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New France in 1634 and the Fate of North America

Written by Michael Varhola

1634 was a pivotal year for the indigenous peoples of North America. It was in that year that the French Jesuit missionaries, in spite of their highest motives, set in motion a series of events that led ultimately to the destruction of those whom they came to both civilize and save for the greater glory of God. The result of these events, one hundred and fifty bloody years later, was an unstoppable European settlement on lands where disease and internecine warfare had so thinned the native population that resistance, no matter how resolute, had become futile. The Jesuits, with their holy motives, and the French and Dutch, with their more worldly ones, exacerbated the preexisting tensions and upset the tenuous balance of power that had existed for generations between the two great powers in the northeastern part of the North American continent, the Huron and Iroquois Confederations.

A small group of Jesuit priests, led by the indomitable Father Jean de Brébeuf, set forth in July, 1634 from the French trading post of Three Rivers on the Saint Lawrence River. The French had finally succeeded in cajoling a group of Huron traders to allow the missionaries to return with them to their own country, Huronia, on the southern shore of Georgian Bay.

The Jesuits were bursting with missionary zeal and optimism. They had a vision and it was a grand one. They intended to build a Catholic empire in the wilderness. The Huron, converted, civilized, and, so they hoped, loyal to the French crown, were to be the cornerstone of that empire. Francis Parkman, in his prodigious work, France and England in North America, used these words to describe the Jesuit dream:

A life sequestered from social intercourse, and remote from every prize which ambition holds worth the pursuit, or a lonely death, under forms, perhaps the most appalling—these were the missionaries’ alternatives. Their maligners may taunt them, if they will, with credulity, superstition, or a blind enthusiasm; but slander itself cannot accuse them of hypocrisy or ambition. Doubtless, in their propagandizing they were acting in concurrence with a mundane policy; but, for the present at least, this policy was traditional and humane. They were promoting the ends of commerce and national expansion. The foundations of French dominion were to be laid deep in the heart and conscience of the savage. His stubborn neck was to be subdued to the “yoke of the Faith.” The power of the priest established, that of the temporal ruler was secure. Those sanguinary hordes, weaned from intestine strife, were to unite in common allegiance to God and the King. Mingled with French traders and French settlers, softened by French manners, guided by French priests, ruled by French officers, their now divided bands would become the constituents of a vast wilderness empire, which in time might span the continent. Spanish civilization crushed the Indian; English civilization scorned and neglected him; French civilization embraced and cherished him.

The Jesuits hoped to succeed where their predecessors, the Franciscan Recollets, had failed. The Recollet Fathers had labored in vain for years to bring Christianity to the semi-nomadic Algonquin bands that roamed the northern forests. These hunter-gatherers, however, preoccupied as they were with the daily struggle for survival, had little time for or interest in the missionaries’ message. The Jesuits, accepting this reality, and also building on the successful experience of their Spanish brethren among the Guarani in South America, selected an entirely different and geographically quite distant population for their conversion efforts. They chose the Huron, the sedentary “farmers of the North,” who in 1634 represented what was probably the most advanced and most concentrated indigenous population in North America. The Jesuits were not going to replicate the experience of the Recollets chasing their flock through the snowy forests of the north, only to find their prospective converts breaking into ever smaller groups as they pursued game, fish, and fur.

The Huron were not like that at all. They lived in a small number of semi-permanent villages in a relatively compact area. From that base the Jesuits hoped to reach out to the surrounding tribes, both settled corn-planters and nomadic hunter-gatherers. It was a grand plan, and not without its merits, but the Jesuits, themselves ignorant of the ways of the Huron and impatient for results, destroyed what they came to save. Intelligent and well-meaning, they often recognized their mistakes—but not until it was too late and the damage was done. The Jesuit message effectively divided the Huron into two opposing camps, both of which were weakened by disease. In addition, their fellow Frenchmen in Quebec and the Dutch in New Amsterdam gave the Iroquois, traditional enemies of the Huron, reason and means to destroy their hereditary enemies.

Of course, it did not all begin in 1634. One has to go back a quarter century before then, to when the eminent French explorer and later governor of New France, Samuel de Champlain, made the fateful decision to support the Huron and Algonquins in their unending war with the Iroquois. The first exposure of the Iroquois to European firearms was on the receiving end when a mixed force of French, Huron, and Algonquins attacked a small force of Iroquois warriors near the site of the future Fort Ticonderoga. With one discharge for his arquebus, Champlain succeeded in killing two Iroquois chiefs and mortally wounded a third. The slaughtered chiefs, seemingly safe in breastplates of wood, provided a dramatic lesson to the stunned warriors: the nature of war had changed. That which was defense against a stone arrowhead, was of no use against firearms or even arrowheads or axes of iron. The Iroquois fled in disarray. Far from being cowed by their defeat, however, they quickly adapted to the new realities. The attacks served to awaken the Iroquois to the threat that this French alliance with their Huron and Algonquin enemies posed to their survival. It served to motivate them to strengthen their own confederation and seek their own sources of metal weapons and firearms.

The Iroquois were living proof of the maxim: that which does not kill you, makes you stronger. They saw themselves as having no alternative. They were surrounded by enemies who were not only better situated geographically but who also, taken together, vastly outnumbered them. To the south were the Susquehannocks blocking access to the European settlements in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. To the east, interfering with their trade with the Dutch settlements, were the Mohicans, another hereditary enemy. To the north were the Algonquins and Montagnais, redoubtable fighters with double advantage of access to both the French traders and the quality furs, which the Europeans coveted. To the west and northwest were other Iroquoian tribes, such as the Wenro, the Erie, and the Tobacco nation. These latter tribes, sometimes neutral and sometimes hostile, lay between them and the Huron, and the Huron lay between these tribes and the beaver-rich country along the upper Georgian Bay.

In spite of the Mohicans, the Iroquois managed to establish trade with the Dutch and, in so doing, secured a reliable source of muskets as well as other European goods. Their supply of beaver was, however, soon exhausted. That turned their eyes to the north and northwest, to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of beaver controlled by small, disorganized bands of Algonquins. These wandering bands that could be made submissive to the Iroquois were it not for their alliance with the Huron. If it were not for the Huron, the Algonquins could be forced into trading their pelts for Iroquois corn rather than Huron corn, pelts which the Iroquois could trade for Dutch muskets, copper kettles, and hatchets. If the Huron could be destroyed or dispersed, then the way to the north would be clear.

The Huron sat astride the gateway to the fur country of the north much as the Trojans had guarded the trade route to the Black Sea and the Carthaginians had controlled access to the Atlantic from the Mediterranean. The Iroquois, like the Mycenaeans and Romans before them, found the situation intolerable. Much like their predecessors in the ancient Mediterranean, they were successful in leveraging an economic disadvantage into a popular and successful war. Just as Roman senators shouted Carthago Delenda Est! Iroquois chieftains must have called for the annihilation of the Huron and any others who might seek to interfere with their trade. Just as young Roman nobles and Mycenaean freebooters longed for glory and loot, so the young Iroquois warriors dreamed of returning from Huronia in triumph bearing prisoners, scalps, and European booty!

The Huron, like the Iroquois, were a confederation. Theirs consisted of four tribes, while that of the Iroquois had five. They constituted the other major power in the northeastern part of the North American. In their own language, they called themselves the Wendats, and their country was Wendake, the “land apart,” which is sometimes translated as “the island.” While not literally an island, Wendake occupied a relatively compact area bordered by water on most sides: Lake Simcoe on the east, Nottawasaga Bay and the Georgian Bay itself on the north and west, with streams and low lying marshy areas in the south completing the circle. Wendake lay nine hundred miles by river to the west of Quebec.

The Huron economy, like that of the Iroquois was based on the growing of corn. Because the economies of these two “super-powers” were basically the same, they had little basis for trade and cooperation. Prior ...