Beyond Lake Huron was the great Ottawa mission, embracing the attempts to christianize the Ottawas on Lake Superior, the Chippewas at Sault Ste. Marie, the Beaver Indians and Crees; at Green Bay was another post for the Menomonees, Pottawatamies, Foxes, and Mascoutens; while south of Lake Michigan came in time Jesuit labors among the Miamis and Illinois. The missions attempted among the Sioux beyond the Mississippi mark the western limit of the old Jesuit efforts to convert the native tribes.
With the establishment of Louisiana came the missions of the Society among the Yazoos, Arkansas, Choctaws, Alibamons, and other tribes.
The Micmac Mission.—The Jesuit missions among the Micmacs never attained any remarkable development, and most of the territory occupied by this branch of the Algonquin family was attended by other bodies of missionaries. Father Julian Perrault began his labors on Cape Breton in 1634; Charles Turgis, with others, was at Miscou in the following years. Most of the Jesuits, however, were compelled to withdraw with shattered health; and Turgis, devoting himself to the care of the sick, died at his post in 1637. Father John Dolebeau became paralyzed, and while returning to France was blown up at sea. At last, however, Father Andrew Richard and Martin de Lyonne succeeded in founding a mission; they learned the language, and extended their labors to Chaleurs Bay, Ile Percée, Miramichi, and Chédabuctou, finding one old woman who had been baptized by Biard at Port Royal. Lyonne died, devotedly attending the sick, in 1661; Richard continued his labors some years later, aided for a time by James Fremin, and cheered by visits from his superior, Jerome Lalemant. They made some converts, although they did not banish the old superstitions and savagery of the tribe; but when Bishop Laval visited Gaspé in 1659, the missionaries presented one hundred and forty Indian Christians for confirmation.
When Richard’s labors ceased, the Recollects took charge of the mission at Isle Percée, where French and Indians were attended from about 1673 by Fathers Hilarion Guesnin and Exuperius Dethune. They were succeeded in 1675 by Father Christian Le Clercq, who took up the Indian mission with zeal, and has left ineffaceable traces of his twelve years’ labor. He acquired the Micmac language; and finding that some Indians, to aid their memory in retaining his instructions, employed a system of hieroglyphics on bits of bark, he studied and improved it, till he had the daily prayers, mass, and catechism in this form. The Indians readily adopted these hieroglyphics, and taught them to their children and later converts. They have been retained in use till the present, and the Rev. Christian Kauder, a Redemptorist, had type cut in Austria, and published a catechism, hymn and prayer book, in them at Vienna in 1866. In 1685 land was given to the priests of the Seminary of Quebec; gentlemen of that body, with some Recollects and occasionally a Jesuit Father, served the coast from Gaspé to Nova Scotia, and all the Micmacs became Catholics. They seem to have been attended with the French, and not as a distinct mission. The Micmac territory included not only the coast, but Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland. Of these missionaries, Messrs. Thury and Gaulin and the Recollect Felix Pain seem to have been the most prominent. The Abbé Anthony S. Maillard, who was missionary to the Micmacs in Cape Breton and Acadia till his death in 1768, exercised great influence; and his mastery of the language is shown in his Grammar of the Micmac, which was printed at New York in 1864.
The Montagnais Mission.—Tadousac was from the commencement of French settlement on the St. Lawrence an anchoring-place for vessels and a trading-station which attracted Indians from the west and north. Missionaries made visits to the spot from an early period, but the Jesuit mission there is regarded as having been founded in 1640. It received charitable aid from the Duchess d’Aiguillon, who maintained for a time the Fathers employed there. Father John de Quen may be said to have established the first permanent mission, from which gradually extended efforts for christianizing the tribes on the shores down to Labrador and on the upper waters of the Saguenay.
The first mission was the result of the effort of Charles Meiachkwat, a Montagnais who had visited Sillery and induced the Jesuit Fathers to send one of their number to Tadousac. Charles erected the first chapel; and may be regarded as the first native Christian of that district, and first native catechist, for he visited neighboring tribes to impart what religious knowledge he had learned.
The missionaries encountered the usual difficulties,—great laxity of morals, a deep-rooted belief in dreams, the influence of the medicine-men, and vices introduced by the traders, especially intoxication. Father Buteux, who replaced De Quen for a time, seems to have been the first to give his neophytes the kind of calendar still in use among the wandering Indians, with spaces for each day, to be marked off as it came, and Sundays and holidays so designated by symbols that they could recognize and observe them.
The missionaries at first went down from Quebec in the spring, and continued their labors till autumn, when the Indians scattered for the winter hunt; but as the neophytes felt the want of a regular ministry during the winter, they attempted, in 1645, to supply it by performing some of the priestly functions themselves. This led to fuller instruction; and to impress them, the missionaries left marked pieces of wood of different colors, called massinahigan, a word still in use in all the Catholic missions among Algonquin nations for a book of prayers.
In 1646 De Quen ascended the Saguenay, and penetrated, by way of the Chicoutimi, to Lake St. John, in order to preach to the Porcupine tribe, who had already erected a cross in their village. Three years later, Father Gabriel Druillettes visited the same tribe and reared his bark chapel among them. In 1651 De Quen made another missionary excursion, reaching various villages on the lake, and subsequently, returning to Tadousac, sailed down the St. Lawrence till he reached bands of the Oumamiwek or Bersiamites, among whom he began mission work.