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"Danton," he said, "you are going through this journey with us, and I intend that you shall know about such matters as this meeting with the Onondagas." "Oh, they were Onondagas?" "Yes. They claim to be Mission Indians, but neither the Father nor I altogether believe them." In a few sentences Menard outlined the conversation. "Now, Danton, this may or may not be an important incident.
What may be taken to concern us is the spirited action of Champlain's middle life the period which lies between his first voyage to the St Lawrence and his return from the land of the Onondagas. Not that he had ended his work in 1616. The unflagging efforts which he continued to put forth on behalf of the starving colony at Quebec demand all praise.
But they saw neither one. "Whoever took them is keeping them well hidden," said Mr. Brown. "Now, we'll go to the Indian camp." Though they called it a camp, it was more of an Indian village where the Onondagas lived. There were many tents, log or slab cabins, and one or two houses built as the white people built theirs.
Leaving the Mohawk village amid a blare of guns and shouts, the young braves on their maiden venture passed successively through the lodges of Oneidas, Onondagas, Senecas, and Cayugas, where they were feasted almost to death by the Iroquois Confederacy. Then they marched to the vast wilderness of snow-padded forests and heaped windfall between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie.
The old Oneida had played directly into his hand; by letting slip the motive for the Seneca raid of the winter before, he had strengthened the one weak point in the speech Menard meant to make. The next speaker was one of the younger war chiefs of the Onondagas.
"It has further been reported to me by the Palatine scout that the Onondagas are wavering, that the Oneidas are disposed to stand our friends, that the Tuscaroras are anxious to remain neutral. "Now, within a few days, news has reached me that these three doubtful nations are to be persuaded by an unknown woman who is, they say, the prophetess of the False-Faces."
They know that the Big Buffalo has no store of furs, no great lodges, that he lives in the woods with only a stolen musket, where he can by his lies capture the peaceful hunters of the Onondagas to make them the slaves of his Chief-Across-the-Water." Menard again dropped to sleep. When the day had nearly reached its middle, he was aroused by two warriors, who pulled him roughly to his feet.
Beyond the Onondagas were scattered the villages of the Cayugas, a people described by the Jesuit missionaries, at a later day, as the most mild and tractable of the Iroquois. They were considered an offshoot of the Onondagas, to whom they bore the same filial relation which the Oneidas bore to the Caniengas.
Fletcher went to Albany with the few men he could gather at the moment, and heard on his arrival that the French were gone. Then he convoked the chiefs, condoled with them, and made them presents. Corn was sent to the Onondagas and Oneidas to support them through the winter, and prevent the famine which the French hoped would prove their destruction. What Frontenac feared had come to pass.
Moved by these considerations and a love of presents, Grangula, of the Onondagas, was in the midst of negotiations for peace with the French, which might have ended happily but for the stratagem of the Huron chief Kondiaronk, called 'The Rat. The remnant of Hurons and the other tribes centring at Michilimackinac did not desire a peace of the French and Iroquois which would not include themselves, for this would mean their own certain destruction.
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