The Jesuits adopted the system of the Recollects, but we have no details of their labors,—one Huron boy taken to France, where he was baptized by the name of Louis de Sainte Foy, being the result of the joint labors to which most allusion is made.
The Court of France seems to have considered that both Recollect and Jesuit had failed to acquire the languages of the country sufficiently to do the work of God and of his most Christian Majesty. At all events, each order hastened to put in print evidence of its proficiency in American linguistics. The Recollect Sagard published a Huron Dictionary; the Jesuit Brebeuf, a translation of Ledesma’s Catechism into Huron, with the Lord’s Prayer and other devotions rendered into Montagnais by Father Enemond Masse.[678]
When England reluctantly yielded up her Canadian conquest, the all-powerful Cardinal Richelieu seems to have looked with no kindly eye on either of the bodies who had already labored to evangelize New France. He offered the mission to his favorite order, the Capuchins, and only when they declined it did he permit the Jesuits to return.
With the restoration of Canada to France by the treaty of Saint Germain in 1632, the history of the great Jesuit missions begins. For some years the Fathers of the Society of Jesus were, almost without exception, the only clergy in the colony in charge of all the churches of the settlers and the missions to the Indian tribes. When a pious association, under the inspiration of the Venerable Mr. Olier, founded Montreal, members of the Society of Priests which he had formed at Saint Sulpice became the clergy of that town; and they gathered near it a double-tongued Indian mission, which still continues to exist under their care. They made no attempt to extend their labors, except in the missionary voyage of Dollier de Casson and Galinée in the mission of the Abbés Fénelon and Trouvé at Quinté Bay, and the later labors of the Abbé Picquet at Ogdensburg.
When Bishop Laval was appointed for Canada in 1658, he founded a seminary at Quebec, which was aggregated to the Seminary of the Foreign Missions in Paris. The Jesuits then resigned all the parishes which they had directed in the colony, and confined themselves to their college and their Indian missions. The priests of the Seminary of Quebec, beside their parish work, also undertook missions among the Indians in Acadia, Illinois, and on the lower Mississippi.
A collision between the Governor of Canada and the Bishop with his clergy and the Jesuits, in regard to the sale of liquor to the Indians, led the Government to send back the Recollects to resume their early labors. They did not, however, undertake any important missions among the Indian tribes. Their efforts were confined almost exclusively to the period and course of La Salle’s attempts at settlement and exploration, and to a mission at Gaspé and a shorter one on the Penobscot.
When the colony of Louisiana took form, the Indian missions there were confided to the Jesuits, who directed them till the suppression of the order terminated their existence in the dominions of France. Spain, in her colonies, sent other orders to continue the work of the Jesuits, and this was done successfully in some places; but there was no effort made to sustain those of the Jesuits in Canada and Louisiana, and amid the political changes which rapidly ensued the early French missions gradually dwindled away.
These Jesuit missions embraced the labors of the Fathers among the Micmacs, chiefly on Cape Breton Island and at Miscou; the missions among the Montagnais, Bersiamites, Oumamiwek, Porcupine Indians, Papinachois, and other tribes of the lower St. Lawrence and Saguenay, the centre being at Tadousac; the missions of which Quebec was the immediate centre, comprising the work among the Montagnais of that district and Algonquins from the west. Of this Algonquin mission, Sillery soon became the main mission; but as the Algonquins disappeared, Abenakis came to settle there, and remained till the chapel was removed to St. François de Sales. Then Three Rivers was a mission station for the Indians near it, and for the Attikamegues inland, till a separate mission was established for that tribe. Beyond Montreal was the mission to the Nipissings, and the great Huron mission, the scene of the most arduous and continued labors of the Fathers among the palisaded towns of the Wyandots and Dinondadies. After the ruin of these nations, the Jesuits led one part of the survivors to Isle Orleans, and subsequently gathered a remnant of them at Lorette, where their descendants still remain. The rest fled towards the Mississippi, and were zealously followed by the energetic missionaries, who gathered them at Mackinac, whence they removed in time to Detroit, and ultimately to Sandusky, the last point where the Jesuits ministered to them.