Silence and desertion reign supreme, where of yore
Bigot's heartless wassailers used to meet and gamble away King Louis's
card money and piastres.
"And sunk are the voices that sounded in mirth.
And empty the goblets and dreary the hearth!"
The tower or boudoir, where was immured the Algonquin maid Caroline, the
beautiful, that too has crumbled to dust.
We are now at Lorette.
TAHOURENCHE.
"I'm the chieftain of this mountain,
Times and seasons found me here,
My drink has been the crystal fountain,
My fare the wild moose or the deer."
(The HURON CHIEF, by Adam Kidd).
There exists a faithful portrait of this noble savage, such as drawn by
himself and presented, we believe, to the Laval University at Quebec; for
glimpses of his origin, home and surroundings, we are indebted to an
honorary chief of the tribe, Ahatsistari. [308]
Paul Tahourenche (Francois Xavier Picard), Great Chief of the Lorette
Hurons, was born at Indian Lorette in 1810; he is consequently at present
71 years of age. He is tall, erect, well proportioned, dignified in face
and deportment; when habited in his Indian regalia: blue frock coat, with
bright buttons and medals, plumed fur cap, leggings of colored cloth,
bright sash and armlets, with war axe, he looks the beau ideal of a
respectable Huron warrior, shorn of the ferocity of other days. Of the
line of Huron chiefs which proceeded him we can furnish but a very meagre
history. Adam Kidd, who wrote a poem entitled the Huron Chief in 1829,
and who paid that year a visit to the Lorette Indians and saw their oldest
chief, Oui-a-ra-lih-to, having unfortunately failed to fulfil the
promise he then made of publishing the traditions and legends of the tribe
furnished him on that occasion, an omission which, we hope, will yet be
supplied by an educated Huron; the Revd. Mr. Vincent. Of Oui-a-ra-lih-
to, we learn from Mr. Kidd: "This venerable patriarch, who is now (in
1829) approaching the precincts of a century, is the grandson of Tsa-a-
ra-lih-to, head chief of the Hurons during the war of 1759. Oui-a-ra-
lih-to, with about thirty-five warriors of the Indian village of Lorette
in conjunction with the Iroquois and Algonquins, was actually engaged in
the army of Burgoyne, a name unworthy to be associated with the noble
spirit of Indian heroism. During my visit to this old chief - May, 1829 - he
willingly furnished me with an account of the distinguished warriors, and
the traditions of different tribes, which are still fresh in his memory,
and are handed from father to son, with the precision, interest and
admiration that the tales and exploits of Ossian and his heroes are
circulated in their original purity to this day among the Irish." Mr. Kidd
alludes also to another great chief, Atsistari, who flourished in 1637,
and who may have been the same as the Huron Saul Ahatsistari, who lived
in 1642.
Of the powerful tribes of the aborigines who, in remote periods, infested
the forests, lakes and streams of Canada, none by their prowess in war,
wisdom in council, success as tillers of the soil, intelligent and lofty
bearing, surpassed the Wyandats, or Hurons. [309] They numbered 15,000
souls, according to the historian Ferland, 40,000 according to Bouchette,
and chiefly inhabited the country bordering on Lake Huron and Simcoe; they
might, says Sagard, have been styled the "nobles" among savages in
contradistinction to that other powerful confederacy, more democratic in
their ways, also speaking the Huron language, and known as the Five
Nations (Mohawks,[310] Oneydoes, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas), styled
by the French the Iroquois, or Hiroquois, from the habit of their orators
of closing their orations with the word "Hiro" - I have said.
'Tis a curious fact that the aborigines whom Jacques Cartier had found
masters of the soil, at Hochelaga (Montreal,) and Stadacona (Quebec,) in
1535, sixty-eight years later on, in 1603, when Champlain visited these
Indian towns, had disappeared: a different race had succeeded them. Though
it opens a wide field to conjecture, recent investigations seem to
indicate that it was the Huron-Iroquois nation who, in 1535, were the
enfants du sol at both places, and that in the interim the Algonquins
had, after bloody wars, dispersed and expelled the Huron-Iroquois. The
savages with whom the early French settlers held intercourse can be
comprised under two specific heads - the Algonquins and the Huron-Iroquois
- the language of each differing as much, observes the learned Abbe
Faillon, as French does from Chinese.
It would take us beyond the limit of this sketch to recapitulate the
series of massacres which reduced these warlike savages, the Hurons, from
their high estate to that of a dispersed, nomadic tribe, and placed the
Iroquois or Mohawks, at one time nearly destroyed by the Hurons, in the
ascendant.
Their final overthrow may be said to date back to the great Indian
massacres of 1648-9, at their towns, or missions, on the shores of Lakes
Simcoe, the first mission being founded in 1615 by the Friar LeCaron,
accompanied by twelve soldiers sent by Champlain in advance of his own
party. The Jesuit mission was attacked by the Iroquois in 1648; St. Louis,
St. Joseph [311], St. Ignace [312], Ste. Marie [313], St. Jean [314],
successively fell, or were threatened; all the inmates who escaped sought
safety in flight; the protracted sufferings of the missionaries Breboeuf
and Gabriel Lallemant have furnished one of the brightest pages of
Christian heroism in New France. Breboeuf expired on the 16th March and
Lallemant on 17th March, 1649. A party of Hurons sought Manitoulin Island,
then called Ekaentoton, a few fled to Virginia; others succeeded in
obtaining protection on the south shore of Lake Erie, from the Erie tribe,
only to share, later on, the dire fate of the nation who had dared to
incorporate them in its sparse ranks.
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