The hopes of the Jesuits were not to be realized. Some progress was made, and converts like Noel Negabamat and Charles Meiachkwat exercised great influence; but the Iroquois war-parties soon drove the new agriculturists from their fields, the nuns removed their hospital to Quebec in 1646, and the neophytes were scattered. “We behold ourselves dying, exterminated every day,” wrote Negabamat in 1651. Some years after, an accidental fire destroyed St. Michael’s church with the mission house, and from that time the Indian settlement at Sillery languished. Disease and excess aided the work of war, and the Algonquins and Montagnais dwindled away.
As early as 1643 some Abenakis from the banks of the Kennebec had visited Sillery, and one chief was baptized. Father Druillettes soon after visited their towns, and founded a mission in their country. This was at first continued, but the Christians of the tribe and those seeking instruction visited Sillery from time to time. This was especially the case after 1657, when the Jesuits suspended their labors in Maine, for fear of giving umbrage to the Capuchin Fathers who had missions on the coast.
Sillery revived as an Abenaki mission, but the soil at last proved unfit for longer cultivation by Indians. By this time, Fathers James and Vincent Bigot had been assigned to this tribe. They looked out for a new mission site, and by the aid of the Marchioness de Bauche bought a tract on the Chaudière River, and in 1683 established near the beautiful falls the mission of St. Francis de Sales. Sillery was abandoned, and there was nothing to mark the famous old mission site, till a monument was erected a few years ago to the memory of Masse and De Noue, who lie there.
With the chapel of St. Francis as a base, a new series of missions gradually spread into Maine. The Jesuits resumed their ministry on the banks of the Kennebec; the Bigots, followed by Rale, Lauverjeat, Loyard, and Sirenne, keeping up their work amid great danger, their presence exciting the most fearful animosity in the minds of New Englanders, who ascribed all Indian hostilities to them. Rale was especially marked out. Though a man of cultivation and a scholar,—his Abenaki dictionary being a monument of his mastery of the language,—a price was set on his head, his chapel was pillaged by one expedition, which carried off his manuscript dictionary[679] (now one of the curiosities in Harvard College Library), and in a later expedition he was slain at the foot of his mission cross, August 23, 1724. He knew his danger, and his superior would have withdrawn him, but the Canadian authorities insisted on his remaining.
Besides this Jesuit mission at Norridgewock, the priests of the seminary at Quebec, anxious to do their part in the mission-work of which their parent institution, the Seminary of the Foreign Missions at Paris, did so much, founded a mission on the Penobscot. This was long directed by the Rev. Peter Thury, who acquired great influence over the Indians, accompanying them in peace and war till his death in 1699. A Recollect, Father Simon, had a mission at Medoktek, on the St. John’s, which was subsequently directed by the Jesuits, as well as that on the Penobscot.
Meanwhile the mission on the Chaudière had been transferred to the site still known as St. François, and on the death of Rale bands of the Kennebec Indians emigrated to it, forming a strong Indian village, which sent many a vindictive war-party on the frontiers of New England. This drew on it fierce retaliation from Rogers and his partisan corps, who captured the village, killed many, and fired church and dwellings.[680]
The Missions at Three Rivers and Montreal.—Ascending the St. Lawrence, the next mission centre was Three Rivers, where the Jesuit missionaries Le Jeune and Buteux resumed, in 1633, the labors of the Recollect Brother Du Plessis and Fathers Huet and Poullain. It was a place of trade where Indians gathered, so that the missionaries found constant objects of their care. Many were instructed, and returned to impart to others their newly acquired knowledge of God’s way with man, and the consolations of Christianity.