Chapter 1
âThe Earthly Paradise of Canadaâ: French Adventurers on Lake Erie
On Christmas Day in 1678, eighteen frightened and exhausted French carpenters shivered in a drafty log cabin on the bank of the Niagara River, thirty-five kilometres above Lake Erie.
The men, led by a former French soldier named La Motte de LuciĂšre, had sailed over a month earlier from Fort Frontenac, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario. Their small, two-masted brigantine was literally bursting with wood, rigging, and all the materials they would need to build a second, larger vessel, or barque, which they intended to sail across Lake Erie in order to open up trade with the Native tribes living in the vast interior of North America.
The first phase of the project, the construction of the barque, was extremely ambitious. Once the men sailed across Lake Ontario and into the Niagara River, they faced a back-breaking hike through the dense forest and around the mighty Niagara Falls with the shipâs cargo strapped to their backs. From there, they would select a site near Lake Erie and build a small shipyard. Only then could they get on with the business of actually building the barque.
The voyage had not started out well; La Motteâs crew had sailed from Fort Frontenac perilously late in the season, and the fierce autumn gales howled throughout the sailing, pushing the brigantine to the brink of capsize many times. Father Louis Hennepin, a missionary of the RĂ©collet order, who travelled with the expedition, describes the sailing in his 1698 account, A new discovery of a vast country in America:
The winds and the cold of autumn were then very violent, insomuch that our crew was afraid to go in so little a vessel. This obliged us and the Sieur de la Motte, our commander, to keep our course on the north side of the lake, to shelter ourselves under the coast against the northwest wind, which otherwise would have forced us upon the southern coast . . . This voyage proved very difficult, because of the unseasonable time of year, winter being near at hand.
Farther west, while seeking shelter from the raging wind and high seas in the mouth of the Humber River, the men awoke to find the brigantine frozen in by the advancing ice. The tiny ship would certainly have been crushed to pieces if not for the crewâs desperate, and ultimately successful, bid to cut it out with axes.
Finally, on December 5, the crewâs fortunes turned for the better. The day dawned calm and clear, and the wind turned favourable for sailing. The brigantine made steady progress across the lake, arriving at the mouth of the Niagara River and making its way as far as present-day Lewiston, New York, by December 18. It was here that the crew found themselves on that miserable Christmas morning, unable to proceed any farther.
The expedition had come to a crossroads. The harsher-than-expected weather and the onset of winter had made any attempt to unload the brigantine and carry its contents around Niagara Falls impossible. So, the men decided to put their tradesmenâs skills to work; chopping down some surrounding trees, they built the small cabin, along with a surrounding palisade for defense, to wait out the weather. But even this was not done without great difficulty, as the ground was already so frozen that they had to throw boiling water on it several times just to drive in the stakes for the palisade.
As crippling as they seemed, the torments of cold and labour were the least of the menâs worries. For in the farthest reaches of New France, far from the safety of their settlements along the St. Lawrence, these early French adventurers were far from the masters of their own fate. That depended entirely on the local First Nations, whose intimate knowledge of the land was essential to all European exploration and trade. And this particular expedition had far from good relations with the local Iroquois nation â actually members of the Seneca tribe, affiliated with the wider Five Nations of Iroquois â who saw the shipbuilding effort on Lake Erie as an incursion into their territory. The Frenchmen were keenly aware of this, as Father Hennepin notes â. . . this new enterprise of building a fort and houses on the river Niagara . . . was like to give jealousy to the Iroquois, and even to the English, who live in this neighbourhood and have a great commerce with them . . .â
Iroquois warriors had kept a constant watch on the men from the time their vessel entered the mouth of the Niagara, sometimes hidden by the dense forest and at other times in plain view, their fearsome war clubs and tomahawks held at the ready. They would not let the beleaguered Frenchmen go any farther, and La Motteâs crew worried that it was only a matter of time before the warriors lost their patience entirely and gave in to their most violent aims.
Their commander had no illusions about the precariousness of his position, either. Hunched around the fire on that frigid, miserable Christmas Day, La Motte came to the conclusion that the only way for the project to move forward was to negotiate an agreement with the Iroquois. So, on December 26, he set out for the nearest village on snowshoes, bringing with him seven armed men and Hennepin, because the father was said to have a working knowledge of the Iroquoisâ language. After five daysâ travel, they arrived at the village of Tagarondies, where they met with the chief in council.
But the negotiations, which dragged on for three full days, did not break the logjam as La Motte had hoped. In a gesture of goodwill, he offered the Iroquois the traditional gifts of cloth, beads, and tools, including hatchets and knives. In return for their endorsement, La Motte promised the Iroquois two things: blacksmith services at the new fort once it was constructed and, a bit more flimsily, reduced prices on trade goods as a result of the healthy business he expected to find in the North American heartland. It wasnât much, but it was all that La Motte had.
The chief was not impressed. He argued that the presence of a French fort in the area would certainly obstruct the route his people normally used to travel to the nearby English and Dutch colonies to trade. Why would he jeopardize these lucrative relationships for such negligible gains? In the end, the Iroquoisâ response was vague; while not a definite no, the Natives certainly withheld their approval; if the French wished to continue with this foolhardy venture, they would have to do so at their own risk.
To make matters worse, just as the crestfallen La Motte and his party were preparing to depart, a war party returned to the village with two prisoners from another tribe. The life of one was spared, but the other was put to death with what Hennepin calls, âsuch exquisite torments that Nero, Domitian, and Maximilian never intended the like . . .â After viewing the day-long agony of the captive at the Iroquoisâ insistence (during which parts of the poor soulâs body were reportedly cut off and fed back to him, as well as to some of the village children), the horrified Frenchmen returned to their miserable cabin at Lewiston in utter despair. To La Motte, putting a sailing ship on Lake Erie now seemed a near impossible goal. His men would be lucky enough to come through the winter with their lives.
Priest or Pathfinder?
Mired in what was undoubtedly the worst Christmas of his life, La Motte had no way of knowing that, back at Fort Frontenac, a plan to rescue his men and the project was hurriedly coming together. The man responsible for it was the same one who had charged La Motte with his mission in the first place â RenĂ©-Robert, Cavelier de La Salle.
On that very Christmas, despite the fact that winter had arrived in full fury on Lake Ontario, La Salle boarded a small brigantine and made sail toward the Niagara River. His vessel was stuffed with the supplies La Motteâs men desperately needed to get through the winter and, more importantly, with further gifts to placate the hostile Iroquois.
It was the first step on a journey that would take La Salle to the very heart of the North American continent, turning him into one of the worldâs most renowned and controversial explorers, and inextricably linking his name with Lake Erie.
La Salleâs early childhood gives no hint of the destiny that awaited him in the backwoods of North America. Quite the contrary; he was born into a well-to-do bourgeois family in Rouen on November 21, 1643. His father, Jean Cavelier, was a successful wholesale haberdasher, and the title de la Salle, which young Robert took, was the name of the familyâs estate near Rouen.
Robert received his early education at the Jesuit college in his hometown, which his father, convinced that Robert was brighter than his older brother, had insisted he attend. There, under the strict discipline of the Jesuit fathers, Robert excelled, particularly in mathematics and sciences. He was so successful, in fact, that the fathers encouraged him to take his vows, which he did at the age of fifteen, and joined the Jesuitsâ powerful Society of Jesus in Paris. But there is evidence that La Salleâs motives in becoming an ordained priest may have gone further than religious conviction, as Professor Paul Chesnel, in his 1901 work, History of Cavelier de la Salle, explains:
. . . he afterwards entered the Society of Jesus as a novice, undoubtedly expecting to be sent as a missionary to remote countries; thus he did reconcile filial obedience with an inherent desire for voyage and adventure. But being possessed of a proud nature, he soon realized that he lacked the docility essential to the making of a good priest . . .
Despite his independent streak, La Salle would spend the next seven years in the Society teaching math and sciences. But his imagination was captivated by the vast wilderness of North America. This was undoubtedly fuelled, at least in part, by reading the Jesuit Relations, which were published between 1632 and 1673. These were regular reports filed by missionaries in the field, and they were very popular reading in France. The missionariesâ tales of mighty forests, thundering waters, and savage Native warriors would certainly have made an impression on the young La Salle. He made several requests to be sent to North America, but each was declined; under the rigorous discipline of the Jesuit order, one did not request reassignment, one was told where to go. In light of La Salleâs ongoing struggles to leave the comfortable confines of Paris, it is not hard to imagine how it must have rankled when his older and supposedly less intelligent brother, Jean, a priest of the Sulpician order, was sent to Quebec as an abbĂ©.
Illustration courtesy of National Archives of Canada C-007802
René-Robert, Cavelier de La Salle. The controversial explorer sought to vastly expand the boundaries of New France.
Finally, in 1665, after years of struggling to reconcile his religious calling with his thirst for adventure and exploration, the latter won out, and La Salle tendered his resignation to the fathers, claiming he had to be released from his vows due to his âmoral frailties.â On March 28, 1667, he left the convent for good.
Suddenly penniless (he had taken an oath of poverty as part of his vows, which denied him access to the Cavelier family fortune), La Salle quickly came to the realization that there was no future for him in France. In early 1667, he boarded a ship bound for Canada, taking with him several grand ideas, honed over many years, for expanding the size and scope of King Louis XIVâs holdings in North America, possibly linking them to a lucrative trade route through the Great Lakes to Asia. It was the first inkling of the vast trading network the lakes were set to become.
A Route to the Southern Sea
Quebec in 1667 was still a relatively new settlement, living in a precarious peace with the neighbouring First Nations. Samuel de Champlain had founded it in 1608 and, though the colony had grown, it still counted less than 10,000 souls as permanent inhabitants, with a large number of these arriving only two years before as soldiers sent by Louis XIV to take the offensive against the Iroquois. That campaign had led to the peace and the soldiers, rewarded with free land, had begun to play a major role in the colonyâs growth.
But farming and fishing were not profitable enough on their own to attract the infusion of enterprising young blood that New France so desperately needed; that honour went to the fur trade. This displeased the kingâs powerful colonial minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Believing that a thriving New France would give the mother country a considerable advantage over colonial rivals like England and Spain, he was frustrated by reports of the number of young men who had fled their settlements and headed west to immerse themselves into Native society and the fur trade. With many of these coureurs de bois gone, Quebec lacked the labour force necessary to promote the growth of a settled population and increase its standard of living.
Looming over all of this, of course, was the powerful Catholic Church. In Quebec, it took the form of several different orders, the most dominant being the Jesuits. The church was a major landholder in the colony, and was deeply embedded in the lives of the colonists in many ways: providing labour and funding, helping them to clear their land, and establishing colleges and other institutions. But the churchâs main goal was to establish a society based on moral, and by modern standards puritanical, grounds in New France, and key to this was its self-proclaimed mission to bring the continentâs Native people into Godâs flock. The church actively pursued this goal by sending missionaries throughout the present provinces of Quebec and Ontario, as well as into upper New York State, with a major missionary effort focusing on the Huron people, known as Sainte-Marie or Huronia, near southern Georgian Bay.
Although the missionary orders were very much rivals, one thing that united them was their dislike of the colonyâs fur traders, especially the coureurs de bois, who lived among the Natives and therefore outside the churchâs long grasp. What irked them even more was that many traders engaged in the destructive practice of trading liquor for furs, exposing Native people to the destructive effects of alcohol, including debilitating long-term addiction. This issue divided Quebecâs citizens perhaps more than any other, and made the missionariesâ already difficult job nearly impossible.
It was into this confused and politically charged world that La Salle stepped when he landed at Quebec City sometime between June and November of 1667. Almost immediately, the outspoken young man from Rouen drew the ire of both the fur traders and the missionaries: to the traders, he was a child of privilege who had managed to quickly corral the favour of the colonyâs governor, Daniel de RĂ©my de Courcelle. Mostly, however, they feared that La Salleâs schemes to expand the colonyâs wealth would cut into their outlandish profits.
To the Jesuits, La Salle was an enigma. Who was this man who had so easily abandoned the missionary life? they wondered. Above all, the fathers were curious about La Salleâs motives. Did he still possess the zeal for Catholicism that he had shown as a boy, or was he no better than the traders, interested only in profits? La Salle drew the suspicion of just about everyone in New France.
But to the Sulpician order, seen as a lesser religious force than the Jesuits in New France, La Salle represented an opportunity. Sensing this energetic young former Jesuitâs potential as a useful ally, they decided to grant him several thousand hectares of land outside Montreal, which was at this time a crude village that had been founded some thirty years earlier and had a meagre population of only a few hundred residents.
A frontier town mainly populated by traders, coureurs de bois, and their Native allies, Montreal was a far cry from Quebec Cityâs relative cleanliness and almost European charm. Militarily, it was a disaster waiting to happen: with few fortifications, the settlement was largely indefensible. Its residents lived in constant fear of the surrounding Native tribes, who were often openly hostile to their very presence in the area. They could, and often did, attack colonists who dared to wander outside Montrealâs palisades.
None of this appeared to trouble La Salle. Working through the fall and wi...