tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[5] soon become familiar ground to all who honor Tekakwitha!

CHAPTER II.

THE MOHAWK VALLEY AND THE MOHAWKS AT THE TIME OF TEKAKWITHA'S BIRTH

FATHER Jogues was put to death in the year 1646, on the south side of the Mohawk River, a few miles to the eastward of Fonda, and not far from the mouth of the Schoharie River. Close to the shrine which has been erected at Auriesville in his memory, is the very ravine in which, during his captivity there, he buried his friend and only companion, Réné Goupil.

Réné, it will be remembered, was cruelly murdered for signing an Indian child with the sign of the cross. The description of the place where this occurred is very explicit in Father Jogues' published letters, and there is no other spot in the whole Mohawk Valley to which it can well be applied. He mentions a certain river which was a quarter of a league distant from the Indian town of Ossernenon, where he was held captive; this was undoubtedly the Schoharie. There in that same vicinity, after he had escaped from captivity and returned to the Mohawks as a missionary, he met his own tragic fate, or rather the glorious reward of his zeal. There, too, or very near there, ten years after his death, Tekakwitha was born. The exact location of her birthplace has not been determined. It was either at the Turtle Castle of Ossernenon described by Jogues, the name of which was afterwards changed, or at a later village site near Auries Creek, to which the people of that castle moved, and to which they gave the name of Gandawague.[6] In either case her birthplace was less than a mile from the present hamlet of Auriesville.

There Kateri Tekakwitha was born in the year 1656. Her father was a Mohawk warrior, and her mother a Christian Algonquin captive, who had been brought up and baptized among the French settlers at Three Rivers in Canada. The Iroquois, or People of the Long House, including the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, were enemies of the Algonquin tribes and hostile to the French.

The Mohawks especially were accustomed to make frequent raids on the settlements in Canada, leaving desolation behind them on the St. Lawrence, and bearing with them to their own valley rich booty, and also captives to be tortured and burned, or else adopted into the Five Nations of Iroquois to swell their numbers. If Frenchmen, these captives were often held as prisoners of war, and haughty terms made for their ransom. It happened on one of these raids into Canada that Tekakwitha's mother, the Algonquin, was thus captured. Torn suddenly from a peaceful home and the French friends who were teaching her "the prayer," she was hurried through the lakes and woods of a strange country, along the great war-trail that leads from the St. Lawrence to the Mohawk through north-eastern New York. Fast following in the path of Jogues, the light canoe that bore her came southward with the braves, and their trophies of war, through Lake Champlain and then Lake George, the newly christened Lake St. Sacrament. Little did the captive dream that ever a child of hers would take that same long journey back again, an exile from the home that she was then approaching, all unconscious of her fate. A home, indeed, awaited her coming in the land of the Mohawks. She was saved from the torture and the fire by a fierce, pagan Mohawk warrior, who took the young Algonquin for his wife. The gentle girl had captured the heart of her conqueror.

Their family consisted of one son and an infant daughter, known later as Kateri Tekakwitha. Père Claude Chauchetière, who wrote in 1695,[7] tells us that they dwelt at "Gandawague, a little village of the Mohawks." There they must have occupied one section of an Iroquois long-house, other kindred families filling up its entire length on both sides of an open space and passage-way through the centre. The occupants of every four sections or alcoves in these houses, two families being on each side of the passage, shared a common hearthfire,[8] with a hole above it in the roof to let in the daylight and let out the smoke. There were usually five of these fires and twenty families in a house about a hundred feet in length. These united households gave name and meaning to the Iroquois League of Kanonsionni, or People of the Long House.

There is reason to believe that Tekakwitha's father took an active part in the affairs both of the Mohawk nation and the Iroquois League. We are told, indeed, that after his death her uncle, who seems to have taken her father's place and responsibilities, was one of the chief men of the Turtle Castle, whose deputies ranked higher in council than those of the Bear and Wolf Castles, Andagoron and Tionnontogen. This was because the turtle was created first, according to