Columbus and Other Heroes of American Discovery

by N. D'Anvers

The point of land on Lake Superior where the white men first stepped ashore appears to have been near the rapid known as the Sault Ste. Marie, at the beginning of the river St. Mary, through which the waters of Lake Superior flow into Lake Huron; and it was probably within sight of the gray and red sandstone cliffs called the Pictured Rocks, which now look down upon the boundary-line between British America and the United States, that Father Raymbault took up his abode, to begin his ministrations among the Chippewayans. Unfortunately, however, his health began to fail him before he had been at work a year, and, after a farewell visit to the Nipissing converts, he retired to Quebec to die.

Jogues, meanwhile, on whom his superior’s mantle should naturally have fallen, was working out a very different mission; and though the Chippewayans were not forgotten, and we find Ste. Marie again a missionary station a few years later, it was the fierce Iroquois who were next to receive a Christian minister among them. Sent down the St. Lawrence on a message connected with Raymbault’s work, the second missionary, a friendly Huron chief named Ahasisteri, two young French laymen, and some twenty-six Hurons, fell into the hands of a party of Mohawks, who had long been eager for a feast of human flesh, and looked upon the whites and their escort as lawful prey. To quote the quaint Father who sent home an account of the matter, if peace could not be made with the Iroquois, no Frenchman would be safe from “finding a tomb in the stomachs of these savages.”

That Jogues this time escaped this awful fate was indeed little short of a miracle. He was marched with his companions in misfortune through three Mohawk villages; he saw Ahasisteri burned to death, and one of his own young Indian converts tomahawked for making the sign of the cross on a baby’s forehead; yet, for some reason unexplained, his own life was spared, and having managed to get away from his party, he wandered about in the woods, carving the name of Christ on the bark of the trees, till he came in sight of the Dutch fort at Albany, and was received by its commandant, Van Cuyler, having been the first white man to cross the northern half of the present state of New York.

From Albany, Jogues was unable to return direct to Canada, either by sea or by land, and he therefore took ship for England, whence, after suffering many things at the hands of Falmouth wreckers, he managed to get back to the land of his adoption. Here he found all the French stations in a state of horror-struck excitement, owing to the increasing hostility of the Iroquois. A Father Bressain, who had fallen into one of their ambushes, had seen his Huron comrades killed and eaten, and had himself been rescued only at the last moment by Dutch traders. Other horrors, too terrible to be related, had been inflicted on the native converts to Christianity, and in 1645 a solemn assembly of all the French authorities was held at Three Rivers, with a view to the negotiation of peace with the terrible enemy. After much private consultation among themselves, and many a picturesque palaver with the Indian sachems, who came to the meeting decked out in all their finery, the French were cheered by the conclusion of “eternal peace” with the Five Nations. This peace actually lasted a whole year, and at the end of that year seemed so little likely to be broken, that Jogues, in spite of all his previous sufferings, resolved to venture again to the south of the St. Lawrence, and try to win over some of the Iroquois to Christianity.

In June, 1646, we find the heroic Jesuit embarking on the Iroquois, now the Richelieu, escorted by four warriors of that nation and two young Algonquins, his object being to found a church among the Onondagas. He arrived safely at a little village at the head of a small sheet of water connected with Lake Champlain, called by the natives Andiatarocté, or the Gate of the Lake, to which he gave the name of St. Sacrement. After a short cruise on the “Gate,” and the presentation of gifts to the Iroquois chiefs and elders who happened to be assembled on its banks, Jogues returned to the St. Lawrence to report progress, and in September of the same year—this time accompanied by a young Frenchman—he once more visited the Iroquois, intending to settle among them and teach them Christianity.

All went well at first, but at the beginning of 1647 Jogues received instructions from his superiors to go to the Mohawk country, with a view to insuring peace with its savage warriors, who were showing signs of breaking the solemn treaty made at Three Rivers. The Jesuit obeyed, though he is reported to have said, “I shall go, but I shall never return.” He was right. He had scarcely set foot among the Mohawks, before he and his fellow-countryman were taken prisoners, charged with having blighted the corn and caused a famine. Stripped half naked, they were dragged into a neighboring village and there put to death. Not until long afterward did any details of the tragedy reach Quebec. A Mohawk prisoner, taken in a struggle with the French on the St. Lawrence, and condemned to death for his share in an ambush into which the white men and some of their Algonquin allies had fallen, confessed before his torture began that he had himself killed Jogues, and another member of his tribe the missionary’s companion.

No more vivid picture of the struggle between savagery and civilization in the early days of Canada could be conceived, than the account sent home by a Jesuit of the young Mohawk’s death. This Mohawk had told how he and another had invited Jogues to supper, and when he arrived in the half-naked state to which he had been reduced, a savage, who had hidden behind the door of the tent where supper was prepared, started out and struck off the head of the unsuspecting guest. The head was stuck on the palisades of the village, as a warning to all other Europeans, and on the following day that of the young French layman was placed beside it.

One would have thought that, after this frank acknowledgment of his own share in the murder, no mercy would have been shown to the Mohawk. But here the true character of the Jesuits came out. Die he still must, and that at the hands of the Algonquins, with all the subtle cruelties in which they were adepts; but there was no reason for him to die in his sins. The short time before the execution was to take place was devoted to converting him to Christianity; and just before he was given up to the native chief who was to preside at his death, he was baptized Isaac, in memory of the man he had helped to martyr. Poor Isaac is said to have cried again and again on our Saviour in his agony, and to have said, when dying, “I have to thank Antaiok” (so he called the Frenchman who had taken him prisoner) “that I am going to heaven; I am very glad.”

The murder of Jogues was the signal for another Indian war; and for a time the French missionaries and laymen alike were absorbed in the primary duty of the defense of their own lives and of those dear to them. Through all the tumult and confusion which ensued, however, the geographical student may, by eager searching, trace the continuous opening up of new districts, and on the blank map which was spread out before us when we began our narrative, we may [♦]jot down the names of many a river and lake almost unconsciously discovered by the white men, in the very height of their struggle.

[♦] ‘dot’ replaced with ‘jot’