Captured By The Iroquois—And Returned

It is generally accepted that a young girl surnamed Baillargeon was abducted by “les Iroquois” about 1661 and later “miraculously” recovered. This girl has stirred up a fair amount of attention on the genealogy message boards over the years. The questions are (1) when exactly did this happen? and (2) who was the girl?

I simply had to investigate this, because 1 of the 3 possible Baillargeon abductees was my 8G grandmother and another was her sister.

First, the story as it has come down to us in the history books:

In 1666 and 1667, the Marquis de Tracy led troops of the Carignan-Salières Regiment into Indian territory in order to suppress the frequent attacks by “les Iroquois”. In the course of one of these operations, he obtained the release of a number of French children who had been more or less assimilated into the life of their captors and who would have in time become wives or warriors of that group. Among these was an older girl who had been in captivity for several years and become so adapted to the Indian way of life and so fond of her adoptive Indian family that she was afraid to leave them and return to Quebec. This girl, recorded as Anne Baillargeon, ran into the woods to escape from the French, but, as she later reported, she encountered a very stern-looking woman who warned that the girl would face severe punishment if she did not return immediately to the French. Anne was so frightened that she obeyed and came back to Quebec with the others.

Upon their return, M. de Tracy paid the tuition for Anne and another rescued girl into the boarding school of the Ursuline convent in Quebec so that they could be re-educated in the Catholic religion and values and in the French way of life. There Anne saw a portrait of the former head of the convent, Mère Marie de Saint-Joseph (who had died in 1652), and immediately exclaimed that that was the woman who had frightened her into returning to the French. Anne then told the story of her vision, saying that the woman wore the same habit as the woman in the portrait. Sounds like a fairy tale, oui?

Actually, there is documentary evidence for the tale. The story of the apparition of the Ursuline nun appears in the 1863 book Les Ursulines de Québec depuis leur établissement jusqu’à nos jours, volume 1, which is online at Canadiana.org; the relevant pages are 250-252. That story was taken from the published correspondence of Mère Marie de L’Incarnation, Mère Marie de Saint-Joseph’s successor; the letter says the event happened in 1667. I do not have access to the surviving records of the Ursuline convent, but several respected historians agree that those records do in fact show that two teen-age French girls were in fact placed with the nuns: “Marie M. Bourgery, agée de quinze ans, et Anne Baillargeon, agée de dix-huit ans”; their fees are being paid by M. Tracy. But the record date is 22 May 1666. Immediately, then, there is a problem.

Tracy’s expedition wherein he forced the Iroquois in what is now New York to return a large group of French captives took place in 1667. He could hardly have placed 2 girls in the convent before they had been rescued! Therefore, he could only have been sponsoring two of the hostages released by the Senecas (one of the nations of the Iroquois) in spring 1666, shortly before the two girls are recorded as being placed in the convent for re-education. Marie de l’Incarnation (or the publisher of her letters) must have gotten the dates mixed up; I think it’s safe to say that the original record of the girls’ entry proves it. People may write down last year instead of this year on a record but they usually don’t write down next year. (Think of the fun we have when we are dating the checks we write every January.)

The history of the Ursulines cited above adds that one of the two girls decided to enter the novitiate but left the convent after a few months; the other girl had already left.

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that most people rely on the unquestionably honest and saintly Mère Marie de l’Incarnation’s letter. But honesty and saintliness do not guarantee a perfect memory, and the letter at issue was edited and published several years after her 1672 death by her (pre-Ursuline) son Claude Martin. I don’t know if the original copy of this particular letter has survived, and since I’ve never seen a sample of Marie’s handwriting, I can’t tell how legible it was. I don’t know how reliable Claude was in transcribing the original letter or how much editing he did on the document. I can’t be sure whether the original written date is 1666 or 1667. The letter purportedly says “Anne” was about 9 years old when captured and was in captivity for 9 years. However, I have noticed that in 17th century Quebec handwriting, the numerals 4, 7, and 9 often look very much alike; that’s why most curés wrote the year out in words rather than in numerals when dating their sacramental records. Therefore, we can’t be sure that the ages of the girls as published by Claude are what Mère Marie herself wrote, much less whether Mère Marie's letter was correct as to ages and dates.

The question for me is, of course, who was the Baillargeon girl captured by the Indians and returned to Quebec in 1666? If the 1863 history transcribes the information accurately, and if the age was not an estimate but verified at the time, and if the age was correctly recorded by the Ursulines in the first place, the girl was born about 1648. That’s a lot of ifs, particularly when you consider the possibility that the girl recorded as “Anne” could actually be “Jeanne”. Sounds crazy, oui?

Mais non! On the Lavalley surname board at Rootsweb, this issue was considered by several people in 2000. (The question was, which was the Baillargeon girl who after being rescued from the Indians married Jean Lavallée (my 7G Grandfather) in 1702. (The correct answer is “none of the above”, because Jean married Jeanne-Catherine Hus, the daughter of one of the 3 suspects.) Among the issues that came up in this discussion was the information (which I later confirmed) that the Île-Orléans was in fact attacked by the Iroquois in 1660-61, a number of people were captured, and that the names of many of the captives are not recorded in any surviving document.

One person involved in the discussion also stated that “Jeanne” and “Anne” were pronounced almost exactly the same in the 1600s, so the names could have been easily confused. This was disputed in a post by Jenny S on the Baillargeon message board in November 2010, but although Jenny correctly points out the overwhelming value of the contemporary record made when the Ursulines received the girls, I disagree with her statement that no one could have mistaken the name “Jeanne” for “Anne” or vice versa.

Why do I disagree? First of all, in the 1600s regional accents were very much more distinct than now and often amounted to mutually-incomprehensible regional dialects. This is true all over Europe, not only in the colony of Quebec. Before radio and talking motion pictures and television homogenized the languages, if you lived anywhere in Europe and moved twenty miles from home, you and your new neighbors might have a lot of difficulty understanding one another.

Moreover, until universal literacy, spelling of a word or name depended on the whim of the person writing it down. In French, when a word beginning with “h” is followed by a vowel, the “h” is generally silent. My immigrant 7G Grandfather François Han-dit-Chaussé is recorded by the curé as "François Janham" in his 1685 marriage record, which François himself signed with the spelling "Jahan". The surname is also recorded elsewhere as Jean, Han, Ham, An, Am, and other creative spellings. (As his descendant, my Great-Grandfather Joseph Chausse/Chosa put it in the 1850s, “You spell it like it sounds.” Great-Grandfather Joseph’s surname is spelled at least 10 different ways in documents that include his name.)

All of these spellings suggest that “Anne” and “Jeanne” could in fact be confused in the 1600s. Tanguay agrees with me: in the first volume of his Dictionnaire Genealogique, published in 1871, he gives the captive’s name as Jeanne rather than Anne. Note also that even in modern French, the two names rhyme.

Now then: there are records of only two Baillargeon families known to be in Quebec in the right time period to be the parents of the miraculously-returned captive “Anne”. One line stems from my 8G Grandparents Mathurin Baillargeon and Marie Métayer, whose marriage contract was drawn up by notary Ameau on 7 August 1650. The other line stems from Jean Baillargeon and Marguerite Guillebourdeaux, who married at Québec on 20 November 1650. Both men came from the region of Angoumois, Mathurin from Embourie and Jean from Londigny; since the two towns are quite close to one another, and Baillargeon is not a particularly common name, I would not be in the least surprised to learn that Jean and Mathurin were related to each other.

If the Ursulines correctly recorded the ages of the two rescued girls who entered the convent school in May 1666, Marie M. (Madeleine) Bourgery was 15 years old then (therefore born about 1651) and Anne Baillargeon was 18 years old (therefore born about 1648).

However, there appear to be only three candidates for the returned Baillargeon girl, all born after 1648, and none of them age 18 in May 1666:

1. Anne Baillargeon was the daughter of my 8G Granparents Mathurin Baillargeon and Marie Métayer. She was baptized at Trois-Rivières in November 1651. Anne was 15 in May 1666.

2: Jeanne Baillargeon, daughter of Jean Baillargeon and Marguerite Guillebourdeaux, was baptized 7 May 1651 at Québec. Six months older than Anne, she had her 15th birthday in May 1666. By 1660 or so, her parents were living on the Île-Orléans, where a number of French persons were captured in 1661; there is no record of the exact number or of the names of the captives. By March 1666, Jeanne’s mother had died and her father had remarried; Jeanne might have been reluctant to return to her father’s home under those circumstances.

3. Jeanne Baillargeon, my direct ancestor, was Anne’s younger sister, the daughter of Mathurin Baillargeon and Marie Métayer, baptized at Trois-Rivières on 5 Nov 1654; she would have been 11 1/2 when rescued in May 1666—in which case the Ursulines were way off the mark when estimating her age as 18.

At this point in researching this issue, I decided to investigate the actual age of the other girl placed in the convent for re-education to see how accurate the Ursulines were in her case. Her name was Marie-Madeleine Bourgery (daughter of Jean-Baptiste Bourgery and Marie Gendre). She, like the daughters of Mathurin Baillargeon, was born at Trois-Rivières; she was baptized there on 22 July 1652. I think it is quite likely that Madeleine and “Anne” were captured together. In May 1666 Madeleine was 2 months short of her 14th birthday. The Ursulines recorded her age at 15 years, which is fairly close. (After leaving the convent, Madeleine married three times, had a large number of children, and died in 1741 at Pointe-Claire “agée environs 100 ans”.)

Right off the top, I decided that my direct ancestor Jeanne (daughter of Mathurin) could be eliminated. We are so accustomed nowadays to modern teenagers being taken for adults that it may seem reasonable to say that Jeanne looked like an 18-year-old. But the Ursulines were only a year off the mark in pegging Madeleine’s age, and the Ursulines had been running their boarding school for Indian girls long enough to be quite familiar with the behavior and demeanor of their charges. It seems extremely unlikely that they could have mistaken a girl not yet age 12 (whether white or Indian) for an 18-year-old young woman. I concluded that Jeanne was not the captive.

But the other two possibles?

Tanguay identifies the Jeanne Baillargeon who was the daughter of Jean and Marguerite as the girl rescued by Tracy from the Iroquois. However, Tanguay failed to notice that this Jeanne was the Jeanne Baillargeon who married Jean LeBrècque on 28 November 1664 at Chateau-Richer, at the age of 13. I seriously doubt that the Ursulines would have listed a wife, however young, as a “girl”, so she is extremely unlikely to have been the recovered captive placed with the Ursulines in 1666 to be re-educated in the ways of French Catholicism. She wouldn’t have needed re-education, since she would have to have been captured after her marriage and therefore could have been in captivity for only about a year and a half. This Jeanne surely would have asked about her husband and been reclaimed by him immediately upon her return.

This leaves Anne, my 8G aunt, who was 15 when she entered the convent school. So why was she recorded as being 18? Either the good Ursulines were guessing as to the ages of the two girls, or whoever made the original entry record in the convent’s books made her numeral 8s look very much like her 5s, a feat which is by no means difficult. A casual glance through a few Quebec parish registers from this time period will convince you.

It seems to me quite likely that both girls appeared or acted somewhat older than their actual age, possibly due to the living conditions during their captivity, to the grave “adult” demeanor expected of “Iroquois” teenagers, and/or to sheer cultural shock at finding themselves in a now-unfamiliar environment.

Of course, none of this proves whether Mère Marie de Saint-Joseph, 14 years after her death, actually appeared to Anne and frightened her into going home. I’m not saying that Anne (or the Ursulines) made the story up, either; I believe from my own experiences that the human spirit survives after the death of the body and that therefore the story is “possibly” true. I’m only saying that such matters are the province of faith, not genealogy.

This case is a good illustration of my Third Genealogical Mantra: Always step back and test your conclusions for reasonableness before deciding whether you have proved your case.

In the case of Anne Baillargeon, I’ve shown that the only reasonable choice for the girl rescued after several years of “Iroquois” captivity is the older daughter of Mathurin Baillargeon and Marie Métayer. I once assumed so; now I’m convinced.

If your family tree shows a woman having children at the age of 6 (or 66), or a man getting married who died as an infant or whose “prior” spouse is still having children with him in a nearby parish, you’ve made a wrong connection somewhere. In Quebec genealogy, this can happen easily because, at any given point in Quebec’s history up to about 1850, the naming customs produced numerous people in the same extended family who had the same name and often were about the same age and living in the same area.

If you don’t look at the “big picture” regularly to make sure that everything makes sense, you’re bound to have mistakes in your research and false ancestors inscribed on your pedigree chart . . . and some of your actual ancestors just might become annoyed with you if you overlook them. If they do, don't say I didn't warn you!

"Tués Par Les Iroquois", Part 2

In my last post I discussed the dangers my Quebec ancestors faced from the Iroquois confederacy and, in particular, the life of my Huron ancestors Nicolas/Arendanki, Jeanne/Otrih8handet and their daughter Catherine/Anenantha, who is my direct ancestor along two separate family lines.

But these were by no means my only 17th-century ancestors whose lives were cut short by the Iroquois, and I’d like to share their stories with you.

My 9G Grandfather Pierre Gareman immigrated from France about 1639 along with his wife Madeleine Charlot and their first two children, Florence (my 8G grandmother) and Nicole. Pierre was engaged to work at Portneuf, but the Iroquois threat there drove them to take refuge at the Jesuit mission at Sillery, where daughter Marguerite was born and baptized in 1639. By 1643, the family was at Trois-Rivières, where son Charles was born and baptized. After another futile attempt to develop their employer’s seigneury at Portneuf, the family settled at Cap Rouge (now part of Quebec city).

On 10 June 1653 the Iroquois attacked, killing a neighbor and capturing Pierre and his 10-year-old son Charles. Pierre was killed, doubtless in a most unpleasant fashion, and his remains were found the following year at Trois-Rivières and given Christian burial on 25 July. But Charles?

For more than twenty years it was assumed that 10-year-old Charles had been likewise killed, but in June 1677 he showed up, very much alive, in Quebec, with an Oneida wife and an infant daughter, who was duly baptized and then turned over to the Ursuline convent to be raised. Charles and his wife then disappeared back into the wilderness and there is no record of them ever having been seen again by any white person; the daughter died in 1683.

One of my 8G Grandfathers, Louis Guimont, was rather famous in his all-too-brief lifetime. Born in France about 1625, he married Jeanne Bitouset, a “Fille à Marrier” (a young woman brought from France to become a wife of a settler before the formal “Filles du Roi” program began in 1663). Louis and Jeanne settled at Beaupré, near Quebec city, and in 1658, despite a very painful back (a problem with which I can sincerely sympathize), he braced himself to place 3 heavy stones into the foundation of the new church at Beaupré and “suddenly found himself healed.” This was the first miracle attributed to Ste-Anne at Beaupré, which became (and still is) a major site of pilgrimage, particularly for the sick. Louis himself undoubtedly believed his healing was a miracle, and he was notable for his religious devotion during the brief remainder of his life.

Louis was one of the hapless habitants of Beaupré captured by the Iroquois on 18 June, 1661. His constant praying during the ordeal completely enraged his captors. According to fellow captive Joseph Hébert, who managed to smuggle some letters written on bark back to family in Quebec: “He was beaten with sticks and iron rods. They beat him so much that he died from the blows, but nonetheless, he did not stop praying to God, so incessantly that the Iroquois, enraged to see his lips moving in prayer, cut off both his upper and lower lips. Was that a horrible sight to see! And nonetheless he did not stop praying, which so angered the Iroquois that they tore his heart from his chest while he was still alive and threw it in his face.” Two of Louis’s children, Joseph and Louise, are my direct ancestors, along different lines.

The infamous Massacre of Lachine, on the stormy night of 4 to 5 August 1689, was the beginning of several days of horror on the Île-Montréal. A huge Iroquois war party (estimated at 1,500 warriors) attacked the village, slaughtering or burning alive many of its inhabitants and capturing many others. Soon the entire Île-Montréal was overrun by the Iroquois, and two of my 8G grandparents, Pierre Dagenais dit Lepine and his wife Anne Brandon, habitants at Rivière-des-Prairies, were among the victims. Pierre was killed on 9 August; the curé found his body and gave it a hasty burial on the spot. Given the circumstances, it is understandable that the curé forgot to record the burial in the register, but he did later insert a loose page in the register recording this act. The loose page eventually fell out and for many years the fate of Pierre was unknown. However, the lost loose page turned up later in the judiciary archives of Joliette, so we now know what happened to him and when. There is a public park name Parc Pierre-Dagenais-Dit-Lepine in present-day Montreal.

As for Pierre's wife Anne Brandon, her precise fate is unknown, but she disappeared the same night her husband was killed and was never seen again. She may have been captured; she may have been killed but her body was never found—or at least, never identified. (Many victims, including women and children, were burned alive and therefore were unidentifiable.) Since her exact fate was not known, her children’s subsequent marriage records do not state that she is dead. In fact, it is possible that she was taken alive back to Iroquois country and survived for many years.

The details of my 7G Grandfather Pierre Forcier’s death have not survived. He and a neighbor, Jacques Vacher, were killed by the Iroquois in the area of their parish, St-François-du-Lac, on 18 May 1690, according to the record of their burial the following day. The Iroquois were making frequent raids in Quebec in this time frame, and the curé who buried the two bodies was doubtless fully occupied with worrying about when the next attack would happen and trying to comfort the terrified members of his congregation; it’s understandable, if frustrating for Pierre’s descendants, that he didn’t record more than the barest detail in recording the deaths of these two men. On the other hand, perhaps it’s better that we don’t know more details . . .

Less than 2 months later, also at St-François-du-Lac, my 8G Grandparents Paul Hus and Jeanne Baillargeon had to bury their 6-year-old son Paul, killed by an Iroquois war party. (The couple gave the same name to a son born in 1702.)

Another 8G grandfather, Jean LaVallée dit Petit, a member of the local militia, was killed by the Iroquois on 12 Jun 1692 near Montréal and buried the same day. No further details are recorded.

My 8G Grandparents Jean Deniau or Deneau and Hélène Daudin were both “tués par les Iroquois” on 12 August 1695 at Boucherville. Again, no details about their deaths were recorded. Their son-in-law, my 7G Grandfather Alexandre Lacoste dit Languedoc, was a witness to their burial later that same day. I do hope his wife Marguerite, my 7G Grandmother, did not have to see the (doubtless mutilated) corpses of her parents.

The Iroquois were not making these attacks on the settlers in Quebec out of sheer cussedness: they had a definite goal. They and their English and Dutch allies in this era shared a desire to monopolize the fur trade: the Iroquois wanted to force all other Indian groups to sell their furs through the Iroquois rather than deal directly with any white traders; the white traders were happy to have the Iroquois deliver the furs instead of having to go out themselves and deal with the people who had trapped the animals and cured the pelts. The Iroquois preferred to deal with the Dutch and English because they supplied them with guns (the French, as a general rule, did not give guns to Indians in this era) and naturally didn’t want to see their rivals equally well-armed. Given the constant hostility among the French, the English, and the Dutch, the Iroquois realized that the French could very well begin supplying guns to their native allies; therefore they wanted to cut off the direct lines of trade between other tribes and the French settlers of Quebec.

In addition, during the last 4 decades of the 1600s, the reason the French endured so many Iroquois attacks was that the Iroquois were desperate to drive out the French from the mid-1660s on—or at least eliminate the French as players in the fur trade. Why? Because the coveted beaver and other animals with valuable furs were growing very scarce in Iroquois territory, and the Iroquois were unable to gain direct access to the vast resources of the Lake Superior region, due to a catastrophic setback they’d suffered in 1662, when they had tried to seize control of that area. Since the tale was passed down orally, there are numerous versions of it with somewhat differing details. Here’s my own synopsis of that event:

1662: Whitefish Bay on Lake Superior, not far from Sault Ste Marie. A large war party of Iroquois (how large depends on who is telling the story—at least about 100 warriors, perhaps 200, some estimates as high as 500) was encamped there. One version says that their presence was reported by the sole survivor of an Ojibwe encampment which had been attacked and otherwise annihilated by that war party. The survivor is said to have spread the news of the common and imminent menace to other bands, and the Ojibwe, the Odawa (Ottawa), and their allies in the area resolved to stop the invasion before it went further. Other versions merely say that the Iroquois were “discovered”.

In any case, a war party was quickly gathered to repel the invaders, since no one doubted that the Iroquois had hostile intentions. The Ojibwe and their allies took advantage of a fortuitous rainy night to creep undetected right up to the edges of the Iroquois encampment. They attacked at dawn. The Iroquois were either completely annihilated or, as one version of the story has it, one humiliated Iroquois was deliberately allowed to live and return home, so that the rest of the Iroquois could know of the disaster and of the firm intention and ability of the inhabitants of the Lake Superior area to repel any further attempts at incursion. Certainly the Iroquois made no more attempts to get a foothold at Lake Superior. The place of the massacre became known as Nadowegoning, “place of Iroquois bones,” because for at least a century later, the bleached and decaying remains of the Iroquois were all over the place. It is now known as Iroquois Point.

The ancestors I’ve discussed who suffered and died at the hands of the Iroquois are not the only family members of mine who were victims. There is, for example, the remarkable case of Anne Baillargeon . . . But that’s another story.