Chapter VI (1)

THE JESUITS, RECOLLECTS, AND THE INDIANS.

BY JOHN GILMARY SHEA, LL.D.

AT the time of the discovery of this portion of the northern continent, the missionary spirit was active in the Catholic Church. The labors of the earlier monks had been revived and continued in the East by the new zeal of the orders of friars, especially of the Franciscan and Dominican Fathers. The earlier voyages of explorations from Cabot’s day were accompanied by priests; and as soon as the condition and character of the inhabitants were known, projects were formed for their conversion. This work was looked upon as a duty by the kings of Spain, Portugal, and France, as well as by the hierarchy and religious orders. Coeval with the Spanish and French attempts to settle on the coast, were missionary efforts, often pushed with wonderful zeal and courage far into the interior by intrepid apostles, who, trusting their lives to Indian guides, sought fields of labor.

The mission lines on the map meet and cross, as, undeterred by the death of pioneers, others took up the task. In 1526, Dominicans reared a chapel on the banks of the James in Virginia; in 1539, the Italian Franciscan Mark, from Nice, penetrated to New Mexico; and soon after, Father Padilla, of the same order, died by the hands of the Indians near the waters of the Missouri. By 1559 Dominicans were traversing the territories of the Mobilian tribes from Pensacola to the Mississippi; and when Melendez founded St. Augustine, it became a mission centre whence the Jesuit missionaries threaded the Atlantic coast to Chesapeake Bay and the banks of the Rappahannock, before they left that field to the Franciscans, who dotted Florida and Georgia with their mission chapels.

The same spirit was seen pervading France, where the conversion of the Indians of the New World was regarded as a duty of the highest order. One of the first traces that we find of French voyages to the northern coast is the mention in an early edition of the Chronicle of Eusebius, in 1508, that Indians who had been brought from the new-found land received baptism within the walls of a cathedral in France.

Though the introduction of Calvinism led to the destruction of many a convent and shrine, and thinned by death the ranks of the mission orders, the zeal for the conversion of the Indians survived the wars of religion. Soon after Poutrincourt began his settlement in Acadia, it was made a reproach to him that nothing had been done for the conversion of the natives. He addressed a letter to the Pope, as if to put the fact of his orthodoxy beyond all question; and when it was proposed to send out Jesuit missionaries to labor among the Indians, he caused twenty-five of the natives to be baptized in token of his zeal for their spiritual welfare.

The establishment of a Jesuit mission was, however, decided upon. On the 12th of June, 1611, Fathers Peter Biard and Enemond Masse reached Port Royal. Some difficulties had been thrown in their way, and others met them in the petty settlement. They turned at once to study the Micmac language, so as to begin their mission labors among that nation of Algonquins. The aged Membertou, who had acquired some French, was their interpreter and first convert. Biard visited all the coast as far as the Kennebec, and tried to give some ideas of Christianity to the Abenakis on that river. Finding that little could be done at Port Royal, where the settlers hampered rather than aided their efforts, the Jesuits projected an independent mission settlement elsewhere. Their protector, Madame de Guercheville, obtained from the French king a grant of all the coast from the St. Lawrence to Florida. A vessel was sent out, the missionaries were taken on board, and a settlement was begun on Mount Desert Island. There a cross was planted, and Mass said at a rustic altar. But the Jesuits were not to carry out their mission projects. English vessels under Argall, from Virginia, attacked the ship and settlement of St. Savior; a Jesuit laybrother was killed; the rest of the settlers were sent to France or carried prisoners to Virginia. Thus ended the first Jesuit mission begun under French auspices.[677]

Meanwhile Champlain had succeeded in establishing a settlement on the St. Lawrence, and had penetrated to Lake Champlain and the rapids of the Ottawa. On all sides were tribes “living like brute beasts, without law, without religion, without God.” His religious zeal was quickened; for Quebec itself was destitute of ministers of religion. The Recollects, a reformed branch of the Franciscan order, were invited to enter the field. They accepted the mission, and in May, 1615, four of the Gray Friars landed at Quebec. Father John Dolbeau at once began a mission among the Montagnais,—the tribe occupying that portion of the St. Lawrence valley,—and wintered with them in their wandering hunter life, enduring all its hardships, and learning their language and ideas. The friendly Wyandots, from the shores of a far distant lake, were the tribe assigned to Father Joseph le Caron, and to the palisaded towns of this more civilized race he boldly ventured, without waiting for Champlain. In the summer of 1615 he set up his altar in a new bark lodge in the Huron town of Caragouha, near Thunder Bay, and began to learn a new strange tongue, so as to teach the flock around him.

The Recollects had thus undertaken to evangelize two races, who, with their kindred, extended from the ocean to the Mississippi, from the Chesapeake and Ohio to the frozen lands of the Esquimaux. Their languages, differing from all known to European scholars in vocabulary, forms, and the construction of sentences, offered incredible difficulties. The ideas these Indians held of a future state were so obscure, that it was not easy to find enough of natural religion by which to lead them to the revealed. Progress was naturally slow,—there was more to discourage than to cheer. Still the Franciscans labored on; and though their number was limited to six, they had in 1625 five missions at Tadousac, Quebec, Three Rivers, among the Nipissings, and in the Huron country.

Finding that the mission field in New France required an order bound to less scrupulous poverty than their own, the Recollects of Paris invited the Jesuits to aid them. Enemond Masse, of the unfortunate Acadian mission, with Charles Lalemant and John de Brebeuf, came over in 1625. The old opposition to the order was renewed. The Jesuits were homeless, till the Recollects opened the doors of their convent to them. Commanding resources from influential friends, they soon began to build, and brought over men to swell the settlement and cultivate the ground. They joined the Recollects in the missions already founded, profiting by their experience. This enabled the Church to extend its missions. Father Joseph de la Roche d’Aillon, leaving the Hurons, struck southwesterly, and founded a mission among the Neutral Nation, apparently on the eastern bank of the Niagara, and urged his countrymen to open direct communication by way of Lake Ontario with that fertile part of the country.

The little colony at Quebec was, however, on the verge of starvation; and after once baffling the English, Champlain surrendered in 1629, and the missions of the Recollects and Jesuits came to a close. A mere handful of converts was all the reward of their long and zealous labors, and these they were compelled to leave exposed to the danger of lapsing back into their original heathendom.

We cannot trace very distinctly the system adopted by the Recollects and their Jesuit auxiliaries during this first period of mission labor in Canada. Their usual course was to remain during the pleasant months at the French posts,—Quebec, Three Rivers, and Tadousac,—attending to the spiritual wants of the French and of the Indians who encamped near by for trade, and then to follow an Indian band on its winter hunt. The Recollects spoke despondingly. Some young men were taken to France and instructed there,—one, Peter Anthony, having the Prince de Guimené as his sponsor in baptism. But they found it almost impossible to keep the young for any prolonged instruction, and they hesitated to baptize adults, except in case of danger of death.

In the Huron country Father Nicholas Viel succeeded Le Caron, and had his little chapel at Quieunonascaran, cultivating a small patch of ground around his bark lodge. His success does not seem to have exceeded that of his fellow religious in the more nomadic tribes. While on his way to Quebec in 1625 he was treacherously hurled from his canoe by a Huron guide, and perished in the rapid waters near Montreal that still bear the name of _Sault au Récollet_.

Another Recollect, Father William Poullain, while on his way with some Frenchmen from Quebec to Sault St. Louis, fell into the hands of the Iroquois, who were about to torture him at the stake, when he was saved by an offer of an exchange made by his countrymen.

The Jesuits adopted the system of the Recollects, but we have no details of their labors,—one Huron boy taken to France, where he was baptized by the name of Louis de Sainte Foy, being the result of the joint labors to which most allusion is made.

The Court of France seems to have considered that both Recollect and Jesuit had failed to acquire the languages of the country sufficiently to do the work of God and of his most Christian Majesty. At all events, each order hastened to put in print evidence of its proficiency in American linguistics. The Recollect Sagard published a Huron Dictionary; the Jesuit Brebeuf, a translation of Ledesma’s Catechism into Huron, with the Lord’s Prayer and other devotions rendered into Montagnais by Father Enemond Masse.[678]

When England reluctantly yielded up her Canadian conquest, the all-powerful Cardinal Richelieu seems to have looked with no kindly eye on either of the bodies who had already labored to evangelize New France. He offered the mission to his favorite order, the Capuchins, and only when they declined it did he permit the Jesuits to return.

With the restoration of Canada to France by the treaty of Saint Germain in 1632, the history of the great Jesuit missions begins. For some years the Fathers of the Society of Jesus were, almost without exception, the only clergy in the colony in charge of all the churches of the settlers and the missions to the Indian tribes. When a pious association, under the inspiration of the Venerable Mr. Olier, founded Montreal, members of the Society of Priests which he had formed at Saint Sulpice became the clergy of that town; and they gathered near it a double-tongued Indian mission, which still continues to exist under their care. They made no attempt to extend their labors, except in the missionary voyage of Dollier de Casson and Galinée in the mission of the Abbés Fénelon and Trouvé at Quinté Bay, and the later labors of the Abbé Picquet at Ogdensburg.

When Bishop Laval was appointed for Canada in 1658, he founded a seminary at Quebec, which was aggregated to the Seminary of the Foreign Missions in Paris. The Jesuits then resigned all the parishes which they had directed in the colony, and confined themselves to their college and their Indian missions. The priests of the Seminary of Quebec, beside their parish work, also undertook missions among the Indians in Acadia, Illinois, and on the lower Mississippi.

A collision between the Governor of Canada and the Bishop with his clergy and the Jesuits, in regard to the sale of liquor to the Indians, led the Government to send back the Recollects to resume their early labors. They did not, however, undertake any important missions among the Indian tribes. Their efforts were confined almost exclusively to the period and course of La Salle’s attempts at settlement and exploration, and to a mission at Gaspé and a shorter one on the Penobscot.

When the colony of Louisiana took form, the Indian missions there were confided to the Jesuits, who directed them till the suppression of the order terminated their existence in the dominions of France. Spain, in her colonies, sent other orders to continue the work of the Jesuits, and this was done successfully in some places; but there was no effort made to sustain those of the Jesuits in Canada and Louisiana, and amid the political changes which rapidly ensued the early French missions gradually dwindled away.

These Jesuit missions embraced the labors of the Fathers among the Micmacs, chiefly on Cape Breton Island and at Miscou; the missions among the Montagnais, Bersiamites, Oumamiwek, Porcupine Indians, Papinachois, and other tribes of the lower St. Lawrence and Saguenay, the centre being at Tadousac; the missions of which Quebec was the immediate centre, comprising the work among the Montagnais of that district and Algonquins from the west. Of this Algonquin mission, Sillery soon became the main mission; but as the Algonquins disappeared, Abenakis came to settle there, and remained till the chapel was removed to St. François de Sales. Then Three Rivers was a mission station for the Indians near it, and for the Attikamegues inland, till a separate mission was established for that tribe. Beyond Montreal was the mission to the Nipissings, and the great Huron mission, the scene of the most arduous and continued labors of the Fathers among the palisaded towns of the Wyandots and Dinondadies. After the ruin of these nations, the Jesuits led one part of the survivors to Isle Orleans, and subsequently gathered a remnant of them at Lorette, where their descendants still remain. The rest fled towards the Mississippi, and were zealously followed by the energetic missionaries, who gathered them at Mackinac, whence they removed in time to Detroit, and ultimately to Sandusky, the last point where the Jesuits ministered to them.

Beyond Lake Huron was the great Ottawa mission, embracing the attempts to christianize the Ottawas on Lake Superior, the Chippewas at Sault Ste. Marie, the Beaver Indians and Crees; at Green Bay was another post for the Menomonees, Pottawatamies, Foxes, and Mascoutens; while south of Lake Michigan came in time Jesuit labors among the Miamis and Illinois. The missions attempted among the Sioux beyond the Mississippi mark the western limit of the old Jesuit efforts to convert the native tribes.

With the establishment of Louisiana came the missions of the Society among the Yazoos, Arkansas, Choctaws, Alibamons, and other tribes.

THE MICMAC MISSION.—The Jesuit missions among the Micmacs never attained any remarkable development, and most of the territory occupied by this branch of the Algonquin family was attended by other bodies of missionaries. Father Julian Perrault began his labors on Cape Breton in 1634; Charles Turgis, with others, was at Miscou in the following years. Most of the Jesuits, however, were compelled to withdraw with shattered health; and Turgis, devoting himself to the care of the sick, died at his post in 1637. Father John Dolebeau became paralyzed, and while returning to France was blown up at sea. At last, however, Father Andrew Richard and Martin de Lyonne succeeded in founding a mission; they learned the language, and extended their labors to Chaleurs Bay, Ile Percée, Miramichi, and Chédabuctou, finding one old woman who had been baptized by Biard at Port Royal. Lyonne died, devotedly attending the sick, in 1661; Richard continued his labors some years later, aided for a time by James Fremin, and cheered by visits from his superior, Jerome Lalemant. They made some converts, although they did not banish the old superstitions and savagery of the tribe; but when Bishop Laval visited Gaspé in 1659, the missionaries presented one hundred and forty Indian Christians for confirmation.

When Richard’s labors ceased, the Recollects took charge of the mission at Isle Percée, where French and Indians were attended from about 1673 by Fathers Hilarion Guesnin and Exuperius Dethune. They were succeeded in 1675 by Father Christian Le Clercq, who took up the Indian mission with zeal, and has left ineffaceable traces of his twelve years’ labor. He acquired the Micmac language; and finding that some Indians, to aid their memory in retaining his instructions, employed a system of hieroglyphics on bits of bark, he studied and improved it, till he had the daily prayers, mass, and catechism in this form. The Indians readily adopted these hieroglyphics, and taught them to their children and later converts. They have been retained in use till the present, and the Rev. Christian Kauder, a Redemptorist, had type cut in Austria, and published a catechism, hymn and prayer book, in them at Vienna in 1866. In 1685 land was given to the priests of the Seminary of Quebec; gentlemen of that body, with some Recollects and occasionally a Jesuit Father, served the coast from Gaspé to Nova Scotia, and all the Micmacs became Catholics. They seem to have been attended with the French, and not as a distinct mission. The Micmac territory included not only the coast, but Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. Of these missionaries, Messrs. Thury and Gaulin and the Recollect Felix Pain seem to have been the most prominent. The Abbé Anthony S. Maillard, who was missionary to the Micmacs in Cape Breton and Acadia till his death in 1768, exercised great influence; and his mastery of the language is shown in his Grammar of the Micmac, which was printed at New York in 1864.

THE MONTAGNAIS MISSION.—Tadousac was from the commencement of French settlement on the St. Lawrence an anchoring-place for vessels and a trading-station which attracted Indians from the west and north. Missionaries made visits to the spot from an early period, but the Jesuit mission there is regarded as having been founded in 1640. It received charitable aid from the Duchess d’Aiguillon, who maintained for a time the Fathers employed there. Father John de Quen may be said to have established the first permanent mission, from which gradually extended efforts for christianizing the tribes on the shores down to Labrador and on the upper waters of the Saguenay.

The first mission was the result of the effort of Charles Meiachkwat, a Montagnais who had visited Sillery and induced the Jesuit Fathers to send one of their number to Tadousac. Charles erected the first chapel; and may be regarded as the first native Christian of that district, and first native catechist, for he visited neighboring tribes to impart what religious knowledge he had learned.

The missionaries encountered the usual difficulties,—great laxity of morals, a deep-rooted belief in dreams, the influence of the medicine-men, and vices introduced by the traders, especially intoxication. Father Buteux, who replaced De Quen for a time, seems to have been the first to give his neophytes the kind of calendar still in use among the wandering Indians, with spaces for each day, to be marked off as it came, and Sundays and holidays so designated by symbols that they could recognize and observe them.

The missionaries at first went down from Quebec in the spring, and continued their labors till autumn, when the Indians scattered for the winter hunt; but as the neophytes felt the want of a regular ministry during the winter, they attempted, in 1645, to supply it by performing some of the priestly functions themselves. This led to fuller instruction; and to impress them, the missionaries left marked pieces of wood of different colors, called _massinahigan_, a word still in use in all the Catholic missions among Algonquin nations for a book of prayers.

In 1646 De Quen ascended the Saguenay, and penetrated, by way of the Chicoutimi, to Lake St. John, in order to preach to the Porcupine tribe, who had already erected a cross in their village. Three years later, Father Gabriel Druillettes visited the same tribe and reared his bark chapel among them. In 1651 De Quen made another missionary excursion, reaching various villages on the lake, and subsequently, returning to Tadousac, sailed down the St. Lawrence till he reached bands of the Oumamiwek or Bersiamites, among whom he began mission work.

The mission of the Holy Cross at Tadousac was, however, the scene of the most assiduous labors, as often a thousand Indians of different tribes would be encamped there; and though nothing could be done to check the errant life of these Algonquins, ideas of Christian morality and faith were inculcated, and much reformation was effected. In 1660 Father Jerome Lalemant, superior of the missions, continued the labors of his predecessors on Lake St. John, and ascending the Mistassini, reached Nekouba, then a gathering-place for the Algonquin tribes of the interior. Here they hoped to reach several nations who had never seen a missionary, and especially the Ecureuil, or Squirrel tribe; but the Iroquois war-parties had penetrated farther than missionary zeal, and the Jesuits found the Algonquins of these remote cantons fleeing in all directions after sustaining a series of defeats from the fierce men-hunters from the Mohawk and Oswego. The great aim was to reach the Crees, but that nation was subsequently approached by way of the great lakes, when the route in that direction was opened by Menard.

Bailloquet and Nouvel wintered in successive years with bands of Montagnais, travelling in snow-shoes, and drawing their chapel requisites on a sled, as they followed the hunters, pitching their tents on encountering other parties, to enable them to fulfil their religious duties. Then, in the spring of 1664, while Druillettes visited the tribes on the upper waters of the Saguenay, Nouvel ascended the Manicouagan to the lake of that name in the country of the Papinachois, a part yet untrodden by the foot of the white man. Some of the tribe were already Christians, converted at the mission posts; but to most the missionary was an object of wonder, and his rude chapel a never-ceasing marvel to them and to a more northerly tribe, the Ouchestigouetch, who soon came to camp beside the mission cross.

Nouvel cultivated this tribe for several years, wintering among them, or pursuing them in their scattered cabins, till the spring of 1667, when all the Christians of these Montagnais bands gathered at Tadousac to meet Bishop Laval, who, visiting his diocese in his bark canoe, was coming to confer on those deemed sufficiently grounded in the faith the sacrament of confirmation. He reached Tadousac on the 24th of June, and was welcomed by four hundred Christian Indians, who escorted him to the temporary bark chapel, for the church had been totally destroyed by fire. The bishop confirmed one hundred and forty-nine.

Beaulieu, Albanel, and Druillettes labored there in the following years; but small-pox and other diseases, with want caused by the Iroquois driving them from their hunting-grounds, had reduced the Indians, so that, as Albanel states, in 1670 Tadousac was almost deserted,—not more than one hundred Indians assembled there, whereas he remembered the time when one could count a thousand or twelve hundred encamped at the post at once; and of this petty band some were Micmacs from Gaspé, and Algonquins from Sillery.

In 1671, while Father de Crépieul remained in charge of the missions near Tadousac, with which he was for years identified, Albanel, with the Sieur Denys de St. Simon, ascended the Saguenay, and wintering near Lake St. John pushed on by Lake and River Nemiskau, till they reached the shores of Hudson’s Bay, where the Jesuit planted his cross and began a mission. On his way to revisit it in 1674, he was crippled by an accident, and Albanel found him helpless in mid-winter in the woods near Lake St. John. Crépieul then visited the Papinachois in their country, as Father Louis Nicolas did the Oumamis at the Seven Islands. Boucher, a few years later, aided Crépieul, and from their chapels at Chicoutimi and Metabetchouan as centres, missionary excursions were made in all directions.

Dalmas, a later auxiliary of Crépieul, after wintering at Chicoutimi, was killed in the spring of 1694 on the shores of Hudson’s Bay.

De Crépieul clung to his arduous mission till 1702, when, broken by his long and severe labors, he retired to Quebec, where he died soon after.

Peter Michael Laure, who occupied the same field from 1720 to 1737, drew up a Montagnais grammar and dictionary, greatly aided, as his manuscript tells us, by the pious Mary Outchiwanich.

Father John Baptist La Crosse was the last of the old Jesuit missionaries at Tadousac and Chicoutimi, dying at the former post in 1782, after the suppression of his order and the disasters of his countrymen. He taught many of his flock to read and write, and they handed down the knowledge from parent to child, clinging to the religious books and Bible selections made for them by this missionary, of whom they still recount wonderful works.

THE MISSIONS AT QUEBEC, THREE RIVERS, AND SILLERY.—The Jesuit missionaries on returning to Canada in 1632 resumed the instruction of the wandering Montagnais near Quebec, Father Le Jeune taking the lead; and when a post was established at Three Rivers, Father Buteux began there the devoted labors which ended only with his life. The missionaries during the time of trade when Indians gathered at the French posts endeavored to gain their good-will, and instructed all who evinced any good disposition; during the rest of the year they made visits to wandering bands, often wintering with them, sharing the dangers and privations of their hunting expeditions amid mountains, rapids, and forests.

From a photograph (lent by Mr. Parkman) of an old print.]

It was soon evident that their precarious mode of life, the rapid diminution of game when they began to kill the animals for their furs and not merely for food, small-pox and other diseases introduced by the French, and the slaughters committed by the Iroquois, would soon sweep away the Upper Montagnais, unless they could be made sedentary. A few endeavored to settle near the French and maintain themselves by agriculture, but in 1637 the missionaries began a kind of reduction at a place above Quebec called at first St. Joseph, but soon known as Sillery, from the name of the pious and benevolent Commander de Sillery in France, who gave means for the good work. Two families, comprising twenty souls in all, settled here, in houses built for them, and began to cultivate the ground. Others soon joined them, and plots were allotted to the several families. Of this settlement Noel Negabamat may be regarded as the founder. Though Sillery was ravaged by disease, which soon broke out in the cabins, the project seemed full of promise; the Indians elected chiefs, and a form of government was adopted. The nuns sent out in 1639 to found a hospital, for which the Duchesse d’Aiguillon gave the necessary means, aided the missionaries greatly. From the day they landed, these self-sacrificing nuns opened wards for the reception of sick Indians, and they decided to establish their hospital at Sillery. They carried out this resolution, and opened it on the first of December, 1640, receiving both French and Indian patients. Their services impressed the natives more deeply than did the educational efforts of the Jesuit Fathers and of the Ursuline nuns, who had schools for Indian children of various tribes at Quebec.

This mission was an object of especial care, and great hopes were entertained of its effecting much in civilizing and converting the Montagnais and Algonquins, both of which nations were represented in the first settlers at St. Joseph’s. These Indians were induced to cultivate the ground, but they still depended on their fishing, and the winter hunt carried them off to the woods. This the missionaries could not prevent, as the hunts supplied the furs for the trade of the company which controlled Canada.

The hopes of the Jesuits were not to be realized. Some progress was made, and converts like Noel Negabamat and Charles Meiachkwat exercised great influence; but the Iroquois war-parties soon drove the new agriculturists from their fields, the nuns removed their hospital to Quebec in 1646, and the neophytes were scattered. “We behold ourselves dying, exterminated every day,” wrote Negabamat in 1651. Some years after, an accidental fire destroyed St. Michael’s church with the mission house, and from that time the Indian settlement at Sillery languished. Disease and excess aided the work of war, and the Algonquins and Montagnais dwindled away.

As early as 1643 some Abenakis from the banks of the Kennebec had visited Sillery, and one chief was baptized. Father Druillettes soon after visited their towns, and founded a mission in their country. This was at first continued, but the Christians of the tribe and those seeking instruction visited Sillery from time to time. This was especially the case after 1657, when the Jesuits suspended their labors in Maine, for fear of giving umbrage to the Capuchin Fathers who had missions on the coast.

Sillery revived as an Abenaki mission, but the soil at last proved unfit for longer cultivation by Indians. By this time, Fathers James and Vincent Bigot had been assigned to this tribe. They looked out for a new mission site, and by the aid of the Marchioness de Bauche bought a tract on the Chaudière River, and in 1683 established near the beautiful falls the mission of St. Francis de Sales. Sillery was abandoned, and there was nothing to mark the famous old mission site, till a monument was erected a few years ago to the memory of Masse and De Noue, who lie there.

With the chapel of St. Francis as a base, a new series of missions gradually spread into Maine. The Jesuits resumed their ministry on the banks of the Kennebec; the Bigots, followed by Rale, Lauverjeat, Loyard, and Sirenne, keeping up their work amid great danger, their presence exciting the most fearful animosity in the minds of New Englanders, who ascribed all Indian hostilities to them. Rale was especially marked out. Though a man of cultivation and a scholar,—his Abenaki dictionary being a monument of his mastery of the language,—a price was set on his head, his chapel was pillaged by one expedition, which carried off his manuscript dictionary[679] (now one of the curiosities in Harvard College Library), and in a later expedition he was slain at the foot of his mission cross, August 23, 1724. He knew his danger, and his superior would have withdrawn him, but the Canadian authorities insisted on his remaining.

Besides this Jesuit mission at Norridgewock, the priests of the seminary at Quebec, anxious to do their part in the mission-work of which their parent institution, the Seminary of the Foreign Missions at Paris, did so much, founded a mission on the Penobscot. This was long directed by the Rev. Peter Thury, who acquired great influence over the Indians, accompanying them in peace and war till his death in 1699. A Recollect, Father Simon, had a mission at Medoktek, on the St. John’s, which was subsequently directed by the Jesuits, as well as that on the Penobscot.

Meanwhile the mission on the Chaudière had been transferred to the site still known as St. François, and on the death of Rale bands of the Kennebec Indians emigrated to it, forming a strong Indian village, which sent many a vindictive war-party on the frontiers of New England. This drew on it fierce retaliation from Rogers and his partisan corps, who captured the village, killed many, and fired church and dwellings.[680]

THE MISSIONS AT THREE RIVERS AND MONTREAL.—Ascending the St. Lawrence, the next mission centre was Three Rivers, where the Jesuit missionaries Le Jeune and Buteux resumed, in 1633, the labors of the Recollect Brother Du Plessis and Fathers Huet and Poullain. It was a place of trade where Indians gathered, so that the missionaries found constant objects of their care. Many were instructed, and returned to impart to others their newly acquired knowledge of God’s way with man, and the consolations of Christianity.

Gradually the Indians who had settled near Three Rivers were almost entirely won; while the Attikamegues, or White Fish Indians, dwelling far inland, came to ask a missionary to reside among them. They were of the Montagnais tongue, and remarkable for their gentle character. Father Buteux, charmed with their docility, instructed them; and at last, in 1651, ascended the river, and after a toilsome journey of fifty-three days, reached their country. All who had not become Christians already were anxiously awaiting his arrival; a rude chapel was raised, and the neophytes in their fervor crowded to it to listen or to pray. The next year Buteux set out once more to make a missionary visit to this interesting race; but the Iroquois were on their track, and the missionary while making a portage received two fatal wounds, and died amid his arduous duties. The tribe was soon nearly annihilated, the survivors seeking refuge among the remote lodges of the scattered Montagnais.

Among the converts at Three Rivers was Pieskaret, the most famous warrior of the Montagnais or Adirondacks, whose bravery was the terror of the Iroquois. But the Indians of that portion of the St. Lawrence valley were doomed,—nearly all were swept away by the Iroquois; and after the death of Buteux the Montagnais mission at Three Rivers seems to have numbered few Indians, nearly all the survivors having fled to their kindred tribes near Tadousac.

When the settlement at Montreal was formed in 1641 by Maisonneuve acting under the Society of Montreal, the Jesuits were the first clergymen of the new town, and began to labor among the Indians who gathered there from the St. Lawrence and Ottawa. This mission of the Jesuits was not, however, a permanent one. The Sulpitians,—a community of priests established in Paris by the Rev. John James Olier, one of the members of the Montreal society,—became the proprietors of the new settlement, and they continue still in charge of churches, institutions, and missions on or near Montreal island, after a lapse of more than two centuries. An Indian mission for Algonquins was begun on the mountain at a spot now known as the Priests’ Farm, chiefly by the liberality and zeal of the Rev. Mr. Belmont. Iroquois and Hurons also came, and the mission was removed to Sault au Récollet, and then to the Lake of the Two Mountains. Here it still exists, embracing an Iroquois village and one of Algonquin language, made up in no small part of Nipissings from the lake of that name. This is the oldest mission organization in Canada, the Sulpitians having been unmolested by the English Government, which put an end to the communities of the Jesuits and Recollects.

Above Montreal no permanent missions were attempted among the Algonquin bands dotted along the line of the Ottawa,—the Indians seeking instruction on their visits to the French posts and missions, or receiving missionaries from time to time, as their river was the great highway to the West.

THE HURON MISSION.—The Huron nation in Upper Canada, a confederacy of tribes allied in origin and language to the Iroquois, had been already the field of a mission conducted by Recollects, aided after a time by the Jesuits. When Canada was restored to France by the treaty of St. Germain, Brebeuf penetrated to his old mission, in 1634, accompanied by Fathers Daniel and Davost, and in September erected a log chapel in the town of Ihonatiria. Thus began the greatest of the Jesuit missions in Canada, which called forth the most intrepid courage of the heralds of Christianity, and triumphed over the heathen hostility in the tribes, only to perish at last by the hands of the terrible Iroquois.

The Hurons lived in palisaded towns, their bark cabins clustering within, while the fields where they cultivated corn, beans, pumpkins, and tobacco lay near. Their hunting and fishing excursions were comparatively short, and they laid up stores of provisions for winter. The opportunity for instructing the people was accordingly much greater than among the nomadic tribes of the Algonquin family. Brebeuf, already versed in the language, extended his studies and initiated his associates into its intricate peculiarities. The young were the first care, and catechetical instructions were daily given to all whom they could gather. The Lord’s Prayer and other devotions were taught; but it was not easy to secure continuous attendance. This led to the project of a school at Quebec, to which some of the most promising boys were sent. There, with less to tempt them, more progress was made; yet the result was but temporary, for the pupils on returning to the upper country threw aside their slight civilization.

As other missionaries arrived, the labors of the Fathers in the Huron country extended; but they found that the medicine-men were bitter enemies, foreseeing a loss of all their influence. The march of Europeans through America always spread new diseases. In the Huron country the ravages were severe. The medicine-men ascribed all to the missionaries. Cabins were closed against them; their lives were in constant peril. Their house was set on fire, and a council of the three tribes met to decide whether they should all be put to death. The undaunted missionaries prepared to meet their fate, committing their chapel service and the fruit of their Indian studies to Peter Tsiwendeentaha, their first adult convert. Their fearless conduct at last triumphed. Adults came to solicit instruction; Ossossare and Teananstayae became mission stations, four Fathers laboring in each, while Garnier and Jogues proceeded to the towns of the Tionontates, a kindred tribe, who from their cultivation and sale of tobacco were generally called by the French the Petun, or Tobacco tribe. As new stations were formed and chapels built in the Huron towns, the missionaries in 1639 erected on the River Wye the mission-house of St. Mary’s, to serve as a centre from which priests could be sent to any of the towns, and where they could always find refuge. They extended their labors to the Neutral Nation and to the Algonquin tribes lying near the Huron country, reaching as far as Sault Ste. Marie. The missionaries endured great hardships and sufferings on these journeys from hunger, cold, and accident,—Brebeuf having broken his collar-bone by a fall, and reaching his lodge only by a long and weary progress on his hands and knees. Their efforts seemed almost vain. In 1640 they could claim only one hundred Christians out of sixteen thousand Hurons; a few prominent chiefs had joined them, but the young braves would not submit to the law of the gospel. Christian families, and still more Christians in heathen families, were subjected to much persecution, till the number of catechumens in a town enabled them to take a firm stand.

Meanwhile the Five Nations, freely supplied with firearms by the Dutch, were annihilating the Huron tribes, already weakened by disease. The war interrupted intercourse between the Huron country and Quebec. Father Jogues, sent down in 1642 to obtain supplies for the mission, while journeying back, fell with many Hurons into the hands of the Mohawks, who killed most of the party, and led the rest with the missionary to their towns. The missionary and his attendant, René Goupil, were tortured and mutilated, reduced to the rude slavery of Indian life, and witnessed the execution of most of their Hurons. Full of missionary zeal, they endeavored to impart some ideas of Christianity; but the effort cost Goupil his life, and Jogues was with difficulty rescued by the Dutch, and sent to Europe.

The missionaries in the Huron country, by the loss of the supplies in the Huron flotilla, were reduced to great straits, till Brebeuf reached them with two assistants, Garreau and Chabanel, whom no dangers could deter. Father Bressani, returning to his western labors, was less fortunate; he too was captured, and endured all but death at the hands of the Mohawks. His sufferings led the charitable Dutch to effect his release. Yet neither Jogues nor Bressani faltered; both returned to Canada to continue their perilous work.

When a temporary peace gave the Huron mission a respite, there were five churches in as many towns, and one for Algonquins living in the Huron country. The voice of the missionary seemed to find more hearers, and converts increased; but the end was at hand.

In July, 1648, the Iroquois attacked Teananstayae. As the braves manned the palisades, Father Daniel was among them to give them the consolations of religion, to confess and baptize; then he hurried to the cabins to minister to the sick and aged. He found his chapel full, and urging them to flight from the rear, he closed the front portal behind him, and awaited the Iroquois braves, who had stormed the palisade and were swooping down on the cross-crowned church. Riddled by arrows and balls, he fell dead, and his body was flung into the burning church of St. Joseph.

The capture of this town seemed a death-blow to hope in the bosoms of the Hurons. They abandoned many of their towns, and fled to the islands of Lake Huron or the towns of the Petuns. They could not be aroused to any system of defence or precaution.

On the 16th of the ensuing March, a force of a thousand Iroquois stormed, at daybreak, the Huron town which the missionaries called St. Ignatius. So general and complete was the massacre, that only three escaped to the next large town, St. Louis. Here were stationed the veteran Brebeuf, companion of the early Recollect missioners in the land, friend of Champlain, and with him as associate the young Gabriel Lalemant. The Hurons urged the missionaries to fly; but, like Daniel, they remained, exercising their ministry to the last, and attending to every call of zeal. The Hurons repelled the first assault; but their palisade was carried at last, and the victorious Iroquois fired the cabins. The missionaries, while ministering to the wounded and dying, were captured. They were taken, with other captives, to the ruined town of St. Ignatius, and there a horrible torture began. They were bound to the stake; Brebeuf’s hands were cut off; Lalemant’s body bristled with awls and iron barbs; red-hot hatchets were pressed under their arms and between their legs; and around the neck of Brebeuf a collar of these weapons was placed. But the heroic old missionary denounced God’s vengeance on the savages for their cruelty and hatred of Christianity, till they cut off his nose and lips, and thrust a firebrand into his mouth. They sliced off his flesh and devoured it, and, scalping him, poured boiling water on his head, in mockery of baptism; then they hacked off his feet, clove open his chest, and devoured his heart. Lalemant was wrapped in bark to which fire was applied, and underwent many of the same tortures as the older missionary; he too was baptized in mockery, his eyes torn out and coals forced into the sockets. After torturing him all the night, his tormenters clove his head asunder at dawn.

St Mary’s was menaced; but the Huron fugitives there sent out a party which repulsed the Iroquois, who then retired, sated with their vengeance. The Huron nation was destroyed. Fifteen towns were abandoned. One tribe, the Scanonaenrat, submitted to the Iroquois, and removed to the Seneca country in a body, with many Hurons of other tribes. Some bands fled to the Petuns, Neuters, Eries, or Susquehannas. A part, following the first fugitives to the islands in Lake Huron, roamed to Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. These were in time brought back by later missionaries to Mackinac.

The Huron mission was overthrown. A few of the Jesuit missionaries followed the fugitives to St. Joseph’s Island; others joined Garnier in the Petun mission. But that too was doomed. Echarita was attacked in December, the Iroquois avoiding the Petun braves who had sallied out to meet them. Garnier, a man of singularly attractive character, earnest and devoted, though mortally wounded, dragged himself along on the ground to minister to the wounded, and was tomahawked as he was in the act of absolving one. Another missionary, Chabanel, was killed by an apostate Huron. Their comrades accompanied the fugitive Petuns as they scattered and sought refuge in the islands. The number of the Hurons and Petuns was too great for the limited and hasty agriculture to maintain. Great misery ensued. In June, 1650, the missionaries abandoned the Huron country, and descended to Quebec with a number of the Hurons. This remnant of a once powerful nation were placed on Isle Orleans; but the Iroquois swept many of them off, and the survivors found a home at Lorette, where their descendants still remain.

Thus ended the Huron mission in Upper Canada, which was begun by the Recollect Le Caron in 1615, and which had employed twenty-nine missionaries, seven of whom had yielded up their lives as the best earnest of their sincerity and devotion to the cause of Christian progress.

The Jesuit missions were by this time reduced to a most shadowy state. The Iroquois had almost entirely swept away the Montagnais tribes on the St. Lawrence above the Saguenay; they had cut to pieces most of the bands of Algonquins on the Ottawa, while the country of the Hurons, Petuns, and Neuters was a desert. The trading-posts of the French at Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec were almost forsaken; no longer did flotillas come laden with peltries to gladden the merchants, and give missionaries an opportunity to address distant tribes. Several missionaries returned to Europe, as there seemed no field to be reached in America.

Suddenly, however, such a field presented itself. The Iroquois, who had carried off a missionary—Father Poncet—from near Quebec, proposed peace. They were in a fierce war with the Eries and Susquehannas, and probably found that in their bloodthirsty march they were making the land a desert, cutting off all supplies of furs from Dutch and French alike. At all events, they restored Poncet, and, proposing peace, solicited missionaries.

THE IROQUOIS MISSION.—War with the Iroquois had been almost uninterrupted since the settlement of Canada. Champlain found the Canadian tribes of every origin arrayed against the fierce confederation which in their symbolic language “formed a cabin.” The founder of Canada had gone to the very heart of the Iroquois country, and at the head of his swarthy allies had given them battle on the shores of Lake Champlain and on the borders of Lake Oneida. But the war had brought the French colony to the brink of ruin, and swept its allies from the face of the earth.

Now peace was to open to missionary influence the castles of this all-conquering people, and a foothold was to be gained there; and not only this, but, relieved from war, Canada was to open intercourse with the great West, and new missions were to be attempted in the basin of the upper lakes and in the valley of the Mississippi. The missionaries of Canada were thus to extend their labors within the present limits of our republic on the north, as the Franciscans of Spain were doing along the southern part from Florida to New Mexico.

The Recollect Joseph de la Roche d’Allion had already in early days crossed the Niagara from the west; Jogues and Raymbault had planted the cross at Sault Ste. Marie; Father Jogues had attempted to found a mission on the banks of the Mohawk; but his body, with the bodies of Goupil and Lalande, had mouldered to dust in our soil.

Father Simon le Moyne, who had succeeded to the Indian name of Jogues, and who inherited his spirit, was the interpreter in the recent negotiations, and had been invited to Onondaga and the Mohawk. For the former, the seat of the council-fire of the Iroquois league, he set out from Quebec July 2, 1654, and reached Onondaga by a route then new to the French, passing through the St. Lawrence, Lake Ontario, and the Oswego. He was favorably received at Onondaga, and the sachems, formally by a wampum belt, invited the French to build a house on Lake Ontario.

There was already a Christian element in the Iroquois cantons. Each of the cantons contained hundreds of Hurons, all instructed in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, and not a few openly professing it; while in the Seneca country was a town made up of the Scanonaenrat Hurons, Petuns, and Neuters. Le Moyne found wherever he went Christians eager to enjoy his ministry.

His embassy filled all with hope; and the next year, as the Onondagas, through a Christian chief, solicited the establishment of a mission by the Jesuit Fathers, Peter Joseph Chaumonot and Claude Dablon were selected. They reached Onondaga, and after a formal reception by the sachems with harangues and exchange of wampum belts, the missionaries were escorted to the spot given to them for their house and chapel. Two springs, one salt and one of clear, sparkling fresh water, still known as the Jesuits’ well, mark the knoll where St. Mary’s of Ganentaa was speedily erected. The Canadian missionaries, from their resources and alms contributed in France, spent large amounts to make this new central mission adapted for all the fond hopes planned for its future work in diffusing the gospel.

The missionaries found the greatest encouragement in the interest manifested, and in the numbers who came to solicit instruction. They labored assiduously to gather the unexpected harvest; but mistrust soon came, with reports of hostile action by the French. Dablon returned to Canada, and a party of French under Captain Dupuis set out to begin a settlement at Onondaga, while Fathers Le Mercier and Menard went to extend the missions. They were welcomed with all the formalities of Indian courtesy; and while Dupuis and his men prepared to form the settlement, the missionaries erected a second chapel at the Onondaga castle, which was attended from Ganentaa. Then René Menard began a mission among the Cayugas, and Chaumonot, passing still farther, visited the Seneca town of Gandagare, and that occupied by the Scanonaenrat, many of whom were already Christians, and more ready to embrace the faith. The Senecas themselves showed a disposition to listen to Christian doctrines. Finding the field thus full of promise, Chaumonot and Menard returned to Onondaga, whence they were despatched to Oneida. Here they found less promise, but there were captive Hurons to profit by their ministry.

[From the _Jesuit Relation_ of 1662-1663, showing the relative positions of the Five Nations, and Fort d’Orange (Albany).

Cf. this with map _Pays des Cinq Nations Iroquoises_, preserved in the Archives of the Marine at Paris, and engraved in Faillon, _Histoire de la Colonie Française_, iii. 196; and with one cited by Harrisse (no. 239), _Le Lac Ontario avec les Lieux circonuoisins, et particulierement les Cinq Nations Iroquoises, l’Année_ 1688, which he would assign to Franquelin.—ED.]]

Meanwhile Father Le Moyne had visited the Mohawk canton from Canada, and prepared the way for a mission in that tribe.

Thus at the close of 1656 missionaries had visited each of the Five Nations, and all seemed ready for the establishment of new and thriving missions. The next year signs of danger appeared. A party of Hurons compelled to remove to Onondaga were nearly all massacred on the way, the missionaries Ragueneau and Duperon in vain endeavoring to stay the work of slaughter, which was coolly ascribed to them. The Mohawks, though they received Le Moyne, were openly hostile. They attacked a flotilla of Ottawas at Montreal, and slew the missionary Leonard Garreau, who was on his way to the far West, to establish missions on the upper lakes.

The missionaries in the cantons and the little French colony at Onondaga were soon evidently doomed to a like fate. So evident was the hostility of the Five Nations, that Governor d’Ailleboust arrested all the Iroquois in Canada to hold them as hostages. The missionaries at Ganentaa saw their danger, and through the winter formed plans for escape. At last, in March, they prepared for a secret flight, and to cover their design gave a banquet to the Onondagas, adopting the kind in which, according to Indian custom, all the food must be eaten. Dances and games were kept up till a late hour; and when the weary guests at last departed, the French, who had amid the din borne to the water’s edge boats and canoes secretly prepared in their house, embarked, and, plying oar and paddle all night long, reached Lake Ontario unseen and undiscovered even by a wandering hunter. It was not till the following evening that the Onondagas, finding the house at Ganentaa still and quiet, discovered that the French had vanished. But the mode of escape was long a mystery to them, so cautiously and adroitly had all the preparations for flight been made.

Le Moyne, in similar peril on the Mohawk, wrote a farewell letter, which he committed to the Dutch authorities; but the sachems of the tribe suddenly sent him to Montreal in the care of a party, so that in March, 1657, the Jesuit missionaries had all withdrawn from the territory of the Five Nations, after their short but laborious effort to open the eyes of the people to the truths of religion.