Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/299

Rh which Champlain had conceived from the first, or which very soon matured itself in his views, and the constraint of the circumstances amid which he found himself, immediately involved him in a warfare which, once begun, was to find no end till the dominion of France was extinguished on the continent. Champlain might at first have been fully content to have one or more tribes of Indians as friends. But he found that he could not secure this end without having more tribes as enemies, because they were the foes of his allies. He was all too readily, however, drawn into what he regarded as the compulsion of necessity for taking a side, — only, without intending it, he took the weaker side.

Champlain passed his first winter in Quebec, in 1608. It was a terrific and a seasoning experience for him and his associates. Of the twenty-eight men of the company, only eight were alive in the spring: cold, exposure, lack of comfort, enforced idleness in a rigid climate, land and water heaped in mountain piles of snow and locked in icy fetters, with the loathsome havoc of the scurvy, had so reduced them. The spring brought reinforcements to Champlain. His friends among the natives were not of his own choosing. They were Algonquins, — large remnants then of once numerous and powerful tribes, Montagnais and Hurons. The confederated, thrifty, and imperious Five Nations, or Iroquois, in central New York, were at deadly feud with them, and had annually swept and desolated their cornfields and villages with fire and slaughter. On the first year of his sojourn at Quebec Champlain became a party to this savage feud. Why did he so? He was of an almost ideal loftiness and grandeur of spirit. With a manly devoutness to consecrate his heroism he preserved a strict moral purity, inexplicable by his lax Indian hosts, which preserved him from the sensuality so freely indulged, with large opportunities, by his volatile countrymen. For twenty years he made almost annually a spring and