His quaint account is translated as follows:
Our Lord inspired me with this method the second year of my mission, when, being greatly embarrassed as to the mode in which I should teach the Indians to pray, I noticed some children making marks on birch bark with coal, and they pointed to them with their fingers at every word of the prayer which they pronounced. This made me think that by giving them some form which would aid their memory by fixed characters, I should advance much more rapidly than by teaching on the plan of making them repeat over and over what I said. I was charmed to know that I was not deceived, and that these characters which I had traced on paper produced all the effect I desired, so that in a few days they learned all their prayers without difficulty. I cannot describe to you the ardor with which these poor Indians competed with each other in praiseworthy emulation which should be the most learned and the ablest. It costs, indeed, much time and pains to make all they require, and especially since I enlarged them so as to include all the prayers of the church, with the sacred mysteries of the trinity, incarnation, baptism, penance, and the eucharist.
There is no description whatever of the characters.
Fig. 1082.—Title page of Kauder’s Micmac Catechism.
The next important printed notice or appearance of the Micmac characters is in the work of Rev. Christian Kauder, a Redemptorist missionary, the title page of which is given in Fig. 1082. It was printed in Vienna in 1866 and therefore was about two centuries later than the first recorded invention of the characters. During those two centuries the French and therefore the Roman Catholic influences had been much of the time dormant in the habitat of the Micmacs (the enforced exodus of the French from Acadie being about 1755). Father Kauder was one of the most active in the renewal of the missions. He learned the Micmac language, probably gathered together such “hieroglyphs” on rolls of bark as had been preserved, added to them parts of the Greek and Roman alphabet and other designs, and arranged the whole in systematic and grammatic form. After about twenty years of work upon them he procured their printing in Vienna. A small part of the edition, which was the first printed, reached the Micmacs. The main part, shipped later, was lost at sea in the transporting vessel.
Fig. 1083.—The Lord’s Prayer in Micmac hieroglyphics.
Fig. 1083 shows the version of the Lord’s Prayer, published by Dr. J. G. Shea (a) in his translation of Le Clercq’s First Establishment of the Faith in New France, this and the preceding figure being taken from the Bibliography of the Languages of the N. A. Indians by Mr. J. C. Pilling, of the Bureau of Ethnology.