Read Ebook: Niagara: An Aboriginal Center of Trade by Porter Peter A Peter Augustus

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It is more likely to have been one of those fearless and hardy men, one of the earliest members of what later became a distinct class--the Coureurs de Bois, or Woodsmen--a class founded by Champlain; on a correct principle for commercial intercourse and the extension of sovereignty, under conditions as they then and there existed ; when, in 1610, he gave a young Frenchman, Etienne Brule, to the Algonquin chief Iroquet; who, in appreciation of Champlain's confidence, gave him a young savage named Savignon, as a pledge of future friendship.

Brule was the first Frenchman known to have joined the savages, to become one of them, and adopt their manner of life. He spent years amongst them, was a woodsman or trader, learnt their languages, was Champlain's personal interpreter among the various tribes, and was often sent as Ambassador from the French at Quebec to savage Nations.

Beloved and trusted by the Indians for years, traveling all over the Northwest, claiming to have discovered Lake Superior, and a copper mine on its shores , he was finally tortured, put to death, and eaten by the Savages.

From his intimacy with Champlain, he must have known--what Champlain knew and had recorded--of the existence of such a waterfall; indeed, it is by no means improbable that many of the details of Champlain's maps were drawn from the latter's descriptions.

From his intimacy with Iroquet--Brule spent the better part of eight years in his Country and in that of his allies; being the territory lying to the north of Lake Ontario--he must have known what Iroquet knew of the location of such a waterfall ; and when Iroquet went to it as a "trading place," Brule doubtless accompanied him.

It must also be remembered that it was this same chief, Iroquet, who later confirmed to Father Daillon the renown of "the great River of the Neutrals"--that is the Niagara--as a Center of Trade; whose location he knew well, but refused to divulge to the Priest.

Knowing of such a wonderful waterfall's existence, and its general location; being a "trader," and Niagara being even then a well-known Center of Trade, the probabilities are that Brule visited it at a very early date.

A TRADING PLACE

But, while white men were no doubt at Niagara early in the 17th Century--possibly as early as 1611--and while we know that Traders and Priests were in its immediate vicinity at various times prior to 1669; and while we have good reason to believe, that in that latter year LaSalle himself explored the whole of the Niagara Frontier; yet it is not until 1678 that we have any positive record of any visit, nor any description of the Cataract by a man who claimed to have actually seen it.

Father Hennepin's first work, "Louisiana," published in 1681, tells of that first recorded visit, and gives the first description of Niagara by an eye-witness.

At the time when that first unnamed white man saw the Cataract the Indians had, and firmly believed in, at least one positive tradition regarding it; one which had long been believed in by the tribes far and near, and which had long been turned to good account in trade by former generations of Indians who dwelt at Niagara; and which was believed in and maintained for many a year afterwards. It was a tradition which had long caused the vicinity of the Cataract to be known far and wide as, and to be, a great Center of Trade; because it related to a highly-prized commodity which was found and primarily procurable only at this spot.

The first printed direct mention of Niagara referred to its famous Portage. The two next references to it were indirect and poetic, and, in so far as geographical location, certainly exemplified a poet's license.

The second printed allusion to it,--an indirect one, as noted later,--was in regard to trade.

Champlain was on the lower St. Lawrence River when, in 1603, he first heard of the Niagara Portage; Father Daillon was within a hundred miles of the Cataract when, in 1626, he first heard of Niagara as a "trading place."

When white men first became really acquainted with the Indians, 300 years ago, the various tribes had, and no doubt had long had, certain "trading places" where they annually met for barter.

At that time, the Hurons and Algonquins had such a meeting place on the upper Ottawa River.

It was at such a trade gathering at Lake Saint Peter, that Iroquet, in 1610, received Brule as a gift.

Father Sagard, who in 1625 was a Missionary among them at Lake Nipissing, has stated that the Hurons used each summer to travel for five or six weeks southerly, in order to meet the tribes which had goods they wanted; and that they brought back those articles both for their own use and for sale to other tribes. From the direction stated, and from other deductions, it is probable that that annual summer journey of the Hurons "for trade" had Niagara as its objective point.

That the Indians traded among themselves is unquestioned. When Cartier, in 1534, ascended the St. Lawrence River, the Indians of Hochelaga were smoking tobacco which had been grown in the sunny south lands. The Muskegons, around James Bay, traded their furs with their southern neighbors for birch bark, out of which to make their canoes. Axes and arrow heads of obsidian--a stone found on the lower Mississippi--were in use among the tribes to the north of Quebec. The Indian "trade" was not all done haphazard. The most of it was done at gatherings held at regularly agreed upon times and places. And in the selection of localities, Niagara must have been a favored meeting place.

That there, and there only, were found those "Erie Stones," a much-sought-for article, was an important reason for its selection as such; its central location and its accessibility from all points were other reasons.

No tribe which feared the fierce Iroquois--and that embraced almost every known tribe--would have dared to go to a "trading place," when in order to reach it they had to cross the country of the Iroquois. But they could get to Niagara from all sides without touching that Iroquois territory. There they could meet and barter with tribes otherwise almost impossible for them to reach.

The tribes of the southeast, and those of the northeast, could there meet in safety.

Again, it was in the Country of the Neutrals, whose territory lay between that of the Iroquois and the Hurons. And Indian law decreed--and it was observed--that in the cabins of the Neutrals even those bitter foes, Iroquois and Hurons, met in peace.

Champlain was certainly the first white man to mention the Falls of Niagara in Literature; Brule was probably Niagara's first white visitor; and equally probable, he was the first white man ever to "trade" there. One would like well to know the particulars of that "trade"--what he got and what he gave.

EARLY REFERENCES

Champlain and Brule are two names of surpassing interest in their relation to Niagara. The first unquestionably heads the long list of Authors who have ever written about our Waterfall; the other probably heads the infinitely longer list--comprising many millions--of those pale-faces who have ever visited our Cataract.

That first reference to Niagara in all Literature is found in that of France, in 1603, when Samuel de Champlain, the subsequent founder of Quebec, the first Governor-General of New France,--and still the most picturesque figure in all Canadian history,--narrated, in his now excessively rare pamphlet, "Des Sauvages" , what the Indians on the St. Lawrence River told him about this waterfall , in these words:

"Then they come to a lake some eighty leagues long, with a great many Islands , the water at its extremity being fresh and the winter mild. At the end of this lake they pass a fall somewhat high, where there is quite a little water which falls down. There they carry their canoes overland for about a quarter of a league, in order to pass the fall; afterwards entering another lake some sixty leagues long and containing very good water."

In the same volume Champlain records that another savage told him,--

"That the water at the western end of the lake was perfectly salt; that there was a fall about a league wide, where a very large mass of water falls into said lake."

It was not the wonders nor the beauty of the Cataract that impressed itself upon the minds of those savages, and that led them to furnish to Champlain--and so to the white man's world--the very first knowledge of the existence of Niagara. No! What most impressed the Cataract upon the minds of those Aborigines was the fact that at this point, the Falls themselves, together with the Rapids for a short distance above them, and for a long distance below them, were an insuperable obstacle to water--that is, canoe--navigation; that here they were obliged to make a long "portage." It was the only break in an otherwise uninterrupted water travel of hundreds of miles; which, going westward, extended from a point on the St. Lawrence, many miles east of the outlet of Lake Ontario, clear to the farthest end of Lake Superior; and which, coming eastward, extended nearly 1,500 miles, from where the City of Duluth now stands even until it reached the bitter waters of the Atlantic Ocean in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence.

In the same volume, "Des Sauvages," appeared a poem by one "La Franchise," addressed to Champlain, in which mention is made of the "Saults Mocosans" or Mocosan Falls, "which shock the eyes of those who dare to look upon that unparalleled downpour."

Mocosa was the name of that territory vaguely called Virginia, and which seems to have embraced everything from New York to Florida, extending indefinitely to the west and northwest. The allusion is generally considered to refer to Niagara; thus making Niagara's appearance in Poetry cotemporaneous with its appearance in prose.

In 1609, Lescarbot published his "Histoire de la Nouvelle France," wherein he quotes extensively from Champlain; the work being reissued in several editions in subsequent years. And in 1610, Lescarbot, who was a great admirer of Champlain , produced a poem, wherein he speaks of the "great falls" which the Indians encounter in going up the St. Lawrence, from below the present site of Montreal, "jusqu'au voisinage de la Virginia"; which, under the above-noted boundaries of Virginia, has been stretched in imagination to include Niagara, but more likely meant the Rapids of the St. Lawrence.

Champlain, in the map which he made in 1612, notes a "waterfall," but places it at the Lake Ontario end of the river; still it is clearly meant for Niagara.

Early references to this Niagara Region--which up to about the middle of the 17th Century was owned and occupied by the Neuters, and after that time by their conquerors and annihilators, the Senecas--are to be found in that wonderful series of Reports made by the Catholic Missionaries in Canada to their Superiors in France, during a large part of the 17th Century, and known as the "Jesuit Relations."

From them we learn that Father Daillon was among the Neutrals, and "on the Iroquois Frontier" , in 1626.

In a letter, dated at Tonachin, a Huron village, 18th July, 1627, Father Daillon told of his visit to the Neuters the year before. In it he wrote:

"I have always seen them constant in their resolution to go with at least four canoes to the trade, if I would guide them, the whole difficulty being that we did not know the way. Yroquet, an Indian known in those countries, who had come there with twenty of his men hunting for beaver, and who took fully five hundred, would never give us any mark to know the mouth of the river. He and several Hurons assured us well that it was only ten days journey to the trading place; but we were afraid of taking one river for another and losing our way, or dying of hunger on the land."

The above quotation, which was given in Sagard, 1636, was omitted from Daillon's letter by Le Clercq in his "Premier ?tablissement de la Foi," 1691. In his translation of the latter work, John Gilmary Shea, in a note concerning this very passage, says:

"This was evidently the Niagara River and the route through Lake Ontario," and he adds: "The omission of the passage by Le Clercq was evidently caused by the allusion to trade."

That omission was doubtless at the instance of the French Government, whose permission was then a necessity before any book could be published. That Government knew the importance and the advantages of Niagara, both as a strategic point and as a Center of Trade. Only four years before Le Clercq's book appeared a French army, under De Denonville, had built a fort there; but the hostility of the Iroquois had forced its abandonment a year later. Anxious to again possess it, planning now to do so by diplomacy rather than by arms, the French Government would naturally have objected to any published allusion to the locality as a point of Trade,--which could in no way have aided its designs, but by further calling Britain's attention to Niagara's importance, would naturally cause her agents to be still further vigilant toward frustrating any move of France for the control thereof.

In the same letter Daillon says:

Yroquet, who was Champlain's friend, as before mentioned, being a close ally of the Hurons, evidently had no desire for a Frenchman to open trade directly with the Iroquois--the sworn foes of the Hurons--and thus to divert any of the trade which he carried on with the French in the Huron Country.

So the first white man known to have been on the Niagara River wrote about it as a "trading place." It clearly was regarded in that light, at that time, both by the Neutrals and by the Hurons; those being the only two tribes which Father Daillon had visited. And if it was so known to the tribes on the west and northwest, there was no reason why it should not have been so known--and it no doubt was so known--to the tribes to the south, to the east, and to the west.

On his map, in 1632, Champlain continues his location of the Cataract at the point where the river enters Lake Ontario; and marks it, "Falls at the extremity of Lake St. Louis very high, where many fish come down and are stunned."

In 1640, Fathers Brebeuf and Chaumonot, on their famous Mission to the Neutrals, crossed the Niagara River at Onguiaahra, a village of that Nation, which stood on the site of the present Lewiston. They probably never saw the Falls; their visit being filled with danger, hunger, and threats of their destruction by the very savages whose souls they were trying to save. Father L'Allement, their Superior, in his account of their Mission, in the Jesuit Relation of 1642, speaks merely of "the village Onguiaahra, of the same name as the river."

Another passage in his letter says,--

"Many of our Frenchmen, who have been here in the Huron Country, in the past made journeys in this Country of the Neutral Nation, for the sake of reaping profit and advantage from furs, and other little wares that one might look for."

And in all probability some of those Frenchmen had reached the Niagara River, in their trade with the Neutrals, before Father Daillon crossed its stream.

Niagara was then, as it is now, the geographical center of the eastern one-third of North America; it was the center of population among the many and widely distributed Indian Tribes; it was the most accessible, the most easily reached place, from all directions, in America. Indian trails led toward it from all points of the compass; it was easily accessible by water from every quarter--and, by canoe, was the Indians preferred means of transportation.

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