"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.

With A Little Help From My Kin

In the spring of 2001—about half a year after I began my research—my mother and I learned of an upcoming powwow sponsored by the Bois Forte Band (where we are enrolled) and the Grand Portage Band, both of Minnesota, and by the Lac La Croix First Nation in Canada. Now, powwows occur several times a year on most reservations, but since we now lived in California, it had never occurred to us to try to attend one in Minnesota. But the minute I read about it, the thought popped into my head that Mom and I should attend and also visit the graves of her mother and grandmother. (Mom had been to the funerals but not to the interments and knew that the graves were not in one of the “official” cemeteries.)

In fact, I felt very strongly that this announcement was an invitation aimed personally at my mother and me. I felt an urgent need for both of us to make this trip, and when I brought it up, my wonderful husband agreed instantly to pay for it. I didn’t know exactly why we were going, but I rather thought I’d find out eventually.

What I didn’t expect was that we would make personal contact with ancestors who had long since walked on.

I know this sounds weird, but bear with me and judge for yourself.

The opening day of the powwow found a lot of people huddling together in the chairs encircling the drum canopy and dance area, waiting for the opening ceremony and wishing they had brought winter coats and umbrellas. The sky was dark gray and threatening to unload a real gullywasher on us, and there was a ferocious icy wind blowing off the lake. The folks in charge were looking extremely anxious: theoretically they could move the powwow indoors into the Day Care Center, but there wouldn’t be room indoors for everyone. In fact, everyone looked nervous if not downright gloomy.

Oddly, (and it seemed odd to me at the time), I wasn’t worried at all. I told the others, “Don’t worry, it’ll be all right. We weren’t told to come here all the way from California just to get pneumonia. We could have gotten it there quite nicely.” I felt very, very confident of what I said. Everyone else appeared to think I was a lunatic.

Finally, just as the drummers were settling into place and the dancers were lining up for the opening ceremony, the clouds dispersed, the sun came out, and the icy wind turned into a gentle breeze, just right to keep everyone from getting too hot during what was very suddenly a beautiful warm June day.

This happened in about two minutes, tops. Normally, as I’m sure you know, it usually takes a lot longer to turn foul weather into perfect weather.

And then, just as the drums were about to begin, an eagle appeared in the sky, circling above the hill on the other side of the road from the powwow grounds. Everybody gasped and smiled: for Anishinaabe, an eagle is a messenger from the spirit world, and the sighting of an eagle is always considered to be a blessing, an omen of hope.

And I had the sudden, strong feeling that the eagle was my great-grandmother, Saag-i-ji-way-ga-bo-wiik, who was (I knew) a full-blood Anishinaabe from Lac La Croix famous for her great spiritual powers, and I knew, absolutely knew that she was the one who had summoned us here.

It was a very strange and wonderful weekend. Cousins we hadn’t seen in many years showed up at the powwow, including several who decided to attend only at the very last minute. One of those was my mother’s double cousin, then living in a nursing home and suffering from Alzheimer’s. But she insisted, over strenuous objections from her caregivers, on coming to the powwow. She had no trouble recognizing my mother or anyone else in the extended family, and had perfectly reasonable conversations with everyone. (She died on September 17 of that year, and we couldn’t attend the funeral because the airlines were still grounded after the September 11 attacks. But we will always cherish that one good day we had with her.)

On the last day of the powwow, one of my cousins remembered the exact place where my grandmother Clara and great-grandmother Saag-i-ji-way-ga-bo-wiik were buried and took us there.

The place was the hilltop overlooking the powwow grounds; the eagle had circled directly over this very spot.

I had planned to tell these women (who had walked on long before I was born) that I was researching our ancestry; I found I didn’t have to. They already knew. They were there, invisible to the eye but overwhelming to the mind and heart. I have never in my life felt so filled with a palpable sense of being loved. My mother felt the same thing. Until that moment, she had never been able to talk about her mother without crying; this was the day the crying ended. She has been at peace about it ever since.

Imagination? I don’t think so. I felt their presence, and so did my mother and the others who were there. You can believe what you wish.

The next day, we faced another rainy morning. Our plan to meet with the historian for the Bois Forte Band that day fell through (although we re-scheduled and met with her the following day). This left us with no concrete plans for this day, and we were just beginning to discuss options when I heard a voice in my head saying, as clearly as if the person was standing next to me, “Come to La Pointe”. Not “go”, mind you, but “come”.

I didn’t think that it was feasible, but that voice was very insistent, so we dug out the maps and found that Bayfield (which runs daily ferries to and from Madeline Island, where La Pointe is located) was actually a little less than 200 miles, perhaps 4 hours each way. We could get there, visit the island for a few hours, and still get back to our hotel in Ely that night, and so we set out. It was cloudy, wet and a bit windy almost the entire way, and we could see heavy rainfall off to the sides, ahead of us, and behind us, but we didn’t drive through any of it; the heavy rain ahead always turned to drizzle wherever we happened to be driving. (We later learned that a tornado had touched down not far off our route.)

When we began the final downhill approach to Bayfield, quite suddenly the drizzle stopped, the sky cleared, the blustery wind turned to a gentle breeze, and we had yet another miraculously warm and beautiful day.

We boarded the ferry and visited the island’s museum. The staff (who were of course familiar with the history of the area) were excited to have visitors who were descendants not only of Michel Cadotte and Equaysayway, but also of Joseph Dufault and Julie Cadotte. Most of the rooms in the museum had originally been separate buildings—and we were told that Joseph Dufault had built one of them. It was a remarkable feeling to walk in rooms that had been walked by our direct ancestors nearly two centuries ago.

We felt as if we had come home—and in a very real sense, we had.

After leaving the museum, we visited the old mission cemetery where Michel Cadotte was buried and paid our respects to him, and then we caught the last ferry off the island. As soon as we were back on the highway, it began to rain again, but lightly, and we had no trouble on the road. Once we were back in Ely (around 10 p.m.) and after I had gotten my mother safely inside the hotel and dashed across the street to get some sandwiches for our dinner, then and only then did the really heavy rain hit where we actually were.

Just coincidence that the rain held off just when we needed it to do so? I don’t think so. Personally, I believe we were summoned to La Pointe by old Michel Cadotte so that he could get a look at his descendants, and Big Mike not only made sure the weather was good during our visit but looked out for our safety on the road both ways, until we got back to our hotel.

Before we returned to California, I managed to spend a few hours at the Minnesota Historical Society Library in St. Paul. Here I found, among other treasures, the obituary for Great-Grandfather Vincent’s father Michel Dufault, son of master carpenter Joseph Dufault and Julie Cadotte, who had died “age 90” on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota in 1916. I also found mentions of at least 3 Louis Dufauts/Dufaults in the fur trade, and—the real pearl in the oyster—a photocopy of the photostat of the original baptism register for the La Pointe Mission from its beginning in 1835 up to early 1854.

That register contain not only considerable documentation on the Dufauts, Cadottes, and Roys but also (to my considerable surprise) the 1839 baptism of Simon Forcier and the 1841 baptism of his sister: my great-grandmother Henriette Forcier (wife of Joseph Chosa). Not only that, but their mother, Marguerite “Rémont” was also in the baptism register (age 15) in January 1836 (five months after the mission opened), along with her half-brother Antoine (age 11). Marguerite was stated to have been born at La Pointe, the daughter of an Anishinaabe woman, Julie Ikwesenchich, and of someone—surely a voyageur or fur trader—recorded by Father Baraga as”NN: Rémont” (most likely Raimond, a fairly common surname among voyageurs, with “NN” standing for “Nomen” i.e. “personal name unknown”).

By 1841, when Henriette was born, the fur trade was collapsing due to changes in fashion in Europe, and the American Fur Company had branched out into a profitable commercial fishing operation centered at Madeline Island. The fish (usually whitefish) would be cleaned, salted down, packed in barrels, and shipped east. Henriette’s father Pierre Forcier was, according to the censuses, a cooper (barrel-maker) by trade. That's how he wound up at La Pointe where his first two children were baptized.

Madeline Island is not a large island. Unquestionably, Joseph Dufault and his son Michel—both carpenters and longtime residents of the island—knew both of Henriette’s parents.

Henriette’s family eventually relocated to Michigan’s Keweenaw Bay area, where Father Baraga had established another mission at Assinins. Baraga later presided at her marriage to Great-Grandfather Joseph Chosa at Assinins. And two of her sons eventually wound up in Minnesota, where they married daughters of Great-Grandfather Vincent Dufauld.

In my search for Mom’s maternal grandfather Vincent Dufauld and his ancestry, I had unexpectedly found her paternal grandmother Henriette and her parents as well. Or rather, I had been led to them.

Simplify, Simplify . . . If They'll Let You!

Almost as soon as I started with Great-Grandfather Joseph, I found myself researching Great-Grandfather Vincent Dufauld as well, because two of Joseph’s sons married two of Vincent’s daughters, and a third son of Joseph married a half-sister of the other two women. I also found that I couldn’t separate either great-grandfather from his Native American affiliations.

Great-Grandfather Joseph’s wife was the daughter of an Anishinaabe (=Ojibwe or Chippewa) woman and a French-Canadian voyageur named Pierre Forcier. Great-Grandfather Vincent was also of mixed-blood ancestry, and the mothers of his three children (all daughters) were full-blood Anishinaabe. How I would research that, I had no idea then. But, being a member of the Bois Forte Band of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe myself, I certainly wanted to know about that side of my maternal heritage.

Traditional genealogical practice, as I discussed in a previous post, is to research just one family line at a time, which all-too-easily turns into researching only the males.

Well, I was already a grandmother, and I realized that if I didn’t get a start on all the family lines (female as well as male) in my children’s ancestry, I might die of old age without making reasonable progress on any of them. So I coolly decided to ignore the “one family at a time” mantra and to get a start on all of the family lines at once, including those of my husband (to his delight and the delight of his relatives).

At first, this seemed to be a straightforward, if complex, process. It soon became overwhelming.

You see, I had been given a lot of information about the most recent generations, but I was determined to confirm and document what I’d been told before trying to go farther back in time. I had been trained in research techniques for both literature and history, and I could not ignore that training. Besides, what’s the point of passing on to future generations the story of their family if you’ve researched the wrong family?

Almost every family has legends about earlier generations; I wanted facts. Documents usually gave me facts—although I had been trained to be skeptical about their accuracy. People enjoy exciting family stories about their family and like to think they’re related to famous people with the same surname, but that’s not proof, even if Grandma believed it. In some cases, what I had been told about my grandparents and great-grandparents eventually turned out to be entirely correct. In others, it was wildly off base.

I did follow the standard genealogical practice: before moving backwards to previous generations, I searched for all of the families involved—French-Canadians, Anishinaabe, mixed-bloods, Danes, and Russian and Polish Jews—in every type of American record available: vital records, census records, immigration and naturalization records for all of them, property records, military records, everything I could think of.

My father was born in Denmark, which meant I only had to follow his trail in the USA before looking in Danish records. I had visited Denmark three times and met my grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins; I knew their names and where they lived, so I knew where in Denmark to start looking for records and made very good progress with my Danish research. My in-laws cooperated splendidly, so I made good progress with documenting my husband's family in this country. I also made reasonable progress with my mother’s immediate family and those of her double cousins, and with many younger-generation cousins, who were all quite eager to share what they knew about the Chosa-Dufauld extended clan and to learn more.

I kept a list of all the surnames I was searching and systematically collected huge masses of printouts (later on, digital copies) of all family records I found. I made daily Google searches of the Internet. There were a lot of names, a lot of microfilms, a lot of online searches. I had papers piled all over the place, and every so often I would bung some of them into a filing cabinet.

I was beginning to feel like Lord Ronald in Stephen Leacock’s tale of Gertrude the Governess, who “flung himself from the room, flung himself on his horse, and rode madly off in all directions.”

No, I still did not fall back on the old “follow one family line at a time as far as you can get” rule. There were too many lines and too many crossovers, and I might not get to all of them in my lifetime, especially since I was still determined to document my female ancestors equally with the males.

Besides, I had the very strong sense that my bedroom was becoming very crowded at night, filled with ancestors urging, even begging me to find them and tell their story. You’d think that someone who has been dead for a couple of centuries would be more patient, but no.

Put yourself in your remote ancestor’s place: if no one has spoken your name with affection and a sense of kinship for many generations, it’s only natural to want to be found, to be remembered and cherished again. So when a descendant of yours starts to research her or his ancestry, you pay that descendant a visit during sleep, and point that descendant in the right direction.

I know this sounds weird. Skeptics will say that when I would suddenly wake up knowing—absolutely, positively knowing what I should do to find the records that would solve a particular problem, it was just the product of my subconscious mind which had continued to gnaw away at that problem while I was doing other things. And sometimes, I know that is the case. In fact, I will often deliberately set a problem aside to let my subconscious clarify the issue.

However, I truly believe that in my perception of nightly visitations, there is more at work than an overactive imagination. I believe that we are more than physical entities; we are more than the sum of our physical parts. And, particularly on my mother’s side of the family, the ability to make or keep a connection with one another—living or dead—without physical means is particularly strong. Sounds crazy, yes?

Not in my family. I’m not talking about ouija boards or seances or anything like that. I’m talking about direct communication between living family members at considerable distances, even if they’ve got the whole planet separating them, without using any physical technology. This happened many times between my mother and me (and between her and her siblings) over the years. So one day, when I urgently needed to talk to my adult daughter (who was in the military and stationed in Europe at the time, and who was unreachable by phone because she was on duty), I concentrated on sending a mental message to her to call home.

Half an hour later she went on break and called home. “I just had a feeling that I should call home now,” she told me. Sheer coincidence? I don’t think so, and neither does my daughter.

I’m not going to give you a long recital of other personal examples at this time. I’ll just say that I have witnessed or experienced so many of them at first hand that I have no doubt that the connections are real, both with the living and the dead.

If you believe in any kind of afterlife, it should not be unreasonable to accept the idea that the dead can and do talk to us, if we take the trouble to listen. It is not unreasonable to believe that those who have walked on before us retain their concern for their family, including their descendants. Most of us would like to be remembered, to have the stories of our lives passed down to future generations. I believe that many of the dead have the same desire, because once I began researching my family’s history, quite a number of my deceased kinfolk told me so.

They came to me mostly at night, in my sleep, when the bustle of daytime life was over and I could hear them—lots of them, talking to me not in Danish or French or Ojibwe or Yiddish but in the universal language of the human spirit, and I could understand what they said.

I still get these visitations. Some just come to say hello. Some just want to tell me they approve of what I’m doing or to thank me for what I’ve done. And there are still a fair number, as yet unidentified, who come to urge me to get on with finding them.

It was all rather overwhelming at first, but I certainly wasn’t about to tell my nightly visitors to go away. For one thing, I didn’t want anyone to get annoyed with me for my neglect. For another, I realized that some of them were trying to help me out.

Still, I knew that I couldn’t possibly satisfy all of them at once. I needed to prioritize—somehow.

So I decided that I would work with one extended family for a while—a few days, a week, a month—until I needed to regroup and decide which source to pursue next, or until I hit a brick wall, or until one of my other ancestors woke me up and give me a gentle nudge in the night to point me to where I might find more information about that branch of the family.

Once I made that decision, I started making better progress, and got more frequent nudges. But Great-Grandfather Joseph? Not a word from him—yet.

I still get those nudges, because genealogy is not a closed-end pursuit. You may run out of records, but you never run out of ancestors; everyone has millions of them.

So I hope you’ll believe me when I say that I still hear the voices of various long-dead relatives in my sleep, telling me where to look next to find their records—or giving me a gentle reminder that there is still work to be done on their branch of the family tree.