At Caughnawaga, P. O. [pp. 607-616]

614 AT CAUGHArAWAGA, P. Q. [Aug.,
until they hear their names called in church! When a widower
marries a widow he leaves his own children in his own house and
goes to live in hers. The Tc~e Di~u, or Corpus Christi, procession is a grand occasion of rejoicing to the Indians; so also is
midnight Mass at Christmas, when the village is crowded with
people, who come in sleighs from near and far to hear the Christmas chants sung in the Iroquois tongue.
In the old histories of Canada there is usually reference made
to Caughuawaga, or Sault St. Louis. Lambert, in his Nortk
Amer?):a, i8o6 to i8o8, says:
"Here I observed one of their little girls, about seven years old, with
something in her arms which she seemed to be nursing, and was going to
look at it when she ran away and hid it under her blanket, as if ashamed;
upon which I ran after her, and found it was a doll placed upon a little
cradle-board and bandaged up with little pieces of colored cotton in exact
imitation of the manner in which the Indian women nurse their children.
I call it the cradle-board because it serves that purpose when the child is
restless far better than the English cradle, it being the practice to suspend
it by a string from the branch of a tree or the top of their wigwam, and
swing it backwards and forwards till the child falls asleep.
"In the course of our walk through the village we met the Chevalier
Lorimier, an old French gentleman, who resides here as an interpreter for the
government, who allows him one hundred pounds per annum. He was an
officer in the French army at the conquest of the country, and in the American war commanded a detachment of Indians, with whom he assimilated
himself so closely in manners that he gained their affections and married
one of their women. At her death he married a French lady of Lachine,
who died a few years after, when such was his partiality for the Indians
that he married another of their women, with whom he still lives. Sault
~t. Louis was granted, May 29, i68o, to the Order of Jesuits."
Pere Charlevoix devotes many pages to the record of this
mission, with which he probably made acquaintance in the early
days of his service in the Society of Jesus, for he was sent to the
`Canadian mission when only twenty-three years old. He spent
four years in America, returning to France in 1709, where for
some time he taught philosophy in the colleges of his order.
Eleven years later the king sent him to make a tour of the French
settlements of the New World, an account of which is published
in his Jo~trna1 d'un Voyage a' 1'AinJrique du Nord. He says:
"What has been the preservation, or at least the safety, of Montreal
and all the country round it is two villages of Iroquois Christians and the
fort of Chambly. The first of these villages is that of Sault St. Louis,
situated on the continent on the south side of the river, and three leagues
above Montreal. It is very populous and has ever been looked upon as
~ne of our strongest barriers against the idolatrous Iroquois and the Eng