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It had been the first purpose of the Jesuits to form permanent
missions in each of the principal Huron towns; but, before the close
of the year 1639, the difficulties and risks of this scheme had
become fully apparent. They resolved, therefore, to establish one
central station, to be a base of operations, and, as it were, a
focus, whence the light of the Faith should radiate through all the
wilderness around. It was to serve at once as residence, fort,
magazine, hospital, and convent. Hence the priests would set forth
on missionary expeditions far and near; and hither they might
retire, as to an asylum, in times of sickness or extreme peril. Here
the neophytes could be gathered together, safe from perverting
influences; and here in time a Christian settlement, Huron mingled
with Frenchmen, might spring up and thrive under the shadow of the
cross.
The site of the new station was admirably chosen. The little river
Wye flows from the southward into the Matchedash Bay of Lake Huron,
and, at about a mile from its mouth, passes through a small lake.
The Jesuits made choice of the right bank of the Wye, where it
issues from this lake,--gained permission to build from the Indians,
though not without difficulty,--and began their labors with an
abundant energy, and a very deficient supply of workmen and tools.
The new establishment was called Sainte Marie. The house at
Teanaustayé, and the house and chapel at Ossossané, were abandoned,
and all was concentrated at this spot. On one hand, it had a short
water communication with Lake Huron; and on the other, its central
position gave the readiest access to every part of the Huron
territory.
During the summer before, the priests had made a survey of their
field of action, visited all the Huron towns, and christened each of
them with the name of a saint. This heavy draft on the calendar was
followed by another, for the designation of the nine towns of the
neighboring and kindred people of the Tobacco Nation. [See
Introduction.] The Huron towns were
portioned into four districts, while those of the Tobacco Nation
formed a fifth, and each district was assigned to the charge of two
or more priests. In November and December, they began their
missionary excursions,--for the Indians were now gathered in their
settlements,--and journeyed on foot through the denuded forests, in
mud and snow, bearing on their backs the vessels and utensils
necessary for the service of the altar.
The new and perilous mission of the Tobacco Nation fell to Garnier
and Jogues. They were well chosen; and yet neither of them was
robust by nature, in body or mind, though Jogues was noted for
personal activity. The Tobacco Nation lay at the distance of a two
days' journey from the Huron towns, among the mountains at the head
of Nottawassaga Bay. The two missionaries tried to find a guide at
Ossossané; but none would go with them, and they set forth on their
wild and unknown pilgrimage alone.
The forests were full of snow; and the soft, moist flakes were still
falling thickly, obscuring the air, beplastering the gray trunks,
weighing to the earth the boughs of spruce and pine, and hiding
every footprint of the narrow path. The Fathers missed their way,
and toiled on till night, shaking down at every step from the
burdened branches a shower of fleecy white on their black cassocks.
Night overtook them in a spruce swamp. Here they made a fire with
great difficulty, cut the evergreen boughs, piled them for a bed,
and lay down. The storm presently ceased; and, "praised be God,"
writes one of the travellers, "we passed a very good night." [Jogues
and Garnier in Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1640, 95.]
In the morning they breakfasted on a morsel of corn bread, and,
resuming their journey, fell in with a small party of Indians, whom
they followed all day without food. At eight in the evening they
reached the first Tobacco town, a miserable cluster of bark cabins,
hidden among forests and half buried in snow-drifts, where the
savage children, seeing the two black apparitions, screamed that
Famine and the Pest were coming. Their evil fame had gone before
them. They were unwelcome guests; nevertheless, shivering and
famished as they were, in the cold and darkness, they boldly pushed
their way into one of these dens of barbarism. It was precisely like
a Huron house. Five or six fires blazed on the earthen floor, and
around them were huddled twice that number of families, sitting,
crouching, standing, or flat on the ground; old and young, women and
men, children and dogs, mingled pell-mell. The scene would have been
a strange one by daylight: it was doubly strange by the flicker and
glare of the lodge-fires. Scowling brows, sidelong looks of distrust
and fear, the screams of scared children, the scolding of squaws,
the growling of wolfish dogs,--this was the greeting of the
strangers. The chief man of the household treated them at first with
the decencies of Indian hospitality; but when he saw them kneeling
in the litter and ashes at their devotions, his suppressed fears
found vent, and he began a loud harangue, addressed half to them and
half to the Indians. "Now, what are these okies doing? They
are making charms to kill us, and destroy all that the pest has
spared in this house. I heard that they were sorcerers; and now,
when it is too late, I believe it." [Lalemant, Relation des Hurons,
1640, 96.] It is wonderful that the priests escaped the tomahawk.
Nowhere is the power of courage, faith, and an unflinching purpose
more strikingly displayed than in the record of these missions.
In other Tobacco towns their reception was much the same; but at the
largest, called by them St. Peter and St. Paul, they fared worse.
They reached it on a winter afternoon. Every door of its capacious
bark houses was closed against them; and they heard the squaws
within calling on the young men to go out and split their heads,
while children screamed abuse at the black-robed sorcerers. As night
approached, they left the town, when a band of young men followed
them, hatchet in hand, to put them to death. Darkness, the forest,
and the mountain favored them; and, eluding their pursuers, they
escaped. Thus began the mission of the Tobacco Nation.
In the following November, a yet more distant and perilous mission
was begun. Brébeuf and Chaumonot set out for the Neutral Nation.
This fierce people, as we have already seen, occupied that part of
Canada which lies immediately north of Lake Erie, while a wing of
their territory extended across the Niagara into Western New York.1
In their athletic proportions, the ferocity of their manners, and
the extravagance of their superstitions, no American tribe has ever
exceeded them. They carried to a preposterous excess the Indian
notion, that insanity is endowed with a mysterious and superhuman
power. Their country was full of pretended maniacs, who, to
propitiate their guardian spirits, or okies, and acquire the
mystic virtue which pertained to madness, raved stark naked through
the villages, scattering the brands of the lodge-fires, and
upsetting everything in their way.
The two priests left Sainte Marie on the second of November, found a
Huron guide at St. Joseph, and, after a dreary march of five days
through the forest, reached the first Neutral town. Advancing
thence, they visited in turn eighteen others; and their progress was
a storm of maledictions. Brébeuf especially was accounted the most
pestilent of sorcerers. The Huron, restrained by a superstitious
awe, and unwilling to kill the priests, lest they should embroil
themselves with the French at Quebec, conceived that their object
might be safely gained by stirring up the Neutrals to become their
executioners. To that end, they sent two emissaries to the Neutral
towns, who, calling the chiefs and young warriors to a council,
denounced the Jesuits as destroyers of the human race, and made
their auditors a gift of nine French hatchets on condition that they
would put them to death. It was now that Brébeuf, fully conscious of
the danger, half starved and half frozen, driven with revilings from
every door, struck and spit upon by pretended maniacs, beheld in a
vision that great cross, which as we have seen, moved onward through
the air, above the wintry forests that stretched towards the land of
the Iroquois. [See ante, chapter 9 second last paragraph (page
109).]
Chaumonot records yet another miracle. "One evening, when all the
chief men of the town were deliberating in council whether to put us
to death, Father Brébeuf, while making his examination of
conscience, as we were together at prayers, saw the vision of a
spectre, full of fury, menacing us both with three javelins which he
held in his hands. Then he hurled one of them at us; but a more
powerful hand caught it as it flew: and this took place a second and
a third time, as he hurled his two remaining javelins. . . . Late at
night our host came back from the council, where the two Huron
emissaries had made their gift of hatchets to have us killed. He
wakened us to say that three times we had been at the point of
death; for the young men had offered three times to strike the blow,
and three times the old men had dissuaded them. This explained the
meaning of Father Brébeuf's vision." [Chaumonot, Vie, 55.]
They had escaped for the time; but the Indians agreed among
themselves, that thenceforth no one should give them shelter. At
night, pierced with cold and faint with hunger, they found every
door closed against them. They stood and watched, saw an Indian
issue from a house, and, by a quick movement, pushed through the
half-open door into this abode of smoke and filth. The inmates,
aghast at their boldness, stared in silence. Then a messenger ran
out to carry the tidings, and an angry crowd collected.
"Go out, and leave our country," said an old chief, "or we will put
you into the kettle, and make a feast of you."
"I have had enough of the dark-colored flesh of our enemies," said a
young brave; "I wish to know the taste of white meat, and I will eat
yours."
A warrior rushed in like a madman, drew his bow, and aimed the arrow
at Chaumonot. "I looked at him fixedly," writes the Jesuit, "and
commended myself in full confidence to St. Michael. Without doubt,
this great archangel saved us; for almost immediately the fury of
the warrior was appeased, and the rest of our enemies soon began to
listen to the explanation we gave them of our visit to their
country." [Ibid., 57.]
The mission was barren of any other fruit than hardship and danger,
and after a stay of four months the two priests resolved to return.
On the way, they met a genuine act of kindness. A heavy snow-storm
arresting their progress, a Neutral woman took them into her lodge,
entertained them for two weeks with her best fare, persuaded her
father and relatives to befriend them, and aided them to make a
vocabulary of the dialect. Bidding their generous hostess farewell,
they journeyed northward, through the melting snows of spring, and
reached Sainte Marie in safety.
[Lalemant, in his Relation of 1641, gives the
narrative of this mission at length. His account
coincides perfectly with the briefer notice of Chaumonot
in his Autobiography. Chaumonot describes the
difficulties of the journey very graphically in a letter
to his friend, Father Nappi, dated Aug. 3, 1640,
preserved in Carayon. See also the next letter, Brébeuf
au T. R. P. Mutio Vitelleschi, 20 Août, 1641.
The Récollet La Roche Dallion had visited the Neutrals
fourteen years before, (see Introduction, note,) and,
like his two successors, had been seriously endangered
by Huron intrigues.] |
The Jesuits had borne all that the human frame seems capable of
bearing. They had escaped as by miracle from torture and death. Did
their zeal flag or their courage fail? A fervor intense and
unquenchable urged them on to more distant and more deadly ventures.
The beings, so near to mortal sympathies, so human, yet so divine,
in whom their faith impersonated and dramatized the great principles
of Christian truth,--virgins, saints, and angels,--hovered over
them, and held before their raptured sight crowns of glory and
garlands of immortal bliss. They burned to do, to suffer, and to
die; and now, from out a living martyrdom, they turned their heroic
gaze towards an horizon dark with perils yet more appalling, and saw
in hope the day when they should bear the cross into the
blood-stained dens of the Iroquois. [This zeal was in no degree due
to success; for in 1641, after seven years of toil, the mission
counted only about fifty living converts,--a falling off from former
years.]
But, in this exaltation and tension of the powers, was there no
moment when the recoil of Nature claimed a temporary sway? When, an
exile from his kind, alone, beneath the desolate rock and the gloomy
pine-trees, the priest gazed forth on the pitiless wilderness and
the hovels of its dark and ruthless tenants, his thoughts, it may
be, flew longingly beyond those wastes of forest and sea that lay
between him and the home of his boyhood. Or rather, led by a deeper
attraction, they revisited the ancient centre of his faith, and he
seemed to stand once more in that gorgeous temple, where, shrined in
lazuli and gold, rest the hallowed bones of Loyola. Column and arch
and dome rise upon his vision, radiant in painted light, and
trembling with celestial music. Again he kneels before the altar,
from whose tablature beams upon him that loveliest of shapes in
which the imagination of man has embodied the spirit of
Christianity. The illusion overpowers him. A thrill shakes his
frame, and he bows in reverential rapture. No longer a memory, no
longer a dream, but a visioned presence, distinct and luminous in
the forest shades, the Virgin stands before him. Prostrate on the
rocky earth, he adores the benign angel of his ecstatic faith, then
turns with rekindled fervors to his stern apostleship.
Now, by the shores of Thunder Bay, the Huron traders freight their
birch vessels for their yearly voyage; and, embarked with them, let
us, too, revisit the rock of Quebec.
1 Introduction.--The river Niagara was at this
time, 1640, well known to the Jesuits, though none of them had
visited it. Lalemant speaks of it as the "famous river of this
nation" (the Neutrals). The following translation, from his Relation
of 1641, shows that both Lake Ontario and Lake Erie had already
taken their present names.
"This river" (the Niagara) "is the same by which our great lake of
the Hurons, or Fresh Sea, discharges itself, in the first place,
into Lake Erie (le lac d'Erié), or the Lake of the Cat Nation. Then
it enters the territories of the Neutral Nation, and takes the name
of Onguiaahra (Niagara), until it discharges itself into Ontario, or
the Lake of St. Louis; whence at last issues the river which passes
before Quebec, and is called the St. Lawrence." He makes no allusion
to the cataract, which is first mentioned as follows by Ragueneau,
in the Relation of 1648.
"Nearly south of this same Neutral Nation there is a great lake,
about two hundred leagues in circuit, named Erie (Erié), which is
formed by the discharge of the Fresh Sea, and which precipitates
itself by a cataract of frightful height into a third lake, named
Ontario, which we call Lake St. Louis."--Relation des Hurons, 1648,
46.
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The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, 1867
Jesuits
in North America
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