Talking severed head spoke to murderers
Story is nonsense, but historians in New France recorded it, nonetheless
It was the autumn of 1657, and a kind of truce hung over the hard-pressed settlement of VilleMarie, as Montreal was then known. Iroquois raids had receded, and there had even been an exchange of hostages held respectively by the Iroquois and the French.
Yet this fragile peace didn’t reflect any growing acceptance by aboriginals of Europeans encroaching on their land. The calm had more to do with the Iroquois’ focusing for a while on renewed hostilities with their traditional enemies to the south, and it would not last.
Nicolas Godé was a carpenter and fur trader who had been in Ville-Marie since its founding, 15 years before. Jean de Saint-Père, his son-inlaw, was a notary. On Oct. 25, they were finishing the roof of a house they were building. It might have been on adjoining properties owned by the two men on what’s now Place d’Armes, or perhaps it was close to Pointe-Saint-Charles, where Godé also had land.
The two men were being helped by their servant, Jacques Noël. Some Oneidas, members of the Iroquois confederacy, were also there that day, idly watching. Perhaps they knew each other, for the trio gave their visitors a meal. Indeed, just a few months before, Godé had been fined 50 livres for selling alcohol to aboriginals, contrary to decrees handed down earlier that year.
But, in fact, the Oneidas weren’t paying a social call, nor a business one. After the Frenchmen had returned to their work atop the house, the visitors suddenly reached for their firearms.
As François Dollier de Casson, Montreal’s first historian, graphically puts it, they aimed at their hosts and “brought them down like sparrows on a rooftop.”
Godé and Noël were scalped; as for SaintPère, according to the saintly Marguerite Bourgeoys, the unfortunate notary was completely beheaded “in order to have his fine growth of hair.”
And so was launched a bizarre denouement. Nonsense it certainly is, but that did not prevent Dollier and another early Sulpician historian, François Vachon de Belmont, as well as Bourgeoys, from recording it, albeit with some skepticism.
As the Oneidas hurriedly made off with their grisly trophies, the story goes, Saint-Père’s head began to speak.
“You murder us,” Dollier has the head declaring. “You commit a thousand cruelties against us, you want to destroy the French, but you will not succeed. The day will come when they will be your masters, and you will obey them. It is vain for you to struggle.”
Bourgeoys records a less triumphalist reproach: “You think you do us harm, but you send us to paradise.”
The voice persisted day and night. Furthermore, it spoke in the murderers’ own language which, during his lifetime, Saint-Père had never learned.
The Oneida men were understandably alarmed. They put the head “sometimes in one place, sometimes another,” Dollier writes. “Even when they covered it with something to prevent it from being heard, it was no better.” Finally, after scalping the head, they threw it away, but still the voice droned on.
Dollier says he heard this weird story from “people of good repute,” including a man to whom it had been told by the Oneida themselves — someone who “understands the Indian tongue as well as I do French.”
This presumably is René Cuillerier, kidnapped by Oneida warriors two years to the day after Saint-Père’s death; he was held captive for 19 months, escaped and finally made his way back to Ville-Marie. Bourgeoys certainly cites Cuillerier as a witness to the Oneidas’ credulity.
A few days after the three Frenchmen died, several Oneidas had been captured. The widows of Saint-Père and Godé asked that their lives be spared, and so they were.
According to her biographer, Patricia Simpson, Bourgeoys found a clearer sign of God’s grace in this act of charity than in any tale of a miraculous talking head.