two children. Such plunder as the village afforded,
consisting of three barrels of gunpowder, with a few guns, blankets, and
kettles, was then seized; and the Puritan militia thought it a
meritorious act to break what they called the "idols" in the church, and
carry off the sacred vessels.

Harmon and his party returned towards night from their useless excursion
to the cornfields, where they found nobody. In the morning a search was
made for the dead, and twenty-six Indians were found and scalped,
including the principal chiefs and warriors of the place. Then, being
anxious for the safety of their boats, the party marched for Taconic
Falls. They had scarcely left the village when one of the two surviving
Mohawks, named Christian, secretly turned back, set fire to the church
and the houses, and then rejoined the party. The boats were found safe,
and embarking, they rowed down to Richmond with their trophies.[265]

The news of the fate of the Jesuit and his mission spread joy among the
border settlers, who saw in it the end of their troubles. In their eyes
Rale was an incendiary, setting on a horde of bloody savages to pillage
and murder. While they thought him a devil, he passed in Canada for a
martyred saint. He was neither the one nor the other, but a man with the
qualities and faults of a man,--fearless, resolute, enduring; boastful,
sarcastic, often bitter and irritating; a vehement partisan; apt to see
things, not as they were, but as he wished them to be; given to
inaccuracy and exaggeration, yet no doubt sincere in opinions and
genuine in zeal; hating the English more than he loved the Indians;
calling himself their friend, yet using them as instruments of worldly
policy, to their danger and final ruin. In considering the ascription of
martyrdom, it is to be remembered that he did not die because he was an
apostle of the faith, but because he was the active agent of the
Canadian government.

There is reason to believe that he sometimes exercised a humanizing
influence over his flock. The war which he helped to kindle was marked
by fewer barbarities--fewer tortures, mutilations of the dead, and
butcheries of women and infants--than either of the preceding wars. It
is fair to assume that this was due in part to him, though it was
chiefly the result of an order given, at the outset, by Shute that
non-combatants in exposed positions should be sent to places of safety
in the older settlements.[266]

FOOTNOTES: