284
EARLY SETTLEMENT AT OGDENSBUKGH.
Picquet counted there a3 many as fifty canoes. There was notwithstanding at Niagara a TradingHouse where the Commandant and Trader lodged, but it was too small, and the King’s property wasnot safe there.
M. Picquet negotiated with the Senecas who promised to repair to his Mission and gave him twelvechildren as hostages, saying to him that their parents had nothing dearer to them and followed him
immediately, as well as the Chief of the Little Rapid with all his family.He set out
with all those Savages to return to Fort Niagara . M. Chabert de Joncaire would not abandon him.At each place where they encountered camps, cabins and entrepots, they were saluted with musquetryby the Indians who never ceased testifying their consideration for the Missionary. M. Picquet tookthe lead with the Savages of the hills; Mess rs Joncaire and Rigouille following with the recruits. Heembarked with thirty-nine Savages in his large canoe and was received on arriving at the fort withthe greatest ceremony, even with the discharge of cannon which greatly pleased the Indians. Onthe morrow he assembled the Senecas, for the first time, in the chapel of the Fort for religious ser-vices.
M. Picquet returned along the south coast of Lake Ontario . Alongside of Choeguen, a youngSeneca met her Uncle who was coming from his village with his wife and children. This young girlspoke so well to her Uncle, though she had but little knowledge of Religion that he promised to re-pair to La Presentation early the following spring, and that he hoped to gain over also seven othercabins of Senecas of which he was chief. Twenty-five leagues from Niagara he visited the RiverGascouchagou 1 where he met a number of Rattlesnakes. The young Indians jumped into the midstof them and killed forty-two without having been bitten by any.
He next visited the Falls of this River. The first which appear in sight in ascending resemblemuch the great Cascade at Saint Cloud, except that they have not been ornamented and do not seemso high, but they possess natural beauties which render them very curious. The second, a quarterof a mile higher, are less considerable, yet are remarkable. The third, also a quarter of a leaguehigher, has beauties truly admirable by its curtains and falls which form also, as at Niagara , a charm-ing proportion and variety. They may be one hundred and some feet high . 3 In the intervals be-tween the falls, there are a hundred little cascades which present likewise a curious spectacle; andif the altitudes of each chute were joined together, and they made but one as at Niagara , the heightwould, perhaps, be four hundred feet; but there is four times less water than at the Niagara Fallwhich will cause the latter to pass, for ever, as a Wonder perhaps unique in the World.
The English to throw disorder into this new levy sent a good deal of brandy. Some savages did,in fact get drunk whom M. Picquet could not bring along. He therefore desired much that Choeguenwere destroyed and the English prevented rebuilding it; and in order that we should be absolutelymasters of the south side of Lake Ontario, he proposed erecting a Fort near there at the bay of theCayugas 3 which would make a very good harbour and furnish very fine anchorage. No place isbetter adapted for a Fort .
He examined attentively the Fort of Choeguen, a post the most pernicious to France that theEnglish could erect. It was commanded almost from all sides and could be very easily approachedin time of war. It was a two story very low building; decked like a ship and surmounted on thetop by a gallery; the whole was surrounded by a stone wall, flanked only with two bastions at theside towards the nearest hill. Two batteries each of three twelve pounders, would have been morethan sufficient to reduce that establishment to ashes. It was prejudicial to us by the facility it af-
1 The Genesee River. In Belin’s Map of Partie Orcidentale de la NouvelU France, 1755 (No. 992 W. C. Slate Lib.) it is de-scribed as a “ River unknown to Geographers , filled with Rapids and Waterfalls.”
2 The highest fall on the river is 1U5 feet.
3 Sodas bay.