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The Rideau, Lachine, and Welland Canals date from this period, and were the commencement of that noble system of artificial waterways that have, in the course of time, enabled large steamers to come all the way from Lake Superior to tide-water. In 1833 the Royal William, entirely propelled by steam, crossed the ocean the pioneer in ocean steam navigation.
After about half an hour's ride, the carriage stopped at a lonely house some distance on the Lower Lachine road, and, alighting, we entered, when I was piloted into an upper chamber, where a woman lay on a couch in need of my attendance.
Amid the chanting of the war-song and the swinging of the tomahawk the French renewed their alliance with the Indians of the West. All were to fight until the Iroquois were destroyed. Even the Ottawas, who had been coquetting with the Senecas, now came out squarely and said that they would stand by Onontio. Here, at last, was a real answer to the Lachine massacre.
This brought her into St. Lawrence river so late, that she was frozen in the Lachine Canal. Early in 1858, she arrived in Cleveland with her cargo in excellent order and to the perfect satisfaction of the consignees.
Thus Frontenac's task was quite hopeless, if we define it as the effort to overthrow English power in America. But neither he nor any one of that age defined his duties so widely. In 1689 Canada was in extremes, with the Iroquois at Lachine and Dongan threatening an attack from New York. Frontenac's policy was defensive.
A grant of new duties upon tea, spirits, and on goods, sold at auction, was made; one thousand pounds granted for the promotion of vaccination as a preventative of small pox; £25,000 was granted for the construction of a canal between Montreal and Lachine; a bill was introduced granting the Speaker of the House an annual salary of £1,000; and another was passed granting a similar salary to the Speaker of the Upper House.
From Montreal to Lachine the well-to-do traveller took a stage-coach, drawn by four spanking greys, leaving Montreal at five in the morning, for stage-coach hours were early and long. At Lachine he left the stage for the steamer, at the Cascades he took a stage again, and at Côteau transferred once more to a steamer for the run to Cornwall.
It requires no flight of the imagination to appreciate the rage Frontenac must have felt when, on returning to Canada, he saw before his eyes the effects of La Barre's rapacity and Denonville's perfidy, of which the massacres of Lachine and La Chesnaye furnished the most ghastly proofs. But in these two cases the element of tragedy was so strong as to efface the mood of exasperation.
In the Indian village of Caughnawaga, situated near the Lachine Rapids, is the half-ruined Curial House, if it may be so called, of the early historian, the Jesuit Charlevoix. Like all French travellers of that period, he had his visions of reaching the Pacific coast, which, although never realized, yet he was a celebrated explorer and an accurate and painstaking writer.
The savages in retaliation exacted a fearful vengeance in the butchery of French colonists. The bloodiest story in the annals of Canada is the massacre at Lachine, a village a few miles above Montreal. On the night of August 4, 1689, fourteen hundred Iroquois burst in on the village and a wild orgy of massacre followed. All Canada was in a panic.
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