by Don Hollway

as appeared in the Dec-Jan 2015 issue of History Magazine

Spring 1609: With just two Frenchmen, 60 natives, and an arquebus à rouet—a wheel-lock musket—Samuel de Champlain (center) defeats 200 Iroquois warrors at Ticonderoga, NY, “When I saw them making a move to fire at us, I rested my musket against my cheek, and aimed directly at one of the [Iroquois'] three chiefs,” Champlain wrote in his memoirs. “With the same shot, two fell to the ground; and one of their men was so wounded that he died some time after. I had loaded my musket with four balls.” One of the two French musketeers at top was likely Étienne Brûlé.

Champlain at Ticonderoga by Charles W. Jefferys.

Not all problems between European colonists and Native Americans could be resolved with steel and black powder. In late July 1609, Samuel de Champlain and a handful of French musketeers helped their Huron allies defeat an entire Iroquois army at Ticonderoga, NY. The Indians celebrated victory by burning, flaying and dismembering a prisoner. They could not comprehend why Champlain wished to shoot him, out of pity. Even when on the same side, natives and Europeans were worlds apart.

At that time there were only two dozen or so white men in New France, and even fewer who had bothered to learn a native language; 17-year-old Étienne Brûlé may have been the only one. The French and the Indians needed an interpreter, a go-between, an ambassador. It was a duty Brûlé would serve for nearly 25 years, making his name (pronounced broo-lay) almost as important in North American history as Champlain’s.

Champlain builds l’Habitation de Québec

A NEW WORLD

The boy from Champigny-sur-Marne—today suburban Paris, then farmland—was one of just eight Frenchmen who survived their first winter at Kebec, “where the river narrows.” After that experience Champlain mostly wintered in France, but Brûlé stayed on. Life in Québec wasn’t all starving and freezing. Each summer the Huron came downriver in great fleets of birch-bark canoes, riding low in the water under heaps of luxurious furs and ingots of pure copper. Just hunting, trapping, and running free through the north woods, a man could become rich, and not only in gold.

Each summer Québec and Montréal swarmed with French traders eager to cut in on Champlain's fur business. The Europeans traded metal implements and clothing. Indians traded furs. Each side bartered away commodities cheap to them, and each felt they got the better of the deal.

“I had a young lad,” wrote Champlain, not yet deigning to call Brûlé by name, “who had spent two winters at Québec, and who desired to go with the [natives] to learn their language. I thought it well to send him in that direction because he could see the country, also the great lake [Huron], observe the rivers, the people, the mines and other rare things, so as to report the truth about all this. He accepted the duty with pleasure.”

In ensuing years Champlain would dispatch many such youths into the wilderness. He called them truchements, interpreters, but they were much more than that. We know them as the voyageurs, the coureurs de bois, the “runners of the woods.” Nicolet and Radisson, the Dutch bushlopers, Boone, Crockett and even Carson, Bridger and the mountain men of the American West followed in their trail. But Étienne Brûlé was the first.

He lived mostly among the Huron, about 30,000 of whom resided around the great lake since named for them, but then known as la Mer Douce, the Freshwater Sea. Their capital, Cahiagué, covered some 25 acres, with a thousand acres of cornfields, two hundred longhouses and a population estimated from three to six thousand—one of the largest villages north of Mexico, larger even than most in Europe. The farm lad from France had arrived in the big city.

Native American longhouse village

GOING NATIVE

Brûlé spent that winter learning how to speak the Hurons’ Iroquoian tongue; how to hunt and trap with snowshoes, snares and stone-tipped arrows; how to make a bark canoe, and to portage and shoot rapids with it; how to wear a cloak of beaver skins with the fur sides in, to grease it with sweat and make it even thicker, more lustrous, and easier to felt—the castor gras or coat beaver, most valued by fur traders. And that the best way to keep warm in a North Woods night was with the Huron girls, who were free, even encouraged, to take as many lovers as they liked before settling down in marriage, and no doubt found Brûlé’s pale skin and beard exotic. When Champlain returned to New France in the summer of 1611 he barely recognized “my servant, who was dressed in the costume of the savages.” The French boy had come back a man…but not necessarily a white man.

Pious Champlain felt the Indians were getting all the evils of civilization, with none of the benefits

GOD COMES TO THE HURON

There were baser ways of appealing to the natives. Freelance traders swarmed Québec and Montréal, willing to trade liquor or muskets for pelts. Pious Champlain felt the Indians were getting all the evils of civilization, with none of the benefits: “What a great misfortune it is, that so many poor creatures live and die without the knowledge of God.”

In the summer of 1615 Franciscan priests journeyed upriver to Huron country. We can only imagine Brûlé’s thoughts upon hearing, as one “black robe” proudly recorded, “the Te Deum being chanted for the first time in that barbarous country.”

“This poor Brûlé,” Father Gabriel Sagard would sniff, “is not very devout, and not much given to praying.”

Brûlé at the mouth of the Humber River, future site of Toronto

AMBASSADOR OF FRANCE

With the Huron firmly under French sway, Brûlé joined their expedition to what is now Pennsylvania, to enlist the powerful Susquehannock tribe against the Iroquois. Champlain agreed to send him off: “The danger, however, was not small, since it was necessary to pass through the midst of enemies.”

Crossing or skirting Lake Ontario, Lake Erie (discovering the future site of Toronto along the way), and the land of the Neutral tribe (who disdained the incessant wars between the Huron and Five Nations), Brûlé and his Huron escorts surprised a party of Iroquois, killing four and taking two prisoners as gifts for their hosts. The Susquehannocks, happy to ally with the French and Huron, showed Brûlé the way even further south. “He continued his course along the [Susquehanna] river as far as the sea,” Champlain learned later, “and to islands and lands near them, which are inhabited by various tribes and large numbers of savages, who are well disposed and love the French above all other nations.”

Brûlé is indisputably the first white man to canoe the length of the Susquehanna, and Chesapeake Bay as well. Had he made the journey just a few years earlier he might have planted the French flag up and down the entire mid-Atlantic. As it was, with the Dutch to the north, Spanish to the south, and English infesting the bay, he had nowhere to go except back upriver. Worse, on continuing to New France his party was attacked by Iroquois. Brûlé was captured.

PRISONER OF THE IROQUOIS

They bound him to a torture post and began tearing out his fingernails and beard, applying fire to his skin. He must have known these were mere preliminaries; Iroquoians often ate their prisoners.

“To hope for mercy he knew he could not [but] submitted himself to Divine wishes more because he was obliged to than otherwise, for he was not devout,” wrote Father Gabriel, to whom Brûlé later told the story, in hindsight not without humor. “…For prayer he said his Benedicte [grace before meals].”

Yet it seems God came to the rescue of his lapsed lamb. When one of the Iroquois made to steal an Agnus Dei medal from around his neck, Brûlé warned, “If you take it and put me to death, you will find that immediately after you will suddenly die, and all those of your house.” A summer storm duly blew up with such abrupt intensity that the Indians sought cover in their longhouses. When they emerged, Brûlé had suddenly become an honored guest. He in turn “promised to restore [the Iroquois] to harmony with the French and their enemies, and cause them to swear friendship with each other.”

“He is more to be pitied than blamed on account of the misfortunes which he experienced on this commission,” Champlain decided upon finally reuniting with his scarred coureur in the summer of 1618. Nevertheless, Brûlé “took leave of me to go back to the Indians, whose acquaintance and affinity he had acquired in his voyages and discoveries.” Having been on the receiving end of torture, however, may have lowered his opinion of Iroquoians. Champlain felt it necessary to add, “I encouraged him to keep to these good intentions.”

ACROSS THE GREAT LAKES

The French had heard of a North Sea said to lie beyond Lake Huron. Champlain knew, “It would require actual presence to ascertain the truth in regard to this matter…it is only men of means, leisure, and energy, who could or would undertake to promote this enterprise.”

Frances Anne Hopkins, Canoes in a Fog, Lake Superior, 1869

Frances Anne Hopkins, Voyageurs at Dawn, 1871

Few men in New France fitted that description better than Étienne Brûlé. During 1621-1623 he pushed past the rapids at the head of Lake Huron. Father Gabriel took his report. “The interpreter Brûlé [has] assured us that beyond the freshwater sea, there is another large lake, [together] about thirty days of travel by canoe according to the report of the Savages, and according to the interpreter four hundred leagues in length.”

That Brûlé’s estimate of the length of Lakes Huron and Superior together (actually about 550 miles) differed from the natives’ is evidence that he learned it firsthand. Further proof was a copper ingot he presented to Father Gabriel, from the mines of Superior’s north shore. Lastly, Champlain’s map of 1632 shows not only the Grand Lac but what may be construed as the mouth of Lake Michigan. This makes Étienne Brûlé likely the first white man to visit all five Great Lakes.

“MORE SAVAGE THAN THE SAVAGES”

He was, however, becoming more and more Indian. In the summer of 1624, when Brûlé and Father Gabriel canoed together in a convoy to Québec, their Huron escorts paused to make offerings of tobacco to a man-shaped rock along the river. The priest was scandalized when Brûlé admitted having made such offerings himself. He reported to Champlain of “the bad life that most of the Frenchmen had led in the country of the Hurons,” and that Brûlé in particular had become “more savage than the savages.”

Henry Farney, Père Marquette, 1910

“It was a very bad example to send persons of such bad morals as the interpreter Brûlé among the Indians,” admitted Champlain, or perhaps the anonymous priest transcribing his memoirs. “Such characters ought to have been severely chastised; for it was recognized that this man was vicious and addicted to women. But what will men not do in expectation of gain.”

As the free traders’ agent among the natives, Brûlé was receiving a commission of 100 pistoles (Spanish doubloons, about 2.2 troy ounces of gold each) per year, for which he had little use. Meanwhile Louis Hébert, who had come with Champlain to New France in 1606 and is still recognized as its first farmer, had fallen on hard times. Brûlé offered to lend him money, free of charge—hardly the act of a man as greedy as Champlain and Father Gabriel claimed. When autocratic governor Émery de Caën heard about it, he forbade the coureur to interfere in the colony’s finances, instead forcing Hébert to take his own loan, at 25% interest.

With this taste of civilization in his mouth, Brûlé disappeared back into the wilderness. He is said to have spent two winters with the Neutrals along Lake Erie, perhaps encouraging them to bypass the Huron middlemen and trade directly with the French. Or, like them, he was simply finding less and less to choose from among the inhabitants of New France, red or white.

Cal Peters, French Trappers on the Red Cedar, 1936

SOLDIERS OF GOD

Meanwhile the Franciscan priests had been replaced by Jesuits, soldiers of God who wasted no time in bringing the free-living coureurs to heel. When Brûlé returned to Québec they held him for a year, forcing him teach them Huron under threat of sending him back to France to live as a European again. (In the absence of interpreters the French and Indians got by on a pidgin mix. “When the Frenchmen use it they think they are talking the savage tongue,” one priest observed, “and when the savages use it they think they are talking French.”) According to one story the Jesuits fulfilled their end of the bargain by putting Brûlé on the next boat regardless, but it makes little difference whether or not he ever set foot across the Atlantic again. New France was becoming more like Old France every day.

TRAITOR

Champlain surrenders Quebec to the English, July 20, 1629.

Protestant England sent privateers to blockade the mouth of the St. Lawrence and threaten Québec itself. Champlain refused to surrender. The English sank his supply ships and left the colony to starve. By the summer of 1629—over twenty years after its founding—Québec was down to some 100 inhabitants, living on roots and dried peas. According to some accounts, Brûlé and several fellow voyageurs canoed down the St. Lawrence on Champlain’s orders to guide any French ships upriver, but instead found the English had returned. Other stories have Brûlé, banished to Europe, joining the English expedition there. All agree that he and the others threw in with the enemy, and piloted the English ships upriver to Québec.

Forced to surrender, Champlain put all the blame on Brûlé and the wayward truchements. “Do you think the English will have any use for you?” he told them. “Be assured that they will not…. And when they have become acquainted with the country they will drive you away.”

Brûlé is said to have replied simply, “The thing is done. We have mixed the cup and we must drink it, and make up our minds never to return to France.”

It can equally be said that he actually saved Québec. Without the supplies held by the English, the colony would certainly have perished. Brûlé was no soldier obliged to follow orders. He was a free man. In many ways he may no longer have even considered himself French.

OUTCAST

But neither was he English. Outcast, for several years he vanishes from the historical record. Only later do we hear that he went back to live with the Huron at Touanché, at the south end of Georgian Bay. The Jesuit accounts would have us believe he sank into drink and debauchery.

In 1632 England’s King Charles I sold New France back to the French. In Huron country Brûlé must have realized he had backed the wrong horse. Worse, the Huron realized it too. In May 1633, when Champlain returned in triumph, they were almost afraid to meet him. Brûlé was nowhere to be found. Only gradually did the truth come out: the Huron at Touanché had killed and eaten him.

MURDERED

His death is Canada’s first murder mystery. Did Brûlé make himself an enemy of the Huron by choosing the English over the French, or by aiding the Neutrals in their fur trades, or by pursuing peace with the hated Iroquois? Or did he simply dally with the wrong woman and fall victim to native vengeance? We will never know. Cannibalism among Iroquoians was a fate usually reserved for honored enemies, whose courage and spirit would thus pass into the tribe.

Martyrdom of Brébeuf and Lalemant by Charles W. Jefferys, 1942

Champlain assured the Huron that he considered the death of a traitor of no consequence. In 1634 Jesuit Father Jean de Brébeuf went to minister at Touanché, but found the site deserted. Smallpox had killed half the population; the survivors, fearing the town cursed, had burned it and fled. “I saw the spot where poor Étienne Brûlé was barbarously and treacherously murdered,” wrote the priest, “which made me think that someday [the Indians] might treat me in the same manner.”

De Brébeuf was horrifically martyred by the Iroquois in 1649, the same year they routed and scattered the Huron nation. By then Champlain himself was long gone, dead of a stroke in Québec. As for Brûlé, even the site of his grave is lost. Only his name lives on. Interpreter, explorer, the “Columbus of the Great Lakes”—or loyal servant gone native, turncoat, traitor—Étienne Brûlé was perhaps the first Québécois who was neither French nor Indian. He was, instead, the first Canadian.

About the author

Author/illustrator/historian Don Hollway has been published in Aviation History, Excellence, History Magazine, Military Heritage, Military History, Military Heritage, Civil War Quarterly, Muzzleloader, Porsche Panorama, Renaissance Magazine, Scientific American, Vietnam, Wild West, and World War II magazines. His work is also available in paperback, hardcover and across the internet, a number of which rank extremely high in global search rankings.

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