In mid-winter of the year 1690, an armed detachment of one hundred and fourteen Canadians (that is, mainly, Frenchmen born in Canada) and ninety-six allied Indians led by Jacques Le Moyne de Sainte-HΘlΦne and Nicolas d'Ailleboust de Manthet, left MontrΘal for the New York colony. Their objective was the village of Schenectady. Travelling on snowshoes and dragging supplies and equipment on toboggans, they arrived in view of their target before midnight on 18 February. Unnoticed, "whilst it snow'd thick" and finding no sentinels posted and one of the village gates ajar ("Ye inhabitants being so negligent and Refractory"), the men silently took up stations at strategic points within the enclosure. They sought to prevent the escape of inhabitants who might carry the alarm to Albany, some twenty kilometers to the south. Then, with savage war cries the invaders threw themselves upon the sleeping settlement. Virtually the entire village was pillaged and burned; some sixty inhabitants were massacred, twenty-five men and boys taken prisoner, and about fifty spared. By mid-day, their mischief complete, the attackers turned their backs on the scene of devastation and set off on the return journey to MontrΘal, leading fifty horses loaded with plunder.
Such was la petite guerre, "a veritable hunt for human game." It was a war of foray, ambush, surprise, skirmish and deadly marksmanship from cover of the forest; a war in which patience and endurance went hand in hand with skill, courage and deception. Heavily outnumbered by the population of the English colonies from the middle of the seventeenth century onward, New France could not otherwise have survived for as long as it did. Indeed for three quarters of a century, from the 1680s to the Conquest, the defence of New France rested more on small detachments of hardy irregulars, adapted to the peculiarities of warfare and travel in the North American wilderness, than on regular troops from France. Without the massed strength of formal armies, the authorities in New France aimed at least to contain British imperial ambitions through the use of superior mobility, surprise, and the religious avoidance of pitched battles.
Thus, the 1690 raid on Schenectady is a characteristic military event in the long history of Canada's colonial wars. But Schenectady was not an isolated event. The terror and devastation created by French colonials and their allies were sown all along the extensive frontier of New France, on land and upon the sea, from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, and from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.
The story of how European settlers and their sons became adept at the art of Indian-style warfare, and used it with marked effect, is a dramatic chapter of the story of New France. At an early stage they laid the foundation of a military tradition which became a feature of Canadian society and persisted even beyond the colonial period. Habitants, settled mainly along the St. Lawrence River, were accustomed from childhood to hunting, fishing and long canoe voyages. Coureurs-de-bois, inured to the forests and waterways of North America, had even wider experience in travel by birch-bark canoe or snowshoes, over long distances in pursuit of the beaver. It was as much the nature of the frontier, as the difficulties of obtaining adequate support from the mother country, which compelled the Canadians to defend their families and homes in the manner in which many of them pursued their livelihoods in close harmony with the country itself. The fact that French regular troops could ill be spared from the battlefields of Europe only emphasized that New France had to rely for survival mainly on its own manpower and resources. An American observer of the 1750s noted the contrast between the English and French colonials:
Our men are nothing but a set of farmers and planters, used only to the axe and hoe. Theirs are used to arms from infancy among the Indians; and are reckoned equal if not superior in that part of the world to veteran troops. "The Canadians" are troops that fight without pay maintain themselves in the woods without charges, march without baggage, and support themselves without stores, and magazines, we are at immense charges for those purposes.
The Iroquois "Terror"
La petite guerre had its origins in the Laurentian colony during the second half of the seventeenth century,and was the direct consequence of the Iroquois raids of the 1640s and 1650s. In the wake of that harrowing experience, the French colony's small population began to adopt the tactics and barbaric practices of their perennial enemy.
In contrast to its neighbours to the south, New France was founded and continued to depend upon the fur trade. Based at QuΘbec, which dominated the hinterland beyond it, the French venture drew its furs from the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence and Ottawa river systems. Since Champlain's time the French had obtained furs from the Hurons and Algonquins north of the Great Lakes. By the middle of the seventeenth century they had penetrated further westward, forming alliances with such tribes as the Illinois and the Miamis. In time, numerous bases were established at MontrΘal, Fort Frontenac, Detroit, Michilimackinac and deep into the West in order to support the fur trade and to maintain the essential and complex Indian diplomacy.
With the expansion of French interests, however, one powerful Amerindian group had been excluded from a share in the trade, the Iroquois. Located south of the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, they reacted by aligning themselves with the Dutch traders at Fort Orange (Albany). In attempting to secure a larger share of the fur trade, they had begun in the 1630s to harass France's Amerindian allies. Thus, the French commercial alliance demanded support by a military alliance as well: as early as 1609, the French under Champlain, had been drawn into conflict in support of their trading partners.
The Iroquois were quick to retaliate, and by the late 1640s, after virtually closing the waterways linking the French traders with their Amerindian allies in the West (pays d'en haut), they succeeded in destroying the Huron Nation. Then, in a veritable reign of terror which lasted until the mid-1660s, the Iroquois directed their fury against the French in a bid to drive them from their settlements along the St. Lawrence.
The effect on the French colony was traumatic. The superior mobility of the Iroquois, their stealth and endurance, and their avoidance of open combat in favour of ambush with equal disregard for men, women and children, caused deep anxiety among the inhabitants. At the height of the "terror", serious thought was given to abandoning New France altogether, and many colonists did, in fact, give up and return to France.
Despite the Iroquois, however, the colony held firm and in time developed effective countermeasures. A "flying column" of soldiers was formed to patrol the St. Lawrence River from Trois RiviΦres to MontrΘal, militia units were organized, and stockades were erected. But the most significant development was the gradual realization that the Iroquois could best be fought on their own ground, using their own tactics: thus the Canadians gravitated toward Indian-style warfare. In the face of what some years later a governor of New France would call "the cruellest war in the world", these were the rules that the Canadians had to accept.
As a result, they learned to fight with the utmost desperation, no quarter asked or given, with little regard for death, since it was infinitely preferable to being taken alive by the enemy The first two generations of settlers became, of necessity, as skilled at guerilla warfare as their Iroquois.
The Adventure at the Long Sault
An initiative was taken in the spring of 1660 at Ville-Marie (MontrΘal), at that time New France's westernmost settlement. A group of seventeen Canadians, led by Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, was joined by four Algonquins and forty Hurons. They set out "... to wage petty warfare (petite guerre) and lay ambuscades for the Iroquois when returning from the chase...." They would go to the Long Sault on the Ottawa, "... and wait for the Iroquoits in the passage att their retourne wth their castors on their ground, hoping to beat and destroy them wth ease, being destitut of necessary things..."
The venture went badly. Because it was the first time that a raiding party of purely French inspiration was launched beyond the confines of the settlements, Dollard's men, in their inexperience (they were "unskilled in managing canoes" for example), committed a number of critical tactical errors. These errors, combined with recurring bad luck, were enough to doom the enterprise. A day or two after Dollard's party arrived at the foot of the Long Sault rapids, there emerged from upstream, not the usual scattered bands of hunters returning from the chase, but a party of 300 warriors on their way to a rendezvous with 400 more who were awaiting them at the Richelieu River prior to launching a massive attack upon the French.
Though they fought bravely, none of Dollard's party survived the devastating Iroquois attacks. In being the first to take the offensive beyond the home settlements, however, they were well ahead of their time. It was to be another quarter century before such forays became a regular feature of the defence of New France.
The Coureurs-de-bois
The repercussions of the Iroquois terror and the pleas of the colonists eventually reached France, where the Minister of Marine, Colbert, determined "to destroy utterly these barbarians." To this end he sent 1200 regular soldiers, mostly of the Carignan-SaliΦres regiment, to QuΘbec in 1665. In January and September of the following year, two large expeditions were launched into the Mohawk country. The regulars from France, however, were very nearly defeated, not by the Iroquois but by the wilderness itself. They were unaccustomed to campaigning in such a country and there were logistical problems in moving and supplying massive detachments of troops in the wilderness.
The French authorities learned valuable lessons from the campaigns of 1666. The grim realities of warfare in the Indian style were becoming clearer. Because the expeditions had included hardened veterans of the fur trade, attention was drawn to their experience and skills; robust, energetic and independent, they had embraced many of the aboriginal ways. They adopted Amerindian dress, food, and language and frequently married Amerindian women. In their pursuit of the beaver and the defence of their pelts against lurking Iroquois, these Frenchmen had come to master the fatigue resulting from the hostile geography and climate.
As time went on, the authorities came to rely heavily (though not exclusively) on the Canadians to spearhead Indian-style campaigns deep into enemy territory. When the Compagnies Franches de la Marine became the permanent force in the colony in the 1680s, their role more often than not would be confined to garrison duties in the forts, labour on the fortifications, and work on behalf of the inhabitants on the land or the artisans in the towns. Henceforth, it was small ad hoc detachments of militia, Canadian-manned and usually Canadian-led, well hardened on the frontier, who bore the brunt of defence on land and on sea in the remote corners of New France.
The population accepted military service if not always cheerfully, at least willingly and with a sense of obligation. Yet the coureurs-de-bois were notoriously undisciplined and disrespectful of authority. French officers like Pierre de Troyes, though they could hardly have succeeded without them, ruefully noted that "the discipline which military life demands... is lacking from the natural merit of the Canadians" and "the character of Canadians... hardly accords with submission." Nevertheless, astute governors like Denonville were quick to note the deep respect the Canadians held for their own leaders, who alone seemed capable of overcoming their insouciance. Under men like the Le Moynes, the Hertels, the Robinaus and the Coulons, Canadians were far better soldiers, under North American conditions, than were the regular troops sent from France.
The Defence of New France to 1713
When he arrived at QuΘbec in 1685, Governor Denonville saw New France caught between two giant pincers. To the south and southwest, the Iroquois, with the active backing of the English at New York (the Dutch colony had passed to England in 1664), had resumed their incursions, this time against France's western allies; while to the north and northwest, the recently-established Hudson's Bay Company was making inroads on the fur trade. Denonville determined to dispose first of the northern menace by authorizing a detachment of one hundred men (seventy Canadians and thirty regular troupes de la Marine) under the command of de Troyes, the colony's most able captain, to proceed to James Bay, seize English interlopers and set up rival French posts in the region.
The party left MontrΘal late in March 1686, journeying by way of the turbulent Ottawa River route to Lake Timiskaming, thence by a chain of lakes and streams and exhausting portages to the Moose River, which flows into James Bay. An expedition of this distance had not been attempted before. After eighty-five days of incredible hardship and constant peril, during which the men at times sank into a despair bordering on mutiny, the expedition finally arrived at James Bay on 21 June. The success of the venture resulted chiefly from the Canadians' expertise in the northern wilderness and their loyalty to their own leaders, in particular the Le Moyne brothers, Saint-HΘlΦne and Iberville. Had it not been for the endurance of these men and their wide experience in wilderness travel, the party would probably never have reached its goal.
Once there, and despite the formal peace which existed between England and France, Troyes' party proceeded to storm and quickly capture three English posts, taking large quantities of fur in the process. At the first post, Moose Fort, Troyes admitted "great difficulty... in dampening down the enthusiasm of our Canadians who were making great whoops in the Indian manner, and were looking for knife play" once the palisade had been breached. By 1686, the adaptation to warfare in the Indian style was complete, and with the James Bay expedition began a new era in Anglo-French relations.
The colony lost no time in rallying to the new tactics which from the 1680s characterized much of the warfare against the English colonies, until the exigencies of the Seven Years' War imposed a more formal standard upon military operations. During this period the greater population of the English colonies, and England's strong commitment to trade in America, irrevocably tilted the balance of power against France. Yet the mustering of small detachments in the style of the James Bay expedition for daring hit-and-run raids against the English contributed importantly to the survival of New France for another three-quarters of a century.
When news that war was imminent reached the English colonies in 1689, the Iroquois were informed immediately, and in August they launched a destructive surprise attack on Lachine. Governor Frontenac determined to retaliate in a series of lighting raids against three English frontier settlements. It was in this context that the raid on Schenectady was carried out in February 1690. Similar raids launched against Salmon Falls and Fort Loyal in New England were no less destructive.
The 1690 offensives revealed a new dimension to la petite guerre: cruelty. The Canadians were proving to be as ruthless as the Iroquois themselves, if not more so. At Schenectady and Salmon Falls, houses had been smashed open, and men, women and children had been scalped as they struggled in terror to get out of their beds. Others were hacked down as they burst from their burning and smoke-filled homes. The life-and-death struggle of New France called for desperate measures. At James Bay, with scurvy threatening, Iberville had allowed the English surgeon to hunt for fresh game, only to take him prisoner in order to accelerate the spread of the dread disease amongst the enemy. When they finally capitulated, the English had lost only three men in actual fighting, but twenty-five had died of scurvy and exposure.
When Britain gained ascendancy in America two generations later the bitter memory of the savagery of the Canadian and Indian war parties survived the actual incidents. In 1758, James Wolfe, a newcomer to America, wrote, "Tho' I am neither inhuman and rapacious yet I own it would give me pleasure to see the Canadian vermin sacked and pillaged and justly repaid their unheard of cruelty".
As the rivalry intensified the Canadians turned as well to privateering (la guerre de course) against English installations along the Atlantic coast and in Hudson Bay. In 1694 the French carried these tactics to within sixty-five kilometres of Boston, while a small squadron of Canadian freebooters under Iberville captured York Fort on Hudson Bay. Two years later Iberville destroyed Fort William Henry on the disputed New England-Acadia border, then sailed to Placentia to join in reducing the English fishery in Newfoundland. The latter campaign proved the most destructive of the entire Anglo-French rivalry in America.
It was not long before French strategy so exasperated the northern English colonial authorities that they united their forces against New France. While assaults on QuΘbec in 1690 and 1711 failed, a series of reprisals were launched with more success against the Abenakis and the Acadian villages, culminating in the capture of Port Royal by a large force under Francis Nicholson in 1710. This victory was soon confirmed by the Treaty of Utrecht which in 1713 ceded Acadia, Newfoundland and Hudson Bay to Britain. Despite these severe territorial losses, however, the heart of New France, the St. Lawrence colony, remained intact, and France set about to consolidate her position in North America.
The Final Phase
The Treaty of Utrecht heralded an unprecedented period of peace which endured until 1744, when war broke out again. Hostilities terminated four years later with no territorial loss on either side. Then in 1754 British and French trading interests clashed in the Ohio Valley, and in 1756, France and Britain were at war once again. The events of the next years, the Seven Years' War, sealed the fate of New France. By now Canadian resources in both men and means were stretched beyond their strength. Britain enjoyed undisputed mastery of the vital Atlantic sea lanes, and she was determined to secure what remained of New France. Also, the English colonials themselves had become proficient in forest warfare as was demonstrated by the exploits of sharpshooting Virginia and Kentucky backwoodsmen, and irregular units such as Rogers Rangers.
Despite an increasingly disadvantageous position, the Canadians had lost none of their enthusiasm for the strategy of the era of Frontenac and the Le Moynes. This was amply demonstrated in June 1755 when 250 Canadians and 600 Indians routed Major-General Braddock's army of 2200 regulars and American provincials at the Monongahela, doubtless the most impressive victory ever recorded by these irregulars.
It was not long before the British regulars adapted their tactics to the North American reality. Britain had determined upon large-scale warfare, involving thousands of regular troops, strong fortifications, and more artillery. The French, in order to avoid being overwhelmed, had no choice but to follow suit; hence, the arrival from France in 1755 of regular troupes de terre, with the French general Montcalm in command. Thus, for the first time, the long Anglo-French rivalry became primarily a struggle between regular troops engaged in orthodox operations and formal sieges, with the traditional mainstay of New France, the militia, reduced to the status of an auxiliary force.
As the actions at Louisbourg, Carillon (Ticonderoga) and QuΘbec were to prove, Canadian irregulars and their Indian allies were of little use in European-style warfare. Faced by an enemy firing massed volleys in the open, they took cover or fled the field. Yet despite these important limitations, the tactics of la petite guerre continued to harass British forces throughout the campaign: war parties continued their raids on American settlements and tied down superior enemy forces by threatening their supply lines, boldly ambushing their columns, or destroying their advance bases. But in the end British military superiority, coupled with the strictest professionalism, prevailed in decisive victories at Louisbourg (1758), QuΘbec (1759) and, finally, at the capitulation of MontrΘal (1760).
New France's indigenous strategy of border raids and forays inaugurated in the last quarter of the seventeenth century had achieved at least the short term objective of defending the colony against superior numbers from the south. Canadian morale was sustained, as was France's prestige in the eyes of her Indian allies, and for a time morale in New England was seriously affected.
In the long run, however, the Canadians' tactics aroused the general indignation of the Anglo-Americans, and led to pillaging expeditions, notably against the weaker Acadian colony. Ultimately, what weighed heaviest was Great Britain's determination to break once and for all the French hold on North America by sheer weight of formal military might, aided not a little by the superiority of her naval power. Yet in the second half of the seventeenth century New France had demonstrated a ferocious determination to survive. From this determination she drew her greatest strength, at the very time her prospects for survival were bleakest.
