This depletion of the Iroquois population alarmed the sachems of the confederacy. To please them, Governor Dongan of New York, himself a Catholic, introduced to the Five Nations three English Jesuits, who sought in vain to counteract the movement. The French did not abandon the Iroquois mission-field until 1687, when the rising power of the English obliged them to withdraw from the country. We have, however, glimpses of occasional attempts thereafter to revive the work, Bruyas being on the ground in 1701, joined the following year by James de Lamberville, Garnier, and Le Valliant, and later by James d'Hue and Peter de Marieul. The entire party were again driven from the cantonments in 1708, De Marieul being the last of his order to remain on duty.
Thereafter, the Jesuits were chiefly devoted to their mission at Caughnawaga, whither many Iroquois retreated before the inroads of Dutch and English settlers who were now crowding upon their lands. When the black gowns were at last expelled from New France, secular priests continued their work among the remnants of those New York Indians who had sought protection by settling among the French colonists on the St. Lawrence.
VI. The Ottawa Mission.
This embraced the tribes beyond Lake Huron,—the Chippewas at Sault Ste. Marie, the Beavers, the Crees, the Ottawas and refugee Hurons on Lake Superior, the Menomonees, Pottawattomies, Sacs, Foxes, Winnebagoes, Miamis, Illinois, and those of the Sioux who lived on or near the banks of the Mississippi. The Ottawas were the first Indians from the upper lakes to trade with the French, hence that vast district became early known as the country of the Ottawas.
The Huron mission was the door to the Ottawa mission. Jogues and Raimbault were with the Chippewas at Sault Ste. Marie in 1641; but it was nineteen years after that (1660), before they were followed by another Jesuit, the veteran Father Ménard, who accompanied an Ottawa fleet up the great river of that name, through Lake Huron and the Sault, and on to Keweenaw Bay, where he said the first mass heard on the shores of the northern sea. After a wretched winter on that inhospitable coast, spent in a shanty of fir boughs, with savage neighbors who reviled his presence, he proceeded inland intent on ministering to some Hurons who had fled from Iroquois persecution to the gloomy pine forest about the upper waters of Black River, in what is now Wisconsin. In August, 1661, he lost his life at a portage, thus being the first martyr upon the Ottawa mission.
Four years later, Claude Alloüez set out for Lake Superior, and reaching Chequamegon Bay in October (1665), built a little chapel of bark upon the southwest shore of that rock-bound estuary,—the famous mission of La Pointe. His flock was a medley, Hurons and Algonkins here clustering in two villages, where they lived on fish, safe at last from the raging Iroquois, although much pestered by the wild Sioux of the West. For thirty years did Alloüez travel from tribe to tribe, through the forests and over the prairies of the vast wilderness which a century later came to be organized into the Northwest Territory, and established missions at Green Bay, Sault Ste. Marie, on the Miami, and, with Marquette, among the Illinois at Kaskaskia.
Later, there arrived on the scene Fathers Louis Nicholas, James Marquette, Dablon, Louis André, Druillettes, Albanel, and others. The field of the Northwest seemed at first, as did the Huron mission, highly promising. The missionaries were everywhere greeted by large audiences, and much curiosity was displayed concerning the rites of the church; but, as usual, the nomadic habits of the Indians rendered instruction difficult. The fathers, with great toil and misery, and subject to daily danger and insult, followed their people about upon long hunting and fishing expeditions; and even when the bands had returned to the squalid villages, life there was almost as comfortless as upon the trail. Among the donnés and the Jesuit coadjutor brothers were skillful workers in metal, who repaired the guns and utensils of the natives, and taught them how best to obtain and reduce the ore from lead and copper deposits. We have evidence that the copper region of Lake Superior was at times resorted to by the lay followers and their Indian attendants, to obtain material for crucifixes and for the medals which the missionaries gave to converts; and in the lead mines centering about where are now Dubuque, Iowa, and Galena, Ill., the missionary attendants and Indians obtained lead for barter with French fur-traders, who, like the soldiers of the Cross, were by this time wandering all over the Northwest.
Marquette had succeeded Alloüez at La Pointe, in 1669; but it was not long before the Hurons and Ottawas of Chequamegon Bay foolishly incurred the fresh hostility of the Sioux, and the following year were driven eastward like autumn leaves before a blast. Marquette established them in a new mission, at Point St. Ignace, opposite Mackinaw; and it was from here that, in 1673, he joined the party of Louis Joliet, en route to the Mississippi River. The St. Ignace mission became the largest and most successful in the Northwest, there being encamped there, during Marquette's time, about 500 Hurons and 1,300 Ottawas. The interesting story of Marquette, a familiar chapter in American history, will be fully developed in the documents of this series; and we shall be able to present for the first time a facsimile of the original MS. Journal of his final and fatal voyage (1674), which is preserved among the many treasures of the Jesuit College of St. Mary's, in Montreal.
After the suspension of the publication of the Relations, in 1673, we obtain few glimpses of the Ottawa mission, save in the occasional references of travelers. The several local missions in the district were, in the main, probably more successful than those in any of the other fields of endeavor. La Pointe, Green Bay; St. Ignace (later Mackinac), Sault Ste. Marie, St. Joseph's, and Kaskaskia became the most important of them all; and at some of these points Catholic missions are still maintained by Franciscan friars and secular priests, for resident French Creoles and Indians. The uprising of the Foxes against French power, which lasted spasmodically from about 1700 to 1755, greatly hampered the work of the Jesuits; they did not, during this period, entirely absent themselves from the broad country of the Ottawas, but conversions were few and the records slight.
There was, for a time, governmental attempt to supplant the Western Jesuits with Récollets. Several friars were with La Salle, who had a great antipathy to the disciples of Loyola,—Father Hennepin's adventures belong to this period of Récollet effort, his colleagues at Fort Crèvecœur being Brothers Ribourde and Membré; but their mission closed with the Iroquois repulse of the French from Crèvecœur, and the consequent death of Ribourde. When La Salle retired from the region, Alloüez resumed the Illinois mission of the Jesuits; and soon after there arrived upon the ground Fathers Gravier, Marest, Mermet, and Pinet, who, because of the more docile character of the tribes collectively known as the Illinois,—Kaskaskias, Cahokias, Peorias, and Tamaroas,—found here a relatively fruitful field. In time, French settlements grew up around the palisaded missions, intermarriages occurred, and the work flourished for many years. Black gowns visited the prosperous Illinois towns as late as 1781, when the death of Father Meurin closed the work of his order in the Northwest.