Annals of Niagara

Front matter

ANNALS OF NIAGARA By William Kirby, F. R. S. C. A story worth the telling*, and if told In simple truth, will shine like burnished 2*old. 1896. Tribune Presses, Welland, Ontario. To the Rev. Canon Bull, President of the Lundy's Lane Historical Society, in admiration of his character as a loyal Canadian, and of his zeal and labour in the promotion of the study of Canadian History, these " Annals of Niagara " are respectfully dedicated by The Author. Niagara, June, 1896. [Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year One Thousand Eight Hundred and Ninety-Six, by William Kieby, in the office of the Minister of Agriculture.]

Chapter I

1640. TPHE history of this famous old Town of Niagara offers matters of * interest to all Canadians as the mother town from which began1 the first settlement of Upper Canada. Its annals date from the earliest record of the appearance of white men among the Indian tribes, found by them in possession of this District of Niagara. The names and achievements of the early explorers and missionaries and of the traders and soldiers who have figured there would fill volumes of interest. This brief record of events is but an abridg ment of abridgments — a skimming of the surface of the deeper waters of our history, which may one day be drawn upon more fully. The legends and stories which cluster round Niagara will furnish the historians and poets of the future with precious and abunelant material for help in building up the literature of our country in the generation not far ahead of us who are living in the last decade of the nineteenth century.

A people without a history or without a national pride in it will not last long. It is those who honor their fathers, their mothers, and their country, who are promised long life in the land God gives them. Be it as it may with the history of other countries, Canada will stand fast by its own, will instil it into the minds anel hearts of her children, teach it diligently to the strangers who come to dwell within our borders, and defend it from falsification and neglect. Riches are deceitful if they occupy too exclusively our thoughts and energies in their acquisition. Pleasures and pastimes that are not the allowable relaxation of honest work or study, weaken the hands and dull the edge of the intellect — deadening the better feelings which dignify and adorn true manhood. When Jacques Cartier landed at Quebec in 1634 a land utterly unknown lay before him.

Its savage inhabitants, who greeted his arrival with friendly acts, seem to have been Iroquois, who told him, by signs, of great lands and waters and strange Indian nations that lived towards the setting sun. Half understanding, and curious to know more, Cartier sailed up the great river as far as Hochelaga, made many observations and returned to Quebec, whence he sailed back to France and reported the discovery of the vast country now Canada. A lapse of seventy years took place after the voyage of Cartier before the country was again visited, by Champlain, and the first settlement made by French colonists on the banks of the St. Lawrence, about Quebec. A noteworthy fact was revealed to Champlain, that in the intervening period between the voyage of Cartier and his own the Indians who met him at Quebec, or Stadacona as it was called, were of a different language and tribe from those who had met Cartier in 1634.

They were called by the French "Hurons," from their bushy mode of dressing their hair. No historical record gives us any information as to the events which had led to this change of inhabitants. But a natural supposition is that the Hurons, who were at perpetual war with the Iroquois, had succeeded in expelling them from the Lower St. Lawrence — and prob ably from all the regions lying north of the St. Lawrence and the great lakes — and had themselves taken possession of the whole territory now comprising the Province of Ontario — with the remarkable exception of the country of the Neutral or Tobacco Nation, which extended from the mouth of the Niagara River and along the northern shores of Lake Erie probably to Detroit. This vast territory was covered with dense forests of oak, maple, beech, hickory, elm and other hardwood trees; in the northern parts pine, cedar, hemlock and other evergreens predominated.

These gloomy forests, trackless and often impenetrable, were only travers able along the streams and rivers that formed the only roads through them. The country had everywhere abundant water — great swamps of cedar and tamarac held water the year round. The creeks and rivers were always brimming full. The surface of lakes and lakelets swarmed with wild fowl and their waters with fish. The dainty white fish — the attikameng or great herring of the Algonquins — moved in shoals of myriads round the shores of Lake Ontario. The trout — salmon trout, salmon, pickerel, herring, pike and sturgeon abounded. The forests were full of wild animals. The elk, deer, bear, wolf and panther were roaming everywhere, and in every small stream the industrious beaver built his dams and lived his useful peaceful life, with no enemy but man to fear.

The wild turkey in droves ran about the forests, and in the spring of the year flocks of wild pigeons filled the heavens like clouds for days and weeks together. It was a land of tree-covered levels and undulating hills. So thick and dense was its wild vegetation that the sun rarely dried up the springs and creeks, which afforded abundant water for every use of animal life and vegetative nature. The silence of the great forests would have been unsupportable but for the sound of flowing waters and the cries of roaming animals and the chirp of birds, too seleiom heard, yet ever cheerful as light thoughts in solitude. The native tribes of this vast region were divided by language and customs into different nations, always at war with one another — war cruel and implacable — which was assuaged only by the extermination of their enemies.

The Hurons, in many links of a great chain, extended from the Ottawa to the shores of the great lake bearing their name. Their principal seat was the country bordering on the Georgian Bay, where they lived in villages rudely but strongly palisaded for defence against their ancient enemies, the Iroquois, who occupied the territory of the present State of New York, from New England to the foot of Lake Erie. Between the Huron country and that of the Iroquois lay the Niagara River and the territory of the Neutral Nation, so called be cause in the incessant wars of the Iroquois and Hurons the Neutrals took no part, but allowed the two powerful enemies to traverse their lands at will in attacking or retreating before each other. These Neutrals, sometimes called La Nation duPetun — the Tobacco Nation — by the early French traders, were a numerous and warlike race, at war with everyone except the Hurons and Iroquois — to whom their land offered a perpetual truce — which neither Huron nor Iroquois dared break for fear of the Neutrals joining with their enemy.

This peculiar policy of the Neutral Nation served its object until the Iroquois finally conquered and drove out the Hurons from their territory, when they ungratefully turned their arms upon the Neutrals and exterminated them to the last man, about 1650. The country of the Neutrals was chiefly on the west and north shore of Lake Erie and River Niagara, but they occupied also some land on the east side of the river. Their principal villages were on the west side. Their chief town, called Onghiara, now Niagara, was at the mouth of the river, at the point of its junction with the lake.

Chapter II

1640. ' I "*HE present Town of Niagara occupies the exact site of this ancient **-* Neutral village of Onghiara. The rich fisheries supplied its inhabitants with abundance and variety of fish. The extensive clear ances, now the Niagara commons, were the cornfields which they cultivated for bread, pumpkins and beans — and possibly the Indian tobacco too, which formed a valuable article of use and trade with other tribes, and which won for them the French title of the Nation du Petun, or Tobacco Nation. Nothing is on record as to the history of this Neutral Nation before Champlain's discovery of Lake Ontario, when he visited a portion of the Neutrals on the east side of the river — and records his visit — and nothing more was known of them until the Jesuit missionaries came among the Hurons, and in about 1640 heard of the Neutrals living to the south of them and separating the country of the Hurons from that of the Iroquois.

The Neutrals were known to the Hurons by the name of Attika darons — people of a different dialect — and the Hurons were known to the Neutrals by the same name ; and that is about all that is known of their name. The Neutrals and Eries, a branch of them, were totally destroyed by the Iroquois, and no trace of their language is left except in the solitary word of their chief town, Onghiara, or Niagara, to give it its modern form. The name was also given to the river ; but whether the village was called after the river or the river after the village nothing is known. It may have been a still older name of some lost tribe which dwelt here before the Neutrals, for* in North America, as far back as we can learn, revolutions and changes of place were of constant occurrence among the savage tribes who held these boundless forests and lakes.

The Seneca tribe of the Five Nations took possession of the east side of the Niagara River after the destruction of the Neutrals in 1650. They continued the name of Onghiara with a slight change. calling the river Nyahgeah. It was a foreign word to them to which no meaning was attached. They found the word when they came here, and its meaning remains an etymological puzzle. Explanations of its meaning from the Iroquois and other Indian tongues are freaks of the imagination — vain diversions of modern Purleys of no value whatever. The branch of the Neutrals called the Tobacco Nation by the French, were so called from their trading with other nations in the article of tobacco — not the product now known by that name all over the world, but the wild plant which was called kinnikinick or Indian tobacco.

It was the common lobelia inflata, whose blue spikes of flowers adorn our fields and road sides, and whose pungent, acrid leaves and roots have an intoxicating quality well-known to those who use it. The Indians mixed its leaves with the bark of the red willow, and inhaled the smoke of it through pipes and puffed it out with great satisfaction from mouths, ears and nostrils. It may be recalled, by the way, that a very popular system of medicine was in vogue in the early years of the settlement in Upper Canada, the basis of which was the peculiar potency of this lobelia or Indian tobacco. It was called the Thompsonian cure, and was much practiced in sicknesses of all kinds in the rural parts of our country. Profuse steaming and "Number Six," as it was called, were consid ered specific for most of the disorders of human life.

Whether this Indian tobacco was used by the Neutrals as a medicine cannot be affirmed. Most probably it was, for the savages are as prone as we are to try medicines compounded of herbs and faith. Certainly the majority of our people in Canada have a very robust faith in quack nostrums, if recommended by strong assevera tions of their virtues. To venture a guess — among a hundred vague guesses of others — one might conjecture that the name of our river meant the Tobacco river, from the Tobacco Nation upon its banks. The river was called Onghiara from its mouth up to the Falls. Beyond the Falls it had no name, but was considered a mere extension of Lake Erie. The Iroquois found the name, and in their dialect called it Oienkwara, which means tobacco smoke, which word is nearly identical with Niagara.

There are slippery places in Indian philology, and we maj* well call to mind the famous sculptured stone of the Kaim of Kilprunes and the interpretation of its letters by that zealous antiquary, the Laird of Monk Barns — with their right meaning given by the old blue gown, Edie Ochiltree, to the sad discomfiture of the over-learned antiquary. Within a life time the accentuation of the name Niagara has been changed. We now place the accent on the antepenult syllable. The Indians, as the English, placed it on the penult, as we find it accented in Goldsmith's poem of "The Traveller," 1764: " Where wild Oswego spreads his swamps around, And Niagara stuns with thundering sound." Even so late as the war of 1812 the colours of the York Volun teers were decorated with the word " Niagaira," in honour of their services on this frontier, and which are still preserved in Toronto in recognition of their royal donor, George, Prince Regent.

When the Neutrals were totally exterminated by the Iroquois about 1650, the Seneca tribe took possession of their country on the eastern side of the Niagara, but not on the western side, which they allowed to be occupied by the Mississauguas, a branch of the great Chippawa Nation, who upon the expulsion of the Hurons from what is now western Ontario came down from the Northwest and claimetl the territory as having belonged to them before the Hurons took it from them. Their claim seems to have been admitted by the Iroquois, but no record exists of the transactions. The Mississauguas were allowed to take up the land as far as the Niagara River, and the site of the town of Onghiara became a chief settlement of the Mississauguas, where they were found in full possession by LaSalle on his first voyage to the west, in 1688.

The Mississauguas, or Great Sauks, lived like the rest of the Chippawas by the lakes and rivers, which they navigated with their beautiful birch bark canoes, subsisting more by fishing than by hunting. The Attikameng, or great herring as the whitefish was called, abounded in Lake Ontario; also the salmon and salmon trout, glorious fishes, fit for a king's table. The pike, pickerel and maskinonge, the herring, sturgeon and other valuable fish, made a water paradise for the Mississauguas. Their women cultivated the open plains of Niagara for Indian corn, pumpkins, beans and probably the Indian tobacco, which, with peltry, held the place of money in the Indian countries. The successive occupation of this territory by so many different tribes has left scarcely a mark behind them to inform posterity of their existence.

A few burial places, some stone weapons and tools, pipes and rude pottery, are occasionally found, but no one can distinguish their respective owners. Nothing is to be learned from these remains except proof of the universal barbarism of the people using them. The ruined stone-built fort of Keniuto, on the edge of the mountain overlooking the plains near Lewiston, was the work of the Five Nations of Iroquois to serve as a place of defence and offence in the long wars carried through the midst of the Neutral Nation against the Hurons. Their warpath was from the lower Niagara, by way of Onghiara, and thence in canoes around the head of the lake to Toronto) and thence by way of Lake Simcoe to the country of the Hurons — a wild route and the scene of savage war1 and adventure in those barbarous times.

The only description of the Neutrals found recorded in history is in the letters of the Jesuit missionaries, who visited their country in 1640. It is a very interesting and full account of those vanished people ; and as the only record of them, and containing all we know of them, deserves transcription here in the very heart and capital, of the Neutral country. In the annual report to their Superior of the Order of Jesuits in Paris for the year 1641 is found the annexed account of the Attikada rons or Neutral Nation, written probably by Father Brebreuf, who was the missionary who went to them from the Huron Nation north of them. He was accompanied by Father Joseph Marie Chanmout, who had come from France the previous year. The account is written in quaint old French, which translated reads as follows :

Chapter III

Relation of New France, in the Year 1641. Chapter VI. — Of the mission of Angels to the Attikadarons or people of the Neutral Nation. This nation is very populous ; in it are to be counted about forty towns or villages. On leaving the Hurons we travel four or five days before we reach the first and nearest of them — that is to say about forty leagues, always going straight to the southward. So that we may say that if, according to the latest and most exact observations we have made, our new house of St. Mary, which is in the middle of the country of the Hurons, is placed in the forty-fourth degree and five and twenty minutes of latitude, the boundary of the Neutral Nation on the side of the Hurons will be about forty -two and-a-half degrees of elevation. A more exact observation cannot, at the present time, be made, for the very sight of an astronomical instrument would drive wild those people who have not endured the sight of one, as we shall see by and by.

From the first village of the Neutral Nation, which we come to on arriving from here, and continuing our journey to the south or southwest, is about four days' journey from there to the mouth of the river so famous of that nation, in Ontario or Lake St. Louis. On this side of the river (and not on the farther side, as is marked on some maps,) are situated the most of the towns of the Neutral Nation. There are three or four on the farther side, ranging from east to west towards the nation of the Cat or Erie Chronons. By this river are discharged the waters of our great lake of the Hurons, or oner douce — quiet sea — which first runs into Lake Erie, or of the Cat Nation, and thence enters the country of the Neutrals and takes the name of Onguiaahra until it discharges into Ontario, or Lake St. Louis, whence arises the river which passes by Quebec called the St. Lawrence, so that if we were once master of the shore nearest the settlements of the Iroquois there would be no danger in ascending the St. Lawrence up to the Neutral Nation, and beyond, with notable saving of time and trouble.

The Rev. Fathers who have been there estimate that the popu lation is at least twelve thousand souls in the whole extent of their country, which would enable them to furnish four thousand warriors, notwithstanding the wars, famine and the sickness which has prevailed among them for three or four years past. After all, I am of opinion that those who have alloweei such an extent to that country, and so many people, have understood by the term Neutral Nations all the other nations to the south and southwest of our Hurons, who are very numerous, but who at first were but confusedly known, all reckoned under one and the same name. The knowledge we have gained since then, both of the language and people, has enabled us to distinguish better among them. Of all the different nations, however, which we now know, there is not one but has trade or war with others still more remote, a fact which shows that the population of these nations which are yet undiscovered is great, and that there are great harvests to reap and great fields in which to plough and sow.

The French, who were first here, named this nation the Neutral. And not without reason, for this country being on the ordinaiy land route of Iroquois and Hurons, sworn enemies, it remained at peace with both, equally. Witness, when the Hurons and Iroquois met together in the same village of this nation, both were in security until they went on the warpath again. But for some time past the fury of one against the other has been so great that in whatever place they met there was no safety for the weaker party, especially if the party were Hurons, for whom this Neutral Nation seems to have the least liking. The Hurons call the Neutral Nation " Attiwandaronk," meaning people of a little different language, for as to nations who speak a tongue which they do not at all understand they call them " Akwanake," of whatever nation they may be, as if they were foreigners.

We have reason to believe that no long time ago the Hurons, Iroquois and Neutral Nations were one people, that they sprang from one family or primitive stock planted on the shore of this region, but who in lapse of time became separated by distance one from another — some more, some less — in residence, interest anel feeling, so that some of them became enemies, others neutral, while some remain in alliance and special relations with each other. These people who are neutral between the Hurons and the Iroquois carry on cruel wars with other western nations, particularly with the Atsistachronons, or Fire Nation, from whom they carried off last year a hundred prisoners, and this year, having a force of two thousand men, they captured over a hundred and seventy, whom they treated with the same cruelties which the Hurons exercise upon their enemies.

But they exceed them in this, they burn the women prisoners of war as well as the men, a thing which the Hurons do not do, who either spare their lives or are content with killing them at the feast and carry off some part of their bodies. In food and clothing the Neutrals do not differ materially from the Hurons. They have in abundance Indian corn, beans and pumpkins. Fish is likewise plentiful, some kinds of which are found in certain places which are not found elsewhere. The Neuters excel in hunting. They chase the deer, buffalo, wild cats, wolves, bears, beaver and other animals whose skins and flesh are valuable. There was great abundance of meat this year by reason of the uncommon snows which have prevailed, which have made hunting easier. It is a rare thing to see in this country more than half a foot of snow, but this year there has been over three feet of snow.

They have also wild turkeys, which go in flocks through the woods and fields. As for refreshing fruits no more are found here than among the Hurons. They have chestnuts in great quantity and wild apples a little larger in size. They wear a robe of skin upon their bare bodies like all the Indians, but with less of care about the breechcloth than the Hurons have. Many of them do not wear it at all. Some wear it, but generally in such a way that they hardly conceal what ought to be covered. The women are usually clothed, at least from the waist to the knees. They seem to be more abandoned and impudent in their immodesty than the Hurons. They embroider their robes with much care and industry, and try to ornament them in divers fashions. They also make figures upon their bodies from head to foot with charcoal pricked into their flesh, upon which they have previously traced their lines, so that we see their faces and breasts figured like the helmets and cuirasses of soldiers in France, and the rest of front part of the body.

As to the rest of their customs and manners of living, they are in all respects similar to the other savages of these countries, particularly in regard to their irreligion and government, whether political or economical. Still there are always a few things in which they differ from our Hurons. In the first place, they appear to be larger, stronger and better built men. Secondly, their affection for their dead seems to be greater. Our Hurons immediately after death take the corpse to the burying place, and only withdraw it thence at the feast of the dead. The Neutrals do not take the corpse to the burying place, but keep it as long as they are able, until decomposition renders it insupportable. A corpse often passes the whole winter in the wigwam, and when they place it at last outside upon a scaffold to decay they draw out the bones as soon as possible and exhibit them to sight, arranged on one side or other of their wigwams, until the feast of the dead.

These objects being continuall}* before their eyes renew the sense of their loss and make them cry and lament with lugubrious sono*s, but this is only done by the women. The third point in which they differ from our Hurons is in the multitude and quality of fools or crazy among them. We find every where on going through the country people who play the fool with all the extravagance possible, and in the liberties which they take they are tolerated and allowed to do whatever they please for fear of offending the evil spirit that is in them. They throw and scatter about coals of fire from the hearths and break whatever they meet with as if they were mad, although for the most part they are as much masters of themselves as other people. They act in that manner they say to please their evil spirit who demands it of them, to wit : him who speaks in dreams to them and gives them to hope for the successes of their wishes in hunting.

While the missionaries were in these parts they learned that the Sonontouchronons (Senecas), one of the Five Nations, had a peculiar form of government. Men and women took in turn the direction of public affairs, so that if a man governs them now he will be succeeded by a woman, who in turn will govern them for her lifetime, except in affairs of war. After the death of the woman a man will have the management of affairs. Some of the old people told our missionaries that they knew of a certain western nation with whom they used to go to war, who were not very far from the sea. These fished for vignots, which are a species of oyster, the shell of which serves to make porcelaine, which are the pearls of that country. They describe the fishing for them in this way : They observed that when the tides rise where these vignots abound, and when the violence of the waves drive them towards the shore, they throw themselves recklessly into the water and seize on all they can lay hold of.

They find them sometimes so large in size that it is with difficulty the}* can embrace one. Some of the elders assured us that the young men who followed this fishing must have no knowledge of a woman, and withdraw themselves from them. I report truly. They relate moreover that those people carry on a sort of war with certain aquatic animals, bigger and swifter in running than the caribou. The young men tease these animals while in the water, which immediately come to land to pursue their aggressors. Then seeing themselves closely followed, throw down a piece of leather or moccasin before the animals, which stop and amuse themselves with it while the hunters gain ground on them, and as often as they find themselves close pressed repeat the same manoeuvre, until they reach a fort or ambuscade where a troop of their people are gathered and surround the beast and master him. This is what we learned of chief importance about those countries.

Chapter IV

1640. ?l/| ANY of the Frenchmen who have been here formerly made -*■*'*• journeys in the country of the Neutrals for sake of the profits and advantages of the fur trade, and other small gains to be hoped for there. But we know of none who went there with the intention to preach the gospel except the Reverend Pere Joseph de la Roche Daillon, a Recollet, who in 1626 passed the winter there. But the Frenchmen who were here at that time, having heard of the ill treat ment which he had received, and fearing that matters would turn worse, sought him and brought him back the following spring. The zeal which led this father to make that voyage as soon as ever he had set foot among the Hurons, did not allow him to study the language, so that he found himself for the most part of the time without an interpreter, and was compelled to teach as well as he could by signs rather than with living voice, as he himself relates in a printed letter of his.

This, added to the bad tricks which the Hurons played upon him, who feared the loss of their trade, like those others of whom we will speak by and by, did not allow him in the short space of time to do what he hael wished to do for the service of God. Fourteen years afterwards the two Fathers of our company, who have charge of this mission, set out from this House of St. Mary on the second day of November last year, 1640. When arrived at St. Joseph, or Teanaustajae, the last village of the Hurons, where they were to procure their provisions for the route and find guides for the way — those who had promised them having failed to keep their word — all they could do was to address them selves to Heaven. After making a vow, Pere de Brebœuf met a young man who had no intention of making this voyage.