FROM 1635 TO 1650
Mystics come to Canada--A city built of dreams--First night at
Montreal--Maisonneuve fights raiders--Le Jeune joins the
hunters--Brébeuf goes to Lake Huron--Life at the Huron mission--The
scourge of the Iroquois--The fight at St. Louis--Rageneau's converts
resist--Flight of the Hurons
While Charles de La Tour and Charnisay scoured the Bay of Fundy in
border warfare like buccaneers of the Spanish Main, what was Quebec
doing?
The Hundred Associates were to colonize the country; but fur trading
and farming never go together. One means the end of the other; and the
Hundred Associates shifted the obligation of settling the country by
granting vast estates called seigniories along the St. Lawrence and
leaving to these new lords of the soil the duty of bringing out
habitants. Later they deeded over for an annual rental of beaver skins
the entire fur monopoly to the Habitant Company, made up of the leading
people of New France. So ended all the fine promises of four thousand
colonists.
Years ago Pontgravé had learned that the Indians of the Up-Country did
not care to come down the St. Lawrence farther than Lake St. Peter's,
where Iroquois foe lay in ambush; and the year before Champlain died a
double expedition had set out from Quebec in July: one to build a fort
north of Lake St. Peter's at the entrance to the river with three
mouths,--in other words, to found Three Rivers; the other, under Father
Brébeuf, the Jesuit, and Jean Nicolet, the wood runner, to establish a
mission in the country of the Hurons and to explore the Great Lakes.
In fact, it must never be forgotten that Champlain's ambitions in
laying the foundations of a new nation aimed just as much to establish
a kingdom of heaven on earth as to win a new kingdom for France.
Always, in the minds of the fathers of New France, Church was to be
first; State, second. When Charles de Montmagny, Knight of Malta,
landed in Quebec one June morning in 1636, to succeed Champlain as
governor of New France, he noticed a crucifix planted by the path side
where {72} viceroy and officers clambered up the steep hill to Castle
St. Louis. Instantly Montmagny fell to his knees before the cross in
silent adoration, and his example was followed by all the gay train of
beplumed officers. The Jesuits regarded the episode as a splendid omen
for New France, and set their chapel organ rolling a _Te Deum_ of
praise, while Governor and retinue filed before the altars with bared
heads.
It was in the same spirit that Montreal was founded.
The Jesuits' letters on the Canadian missions were now being read in
France. Religious orders were on fire with missionary ardor. The
Canadian missions became the fashion of the court. Ladies of noble
blood asked no greater privilege than to contribute their fortunes for
missions in Canada. Nuns lay prostrate before altars praying night and
day for the advancement of the heavenly kingdom on the St. Lawrence.
The Jesuits had begun their college in Quebec. The very year that
Champlain had first come to the St. Lawrence there had been born in
Normandy, of noble parentage, a little girl who became a passionate
devotee of Canadian missions. To divert her mind from the calling of a
nun, her father had thrown her into a whirl of gayety from which she
emerged married; but her husband died in a few years, and Madame de la
Peltrie, left a widow at twenty-two, turned again heart and soul to the
scheme of endowing a Canadian mission. Again her father tried to
divert her mind, threatening to cut off her fortune if she did not
marry. An engagement to a young noble, who was as keen a devotee as
herself, quieted her father and averted the loss of her fortune. On
the death of her father the formal union was dissolved, and Madame de
la Peltrie proceeded to the Ursuline Convent of Tours, where the
Jesuits had already chosen a mother superior for the new institution to
be founded at Quebec--Marie of the Incarnation, a woman of some fifty
years, a widow like Madame de la Peltrie, and, like Madame de la
Peltrie, a mystic dreamer of celestial visions and divine communings
and heroic sacrifices. How much of truth, how much of self-delusion,
{73} lay in these dreams of heavenly revelation is not for the outsider
to say. It is as impossible for the practical mind to pronounce
judgment on the mystic as for the mystic to pronounce sentence on the
scientist. Both have their truths, both have their errors; and by
their fruits are they known.
[Illustration: MADAME DE LA PELTRIE (After a picture in the Ursuline
Convent, Quebec)]
May 4th, 1639, Madame de la Peltrie and Marie of the Incarnation
embarked from Dieppe for Canada. In the ship were also another
Ursuline nun, three hospital sisters to found the Hôtel Dieu at Quebec,
Father Vimont, superior of Quebec Jesuits, and two other priests. The
boat was like a chapel. Ship's bell tolled services. Morning prayer
and evensong were chanted from the decks, and the pilgrims firmly
believed that their vows allayed a storm. July 1st they were among the
rocking dories of the Newfoundland fishermen, and then on the 15th the
little sailboat washed and rolled to anchor inshore among the fur
traders under the heights of Tadoussac.
At sight of the somber Saguenay, the silver-flooded St. Lawrence, the
frowning mountains, the far purple hills, the primeval forests through
which the wind rushed with the sound of the sea, the fishing craft
dancing on the tide like cockle boats, the grizzled fur traders bronzed
as the crinkled oak forests where they passed their lives, the tawny,
naked savages agape at these white-skinned women come from afar, the
hearts of the {74} housed-up nuns swelled with emotions strange and
sweet,--the emotions of a new life in a new world. And when they
scrambled over the rope coils aboard a fishing schooner to go on up to
Quebec, and heard the deep-voiced shoutings of the men, and witnessed
the toilers of the deep fighting wind and wave for the harvest of the
sea, did it dawn on the fair sisterhood that God must have workers
_out_ in the strife of the world, as well as workers _shut up_ from the
world inside convent walls? Who knows? . . . Who knows? At
Tadoussac, that morning, to both Madame de la Peltrie and Marie of the
Incarnation it must have seemed as if their visions had become real.
And then the cannon of Quebec began to thunder till the echoes rolled
from hill to hill and shook--as the mystics thought--the very
strongholds of hell. Tears streamed down their cheeks at such welcome.
The whole Quebec populace had rallied to the water front, and there
stood Governor Montmagny in velvet cloak with sword at belt waving hat
in welcome. Soldiers and priests cheered till the ramparts rang. As
the nuns put foot to earth once more they fell on their knees and
kissed the soil of Canada. August 1st was fête day in Quebec. The
chapel chimes rang . . . and rang again their gladness. The organ
rolled out its floods of soul-shattering music, and deep-throated chant
of priests invoked God's blessing on the coming of the women to the
mission. So began the Ursuline Convent of Quebec and the Hôtel Dieu of
the hospital sisters; but Montreal was still a howling wilderness
untenanted by man save in midsummer, when the fur traders came to
Champlain's factory and the canoes of the Indians from the Up-Country
danced down the swirling rapids like sea birds on waves.
The letters from the Jesuit missions touched more hearts than those of
the mystic nuns.
In Anjou dwelt a receiver of taxes--Jérôme le Royer de la Dauversière,
a stout, practical, God-fearing man with a family, about as far removed
in temperament from the founders of the Ursulines as a character could
well be. Yet he, too, had mystic {75} dreams and heard voices bidding
him found a mission in the tenantless wilderness of Montreal. To the
practical man the thing seems sheer moon-stark madness. If Dauversière
had lived in modern days he would have been committed to an asylum.
Here was a man with a family, without a fortune, commanded by what he
thought was the voice of Heaven to found a hospital in a wilderness
where there were no people. Also in Paris dwelt a young priest, Jean
Jacques Olier, who heard the self-same voices uttering the self-same
command. These two men were unknown to each other; yet when they met
by chance in the picture gallery of an old castle, there fell from
their eyes, as it were, scales, and they beheld as in a vision each the
other's soul, and recognized in each fellow-helper and comrade of the
spirit. To all this the practical man cries out "Bosh"! Yet Montreal
is no bosh, but a stately city, and it sprang from the dreams--"fool
dreams," enemies would call them--of these two men, the Sulpician
priest and the Anjou tax collector.
Hour after hour, arm in arm, they walked and talked, the man of prayers
and the man of taxes. People or no people at Montreal, money or no
money, they decided that the inner voice must be obeyed. A Montreal
Society was formed. Six friends joined. What would be equal to
$75,000 was collected. There were to be no profits on this capital.
It was all to be invested to the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven.
Unselfish if you like, foolish they may have been, but not hypocrites.
First of all, they must become Seigneurs of Montreal; but the island of
Montreal had already been granted by the Hundred Associates to one
Lauson. To render the title doubly secure, Dauversière and Olier
obtained deeds to the island from Lauson and from the Hundred
Associates.
Forty-five colonists, part soldiers, part devotees, were then gained as
volunteers; but a veritable soldier of Heaven was desired as commander.
Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, was noted for his heroism in
war and zeal in religion. When other officers returned from battle for
wild revels, Maisonneuve withdrew to play the flute or pass hours in
religious {76} contemplation. His name occurred to both Dauversière
and Olier as fittest for command; but to make doubly sure, they took
lodgings near him, studied his disposition, and then casually told him
of their plans and asked his coöperation. Maisonneuve was in the prime
of life, on the way to high service in the army. His zeal took fire at
thought of founding a Kingdom of God at Montreal; but his father
furiously opposed what must have seemed a mad scheme. Maisonneuve's
answer was the famous promise of Christ: "No man hath left house or
brethren or sister for my sake but he shall receive a hundredfold."
Maisonneuve was warned there would be no earthly reward--no pay--for
his arduous task; but he answered, "I devote my life and future; and I
expect no recompense."
Mademoiselle Jeanne Mance, thirty-four years old, who had given herself
to good works from childhood, though she had not yet joined the
cloister, now felt the call to labor in the wilderness. Later, in
1653, came Marguerite Bourgeoys to the little colony beneath the
mountain. She too, like Jeanne Mance, distrusted dreams and visions
and mystic communings, cherishing a religion of good works rather than
introspection of the soul. Dauversière and Olier remained in France.
Fortunately for Montreal, practical Christians, fighting soldiers of
the cross, carried the heavenly standard to the wilderness.
It was too late to ascend the St. Lawrence when the ship brought the
crusaders to Quebec in August, 1641; and difficulties harried them from
the outset. Was Montmagny, the Governor, jealous of Maisonneuve; or
did he simply realize the fearful dangers Maisonneuve's people would
run going beyond the protection of Quebec? At all events, he
disapproved this building of a second colony at Montreal, when the
first colony at Quebec could barely gain subsistence. He offered them
the Island of Orleans in exchange for the Island of Montreal, and
warned them of Iroquois raid.
"I have not come to argue," answered Maisonneuve, "but to act. It is
my duty to found a colony at Montreal, and thither I go though every
tree be an Iroquois."
{77} Maisonneuve passed the winter building boats to ascend the St.
Lawrence next spring; and Madame de la Peltrie, having established the
Ursulines at Quebec, now cast in her lot with the Montrealers for two
years.
May 8, 1642, the little flotilla set out from Quebec--a pinnace with
the passengers, a barge with provisions, two long boats propelled by
oars and a sweep. Montmagny and Father Vimont accompanied the
crusaders; and as the boats came within sight of the wooded mountain on
May 17, hymns of praise rose from the pilgrims that must have mingled
strangely on Indian ears with the roar of the angry rapids. One can
easily call up the scene--the mountain, misty with the gathering
shadows of sunset, misty as a veiled bride with the color and bloom of
spring; the boats, moored for the night below St. Helen's Island, where
the sun, blazing behind the half-foliaged trees, paints a path of fire
on the river; the white bark wigwams along shore with the red gleam of
camp fire here and there through the forest; the wilderness world
bathed in a peace as of heaven, as the vesper hymn floats over the
evening air! It is a scene that will never again be enacted in the
history of the world--dreamers dreaming greatly, building a castle of
dreams, a fortress of holiness in the very center of wilderness
barbarity and cruelty unspeakable. The multitudinous voices of traffic
shriek where the crusaders' hymn rose that May night. A great city has
risen on the foundations which these dreamers laid. Let us not scoff
too loudly at their mystic visions and religious rhapsodies! Another
generation may scoff at our too-much-worldliness, with our dreamless
grind and visionless toil and harder creeds that reject everything
which cannot be computed in the terms of traffic's dollar! Well for us
if the fruit of our creeds remain to attest as much worth as the deeds
of these crusaders!
Early next morning the boats pulled in ashore where Cartier had landed
one hundred years before and Champlain had built his factory thirty
years ago. Maisonneuve was first to spring on land. He dropped to his
knees in prayer. The others as {78} they landed did likewise. Their
hymns floated out on the forest. Madame de la Peltrie, Jeanne Mance,
and the servant, Charlotte Barré, quickly decorated a wildwood altar
with evergreens. Then, with Montmagny the Governor, and Maisonneuve
the soldier, standing on either side, Madame de la Peltrie and Jeanne
Mance and Charlotte Barré, bowed in reverence, with soldiers and
sailors standing at rest unhooded, Father Vimont held the first
religious services at Mont Royal. "You are a grain of mustard seed,"
he said, "and you shall grow till your branches overshadow the earth."
Maisonneuve cut the first tree for the fort; and a hundred legends
might be told of the little colony's pioneer trials. Once a flood
threatened the existence of the fort. A cross was erected to stay the
waters and a vow made if Heaven would save the fort a cross should be
carried and placed on the summit of the mountain. The river abated,
and Maisonneuve climbed the steep mountain, staggering under the weight
of an enormous cross, and planted it at the highest point. Here, in
the presence of all, mass was held, and it became a regular pilgrimage
from the fort up the mountain to the cross.
In 1743 came Louis d'Ailleboust and his wife, both zealously bound by
the same vows as devotees, bringing word of more funds for Ville Marie,
as Montreal was called. Montmagny's warning of Iroquois proved all too
true. Within a year, in June, 1743, six workmen were beset in the
fields, only one escaping. Because his mission was to convert the
Indians, Maisonneuve had been ever reluctant to meet the Iroquois in
open war, preferring to retreat within the fort when the dog Pilot and
her litter barked loud warning that Indians were hiding in the woods.
Any one who knows the Indian character will realize how clemency would
be mistaken for cowardice. Even Maisonneuve's soldiers began to doubt
him.
"My lord, my lord," they urged, "are the enemy never to get a sight of
you? Are we never to face the foe?"
Maisonneuve's answer was in March, 1644, when ambushed hostiles were
detected stealing on the fort.
{79} "Follow me," he ordered thirty men, leaving D'Ailleboust in
command of the fort.
Near the place now known as Place d'Armes the little band was greeted
by the eldritch scream of eighty painted Iroquois. Shots fell thick
and fast. The Iroquois dashed to rescue their wounded, and a young
chief, recognizing Maisonneuve as the leader of the white men, made a
rush for the honor of capturing the French commander alive.
Maisonneuve had put himself between his retreating men and the
advancing warriors. Firing, he would retreat a pace, then fire again,
keeping his face to the foe. His men succeeded in rushing up the
hillock, then made for the gates in a wild stampede. Maisonneuve was
backing away, a pistol in each hand. The Iroquois circled from tree to
tree, near and nearer, and like a wildwood creature of prey was
watching his chance to spring, when the Frenchman fired. The pistol
missed. Dodging, the Indian leaped. Maisonneuve discharged the other
pistol. The Iroquois fell dead, and while warriors rescued the body,
Maisonneuve gained the fort gates. This was only one of countless
frays when the dog Pilot with her puppies sounded the alarm of prowlers
in the woods.
What were the letters, what the adventures described by the Jesuits,
that aroused such zeal and inspired such heroism? It would require
many volumes to record the adventures of the Jesuits in Canada, and a
long list to include all their heroes martyred for the faith. Only a
few of the most prominent episodes in the Jesuits' adventures can be
given here.
When Pierre le Jeune reached Quebec after the victory of the Kirke
brothers, he found only the charred remains of a mission on the old
site of Cartier's winter quarters down on the St. Charles. Of houses,
only the gray-stone cottage of Madame Hebert had been left standing.
Here Le Jeune was welcomed and housed till the little mission could be
rebuilt. At first it consisted of only mud-plastered log cabins,
thatch-roofed, divided into four rooms, with garret and cellar. One
room decorated with saints' images and pictures served as chapel;
another, as {80} kitchen; a third, as lodgings; the fourth, as
refectory. In this humble abode six Jesuit priests and two lay
brothers passed the winter after the war. The roof leaked like a
sieve. The snow piled high almost as the top of the door. Le Jeune's
first care was to obtain pupils. These consisted of an Indian boy and
a negro lad left by the English. Meals of porridge given free
attracted more Indian pupils; but Le Jeune's greatest difficulty was to
learn the Indian language. Hearing that a renegade Indian named
Pierre, who had served the French as interpreter, lodged with some
Algonquins camped below Cape Diamond, Le Jeune tramped up the river
bank, along what is now the Lower Road, where he found the Indians
wigwamming, and by the bribe of free food obtained Pierre. Pierre was
at best a tricky scoundrel, who considered it a joke to give Le Jeune
the wrong word for some religious precept, gorged himself on the
missionaries' food, stole their communion wine, and ran off at Lent to
escape fasting.
[Illustration: PIERRE LE JEUNE]
When Champlain returned to receive Quebec back from the English, more
priests joined the Jesuits' mission. Among them was the lion-hearted
giant, Brébeuf.
If Champlain's bush lopers could join bands of wandering Indians for
the extension of French dominion, surely the Jesuits could dare as
perilous a life "for the greater glory of God,"--as their vows declared.
{81} Le Jeune joined a band of wandering Montaignais, Pierre, the
rascal, tapping the keg of sacramental wine the first night out, and
turning the whole camp into a drunken bedlam, till his own brother
sobered him with a kettle of hot water flung full in the face. That
night the priest slept apart from the camp in the woods. By the time
the hunters reached the forest borderland between Quebec and New
Brunswick, their number had increased to forty-five. By Christmas time
game is usually dormant, still living on the stores of the fall and not
yet driven afield by spring hunger. In camp was no food. The hunters
halted the march, and came in Christmas Eve of 1633 with not so much as
a pound of flesh for nearly fifty people. From the first the Indian
medicine man had heaped ridicule on the white priest, and Pierre had
refused to interpret as much as a single prayer; but now the whole camp
was starving. Pierre happened to tell the other Indians that Christmas
was the day on which the white man's God had come to earth. In vain
the medicine man had pounded his tom-tom and shouted at the Indian gods
from the top of the wigwams and offered sacrifice of animals to be
slain. No game had come as the result of the medicine man's invocation.
Le Jeune gathered the people about him and through Pierre, the
interpreter, bade them try the white man's God. In the largest of the
wigwams a little altar was fitted up. Then the Indians repeated this
prayer after Le Jeune:
Jesus, Son of the Almighty . . . who died for us . . . who promised
that if we ask anything in Thy name, Thou wilt do it--I pray Thee with
all my heart, give food to these people . . . this people promises Thee
faithfully they will trust Thee entirely and obey Thee with all their
heart! My Lord, hear my prayer! I present Thee my life for this
people, most willing to die that they may live and know Thee.
"Take that back," grunted the chief. "We love you! We don't want you
to die."
"I only want to show that I am your friend," answered the priest.
Le Jeune then commanded them to go forth to the hunt, full of faith
that God would give them food.
{82} But alas for the poor father's hopes and the childlike Indian vow!
True, they found abundance of food,--a beaver dam full of beaver, a
moose, a porcupine taken by the Indian medicine man. Father Le Jeune,
with radiant face, met the hunters returning laden with game.
"We must thank your God for this," said the Indian chief, throwing down
his load.
"Bah," says Pierre, "you 'd have found it anyway."
"This is not the time to talk," sneered the medicine man. "Let the
hungry people eat."
And by the time the Indians had gorged themselves with ample measure
for their long fast, they were torpid with sleep. The sad priest was
fain to wander out under the stars. There, in the snow-padded silences
of the white-limned forest, far from the joyous peal of Christmas
bells, he knelt alone and worshiped God.
For five months he wandered with the Montaignais, and now in April the
hunters turned toward Quebec with their furs. At three in the morning
Le Jeune knocked on the door of the mission house at Quebec, and was
welcomed home by the priests. The pilgrimage had taught him what the
Jesuits have always held--the way to power with a people is through the
education of the children. "Give me a child for the first seven years
of its life," said a famous educator, "and I care not what you do with
him the rest of his years." Missions and schools must be established
among the tribes of Hurons and Iroquois.
Consequently, when Champlain sent his soldiers in 1634 to build a fort
at Three Rivers, they were accompanied by three Jesuits, chief of whom
was Jean de Brébeuf, lion-hearted, bound for the land of the Hurons.
The chapel bells of Quebec rang and rang again in honor of the new
Jesuit mission--morning, noon, and night they chimed in airy music,
calling men's thoughts to God, just as you may hear the chimes to-day;
and the ramparts below Quebec thundered and reëchoed with salvos of
cannon when the missionaries set out for Three Rivers.
{83} At Three Rivers waited the Indians of the Up-Country. The Jesuits
embarked with them for the land of the Hurons. The priests traveled
barefoot to avoid injuring the frail bark of the canoes. Barely had
farewell cheers faded on the river, when the canoes spread apart. With
pieces of buckskin hoisted on fishing rods for sail, and a flipping of
paddles as naked, bronzed arms set the pace, the voyage had begun.
Heroism is easy with chapel bells ringing; it is another matter,
barefoot and with sleeves rolled up.
It was the same trail that Champlain had followed up the Ottawa. Only
Champlain was assured of good treatment, for he had promised to fight
in the Indian wars; but the Jesuits were dependent on the caprice of
their conductors. Any one, who, from experience in the wilds, has
learned how the term "tenderfoot" came to be applied, will realize the
hardships endured--and endured without self-pity--by these scholarly
men of immured life. The rocks of the portage cut their naked feet.
The Indians refused to carry their packs overland and flung bundles of
clothing and food into the water. In fair weather the voyageurs slept
on the sand under the overturned canoes; in rain a wigwam was raised,
and into the close confines of this tent crowded men, women, and
children, for the most part naked, and with less idea of decency than a
domestic dog. Each night, as the boats were beached, the priests
wandered off into the woods to hold their prayers in privacy. Soon the
canoes were so far apart the different boats did not camp together, and
the white men were scattered alone among the savages. Robberies
increased till, when Brébeuf reached Georgian Bay, thirty days from
leaving Three Rivers, he had little left but the bundles he had carried
for himself.
Brébeuf had been to the Huron country before with Etienne Brulé,
Champlain's pathfinder; but of the first mission no record exists.
Brébeuf found that Brulé had been murdered near the modern Penetang;
and the Indians had scarcely brought the priest's canoe ashore, when
they bolted through the woods, leaving him to follow as best he could.
{84} Take a map of modern Ontario. Draw a circle round Georgian Bay,
running from Muskoka through Lake Simcoe and up into Manitoulin Island.
Here, on the very stamping ground of the summer tourist, was the scene
of the Jesuits' Huron mission.
[Illustration: GEORGIAN BAY]
When Brébeuf's tall frame emerged from the woods, the whole village of
Ihonateria dashed out to welcome him, shouting, "He has come! He has
come again! Behold, the Black Robe has come again!" Young braves
willingly ran back through the forest for the baggage, which the
voyageurs had thrown aside; and at one o'clock in the morning, as the
messengers came through the moonlit forest, Brébeuf took up his abode
in the house of the leading chief. Later came Fathers Davost and
Daniel. By October the Indians had built the missionaries their
wigwam, a bark-covered house of logs, thirty-six feet long, divided
into three rooms, reception room, living quarters, church. In the
entrance hall assembled the Indians, squatting on the floor, gazing in
astonishment at the religious pictures on the wall, and, above all, at
the clock.
{85} "What does he say?" they would ask, listening solemnly to the
ticking.
"He says 'Hang on the kettle,'" Brébeuf would answer as the clock
struck twelve, and the whole conclave would be given a simple meal of
corn porridge; but at four the clock sang a different song.
"It says 'Get up and go home,'" Brébeuf would explain, and the Indians
would file out, knowing well that the Black Robes were to engage in
prayer.
No holiday in the wildwoods was the Jesuit mission. Chapel bell called
to service at four in the morning. Eight was the breakfast hour. The
morning was passed teaching, preaching, visiting. At two o'clock was
dinner, when a chapter of the Bible was read. After four the Indians
were dismissed, and the missionaries met to compare notes and plan the
next day's campaign.
By 1645, five mission houses had been established, with Ste. Marie on
the Wye, east of Midland, as the central house. Near Lake Simcoe were
two missions,--St. Jean Ba'tiste and St. Joseph; near Penetang, St.
Louis, and St. Ignace. Westward of Ste. Marie on the Wye were half a
dozen irregular missions among the Tobacco Indians. Each of the five
regular missions boasted palisaded inclosures, a chapel of log slabs
with bell and spire, though the latter might be only a high wooden
cross. At Ste. Marie, the central station, were lodgings for sixty
people, a hospital, kitchen garden, with cattle, pigs, and poultry. At
various times soldiers had been sent up by the Quebec governors, till
some thirty or forty were housed at Ste. Marie. In all were eighteen
priests, four lay brothers, seven white servants, and twenty-three
volunteers, unpaid helpers--donnés, they were called, young men
ardently religious, learning woodlore and the Indian language among the
Jesuits, as well as exploring whenever it was possible for them to
accompany the Indians. Among the volunteers was one Chouart
Groseillers, who, if he did not accompany Father Jogues on a preaching
tour to the tribes of Lake Superior, had at least gone as far as the
Sault and learned of the vast unexplored world beyond Lake Superior.
{86} Food, as always, played a large part in winning the soul of the
redskin. On church fête days as many as three thousand people were fed
and lodged at Ste. Marie. That the priests suffered many trials among
the unreasonable savages need not be told. When it rained too heavily
they were accused of ruining the crops by praying for too much rain;
when there was drouth they were blamed for not arranging this matter
with their God; and when the scourge of smallpox raged through the
Huron villages, devastating the wigwams so that the timber wolves
wandered unmolested among the dead, it was easy for the humpback
sorcerer to ascribe the pestilence also to the influence of the Black
Robes. Once their houses were set on fire. Again and again their
lives were threatened. Often after tramping twenty miles through the
sleet-soaked, snow-drifted spring forests, arriving at an Indian
village foredone and exhausted, the Jesuit was met with no better
welcome than a wigwam flap closed against his entrance, or a rabble of
impish children hooting and jeering him as he sought shelter from house
to house.
But an influence was at work on the borders of the St. Lawrence that
yearly rendered the Hurons more tractable. From raiding the
settlements of the St. Lawrence, the Iroquois were sweeping in a
scourge more deadly than smallpox up the Ottawa to the very forests of
Georgian Bay. The Hurons no longer dared to go down to Quebec in
swarming canoes. Only a few picked warriors--perhaps two hundred and
fifty--would venture so near the Iroquois fighting ground.
One winter night, as the priests sat round their hearth fire watching
the mournful shadows cast by the blazing logs on the rude walls,
Brébeuf, the soldier, lion-hearted, the fearless, told in a low, dreamy
voice of a vision that had come,--the vision of a huge fiery cross
rising slowly out of the forest and moving across the face of the sky
towards the Huron country. It seemed to come from the land of the
Iroquois. Was the priest's vision a dream, or his own intuition deeper
than reason, assuming dire form, portending a universal fear? Who can
tell? I can but repeat the story as it is told in their annals.
{87} "How large was the cross?" asked the other priests. Brébeuf gazes
long in the fire.
"Large enough to crucify us all," he answers.
And, as he had dreamed, fell the blow.
St. Joseph, of the Lake Simcoe region, was situated a day's travel from
the main fortified mission of Ste. Marie. Round it were some two
thousand Hurons to whom Father Daniel ministered. Father Daniel was
just closing the morning services on July the 4th, 1648. His tawny
people were on their knees repeating the responses of the service, when
from the forest, humming with insect and bird life, arose a sound that
was neither wind nor running water--confused, increasing, nearing!
Then a shriek broke within the fort palisades,--"The enemy! the
Iroquois!" and the courtyard was in an uproar indescribable. Painted
redskins, naked but for the breech clout, were dashing across the
cornfields to scale the palisades or force the hastily slammed gates.
Father Daniel rushed from church to wigwams rallying the Huron
warriors, while the women and children, the aged and the feeble, ran a
terrified rabble to the shelter of the chapel. Before the Hurons could
man the walls, Iroquois hatchets had hacked holes of entrance in the
palisades. The fort was rushed by a bloodthirsty horde making the air
hideous with fiendish screams.
"Fly! Save yourselves!" shouted the priest. "I stay here! We shall
this day meet in Heaven!"
In the volley and counter volley of ball and arrow, Father Daniel
reeled on his face, shot in the heart. In a trice his body was cut to
pieces, and the Iroquois were bathing their hands in his warm
lifeblood. A moment later the village was in roaring flames, and on
the burning pile were flung the fragments of the priest's body. The
victors set out on the homeward tramp with a line of more than six
hundred prisoners, the majority, women and children, to be brained if
their strength failed on the march, to be tortured in the Iroquois
towns if they survived the abuse on the way.
{88} Next westward from the Lake Simcoe missions were St. Ignace with
four hundred people and St. Louis with seven hundred, near the modern
Penetang and within short distance of the Jesuits' strong headquarters
on the River Wye. At these two missions labored Brébeuf, the giant,
and a fragile priest named Lalemant.
Encouraged by the total destruction of St. Joseph, the Iroquois that
very fall took the warpath with more than one thousand braves.
Ascending the Ottawa leisurely, they had passed the winter hunting and
cutting off any stray wanderers found in the forest.
The Hurons knew the doom that was slowly approaching. Yet they
remained passive, stunned, terrified by the blow at St. Joseph. It was
spring of 1649 before the warriors reached Georgian Bay. March winds
had cleared the trail of snowdrifts, but the forests were still
leafless. St. Ignace mission lay between Lake Simcoe and St. Louis.
Approaching it one windy March night, the Iroquois had cut holes
through the palisades before dawn and burst inside the walls with the
yells and gyrations of some hideous hell dance. Here a warrior
simulated the howl of the wolf. There another approached in the
crouching leaps of a panther, all the while uttering the yelps and
screams of a beast of prey lashed to fury. The poor Hurons were easy
victims. Nearly all their braves happened to be absent hunting, and
the four hundred women and children, rushing from the long houses half
dazed with sleep, fell without realizing their fate, or found
themselves herded in the chapel like cattle at the shambles, Iroquois
guards at every window and door.
Luckily three Hurons escaped over the palisades and rushed breathless
through the forest to forewarn Brébeuf and Lalemant cooped up in St.
Louis. The Iroquois came on behind like a wolf pack.
"Escape! Escape! Run to the woods, Black Robes! There is yet time,"
the Indian converts urged Brébeuf; but the lion-hearted stood
steadfast, though Lalemant, new to scenes of carnage, turned white and
trembled in spite of his resolution.
{89} "Who would protect the women if the men fled like deer to the
woods?" demanded Brébeuf, and the tigerish yells of the on-rushing
horde answered the question.
[Illustration: BRÉBEUF]
Before day dawn had tipped the branches of the leafless trees with
shafted sunlight, the enemy were hacking furiously at the palisades.
Trapped and cornered, the most timid of animals will fight. With such
fury, reckless from desperation, cherishing no hope, the Hurons now
fought, but they were handicapped by lack of guns and balls. Thirty
Iroquois had been slain, a hundred wounded, and the assailants drew off
for breath. It was only the lull between two thunderclaps. A moment
later they were on St. Louis' walls and had hacked through a dozen
places. At these spots the fiercest fighting occurred, and those
Iroquois who had not already bathed their faces in the gore of victims
at St. Ignace were soon enough dyed in their own blood. Here, there,
everywhere, were Brébeuf and Lalemant, fighting, administering last
rites, exhorting the Hurons to perish valiantly. Then the rolling
clouds of flame and smoke told the Hurons that their village was on
fire. Some dashed back to die inside the burning wigwams. Others
fought desperately to escape through the broken walls. A few, in the
confusion and smoke, succeeded in reaching the woods, whence they ran
to warn Ste. Marie on the Wye. Brébeuf and Lalemant had been knocked
down, stripped, bound, and were now {90} half driven, half dragged,
with the other captives to be tortured at Ignace. Not a sign of fear
did either priest betray.
One would fain pass over the next pages of the Jesuit records. It is
inconceivable how human nature, even savage nature, so often stoops
beneath the most repellent cruelties of the brute world. It is
inconceivable unless one acknowledge an influence fiendish; but let us
not judge the Indians too harshly. When the Iroquois warriors were
torturing the Hurons and their missionaries, the populace of civilized
European cities was outdoing the savages on victims whose sins were
political.
While the Jesuits of Ste. Marie were praying all day and night before
the lighted altar for heavenly intervention to rescue Brébeuf and
Lalemant, the two captured priests stood bound to the torture stakes,
the gapingstock of a thousand fiends. When the Iroquois singed Brébeuf
from head to foot with burning birch bark, he threatened them in tones
of thunder with everlasting damnation for persecuting the servants of
God. The Iroquois shrieked with laughter. Such spirit in a man was to
their liking. Then, to stop his voice, they cut away his lips and
rammed a red-hot iron into his mouth. Not once did the giant priest
flinch or writhe at the torture stake. Then they brought out Lalemant,
that Brébeuf might suffer the agony of seeing a weaker spirit flinch.
Poor Lalemant fell at his superior's feet, sobbing out a verse of
Scripture. Then they wreathed Lalemant in oiled bark and set fire to
it.
"We baptize you," they yelled, throwing hot water on the dying man.
Then they railed out blasphemies, obscenities unspeakable, against the
Jesuits' religion. Brébeuf had not winced, but his frame was relaxing.
He sank to his knees, a dying man. With the yells of devils jealous of
losing their prey, they ripped off his scalp while he was still alive,
tore his heart from his breast, and drank the warm lifeblood of the
priest. Brébeuf died at four in the afternoon. Strange to relate,
Lalemant, of the weaker body, survived the tortures till daybreak,
when, weary of the sport, the Indians desisted from their mad night
orgies and put an end to his sufferings by braining him.
{91} Over at Ste. Marie, Ragueneau and the other priests momentarily
awaited the attack; but at Ste. Marie were forty French soldiers and
ample supply of muskets. The Iroquois was bravest as the wolf is
bravest--when attacking a lamb. Three hundred Hurons lay in ambush
along the forest trail. These ran from the Iroquois like sheep; but
when three hundred more sallied from the fort, led by the French, it
was the Iroquois' turn to run, and they fled back behind the palisades
of St. Louis. The Hurons followed, entered by the selfsame breaches
the Iroquois had made, and drove the invaders out. More Iroquois
rushed from Ignace to the rescue. A hundred Iroquois fell in the day's
fight, and when they finally recaptured St. Louis, only twenty Hurons
remained of the three hundred. The victory had been bought at too
great cost. Tying their prisoners to stakes at St. Ignace, they heaped
the courtyard with inflammable wood, set fire to all, and retreated,
taking only enough prisoners to carry their plunder.
[Illustration: REMNANTS OF WALLS OF FORT ST. MARY ON CHRISTIAN ISLAND
IN 1891]
Ste. Marie for the time was safe. The invaders had gone; but the blow
had crushed forever the prowess of the Huron nation. The remaining
towns had thought for nothing but flight. {92} Town after town was
forsaken and burned in the summer of 1649, the corn harvest left
standing in the fields, while the panic-stricken people put out in
their canoes to take refuge on the islands of Georgian Bay. Ste. Marie
on the Wye alone remained, and the reason for its existence was
vanishing like winter snow before summer sun, for its people fled . . .
fled . . . fled . . . daily fled to the pink granite islands of the
lake. The Hurons begged the Jesuits to accompany them, and there was
nothing else for Ragueneau to do. Ste. Marie was stripped, the stock
slain for food. Then the buildings were set on fire. June 14, just as
the sunset bathed water and sky in seas of gold, the priest led his
homeless people down to the lake as Moses of old led the children of
Israel. Oars and sweeps, Georgian Bay calm as glass, they rafted
slowly out to the Christian Islands,--Faith, Hope, and Charity,--which
tourists can still see from passing steamers, a long wooded line beyond
the white water-fret of the wind-swept reefs. The island known on the
map as Charity, or St. Joseph, was heavily wooded. Here the refugees
found their haven, and the French soldiers cleared the ground {93} for
a stone fort of walled masonry,--the islands offering little else than
stone and timber, though the fishing has not failed to this day.
[Illustration: MAP OF THE GREAT LAKES Showing the territory of the
Jesuit Huron missions]
By autumn the walled fort was complete, but some eight thousand
refugees had gathered to the island. Such numbers could not subsist on
Georgian Bay in summer. In winter their presence meant starvation, and
before the spring of 1650 half had perished. Of the survivors, many
had fed on the bodies of the dead. No help had come from Quebec for
almost three years. The clothing of the priests had long since worn to
shreds. Ragueneau and his helpers were now dressed in skins like the
Indians, and reduced to a diet of nuts and smoked fish.
With warm weather came sickness. And also came bands of raiding
Iroquois striking terror to the Tobacco Indians. Among them, too,
perished Jesuit priests, martyrs to the faith. Did some of the Hurons
venture from the Christian Islands across to the mainland to hunt, they
were beset by scalping parties and came back to the fort with tales
that crazed Ragueneau's Indians with terror. The Hurons decided to
abandon Georgian Bay. Some scattered to Lake Superior, to Green Bay,
to Detroit. Others found refuge on Manitoulin Island. A remnant of a
few hundreds followed Ragueneau and the French down the Ottawa to take
shelter at Quebec. Their descendants may be found to this day at the
mission of Lorette.
To-day, as tourists drive through Quebec, marveling at the massive
buildings and power and wealth of Catholic orders, do they pause to
consider that the foundation stones of that power were dyed in the
blood of these early martyrs? Or, as the pleasure seekers glide among
the islands of Georgian Bay, do they ever ponder that this fair world
of blue waters and pink granite islands once witnessed the most bloody
tragedy of brute force, triumphant over the blasted hopes of religious
zeal?
{94}