THE PATHS OF THE GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS
It was exactly a hundred years, according to some authorities, after
Jacques Cartier opened and passed through the door of the St. Lawrence
Valley that another son of France, Jean Nicolet, again the first of
Europeans so far as is now certainly known, looked over into the great
valley of the Mississippi from the north.
Champlain, dying beneath the Rock of Quebec, had touched two of the Great
Lakes twenty years before. He never knew probably that another of those
immense inland seas lay between, though, as his last map indicates, he had
some word several years before his death of a greater sea beyond, where
now two mighty lakes, the largest bodies of fresh water on the globe,
carry their sailless fleets and nourish the life of millions on their
shores.
From the coureurs de bois, "runners of the woods," whom he, tied by the
interests of his feeble colony to the Rock, had sent out, enviously no
doubt, upon journeys of exploration and arbitration among the Indians, and
from the Gray Friars and Black Gowns who, inflamed of his spirit, had gone
forth through the solitudes from Indian village to village, from suffering
to suffering, reports had come which he must have been frequently
translating with his practised hand into river and shore line of this
precious map, the original of which is still kept among the proud archives
of France. He was disappointed the while, I have no doubt, that still the
fresh water kept flowing from the west, and that still there was no word
of the salt sea.
The straight line which makes the western border of his map is merciful of
his ignorance, but merciless of his hopes. It admits no stream that does
not flow into one of the lakes or into the St. Lawrence. But it was made
probably four years before his death and it is possible, indeed probable,
that just before paralysis came upon him, he had heard through the famous
coureur de bois, Jean Nicolet, whom he had despatched the year previous,
of a river which this man of the woods had descended so far that "in three
days more" he would have reached what the Indians called the "Great
Water." [Footnote: The Mississippi. Nicolet probably did not go beyond the
Fox portage. See C. W. Butterfield, "The Discovery of the Northwest by
Jean Nicolet."] There is good reason, in the appointment of this same
coureur de bois as a commissioner and interpreter at Three Rivers, for
thinking (as one wishes to think) that like Moses, Champlain had, through
him a vision of the valley which he himself might not enter, but which his
compatriots were to possess.
The historian Bancroft said of that land: "Not a cape was turned, not a
river entered, but a Jesuit led the way." But the men of sandalled feet
had not yet penetrated so far in 1635. It is an interesting tribute to
these spiritual pioneers, however, that the particular rough coureur de
bois who first looked into that far valley of solitude, inhabited only by
Indians and buffaloes and other untamed beasts, would doubtless never have
left his Indian habits and returned to civilization if he could have lived
without the sacraments of the church.
This coureur de bois Nicolet presents a grotesque appearance as he mounts
the rims of the two valleys where the two bowls touch each other, bowls so
full that in freshet the water sometimes overflows the brim and makes one
continuous valley.
Nicolet would not be recognized for the Frenchman that he was, as he
appears yonder; for, having been told that the men whom he was to meet
were without hair upon their faces and heads, and thinking himself to be
near the confines of China, he had attired himself as one about to be
received at an Oriental court. Accordingly, he stands upon the edge of the
prairies in a robe of Chinese damask embroidered with flowers and birds--
but with a pistol in each hand. Having succeeded in his mission to these
barbarians (for such he found them to be, wearing breech-clouts instead of
robes of silk), he was impelled or lured over into the great valley, it is
believed. He passed from the lake on the border of Champlain's map
[Footnote: Lake Michigan.] up a river (the Fox) that by and by became but
a stream over which one might jump. He portaged from this stream or creek
across a narrow strip of prairie, only a mile wide, to the Wisconsin
River, a tributary of the Mississippi. The statement over which I have
pondered, walking along that river, that he might have reached the "great
water" in three more days, is intelligible only in this interpretation of
his course.
The next Europeans to look out over the edge of the basin of the lakes
were two other sons of France, one a man of St. Malo, Radisson, a voyageur
and coureur de bois, the other his brother-in-law, Groseilliers (1654). It
is thought that these companions went all the way to the Mississippi and
so became the discoverers of her northern waters. The journal of the
voyage is unfortunately somewhat obscure. The great "rivers that divide
themselves in two" are many in that valley, and no one can be certain of
the identity of that river "called the forked" mentioned in the "relation"
of Radisson, which had "two branches, one towards the west, the other
towards the south," and, as the travellers believed, ran toward Mexico.
[Footnote: See Warren Upham. Groseilliers and Radisson, the first white
men in Minnesota, 1655-6 and 1659-60, and their discovery of the Upper
Mississippi River, in Minn. Historical Society Collections, 10:449-594.]
Then came the Hooded Faces, the friars and the priests. To the four
Récollet friars whom Champlain brought out with him in 1615 from the
convent of his native town (Brouage), Jamay, D'Olbeau, Le Caron, and a lay
brother, Du Plessis, others were added, but there were not more than six
in all for the missions extending from Acadia to where Champlain found Le
Caron in 1615 in the vicinity of Lake Huron. Their experiences and ardor
(not unlike those of other missionaries in other continents and in our own
times) have illustration in this extract from a letter written by Le
Caron: "It would be difficult to tell you the fatigue I have suffered,
having been obliged to have my paddle in hand all day long and row with
all my strength with the Indians. I have more than a hundred times walked
in the rivers over the sharp rocks, which cut my feet, in the mud, in the
woods, where I carried the canoe and my little baggage, in order to avoid
the rapids and frightful waterfalls. I say nothing of the painful fast
which beset us, having only a little sagamity, which is a kind of
pulmentum composed of water and the meal of Indian corn, a small quantity
of which is dealt out to us morning and evening. Yet I must avow that amid
my pains I felt much consolation. For alas! when we see such a great
number of infidels, and nothing but a drop of water is needed to make them
children of God, one feels an ardor which I cannot express to labor for
their conversion and to sacrifice for it one's repose and life."
[Footnote: Le Clercq, "First Establishment of the Faith in New France
(Shea)," 1:95.]
"Six months before the Pilgrims began their meeting-house on the burial
hill at Plymouth," he and his brother priests laid the corner-stone of
"the earliest church erected in French-America." It was a bitter
disappointment when, in 1629, he was carried away by the English from his
infant mission to spend his latter days far from his savage converts,
perhaps in his whitewashed cell in the convent of Brouage, and to
administer before an altar where it was not necessary to have neophytes
wave green boughs to drive off the mosquitoes--those pestiferous insects
from whose persecutions a brother Récollet said he suffered his "worst
martyrdom" in America. But more bitter chagrin was in store for Le Caron,
for when the French returned to Quebec, in 1632, after the restoration
under the treaty, the Gray Apostles of the White Cord (who had invited the
Black Gowns to join them in their missions years before and had so
hospitably entertained them when denied shelter elsewhere in Quebec) were
not permitted to be of the company. [Footnote: Le Caron, says Le Clercq,
when he "saw all his efforts were useless, experienced the same fate as
Saint Francis Xavier, who when on the point of entering China, found so
many secret obstacles to his pious design that he fell sick and died of
chagrin. So was Father Joseph a martyr to the zeal which consumed him, and
of that ardent charity which burned in his heart to visit his church
again."--Le Clercq, 1.c. 1:324.] The Jesuits went alone. Repairing their
dilapidated buildings of Notre Dame des Anges, a little way out of Quebec
on the St. Charles River, where Cartier had spent his first miserable
winter in America, they began their enterprises _ad majorem Dei gloriam_
in a field of labor whose vastness "might," as Parkman says, "tire the
wings of thought itself." Le Jeune left the convent at Dieppe, De Noue
that at Rouen, and they went out from Havre together to begin their labors
among a people whose first representatives came aboard the vessel at
Tadoussac with faces variously painted, black and red and yellow, as a
party of "carnival maskers." One cannot well conjecture a more hopeless
undertaking than that of making those half-naked, painted barbarians
understand the mystery of the Trinity, for example, or the significance of
the cross. Think of this gentle, holy father, Le Jeune, seated in a hovel
beside one of these savages, whose language he is trying to learn, bribing
his Indian tutor with a piece of tobacco at every difficulty to make him
more attentive, or with half-frozen fingers writing his Algonquin
exercises, or making translations of prayers for the tongues of his
prospective converts--and you will be able to appreciate the beginnings of
the task to which these men without the slightest question set themselves.
It was a life, once these men left the mission house of Notre Dame des
Anges, that was without the slightest social intercourse, that was beyond
the prizes of any earthly ambition, that was frequently in imminence of
torture and death, and that was usually in physical discomfort if not in
pain. Obscure and constant toil for tender hands, solitude, suffering,
privation, death--these made up the portion of the messengers of the faith
who turned their faces toward the wilderness, their steps into the gloom
of the forests, pathless except for the traces of the feet of savages and
wild beasts.
For it is twenty-five years after that memorable day when Le Caron first
said mass on the shores of one of the Great Lakes (Champlain being
present) before the farthermost shore of the farthest lake is reached by
these patient and valorous pilgrims of the west. The story of that heroic
journey, of the consecration of those forests and waters and clearings by
suffering and unselfish ministry, fills many volumes (forty in the French
edition and seventy-two in the edition recently published in the United
States, the English translation being presented on the pages opposite the
Latin or French originals). There is material in them for many chapters of
a new-world "Odyssey." To these "Relations," as they were called, we owe
the great body of information we have concerning New France, from 1603 in
Acadia to the early part of the eighteenth century in the Mississippi and
St. Lawrence Valleys; for they who wrote them were not priests alone, they
were at the same time explorers, scientists, historical students,
ethnologists (the first and best-fitted students of the North American
Indian), physicians to the bodies as well as ministers to the souls of
those wild creatures.
There was a time when these "Relations," as they came from the famous
press of Cramoisy, were eagerly awaited and devoured, and were everywhere
the themes of enthusiastic discussion in circles of high devotion in Paris
and throughout France, where it is doubtless believed by many to-day that
the borders of the lakes which the authors of these "Relations" traversed
are still possessed by Indians, or at best by half-civilized, half-
barbaric peoples who would stand agape in the Louvre as the Goths stood
before the temples and the statues of Rome.
The "Relations" of Jesuits are among our most precious chronicles in
America. With these the history of the north--the valleys of the St.
Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi--begins. The coureurs de
bois may have anticipated the priests in some solitary places, but they
seldom made records. Doubtless, like Nicolet, they told their stories to
the priests when they went back to the altars for sacrament, so that even
their experiences have been for the most part preserved. But when we know
under what distracting and discouraging conditions even the priest wrote,
we wonder, as Thwaites says, that anything whatever has been preserved in
writing. The "Relations" were written by the fathers, he reminds us,
[Footnote: "Jesuit Relations," 1:39, 40.] in Indian camps, the aboriginal
insects buzzing or crawling about them, in the midst of a chaos of
distractions, immersed in scenes of squalor and degradation, overcome by
fatigue and improper sustenance, suffering from wounds and disease, and
maltreated by their hosts who were often their jailers. What they wrote
under these circumstances is simple and direct. There is no florid
rhetoric; there is little self-glorification; no unnecessary dwelling on
the details of martyrdom; and there is not a line to give suspicion "that
one of this loyal band flinched or hesitated."
"I know not," says one of these apostles [Footnote: Fr. Francesco Giuseppe
Bressani, "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 39:55.] in an epistle to the
Romans (for this particular letter went to Rome), "I know not whether your
Paternity will recognize the letter of a poor cripple, who formerly, when
in perfect health was well known to you. The letter is badly written, and
quite soiled because in addition to other inconveniences, he who writes it
has only one whole finger on his right hand; and it is difficult to avoid
staining the paper with the blood which flows from his wounds, not yet
healed: he uses arquebus powder for ink, and the earth for a table." This
particular early American writer, besides having his hand split and now
one finger-nail or joint burned off and now another, his hair and beard
pulled out, his flesh burned with live coals and red-hot stones, was hung
up by the feet, had food for dogs placed upon his body that they might
lacerate him as they ate, but finally escaped death itself through sale to
the Dutch.
Two other chroniclers of that life of which they were a part, were two men
of noble birth: the giant Brébeuf, "the Ajax of the mission," a man of
vigorous passions tamed by religion (as Parkman says, "a dammed-up torrent
sluiced and guided to grind and saw and weave for the good of man"); and
in marked and strange contrast with him, Charles Garnier, a young man of
thirty-three, of beardless face--laughed at by his friends in Paris, we
are told, because he was beardless but admired by the Indians for the same
reason--of a delicate nature but of the most valiant spirit.
It was Brébeuf who kept the westernmost outpost for many years. A man of
iron frame and resoluteness, the only complaint of his that I have found,
is one which would furnish a study for a great artist: it was that he had
"no moment to read his breviary, except by moonlight or the fire, when
stretched out to sleep on a bare rock by some savage cataract,--or in a
damp nook of the adjacent forest." There is another picture of him in
action, crouched in a canoe, barefoot, toiling at the paddle, hour after
hour, day after day, week after week, behind the lank hair and brown
shoulders and long, naked arms of his aboriginal companion. Still another
simple "Relation" shows him teaching the Huron children to chant and
repeat the commandments under reward of beads, raisins, or prunes. In
1637, accused of having bewitched the Huron nation and having brought
famine and pest, he was doomed to death; he wrote his farewell letter to
his superior, gave his farewell dinner to his enemies, taking that
opportunity to preach a farewell sermon concerning the Trinity, heaven and
hell, angels and fiends--the only real things to him--and so wrought upon
his guests that he was spared to labor on, though often in peril, until
the Iroquois (1649), still following the Hurons, found him with a brother
priest giving baptism and absolution to the savages dying in that last
struggle this side of the Lakes against their ancient enemies. They tied
him to a stake, hung a collar of "hatchets heated red-hot" about his neck,
baptized him with boiling water, cut strips of flesh from his limbs, drank
his blood as if to inherit of his valiance, and finally tore out and ate
his heart for supreme courage. Such cannibalism seems poetically
justifiable in tribute to such unflinching constancy of devotion.
His brother priest, Lalemant, who was tortured to death at the same time,
had thought it no good omen ten years before (1639) that no martyr's blood
had yet furnished seed for the church in that new soil, though consoling
himself with the thought that the daily life amid abuse and threats,
smoke, fleas, filth, and dogs might be "accepted as a living martyrdom."
There was ample seed by now, and still more was soon to be added, for very
soon, the same year, the gentle Garnier is to die the same death
ministering to these same Hurons, whose refugees, flying beyond two lakes
to escape from their murderous foes, are to lure the priests on still
farther westward till, even in their unmundane thoughts, the great,
mysterious river begins to flow toward a longed-for sea.
It was by such a path of danger and suffering, a path which threads gloomy
forests, that the first figures clad in black gowns came and peered over
the edge of the valley of this mysterious stream, even before Radisson and
Groseilliers wandered in that wooded and wet and fertile peninsula which,
beginning at the junction of three lakes, widens to include the whole
northwest of what is now the United States. You may travel in a day and a
night now up the Ottawa River, above Lake Nipissing, around Huron to the
point of that peninsula, from Montreal, and if you go in the season of the
year in which I once made the journey you will find this path (the path on
which Champlain came near losing his life, where Récollet and Jesuit,
coureur de bois and soldier toiled up hundreds of portages) bordered as a
garden path much of the way by wild purple flowers (that doubtless grew
red in the blood-sodden ground of the old Huron country), with here and
there patches of gold.
The first of these was Father Raymbault and with him Father Isaac Jogues,
who was later to knock with mutilated hands for shelter at the Jesuit
college in Rennes. Jogues was born at Orleans; he was of as delicate mould
as Garnier, modest and refined, but "so active that none of the Indians
could surpass him in running." In the autumn of 1641 he stood with his
companion at the end of the peninsula between the Lakes, their
congregation to the number of two thousand having been gathered for them
from all along the southern shore of Lake Superior, the land of the
Chippewas. Father Raymbault died at Quebec from exposure and hardship
encountered here, the first of the Christian martyrs on that field, and
Jogues was soon after sent upon an errand of greater peril. While on his
way from Quebec to the new field (the old Huron station) with wine for the
eucharist, writing materials, and other spiritual and temporal supplies,
he was captured by the Iroquois and with his companions subjected to such
torture as even Brébeuf was not to know. Journeying from the place of his
capture on the St. Lawrence to that of his protracted torture he, first of
white men, saw the Lake Como of America which bears the name of "George,"
a king of England, instead of "Jogues," whom the holy church may honor
with canonization, but who should rather be canonized by the hills and
waters where he suffered. His fingers were lacerated by the savages before
the journey was begun; up the Richelieu River he went, suffering from his
wounds and "the clouds of mosquitoes." At the south end of Lake Champlain
this gentle son of France was again subjected to special tortures for the
gratification of another band of Iroquois; his hands were mangled, his
body burned and beaten till he fell "drenched in blood." Where thousands
now land every summer at the head of Lake George for pleasure he staggered
forth under his portage burden to the shores of the Mohawk, where again
the chief called the crowd to "caress" the Frenchmen with knives and other
instruments of torture, the children imitating the barbarity of their
elders. I should not repeat such details of this horrible story here
except to give background to one moment's act in the midst of it all,
illustrative of the motive which was back of this unexampled endurance.
While he and his companions were on the scaffold of torture, four Huron
prisoners were brought in and put beside the Frenchmen: whereupon Father
Jogues began his ministry anew, for when an ear of green corn was thrown
him for food, discovering a few rain-drops clinging to the husks, he
secretly baptized two of his eleventh-hour converts.
This was not the end, but after months of pain and privation, which make
one wonder at what a frail body, fitted with a delicate organism, can
endure, he escaped by the aid of the Dutch at Fort Orange (now the capital
of the State of New York), whither the Iroquois had gone to trade, and
after six weeks in hiding there, was sent to New Amsterdam--then a
"delapidated fort garrisoned by sixty soldiers" and a village of only four
or five hundred inhabitants, but even at that time so cosmopolitan that,
as one of my friends who has recently revived a census of that day shows,
nearly twenty different languages were spoken.
It is thus that a little French father of the wilderness comes from a
thousand miles behind the mountains, from the shores of the farthest lake,
in the middle of the continent, at a time when New York and Boston had
together scarcely more inhabitants than would fill a hall in the Sorbonne.
If only Richelieu (who died in the very year that Jogues was exemplifying
so faithfully the teaching of Him whose brother he called himself) had
permitted the Huguenot who wanted to go, to follow this little priest into
those wilds, instead of trying in vain to persuade those to go who would
not, who shall say that American visitors from that far interior might not
be speaking to-day in a tongue which Richelieu, were he alive, could best
understand.
The little father, who has always seemed to me an old man, though he was
then only thirty-six, was carried back to England, suffering from nature
and pirates almost as much as from the Iroquois, and at last reached
Rennes, where, after his identity was disclosed, the night was given to
jubilation and thanksgiving, we are told. He was summoned to Paris, where
the queen "kissed his mutilated hands" and exclaimed: "People write
romances for us--but was there ever a romance like this, and it is all
true?" Others gladly did him honor. But all this gave no satisfaction to
his soul bent upon one task, and as soon as the Pope, at the request of
his friends, granted a special dispensation [Footnote: The answer of Pope
Urban VIII was: "Indignum esset martyrem Christi, Christi non bibere
sanguinem."] which permitted him, though deformed by the "teeth and knives
of the Iroquois," to say mass once more, he returned to the wilderness
where within a few months the martyrdom was complete and his head was
displayed from the palisades of a Mohawk town.
So vanished the face of the first priest of France from the edge of the
great valley, he, too, as Raymbault, perhaps, hoping "to reach China
across the wilderness" but finding his path "diverted to heaven."
It was not until 1660 that another came into that peninsula at whose point
Jogues had preached, the aged Ménard, who after days among the tangled
swamps of northern Wisconsin was lost, and only his cassock, breviary, and
kettle were ever recovered. A little later came Allouez and Dablon, and
Druilletes who had been entertained at Boston by Winslow and Bradford and
Dudley and John Eliot, and last of those to be selected from the
increasing number of that brotherhood for mention, the young Père
Marquette, "son of an old and honorable family at Laon," of extraordinary
talents as a linguist (having learned, as Parkman tells us, to speak with
ease six Indian languages) and in devotion the "counterpart of Garnier and
Jogues." When he first appears in the west it is at the mission of Pointe
de St. Esprit, near the very western end of Lake Superior. There he heard,
from the Illinois who yearly visited his mission, of the great river they
had crossed on their way, and from the Sioux, who lived upon its banks,
"of its marvels." His desire to follow its course would seem to have been
greater than his interest in the more spiritual ends of his mission, for
he disappointedly, it is intimated, followed his little Huron flock
suddenly driven back toward the east by the Iroquois of the West--the
Sioux. At Point St. Ignace, a place midway between the two perils, the
Sioux of the West and the Iroquois of the East, they huddled under his
ministry.
It was there in the midst of his labors among his refugees, that Louis
Joliet, the son of a wagon-maker of Quebec, a grandson of France, found
him on the day, as he writes in his journal, of "the Immaculate Conception
of the Holy Virgin, whom I had continually invoked since I came to this
country of the Ottawas to obtain from God the favor of being enabled to
visit the Nations on the river Missisipi." Joliet carried orders from
Frontenac the governor and Talon the intendant, that Marquette should join
him--or he Marquette--upon this voyage of discovery, so consonant with
Marquette's desire for divine ordering. Marquette quieted his morbid
conscience, which must have reproved his exploring ambitions, by
reflecting upon the "happy necessity of exposing his life" for the
salvation of all the tribes upon that particular river, and especially, he
adds, as if to silence any possible lingering remonstrance, "the Illinois,
who when I was at St. Esprit, had begged me very earnestly to bring the
Word of God among them."
So the learned son of Laon and the practical son of the wagon-maker of
Quebec set out westward upon their journey under the protection of
Marquette's particular divinity, but provided by Joliet with supplies of
smoked meat and Indian corn, and furnished with a map of their proposed
route made up from rather hazy Indian data. Through the strait that leads
into Lake Michigan, and along the shores of this wonderful western sea
they crept, stopping at night for bivouac on shore; then up Green Bay to
the old mission; and then up the Fox River, where Nicolet had gone, in his
love not of souls but of mere adventure. What interests one who has lived
in that region, is to hear the first word of praise of the prairies
extending farther than the eye can see, interspersed with groves or with
lofty trees. [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 59:103.]
I have spoken of the little river, dwindling into a creek of perplexed
channel before the trail is found that ties the two great valleys
together. One cannot miss it now, for when I last passed over it it was
being paved, or macadamized, and a steam-roller was doing in a few days
what the moccasined or sandalled feet of the first travellers there would
not have accomplished in a thousand thousand years. I shall speak later of
what has grown upon this narrow isthmus (now crossed not merely by trail
and highway, but by canal as well), but I now must hasten on where the
impatient priest and his sturdy, practical companion are leading, toward
the Wisconsin.
Nicolet may have put his boat in this same Wisconsin River, but if he did
he did not go far below the portage. La Salle may even have walked over
this very path only a year or two before. But, after all, it is only a
question as to which son of France it was, for we know of a certainty that
on a day in June of 1673 Joliet and Marquette did let their canoes yield
to the current of this broad, tranquil stream after their days of paddling
up the "stream of the wild rice."
I have walked in the wide valley of the Wisconsin River and have seen
through the haze of an Indian summer day the same dim bluffs that
Marquette looked upon, and by night the light of the same stars that
Marquette saw reflected from its surface. But having never ridden upon its
waters, I take the description of one who has followed its course more
intimately if not more worshipfully. "They glided down the stream," he
writes, "by islands choked with trees and matted with entangling grape-
vines, by forests, groves and prairies, the parks and pleasure-grounds of
a prodigal nature; by thickets and marshes and broad bare sand-bars; under
the shadowing trees between whose tops looked down from afar the bold brow
of some woody bluff. At night, the bivouac, the canoes inverted on the
bank, the nickering fire, the meal of bison-flesh or venison, the evening
pipes, and slumber beneath the stars; and when in the morning they
embarked again, the mist hung on the river like a bridal veil, then melted
before the sun, till the glassy water and the languid woods basked
breathless in the sultry glare." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," pp. 63
and 64.]
But to those first voyagers it had a charm, a lure which was not of stars
or shadows or wooded bluffs or companionable bivouac. It led to the great
and the unknown river, which in turn led to a sea remote from that by
which the French had come out of Europe into America. They were travelling
over the edge of Champlain's map, away from Europe, away from Canada, away
from the Great Lakes. As far as that trail which led through the grass and
reeds up from the Fox, one might have come every league of the way from
Havre or even from a quay of the Seine, by water, except for a few paces
of portage at La Chine and at Niagara. But that narrow strip of prairie
which they crossed that June day in 1673 was in a sense the coast of a new
sea, they knew not what sea--or, better, it was the rim of a new world.
On the 17th of June they entered the Mississippi with a joy which they
could not express, Marquette naming it, according to his vow, in honor of
the Virgin Mary, Rivière de la Conception, and Joliet, with an earthly
diplomacy or gratitude, in honor of Frontenac, "La Buade." For days they
follow its mighty current southward through the land of the buffalo, but
without sight for sixty leagues of a human being, where now its banks are
lined with farms, villages, and towns. At last they come upon footprints
of men, and following them up from the river they enter a beautiful
prairie where a little way back from the river lay three Indian villages.
There, after peaceful ceremonies and salutations, they, the first
Frenchmen on the farther bank, their fame having been carried westward
from the missions on the shores of the lakes, were received.
"I thank thee," said the sachem of the Illinois, addressing them; "I thank
thee, Black Gown, and thee, O frenchman," addressing himself to Monsieur
Jollyet, "for having taken so much trouble to come to visit us. Never has
the earth been so beautiful, or the sun so Bright, as to-day; Never has
our river been so Calm, or so clear of rocks, which your canoes have
Removed in passing; never has our tobacco tasted so good, or our corn
appeared so fine, as We now see Them. Here is my son, whom I give thee to
Show thee my Heart. I beg thee to have pity on me, and on all my Nation.
It is thou who Knowest the great Spirit who has made us all. It is thou
who speakest to Him, and who hearest his word. Beg Him to give me life and
health, and to come and dwell with us, in order to make us Know him."
[Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 59:121.]
Knowing the linguistic attainments of Marquette and his sincerity, one
must credit this first example of eloquence and poetry of the western
Indians, cultivated of life amid the elemental forces of the water, earth,
and sky. [Footnote: It was of these same prairies, rivers, and skies,
these same elemental ever-present forces, that Abraham Lincoln learned the
simple, rugged eloquence that made him the most powerful soul that valley
has known.] A beautiful earth, sprinkled with flowers, a bright sun, a
calm river free of rocks, sweet-flavored tobacco, thriving corn, an
acquaintance with the Great Spirit--well might the old man who received
the French man say: "thou shalt enter all our cabins in peace."
Indian eloquence is not of the lips only. It is a poor Indian speech
indeed that is not punctuated by gifts. And so it was that the French
travellers resumed their journey laden with presents from their prairie
hosts, and a slave to guide them, and a calumet to procure peace wherever
they went.
It is enough now, perhaps, to know that the voyagers passed the mouth of
the Illinois, the Missouri, the Ohio, and reached the mouth of the
Arkansas, when thinking themselves near the gulf and fearing that they
might fall into the hands of the Spaniards if they ventured too near the
sea, and so be robbed of the fruits of their expedition, they turned their
canoes up-stream. Instead, however, of following their old course they
entered the Illinois River, known sometimes as the "Divine River." I
borrow the observing father's description of that particular valley as it
was just two centuries before I first remember seeing it. "We have seen
nothing like this river for the fertility of the land, its prairies,
woods, wild cattle, stag, deer, wildcats, bustards, swans, ducks, parrots,
and even beaver; its many little lakes and rivers." [Footnote: B. F.
French, "Historical Collections of Louisiana," 4:51. "Jesuit Relations"
(Thwaites), 59:161.] Through this paradise of plenty they passed, up one
of the branches of the Illinois, till within a few miles of Lake Michigan,
where they portaged a thousand paces to a creek that emptied into the lake
of the Illinois. If they were following that portage path and creek today
they would be led through that city which stands next to Paris in
population--the city of Chicago, in the commonwealth that bears the name
of the land through which the French voyagers passed, "Illinois."
At the end of September, having been absent four months, and having
paddled their canoes over twenty-five hundred miles, they reached Green
Bay again. There these two pioneers, companions forever in the history of
the new world, separated--Joliet to bear the report of the discovery of
the Rivière de Buade to Count Frontenac, Marquette to continue his
devotions to his divinity and recruit his wasted strength, that he might
keep his promise to return to minister to the Illinois, whom he speaks of
as the most promising of tribes, for "to say 'Illinois' is in their
language to say 'the men.'"
By most unhappy fate Joliet's canoe was upset in the Lachine Rapids, when
almost within sight of Montreal, and all his papers, including his
precious map, were lost in the foam. But several maps were made under his
direction or upon his data.
Marquette's map, showing nothing but their course and supplying nothing
from conjecture, was found nearly two hundred years later in St. Mary's
College in Montreal, furnishing, I have thought, a theme and design for a
mural painting in the interesting halls of the Sorbonne, where so many
periods, personages, and incidents of the world's history are worthily
remembered. The art of that valley has sought to reproduce or idealize the
faces of these pioneers. The more eloquent, visible memorial would be the
crude map from the hand of the priest Jacques Marquette, son of Rose de la
Salle of the royal city of Rheims.
Of his setting out again for the Illinois, where he purposed establishing
a mission, of his spending the winter, ill, in a hut on the Chicago
portage path, of his brief visit to the Illinois, of his journey
northward, of his death by the way, and of the Indian procession that bore
his bones up the lake to Point St. Ignace--of all this I may not speak in
this chapter.
Here let me say only the word of tribute that comes to him out of his own
time, as the first stories of history came, being handed down from
generation to generation by word of mouth, till a poet or a historian
should make them immortal. The story of Marquette I had known for many
years from the blind Parkman, but not long ago I met one day an Indian
boy, with some French blood of the far past in his veins, the son of a
Chippewa chief, a youth who had never read Parkman or Winsor but who knew
the story of Marquette better than I, for his grandmother had told him
what she had heard from her grandmother, and she in turn from her mother
or grandmother, of listening to Marquette speak upon the shores of
Superior, of going with other French and Indians on that missionary
journey to the Illinois to prepare food for him, and of hearing the
mourning among the Indians when long after his death the report of his end
reached their lodges.
The grim story of the labors of the followers of Loyola among the Indians
has its beatific culmination in the life of this zealot and explorer.
Pestilence and the Iroquois had ruined all the hopes of the Jesuits in the
east. Their savage flocks were scattered, annihilated, driven farther in
the fastnesses, or exiled upon islands. The shepherds who vainly followed
their vanishing numbers found themselves out upon the edge of a new field.
If the Iroquois east and west could have been curbed, the Jesuits would
have become masters of that field and all the north. We shall, thinking of
that contingency, take varying views, beyond reconciliation, as to the
place of the Iroquois in American history; but we shall all agree,
whatever our religious and political predilection, men of Old France and
men of New France alike, in applauding the sublime disinterestedness,
fearless zeal, and unquestioned devotion to something beyond the self,
which have consecrated all that valley of the Lakes and have, in the
person of Marquette, the son of Laon, made first claim upon the life of
the valley, whose great water he helped to discover.