A Champlain Fourth
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Published: July 4, 2009
Four hundred years ago on July 4 the region along Lake Champlain encompassing the shores of what is now Vermont, New York and Quebec was a wilderness abundant with wildlife but sparsely populated by people. That's because it was a war zone between the territories of the Mohawk to the south and the Algonquins, Hurons and others to the north.
On that day a party of Indians and a smaller party of Frenchmen were canoeing up the St. Lawrence River with plans to head south to attack the Mohawks. Samuel de Champlain, the leader of the tiny French settlements along the St. Lawrence, had concluded that only be dealing a sharp blow against the Mohawks could he achieve peaceful relations among the Mohawks and the tribes of the St. Lawrence Valley. He believed peace among the Indians was essential if the French settlements were to survive.
On July 14, 1609, Champlain's party paddled onto Lake Champlain. Later that month Champlain, two other Frenchmen and a few dozen Indians had their battle with the Mohawks at what is now Ticonderoga, killing as many as 50 Mohawks and seizing the Mohawk camp. Champlain's strategy worked. Twenty years of peace among the Indians followed.
Vermont, New York and Quebec are now in the midst of a celebration to mark the 400th anniversary of Champlain's arrival at Lake Champlain. He was the first European to see the lake, which is the only geographical feature among hundreds that he discovered and mapped that he named after himself.
It is worth thinking about the span of time that elapsed between these events on Lake Champlain and the events occurring at Philadelphia that we celebrate today. Between July 1609 and July 1776, 167 years elapsed. July 4 is when we celebrate the independence of the United States from Great Britain, but to get to the Fourth of July as we think of it, much history had to happen.
Champlain eventually succeeded in establishing French colonies in Canada (a word taken from the name of an Indian tribe in eastern Quebec). The indispensable history "Champlain's Dream" by David Hackett Fischer tells the story of his long struggle to make it happen.
Meanwhile, just two years before Champlain's arrival on Lake Champlain, the British had established their first permanent foothold at Jamestown in Virginia. Both the French and British had to figure out how to deal with the native peoples they encountered, and Fischer's book describes their different approaches. Champlain treated the Indians with respect, living among them, learning from them, trying to achieve a degree of concord that would allow all to thrive. His attitude derived from a broadly conceived idea of our common humanity. Thus, the French were far more successful than the British, who exercised greater hostility, in living side by side with the Indians.
Disease and warfare decimated the Indians, in any event. Meanwhile, colonies grew in French and British America. The introduction of African slaves to British America deformed society there, but the American outposts of both the French and British empires were indeed becoming a new world.
Those empires eventually clashed, and in 1763 what we call the French and Indian War ended with the British taking possession of French Canada. Thirteen years later on July 4, the American colonists declared they were thenceforth independent of their imperial overlords.
This July 4 our celebration of American independence occurs within our celebration of those earlier events when Europeans first arrived on Lake Champlain. It is a reminder that our history is infinitely complex, involving many peoples and many events that might have turned out differently.
It wasn't for 150 years or so after Champlain's arrival on the lake that Americans arrived in large numbers to settle Vermont. And it wasn't until 15 years after the Declaration of Independence that Vermont joined the American union. Observance of Champlain's quadricentennial thus helps shed light on the vast sweep of our ever-unfolding history.
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