The Conquest of New France | Page 6

this route unsafe. Their power was far-reaching and their ambition
limitless. They aimed to be masters of North America. Like all virile
but backward peoples, they believed themselves superior to every other
race. Their orators declared that the fate of the world was to turn on
their policy.
On Frontenac's return to Canada he had a stormy inheritance in
confronting the Iroquois. They had real grievances against France.
Devonvine, Frontenac's predecessor, had met their treachery by
treachery of his own. Louis XIV had found that these lusty savages
made excellent galley slaves and had ordered Denonville to secure a
supply in Canada. In consequence the Frenchman seized even friendly
Iroquois and sent them over seas to France. The savages in retaliation
exacted a fearful vengeance in the butchery of French colonists. The
bloodiest story in the annals of Canada is the massacre at Lachine, a
village a few miles above Montreal. On the night of August 4, 1689,
fourteen hundred Iroquois burst in on the village and a wild orgy of
massacre followed. All Canada was in a panic. Some weeks later
Frontenac arrived at Quebec and took command. To the old soldier,
now in his seventieth year, his hard task was not uncongenial. He had
fought the savage Iroquois before and the no less savage Turk. He
belonged to that school of military action which knows no scruple in its
methods, and he was prepared to make war with all the frightfulness
practised by the savages themselves. His resolute, blustering demeanor
was well fitted to impress the red men of the forest, for an imperious
eye will sometimes cow an Indian as well as a lion, and Frontenac's
mien was imperious. In his life in court and camp he had learned how

to command.
The English in New York had professed to be brothers to the Iroquois
and had called them by that name. This title of equality, however,
Frontenac would not yield. Kings speak of "my people"; Frontenac
spoke to the Indians not as his brothers but as his children and as
children of the great King whom he served. He was their father, their
protector, the disposer and controller of mighty reserves of power, who
loved and cared for those putting their trust in him. He could unbend to
play with their children and give presents to their squaws. At times he
seemed patient, gentle, and forgiving. At times, too, he swaggered and
boasted in terms which the event did not always justify.
La Potherie, a cultivated Frenchman in Canada during Frontenac's
regime, describes an amazing scene at Montreal, which seems to show
that, whether Frontenac recognized the title or not, he had qualities
which made him the real brother of the savages. In 1690 Huron and
other Indian allies of the French had come from the far interior to trade
and also to consider the eternal question of checking the Iroquois. At
the council, which began with grave decorum, a Huron orator begged
the French to make no terms with the Iroquois. Frontenac answered in
the high tone which he could so well assume. He would fight them until
they should humbly crave peace; he would make with them no treaty
except in concert with his Indian allies, whom he would never fail in
fatherly care. To impress the council by the reality of his oneness with
the Indians, Frontenac now seized a tomahawk and brandished it in the
air shouting at the same time the Indian war-song. The whole assembly,
French and Indians, joined in a wild orgy of war passion, and the old
man of seventy, fresh from the court of Louis XIV, led in the
war-dance, yelled with the Indians their savage war-whoops, danced
round the circle of the council, and showed himself in spirit a brother of
the wildest of them. This was good diplomacy. The savages swore to
make war to the end under his lead. Many a frontier outrage, many a
village attacked in the dead of night and burned, amidst bloody
massacre of its few toil-worn settlers, was to be the result of that
strange mingling of Europe with wild America.
Frontenac's task was to make war on the English and their Iroquois
allies. He had before him the King's instructions as to the means for
effecting this. The King aimed at nothing less than the conquest of the

English colonies in America. In 1664 the English, by a sudden blow in
time of peace, had captured New Netherland, the Dutch colony on the
Hudson, which then became New York. Now, a quarter of a century
later, France thought to strike a similar blow against the English, and
Louis XIV was resolved that the conquest should be thoroughgoing.
The Dutch power had fallen before a meager naval force. The English
now