Smallpox orphans St. Kateri Tekakwitha at four and nearly blinds her

GANDAOUAGUÉ, Mohawk Valley, 1660 AD — Smallpox swept the Turtle clan’s village of Gandaouagué this year, and within a few days it killed three people from one family: a Mohawk chief, his Christian Algonquin wife and their small son. Their daughter, four years old, caught the disease as well and nearly died. She lived, but the disease scarred her face and ruined her eyes. The Church honours her as Saint Kateri Tekakwitha. Her people called the child Tekakwitha; Kateri comes from Catherine, the name she was given years later at her baptism.

Her mother was a Christian, and her father was not. To baptise the children the family needed a priest, and there was none left in the Mohawk country. The Mohawks were at war with the French. Two years earlier they had held the last Jesuit priest among them, Father Lemoyne, as a hostage, then sent him back to Canada.

St. Kateri’s mother had not been born among the Mohawks. She was an Algonquin, baptised by Jesuit missionaries at Trois-Rivières on the St. Lawrence and brought up there among the French settlers. About 1653 AD, in the Iroquois wars against the Algonquin nations, raiders took her prisoner near Trois-Rivières and carried her south to their own country. Captives brought back to the valley were often tortured and burned. A Mohawk warrior saved her from the torture and the fire and married her. St. Kateri was born in 1656 AD, and a younger brother followed.

Late last year the Turtle clan raised a new palisade around their town, on a small, high point of land where Auries Creek runs into the Mohawk River, about forty miles west of the Dutch trading post at Fort Orange. Of the Mohawk towns it was the nearest to the Dutch. The Turtles asked Dutch envoys visiting from Fort Orange to bring horses and drag the logs up the slope. The Dutch answered that their horses could never climb it with no road. They gave the Mohawks fifty new hatchets as a token of friendship and went home to the Hudson, and the Turtles finished the palisade on their own.

Inside it the families lived in bark longhouses about a hundred feet long. Each house held about twenty families, two on either side of a central passage and four to each fire. Above every hearth a hole in the roof let the smoke out and the daylight in.

The smallpox had been spreading through the Mohawk nation since last year, and this year it reached Gandaouagué. Many people in the town died, children and adults alike. In St. Kateri’s family, her father, her mother and her little brother all died within a few days of one another.

Father Pierre Cholenec, a Jesuit who later knew St. Kateri, wrote that her mother “preserved her faith even to her death.” Her two small children were still unbaptised, and Father Cholenec wrote that the mother “had the pain to die without having been able to procure for them the grace of Baptism.” Anastasia Tegonhatsihongo, who had been the mother’s friend, told the Jesuit Father Claude Chauchetière years afterwards that St. Kateri’s mother had been a fervent Christian to the last and died with a prayer on her lips.

Father Cholenec wrote that St. Kateri, at four, “was also attacked like the others, but she did not sink as they did under the violence of the disease.” Her eyes were left so weak that she nearly lost her sight, and she could never again bear strong light. From then on she kept herself wrapped in her blanket and shaded her eyes with it whenever she went out, and on some days she stayed shut inside the lodge from morning to night.

Her uncle succeeded her father as chief of the Turtle clan. He was often on bad terms with the French missionaries and on good terms with the Dutch traders at Fort Orange. He and his wife had no children of their own. They took St. Kateri into their lodge and adopted another girl as well, a little older, who became her sister. By Mohawk custom an uncle called his niece his daughter, and she called him father. Father Cholenec wrote of where the epidemic left the child: “at the age of four years she found herself an orphan, under the care of her aunts, and in the power of an uncle who was the leading man in the settlement.”

The hill where Gandaouagué stood, on the west bank of Auries Creek, rises just west of the hamlet of Auriesville, New York. The Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs stands about a mile to the east, on the hill of Ossernenon. Ossernenon was the older Mohawk town where the Mohawks put the Jesuit missionary St. Isaac Jogues to death in 1646 AD.