The Jesuit Missions : A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness

by Thomas Guthrie Marquis

The Iroquois had won, but they had no stomach for raiding the settlements. If seventeen Frenchmen, assisted by a few Indians, could keep their hosts at bay for a week, it would be useless to attack strongly fortified posts. And so Daulac and his men at this 'Canadian Thermopylae' had really turned aside the tide of war from New France. The settlements were saved, and for a time traders and missionaries journeyed along the St Lawrence and the Ottawa unmolested.

In 1663, when Louis XIV took New France under his wing, the surviving members of the original Society of Our Lady of Montreal made over the island to the Sulpicians, who assumed the liabilities of the Society, and took up the task of looking after the education of the inhabitants and the care of the sick. Four years later the Seminary of St Sulpice was given judicial rights in the mission of Ville Marie. In 1668 five more Sulpicians came to the colony, among them Rene de Galinee and Dollier de Casson, who were to win distinction as missionaries and explorers. Many Sulpician missions pushed out from Ville Marie, along the upper St Lawrence and the north shore of Lake Ontario.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century the complexion of Ville Marie, then generally called Montreal, had somewhat changed. The Jesuits, the Recollets, who had returned to New France in 1670, and the Sulpicians all laboured there. Moreover, from a mere mission station it had become an important trading centre; and as such it was to continue. In position it was well adapted for the fur trade, and after the British took possession in 1760 it became the emporium of a great traffic in the fur-fields of the north and west. But its glorious days are those of its infancy, the days of Maisonneuve and Daulac, of Jeanne Mance and Marguerite Bourgeoys, of Rene de Galinee and Dollier de Casson.

CHAPTER X

THE MISSIONARY EXPLORERS

The establishment of royal government in 1663 gave new life to the missions of Canada, and the missionaries pressed forward with unflagging zeal. They penetrated to the remotest known tribes and blazed fresh trails for traders and settlers in the western and northern wildernesses. We have not space here to tell the story of these pathfinders, but a few examples may be given. In 1665 Father Claude Allouez went to Lake Superior to begin a sojourn of twenty-five years among the Indians in the region which now forms part of the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. In 1666 Father Gabriel Druillettes, 'the patriarch' of the Abnaki mission, who had already borne the Cross to the Crees of the north, began his labours among the Algonquins of Georgian Bay and Lake Superior. In 1669 and 1670 the Sulpicians Dollier de Casson and Rene de Galinee explored and charted Lake Erie and the waters between it and Lake Huron. In 1670 Father Claude Dablon, superior of the western missions, joined Father Allouez at the mission of St Francois-Xavier on Green Bay; and, among the Winnebagoes of this region and the Mascoutens and Miamis between the rivers Fox and Wisconsin, he learned of 'the famous river called the Mississippi.' In 1672 Father Charles Albanel toiled from the Saguenay to Hudson Bay, partly as missionary, but chiefly to lay claim to the country for New France, and to watch the operations of the newly founded Hudson's Bay Company.

It was the 25th of May 1670 when Galinee and Casson arrived at Sault Ste Marie, after an arduous canoe journey from their wintering camp on Lake Erie, near the site of the present town of Port Dover. At the Sault they found a thriving mission. It had a capacious chapel and a comfortable dwelling-house; it was surrounded by a palisade of cedars, and about it were cultivated bits of ground planted with wheat, Indian corn, peas, and pumpkins. Near by were clusters of bark wigwams, the homes of Ojibwas and other Indians, who came here each year to catch the whitefish that teemed in the waters of the rapids fronting the settlement.

One of the priests in charge of this mission, when the Sulpicians halted at it on their circuitous journey back to Montreal, was the young Jesuit Jacques Marquette, a man of delicate mould, indomitable will, keen intellect, and ardent faith. He was not to remain long at Sault Ste Marie; for he had heard 'the call of the west'; and in the summer of this year he set out for the mission of St Esprit, at La Pointe, on the south-west shore of Lake Superior. Here there was a motley collection of Indians, among them many Hurons and Petuns, who had fled to this remote post to be out of reach of the Iroquois. These exiles from Huronia still remembered the Jesuits and retained 'a little Christianity.' St Esprit was not only a mission; it was a centre of the fur trade, and to it came Illinois Indians from the Mississippi and Sioux from the western prairies. From these Marquette learned of the great river, and from their description of it he was convinced that it flowed into the Gulf of California. He had a burning desire to visit the savage hordes that dwelt along this river, and a longing to explore it to its mouth. But while he meditated the journey war broke out between the Sioux—the Iroquois of the west—and the Hurons and Ottawas of St Esprit. The Sioux won, and the vanquished Hurons and Ottawas took to flight, the Hurons going to Michilimackinac and the Ottawas to Great Manitoulin Island. Marquette followed the Hurons, and set up a mission at Point St Ignace, on the north shore of the strait of Michilimackinac.

Meanwhile 'the great intendant,' Talon, was pushing out in all directions for new territory to add to the French dominions in America. And just before the end of his brilliant administration he commissioned the explorer Louis Jolliet to find and explore the Mississippi, of which so much had been heard from missionaries, traders, and Indians. Like Marquette, Talon believed that this river flowed into the Western Sea—the Pacific ocean—and that it would open a route to China and the Indies; and it was directed that Marquette should accompany Jolliet on the journey.

Jolliet left Montreal in the autumn of 1672 and reached Michilimackinac, where he was to spend the winter with Marquette, just as the ice was forming on lake and river. When he drew up his canoe in front of the palisaded mission at Point St Ignace, Marquette felt that his ambitions were about to be realized. He was disappointed in his flock of Algonquins and the feeble remnant of Hurons, and he hoped to gather about him on the Great Plains—of whose vegetation and game he had heard marvellous accounts—a multitude of Indians who would welcome his Gospel message. Dablon and Allouez had already touched the outskirts of this country, and their success was an earnest of great things in store.