allied in origin and language to the Iroquois, numbered about 16,000
souls, and dwelt in several large villages in a narrow district on the
high ground between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay of Lake Huron. Their
dwellings were bark cabins, clustered within stoutly-palisaded walls,
and near each fortified town were fields of corn, beans, pumpkins,
and tobacco. Agricultural in habit, keen traders, and in the main
sedentary, these semi-naked savages made short hunting and fishing
expeditions, and laid up stores for the winter. They were better
fighters than the Algonkins around them, yet were obliged gradually
to withdraw northward and westward from Iroquois persecution, and
during the period of the Jesuit missions were almost annihilated by
the latter. To the southwest, across a wide stretch of unpopulated
forest, were the allies and kindred of the Hurons, the Tionontates,
called also Petuns, or Tobacco Nation, a term having its origin in
their custom of cultivating large fields of tobacco, which commodity
they used in a wide-spread barter with other tribes. To the southeast
of the Petuns, west of Lake Ontario and on both sides of the gorge of
Niagara, were the peaceful Atiwandaronks, who, being friends alike of
Iroquois, Algonkins, and Hurons, were known as the Neutral Nation. To
the eastward of the Neutrals, strongly intrenched in the interlocking
basins of the Genesee and the Mohawk, lay the dread confederacy of the
Iroquois, who in time were to spread like a pestilence over the lands
of all their neighbors.
The intelligence and mobility of the Hurons rendered the early
prospects for missionary effort among them more promising than with
the rude and nomadic Algonkins. But while at first the missionaries
of New France were well received, the innate savagery of these people
in time asserted itself. Their medicine-men, as bitterly fanatical as
the howling dervishes of the Orient, plotted the destruction of the
messengers of the new faith; the introduction of European diseases
was attributed to the "black gowns;" the ravages of the Iroquois were
thought to be brought on by the presence of the strangers; the rites
of the church were looked upon as infernal incantations, and the lurid
pictures of the Judgment, which were displayed in the little forest
chapels, aroused unspeakable terror among this simple people; finally,
an irresistible wave of superstitious frenzy led to the blotting out of
the mission, accompanied by some of the most heart-rending scenes in
the history of Christian evangelization.
It will be remembered that in 1615 the Récollet friar, Joseph le
Caron, made his way into the far-away country of the Hurons, but
returned in the following year, having learned much of their language
and customs. Five years later, another of his order, William Poulin,
took up the weary task, being joined in 1623 by Fathers Le Caron and
Nicholas Viel, and the historian of the Récollet missions, Brother
Gabriel Sagard. All of them soon left the field, however, save Viel,
who alone, amid almost incredible hardships, attained some measure of
success; but in 1625, when descending the Ottawa to meet and arrange
for co-operation with the Jesuit Brébeuf, at Three Rivers, he was
willfully drowned by his Indian guide in the last rapid of Des Prairies
River, just back of Montreal. Such is the origin of the name of the
dread Sault au Récollet.
In 1626, the Jesuits Brébeuf and Anne de Nouë, having received some
linguistic instruction from Récollets who had been in the Huron field,
proceeded thither, with a Récollet friar, Joseph de la Roche Daillon,
to resume the work which the Récollets had abandoned. Daillon attempted
a mission to neighboring Neutrals, but, being roughly handled by
them, rejoined his Jesuit friends among the Hurons. Two years later,
he returned to Quebec, having been preceded by De Nouë, who found it
impossible to master the difficult language of their dusky flock.
Brébeuf, now left alone, labored gallantly among these people, and,
winning the hearts of many by his easy adoption of their manners,
gathered about him a little colony of those favorably inclined to his
views. He was recalled to Quebec in 1629, arriving there just in time
to fall into the hands of Louis Kirk, and be transported to England.
When Canada was restored to France, by the treaty of St. Germain, the
Jesuits were given sole charge of the Indian missions, but it was 1634
before the Huron mission could be reopened. In September, Brébeuf,
Antoine Daniel, and Davost returned to Brébeuf's old field, and
commenced, in the large town of Ihonatiria, the greatest Jesuit mission
in the history of New France. Others soon joined them. Additional
missions were opened in neighboring towns, some of the strongest of
these being each served by four fathers, who were assisted by laymen
donnés, or given men; while in the cultivation of the soil, and the
fashioning of implements and utensils both for the fathers and for the
Indians, numerous hired laborers, from the French colonies on the St.
Lawrence, were employed in and about the missions. Charles Garnier and
Isaac Jogues, with their attendants, made a tour of the Petun villages;
other Jesuits were sent among the Neutrals; and even the Algonkins as
far northwestward as Sault Ste. Marie were visited (1641) by Raymbault
and Jogues, and looked and listened with awe at the celebration of the
mass. In 1639, there was built, on the River Wye, the fortified mission
house of St. Mary's, to serve as a center for the wide-spread work, as
a place for ecclesiastical retreat for the fathers, and a refuge when
enemies pressed too closely upon them.
The story of the hardships and sufferings of the devoted missionaries,
as told us by Rochemonteix, Shea, and Parkman, and with rare modesty
recorded in the documents to be contained in this series, is one of
the most thrilling in the annals of humanity. Space forbids us here
to dwell upon the theme. No men have, in the zealous exercise of
their faith, performed hardier deeds than these Jesuits of the Huron
mission; yet, after three years of unremitting toil, they could (1640)
count but a hundred converts out of a population of 16,000, and these
were for the most part sick infants or aged persons, who had died
soon after baptism. The rugged braves scorned the approaches of the
fathers, and unmercifully tormented their converts; the medicine-men
waged continual warfare on their work; smallpox and the Iroquois were
decimating the people.
Jogues was (1642) sent down to the colonies for supplies for the
missions, but with his Huron companions was captured by an Iroquois
war-party, who led them to the Mohawk towns. There most of the Hurons
were killed, and Jogues and his donné, René Goupil, were tortured
and mutilated, and made to serve as slaves to their savage jailers.
Finally Goupil, a promising young physician, was killed, and Jogues,
being rescued by the Dutch allies of the Mohawks, was sent to Europe.
Supplies thus failing them, the Huron missionaries were in a sad plight
until finally (1644) relieved by an expedition to the lower country
undertaken at great hazards by Brébeuf, Garreau, and Noël Chabanel. The
same season, Francis Joseph Bressani, attempting to reach the Huron
missions, had been captured and tortured by Mohawks; like Jogues, he
was rescued through Dutch intercession and sent back to Europe, but
both of these zealots were soon back again facing the cruel dangers of
their chosen task.
A temporary peace followed, in 1645, and the hope of the Jesuits was
rekindled, for they now had five missions in as many Huron towns, and
another established for Algonkins who were resident in the Huron
district. But in July, 1648, the Iroquois attacked Teanaustayé, the
chief Huron village, and while encouraging the frenzied defense Father
Daniel lost his life at the hands of the enemy. He was thus the first
Jesuit martyr in the Huron mission, and the second in New France,--for
Jogues had been tortured to death in the Iroquois towns, two years
before. The spirit of the Hurons was crushed in this bloody foray;
large bands, deserting their towns, fled in terror to seek protection
of the Petuns, while others made their way to the Manitoulin Islands of
Lake Huron, and even as far west as the islands of Green Bay and the
matted pine forests of Northern Wisconsin. Here and there a town was
left, however, and one of the largest of these, called St. Ignatius
by the Jesuits, was stormed by a thousand Iroquois, March 16, 1649.
The three survivors fled through the woods to neighboring St. Louis,
where were Brébeuf, now grown old in his service of toil, and young
Gabriel Lalemant. Bravely did they aid in defending St. Louis, and
administering to wounded and dying; but at last were captured, and
being taken to the ruined town of St. Ignatius were most cruelly
tortured until relieved by death. Early in November, Fathers Garnier
and Chabanel met their death in the Petun country, the former at the
hands of Iroquois, the latter being killed by a Huron who imagined that
the presence of the Jesuits had brought curses upon his tribe.
The missions in the Huron country were now entirely abandoned. A
few of the surviving Jesuits followed their flocks to the islands
in Lake Huron; but in June, 1650, the enterprise was forsaken, and
the missionaries, with a number of their converts, retired to a
village, founded for them, on the Island of Orleans, near Quebec. This
settlement being in time ravaged by the Iroquois, a final stand was
made at Lorette, also in the outskirts of Quebec, which mission exists
to this day.
The great Huron mission, which had been conducted for thirty-five
years, had employed twenty-nine missionaries, of whom seven had lost
their lives in the work. This important field forsaken, many of the
missionaries had returned to Europe disheartened, and apparently
the future for Jesuit missions in New France looked gloomy enough.
The Iroquois had now practically destroyed the Montagnais between
Quebec and the Saguenay, the Algonkins of the Ottawa, and the Hurons,
Petuns, and Neutrals. The French colonies of Quebec, Three Rivers,
and Montreal, had suffered from repeated raids of the New York
confederates, and their forest trade was now almost wholly destroyed.
In this hour of darkness, light suddenly broke upon New France.
The politic Iroquois, attacked on either side by the Eries and the
Susquehannas, and fearing that while thus engaged their northern
victims might revive for combined vengeance, sent overtures of peace to
Quebec, and cordially invited to their cantonments the once detested
black gowns.
V. THE IROQUOIS MISSION.
Champlain had early made enemies of the Iroquois, by attacking them
as the allies of his Algonkin neighbors. This enmity extended to all
New France, and lasted, with brief intervals of peace, for over half
a century. We have seen that Jogues was the first of his order (1642)
to enter the Iroquois country, as a prisoner of the Mohawks, the
easternmost of the five tribes of the confederacy. Two years later,
Bressani, while on his way to the Huron missions, was also captured by
the Mohawks, passed through a similar experience of torture, was sold
to the Dutch, and transported back to France, and, again like Jogues
resumed his hazardous task of attempting to tame the American savage.
During the first peace (May, 1646), Jogues, now in civilian costume,
paid a brief visit to his former tormentors on the Mohawk, this time
conveying only expressions of good-will from the governor of New
France. His political errand accomplished, he returned to Quebec; but
in August was back again, with a young French attendant named Lalande,
intent on opening admission among the Iroquois. Meanwhile, there had
been a revulsion of sentiment on their part, and the two Frenchmen had
no sooner reached the Mohawk than they were tortured and killed.
During an Iroquois attack upon Quebec, seven years later (1653),
Father Joseph Anthony Poncet was taken prisoner by the marauders and
carried to the Mohawk, where he suffered in the same manner as his
predecessors; but his captors being now desirous of a renewal of
peace with the French, spared his life, and sent him back to Quebec
with overtures for a renewal of negotiations. Early in July, 1654,
Father Simon le Moyne was sent forth upon a tour of inspection, and
returned to Quebec in September, with glowing reports of the fervor
of his reception by both Mohawks and Onondagas. It was determined to
rear a mission among the latter, and thither (1655),--a four weeks'
voyage,--proceeded Claude Dablon and Peter Mary Joseph Chaumonot;
while, to appease the jealous Mohawks, Le Moyne at the same time
reopened a brief but unprosperous mission among that tribe.
At first, Dablon and Chaumonot had high hopes of their Onondaga
enterprise; but mistrust soon arose in the minds of the natives,
and Dablon found it necessary to proceed to Quebec and obtain fresh
evidences of the friendship of the French. He returned in the early
summer of 1656, accompanied by Fathers Francis Le Mercier, superior of
the Canadian mission, and René Ménard, two lay brothers, and a party
of French colonists under a militia captain, who designed founding
a settlement in the land of the Iroquois. By the close of the year,
the work was in a promising stage; a number of Christianized Hurons,
who had been adopted into the confederacy, formed a nucleus for
proselyting, several Iroquois converts had been made, and all five of
the tribes had been visited by the missionaries.
Fathers Paul Ragueneau and Joseph Imbert Dupéron, who had been sent
out from Quebec in July, 1657, to assist the Onondaga mission, reached
it only after many perils en route; for meanwhile, there had been
a fresh Iroquois uprising against the Hurons and Ottawas, in which
Father Leonard Garreau lost his life near Montreal, and the entire
confederacy was soon in an uproar against the white allies of its
ancient enemies. The intrepid Le Moyne joined the party in November,
and in the following March (1658), on learning that all of the French
had been condemned to death, the entire colony stole away in the night,
and reached Montreal only after a long and hazardous voyage. The great
Iroquois mission, which had promised so happily and cost so much in
blood and treasure, was now thought to be a thing of the past.
There was, however, still another chapter to the story. In the summer
of 1660, after two years of bloody forays against New France, a Cayuga
sachem, who had been converted at Onondaga, came to Montreal as a peace
messenger, asking for another black gown to minister to the native
converts and a number of French captives in the Iroquois towns. Once
more, Le Moyne cheerfully set out upon what seemed a path to death; but
he passed the winter without molestation, and in the spring following
was allowed to return to Canada with the French prisoners.
It was five years later (1665), before the government of New France
felt itself sufficiently strong to threaten chastisement of the raiding
Iroquois, who had long been making life a torment in the colonies on
the St. Lawrence. The Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas sued
for peace; but the Mohawks were obstinate, and their villages were
wasted by fire until they too asked for mercy and the ministrations of
the Jesuits. Fathers James Fremin, James Bruyas, and John Pierron were
sent out in 1667; later, they were assisted by Julian Garnier, Stephen
de Carheil, Peter Milet, and Boniface, so that by the close of 1668 a
mission was in progress in each of the five cantonments. A few notable
converts were made, among them Catharine Tegakouita, known as the
"Iroquois saint;" Catharine Ganneaktena, an Erie captive who afterwards
founded a native mission village on the banks of the St. Lawrence;
the head-men Assendasé, Kryn, and Soenrese. But a great success
was never possible; here as elsewhere, the vices and superstitions
of the tribesmen were deep-rooted, and they had not yet reached
a stage of culture where the spiritual doctrines of Christianity
appealed strongly, save to a few emotional natures. The converts
were subjected to so many annoyances and dangers, that isolation
was thought essential, and there was established for them opposite
Montreal the palisaded mission of St. Francis Xavier; this settlement,
fostered by the French as a buffer against Iroquois attack on the
colonists, was subsequently removed to Sault St. Louis, and is known
in our day as Caughnawaga. This mission, and that of the Sulpitians on
Montreal Mountain--later removed to the neighboring Lake of the Two
Mountains,--and at Quinté Bay, were frequently recruited by Iroquois
Christians, who were carefully instructed by the missionaries in the
arts of agriculture and the rites of the church.
This depletion of the Iroquois population alarmed the sachems of the
confederacy. To please them, Governor Dongan of New York, himself a
Catholic, introduced to the Five Nations three English Jesuits, who
sought in vain to counteract the movement. The French did not abandon
the Iroquois mission-field until 1687, when the rising power of the
English obliged them to withdraw from the country. We have, however,
glimpses of occasional attempts thereafter to revive the work, Bruyas
being on the ground in 1701, joined the following year by James de
Lamberville, Garnier, and Le Valliant, and later by James d'Hue
and Peter de Marieul. The entire party were again driven from the
cantonments in 1708, De Marieul being the last of his order to remain
on duty.
Thereafter, the Jesuits were chiefly devoted to their mission at
Caughnawaga, whither many Iroquois retreated before the inroads of
Dutch and English settlers who were now crowding upon their lands. When
the black gowns were at last expelled from New France, secular priests
continued their work among the remnants of those New York Indians who
had sought protection by settling among the French colonists on the St.
Lawrence.
VI. THE OTTAWA MISSION.
This embraced the tribes beyond Lake Huron,--the Chippewas at Sault
Ste. Marie, the Beavers, the Crees, the Ottawas and refugee Hurons
on Lake Superior, the Menomonees, Pottawattomies, Sacs, Foxes,
Winnebagoes, Miamis, Illinois, and those of the Sioux who lived on or
near the banks of the Mississippi. The Ottawas were the first Indians
from the upper lakes to trade with the French, hence that vast district
became early known as the country of the Ottawas.
The Huron mission was the door to the Ottawa mission. Jogues and
Raimbault were with the Chippewas at Sault Ste. Marie in 1641; but it
was nineteen years after that (1660), before they were followed by
another Jesuit, the veteran Father Ménard, who accompanied an Ottawa
fleet up the great river of that name, through Lake Huron and the
Sault, and on to Keweenaw Bay, where he said the first mass heard
on the shores of the northern sea. After a wretched winter on that
inhospitable coast, spent in a shanty of fir boughs, with savage
neighbors who reviled his presence, he proceeded inland intent on
ministering to some Hurons who had fled from Iroquois persecution to
the gloomy pine forest about the upper waters of Black River, in what
is now Wisconsin. In August, 1661, he lost his life at a portage, thus
being the first martyr upon the Ottawa mission.
Four years later, Claude Alloüez set out for Lake Superior, and
reaching Chequamegon Bay in October (1665), built a little chapel of
bark upon the southwest shore of that rock-bound estuary,--the famous
mission of La Pointe. His flock was a medley, Hurons and Algonkins here
clustering in two villages, where they lived on fish, safe at last
from the raging Iroquois, although much pestered by the wild Sioux of
the West. For thirty years did Alloüez travel from tribe to tribe,
through the forests and over the prairies of the vast wilderness which
a century later came to be organized into the Northwest Territory, and
established missions at Green Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, on the Miami, and,
with Marquette, among the Illinois at Kaskaskia.
Later, there arrived on the scene Fathers Louis Nicholas, James
Marquette, Dablon, Louis André, Druillettes, Albanel, and others. The
field of the Northwest seemed at first, as did the Huron mission,
highly promising. The missionaries were everywhere greeted by large
audiences, and much curiosity was displayed concerning the rites of
the church; but, as usual, the nomadic habits of the Indians rendered
instruction difficult. The fathers, with great toil and misery, and
subject to daily danger and insult, followed their people about upon
long hunting and fishing expeditions; and even when the bands had
returned to the squalid villages, life there was almost as comfortless
as upon the trail. Among the donnés and the Jesuit coadjutor brothers
were skillful workers in metal, who repaired the guns and utensils of
the natives, and taught them how best to obtain and reduce the ore from
lead and copper deposits. We have evidence that the copper region
of Lake Superior was at times resorted to by the lay followers and
their Indian attendants, to obtain material for crucifixes and for the
medals which the missionaries gave to converts; and in the lead mines
centering about where are now Dubuque, Iowa, and Galena, Ill., the
missionary attendants and Indians obtained lead for barter with French
fur-traders, who, like the soldiers of the Cross, were by this time
wandering all over the Northwest.
Marquette had succeeded Alloüez at La Pointe, in 1669; but it was
not long before the Hurons and Ottawas of Chequamegon Bay foolishly
incurred the fresh hostility of the Sioux, and the following year
were driven eastward like autumn leaves before a blast. Marquette
established them in a new mission, at Point St. Ignace, opposite
Mackinaw; and it was from here that, in 1673, he joined the party of
Louis Joliet, en route to the Mississippi River. The St. Ignace mission
became the largest and most successful in the Northwest, there being
encamped there, during Marquette's time, about 500 Hurons and 1,300
Ottawas. The interesting story of Marquette, a familiar chapter in
American history, will be fully developed in the documents of this
series; and we shall be able to present for the first time a facsimile
of the original MS. Journal of his final and fatal voyage (1674), which
is preserved among the many treasures of the Jesuit College of St.
Mary's, in Montreal.
After the suspension of the publication of the _Relations_, in 1673,
we obtain few glimpses of the Ottawa mission, save in the occasional
references of travelers. The several local missions in the district
were, in the main, probably more successful than those in any of the
other fields of endeavor. La Pointe, Green Bay; St. Ignace (later
Mackinac), Sault Ste. Marie, St. Joseph's, and Kaskaskia became the
most important of them all; and at some of these points Catholic
missions are still maintained by Franciscan friars and secular priests,
for resident French Creoles and Indians. The uprising of the Foxes
against French power, which lasted spasmodically from about 1700 to
1755, greatly hampered the work of the Jesuits; they did not, during
this period, entirely absent themselves from the broad country of the
Ottawas, but conversions were few and the records slight.
There was, for a time, governmental attempt to supplant the Western
Jesuits with Récollets. Several friars were with La Salle, who had
a great antipathy to the disciples of Loyola,--Father Hennepin's
adventures belong to this period of Récollet effort, his colleagues at
Fort Crèvecoeur being Brothers Ribourde and Membré; but their mission
closed with the Iroquois repulse of the French from Crèvecoeur, and
the consequent death of Ribourde. When La Salle retired from the
region, Alloüez resumed the Illinois mission of the Jesuits; and soon
after there arrived upon the ground Fathers Gravier, Marest, Mermet,
and Pinet, who, because of the more docile character of the tribes
collectively known as the Illinois,--Kaskaskias, Cahokias, Peorias,
and Tamaroas,--found here a relatively fruitful field. In time, French
settlements grew up around the palisaded missions, intermarriages
occurred, and the work flourished for many years. Black gowns visited
the prosperous Illinois towns as late as 1781, when the death of Father
Meurin closed the work of his order in the Northwest.
VII. THE LOUISIANA MISSION.