Shadow Woman Read Online Free PDF

little
golden-haired children digging with plastic shovels in the muck. If
the mother wasn’t careful, they might actually find something,
Jane thought. The People had lived here once. That black mud made it
easy to grow corn, beans, and squash with a digging stick, and the
weeds came right up with a tug.
    The village was called
Dayodehokto, a phrase that meant “a bend in a creek,” so
the rows of longhouses had probably been close to the stream on the
far side of the trees, but the cultivated fields had stretched for a
couple of miles in all directions. A Dutchman who came through here
in the 1670s counted 120 longhouses with twelve or thirteen fires in
a line down the center of each one. On opposite sides of each fire
were a pair of compartments, where two adult women slept with their
husbands – when the men were home – and their children.
After allowing for the usual exaggeration, Jane guessed the village
would have contained nearly three thousand people on June 23, 1687,
when this quiet little spot had its moment of importance in global
politics.
    For twenty years, Louis XIV, the
Sun King, had been ordering successive governors of New France to
exterminate the five Iroquois nations, but particularly the Senecas,
who lived the farthest west and were most disruptive to the fur trade
with the Indians of the western Great Lakes.
    He had received no satisfaction
in the past, but this time he had found himself a soldier. The
Marquis de Denonville efficiently assembled the total military force
of New France – probably a thousand soldiers, traders, and
trappers. The Sun King sent him two thousand French regular troops,
half the number he had requested, along with a regal apology about
being strapped for cash. Denonville gathered six hundred allies from
the Indians of the west – Miamis, Illinois, Potawatomis,
Hurons, Ottawas. They all met at Fort Niagara, where the river
emptied into Lake Ontario, traveled in four hundred boats and canoes
to Irondequoit Bay, and marched south along the trail to this
village.
    The army was confident that the
people they were attacking were almost all women and children. Seneca
men were out in the forests for most of the year, hunting or raiding
distant tribes. The Senecas had no reason to expect an attack,
because they had been assured that Louis XIV and their ally the
English king James II were friends at the moment.
    On the first day. the French
expedition made good progress down the trail toward this spot. They
marched with half the Canadian woodsmen and Indians in front, then
the French army, and then a rear guard of Indians and woodsmen. On
the second day they reached the edge of the cornfields but found them
strangely deserted. At this time of year, the Month of Strawberries,
the corn was still unripe and needed constant tending. The fields
should have been full of women, chattering as they weeded and turned
the soil. The marquis conceded that his tactic of surprise had
failed, but he was sure the mission might still succeed if his men
were quick enough. The French force ran toward the village in their
eagerness to cut down the fleeing women and children before they
could vanish into the forest.
    The front of the column passed
within a few yards of something they were not expecting – a
group of Seneca warriors lying on their bellies in the brush. The
Senecas waited until the vanguard had moved on, then tore into the
center of the column, where the French soldiers were, first firing
their rifles and then falling on the soldiers with tomahawks and war
clubs. The French fell into disorder, firing at trees, bushes, or
their Indian allies and then scattering along the trail in both
directions. The Senecas killed over a hundred and then disappeared
into the forest again.
    It took the marquis the rest of
the day to rally and reassemble his men, then force them to set up a
secure camp for the night. In the morning he cautiously advanced into
the village of Dayo-dehokto and discovered