1683, and from being a common soldier, had by his ability risen to
an officer’s position. He became a favorite of Frontenac, and was
selected by him to bear the despatch to Paris which conveyed an
account of Phips’s failure before Quebec in 1690. He was not long
after made deputy-governor of Placentia, where he quarrelled with his
superior and fled to France; and here, fearing arrest, he was obliged
to escape beyond its boundaries. After the Peace of Ryswick he sought
reinstatement, but was not successful; and it is alleged that his book,
which he now published, was in some measure the venting of his spleen.
It appeared in 1703, at La Haye, as _Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amérique
septentrionale, qui contiennent une Relation des différens Peuples
que y habitent_, in two volumes (the second entitled _Mémoires de
l’Amérique septentrionale, ou la suite des Voyages_), with twenty-six
maps and plates (Sabin, vol. x. nos. 38,635-38,638; Carter-Brown, vol.
iii. no. 36; Quaritch, 25 shillings; Leclerc, no. 737, 40 francs).
Another edition, in somewhat larger type and better engravings, with a
vignette in place of the sphere on the title, appeared the same year.
Dr. Shea is inclined to think this the authorized edition, and the
other a pirated one, with reversed cuts. La Hontan, being in London,
superintended an edition published there the same year in English,
called _New Voyages to North America_ (in Harvard College Library;
cf. _Brinley Catalogue_, no. 101; Field, _Indian Bibliography_, no.
852; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 39), likewise in two volumes, but
containing in addition a Dialogue between La Hontan and a Huron Indian
(the Rat), which had not been included in the Hague edition, and which
was the vehicle of some religious scepticism. There were thirteen
plates in vol. i., and eleven in vol. ii., and La Hontan speaks of
them as being much better than those of the Holland edition (Sabin,
vol. x. no. 38,644). This same Dialogue was issued separately the next
year (1704) at Amsterdam in French,—_Dialogue du Baron de La Hontan
et d’un Sauvage dans l’Amérique_; and also, with a changed title
(_Supplément aux Voyages du Baron La Hontan_), as the third volume or
“suite” of the _Voyages_, and sometimes with added pages devoted to
travels in Portugal and Denmark (Sabin, vol. x. nos. 38,633, 38,634,
38,637; Field, no. 853; Leclerc, nos. 738, 739; Muller, _Books on
America_, 1872, no. 864). These editions are found with the dates also
of 1704 and 1705. What is called a “seconde Édition, revue, corrigée,
et augmentée,” with twenty-seven plates (but not from the same coppers,
however, with the earlier issues), and omitting the “Carte générale,”
appeared likewise at La Haye in 1705 and 1706. This is professedly
“almost recast, to make the style more pure, concise, and simple,
with the Dialogues rewritten.” The Denmark and Portugal voyage being
omitted, it is brought within two volumes, the second of which is still
called _Mémoires_, etc. (Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 68). There were
later French editions in 1707, 1709, and 1715, and at Amsterdam in
1721, with the “suite,” dated 1728, three volumes in all, and sometimes
all three are dated 1728; and still other editions are dated 1731 and
1741 (Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,640, who says it is quite impossible to
make a clear statement of all the varieties of these several editions;
Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no. 689). The English version appeared again
at London in 1735 (Menzies, no. 1,178; Brinley, no. 101; Sabin, vol.
x. nos. 38,645, 38,646, who says there are various imprints; and it is
also included in Pinkerton’s _Voyages_, vol. xiii.). There are also
a German edition, _Des beruhmten Herrn Baron de La Hontan Neueste
Reisen_, 1709 (Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,647; Carter-Brown, vol. iii. no.
123; Stevens, _Bibl. Hist._, no. 2,505), and a Dutch, _Reizen van den
Baron van La Hontan_, 1739 (Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,648; Stevens, no.
2,506).
[Illustration: PART OF LA HONTAN’S MAP.
This is the western part of the _Carte Générale de Canada_, which
appeared in the _Nouveaux Voyages_, La Haye, 1709, vol. ii., and was
re-engraved in his _Mémoires_, Amsterdam, 1741, vol. iii.]
[Illustration: PART OF LA HONTAN’S MAP.
A middle section from his “Carte Générale de Canada,” in his _Nouveaux
Voyages_, La Haye, 1709, vol. ii.; re-engraved in the Amsterdam, 1741,
edition of the _Mémoires_, vol. iii.]
[Illustration: LA HONTAN’S MAP.
A fac-simile of the frontispiece to La Hontan’s _New Voyages_, London,
1703. It was less carefully drawn in the re-engraving of smaller size
for the _Mémoires de l’Amérique_, vol. ii., Amsterdam; and still
another plate of the same map will be found in the 1709 and 1715 La
Haye editions.]
The book is thought to have been edited by Nicolas Gueudeville; or at
least his hand is usually recognized in the customary third volume
of some of the editions. Faribault (p. 76) says that a bookseller in
Amsterdam knew that the Dialogue was added by Gueudeville, in whose
_Atlas_, Amsterdam, 1719, as well as in Corneille’s _Geographical
Dictionary_, the accounts given of La Hontan’s Rivière Longue are
incorporated.
[Illustration: LA HONTAN’S RIVIERE LONGUE.
Fac-simile of the map in the _Nouveaux Voyages_, La Haye, 1709, i. 136.
He reports that the river was called by some the Dead River, because of
its sluggish current.]
As early as 1715-1716 there was a general discrediting of the story of
La Hontan, as will be seen by letters addressed by Bobé to De l’Isle,
the French geographer, and printed in the _Historical Magazine_,
iii. 231, 232; but the English geographer, Herman Moll, in his maps
between 1710 and 1720, was under La Hontan’s influence. Another English
cartographer, John Senex (1710), accepted the La Hontan story with
considerable hesitation, and later rejected it. Daniel Coxe, in his
_Carolana_ (1727), quite unreservedly accepted it; and the Long River
appears as Moingona in Popple’s _Atlas_, in 1733.
The German geographer, Homann, of Nuremberg, was in some degree
influenced; and the French cartographer De l’Isle sometimes accepted
these alleged discoveries, and again discarded them; but the careful
work of Bellin, in Charlevoix’s _Nouvelle France_, did much to relegate
La Hontan to oblivion. Charlevoix himself says: “The great liberty
which La Hontan gives his pen has contributed greatly to make his
book read by people not informed to separate truth from falsehood. It
fails to teach the well-informed, and confuses others. The episode
of the voyage up the Long River is as fabulous as the Barataria of
Sancho Panza.” (Cf. Shea’s ed., i. 86, with Shea’s note, iii. 286.)
The Long River some years later, however, figured in the map which
illustrates Samuel Engel’s _Extraits raisonnés des Voyages faits dans
les parties septentrionales_, published at Lausanne, and again in 1765,
and again in 1779, and of which there is also a German translation.
At a later date Carver accepted the accounts of this western river
as genuine, and identified it with the St. Peter’s,—a belief which
Long again, in his _Expedition to St. Peter’s River_, wholly rejected.
(Cf. also J. H. Perkins in the_ North American Review_ (1839), vol.
xlviii. no. 98, where it is thought possible; and the paper by H.
Scadding in the _Canadian Journal_, 2d series, vol. xiii. pp. 240,
396.) Parkman expresses the present view of scholars when he says (_La
Salle_, p. 458) that La Hontan’s account of the Long River is a sheer
fabrication; but he did not, like Hennepin, add slander and plagiarism
to mendacity. Again, in his _Frontenac_ (p. 105), he calls La Hontan
“a man in advance of his time, for he had the caustic, sceptical,
and mocking spirit which a century later marked the approach of the
great Revolution. He usually told the truth when he had no motive to
do otherwise, and yet was capable at times of prodigious mendacity,”
for his account of what “he saw in the colony is commonly in accord
with the best contemporary evidence.” There are some exceptions to
this view. Gravier speaks of La Hontan as “de bonne foi et de jugement
sain”!
CHAPTER VI.
THE JESUITS, RECOLLECTS, AND THE INDIANS.
BY JOHN GILMARY SHEA, LL.D.
AT the time of the discovery of this portion of the northern continent,
the missionary spirit was active in the Catholic Church. The labors of
the earlier monks had been revived and continued in the East by the
new zeal of the orders of friars, especially of the Franciscan and
Dominican Fathers. The earlier voyages of explorations from Cabot’s
day were accompanied by priests; and as soon as the condition and
character of the inhabitants were known, projects were formed for their
conversion. This work was looked upon as a duty by the kings of Spain,
Portugal, and France, as well as by the hierarchy and religious orders.
Coeval with the Spanish and French attempts to settle on the coast,
were missionary efforts, often pushed with wonderful zeal and courage
far into the interior by intrepid apostles, who, trusting their lives
to Indian guides, sought fields of labor.
The mission lines on the map meet and cross, as, undeterred by the
death of pioneers, others took up the task. In 1526, Dominicans reared
a chapel on the banks of the James in Virginia; in 1539, the Italian
Franciscan Mark, from Nice, penetrated to New Mexico; and soon after,
Father Padilla, of the same order, died by the hands of the Indians
near the waters of the Missouri. By 1559 Dominicans were traversing the
territories of the Mobilian tribes from Pensacola to the Mississippi;
and when Melendez founded St. Augustine, it became a mission centre
whence the Jesuit missionaries threaded the Atlantic coast to
Chesapeake Bay and the banks of the Rappahannock, before they left that
field to the Franciscans, who dotted Florida and Georgia with their
mission chapels.
The same spirit was seen pervading France, where the conversion of the
Indians of the New World was regarded as a duty of the highest order.
One of the first traces that we find of French voyages to the northern
coast is the mention in an early edition of the Chronicle of Eusebius,
in 1508, that Indians who had been brought from the new-found land
received baptism within the walls of a cathedral in France.
Though the introduction of Calvinism led to the destruction of many
a convent and shrine, and thinned by death the ranks of the mission
orders, the zeal for the conversion of the Indians survived the wars
of religion. Soon after Poutrincourt began his settlement in Acadia,
it was made a reproach to him that nothing had been done for the
conversion of the natives. He addressed a letter to the Pope, as if
to put the fact of his orthodoxy beyond all question; and when it was
proposed to send out Jesuit missionaries to labor among the Indians, he
caused twenty-five of the natives to be baptized in token of his zeal
for their spiritual welfare.
The establishment of a Jesuit mission was, however, decided upon. On
the 12th of June, 1611, Fathers Peter Biard and Enemond Masse reached
Port Royal. Some difficulties had been thrown in their way, and others
met them in the petty settlement. They turned at once to study the
Micmac language, so as to begin their mission labors among that nation
of Algonquins. The aged Membertou, who had acquired some French, was
their interpreter and first convert. Biard visited all the coast as
far as the Kennebec, and tried to give some ideas of Christianity to
the Abenakis on that river. Finding that little could be done at Port
Royal, where the settlers hampered rather than aided their efforts,
the Jesuits projected an independent mission settlement elsewhere.
Their protector, Madame de Guercheville, obtained from the French king
a grant of all the coast from the St. Lawrence to Florida. A vessel
was sent out, the missionaries were taken on board, and a settlement
was begun on Mount Desert Island. There a cross was planted, and Mass
said at a rustic altar. But the Jesuits were not to carry out their
mission projects. English vessels under Argall, from Virginia, attacked
the ship and settlement of St. Savior; a Jesuit laybrother was killed;
the rest of the settlers were sent to France or carried prisoners
to Virginia. Thus ended the first Jesuit mission begun under French
auspices.[677]
Meanwhile Champlain had succeeded in establishing a settlement on the
St. Lawrence, and had penetrated to Lake Champlain and the rapids of
the Ottawa. On all sides were tribes “living like brute beasts, without
law, without religion, without God.” His religious zeal was quickened;
for Quebec itself was destitute of ministers of religion. The
Recollects, a reformed branch of the Franciscan order, were invited to
enter the field. They accepted the mission, and in May, 1615, four of
the Gray Friars landed at Quebec. Father John Dolbeau at once began a
mission among the Montagnais,—the tribe occupying that portion of the
St. Lawrence valley,—and wintered with them in their wandering hunter
life, enduring all its hardships, and learning their language and
ideas. The friendly Wyandots, from the shores of a far distant lake,
were the tribe assigned to Father Joseph le Caron, and to the palisaded
towns of this more civilized race he boldly ventured, without waiting
for Champlain. In the summer of 1615 he set up his altar in a new bark
lodge in the Huron town of Caragouha, near Thunder Bay, and began to
learn a new strange tongue, so as to teach the flock around him.
The Recollects had thus undertaken to evangelize two races, who,
with their kindred, extended from the ocean to the Mississippi, from
the Chesapeake and Ohio to the frozen lands of the Esquimaux. Their
languages, differing from all known to European scholars in vocabulary,
forms, and the construction of sentences, offered incredible
difficulties. The ideas these Indians held of a future state were so
obscure, that it was not easy to find enough of natural religion by
which to lead them to the revealed. Progress was naturally slow,—there
was more to discourage than to cheer. Still the Franciscans labored
on; and though their number was limited to six, they had in 1625 five
missions at Tadousac, Quebec, Three Rivers, among the Nipissings, and
in the Huron country.
Finding that the mission field in New France required an order bound
to less scrupulous poverty than their own, the Recollects of Paris
invited the Jesuits to aid them. Enemond Masse, of the unfortunate
Acadian mission, with Charles Lalemant and John de Brebeuf, came over
in 1625. The old opposition to the order was renewed. The Jesuits were
homeless, till the Recollects opened the doors of their convent to
them. Commanding resources from influential friends, they soon began
to build, and brought over men to swell the settlement and cultivate
the ground. They joined the Recollects in the missions already founded,
profiting by their experience. This enabled the Church to extend its
missions. Father Joseph de la Roche d’Aillon, leaving the Hurons,
struck southwesterly, and founded a mission among the Neutral Nation,
apparently on the eastern bank of the Niagara, and urged his countrymen
to open direct communication by way of Lake Ontario with that fertile
part of the country.
The little colony at Quebec was, however, on the verge of starvation;
and after once baffling the English, Champlain surrendered in 1629,
and the missions of the Recollects and Jesuits came to a close. A
mere handful of converts was all the reward of their long and zealous
labors, and these they were compelled to leave exposed to the danger of
lapsing back into their original heathendom.
We cannot trace very distinctly the system adopted by the Recollects
and their Jesuit auxiliaries during this first period of mission labor
in Canada. Their usual course was to remain during the pleasant months
at the French posts,—Quebec, Three Rivers, and Tadousac,—attending to
the spiritual wants of the French and of the Indians who encamped near
by for trade, and then to follow an Indian band on its winter hunt. The
Recollects spoke despondingly. Some young men were taken to France and
instructed there,—one, Peter Anthony, having the Prince de Guimené as
his sponsor in baptism. But they found it almost impossible to keep
the young for any prolonged instruction, and they hesitated to baptize
adults, except in case of danger of death.
In the Huron country Father Nicholas Viel succeeded Le Caron, and
had his little chapel at Quieunonascaran, cultivating a small patch
of ground around his bark lodge. His success does not seem to have
exceeded that of his fellow religious in the more nomadic tribes. While
on his way to Quebec in 1625 he was treacherously hurled from his canoe
by a Huron guide, and perished in the rapid waters near Montreal that
still bear the name of _Sault au Récollet_.
Another Recollect, Father William Poullain, while on his way with some
Frenchmen from Quebec to Sault St. Louis, fell into the hands of the
Iroquois, who were about to torture him at the stake, when he was saved
by an offer of an exchange made by his countrymen.
The Jesuits adopted the system of the Recollects, but we have no
details of their labors,—one Huron boy taken to France, where he was
baptized by the name of Louis de Sainte Foy, being the result of the
joint labors to which most allusion is made.
The Court of France seems to have considered that both Recollect and
Jesuit had failed to acquire the languages of the country sufficiently
to do the work of God and of his most Christian Majesty. At all events,
each order hastened to put in print evidence of its proficiency
in American linguistics. The Recollect Sagard published a Huron
Dictionary; the Jesuit Brebeuf, a translation of Ledesma’s Catechism
into Huron, with the Lord’s Prayer and other devotions rendered into
Montagnais by Father Enemond Masse.[678]
When England reluctantly yielded up her Canadian conquest, the
all-powerful Cardinal Richelieu seems to have looked with no kindly
eye on either of the bodies who had already labored to evangelize New
France. He offered the mission to his favorite order, the Capuchins,
and only when they declined it did he permit the Jesuits to return.
[Illustration]
With the restoration of Canada to France by the treaty of Saint
Germain in 1632, the history of the great Jesuit missions begins. For
some years the Fathers of the Society of Jesus were, almost without
exception, the only clergy in the colony in charge of all the churches
of the settlers and the missions to the Indian tribes. When a pious
association, under the inspiration of the Venerable Mr. Olier, founded
Montreal, members of the Society of Priests which he had formed at
Saint Sulpice became the clergy of that town; and they gathered near it
a double-tongued Indian mission, which still continues to exist under
their care. They made no attempt to extend their labors, except in the
missionary voyage of Dollier de Casson and Galinée in the mission of
the Abbés Fénelon and Trouvé at Quinté Bay, and the later labors of the
Abbé Picquet at Ogdensburg.
When Bishop Laval was appointed for Canada in 1658, he founded a
seminary at Quebec, which was aggregated to the Seminary of the Foreign
Missions in Paris. The Jesuits then resigned all the parishes which
they had directed in the colony, and confined themselves to their
college and their Indian missions. The priests of the Seminary of
Quebec, beside their parish work, also undertook missions among the
Indians in Acadia, Illinois, and on the lower Mississippi.
A collision between the Governor of Canada and the Bishop with his
clergy and the Jesuits, in regard to the sale of liquor to the Indians,
led the Government to send back the Recollects to resume their early
labors. They did not, however, undertake any important missions among
the Indian tribes. Their efforts were confined almost exclusively
to the period and course of La Salle’s attempts at settlement and
exploration, and to a mission at Gaspé and a shorter one on the
Penobscot.
When the colony of Louisiana took form, the Indian missions there were
confided to the Jesuits, who directed them till the suppression of the
order terminated their existence in the dominions of France. Spain, in
her colonies, sent other orders to continue the work of the Jesuits,
and this was done successfully in some places; but there was no effort
made to sustain those of the Jesuits in Canada and Louisiana, and amid
the political changes which rapidly ensued the early French missions
gradually dwindled away.
These Jesuit missions embraced the labors of the Fathers among the
Micmacs, chiefly on Cape Breton Island and at Miscou; the missions
among the Montagnais, Bersiamites, Oumamiwek, Porcupine Indians,
Papinachois, and other tribes of the lower St. Lawrence and Saguenay,
the centre being at Tadousac; the missions of which Quebec was
the immediate centre, comprising the work among the Montagnais
of that district and Algonquins from the west. Of this Algonquin
mission, Sillery soon became the main mission; but as the Algonquins
disappeared, Abenakis came to settle there, and remained till the
chapel was removed to St. François de Sales. Then Three Rivers was
a mission station for the Indians near it, and for the Attikamegues
inland, till a separate mission was established for that tribe. Beyond
Montreal was the mission to the Nipissings, and the great Huron
mission, the scene of the most arduous and continued labors of the
Fathers among the palisaded towns of the Wyandots and Dinondadies.
After the ruin of these nations, the Jesuits led one part of the
survivors to Isle Orleans, and subsequently gathered a remnant of
them at Lorette, where their descendants still remain. The rest fled
towards the Mississippi, and were zealously followed by the energetic
missionaries, who gathered them at Mackinac, whence they removed in
time to Detroit, and ultimately to Sandusky, the last point where the
Jesuits ministered to them.
Beyond Lake Huron was the great Ottawa mission, embracing the attempts
to christianize the Ottawas on Lake Superior, the Chippewas at Sault
Ste. Marie, the Beaver Indians and Crees; at Green Bay was another
post for the Menomonees, Pottawatamies, Foxes, and Mascoutens; while
south of Lake Michigan came in time Jesuit labors among the Miamis and
Illinois. The missions attempted among the Sioux beyond the Mississippi
mark the western limit of the old Jesuit efforts to convert the native
tribes.
With the establishment of Louisiana came the missions of the Society
among the Yazoos, Arkansas, Choctaws, Alibamons, and other tribes.
THE MICMAC MISSION.—The Jesuit missions among the Micmacs never
attained any remarkable development, and most of the territory occupied
by this branch of the Algonquin family was attended by other bodies of
missionaries. Father Julian Perrault began his labors on Cape Breton
in 1634; Charles Turgis, with others, was at Miscou in the following
years. Most of the Jesuits, however, were compelled to withdraw with
shattered health; and Turgis, devoting himself to the care of the sick,
died at his post in 1637. Father John Dolebeau became paralyzed, and
while returning to France was blown up at sea. At last, however, Father
Andrew Richard and Martin de Lyonne succeeded in founding a mission;
they learned the language, and extended their labors to Chaleurs Bay,
Ile Percée, Miramichi, and Chédabuctou, finding one old woman who had
been baptized by Biard at Port Royal. Lyonne died, devotedly attending
the sick, in 1661; Richard continued his labors some years later, aided
for a time by James Fremin, and cheered by visits from his superior,
Jerome Lalemant. They made some converts, although they did not banish
the old superstitions and savagery of the tribe; but when Bishop Laval
visited Gaspé in 1659, the missionaries presented one hundred and forty
Indian Christians for confirmation.
[Illustration]
When Richard’s labors ceased, the Recollects took charge of the mission
at Isle Percée, where French and Indians were attended from about 1673
by Fathers Hilarion Guesnin and Exuperius Dethune. They were succeeded
in 1675 by Father Christian Le Clercq, who took up the Indian mission
with zeal, and has left ineffaceable traces of his twelve years’ labor.
He acquired the Micmac language; and finding that some Indians, to
aid their memory in retaining his instructions, employed a system of
hieroglyphics on bits of bark, he studied and improved it, till he
had the daily prayers, mass, and catechism in this form. The Indians
readily adopted these hieroglyphics, and taught them to their children
and later converts. They have been retained in use till the present,
and the Rev. Christian Kauder, a Redemptorist, had type cut in Austria,
and published a catechism, hymn and prayer book, in them at Vienna in
1866. In 1685 land was given to the priests of the Seminary of Quebec;
gentlemen of that body, with some Recollects and occasionally a Jesuit
Father, served the coast from Gaspé to Nova Scotia, and all the Micmacs
became Catholics. They seem to have been attended with the French,
and not as a distinct mission. The Micmac territory included not only
the coast, but Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland.
Of these missionaries, Messrs. Thury and Gaulin and the Recollect
Felix Pain seem to have been the most prominent. The Abbé Anthony S.
Maillard, who was missionary to the Micmacs in Cape Breton and Acadia
till his death in 1768, exercised great influence; and his mastery of
the language is shown in his Grammar of the Micmac, which was printed
at New York in 1864.
THE MONTAGNAIS MISSION.—Tadousac was from the commencement of French
settlement on the St. Lawrence an anchoring-place for vessels and
a trading-station which attracted Indians from the west and north.
Missionaries made visits to the spot from an early period, but the
Jesuit mission there is regarded as having been founded in 1640. It
received charitable aid from the Duchess d’Aiguillon, who maintained
for a time the Fathers employed there. Father John de Quen may be said
to have established the first permanent mission, from which gradually
extended efforts for christianizing the tribes on the shores down to
Labrador and on the upper waters of the Saguenay.
The first mission was the result of the effort of Charles Meiachkwat,
a Montagnais who had visited Sillery and induced the Jesuit Fathers to
send one of their number to Tadousac. Charles erected the first chapel;
and may be regarded as the first native Christian of that district, and
first native catechist, for he visited neighboring tribes to impart
what religious knowledge he had learned.
The missionaries encountered the usual difficulties,—great laxity
of morals, a deep-rooted belief in dreams, the influence of the
medicine-men, and vices introduced by the traders, especially
intoxication. Father Buteux, who replaced De Quen for a time, seems to
have been the first to give his neophytes the kind of calendar still in
use among the wandering Indians, with spaces for each day, to be marked
off as it came, and Sundays and holidays so designated by symbols that
they could recognize and observe them.
The missionaries at first went down from Quebec in the spring, and
continued their labors till autumn, when the Indians scattered for
the winter hunt; but as the neophytes felt the want of a regular
ministry during the winter, they attempted, in 1645, to supply it by
performing some of the priestly functions themselves. This led to
fuller instruction; and to impress them, the missionaries left marked
pieces of wood of different colors, called _massinahigan_, a word still
in use in all the Catholic missions among Algonquin nations for a book
of prayers.
In 1646 De Quen ascended the Saguenay, and penetrated, by way of the
Chicoutimi, to Lake St. John, in order to preach to the Porcupine
tribe, who had already erected a cross in their village. Three years
later, Father Gabriel Druillettes visited the same tribe and reared
his bark chapel among them. In 1651 De Quen made another missionary
excursion, reaching various villages on the lake, and subsequently,
returning to Tadousac, sailed down the St. Lawrence till he reached
bands of the Oumamiwek or Bersiamites, among whom he began mission work.
[Illustration]
The mission of the Holy Cross at Tadousac was, however, the scene of
the most assiduous labors, as often a thousand Indians of different
tribes would be encamped there; and though nothing could be done to
check the errant life of these Algonquins, ideas of Christian morality
and faith were inculcated, and much reformation was effected. In 1660
Father Jerome Lalemant, superior of the missions, continued the labors
of his predecessors on Lake St. John, and ascending the Mistassini,
reached Nekouba, then a gathering-place for the Algonquin tribes of
the interior. Here they hoped to reach several nations who had never
seen a missionary, and especially the Ecureuil, or Squirrel tribe; but
the Iroquois war-parties had penetrated farther than missionary zeal,
and the Jesuits found the Algonquins of these remote cantons fleeing
in all directions after sustaining a series of defeats from the fierce
men-hunters from the Mohawk and Oswego. The great aim was to reach the
Crees, but that nation was subsequently approached by way of the great
lakes, when the route in that direction was opened by Menard.
[Illustration]
Bailloquet and Nouvel wintered in successive years with bands of
Montagnais, travelling in snow-shoes, and drawing their chapel
requisites on a sled, as they followed the hunters, pitching their
tents on encountering other parties, to enable them to fulfil their
religious duties. Then, in the spring of 1664, while Druillettes
visited the tribes on the upper waters of the Saguenay, Nouvel ascended
the Manicouagan to the lake of that name in the country of the
Papinachois, a part yet untrodden by the foot of the white man. Some
of the tribe were already Christians, converted at the mission posts;
but to most the missionary was an object of wonder, and his rude chapel
a never-ceasing marvel to them and to a more northerly tribe, the
Ouchestigouetch, who soon came to camp beside the mission cross.
Nouvel cultivated this tribe for several years, wintering among them,
or pursuing them in their scattered cabins, till the spring of 1667,
when all the Christians of these Montagnais bands gathered at Tadousac
to meet Bishop Laval, who, visiting his diocese in his bark canoe, was
coming to confer on those deemed sufficiently grounded in the faith the
sacrament of confirmation. He reached Tadousac on the 24th of June, and
was welcomed by four hundred Christian Indians, who escorted him to the
temporary bark chapel, for the church had been totally destroyed by
fire. The bishop confirmed one hundred and forty-nine.
Beaulieu, Albanel, and Druillettes labored there in the following
years; but small-pox and other diseases, with want caused by the
Iroquois driving them from their hunting-grounds, had reduced the
Indians, so that, as Albanel states, in 1670 Tadousac was almost
deserted,—not more than one hundred Indians assembled there, whereas
he remembered the time when one could count a thousand or twelve
hundred encamped at the post at once; and of this petty band some were
Micmacs from Gaspé, and Algonquins from Sillery.
[Illustration]
In 1671, while Father de Crépieul remained in charge of the missions
near Tadousac, with which he was for years identified, Albanel, with
the Sieur Denys de St. Simon, ascended the Saguenay, and wintering near
Lake St. John pushed on by Lake and River Nemiskau, till they reached
the shores of Hudson’s Bay, where the Jesuit planted his cross and
began a mission. On his way to revisit it in 1674, he was crippled by
an accident, and Albanel found him helpless in mid-winter in the woods
near Lake St. John. Crépieul then visited the Papinachois in their
country, as Father Louis Nicolas did the Oumamis at the Seven Islands.
Boucher, a few years later, aided Crépieul, and from their chapels at
Chicoutimi and Metabetchouan as centres, missionary excursions were
made in all directions.
[Illustration]
Dalmas, a later auxiliary of Crépieul, after wintering at Chicoutimi,
was killed in the spring of 1694 on the shores of Hudson’s Bay.
De Crépieul clung to his arduous mission till 1702, when, broken by his
long and severe labors, he retired to Quebec, where he died soon after.
Peter Michael Laure, who occupied the same field from 1720 to 1737,
drew up a Montagnais grammar and dictionary, greatly aided, as his
manuscript tells us, by the pious Mary Outchiwanich.
Father John Baptist La Crosse was the last of the old Jesuit
missionaries at Tadousac and Chicoutimi, dying at the former post
in 1782, after the suppression of his order and the disasters of
his countrymen. He taught many of his flock to read and write, and
they handed down the knowledge from parent to child, clinging to the
religious books and Bible selections made for them by this missionary,
of whom they still recount wonderful works.
[Illustration]
THE MISSIONS AT QUEBEC, THREE RIVERS, AND SILLERY.—The Jesuit
missionaries on returning to Canada in 1632 resumed the instruction
of the wandering Montagnais near Quebec, Father Le Jeune taking the
lead; and when a post was established at Three Rivers, Father Buteux
began there the devoted labors which ended only with his life. The
missionaries during the time of trade when Indians gathered at the
French posts endeavored to gain their good-will, and instructed all
who evinced any good disposition; during the rest of the year they
made visits to wandering bands, often wintering with them, sharing the
dangers and privations of their hunting expeditions amid mountains,
rapids, and forests.
[Illustration: PAUL LE JEUNE.
From a photograph (lent by Mr. Parkman) of an old print.]
It was soon evident that their precarious mode of life, the rapid
diminution of game when they began to kill the animals for their furs
and not merely for food, small-pox and other diseases introduced by
the French, and the slaughters committed by the Iroquois, would soon
sweep away the Upper Montagnais, unless they could be made sedentary.
A few endeavored to settle near the French and maintain themselves by
agriculture, but in 1637 the missionaries began a kind of reduction
at a place above Quebec called at first St. Joseph, but soon known
as Sillery, from the name of the pious and benevolent Commander de
Sillery in France, who gave means for the good work. Two families,
comprising twenty souls in all, settled here, in houses built for
them, and began to cultivate the ground. Others soon joined them, and
plots were allotted to the several families. Of this settlement Noel
Negabamat may be regarded as the founder. Though Sillery was ravaged by
disease, which soon broke out in the cabins, the project seemed full
of promise; the Indians elected chiefs, and a form of government was
adopted. The nuns sent out in 1639 to found a hospital, for which the
Duchesse d’Aiguillon gave the necessary means, aided the missionaries
greatly. From the day they landed, these self-sacrificing nuns opened
wards for the reception of sick Indians, and they decided to establish
their hospital at Sillery. They carried out this resolution, and opened
it on the first of December, 1640, receiving both French and Indian
patients. Their services impressed the natives more deeply than did the
educational efforts of the Jesuit Fathers and of the Ursuline nuns, who
had schools for Indian children of various tribes at Quebec.
This mission was an object of especial care, and great hopes were
entertained of its effecting much in civilizing and converting the
Montagnais and Algonquins, both of which nations were represented in
the first settlers at St. Joseph’s. These Indians were induced to
cultivate the ground, but they still depended on their fishing, and
the winter hunt carried them off to the woods. This the missionaries
could not prevent, as the hunts supplied the furs for the trade of the
company which controlled Canada.
The hopes of the Jesuits were not to be realized. Some progress was
made, and converts like Noel Negabamat and Charles Meiachkwat exercised
great influence; but the Iroquois war-parties soon drove the new
agriculturists from their fields, the nuns removed their hospital
to Quebec in 1646, and the neophytes were scattered. “We behold
ourselves dying, exterminated every day,” wrote Negabamat in 1651.
Some years after, an accidental fire destroyed St. Michael’s church
with the mission house, and from that time the Indian settlement at
Sillery languished. Disease and excess aided the work of war, and the
Algonquins and Montagnais dwindled away.
[Illustration]
As early as 1643 some Abenakis from the banks of the Kennebec had
visited Sillery, and one chief was baptized. Father Druillettes soon
after visited their towns, and founded a mission in their country.
This was at first continued, but the Christians of the tribe and
those seeking instruction visited Sillery from time to time. This was
especially the case after 1657, when the Jesuits suspended their labors
in Maine, for fear of giving umbrage to the Capuchin Fathers who had
missions on the coast.
[Illustration]
Sillery revived as an Abenaki mission, but the soil at last proved
unfit for longer cultivation by Indians. By this time, Fathers James
and Vincent Bigot had been assigned to this tribe. They looked out
for a new mission site, and by the aid of the Marchioness de Bauche
bought a tract on the Chaudière River, and in 1683 established near
the beautiful falls the mission of St. Francis de Sales. Sillery was
abandoned, and there was nothing to mark the famous old mission site,
till a monument was erected a few years ago to the memory of Masse and
De Noue, who lie there.
[Illustration]
With the chapel of St. Francis as a base, a new series of missions
gradually spread into Maine. The Jesuits resumed their ministry on
the banks of the Kennebec; the Bigots, followed by Rale, Lauverjeat,
Loyard, and Sirenne, keeping up their work amid great danger, their
presence exciting the most fearful animosity in the minds of New
Englanders, who ascribed all Indian hostilities to them. Rale was
especially marked out. Though a man of cultivation and a scholar,—his
Abenaki dictionary being a monument of his mastery of the language,—a
price was set on his head, his chapel was pillaged by one expedition,
which carried off his manuscript dictionary[679] (now one of the
curiosities in Harvard College Library), and in a later expedition he
was slain at the foot of his mission cross, August 23, 1724. He knew
his danger, and his superior would have withdrawn him, but the Canadian
authorities insisted on his remaining.
Besides this Jesuit mission at Norridgewock, the priests of the
seminary at Quebec, anxious to do their part in the mission-work of
which their parent institution, the Seminary of the Foreign Missions at
Paris, did so much, founded a mission on the Penobscot. This was long
directed by the Rev. Peter Thury, who acquired great influence over the
Indians, accompanying them in peace and war till his death in 1699. A
Recollect, Father Simon, had a mission at Medoktek, on the St. John’s,
which was subsequently directed by the Jesuits, as well as that on the
Penobscot.
Meanwhile the mission on the Chaudière had been transferred to the
site still known as St. François, and on the death of Rale bands of
the Kennebec Indians emigrated to it, forming a strong Indian village,
which sent many a vindictive war-party on the frontiers of New England.
This drew on it fierce retaliation from Rogers and his partisan
corps, who captured the village, killed many, and fired church and
dwellings.[680]
THE MISSIONS AT THREE RIVERS AND MONTREAL.—Ascending the St. Lawrence,
the next mission centre was Three Rivers, where the Jesuit missionaries
Le Jeune and Buteux resumed, in 1633, the labors of the Recollect
Brother Du Plessis and Fathers Huet and Poullain. It was a place of
trade where Indians gathered, so that the missionaries found constant
objects of their care. Many were instructed, and returned to impart to
others their newly acquired knowledge of God’s way with man, and the
consolations of Christianity.
Gradually the Indians who had settled near Three Rivers were almost
entirely won; while the Attikamegues, or White Fish Indians, dwelling
far inland, came to ask a missionary to reside among them. They were
of the Montagnais tongue, and remarkable for their gentle character.
Father Buteux, charmed with their docility, instructed them; and
at last, in 1651, ascended the river, and after a toilsome journey
of fifty-three days, reached their country. All who had not become
Christians already were anxiously awaiting his arrival; a rude chapel
was raised, and the neophytes in their fervor crowded to it to listen
or to pray. The next year Buteux set out once more to make a missionary
visit to this interesting race; but the Iroquois were on their
track, and the missionary while making a portage received two fatal
wounds, and died amid his arduous duties. The tribe was soon nearly
annihilated, the survivors seeking refuge among the remote lodges of
the scattered Montagnais.
Among the converts at Three Rivers was Pieskaret, the most famous
warrior of the Montagnais or Adirondacks, whose bravery was the terror
of the Iroquois. But the Indians of that portion of the St. Lawrence
valley were doomed,—nearly all were swept away by the Iroquois; and
after the death of Buteux the Montagnais mission at Three Rivers seems
to have numbered few Indians, nearly all the survivors having fled to
their kindred tribes near Tadousac.
[Illustration]
When the settlement at Montreal was formed in 1641 by Maisonneuve
acting under the Society of Montreal, the Jesuits were the first
clergymen of the new town, and began to labor among the Indians who
gathered there from the St. Lawrence and Ottawa. This mission of the
Jesuits was not, however, a permanent one. The Sulpitians,—a community
of priests established in Paris by the Rev. John James Olier, one
of the members of the Montreal society,—became the proprietors of
the new settlement, and they continue still in charge of churches,
institutions, and missions on or near Montreal island, after a lapse of
more than two centuries. An Indian mission for Algonquins was begun on
the mountain at a spot now known as the Priests’ Farm, chiefly by the
liberality and zeal of the Rev. Mr. Belmont. Iroquois and Hurons also
came, and the mission was removed to Sault au Récollet, and then to the
Lake of the Two Mountains. Here it still exists, embracing an Iroquois
village and one of Algonquin language, made up in no small part of
Nipissings from the lake of that name. This is the oldest mission
organization in Canada, the Sulpitians having been unmolested by the
English Government, which put an end to the communities of the Jesuits
and Recollects.
Above Montreal no permanent missions were attempted among the Algonquin
bands dotted along the line of the Ottawa,—the Indians seeking
instruction on their visits to the French posts and missions, or
receiving missionaries from time to time, as their river was the great
highway to the West.
THE HURON MISSION.—The Huron nation in Upper Canada, a confederacy of
tribes allied in origin and language to the Iroquois, had been already
the field of a mission conducted by Recollects, aided after a time by
the Jesuits. When Canada was restored to France by the treaty of St.
Germain, Brebeuf penetrated to his old mission, in 1634, accompanied by
Fathers Daniel and Davost, and in September erected a log chapel in the
town of Ihonatiria. Thus began the greatest of the Jesuit missions in
Canada, which called forth the most intrepid courage of the heralds of
Christianity, and triumphed over the heathen hostility in the tribes,
only to perish at last by the hands of the terrible Iroquois.
The Hurons lived in palisaded towns, their bark cabins clustering
within, while the fields where they cultivated corn, beans, pumpkins,
and tobacco lay near. Their hunting and fishing excursions were
comparatively short, and they laid up stores of provisions for winter.
The opportunity for instructing the people was accordingly much greater
than among the nomadic tribes of the Algonquin family. Brebeuf,
already versed in the language, extended his studies and initiated his
associates into its intricate peculiarities. The young were the first
care, and catechetical instructions were daily given to all whom they
could gather. The Lord’s Prayer and other devotions were taught; but it
was not easy to secure continuous attendance. This led to the project
of a school at Quebec, to which some of the most promising boys were
sent. There, with less to tempt them, more progress was made; yet the
result was but temporary, for the pupils on returning to the upper
country threw aside their slight civilization.
[Illustration]
As other missionaries arrived, the labors of the Fathers in the Huron
country extended; but they found that the medicine-men were bitter
enemies, foreseeing a loss of all their influence. The march of
Europeans through America always spread new diseases. In the Huron
country the ravages were severe. The medicine-men ascribed all to
the missionaries. Cabins were closed against them; their lives were
in constant peril. Their house was set on fire, and a council of the
three tribes met to decide whether they should all be put to death.
The undaunted missionaries prepared to meet their fate, committing
their chapel service and the fruit of their Indian studies to Peter
Tsiwendeentaha, their first adult convert. Their fearless conduct at
last triumphed. Adults came to solicit instruction; Ossossare and
Teananstayae became mission stations, four Fathers laboring in each,
while Garnier and Jogues proceeded to the towns of the Tionontates,
a kindred tribe, who from their cultivation and sale of tobacco
were generally called by the French the Petun, or Tobacco tribe. As
new stations were formed and chapels built in the Huron towns, the
missionaries in 1639 erected on the River Wye the mission-house of St.
Mary’s, to serve as a centre from which priests could be sent to any of
the towns, and where they could always find refuge. They extended their
labors to the Neutral Nation and to the Algonquin tribes lying near the
Huron country, reaching as far as Sault Ste. Marie. The missionaries
endured great hardships and sufferings on these journeys from hunger,
cold, and accident,—Brebeuf having broken his collar-bone by a fall,
and reaching his lodge only by a long and weary progress on his hands
and knees. Their efforts seemed almost vain. In 1640 they could claim
only one hundred Christians out of sixteen thousand Hurons; a few
prominent chiefs had joined them, but the young braves would not submit
to the law of the gospel. Christian families, and still more Christians
in heathen families, were subjected to much persecution, till the
number of catechumens in a town enabled them to take a firm stand.
Meanwhile the Five Nations, freely supplied with firearms by the Dutch,
were annihilating the Huron tribes, already weakened by disease. The
war interrupted intercourse between the Huron country and Quebec.
Father Jogues, sent down in 1642 to obtain supplies for the mission,
while journeying back, fell with many Hurons into the hands of the
Mohawks, who killed most of the party, and led the rest with the
missionary to their towns. The missionary and his attendant, René
Goupil, were tortured and mutilated, reduced to the rude slavery of
Indian life, and witnessed the execution of most of their Hurons.
Full of missionary zeal, they endeavored to impart some ideas of
Christianity; but the effort cost Goupil his life, and Jogues was with
difficulty rescued by the Dutch, and sent to Europe.
[Illustration]
The missionaries in the Huron country, by the loss of the supplies in
the Huron flotilla, were reduced to great straits, till Brebeuf reached
them with two assistants, Garreau and Chabanel, whom no dangers could
deter. Father Bressani, returning to his western labors, was less
fortunate; he too was captured, and endured all but death at the hands
of the Mohawks. His sufferings led the charitable Dutch to effect his
release. Yet neither Jogues nor Bressani faltered; both returned to
Canada to continue their perilous work.
When a temporary peace gave the Huron mission a respite, there were
five churches in as many towns, and one for Algonquins living in the
Huron country. The voice of the missionary seemed to find more hearers,
and converts increased; but the end was at hand.
In July, 1648, the Iroquois attacked Teananstayae. As the braves
manned the palisades, Father Daniel was among them to give them the
consolations of religion, to confess and baptize; then he hurried to
the cabins to minister to the sick and aged. He found his chapel full,
and urging them to flight from the rear, he closed the front portal
behind him, and awaited the Iroquois braves, who had stormed the
palisade and were swooping down on the cross-crowned church. Riddled by
arrows and balls, he fell dead, and his body was flung into the burning
church of St. Joseph.
The capture of this town seemed a death-blow to hope in the bosoms of
the Hurons. They abandoned many of their towns, and fled to the islands
of Lake Huron or the towns of the Petuns. They could not be aroused to
any system of defence or precaution.
On the 16th of the ensuing March, a force of a thousand Iroquois
stormed, at daybreak, the Huron town which the missionaries called St.
Ignatius. So general and complete was the massacre, that only three
escaped to the next large town, St. Louis. Here were stationed the
veteran Brebeuf, companion of the early Recollect missioners in the
land, friend of Champlain, and with him as associate the young Gabriel
Lalemant. The Hurons urged the missionaries to fly; but, like Daniel,
they remained, exercising their ministry to the last, and attending to
every call of zeal. The Hurons repelled the first assault; but their
palisade was carried at last, and the victorious Iroquois fired the
cabins. The missionaries, while ministering to the wounded and dying,
were captured. They were taken, with other captives, to the ruined town
of St. Ignatius, and there a horrible torture began. They were bound
to the stake; Brebeuf’s hands were cut off; Lalemant’s body bristled
with awls and iron barbs; red-hot hatchets were pressed under their
arms and between their legs; and around the neck of Brebeuf a collar of
these weapons was placed. But the heroic old missionary denounced God’s
vengeance on the savages for their cruelty and hatred of Christianity,
till they cut off his nose and lips, and thrust a firebrand into his
mouth. They sliced off his flesh and devoured it, and, scalping him,
poured boiling water on his head, in mockery of baptism; then they
hacked off his feet, clove open his chest, and devoured his heart.
Lalemant was wrapped in bark to which fire was applied, and underwent
many of the same tortures as the older missionary; he too was baptized
in mockery, his eyes torn out and coals forced into the sockets. After
torturing him all the night, his tormenters clove his head asunder at
dawn.
[Illustration]
St Mary’s was menaced; but the Huron fugitives there sent out a
party which repulsed the Iroquois, who then retired, sated with
their vengeance. The Huron nation was destroyed. Fifteen towns were
abandoned. One tribe, the Scanonaenrat, submitted to the Iroquois, and
removed to the Seneca country in a body, with many Hurons of other
tribes. Some bands fled to the Petuns, Neuters, Eries, or Susquehannas.
A part, following the first fugitives to the islands in Lake Huron,
roamed to Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. These were in time brought
back by later missionaries to Mackinac.
The Huron mission was overthrown. A few of the Jesuit missionaries
followed the fugitives to St. Joseph’s Island; others joined Garnier
in the Petun mission. But that too was doomed. Echarita was attacked
in December, the Iroquois avoiding the Petun braves who had sallied
out to meet them. Garnier, a man of singularly attractive character,
earnest and devoted, though mortally wounded, dragged himself along on
the ground to minister to the wounded, and was tomahawked as he was
in the act of absolving one. Another missionary, Chabanel, was killed
by an apostate Huron. Their comrades accompanied the fugitive Petuns
as they scattered and sought refuge in the islands. The number of the
Hurons and Petuns was too great for the limited and hasty agriculture
to maintain. Great misery ensued. In June, 1650, the missionaries
abandoned the Huron country, and descended to Quebec with a number of
the Hurons. This remnant of a once powerful nation were placed on Isle
Orleans; but the Iroquois swept many of them off, and the survivors
found a home at Lorette, where their descendants still remain.
Thus ended the Huron mission in Upper Canada, which was begun by
the Recollect Le Caron in 1615, and which had employed twenty-nine
missionaries, seven of whom had yielded up their lives as the best
earnest of their sincerity and devotion to the cause of Christian
progress.
The Jesuit missions were by this time reduced to a most shadowy state.
The Iroquois had almost entirely swept away the Montagnais tribes on
the St. Lawrence above the Saguenay; they had cut to pieces most of the
bands of Algonquins on the Ottawa, while the country of the Hurons,
Petuns, and Neuters was a desert. The trading-posts of the French at
Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec were almost forsaken; no longer
did flotillas come laden with peltries to gladden the merchants, and
give missionaries an opportunity to address distant tribes. Several
missionaries returned to Europe, as there seemed no field to be reached
in America.
Suddenly, however, such a field presented itself. The Iroquois, who had
carried off a missionary—Father Poncet—from near Quebec, proposed
peace. They were in a fierce war with the Eries and Susquehannas, and
probably found that in their bloodthirsty march they were making the
land a desert, cutting off all supplies of furs from Dutch and French
alike. At all events, they restored Poncet, and, proposing peace,
solicited missionaries.
THE IROQUOIS MISSION.—War with the Iroquois had been almost
uninterrupted since the settlement of Canada. Champlain found
the Canadian tribes of every origin arrayed against the fierce
confederation which in their symbolic language “formed a cabin.” The
founder of Canada had gone to the very heart of the Iroquois country,
and at the head of his swarthy allies had given them battle on the
shores of Lake Champlain and on the borders of Lake Oneida. But the
war had brought the French colony to the brink of ruin, and swept its
allies from the face of the earth.
[Illustration]
Now peace was to open to missionary influence the castles of this
all-conquering people, and a foothold was to be gained there; and not
only this, but, relieved from war, Canada was to open intercourse with
the great West, and new missions were to be attempted in the basin of
the upper lakes and in the valley of the Mississippi. The missionaries
of Canada were thus to extend their labors within the present limits of
our republic on the north, as the Franciscans of Spain were doing along
the southern part from Florida to New Mexico.
The Recollect Joseph de la Roche d’Allion had already in early days
crossed the Niagara from the west; Jogues and Raymbault had planted
the cross at Sault Ste. Marie; Father Jogues had attempted to found a
mission on the banks of the Mohawk; but his body, with the bodies of
Goupil and Lalande, had mouldered to dust in our soil.
Father Simon le Moyne, who had succeeded to the Indian name of Jogues,
and who inherited his spirit, was the interpreter in the recent
negotiations, and had been invited to Onondaga and the Mohawk. For the
former, the seat of the council-fire of the Iroquois league, he set
out from Quebec July 2, 1654, and reached Onondaga by a route then new
to the French, passing through the St. Lawrence, Lake Ontario, and
the Oswego. He was favorably received at Onondaga, and the sachems,
formally by a wampum belt, invited the French to build a house on Lake
Ontario.
There was already a Christian element in the Iroquois cantons. Each
of the cantons contained hundreds of Hurons, all instructed in the
fundamental doctrines of Christianity, and not a few openly professing
it; while in the Seneca country was a town made up of the Scanonaenrat
Hurons, Petuns, and Neuters. Le Moyne found wherever he went Christians
eager to enjoy his ministry.
[Illustration]
His embassy filled all with hope; and the next year, as the Onondagas,
through a Christian chief, solicited the establishment of a mission
by the Jesuit Fathers, Peter Joseph Chaumonot and Claude Dablon were
selected. They reached Onondaga, and after a formal reception by the
sachems with harangues and exchange of wampum belts, the missionaries
were escorted to the spot given to them for their house and chapel.
Two springs, one salt and one of clear, sparkling fresh water, still
known as the Jesuits’ well, mark the knoll where St. Mary’s of Ganentaa
was speedily erected. The Canadian missionaries, from their resources
and alms contributed in France, spent large amounts to make this new
central mission adapted for all the fond hopes planned for its future
work in diffusing the gospel.
[Illustration]
The missionaries found the greatest encouragement in the interest
manifested, and in the numbers who came to solicit instruction. They
labored assiduously to gather the unexpected harvest; but mistrust
soon came, with reports of hostile action by the French. Dablon
returned to Canada, and a party of French under Captain Dupuis set
out to begin a settlement at Onondaga, while Fathers Le Mercier and
Menard went to extend the missions. They were welcomed with all the
formalities of Indian courtesy; and while Dupuis and his men prepared
to form the settlement, the missionaries erected a second chapel at
the Onondaga castle, which was attended from Ganentaa. Then René
Menard began a mission among the Cayugas, and Chaumonot, passing still
farther, visited the Seneca town of Gandagare, and that occupied by
the Scanonaenrat, many of whom were already Christians, and more ready
to embrace the faith. The Senecas themselves showed a disposition to
listen to Christian doctrines. Finding the field thus full of promise,
Chaumonot and Menard returned to Onondaga, whence they were despatched
to Oneida. Here they found less promise, but there were captive Hurons
to profit by their ministry.
[Illustration: LAKE ONTARIO AND THE IROQUOIS COUNTRY.
[From the _Jesuit Relation_ of 1662-1663, showing the relative
positions of the Five Nations, and Fort d’Orange (Albany).
Cf. this with map _Pays des Cinq Nations Iroquoises_, preserved in the
Archives of the Marine at Paris, and engraved in Faillon, _Histoire de
la Colonie Française_, iii. 196; and with one cited by Harrisse (no.
239), _Le Lac Ontario avec les Lieux circonuoisins, et particulierement
les Cinq Nations Iroquoises, l’Année_ 1688, which he would assign to
Franquelin.—ED.]]
Meanwhile Father Le Moyne had visited the Mohawk canton from Canada,
and prepared the way for a mission in that tribe.
Thus at the close of 1656 missionaries had visited each of the Five
Nations, and all seemed ready for the establishment of new and thriving
missions. The next year signs of danger appeared. A party of Hurons
compelled to remove to Onondaga were nearly all massacred on the way,
the missionaries Ragueneau and Duperon in vain endeavoring to stay the
work of slaughter, which was coolly ascribed to them. The Mohawks,
though they received Le Moyne, were openly hostile. They attacked
a flotilla of Ottawas at Montreal, and slew the missionary Leonard
Garreau, who was on his way to the far West, to establish missions on
the upper lakes.
[Illustration]
The missionaries in the cantons and the little French colony at
Onondaga were soon evidently doomed to a like fate. So evident was the
hostility of the Five Nations, that Governor d’Ailleboust arrested
all the Iroquois in Canada to hold them as hostages. The missionaries
at Ganentaa saw their danger, and through the winter formed plans for
escape. At last, in March, they prepared for a secret flight, and to
cover their design gave a banquet to the Onondagas, adopting the kind
in which, according to Indian custom, all the food must be eaten.
Dances and games were kept up till a late hour; and when the weary
guests at last departed, the French, who had amid the din borne to
the water’s edge boats and canoes secretly prepared in their house,
embarked, and, plying oar and paddle all night long, reached Lake
Ontario unseen and undiscovered even by a wandering hunter. It was
not till the following evening that the Onondagas, finding the house
at Ganentaa still and quiet, discovered that the French had vanished.
But the mode of escape was long a mystery to them, so cautiously and
adroitly had all the preparations for flight been made.
Le Moyne, in similar peril on the Mohawk, wrote a farewell letter,
which he committed to the Dutch authorities; but the sachems of the
tribe suddenly sent him to Montreal in the care of a party, so that
in March, 1657, the Jesuit missionaries had all withdrawn from the
territory of the Five Nations, after their short but laborious effort
to open the eyes of the people to the truths of religion.
The Iroquois then dropped the mask, and war parties swept through
the French colony, filling it with fire and blood. Yet the influence
of the missionaries had not been in vain. One able man, Garakonthié,
had listened and studied, though his unmoved countenance gave no
token of interest or assent. He became the protector of the Indian
Christians and of French prisoners, as well as an open advocate of
peace. Saonchiogwa, the Cayuga sachem, embraced his views, and in the
summer of 1660 appeared at Montreal as an envoy of peace, restoring
some prisoners and demanding a missionary for Onondaga. The Governor
of Canada hesitated to ask any of the Jesuit Fathers to undertake so
perilous a duty; but as the lives of the French at Onondaga depended on
it, Father Le Moyne intrepidly undertook the mission. He was waylaid
by Oneidas, but escaped, and reached Oswego. Garakonthié came out to
meet him. Once more peace was ratified. Nine prisoners accompanied
Garakonthié to Montreal, Le Moyne remaining; but so frail was the
newly established peace, that war parties from Mohawk and Onondaga
slew, near Montreal, two zealous Sulpitians, the Rev. Messrs. Vignal
and Le Maître. Though aware that any moment might be his last, Le
Moyne labored on at Onondaga and Cayuga among Huron captives and
native Iroquois, many, especially women, having become Christians, and
instructing others whom they brought to the missionary. His labors
ended in the spring of 1661, when he returned to Canada with the rest
of the French captives.
Again war was resumed, and though there were negotiations for peace,
and even applications for missionaries, the French Government, weary of
being the sport of Indian treachery, resolved to humble the Iroquois.
Regular troops and a body of colonists were sent from Europe, and
preparations made for a vigorous war. Forts were erected on the
Sorel River and Lake Champlain to cover Canada and aid in operations
against the Mohawks and Oneidas. The western cantons, influenced by
Garakonthié, proposed peace, and their proposals were accepted. Then,
in 1665, De Courcelles led a force, on snow-shoes, to the very castles
of the Mohawks, and though the tribe was warned in time to escape,
their flight had its effect on the other cantons. The Oneidas asked for
peace, and the Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas renewed their request.
De Tracy, the Viceroy of Canada, led in person a force of twelve
hundred French and one hundred Indians to the Mohawk country, and laid
it waste, burning all their towns and destroying all their stores of
provisions.
This exhibition of strength compelled the Mohawks to sue for peace.
All the cantons united in the treaty, and all solicited missionaries.
Once more were the Jesuits to undertake to propagate Christianity in
the towns of the Iroquois league, which had been so uniformly hostile
to the French and their allies. In July, 1667, Fathers Fremin, Bruyas,
and Pierron set out for the field of their mission work, trusting
their lives to a Mohawk party. They reached Gandawagué, and there and
elsewhere found Christians. A chapel in honor of St. Mary was raised,
and Fremin, sending Bruyas to Oneida, began his labors seriously.
Pierron, after visiting Albany, returned to Quebec, and in May, 1668,
Onondaga was assigned to Father Julian Garnier. Then De Carheil began
St. Joseph’s mission at Cayuga; and Fremin, leaving Pierron on the
Mohawk, set out for the Seneca country to establish a mission there.
Missionaries were thus at their labors in all the cantons, reviving
the faith of the captive Hurons, and winning the better disposed to
the faith. At Onondaga, Garakonthié during his life was the great stay
of the missions. He did not at once embrace Christianity; but after
mature deliberation was baptized with great solemnity in the cathedral
of Quebec in 1669, and persevered to his death, respected by English,
Dutch, and French, and by the Indians of the Five Nations, as a man
of remarkable ability and virtue. The Mohawk canton gave to the faith
Catharine Ganneaktena, an Erie captive, who founded subsequently a
mission village on the St. Lawrence; Catharine Tehgahkwita, a Mohawk
girl whom Canada reveres to this day as a saint; the Chief Assendasé;
and subsequently Kryn, known as the Great Mohawk: Oneida gave the
Chief Soenrese. Everywhere the missionaries found hearers, and among
them many with courage enough to throw off the old ideas and accept
Christianity with the strict obligations it imposed. The liquor which
was sold without check at Albany made drunkenness prevalent throughout
the castles of the Five Nations, brutalizing the braves; and these
degraded men became tools of the medicine-men, who, clinging to the old
belief, rallied around them the old Pagan party. But it is a remarkable
fact that the Jesuit missionaries, while they did not succeed in
making the Five Nations Christian, overthrew the worship of Agreskoué,
or Tharonhiawagon, their old divinity, so completely that his name
disappeared; and even those Iroquois who to this day refuse to accept
Christianity, nevertheless worship Niio or Hawenniio, God or the Lord,
who is no other than the God preached by the Jesuits in their almost
hopeless struggle in the seventeenth century.
The Christians in the cantons were subjected to so many annoyances
and petty persecutions, that gradually some sought homes with the
Hurons at Lorette; but when, in 1669, the Jesuits offered La Prairie
de la Magdelaine, a tract owned by them opposite Montreal, the
Iroquois Christians began there the mission of St. Francis Xavier.
The opportunity of being free from all molestation, of enjoying their
religion in peace, led many to emigrate from the castles in New York,
and a considerable village grew up, which the French fostered as a
protection to Canada. This mission in time was moved up to Sault St.
Louis, and became the present village of Caughnawaga, of which St.
Regis is an offshoot. About the same time Iroquois Christians gathered
at the Sulpitian Mission of the Mountain formed a village there
beside that of the Algonquins, and this, removed to the Lake of the
Two Mountains, still subsists, the same church serving for the flock
divided in language.
These missions, continually recruited by accessions of converts from
New York, afforded the missionaries the best opportunity for improving
the Indians, and the spirit of religious fervor prevailed. The daily
devotions, the zeal and piety of these new Christians, won encomiums
from the bishop and clergy and from the civil authorities.
The sachems of the league saw with no favorable eye this emigration
which was building up Iroquois settlements in Canada; for at Quinté
Bay, Lake Ontario, was a third, chiefly of Cayugas, among whom the
Sulpitians became missionaries. Finding their own efforts to recall the
emigrants fruitless, the sachems complained to the English authorities.
Dongan, the able governor of New York, whose great object was to
exclude the French from the territory south of the great lakes, took up
the matter in earnest. He brought over English Jesuits to replace those
of France in the missions in the cantons from the Mohawk to Seneca
Lake, and offered the Christian Iroquois in Canada a tract at Saratoga,
promising them a missionary and special protection. The fall of James
II. prevented the successful issue of this plan; but the opposition
made manifest in the English policy roused the old feeling in the
Iroquois, and when De la Barre, and subsequently Denonville, marched
to attack the Iroquois, the missionaries, no longer safe, abandoned
their missions. John de Lamberville, at Onondaga, was the last of the
missionaries, and he remained in his chapel till news arrived that
Denonville had seized many of the Iroquois in order to send them to the
galleys in France, and was advancing at the head of an army. His life
was forfeited, but the magnanimous sachems would not punish him for the
crime of another. They sent him safely back under an escort.
[Illustration]
Thus the Jesuit missions in New York ended virtually in 1687. Father
Milet, captured at Fort Frontenac, was a prisoner at Oneida from 1689
to 1694; and in spite of a severe law passed by New York in 1700,
Bruyas, the very next year, endeavored to revive the Iroquois missions;
but they never recovered any of their old importance, and were finally
abandoned in 1708, when the last Jesuit missionary retired to Albany.
Thenceforth the Jesuits devoted themselves to their mission at Sault
St. Louis; though at a later period the Sulpitian Picquet gathered a
new mission at the Presentation, now Ogdensburg, in 1748.
[Illustration]
During the period of the main missions in the tribes from 1668 to
1687, the baptisms—chiefly of infants, and adults in danger of
death—were about two hundred and fifty a year in the Five Nations; no
permanent church or mission-house was erected, and the result of their
teachings was the only monument. This was not slight: many were sincere
Christians, frequenting Montreal and Philadelphia for the practice of
their religion, while the Moravian and other later missionaries found
these converts, from a knowledge of Christian thought and prayers,
valuable auxiliaries in enabling them to reach the heathen Iroquois.
Pennsylvania, which had English Jesuit missionaries in her borders,
wisely employed their influence to attract Catholic Iroquois to the
chapel in Philadelphia, in order to win through them the good-will of
the cantons.
Towards the close of the Jesuit missions in New York, the Recollects
appeared within the Iroquois limits at Quinté Bay and Niagara, during
La Salle’s sway; but they made no serious effort to found a mission,
though Father Hennepin obtained Bruyas’ works on the Mohawk language,
in order to fit himself for the task. After the extinction of the
Jesuits, secular priests continued the missions at Sault St. Louis and
St. Regis, which still exist.
THE OTTAWA MISSIONS.—In the geographical distribution of the country,
the district around Lake Superior acquired at an early period the
name of the country of the Ottawas, from the first tribe which opened
intercourse with the French. The Jesuits, after establishing their
missions among the Hurons, soon extended their care to the neighboring
Algonquin tribes, and in 1641 Father Jogues and Father Raymbault
visited the Chippewas of Sault Ste. Marie. But the overthrow of the
Wyandots and the desertion of their country interrupted for years all
intercourse between the French on the St. Lawrence and the tribes
on the upper lakes. Yet in 1656 an Ottawa flotilla reached the St.
Lawrence, and the missionaries Garreau and Druillettes set out with
them for the West; but near Montreal Island they were ambushed by the
Iroquois, and Garreau was left weltering in his blood. Undeterred by
his fate or by the hardships and perils of the long journey, the aged
Menard, a veteran of the Huron and Cayuga missions, set out, encouraged
by Bishop Laval, with another Ottawa flotilla, in July, 1660, expecting
no fate but one that would appall most men. “Should we at last die
of misery,” he wrote, “how great our happiness will be!” Paddling
all day, compelled to bear heavy burdens, deprived of food, and even
abandoned by his brutal Ottawa guides, Menard at last reached a bay
on the southern shore of Lake Superior on the festival of St. Teresa,
and named it in her honor. It was apparently Keweenaw Bay. “Here,” he
wrote, “I had the consolation of saying mass, which repaid me with
usury for all my past hardships. Here I began a mission, composed of
a flying church of Christian Indians from the neighborhood of the
settlements, and of such as God’s mercy has gathered in here.” A chief
at first received him into his wigwam, but soon drove him out; and the
aged priest made a rude shelter of fir branches piled up, and in this
passed the winter laboring to instruct and console some as wretched
as himself. In the spring his zeal led him to respond to a call from
some fugitive Hurons who were far inland. He set out, but was lost at a
portage, and in all probability was murdered by a Kickapoo, in August,
1661.
Claude Allouez was the next Jesuit assigned to this dangerous post. In
the summer of 1665 he set out, and reaching Chegoimegon Bay on Lake
Superior on the first of October, began the mission of La Pointe du St.
Esprit, content to labor there alone with no mission station and no
countrymen except a few fur-traders between his chapel and Montreal.
For thirty years he went from tribe to tribe endeavoring to plant the
faith of which he was the envoy. He founded the mission at Sault Ste.
Marie, those in Green Bay, the Miami, and, with Marquette, the Illinois
mission. He was the first of the missionaries to meet the Sioux and to
announce the existence of the great river Mesipi. His first labors were
among the Chippewas at Sault Ste. Marie, the Ottawas at La Pointe, and
the Nipissings at Lake Alimpegon. When reinforced by Fathers Nicolas,
Marquette, and Dablon, the last two took post at Sault Ste. Marie; and
Allouez, leaving the Ottawa mission to Father Marquette, who soon had
the Hurons also gather around him at La Pointe, proceeded to Green Bay,
where he founded, in December, 1669, the mission of St. Francis Xavier
and a motley village of Sacs and Foxes, Pottawatamies, and Winnebagoes.
His visits soon extended to other towns on the bay and on Fox River.
At these missions the Jesuits, after their daily mass, remained for a
time to instruct all who came; then they visited the cabins to comfort
the sick, and to baptize infants in danger of death. Study of the
dialects of the various tribes cost hours of patient toil; and reaching
the western limit of the Algonquin tribes, they were already in contact
with the Winnebagoes and Sioux of a radically different stock,—the
Dakota.
Marquette was preparing the way to the lodges of the Sioux, when
the folly of the Hurons and Ottawas provoked that tribe to war. The
Hurons fled to Mackinac, the Ottawas to Manitouline, and Marquette was
compelled to defer his projected Sioux and Illinois missions.
The field seemed full of promise, and other missionaries were sent
out. They labored amid great hardships, and suffered much from the
brutality of the Indians. With tribes that were constantly shifting
their camping-grounds, it was difficult to maintain any regular system
of instruction for adults, or to bring the young to frequent the
chapel with any assiduity. Lay brothers, skilled as smiths and workers
in metal, were powerful auxiliaries in winning the good-will of the
Indians, as they repaired guns and other weapons and utensils. They
were the first manufacturers of the West, visiting the copper deposits
of Lake Superior, to obtain material for crucifixes, medals, and
other similar objects, which the missionaries distributed among their
converts. Yet even these lay brothers and their helpers, the volunteer
_donnés_, were not free from danger, and tradition claims that one of
them was killed by the brutal men whom they had so long served so well.
Of these missions, that at Mackinac, with its Hurons and Ottawas,
became the largest and most fervent. The former were more easily
recalled to their long-forgotten Christian duties, and the Ottawas
benefited by their example. Between 1670 and 1680 this mission, then
at Point St. Ignace, numbered five hundred Hurons and thirteen hundred
Ottawas.
The missions at Green Bay could show much less progress among the Sacs
and Foxes, Mascoutens, Pottawatamies, and Menomonees.
Father Marquette, setting out in June, 1673, from Mackinac with Louis
Jolliet, ascended the Fox, and reaching the Wisconsin by a portage,
entered the Mississippi, which they descended to the villages of the
Quappas or Arkansas. Returning by way of the Illinois River, the Jesuit
gave the Kaskaskias the first instructions, and was so encouraged that
he returned to found a mission, but died before he could reach his
chapel at Mackinac. This Illinois mission was continued by Allouez, who
visited it regularly for several years from his headquarters among the
Miamis.
There had arisen by this time a strong government opposition to the
Jesuits, based partly on a hostility to the order which had always
prevailed in France, but heightened in Canada by the fact that in the
struggle between the civil authorities and the bishop with his clergy
in regard to the selling of liquor to the Indians, the Jesuits were
regarded as the most stanch and active adherents of the bishop. This
feeling led to the recall of the Recollects. They found, however,
few avenues for their labors. Several were assigned to Cavelier de la
Salle, to accompany him on his explorations. One was stationed at Fort
Frontenac, and Father Hennepin made some attempt to acquire a knowledge
of Iroquois; but no mission work is recorded there or at Niagara, where
Father Watteau was left.
Father Gabriel de la Ribourde, with Hennepin and Zenobius Membré,
proceeded westward, and when La Salle established his post on the
Illinois, which he called Fort Crèvecœur, the three Franciscans
attempted a mission. Then Father Zenobius took up his residence in an
Illinois wigwam. He found great difficulty, and was not destined to
continue the experiment long. Hennepin, sent off by La Salle, descended
to the Mississippi, and fell into the hands of the Sioux, who carried
him up to the falls which still bear the name he conferred, “St.
Anthony’s.” He was rescued after a time by Du Lhut, but can scarcely
be said to have founded a mission. The Iroquois drove the French from
Fort Crèvecœur by their attack on the Illinois, Father Gabriel was
killed on the march by wandering Indians, and the attempted Recollect
mission closed. After La Salle’s descent of the Mississippi and
departure from the west, Allouez resumed his labors in Illinois, and
was followed by Gravier, who placed the mission on a solid basis, and
reduced the language to grammatical rules. Binneteau, the Marests,
Mermet, and Pinet came to join in the good work. The Illinois seemed to
show greater docility than did the tribes on Lake Superior and Green
Bay. The missionaries were stationed among the Kaskaskias, Cahokias,
Peorias, and Tamaroas. French settlements grew up in the fertile
district, and marriages with converted Indian women were not uncommon.
These missions flourished for several years, and a monument of the zeal
of the Jesuits exists in a very extensive and elaborate dictionary of
the language, with catechism and prayers, apparently the work of Father
le Boulanger.
When Iberville reached the mouth of the Mississippi he was accompanied
by Jesuit Fathers; but at that time no regular mission was attempted at
the mouth of the river.
The Seminary of Quebec resolved to enter the wide field opened by the
discovery of the Mississippi. Under the authority of the Bishop of
Quebec, the Rev. Francis de Montigny, the Rev. Messrs. St. Côme and
Davion were sent to Louisiana in 1698. They took charge of the Tamaroa
mission on the Illinois, and attempted missions among the Natchez,
Taensas, and Tonicas; but the Rev. Mr. St. Côme, who was stationed at
Natchez, and the Rev. Mr. Foncault were killed by roving Indians. Then
the priests of the Quebec Seminary withdrew from the lower Mississippi,
but continued to labor at Tamaroa, chiefly for the French, till the
closing years of French rule.
The Indian missions of Louisiana were then assigned to the Jesuits,
who were allowed to have a residence in New Orleans, but were excluded
from all ministry among the colonists. Their principal missions, among
the Arkansas, Yazoos, Choctaws, and Alibamons were continued till the
suppression of the order. At the time of the Natchez outbreak, the
Jesuit Father du Poisson, who had stopped at the post to give the
settlers the benefit of his ministry in the absence of their priest,
was involved in the massacre; Father Souel was butchered by the Yazoos
whom he was endeavoring to convert, and Father Doutreleau escaped in
a most marvellous manner. In the subsequent operations of the French
against the Chickasaws, Father Sénat, accompanying a force of French
and Illinois as chaplain, was taken and put to death at the stake,
heroically refusing to abandon the wounded and dying.
These Louisiana missions extended to the country of the Sioux, where
several attempts were made by Father Guignas, who was long a prisoner,
and by other Jesuit Fathers. Aubert died by the hands of the Indians
while trying to reach and cross the Rocky Mountains with La Verenderye.
The increasing hostility to the Jesuits naturally weakened their
missions, which received a death-blow from the suppression of the order
in France,—a step carried out so vindictively in Louisiana, that all
the churches at their Indian missions were ordered to be razed to the
ground.
As Canada fell to England and Louisiana to Spain, the work of the
Jesuit missionaries in French North America ended. Their record is
a chapter of American history full of personal devotedness, energy,
courage, and perseverance; none can withhold the homage of respect
to men like Jogues, Brebeuf, Garnier, Buteux, Gravier, Allouez, and
Marquette. Men of intelligence and education, they gave up all that
civilized life can offer to share the precarious life of wandering
savages, and were the first to reveal the character of the interior of
the country, its soil and products, the life and ideas of the natives,
and the system of American languages. They made known the existence
of salt springs in New York, and of copper on Lake Superior; they
identified the ginseng, and enabled France to open a lucrative trade in
it with China; they planted the first wheat in Illinois and the first
sugar in Louisiana. Their missions did not equal in results those of
the Franciscans in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California,—not
from any lack of personal ability or devotion to their work, but
because they were at the mercy of trading companies, which allowed them
a stipend just sufficing for their moderate wants; but neither company
nor government made any outlay for such mission-work as would have
enabled the missionaries to carry out any general plan for civilizing
the natives. The Spanish Government, on the contrary, dealt directly
with the missionaries, and did all to insure the success of their
teaching. When a mission was to be established in Texas, New Mexico,
or California, with the missionaries went a party of soldiers to erect
a _presidio_ or garrison-house as the nucleus of a settlement. These
soldiers took their families with them; civilized Indians from Mexico
who had acquired some European arts and trades were also sent, as being
able to understand the character of the Indians better. With the party
went horses, cattle, sheep, swine, agricultural implements, grain and
seeds for planting, looms, etc. Then a mission was established, and as
converts were made in the neighboring tribes, they were brought into
the mission, and there taught to read and write in Spanish, instructed
religiously, and trained to agriculture and trades. The mission was
under discipline like a large factory, and each family shared in the
profit.
The defect of the system was that no provision was made for the
gradual settling apart from the mission of those who showed ability
and judgment, allowing them to manage for themselves, and replacing
them by others. They were kept too long in the degree of vassals, with
no incentive to acquire manhood and independence. Accordingly, when
the missions were suppressed, the Indians, who had never acted for
themselves, were left in a state of helplessness.
Such a system in Canada would have saved the Indians of the St.
Lawrence Valley and Upper Canada. What was accomplished, was effected
by the indomitable energy of individuals,—the Jesuits, laboring most
earnestly and continuously, effecting most; the Sulpitians ranking
next; then the Priests of the Foreign Missions, and the Recollects.
In our time the work of winning the Indians to the Catholic faith, or
retaining them among its adherents, has devolved almost entirely on
the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Canada and Oregon, the Jesuits and
Benedictines in the United States.
CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION.
THE works bearing directly or mainly on the history of the Catholic
missions in Canada and the other parts of the northern continent once
claimed by France embrace so large a collection, that, instead of the
missions being an incident in the civil history, the civil history of
French America for much of its first century has to be gleaned from the
annals of its missionary work.
For the first Recollect mission,—1615-1629,—the main authority is
Sagard, _Le Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons, situé en l’Amérique vers
la Mer douce, és derniers confins de la Nouvelle France, dite Canada_,
Paris, Denys Moreau, 1632; enlarged a few years later, and published
as _Histoire du Canada et Voyages que les Frères Mineurs Recollects y
ont faicts pour la conversion des infidelles_, Paris, Claude Sonnius,
1636. To each of these works is appended a _Dictionnaire de la Langve
Hvronne_, Paris, 1632. Sagard’s work is very diffuse, rich in details
on Indian life and customs, but gives little as to the civil history of
Canada.[681]
Le Clercq, _Établissement de la Foi_, 2 vols. 12mo, 1691, translated
as _Establishment of the Faith_, 2 vols. 8vo, New York, 1881,[682]
gives in the first volume a clearer and more definite account of the
ecclesiastical history of Canada for the period embraced in the first
Recollect mission.
The _Voyages de Champlain_, Paris, 1619, gives some account of
the introduction of the Recollects into Canada.[683] In Margry,
_Découvertes et Établissements des Français_, Paris, 1875, there are
two memoirs by the Recollects, drawn up to obtain permission to return
to Canada,—one made in 1637 (vol. i. p. 3), the other in 1684 (p.
18),—both bearing on their earlier labors.
Le Clercq refers in two places[684] to “an ample Relation given to the
public” by the Recollects of Aquitaine for an account of their labors
in Acadia; but the work is still unknown to bibliographers and students.
For the later Recollect missions, the sources to be consulted are
Father Christian Le Clercq, _Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie_, Paris,
1691, and the second volume of his _Établissement de la Foi_. Hennepin,
in his _Description de la Louisiane_, Paris, 1683, 1688, translated
as _Description of Louisiana_, New York, 1881, gives an account of
his own missionary career; but his _Nouvelle Découverte_ expands his
former work, and introduces matter of doubtful authenticity, while his
_Nouveau Voyage_ is based on the second volume of Le Clercq.[685]
As bearing on the Recollect missions, cf. the _Voyage au Nouveau Monde_
of Father Crespel, Amsterdam, 1757; in English in _Perils of the Ocean
and Wilderness_, Boston.[686]
* * * * *
On the Jesuit missions, the works to be consulted are, for the first
attempt in Acadia, Biard, _Relation de la Nouvelle France, de ses
Terres, Naturel des Terres, et de ses Habitans_, Lyons, 1616, reprinted
in the _Relations des Jésuites_, Quebec, 1858, and in fac-simile by
Dr. O’Callaghan; the accounts in the _Annuæ Litteræ Societatis Jesu_
for 1612, Lyons, 1618, and for 1611, Douay, 1618; Biard’s letter in
Carayon’s _Première Mission des Jésuites au Canada_, pp. 1-105; and an
adverse view in Lescarbot, _Histoire de la Nouvelle France_, 3d ed.,
Paris, 1618.
For the missions of Canada proper, the series of _Jesuit Relations_,
as they are generally called, volumes issued in Paris, beginning
with the “Lettre du Père Charles l’Allemant,” Paris, 1627 (also vol.
xiii. of the _Mercure Français_), as _Relation de ce qui s’est passé
en la Nouvelle France en l’année MDCXXVI_, and continued annually
from the _Briève Relation du Voyage de la Nouvelle France_, by Father
Paul le Jeune, printed by Cramoisy at Paris in 1632, down to the
year 1672, comprising in all a series of forty-one volumes. Besides
the religious information which it was their main object to convey,
in order to interest the pious in France in their mission work, the
Jesuits in these _Relations_ give much information as to the progress
of geographical discovery, the resources and fauna of the country, the
Indian nations, their language, manners, and customs, their wars and
vicissitudes. The volumes have been much sought by collectors, and
the whole series was reprinted by the Canadian Government at Quebec
in 1858, in three large octavo volumes, under the title of _Relations
des Jésuites_. Though some _Relations_ were reprinted and translated
into Latin, complete sets have never been common. In Le Clercq’s
_Établissement de la Foi_ there is a bitter and satirical review of
these Jesuit _Relations_, but the writer evidently had only eight or
nine of the volumes; and Arnauld, the great enemy of the Jesuits,
having his attention drawn to them by Le Clercq’s work, found great
difficulty in getting copies of any, but finally discovered fourteen
in “a great library.” Dr. E. B. O’Callaghan drew attention to them in
a paper before the New York Historical Society, and several collectors
endeavored to complete sets. Mr. James Lenox obtained nearly all,
reprinting two that exist in almost unique copies. Matter was prepared
for subsequent volumes by the Superiors of the Canada missions,
and the _Relations_ for 1672-73, 1675, 1673-79, 1696, and separate
_Relations_ bearing on the Abenaki, Illinois, and Louisiana missions
have been printed to correspond with the old _Relations_; and many
of these were reprinted under the title of _Relations Inédites de la
Nouvelle France_, 2 vols., 12mo, Paris, 1861. The autobiography of
the missionary Chaumonot has also been issued (New York, 1858; Paris,
1869); and _Lives of Father Isaac Jogues and Brebeuf_, by Father
Felix Martin (Paris, 1873, etc.). One work called forth by the Jesuit
missions in Canada is the _Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains comparées
dux mœurs des premiers Temps_, by Father Lafitau, long a missionary at
Sault St. Louis, and author also of a treatise on the Ginseng.[687]
[Illustration: IROQUOIS FIVE NATIONS AND MISSION SITES,
1656-1684 (_John S. Clark_, 1879).]
For the Louisiana mission there are some letters in the _Lettres
Édifiantes_, which are also given in Rt. Rev. W. I. Kip, _Early Jesuit
Missions in North America_, New York, 1847. The close of that mission
is described in Carayon, _Bannissement des Jésuites de la Louisiane_,
Paris, 1865. Besides the works in French, there is a _Breve Relatione
d’alcune Missione_, by Father Joseph Bressani, a Huron missionary
captured and tortured by the Mohawks. It appeared at Macerata in
1653, and a French translation of it by F. Félix Martin was issued
in Montreal in 1852. The work of Du Creux, _Historia Canadensis_,
Paris, 1664, gives a summary of the mission work of the Jesuits in
Canada. Father Marquette’s account of his voyage down the Mississippi
was first printed by Thevenot, _Recueil de Voyages_, Paris, 1681, and
was translated into Dutch and issued by Vander Aa. It was printed
from the original manuscript by Mr. James Lenox,—_Récit des Voyages
et des Descouvertes du R. Père Jacques Marquette_,—and had been
previously translated and published by J. G. Shea in his _Discovery and
Exploration of the Mississippi Valley_, New York, 1852.
* * * * *
The history of the Sulpitian missions is to be found chiefly in recent
works: Faillon, _Histoire de la Colonie Française en Canada_, 3 vols.,
Montreal, 1854; _Vie de la Sœur Bourgeoys_, 1853; _Vie de Mlle. Mance_,
2 vols., 1854. Belmont, _Histoire du Canada_, Quebec, 1840; Dollier
de Casson, _Histoire de Montreal_, Montreal, 1869; and _Voyage de MM.
Dollier et Galinée_, Montreal, 1875, are printed from manuscripts of
early missionaries of that body.
Of the missions founded by the Seminary of Quebec nothing has been
printed except the _Relation de la Mission du Mississippi du Séminaire
de Québec en_ 1700, New York, 1861. The vast and successful Spanish
missions, extending from the Chesapeake to the Gulf of California, have
a literature of their own, of which it is not our province to treat.
[Illustration]
NOTE.—The map on the preceding page is a reproduction of a part of a
map by Gen. John S. Clark, showing the missionary sites, 1656-1684,
in the Iroquois country. It appeared in Dr. Charles Hawley’s _Early
Chapters of Cayuga History_, Auburn, 1879, which had an Introduction on
the _Jesuit Relations_ by Dr. Shea.
THE JESUIT RELATIONS,
AND OTHER MISSION RECORDS.
A CHRONOLOGICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY BY THE EDITOR.
THE main bibliographical sources for this study pertain to the Jesuit
missions, as follows:—
LE PÈRE AUGUSTE CARAYON: _Bibliographie historique de la Compagnie de
Jésus, ... depuis leur Origine jusqu’à nos jours_, Paris, 1864, 4º.
[Illustration]
HENRY HARRISSE: _Notes sur la Nouvelle France_, 1545-1700, Paris,
1872. He says, no. 49, that no library (1870-71) has a complete set
of the _Jesuit Relations_; and adds that, including those of 1616 and
1627, a full set consists of fifty-four volumes, nine of which are
second editions, and one a Latin translation. He had inspected all but
one.
E. B. O’CALLAGHAN: a catalogue raisonnée (1632-1672), in the _N.
Y. Hist. Soc. Proc._, 1847, p. 140, also printed separately. Field
(_Indian Bibliography_, no. 1,146), in noticing this essay, says that
Dr. O’Callaghan enumerates only forty titles, of which the Carter-Brown
Collection had thirty-six; Harvard College, thirty-five; Henry C.
Murphy, twenty-nine. “Of the forty-eight now [1873] known to exist, Mr.
Murphy has secured all but three.” Dr. O’Callaghan at that time named
twenty libraries, public and private, in the United States which had
sets more or less imperfect. The volumes of some years were not very
scarce, those of 1648-1649 and 1653-1654 being known in ten copies in
these libraries, while there were at that time no copies at all of the
years 1655 and 1659; and these, marked by titles varying from the usual
form, are still the rarest of the series.
The O’Callaghan pamphlet was reissued at Montreal in 1850 in a French
translation by Father Martin, the superior of the Jesuits in Canada,
who amended the text in places, and included the Biard _Relation_ of
1613. He also gave an account of unprinted ones still preserved in
Canada which were written subsequent to 1672, when the annual printing
of them ceased.
Deriving help from this and other sources, Dr. O’Callaghan issued
privately, in 1853, a broadside, with an amended list of the
_Relations_ and their several principal repositories,—State Library,
Albany; Harvard College Library; the Parliamentary Library, Quebec;
and the private libraries of Mr. Carter-Brown of Providence, Mr. Lenox
of New York, Rev. Mr. Plante, Mr. O. H. Marshall of Buffalo, and Mr.
George Bancroft.
In June, 1870, Dr. O’Callaghan issued a circular asking information
of owners of the volumes for a second edition of his tract; but I
cannot learn that the new edition was ever published. At the sale of
Dr. O’Callaghan’s library December, 1882, his _Catalogue_, p. 105,
showed 31 of the series; and they brought $1,068.45. Dr. O’Callaghan
contributed a paper on the _Relations to the International Magazine_,
iii. 185.
CARTER-BROWN LIBRARY: _Catalogue_, vol. ii. p. 164.
LENOX LIBRARY: _Contributions_, no. ii., _The Jesuit Relation_, etc.,
New York, 1879. The _Relation_ of 1659, of which the copy in the
Library of the Canadian Parliament was supposed to be unique, was
reprinted in fac-simile by Mr. Lenox. In 1854, at the destruction of
the Parliamentary Library at Montreal, its series of these _Relations_,
forty-three in number (except eight), and including this unique volume,
was destroyed. This _Contribution_ shows the Lenox Library to possess
forty-nine out of the series of fifty-five, counting different editions
of the forty-one titles, from 1632 to 1672, making the fifty-five to
include two translations and twelve second or later editions. The
Lenox series lacks nos. 1, 28, and 35, as enumerated, and of no. 35
the Carter-Brown Library has the only copy known in America. The Lenox
Library also lacks the first issue of no. 2, and the second issue of
nos. 3 and 5. It has four duplicates, with slight variations.
These _Relations_ will also be found entered under their respective
authors in Sabin’s _Dictionary_ and in Field’s _Indian Bibliography_.
* * * * *
The reason of the rarity of these books may lie in part in the
smallness of the editions, but probably most in the avidity of readers,
and consequent destruction; for Charlevoix says, “They were at the time
extremely relished in France.” Of their character, the same authority
says: “There is no other source to which we can apply for instruction
as to the progress of religion among the savages, or for a knowledge of
these people, all of whose languages the Jesuits spoke. The style of
these _Relations_ is extremely simple; but this simplicity itself has
not contributed less to give them a great celebrity than the curious
and edifying matter they contain.” Father Martin, in his translation
of Bressani, speaks (p. 8) Of these _Relations_ as the most precious
monument, and sometimes the only source, of the history of Canada, and
praises the impartial use made of them by Bancroft and Sparks. Parkman
says of them: “Though the productions of men of scholastic training,
they are simple and often crude in style, as might be expected of
narratives hastily written in Indian lodges or rude mission-houses in
the forest, amid annoyances and interruptions of all kinds. In respect
to the value of their contents, they are exceedingly unequal.... The
closest examination has left me no doubt that these missionaries wrote
in perfect good faith, and that the _Relations_ hold a high place as
authentic and trustworthy historical documents. They are very scarce,
and no complete collection of them exists in America.” Shea (_Le
Clercq_, i. 381) has a note of the contemporary discrediting of the
_Relations_ by rival orders.
The series was reprinted by the Canadian Government in 1858 in
three octavo volumes, with bibliographical notes and synopses,
containing—vol. i. 1611, 1626, 1632 to 1641; ii. 1642 to 1655; iii.
1656 to 1672. These reprinted volumes are not now easy to find, and
have been lately priced at £7 10_s._ and 100 francs. Field, _Indian
Bibliography_, no. 1,177; Lenox, _Jesuit Relations_, p. 14.
There have been three supplemental and complemental issues of allied
and later _Relations_; one was printed at the expense of Mr. Lenox,
and the others had the editorial care of Dr. O’Callaghan and Dr.
Shea, of which notice will be taken under their respective dates. See
the lists of Shea’s “Cramoisy Series” (100 copies printed) in the
_Lenox Contributions_, p. 15; Field, _Indian Bibliography_, nos. 129
and 1,397; and _Menzies Catalogue_, no. 1,811; and the _O’Callaghan
Catalogue_ for Dr. O’Callaghan’s series (25 copies printed). Dr. Shea’s
acquaintance with the subject was first largely evinced by his _History
of the Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States_,
1529-1854, published, at the instance of Jared Sparks, in New York in
1855 (Field, no. 1,392); and he published a list of early missionaries
among the Iroquois in the _Documentary History of New York_, iv. 189.
The earliest summarizing of these _Relations_ or of those before
1656, was by the Père du Creux (or Creuxius, b. 1596, d. 1666) in his
_Historiæ Canadensis, sev Novæ Franciæ, libri decem_, Paris, 1664
(pp. xxvi, 810, 4, map and thirteen plates). There are copies in
Harvard College, Carter-Brown, Lenox, and New York Historical Society
libraries. Cf. Rich (1832), no. 333, £1 16_s._; Brinley, no. 82, $80;
Carayon, no. 1,322; Harrisse, no. 120; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 945,
with fac-simile of title; Leclerc, _Bibl. Amér._ no. 706, 500 fr.;
Ternaux, no. 823; Lenox, p. 10; O’Callaghan, no. 699; Huth, i. 367;
Sunderland, vol. ii. no. 3,561; Charlevoix (Shea’s edition), i. 81,
who says: “This extremely diffuse work was composed almost exclusively
from the Jesuit _Relations_. Father du Creux did not reflect that
details read with pleasure in a letter become unsupportable in a
continuous history.” “It contains, however,” says Dr. Shea, “some
curious statements, showing that he had other material.” The map,
_Tabula Novæ Franciæ anno 1660_, extends so as to include Hudson’s
Bay, Newfoundland, the Chesapeake, and Lake Superior; and it has a
corner-map, “Pars regionis Huronum hodie desertæ.” The map has been
reproduced in Martin’s translation of Bressani’s _Relation_ of 1653,
and is given in part on another page of the present volume.
The _Relations_ were not much noticed by writers at the time, and few
allusions to them appear in contemporaneous works. One of the few
books which drew largely from them is _Le Nouveau Monde ou l’Amérique
Chrestienne.... Par M^e Charles Chavlmer, Historiographe de France_.
Paris, 1659.
The story of the missions of New France necessarily makes part of
the general works of Charlevoix and the other Catholic historians,
particularly the _Histoire du Canada_ of Brasseur de Bourbourg, Paris,
1859, who depends largely upon Bancroft for his facts. Mr. Parkman,
not bound by the same ties, gives a view of the Jesuits’ character,
in his _Jesuits in North America_, which has been questioned by their
adherents. His book, however, is of the first importance; and Dr.
George E. Ellis, in the _Atlantic Monthly_, September, 1867, recounts,
in a review of the book, the historian’s physical disability, which
has from the beginning of his labor sadly impeded the progress of
his work. Cf. also Dr. Ellis’s sustained estimate of Parkman, in his
_Red Man and White Man in North America_, p. 259. The story of the
Jesuits’ trials contained in the _Lettres Edifiantes_ is translated
in Bishop W. I. Kip’s _Early Jesuit Missions in North America_, 1846,
and again, 1866. Cf. also _Magazine of American History_, iii. 767; M.
J. Griffin in _Canadian Monthly_, i. 344; W. B. O. Peabody’s “Early
Jesuit Missionaries in the Northwest,” in _Democratic Review_, May,
1844, reprinted in Beach’s _Indian Miscellany_; Judge Law on the same
subject, in _Wisconsin Historical Society’s Collections_, iii. 89; and
Thébaud on the natives and the missions, in _The Month_, June, 1877;
Poole’s _Index_ gives other references, p. 683. Dr. Shea, at the end of
his _Catholic Missions_, p. 503, gives a list of his sources printed
and in manuscript.
[Illustration: A CANADIAN (_from Creuxius_).]
Of the tribes encountered by the Jesuits, there is no better compact
account than Mr. Parkman gives in the Introduction to his _Jesuits in
North America_, where he awards (p. liv) well-merited praise to Lewis
H. Morgan’s _League of the Iroquois_, and qualified commendation to
Schoolcraft’s _Notes on the Iroquois_, and gives (p. lxxx) a justly
severe judgment on his _Indian Tribes_. Mr. Parkman’s Introduction
first appeared in the _North American Review_, 1865 and 1866.
[Illustration: THE OHIO VALLEY, 1600.
This sketch follows one by Mr. C. C. Baldwin, accompanying an article
on “Early Indian Migrations in Ohio,” in the _American Antiquarian_,
i. 228 (reprinted in _Western Reserve Historical Society’s Tracts_,
no. 47), in which he conjecturally places the position of the tribes
occupying that valley at the opening of the seventeenth century. The
key is as follows: 1, Ottawas; 2, Wyandots and Hurons: 3, Neutrals; 4,
Iroquois; 5, Eries; 6, Andastes, or Susquehannahs; 7, Algonquins; 8,
Cherokees; 9, Shawnees; 10, Miamies; 11, Illinois; 12, Arkansas; 13,
Cherokees. (On the Andastes see Hawley’s _Cayuga History_, p. 36.)
[Illustration]
There is another map of the position of the Indians in 1600 in George
Gale’s _Upper Mississippi_, Chicago, 1867, p. 49; and Dr. Edward
Eggleston gives one of wider scope in the _Century Magazine_, May,
1883, p. 98. Cf. Henry Harvey’s _History of the Shawnee Indians_,
1681-1854, Cincinnati, 1855; and a paper by D. G. Brinton on the
Shawnees and their migrations, in the _Historical Magazine_, x. 21.
Judge M. F. Force, in _Some Early Notices of the Indians of Ohio_,
Cincinnati, 1879, an address before the Philosophical and Historical
Society of Ohio, has tracked the changing habitations of the tribes
of that region. There is a paper by S. D. Peet on the location of
the Indian tribes between the Ohio and the Lakes, in the _American
Antiquarian_, i. 85. William H. Harrison controverted the view that
the Iroquois ever conquered the valley of the Ohio, in his “Discourse
on the Aborigines of the Valley of the Ohio,” which was printed at
Cincinnati in 1838, at Boston in 1840, and in the Historical and
Philosophical Society of Ohio’s _Transactions_, vol. i. part 2d, p.
217; but compare C. C. Baldwin’s “Iroquois in Ohio, and the Destruction
of the Eries,” in _Western Reserve Historical Society’s Tracts_, no.
40. David Cusick (a Tuscarora) published _Sketches of Ancient History
of the Six Nations_, at Tuscarora Village, 1825, and again at Lockport,
N. Y., 1848. An historical sketch of the Wyandots will be found in
the _Historical Magazine_, v. 263; and Peter Clarke (a Wyandot) has
published the _Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandots_. See
references in Poole’s Index under Hurons, Iroquois, Indians, etc.]
There is a rare book containing contemporary accounts of the savages,
which was written at Three Rivers in 1663, by the governor of that
place, the Sieur Pierre Boucher, and published in Paris in 1664, under
the title, _Histoire veritable et naturelle des Mœurs et Productions du
Pays de la Nouvelle France, vulgairement dite le Canada_. The author,
says Charlevoix (Shea’s edition, i. p. 80), should not be confounded
with the Jesuit of the same name; and he calls the book under
consideration a “superficial but faithful account of Canada.” There are
copies in the Harvard College, Lenox (_Jesuit Relations_, p. 10), and
Carter-Brown (_Catalogue_ ii. 941) libraries.[688]
Another early account is the _Mémoire sur les Mœurs ... des Sauvages_,
by Nicholas Perrot, which remained in manuscript till it was edited by
Father Tailhan, and printed in 1864.[689]
The Jesuit Lafitau published at Paris in 1724 his _Mœurs des Sauvages
Amériquains_ in two volumes, with various plates, which in the main
is confined to the natives of Canada, where he had lived long with
the Iroquois. Charlevoix said of his book, twenty years later, “We
have nothing so exact upon the subject;” and Lafitau continues to
hold high rank as an original authority, though his book is overlaid
with a theory of the Tartaric origin of the red race. Mr. Parkman
calls him the most satisfactory of the elder writers. (Field, no. 850;
Carter-Brown, vol. iii. nos. 344, 345, 472; Sabin, vol. x. p. 22.)
There was a Dutch version, with the same plates, in 1731.
Bacqueville de la Potherie’s _Histoire de l’Amérique Septentrionale_,
in four volumes, with a distinctive title to each (1722 and 1753), is
mainly a history of the Indians with which the French came in contact.
He wrote early in the last century, and his book saw several editions,
evincing the interest it created. His information is at second hand for
the early portions of the period covered (since Cartier); but of the
later times he becomes a contemporary authority. (Field, no. 66,)
Of less interest in relation to the seventeenth century is Le
Beau’s _Voyage Curieux et Nouveau parmi les Sauvages de l’Amérique
Septentrionale_, published at Amsterdam in 1738,—a work, however, of a
semi-historical character, (Field, no. 901.)
Cadwallader Colden’s _History of the Five Indian Nations_ was printed
by Bradford in New York in 1727, and is now very rare. Dr. Shea
reprinted it in 1866, and in his introduction and notes its somewhat
curious bibliographical history is learnedly traced. (Carter-Brown,
vol. iii. nos. 393, 394; Field, _Indian Bibliography_, 341; Menzies,
429, $210; Sabin, vol. v. p. 222.) The three later London editions
(1747, 1750, 1755) were altered somewhat by the English publishers,
without indicating the variations they introduced. (Carter-Brown,
vol. iii. nos. 847, 922, 1,049.) A portrait of Colden is given in the
_Historical Magazine_, ix. 1. Sulte, in his _Mélanges_, p. 184, has
an essay on the respective positions of the Iroquois and Algonquins
previous to the coming of the Europeans.
D. G. Brinton, at the end of chap. i. of his _Myths of the New World_,
characterizes the different writers on the mythologies of the Indians;
and Mr. Parkman, _Jesuits_, etc., p. lxxxviii, notes some of the
repositories of Iroquois legends.
A valuable paper on the origin of the Iroquois confederacy, by Horatio
Hale, is printed in _Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc._, xix. 241; and Mr. C. C.
Baldwin has a paper on the Iroquois in Ohio in the _Western Reserve
Historical Society_, no. 40, and another paper on the early Indian
migrations, in no. 47. Mr. Hale has further extended our knowledge by
the curious learning of his _Iroquois Book of Rites_, Cincinnati, 1883;
and he also printed in the _American Antiquarian_, January and April,
1883 (also separately Chicago, 1883), a scholarly paper on _Indian
Migrations as evidenced by Language_.
So far as relates to the more easterly tribes coming within the range
of the Jesuits’ influence, Parkman’s description can be compared with
the plain matter-of-fact enumerations which make up the picture in
Palfrey’s _New England_, which are derived from authorities enumerated
in his notes. See various papers in the _Canadian Journal_.
[Illustration]
The general historians of New France necessarily give more or less
attention to the study of the Indians as the Jesuits found them; and
such a study is an integral part of Dr. George E. Ellis’s learned
monograph, _The Red Man and the White Man in North America_, whose
account of the different methods of converting the natives, pursued by
the French and the English, may be compared with that in Archbishop
Spalding’s _Miscellanea_, i. 333.
* * * * *
[In the enumeration below the initials of the repositories of copies
signify: =C.=, Library of Congress; =CB.=, Carter-Brown Library,
Providence; =F.=, Mrs. J. F. Fisher, Alverthorpe, Penn.; =GB.=, Hon.
George Bancroft, Washington; =HC.=, Harvard College; =J.=, Jesuits’
College, Georgetown, D.C.; =K.=, Charles H. Kalbfleisch, New York;
=L.=, Lenox Library, N.Y.; =M.=, the late Henry C. Murphy, Brooklyn,
L.I.; =OHM.=, O. H. Marshall, Buffalo; =NY.=, New York State Library,
Albany; =SJ.=, St. John’s College, Fordham, N.Y.; =V.=, Catholic
Bishop of Vincennes, Indiana.
Space is not taken in these notes to give full titles nor exhaustive
collations, which can be found in the authorities referred to, the
figures following them being to _numbers_; but the references to the
_Lenox Contributions_ is necessarily to pages.]
=1580.=—The Lenox bibliography begins the series of allied works with
_A Shorte and briefe narration of the two Navigations and Discoveries
to the northweast partes, called Newe France_, London, 1580. Harrisse,
_Notes sur la Nouvelle France,_ no. 5.
=1605.=—De Monts’ Commission. See chapter iv.
=1609.=—_Coppie d’une lettre envoyée de la Nouvelle France, par le
Sieur Cōbes,_ Lyons. (Harrisse, no. 20; Lenox, p. 3; Sabin, xiii. no.
56,083.) Dated “Brest-en-Canada, 13 Février, 1608.” The Carter-Brown
_Catalogue_ (vol. ii. no. 80) shows only a manuscript copy. Brunet
speaks of a single copy, sold and bought for America.
=1610.=—_La Conversion des Savages ... baptizés en la Nouvelle
France_, Paris. Harrisse, no. 21; Lenox, p. 3; Carter-Brown, vol. ii.
no. 99.
=1610.=—_Lettre missive, touchant la conversion ... du grand Sagamos_,
Paris. Lenox, p. 3; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 103 (manuscript only.)
=1611.=—_Missio Canadensis. Epistola ex Porturegali in Acadia._ This
is a reprint, made for Dr. O’Callaghan at Albany in 1870 (25 copies),
following the letter as given in the _Annuæ litteræ Societatis Jesu_,
1611 and 1612. (Cf. Lenox, p. 18; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 119.)
Carayon says that this Annual extends from 1581 (imprint, 1583) to
1614; and then again, 1650-1654. There are incomplete sets in the
Harvard College and Carter-Brown libraries. From the same source Dr.
O’Callaghan also reprinted _Relatio rerum gestarum in Nova Francia_,
1613, which relates to Biard’s mission.
=1613.=—_Contract d’association des Jésuites au trafique de Canada_,
Lyons. (Harrisse, no. 28.) Tross’s reprint on vellum (12 copies only)
is in the Lenox (p. 4) and Carter-Brown (vol. ii. no. 148) Collections.
=1611-1613.=—_Canadicæ Missionis Relatio ab anno 1611 usque ad annum
1613, auctore Josepho Juvencio._ Dr. O’Callaghan’s reprint, no. 4.
(O’Callaghan, no. 1,980; Lenox, p. 18.)
=1612.=—_Relation dernière de ce qui s’est passé au voyage du Sieur de
Poutrincourt en la Nouvelle France_, Paris. A description of the voyage
of Biard and Masse from Dieppe, Jan. 26, 1611. (Cf. Harrisse, no. 26.)
COPY: HC.
Upon this early mission, see Carayon, _Première mission des Jésuites
au Canada, lettres et documents inédits_, Paris, 1864. (Sabin, vol.
iii. no. 10,792.) These letters and others are cited by Harrisse,
nos. 397-400, 404-406. (Cf. Parkman’s _Pioneers_, p. 263.) Charlevoix
(Shea’s ed., p. 87) cites Juvency’s _Historiæ Societatis Jesu pars
quinta_, book xv., Rome, 1710, as elucidating events in Acadia in
1611. (Harrisse, no. 402.) For the trading relations of the Jesuits,
see Lescarbot (1618), p. 665; Champlain (1632), p. 100, and references
in Harrisse, no. 28, and Parkman’s _Old Régime_, p. 328. These early
Acadian missions are treated in the _Catholic World_, xii. 628, 826;
xxii. 666, and in _Historical Magazine_, xv. 313, 391; xvi. 41.
The subject of the Capuchins and other Catholics on the Maine coast at
an early date is followed in _Historical Magazine_, viii. 301, and in
_Maine Historical Collections_, i. 323. Cf. Poor’s _Gorges_, p. 98.
=1613-1614.=—_Relatio rerum gestarum in Nova-Francia Missione annis
1613 et 1614._ Lugduni. No. 6 of Dr. O’Callaghan’s reprints, Albany,
1871. Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 170; O’Callaghan, no. 1,250; Lenox, p.
19.
=1616.=—_Relation de la Nouvelle France ... faicte par le P.
Pierre Biard_, Lyons. Chaps. i. to viii. are on the country and its
inhabitants. Chap. xi. is on the arrival of the Jesuits in 1611; and
in Harrisse’s opinion, it constitutes a reply to the _Factum escrit et
publié contre les Jésuites_,—a publication of which we can find no
other trace. It also describes the labors of the missionaries and the
cruelties of Argall. See chap. iv.
See Harrisse, no. 30, on the question of an earlier edition in 1612.
The Supplément of Brunet calls this 1612 edition spurious. (Carayon,
p. 178; Lenox, p. 4, for a copy, with title in fac-simile by Pilinski,
which yet cost 1,000 francs, as per Leclerc, no. 2,482.) A reprint,
“presque en fac-simile,” was made at Albany in 1871 from a copy owned
by Rufus King, of Jamaica, L. I. The Carter-Brown (vol. ii. no. 178)
has only this fac-simile, and it is noted in O’Callaghan, nos. 1,207,
1,971, where it is stated only twenty-five were printed, at $25 per
copy.
=1626.=—_Coppie de la lettre escripte par le R. P. Denys Jamet,
Commissaire des PP. Recollestz de Canada._ Dated Quebec, Aug. 15, 1626.
REFERENCES: Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 315. Dr. Shea thinks the date
should be 1620. It is from Sagard, p. 58.
=1626.=—_Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle France, 1626.
Envoyée au Père Hierosme L’Allemant par Charles L’Allemant._ Paris,
1629. Reprinted (no. 7) in O’Callaghan’s series, from the text in
_Mercure François_, vol. xiii.
REFERENCES: Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 351; O’Callaghan, nos. 1,210,
1,250, 1,982; Lenox, p. 19. Le Clercq doubts L’Allemant’s authorship;
but see Shea’s _Le Clercq_, i. 329.
=1627.=—_Lettre du Père Charles l’Allemant, Supérieur de la mission de
Canadas_, Paris, 1627. It bears date Aug. 1, 1626.
REFERENCES: Sabin, vol. x. no. 38,680; Harrisse, no. 41; Faribault,
no. 361; Ternaux, no. 496; Carayon, p. 179; Lenox, p. 4; O’Callaghan,
no. 1,250.
It was reprinted in 1871 in O’Callaghan’s series. (Carter-Brown,
vol. ii. no. 328; O’Callaghan, no. 1,208.) It first appeared in the
_Mercure François_, xiii. 1. This last publication appeared in Paris,
1611-1646, in twenty-three volumes, and contains much illustrative of
these early missions. There are sets of the _Mercure_ in the Boston
Athenæum, Harvard College, Carter-Brown, Boston Public libraries, etc.
The reprint of L’Allemant’s _Lettre_ in the Quebec edition of the
_Relations_, follows the text of the _Mercure_, which corresponds,
as is not always the case of these early _Relations_, with the
contemporary separate text, as Mr. Lenox has pointed out in the
_Historical Magazine_, iii. 19. Carayon, in his _Première Mission_,
translates from another letter of L’Allemant, preserved at Rome, and
of the same date, another account of these early Jesuit labors, which
he sent to Père Vitelleschi. L’Allemant’s name in the contemporary
publications is spelled with a single or double _l_, indifferently.
Another of O’Callaghan’s series (Albany, 1870), was _Copie de trois
Lettres escrittes en 1625 et 1626 par le P. Charles Lallemand_.
O’Callaghan, nos. 1,209, 1,250; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 316.
=1629.=—_Lettre du Rev. Père l’Allemand au Rev. Père Supérieur du
Collège des Jésuites à Paris, 22 Novembre, 1629._ It is found in
Champlain’s _Voyages_, and a reprint (no. 3) is in O’Callaghan’s
series, Albany, 1870. O’Callaghan, nos. 1,250, 1,979; Sabin, vol. x.
no. 38,681; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 390; Carayon, p. 179; Lenox, p.
18. It is translated in Shea’s _Perils of the Ocean and Wilderness_.
* * * * *
[The regular series of so-called RELATIONS, addressed to the
Provincial of the order in France, begins here.]
=1632.=—LE JEUNE. _Brieve Relation du Voyage de la Nouvelle France,
fait au mois d’Avril dernier, par le P. Paul le Jeune._ Paris, 1632.
Pages 68, one leaf for the Privilege.
CONTENTS: The arrival and reinstatement of the order in Quebec, with
notices of the natives.
REFERENCES: Carayon, no. 1,260; Harrisse, no. 49; Sabin, vol. x. no.
39,946. Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 381, with fac-simile of title.
COPIES: =CB.=, =GB.=, =M.= Others in the Arsenal and National
Libraries at Paris, etc.
It was reprinted in the _Mercure François_ for 1633.
=1633.=—LE JEUNE. _Relation de ce qui s’est passé en la Nouvelle
France en l’année 1633._ Paris, 1634. Pages 216 and Privilege, with
a cupid in the vignette, and errors of pagination. A second issue
has a ram’s head for a vignette, and some typographical variations.
These vignettes are at the top of p. 3; that with two storks is on the
titlepage.
CONTENTS: Champlain’s arrival, and that of Brebeuf and Masse; Le
Jeune’s difficulties with the native language.
REFERENCES: Carayon, no. 1,261; Harrisse, nos. 55, 56; Sabin, vol. x.
no. 39,947-48; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 417; O’Callaghan, no. 1,212.
(2d issue).
COPIES: =CB.=, =GB.=, =HC.= (3d issue), =M.=
There is an abridgment in the _Mercure François_ for 1633.
=1634.=—LE JEUNE. _Relation ... en l’année 1634._ Paris, 1635. Pages
4, 342, with pp. 321-22 numbered 323-24. A second issue corrects p.
321, but makes 337 to be 339.
CONTENTS: Champlain’s Domestic Life; Labors of Missionaries; Habits of
Indians, and (chap. 9) Account of their Languages; Le Jeune’s Journal,
August, 1633, to April, 1634, while he was living with the savages.
REFERENCES: Carayon, no. 1,263. Harrisse, nos. 60, 61; Sabin, vol. x.
no. 39,949; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 307; Lenox, p. 4; O’Callaghan,
no. 1,235; Harrassowitz (1882, 180 marks).
COPIES: =CB.=, =F.=, =GB.=, =HC.=, =K.=, =L.= (1st ed.), =M.=
=1635.=—LE JEUNE. _Relation ... en l’année 1635._ Paris, 1636. Pages
4, 246, 2.
CONTENTS: Report, dated August 28, 1635, ending on p. 112; Report from
the Huron country by Brebeuf, with “divers sentimens.” Report from
Cape Breton by Perrault.
REFERENCES: Carayon, no. 1,264; Harrisse, nos. 58, 63; Carter-Brown,
vol. ii. no. 436; Lenox, p. 5; Sabin, vol. x. nos. 39,950, 39,951;
O’Callaghan, no. 1,214; Leclerc, no. 778 (140 francs). Priced (1883),
$50.
COPIES: =CB.=, =GB.=, =HC.=, =L.=, =M.=, =OHM.=
=1635.=—LE JEUNE. _Relation_, etc. Avignon, 1636.
CONTENTS: Same as the Paris edition.
REFERENCES: Harrisse, no 64; Lenox, p. 5.
COPIES: The Lenox _Contributions_ claims its copy as the only one now
known; if so, a third edition is represented in a defective copy noted
in O’Callaghan, no. 1,215.
=1636.=—LE JEUNE. _Relation ... en l’année 1636._ Paris, 1637. Pages
8, 272, 223.
CONTENTS: Report; Death of Champlain, etc.; Brebeuf’s Huron report,
with account of the language, customs, etc.
REFERENCES: Carayon, no. 1,265; Harrisse, no. 65; Sabin, vol. x. no.
39,952; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 446; Lenox, p. 5; Harrassowitz,
1883 (125 marks).
COPIES: =CB.=, =HC.=, =K.=, =L.= It does not appear whether copies
=GB.=, =M.=, =OHM.=, and =V.= are of this or of the following edition.
=1636.=—LE JEUNE. _Relation_, etc. Paris, 1637. Pages 199 in smaller
type than the preceding edition; the Huron report sometimes wanting,
though mentioned in the title, while it was not mentioned in the
preceding edition; but Sobolewski describes a copy which has this Huron
report, occupying 163 pages.
REFERENCES: Harrisse, no. 66; Lenox, p. 5.
=1637.=—LE JEUNE. _Relation ... en l’année 1637._ Rouen, 1638. Pages
10,336 (pp. 193-196 omitted in paging), 256, with vignette of I. H. S.
supported by two angels on the title. A second issue has the I. H. S.
surrounded by rays, and there are other typographical changes in the
title only. A folding woodcut of fireworks between pp. 18 and 19.
CONTENTS: Report about the missions and the Huron Seminary near
Quebec; Report by Lemercier from the Huron country, dated 1637.
REFERENCES: Harrisse, nos. 67, 68; Sabin, vol. x. no. 39,953;
Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 457; Lenox, p. 5; O’Callaghan, no. 1,216;
Harrassowitz, 1880 (150 francs); Leclerc, 779 (200 francs).
COPIES: =CB.=, =HC.=, =K.=, =M.=, =OHM.=, =L.= (both varieties).
Harrisse, p. xiv, says the oldest original document he has found is a
memorandum of a gift, August 16, 1637, by the Duchesse d’Aiguillon to
the Réligieuses Hospitalières of Quebec (cf. also his no. 457).
=1638.=—LE JEUNE. _Relation ... en l’année 1638._ Paris, 1638. Pages
4, 78, 2, 68. A second edition has pp. 4, 78, 76. Harrisse says it is
distinguishable by the last page being marked 67, correctly, and page
39 of the Huron report having the word _fidelle_ instead of _fidèle_;
but the whole volume is reset.
CONTENTS: Report,—Failure of the Huron Seminary; Persecution of the
Fathers; Lemercier’s Report from the Huron Country, 1637-38, with
account of Lunar Eclipse, December, 1637.
REFERENCES: Carayon, no. 1,267; Harrisse, nos. 69, 70; Sabin, vol.
x. nos. 39,954, 39,955; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. no. 458; Lenox,
p. 5; O’Callaghan, no. 1,217; Stevens, _Bibl. Hist._, no. 1,120;
Harrassowitz, 1883 (125 marks).
COPIES: =CB.=, =GB.=, =HC.=, =K.=, =L.= (both eds.), =OHM.=, =NY.=
Harrisse, p. 62, says a Latin version is included “dans le recueil du
P. Trigaut, Cologne, 1653.”
=1639.=—LE JEUNE. _Relation ... en l’année 1639._ Paris, 1640. Pages
8, 166, 2, 174. A second edition was a page-for-page reprint, with
typographical changes on almost every page. The Privilege on the first
reads, _Par le Roy en son Conseil_, and is signed March 26, 1638; the
word _son_ is omitted in the second, and the date of this is Dec. 20,
1639.
CONTENTS: Regular Report; Huron Report, June, 1638, to June, 1639.
REFERENCES: Carayon, no. 1,268; Harrisse, nos. 74, 75; Sabin, vol.
x. no. 39,956; Carter-Brown, vol. ii. pp. 481, 482; Lenox, p. 6;
O’Callaghan, no. 1,218; Harrassowitz, 1883 (125 marks).
COPIES: =CB.= (both eds.), =GB.=, =HC.=, =K.=, =L.= (both eds.).
=1640.=—VIMONT. _Relation ... en l’année_ M. DC. XL. Paris, 1641.
Pages 8, 197, 3, 196; but 191 and 192 are repeated.
CONTENTS: Report on the State of the Colony and the Missions; Report
from the Huron Country by Hierosme Lalemant, mentioning a map of the
Western country by Ragueneau.
REFERENCES: Carayon, no. 1,269; Harrisse, no. 76; Carter-Brown, vol.
ii. p. 495; Lenox, p. 6; O’Callaghan, no. 1,219; Dufossé, no. 8,660
(125 francs); Harrassowitz, 1883 (125 marks).
COPIES: =CB.=, =GB.=, =HC.=, =K.=, =L.=, =OHM.=
We derive the earliest mention of Jean Nicolet’s explorations about
Green Bay from this _Relation_, and what it says is translated in
Smith’s _Wisconsin_, vol. iii. See chapter v. of the present volume.
=1640-1641.=—VIMONT. _Relation ... ès années 1640 et 1641._ Paris,
1642. Pages 8, 216, 104. Chap. vi. is numbered viii., and there are
other irregularities.
CONTENTS: Report,—Missions News; Wars with the Iroquois; Tadousac
Mission; Report from the Huron Country by Lalemant, June, 1640, to
June, 1641; First mention of Niagara as Onguiaahra; a Huron Prayer
interlined.
REFERENCES: Carayon, no. 1,720; Harrisse, no. 77; Carter-Brown, vol.
ii. p. 509; Lenox, p. 6; O’Callaghan, no. 1,220; Harrassowitz, 1883
(100 marks). Cf. Faillon, _Hist. de la Col. Française_, vols. i. and
ii., chaps. 4 and 5, on this Iroquois War.
COPIES: =CB.=, =GB.=, =HC.=, =K.=, =L.= (two copies, with slight
variations), =OHM.=
=1642.=—VIMONT. _Relation ... en l’année 1642._ Paris, 1643. Pages 8,
191, 1, 170; pp. 76, 77, omitted in paging.
CONTENTS: Report,—Founding of Montreal; Capture of Jogues; Lunar
Eclipse, April 4, 1642; Lalemant’s Report from the Huron Country,
June, 1641, to June, 1642.
REFERENCES: Carayon, no. 1,271; Harrisse, no. 80; Carter-Brown, vol.
ii. no. 528; Lenox, p. 6; O’Callaghan, no. 1,221; Harrassowitz, 1883
(125 marks); Dufossé, 1878 (180 francs).
COPIES: =CB.=, =GB.=, =HC.=, =K.=, =L.=, =M.=, =NY.=, =V.=
On Jogues’ exploration to the Sault Ste. Marie, see Margry,
_Découvertes_, i. 45; Shea’s _Charlevoix_, i. 137.
For references on the founding and early history of Montreal, see
Harrisse, p. 79. The Abbé Faillon’s _Histoire de la Colonie Française
en Canada_, Paris, 1865-1866, three volumes, with maps, pertains
chiefly to Montreal, and was left incomplete at the author’s death.
[Illustration: MONTREAL AND ITS VICINITY.
Faillon, _Histoire de la Colonie Française_, iii. 375, gives a map of
Montreal preserved in the French archives,—_Plan de Villemarie et des
premières rues projetées pour l’établissement de la Haute Ville_. This
represents the town at about 1665. There is a fac-simile of another
plan of about 1680 preserved in the library of the Canadian Parliament,
the original being at Paris (_Catalogue_, 1858, p. 1,615). A plan of
1685 is given in _l’Héroïne Chrétienne du Canada, ou Vie de Mlle. le
Ber, Villemarie_, 1860. Charlevoix gives a map with the old landmarks,
and it is reproduced in Shea’s edition, ii. 170. A later one is in La
Potherie, 1753 edition, ii. 311 (given above), and one of about 1759,
in Miles’s _Canada_, p. 296.]
He derives new matter from the public archives in France, goes over
afresh the whole history of Champlain’s career, and throws light on
points left dark by Charlevoix and the earlier narrators, and is in
some respects the best of the recent French historians; but Parkman
(_Jesuits_, p. 193) cautions us that his partisan character as an
ardent and prejudiced Sulpitian should be well kept in mind (cf. Field,
p. 518; and chap. vii. of the present volume). Dollier de Casson’s
_Histoire de Montréal_, 1640-1672, is a manuscript in the Mazarin
Library in Paris, of which Mr. Parkman has a copy. It was printed in
1871 by the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, in the third
series of their historical documents. Parkman refers to (_Jesuits_,
p. 209), and gives extracts from, _Les véritables Motifs ... de la
Société de Notre Dame de Montréal pour la Conversion des Sauvages_,
which was published in 1643 as a defence against aspersions of the
“Hundred Associates.” It was probably printed at Paris. A copy some
years since passed into an American collection at 800 francs. A
transcript of a copy, collated by Margry, was used in the reprint
issued in the _Mémoires de la Société historique de Montreal_, in
1880, under the editing of the Abbé Verreau, who attributes it to
Olier, while Faillon has ascribed it to Laisné de la Marguerie. The
editor adds some important “notices bibliographiques et documentaires;”
some “notes historiques par le Commandeur Viger,” from an unpublished
work,—_Le Petit Registre_; a “liste des premiers Colons de Montreal.”
Of the older authorities, Le Clercq and Charlevoix (Shea’s edition,
note, ii. 129) are useful; but Charlevoix, as Parkman says, was not
partial to Montreal. The Société historique de Montreal began in 1859
the publication of _Mémoires et Documents relatifs a l’histoire du
Canada_. The first number, “Dè l’Esclavage en Canada,” was the joint
work of J. Viger and L. H. Lafontaine, but it has little matter falling
within the present period; the second, “De la Famille des Lauson,” the
governor of New France after 1651, by Lafontaine, with an Appendix on
the “Vice-Rois et Lieutenants Generaux des rois de France en Amerique,”
by R. Bellemare; the third, “Ordonances de M^{r} Paul de Chomedey,
Sieur de Maisonneuve, premier gouverneur de Montreal,” etc; the fourth,
“Règne Militaire en Canada;” the fifth, “Voyage de Dollier et Galinée.”
See a paper on Montreal and its founder, Maisonneuve, in the _Canadian
Antiquarian_, January, 1878. Concerning the connection of M. Olier with
the founding of Montreal and the schemes connected with it for the
conversion of the savages, see Faillon, _Vie de M. Olier_, Paris, 1873,
iii. 397, etc., and references there cited; and also see Faillon, _Vie
de Mdlle. Mance_, Paris, 1854, and Parkman in _Atlantic Monthly_, xix.
723.