On the twelfth of June, 1611, there arrived at Port Royal, at the instance of King Henry IV., two Jesuit fathers, Pierre Biard and Ennemond Massé. They were, however, not favorably received by Poutrincourt and his followers; they found great practical difficulties in acquiring the Indian languages and made slight progress in the herculean task to which they had been set. To them, came the following year, a lay brother, Gilbert du Thet, who was soon dispatched to the head of the order, in France, with an account of the situation. In the spring of 1613, he returned, in company with Father Quentin. The little band of missionaries had no sooner established themselves at the new French colony on Mt. Desert Island, than the latter was attacked and dispersed by the Virginian Argall. Du Thet was killed in the fight, Massé was, with other colonists, set adrift in a boat, and Biard and Quentin were taken to Virginia, to be eventually shipped to England, and thence allowed to return into France. Several of the earlier documents of our series have to do with this first and apparently unfruitful mission of the Jesuits to Acadia.
In 1615, Champlain thought the time ripe for the institution of Indian missions upon the St. Lawrence, a spiritual field hitherto neglected, and introduced to Quebec four members of the fraternity of Récollets, the most austere of the three orders of Franciscans; these were Fathers Denis Jamay, Jean d'Olbeau, and Joseph le Caron, and a lay brother, Pacifique du Plessis. To D'Olbeau was assigned the conversion of the Montagnais of the Lower St. Lawrence; Le Caron went to the Hurons, or Wyandots, in the vast stretch of forested wilderness west of the Ottawa River, and before the coming of autumn had established a bark chapel in their midst; Jamay and Du Plessis remained in the neighborhood of Quebec, ministering to the colonists and the wandering savages who came to the little settlement for purposes of trade or sociability, or through fear of scalp-hunting Iroquois. For ten years did these gray friars practice the rites of the church in the Canadian woods, all the way from the fishing and trading outpost of Tadoussac to the western Lake of the Nipissings. Barefooted, save for heavy wooden sandals, coarsely clad in gown and hood, enduring in a rigorous climate, to which they were unused, all manner of hardships by flood and field, they were earnestly devoted to their laborious calling in a time when elsewhere the air of New France was noisy with the strife of self-seeking traders and politicians. Yet somehow their mission seemed without important result. Even less successful was the enterprise of some fellow Récollets, who, in 1619, began independent work among the French fishermen and Micmacs of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Gaspé, but were forced in 1624, after many disasters, to abandon their task, three of them joining the party at Quebec.
The little band on the St. Lawrence, although thus reinforced, felt impelled, in 1625, to invite the powerful aid of the Jesuits, who in the face of great odds were just then holding most successful missions in Asia, Africa, and South America. In response to the call, three fathers of the black gown came to Quebec this year,—Massé, who had been of the old Acadian mission, Charles Lalemant, and that giant among them, in both stature and deeds, Jean de Brébeuf. Immediately the work began to broaden, but the records of the dual mission do not give evidence of many converts,—a few Huron youth taken to France, and there instructed and baptized, being the chief gains. The wandering habits of the Indians were not favorable to persistent instruction of the young, and adults were unwilling to commit themselves to the new doctrine, even when not openly opposed to its promulgation. The summer months were usually spent by the missionaries at Tadoussac, Quebec, and Three Rivers, where trading parties from the tribes were wont to assemble; and, when the latter scattered for their winter hunts, the missionaries accompanied them, sharing the toils, dangers, and discomforts of the movable camps, and often suffering much from positive abuse at the hands of their not over-willing hosts.
The settlements of Port Royal and Quebec were at this time wretched little hamlets of a few dozen huts each, surrounded by a palisade, and these fell an easy prey to small English naval forces (1628-29). With their fall, ended the slender mission of the Récollets and Jesuits, who were in triumph carried off to England. For a few months, France did not hold one foot of ground in North America. But as peace had been declared between France and England before this conquest, the former received back all of its possessions, and the inevitable struggle for the mastery of the continent was postponed for four generations longer.
With the release of Canada to France, in 1632, the Jesuits were by the home authorities placed in sole charge of the spiritual interests of both settlers and Indians, and the history of their greatest missions begins at this time. On the fifth of July, there landed at Quebec, Fathers Paul le Jeune and Anne de Nouë, and a lay brother named Gilbert. Le Jeune was the superior, and at once devoted himself to learning the language and customs of the savages, and so studying the enormous field before him as intelligently to dispose of his meagre forces.
The Indians.
The existence of rival tribes among the Red Indians of North America, was, perhaps, the most formidable obstacle in the path of the missionaries. It has always been impossible to make any hard-and-fast classification; yet the Indians presented a considerable variety of types, ranging from the Southern Indians, some of whose tribes were in a relatively high stage of material advancement and mental calibre, down to the savage root-eaters of the Rocky Mountain region. The migrations of some of the Indian tribes were frequent, and they occupied overlapping territories, so that it is impossible to fix the tribal boundaries with any degree of exactness. Again, the tribes were so merged by intermarriage, by affiliation, by consolidation, by the fact that there were numerous polyglot villages of renegades, by similarities in manner, habits, and appearance, that it is difficult even to separate the savages into families. It is only on philological grounds that these divisions can be made at all. In a general way we may say that between the Atlantic and the Rockies, Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, there were four Indian languages in vogue, with great varieties of local dialect:
I. The Algonkins were the most numerous, holding the greater portion of the country from the unoccupied "debatable land" of Kentucky northward to Hudson Bay, and from the Atlantic westward to the Mississippi. Among their tribes were the Micmacs of Acadia, the Penobscots of Maine, the Montagnais of the St. Lawrence, the ill-defined tribes of the country round about Lake St. John, and the Ottawas, Chippewas, Mascoutens, Sacs, Foxes, Pottawattomies, and Illinois of the Upper Lakes. These savages were rude in life and manners, were intensely warlike, depended for subsistence chiefly on hunting and fishing, lived in rude wigwams covered with bark, skins, or matted reeds, practised agriculture in a crude fashion, and were less stable in their habitations than the Southern Indians. They have made a larger figure in our history than any other family, because through their lands came the heaviest and most aggressive movement of white population, French or English. Estimates of early Indian populations necessarily differ, in the absence of accurate knowledge; but it is now believed that the number was never so great as was at first estimated by the Jesuit fathers and the earliest English colonists. A careful modern estimate is, that the Algonkins at no time numbered over 90,000 souls, and possibly not over 50,000.
II. In the heart of this Algonkin land was planted the ethnic group called the Iroquois, with its several distinct branches, often at war with each other. The craftiest, most daring, and most intelligent of North American Indians, yet still in the savage hunter state, the Iroquois were the terror of every native band east of the Mississippi, before the coming of the whites, who in turn learned to dread their ferocious power. The five principal tribes of this family—Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, all stationed in palisaded villages south and east of lakes Erie and Ontario—formed a loose confederacy styled by themselves and the French "The Long House," and by the English "The Five Nations," which firmly held the waterways connecting the Hudson and Ohio rivers and the Great Lakes. The population of the entire group was not over 17,000—a remarkably small number, considering the active part they played in American history, and the control which they exercised through wide tracts of wilderness. Related to, but generally at war with them, were the Hurons of Canada, among whom the Jesuits planted their earliest missions. Champlain, in an endeavor to cultivate the friendship of his Huron and Algonkin neighbors, early made war on the Iroquois, and thus secured for New France a heritage of savage enmity which contributed more than any other one cause to cripple its energies and render it at last an easy prey to the rival power of the English colonies.
III. The Southern Indians occupied the country between the Tennessee River and the Gulf, the Appalachian Ranges and the Mississippi. Of a milder disposition than their Northern cousins, the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles were rather in a barbarous than in a savage state; by the time of the Revolution, they were not far behind the white proprietors in industrial or domestic methods, and numbered not above 50,000 persons. With them, this story of the Jesuit missions has little to do; the Louisiana mission, an offshoot of that of New France, did faithful work here, but the documentary result was neither as interesting nor as prolific, and necessarily occupies but small space in the present series.