1639, 1640.
THE TOBACCO NATION--THE NEUTRALS.
A Change of Plan • Sainte Marie • Mission of the Tobacco Nation • Winter
Journeying • Reception of the Missionaries • Superstitious Terrors •
Peril of Garnier and Jogues • Mission of the Neutrals • Huron Intrigues
• Miracles • Fury of the Indians • Intervention of Saint Michael •
Return to Sainte Marie • Intrepidity of the Priests • Their Mental
Exaltation
It had been the first purpose of the Jesuits to form permanent missions
in each of the principal Huron towns; but, before the close of the year
1639, the difficulties and risks of this scheme had become fully
apparent. They resolved, therefore, to establish one central station, to
be a base of operations, and, as it were, a focus, whence the light of
the Faith should radiate through all the wilderness around. It was to
serve at once as residence, fort, magazine, hospital, and convent. Hence
the priests would set forth on missionary expeditions far and near; and
hither they might retire, as to an asylum, in times of sickness or
extreme peril. Here the neophytes could be gathered together, safe from
perverting influences; and here in time a Christian settlement, Hurons
mingled with Frenchmen, might spring up and thrive under the shadow of
the cross.
The site of the new station was admirably chosen. The little river Wye
flows from the southward into the Matchedash Bay of Lake Huron, and, at
about a mile from its mouth, passes through a small lake. The Jesuits
made choice of the right bank of the Wye, where it issues from this
lake,--gained permission to build from the Indians, though not without
difficulty,--and began their labors with an abundant energy, and a very
deficient supply of workmen and tools. The new establishment was called
Sainte Marie. The house at Teanaustayé, and the house and chapel at
Ossossané, were abandoned, and all was concentrated at this spot. On one
hand, it had a short water communication with Lake Huron; and on the
other, its central position gave the readiest access to every part of
the Huron territory.
During the summer before, the priests had made a survey of their field
of action, visited all the Huron towns, and christened each of them with
the name of a saint. This heavy draft on the calendar was followed by
another, for the designation of the nine towns of the neighboring and
kindred people of the Tobacco Nation. [1] The Huron towns were portioned
into four districts, while those of the Tobacco Nation formed a fifth,
and each district was assigned to the charge of two or more priests. In
November and December, they began their missionary excursions,--for the
Indians were now gathered in their settlements,--and journeyed on foot
through the denuded forests, in mud and snow, bearing on their backs the
vessels and utensils necessary for the service of the altar.
[1] See Introduction.
The new and perilous mission of the Tobacco Nation fell to Garnier and
Jogues. They were well chosen; and yet neither of them was robust by
nature, in body or mind, though Jogues was noted for personal activity.
The Tobacco Nation lay at the distance of a two days' journey from the
Huron towns, among the mountains at the head of Nottawassaga Bay. The
two missionaries tried to find a guide at Ossossané; but none would go
with them, and they set forth on their wild and unknown pilgrimage
alone.
The forests were full of snow; and the soft, moist flakes were still
falling thickly, obscuring the air, beplastering the gray trunks,
weighing to the earth the boughs of spruce and pine, and hiding every
footprint of the narrow path. The Fathers missed their way, and toiled
on till night, shaking down at every step from the burdened branches a
shower of fleecy white on their black cassocks. Night overtook them in a
spruce swamp. Here they made a fire with great difficulty, cut the
evergreen boughs, piled them for a bed, and lay down. The storm
presently ceased; and, "praised be God," writes one of the travellers,
"we passed a very good night." [2]
[2] Jogues and Garnier in Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1640, 95.
In the morning they breakfasted on a morsel of corn bread, and, resuming
their journey, fell in with a small party of Indians, whom they followed
all day without food. At eight in the evening they reached the first
Tobacco town, a miserable cluster of bark cabins, hidden among forests
and half buried in snow-drifts, where the savage children, seeing the
two black apparitions, screamed that Famine and the Pest were coming.
Their evil fame had gone before them. They were unwelcome guests;
nevertheless, shivering and famished as they were, in the cold and
darkness, they boldly pushed their way into one of these dens of
barbarism. It was precisely like a Huron house. Five or six fires blazed
on the earthen floor, and around them were huddled twice that number of
families, sitting, crouching, standing, or flat on the ground; old and
young, women and men, children and dogs, mingled pell-mell. The scene
would have been a strange one by daylight: it was doubly strange by the
flicker and glare of the lodge-fires. Scowling brows, sidelong looks of
distrust and fear, the screams of scared children, the scolding of
squaws, the growling of wolfish dogs,--this was the greeting of the
strangers. The chief man of the household treated them at first with the
decencies of Indian hospitality; but when he saw them kneeling in the
litter and ashes at their devotions, his suppressed fears found vent,
and he began a loud harangue, addressed half to them and half to the
Indians. "Now, what are these okies doing? They are making charms to
kill us, and destroy all that the pest has spared in this house. I heard
that they were sorcerers; and now, when it is too late, I believe it."
[3] It is wonderful that the priests escaped the tomahawk. Nowhere is
the power of courage, faith, and an unflinching purpose more strikingly
displayed than in the record of these missions.
[3] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1640, 96.
In other Tobacco towns their reception was much the same; but at the
largest, called by them St. Peter and St. Paul, they fared worse. They
reached it on a winter afternoon. Every door of its capacious bark
houses was closed against them; and they heard the squaws within calling
on the young men to go out and split their heads, while children
screamed abuse at the black-robed sorcerers. As night approached, they
left the town, when a band of young men followed them, hatchet in hand,
to put them to death. Darkness, the forest, and the mountain favored
them; and, eluding their pursuers, they escaped. Thus began the mission
of the Tobacco Nation.
In the following November, a yet more distant and perilous mission was
begun. Brébeuf and Chaumonot set out for the Neutral Nation. This fierce
people, as we have already seen, occupied that part of Canada which lies
immediately north of Lake Erie, while a wing of their territory extended
across the Niagara into Western New York. [4] In their athletic
proportions, the ferocity of their manners, and the extravagance of
their superstitions, no American tribe has ever exceeded them. They
carried to a preposterous excess the Indian notion, that insanity is
endowed with a mysterious and superhuman power. Their country was full
of pretended maniacs, who, to propitiate their guardian spirits, or
okies, and acquire the mystic virtue which pertained to madness, raved
stark naked through the villages, scattering the brands of the
lodge-fires, and upsetting everything in their way.
[4] Introduction.--The river Niagara was at this time, 1640, well known
to the Jesuits, though none of them had visited it. Lalemant speaks of
it as the "famous river of this nation" (the Neutrals). The following
translation, from his Relation of 1641, shows that both Lake Ontario and
Lake Erie had already taken their present names.
"This river" (the Niagara) "is the same by which our great lake of the
Hurons, or Fresh Sea, discharges itself, in the first place, into Lake
Erie (le lac d'Erié), or the Lake of the Cat Nation. Then it enters the
territories of the Neutral Nation, and takes the name of Onguiaahra
(Niagara), until it discharges itself into Ontario, or the Lake of St.
Louis; whence at last issues the river which passes before Quebec, and
is called the St. Lawrence." He makes no allusion to the cataract, which
is first mentioned as follows by Ragueneau, in the Relation of 1648.
"Nearly south of this same Neutral Nation there is a great lake, about
two hundred leagues in circuit, named Erie (Erié), which is formed by
the discharge of the Fresh Sea, and which precipitates itself by a
cataract of frightful height into a third lake, named Ontario, which we
call Lake St. Louis."--Relation des Hurons, 1648, 46.
The two priests left Sainte Marie on the second of November, found a
Huron guide at St. Joseph, and, after a dreary march of five days
through the forest, reached the first Neutral town. Advancing thence,
they visited in turn eighteen others; and their progress was a storm of
maledictions. Brébeuf especially was accounted the most pestilent of
sorcerers. The Hurons, restrained by a superstitious awe, and unwilling
to kill the priests, lest they should embroil themselves with the French
at Quebec, conceived that their object might be safely gained by
stirring up the Neutrals to become their executioners. To that end, they
sent two emissaries to the Neutral towns, who, calling the chiefs and
young warriors to a council, denounced the Jesuits as destroyers of the
human race, and made their auditors a gift of nine French hatchets on
condition that they would put them to death. It was now that Brébeuf,
fully conscious of the danger, half starved and half frozen, driven with
revilings from every door, struck and spit upon by pretended maniacs,
beheld in a vision that great cross, which, as we have seen, moved
onward through the air, above the wintry forests that stretched towards
the land of the Iroquois. [5]
[5] See ante, (page 109).
Chaumonot records yet another miracle. "One evening, when all the chief
men of the town were deliberating in council whether to put us to death,
Father Brébeuf, while making his examination of conscience, as we were
together at prayers, saw the vision of a spectre, full of fury, menacing
us both with three javelins which he held in his hands. Then he hurled
one of them at us; but a more powerful hand caught it as it flew: and
this took place a second and a third time, as he hurled his two
remaining javelins.... Late at night our host came back from the
council, where the two Huron emissaries had made their gift of hatchets
to have us killed. He wakened us to say that three times we had been at
the point of death; for the young men had offered three times to strike
the blow, and three times the old men had dissuaded them. This explained
the meaning of Father Brébeuf's vision." [6]
[6] Chaumonot, Vie, 55.
They had escaped for the time; but the Indians agreed among themselves,
that thenceforth no one should give them shelter. At night, pierced with
cold and faint with hunger, they found every door closed against them.
They stood and watched, saw an Indian issue from a house, and, by a
quick movement, pushed through the half-open door into this abode of
smoke and filth. The inmates, aghast at their boldness, stared in
silence. Then a messenger ran out to carry the tidings, and an angry
crowd collected.
"Go out, and leave our country," said an old chief, "or we will put you
into the kettle, and make a feast of you."
"I have had enough of the dark-colored flesh of our enemies," said a
young brave; "I wish to know the taste of white meat, and I will eat
yours."
A warrior rushed in like a madman, drew his bow, and aimed the arrow at
Chaumonot. "I looked at him fixedly," writes the Jesuit, "and commended
myself in full confidence to St. Michael. Without doubt, this great
archangel saved us; for almost immediately the fury of the warrior was
appeased, and the rest of our enemies soon began to listen to the
explanation we gave them of our visit to their country." [7]
[7] Ibid., 57.
The mission was barren of any other fruit than hardship and danger, and
after a stay of four months the two priests resolved to return. On the
way, they met a genuine act of kindness. A heavy snow-storm arresting
their progress, a Neutral woman took them into her lodge, entertained
them for two weeks with her best fare, persuaded her father and
relatives to befriend them, and aided them to make a vocabulary of the
dialect. Bidding their generous hostess farewell, they journeyed
northward, through the melting snows of spring, and reached Sainte Marie
in safety. [8]
[8] Lalemant, in his Relation of 1641, gives the narrative of this
mission at length. His account coincides perfectly with the briefer
notice of Chaumonot in his Autobiography. Chaumonot describes the
difficulties of the journey very graphically in a letter to his friend,
Father Nappi, dated Aug. 3, 1640, preserved in Carayon. See also the
next letter, Brébeuf au T. R. P. Mutio Vitelleschi, 20 Août, 1641.
The Récollet La Roche Dallion had visited the Neutrals fourteen years
before, (see Introduction, note,) and, like his two successors, had been
seriously endangered by Huron intrigues.
The Jesuits had borne all that the human frame seems capable of bearing.
They had escaped as by miracle from torture and death. Did their zeal
flag or their courage fail? A fervor intense and unquenchable urged them
on to more distant and more deadly ventures. The beings, so near to
mortal sympathies, so human, yet so divine, in whom their faith
impersonated and dramatized the great principles of Christian
truth,--virgins, saints, and angels,--hovered over them, and held before
their raptured sight crowns of glory and garlands of immortal bliss.
They burned to do, to suffer, and to die; and now, from out a living
martyrdom, they turned their heroic gaze towards an horizon dark with
perils yet more appalling, and saw in hope the day when they should bear
the cross into the blood-stained dens of the Iroquois. [9]
[9] This zeal was in no degree due to success; for in 1641, after seven
years of toil, the mission counted only about fifty living
converts,--a falling off from former years.
But, in this exaltation and tension of the powers, was there no moment
when the recoil of Nature claimed a temporary sway? When, an exile from
his kind, alone, beneath the desolate rock and the gloomy pine-trees,
the priest gazed forth on the pitiless wilderness and the hovels of its
dark and ruthless tenants, his thoughts, it may be, flew longingly
beyond those wastes of forest and sea that lay between him and the home
of his boyhood: or rather, led by a deeper attraction, they revisited
the ancient centre of his faith, and he seemed to stand once more in
that gorgeous temple, where, shrined in lazuli and gold, rest the
hallowed bones of Loyola. Column and arch and dome rise upon his vision,
radiant in painted light, and trembling with celestial music. Again he
kneels before the altar, from whose tablature beams upon him that
loveliest of shapes in which the imagination of man has embodied the
spirit of Christianity. The illusion overpowers him. A thrill shakes his
frame, and he bows in reverential rapture. No longer a memory, no longer
a dream, but a visioned presence, distinct and luminous in the forest
shades, the Virgin stands before him. Prostrate on the rocky earth, he
adores the benign angel of his ecstatic faith, then turns with rekindled
fervors to his stern apostleship.
Now, by the shores of Thunder Bay, the Huron traders freight their birch
vessels for their yearly voyage; and, embarked with them, let us, too,
revisit the rock of Quebec.