Erie defenders to surrender or face certain destruction. last remaining Erie wherever they could be found. Regret- Then invoking his new Faith, he warned, "The Master of tably, much of the Jesuit Relations for 1665 is missing. life fights for us; you will be ruined if you resist him." "Who From that portion which has survived it is known that on is this Master of our lives?" came back the Erie reply. "We September 12, 1655, an Onondaga delegation of eighteen acknowledge none but our arms and hatchets." It was then arrived in to petition the Governor of New that the "assault was made and the palisade attacked on all "for French soldiers to defend their villages against the sides." inroads of the Cat Nation" as well as for more weapons. The siege of the Erie fort was a long and costly one. Two months later, Jesuit missionaries assigned to the Iro- Though the Erie warriors outnumbered the , they quois mission at Onnontague, Fathers Joseph Chaumonot were burdened by the presence of their women and children. and Claude Dablon, baptized a captured Erie boy of nine or And they had few if any guns (and no powder) in contrast to ten years of age just before he was burned to death, "no the well-armed Iroquois. On the other hand, they were quarter being now given between the two tribes." In late archers extraordinaire,the Jesuits grudgingly acknowledg- January 1656, they witnessed the "boiling of the war-kettle" ing that "they fight like Frenchmen, bravely sustaining the as the Iroquois prepared for a new offensive against the first discharge of the Iroquois, who are armed with our Erie, while on the fifth of February, they "wiped away the muskets, and then falling upon them with a hailstorm of blood" for a large war party of Seneca and Oneida returning poisoned arrows, which they discharge eight or ten times "from their latest engagement with the Cat Nation." before a musket can be reloaded." On February 11, two more Erie captives, young men The end came with the near-exhaustion of Erie arrows between twenty and thirty years of age, were brought in by and an Iroquois stratagem. Simply, the Onondaga hit upon Onondaga warriors. Each was given to a family to replace the plan of using their long war canoes as shields to ward off someone lost in combat. As reported by Father Dablon, the volleys of poisonous arrows as they approached the Erie "The younger and handsomer one, a Nephew of the other, works. Driving back the entrenched defenders with musket- was given to the greatest warrior of the Country, named ry, they inverted their canoes to use them as scaling ladders Aharihon, a Captain famous for his warlike exploits, but as to get up and over the palisaded walls. As their enemies arrogant and bloodthirsty as he is brave ... . Though scaled the walls, more than three hundred of the Erie de- Aharihon already had sacrificed forty Erie captives to fenders broke and ran, leaving their comrades and women avenge the loss of one of his brothers in the war, he con- and children behind. Once in the fort, the Iroquois com- cluded that this young man too "must die in atonement for menced a systematic butchery of its occupants, the "carnage his brother's death." Accordingly, the young captive was among the women and children" being so great "that blood roasted alive over a slow fire, his torture finally ending in was knee-deep in certain places." Shamed by their own death in the early morning hours of February 15, 1656. cowardice, the three hundred Erie warriors who had bolted Not all Erie captives were so unfortunate. An Erie returned to the scene of the slaughter. For a brief moment, woman, captured and enslaved by the Oneida, became a they caught the Iroquois off guard and exacted their own Christian convert and was baptized by the Bishop of partial retribution. But the Iroquois recovered in time to with the name Catherine Gandeaktena. In 1667 she per- crush the returning Erie and complete the annihilation, suaded her Iroquois husband and several of his relatives to though their own losses overall were so heavy that they go with her to found an Iroquois mission near Montreal, the were compelled to remain two months in Erie country to celebrated Mission of la Prairie de la Magdeleine. By the bury their dead and care for their wounded. time of her death in 1673, she had earned the acclaim of On September 11, 1654, while the Iroquois were winning hundreds of Frenchmen and Iroquois alike for her virtue and their signal though costly victory, Le Moyne arrived back in saintliness and for her success in attracting some two hun- Quebec to report the success of his efforts to assure French dred Iroquois converts to the mission. peace with the Iroquois and their ultimate conversion to Some Eries managed to elude the Iroquois for a time. As Christianity. Indeed, in the two years that followed, the late as 1680, a remnant band of six hundred Erie men, Iroquois did keep the peace with France. And when women, and children surrendered voluntarily to the Iro- Achionagueras returned to Onnontague from his conquest quois south and east of the Ohio River and were then of the Erie, he fulfilled a battlefield pledge that if the Master apparently absorbed into the Five Nations, their identities of life would help him achieve victory, he would assist the as Erie finally at an end. Jesuit fathers in converting his people to Christianity. With Henry R. Schoolcraft, famed Indian authority of the his assistance, so successful was the Iroquois mission that nineteenth century, reported the Iroquois version of the by 1656 the Jesuits could report that "more Iroquois have Eries' ultimate fate: "Seneca tradition affirms that after the become Christians in two months than there were Hurons defeat of the most westerly bodies of the Eries, on the shores converted in several years." of , the survivors fled to the Allegheny River, As for the Erie, the Iroquois war against them continued called Ohio by them, down which they fled.... Their through 1655 and on into 1656. With the principal fortified council-fire was put out. Their name was obliterated from towns already destroyed, Iroquois strategy now called for the number of tribes. The places where they once dwelt the elimination of the last remote villages and, indeed, the knew them no more ... " e

34 TIMELINE