THE MISSION OF VILLE MARIE
While the Jesuits carried the Cross to the Hurons, the
Algonquins, and the Iroquois, other crusaders, equally
noble and courageous, planted it on the spot where now
stands the foremost city of the Dominion. The settlement
of the large and fertile island at the confluence of the
Ottawa and the St Lawrence had a motive all its own.
Quebec was founded primarily for trade; and so with
practically all other settlements which have grown into
great centres of population. But Montreal was originally
intended solely for a mission station. Its founders had
no thought of trade; indeed, they were prohibited from
dealing in furs, then the chief marketable product of
the colony.
We have seen that the men and women who founded the
Sillery mission, and the Hotel-Dieu and the Ursuline
convent at Quebec, received their inspiration from the
Relations of the Jesuits. So likewise did the founders
of the settlement on the island of Montreal. Jerome le
Royer de la Dauversiere of La Fleche in Anjou, a receiver
of taxes, and Abbe Jean Jacques Olier of Paris, were the
prime movers in the undertaking. Each independently of
the other had conceived the idea of establishing on the
island of Hochelaga a mission for the conversion of the
heathen in Canada. Meeting by accident at the Chateau of
Meudon near Paris, they planned their enterprise, and
decided to found a colony of devotees, composed of an
order of priests, an order of sisters to care for the
sick and infirm, and an order of nuns for the teaching
of young Indians and the children of settlers at the
mission. These two enthusiasts went to work in a quite
practical way to realize their ambition. They succeeded
in interesting the Baron de Fancamp and three other
wealthy gentlemen, and soon had a sum--about $75,000--
ample for the establishment of the colony. While they
were busy at this work, Mademoiselle Jeanne Mance, a
courageous and devout woman, was moved by one of Father
Le Jeune's Relations to devote her life to the care of
the wounded and suffering in the wilds of New France;
and the projected colony on the island of Montreal offered
an opportunity for the fulfilment of her desire. Madame
de Bullion, a rich and very charitable woman, had agreed
to aid Olier and Dauversiere by endowing a hospital in
the colony, and Jeanne Mance offered her services as
nurse and housekeeper. A leader was needed, a man of
soldierly training and pious life; and in Paul de Chomedy,
Sieur de Maisonneuve, a veteran of the wars in Holland,
the ideal man was found. No attempt was made at this time
to secure teachers; there would be at first neither white
nor red children to teach, for there were no Indians
living on the island of Montreal, and the colonists would
not at first bring their families to this wilderness
post. The funds collected and the leader found, the next
step was to get permission from the Hundred Associates
to settle on the island; and here was a difficulty. The
Associates had been liberal in land-grants to their own
members; and Jean de Lauzon, the president, had received
for himself large concessions, among them the entire
island of Montreal. However, he was persuaded, probably
for a consideration, to part with a grant that brought
him no return, and which he could visit only at the risk
of his scalp. Olier and Dauversiere and their associates
secured the land, and Maisonneuve was appointed governor
of the new colony.
The Jesuits had played an important part in this
undertaking. It was their Relations that had given the
impulse, and the promoters of the colony had the able
assistance of Father Charles Lalemant, whom we have
already met as the first superior of the Jesuit order in
New France. It was he who persuaded Jean de Lauzon to
consent to surrender his grant, and it was to him that
Maisonneuve first came to seek advice as to how he could
best consecrate his sword to the Church in Canada. And
it was largely on Lalemant's recommendation that
Maisonneuve received his appointment as leader of the
colonists and governor of the colony. To Lalemant, too,
came Jeanne Mance when she first heard the clear call to
the new mission.
The promoters of the 'Society of Our Lady of Montreal'
now set to work to collect recruits for the mission,
provide supplies, and prepare vessels to transport the
colonists to New France. All was ready about the middle
of June 1641, and, while Dauversiere, Olier, and Fancamp
remained in France to look after the interests of the
colony there, Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance, with three
other women and about fifty men, set sail and arrived in
Quebec before the end of August. Here they did not find
the enthusiastic welcome which they expected. Maisonneuve
had come with a special commission as governor of Montreal,
and was coldly received by Montmagny, who was jealous of
him, and who moreover believed, no doubt rightly, that
a divided authority would not be in the best interests
of struggling New France. The Jesuits at Quebec tried to
persuade Maisonneuve to abandon his enterprise. There
were, they said, no inhabitants on the island of Montreal,
it was in the direct route of the Mohawks, who annually
haunted the Ottawa and St Lawrence, and swift destruction
would surely be the fate of the colony. But Maisonneuve
could not be moved from his fixed purpose; he would go
to Montreal even 'if every tree on that island were to
be changed to an Iroquois.'
Accompanied by Father Vimont, the superior of the Jesuits,
and Governor Montmagny, Maisonneuve went up the river,
and took formal possession of the island on the 15th of
October in the name of the 'Society of Our Lady of
Montreal.' The colonists spent the winter at St Michel,
near Sillery, for there was no room for the Montrealers
in the buildings at Quebec. On May 8, 1642, Maisonneuve
led his company--in a pinnace, a barge, and two row-boats
--to the site of the new colony. Here, too, were Father
Vimont and Madame de la Peltrie, who for the nonce had
deserted her Ursulines to accompany Jeanne Mance to a
field that offered greater excitement and danger. On the
18th of May, at a spot where tall warehouses now abound
and where the varied roar of the traffic of a great city
never ceases, they set up an altar, and Father Vimont
consecrated the island mission. In the course of his
sermon he uttered the prophetic words: 'You are a grain
of mustard seed that shall rise and grow till its branches
overshadow the earth. You are few, but your work is the
work of God. His smile is upon you and your children
shall fill the land.' The city of Montreal, the throbbing
heart of the business life of Canada, with its half-million
and more inhabitants and its magnificent charitable,
religious, and educational institutions, is the fulfilment
of his words.
But the beginnings were feeble and disheartening. A few
houses, flanked by a windmill and fort, and connected by
a footpath where now runs St Paul Street, represented
the beginnings of Montreal--or Ville Marie, as the
settlement had been christened by the Society in Paris.
The Iroquois soon learned of Ville Marie. Within a few
months a scalping party of Mohawks paid it a visit, and
killed several workmen and wounded others. The wounded
became the care of Jeanne Mance, who never henceforth
lacked patients. Between the labourers injured by accident
in the forest and the wounded from Iroquois fights, the
gentle-handed nurse and her assistants were kept always
busy. Many of her patients were friendly Indians who had
suffered in the raids; sometimes even a sorely smitten
Iroquois would be borne to the rude hospital.
But the mission did not grow. The Algonquins and Hurons
viewed the island of Montreal as too exposed for a
permanent encampment, for the Iroquois ever hovered about
it. At no season of the year was Ville Marie immune from
attack; night and day the inhabitants had to be on the
alert; and often the cry 'The Iroquois!' sent the entire
population to the shelter of the fort. For fifteen years
there was little change in the population, and year after
year the same dangers and hardships faced the people.
But Maisonneuve and Jeanne Mance hoped on, confident that
Ville Marie was destined to have a glorious future. In
1653 Marguerite Bourgeoys, a woman of great force of
character, arrived in the colony to open a school. Finding
no white pupils, she gathered about her a few red children,
and made her school-room in a stable assigned to her by
Maisonneuve. Presently more pupils came, and among them
some white children. In 1658 she returned to France to
secure assistants, and when, in the following year, she
resumed her labours at Ville Marie, it was as the head
of the 'Congregation of the Sisters of Notre Dame,' an
organization that has so greatly developed as to make
its influence felt, not only in Canada, but in the United
States as well.
Meanwhile, in 1642, Abbe Olier had founded the Seminary
of St Sulpice in Paris; and during the intervening years
had been assiduously training missionaries to take over
the spiritual control of Ville Marie. Since its founding
the Jesuits Poncet, Du Peron, Le Moyne, and Pijart, who
had been trained in the difficult school of the Huron
mission, and Le Jeune and Druillettes, had ministered to
the inhabitants. But in August 1657 the Sulpician priests
Gabriel de Queylus, Gabriel Souart, and Dominic Galinier
arrived at Ville Marie, and the Jesuits immediately
surrendered the parish to them. Henceforth Ville Marie
was to be the peculiar care of the Sulpicians, giving
them for many years enough of both difficulty and danger.
The Iroquois peril did not abate. Never a month passed
but the alarm-bell rang out to warn the settlers that
the savages were at hand. Even the priests went about
their duties with sword at side; and two of them, Vignal
and Le Maitre, fell beneath the tomahawk. Only the courage,
watchfulness, and foresight of Maisonneuve and of such
men as Sergeant-Major Lambert Closse, who gave his life
for the colony, saved Ville Marie from utter destruction.
And as years went on the Iroquois grew bolder. Having
scattered the Hurons and the Algonquins, they now threatened
every trading-post and mission station in Canada.
In 1660 the climax came. Early in the spring of that year
the harassed mission at Ville Marie learned that several
hundred Iroquois, who had wintered on the upper Ottawa,
were coming down, and that another horde, approaching by
way of the Richelieu, would join forces with them. It
was the purpose of the savages to destroy Ville Marie
and Three Rivers and Quebec, and to wipe out the French
on the St Lawrence for good and all.
There was at this time in Ville Marie a young soldier
named Adam Daulac, or Dollard, Sieur des Ormeaux,
twenty-five years old. He believed that the best defence
was attack, and boldly proposed to ascend the Ottawa,
with a band of sixteen volunteers, and waylay the Iroquois
coming from the north-west. And so the gallant young men
bade farewell to their friends and set out. In two large
canoes they paddled up the Ottawa, past the swift waters
at Ste Anne, through the smooth stretch of the Lake of
the Two Mountains, up the fierce current at Carillon,
and then on to the rapids of the Long Sault. Here they
paused; this was a fitting place for battle. The Iroquois
would never expect to find a handful of Frenchmen here,
and they could be surprised as they raced down the rapids.
On a level stretch near the foot of the Sault there was
a rude fort ready at hand, a palisaded structure which
had served during the previous autumn as a shelter for
an Algonquin war-party. The French drew the canoes up on
the shore, and stored the provisions and ammunition in
the fort. Then all save the watchful sentinels lay down
for a much-needed rest. On the following day Daulac's
band was reinforced by four Algonquins and forty Hurons,
the Hurons led by the chief Annahotaha, an inveterate
foe of the Iroquois, who had on more than one occasion
taken terrible revenge on the enemies of his people.
Daulac, now in command of sixty men, confidently awaited
the Iroquois. In the meantime axe and saw and shovel were
plied to erect a second row of palisades and to fill the
space between with earth to the height of a man's breast.
Scouts went out and discovered the encampment of the
Iroquois, and at last brought the news that two canoes
were running the rapids. Daulac hurriedly placed several
of his best marksmen in ambush at a spot where the Iroquois
were likely to land. The musketeers, however, in their
excitement, did not kill all the canoemen. Two of the
Iroquois escaped and sped back through the forest to warn
their countrymen, and soon a hundred canoes came leaping
down the turbulent waters. For a moment Daulac and his
men watched the advancing savages. Then they dashed into
the fort to prepare for the fight. Against their defences
rushed the Iroquois. Again and again the defenders drove
them back with great loss. And for a week the heroic
band, living on short rations of crushed corn and water
from a well they had dug within the fort, kept the
assailants at bay. During this time the Iroquois received
large reinforcements, but to no avail. At length they
made shields of split logs heavy enough to resist bullets;
and presently the bewildered defenders of the fort saw
a wooden wall advancing against them. They fired rapid,
despairing volleys; a few of the shield-bearers fell,
but their places were quickly filled from those in the
rear. At the foot of the palisades the Iroquois cast
aside the shields, and, hatchet in hand, hacked an opening.
The end had come. The Iroquois breached the wall. But
Daulac and his men stood to the last, brandishing knife
and axe, while with fierce war-cries the Iroquois bounded
into the fort; and when the sounds of battle ceased there
remained only three Frenchmen, living but mortally wounded,
on whom the savages could glut their vengeance.
[Footnote: The story of the fight was brought to Montreal
by some Hurons who deserted Daulac's party and escaped.]
The Iroquois had won, but they had no stomach for raiding
the settlements. If seventeen Frenchmen, assisted by a
few Indians, could keep their hosts at bay for a week,
it would be useless to attack strongly fortified posts.
And so Daulac and his men at this 'Canadian Thermopylae'
had really turned aside the tide of war from New France.
The settlements were saved, and for a time traders and
missionaries journeyed along the St Lawrence and the
Ottawa unmolested.
In 1663, when Louis XIV took New France under his wing,
the surviving members of the original Society of Our Lady
of Montreal made over the island to the Sulpicians, who
assumed the liabilities of the Society, and took up the
task of looking after the education of the inhabitants
and the care of the sick. Four years later the Seminary
of St Sulpice was given judicial rights in the mission
of Ville Marie. In 1668 five more Sulpicians came to the
colony, among them Rene de Galinee and Dollier de Casson,
who were to win distinction as missionaries and explorers.
Many Sulpician missions pushed out from Ville Marie,
along the upper St Lawrence and the north shore of Lake
Ontario.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the complexion
of Ville Marie, then generally called Montreal, had
somewhat changed. The Jesuits, the Recollets, who had
returned to New France in 1670, and the Sulpicians all
laboured there. Moreover, from a mere mission station it
had become an important trading centre; and as such it
was to continue. In position it was well adapted for the
fur trade, and after the British took possession in 1760
it became the emporium of a great traffic in the fur-fields
of the north and west. But its glorious days are those
of its infancy, the days of Maisonneuve and Daulac, of
Jeanne Mance and Marguerite Bourgeoys, of Rene de Galinee
and Dollier de Casson.