The English in New York had professed to be brothers to the Iroquois and had called them by that name.This title of equality, however, Frontenac would not yield.Kings speak of "my people"; Frontenac spoke to the Indians not as his brothers but as his children and as children of the great King whom he served.
He was their father, their protector, the disposer and controller of mighty reserves of power, who loved and cared for those putting their trust in him.He could unbend to play with their children and give presents to their squaws.At times he seemed patient, gentle, and forgiving.At times, too, he swaggered and boasted in terms which the event did not always justify.
La Potherie, a cultivated Frenchman in Canada during Frontenac's regime, describes an amazing scene at Montreal, which seems to show that, whether Frontenac recognized the title or not, he had qualities which made him the real brother of the savages.In 1690Huron and other Indian allies of the French had come from the far interior to trade and also to consider the eternal question of checking the Iroquois.At the council, which began with grave decorum, a Huron orator begged the French to make no terms with the Iroquois.Frontenac answered in the high tone which he could so well assume.He would fight them until they should humbly crave peace; he would make with them no treaty except in concert with his Indian allies, whom he would never fail in fatherly care.To impress the council by the reality of his oneness with the Indians, Frontenac now seized a tomahawk and brandished it in the air shouting at the same time the Indian war-song.The whole assembly, French and Indians, joined in a wild orgy of war passion, and the old man of seventy, fresh from the court of Louis XIV, led in the war-dance, yelled with the Indians their savage war-whoops, danced round the circle of the council, and showed himself in spirit a brother of the wildest of them.This was good diplomacy.The savages swore to make war to the end under his lead.Many a frontier outrage, many a village attacked in the dead of night and burned, amidst bloody massacre of its few toil-worn settlers, was to be the result of that strange mingling of Europe with wild America.
Frontenac's task was to make war on the English and their Iroquois allies.He had before him the King's instructions as to the means for effecting this.The King aimed at nothing less than the conquest of the English colonies in America.In 1664 the English, by a sudden blow in time of peace, had captured New Netherland, the Dutch colony on the Hudson, which then became New York.Now, a quarter of a century later, France thought to strike a similar blow against the English, and Louis XIV was resolved that the conquest should be thoroughgoing.The Dutch power had fallen before a meager naval force.The English now would have to face one much more formidable.Two French ships were to cross the sea and to lie in wait near New York.Meanwhile from Canada, sixteen hundred armed men, a thousand of them French regular troops, were to advance by land into the heart of the colony, seize Albany and all the boats there available, and descend by the Hudson to New York.The warships, hovering off the coast, would then enter New York harbor at the same time that the land forces made their attack.The village, for it was hardly more than this, contained, as the French believed, only some two hundred houses and four hundred fighting men and it was thought that a month would suffice to complete this whole work of conquest.Once victors, the French were to show no pity.All private property, but that of Catholics, was to be confiscated.
Catholics, whether English or Dutch, were to be left undisturbed if not too numerous and if they would take the oath of allegiance to Louis XIV and show some promise of keeping it.Rich Protestants were to be held for ransom.All the other inhabitants, except those whom the French might find useful for their own purposes, were to be driven out of the colony, homeless wanderers, to be scattered far so that they could not combine to recover what they had lost.With New York taken, New England would be so weakened that in time it too would fall.Such was the plan of conquest which came from the brilliant chambers at Versailles.
New York did not fall.The expedition so carefully planned came to nothing.Frontenac had never shown much faith in the enterprise.At Quebec, on his arrival in the autumn of 1689, he was planning something less ideally perfect, but certain to produce results.The scarred old courtier intended so to terrorize the English that they should make no aggressive advance, to encourage the French to believe themselves superior to their rivals, and, above all, to prove to the Indian tribes that prudence dictated alliance with the French and not with the English.
Frontenac wrote a tale of blood.There were three war parties;one set out from Montreal against New York, and one from Three Rivers and one from Quebec against the frontier settlements of New Hampshire and Maine.To describe one is to describe all.Aband of one hundred and sixty Frenchmen, with nearly as many Indians, gathers at Montreal in mid-winter.The ground is deep with snow and they troop on snowshoes across the white wastes.
