could strut in the insolence of pride in their home villages, each with his stick suspended around his neck. The Iroquois losses had not been heavy on this last day, but it is much to be doubted if the leaders of this great concentration took satisfaction out of the result. They had won, but at a bitter cost in men, in prestige, in the complete dislocation of their plans for driving the French into the sea.

A few days after the finish of the struggle a trading company came down the Ottawa in canoes loaded with fur from a profitable winter of hunting and trading. In the van were the two eager young men who had slipped out in the dead of night through the harbor guards at Three Rivers, Radisson and Groseilliers.

For the most part, they had spent the winter in the country north and west of Lake Superior but had penetrated far enough south to see where a certain forked river had its source. Radison’s notes indicate that this river was considered of very great importance among the Indians of that district, and so some historians have seized on his reference as meaning that it was this ingenious young trader who discovered the Mississippi. Whether or not the eyes of the eager pair had rested on the Father of Waters, there is no denying that they had spent a fruitful time. They were bringing back news that the country north of Lake Superior was thickly populated with an especially fine species of beaver and that the Indians of all the western lands were eager to trade with the French. They were full of information about the northern waters and had evolved a new theory with reference to the approach to Hudson’s Bay. They were convinced that instead of running the gamut of Iroquois interference along the Ottawa, the bay could be more readily reached by sailing north of Labrador and cutting in through an entrance from the Atlantic. A more specific result was the heavily loaded condition of the canoes. It developed later that the value of the furs they were taking to the market reached the handsome total of 140,000 livres.

When the home-coming traders reached the Long Sault a terrible sight greeted their eyes. Before leaving on their morose and far from triumphant return to Iroquois land, the victors had trussed up the bodies of the French dead to posts along the line of the shore. It is not known whether the hunting party removed the bodies from the posts and buried them, although it seems certain they would do so. This much they did, however—they counted the bodies. There were sixteen. Not seventeen; one was missing.

The last day of the attack could not have been later than May 11. Ten days later one of the Huron deserters, a Christian who had been baptized and given the name of Louis, arrived at Montreal, having
managed to make his escape. He told the story of the uneven struggle, providing the details which could come only from an eyewitness. The circumstantial narrative which has been set down is based largely on what Louis told of the epic adventure and on corroborative bits of evidence which developed later from other Huron prisoners who escaped, one of whom was actually tied to the death stake and had suffered the first tortures when a violent storm drove his tormentors into shelter and gave him the opportunity to free himself from his bonds.

The first inventory of the wills and possessions of the brave young men was made in May 27. On June 3 their deaths were entered on the parish records. They were now officially dead, even the one who had not been fortunate enough to have his lifeless body nailed to a post along the boiling waters of the Long Sault.

The Iroquois forces returned to their own country without striking another blow, and the conclusion has been accepted that they had lost faith in the feasibility of breaking down the bristling redoubts of Montreal. Their confidence had been shaken by the difficulty they had met in carrying a flimsy barricade with no more than a handful of boys behind it. The French crops were planted in peace, and in the fall there was a bountiful harvest to carry the settlers through the long winter.

It does not matter whether or not Adam Dollard enlisted his band with a sure knowledge of the fate in store for them and an advance knowledge of Iroquois plans. The important thing is that they did save the colonies. They held the gap long enough, even as Leonidas did at Thermopylae.

B
EFORE the gallantry of Adam Dollard and his companions brought about a temporary lull in the hostility with the Iroquois, there had been developments of a highly interesting nature in the colony of New France. As a result of the reorganization of the Company at Montreal, in which the spirituelle but strong-minded Jeanne Mance had played a big part, it had been recognized that the original founders were no longer capable of providing satisfactorily for the needs of the growing town and that a more direct form of control was desirable. The newly created Seminary of St. Sulpice was invited in 1657 to assume the task. They accepted, and so there began an association which was highly successful and which has left indelible traces on the city of Montreal.