This was centered at Tadoussac, and ministered to the Montagnais, Bersiamites, Porcupines, Oumaniwek, Papinachois, and other tribes of the Lower St. Lawrence and the Saguenay. Tadoussac had, from the earliest historic times, been a favorite harbor and trading-station for the French; for, being at the junction of two great rivers, it was convenient as a place of assembly for the natives of the lower country. The first priests in the district had said mass there; but it was not until 1640 that a Jesuit mission was formed by Father Jean du Quen, its sphere of influence soon reaching to the upper waters of the Saguenay, Lake St. John, Hudson Bay, and the coast of Labrador. Du Quen was actively assisted by Charles Meiachkwat, a Montagnais convert, who erected the first chapel, became a catechist, and made extended tours through the neighboring tribes. In time, there were associated with Du Quen, Fathers Buteux and Druillettes. Protracted missionary tours were made by them, with results which were considered satisfactory as compared with other missions; although they had serious difficulties to contend with, in the prevalent intemperance which the fur trade introduced among the natives, the belief in dreams, the laxity of morals, and the wiles of medicine-men, or sorcerers, as they were called by the Jesuits.
For the first few years, the missionaries spent their winters in Quebec, ministering to the colonists, and each spring went down to Tadoussac to meet the summer trading parties; but greater persistency of effort was deemed desirable, and thereafter, instead of returning home in the autumn, they followed the Indians upon their winter hunts, and in the course of these wanderings endured the usual privations and hardships of traveling camps. Bailloquet, Nouvel, Beaulieu, Albanel, De Crépieul, Dalmas, Boucher, Peter Michael Laure, and Jean Baptiste Labrosse, are other names of Jesuit fathers who at different periods were engaged upon this toilsome mission.
In 1670, Tadoussac was almost deserted, owing to Iroquois raids and the ravages of smallpox; the Montagnais and kindred tribes were in hiding, through the vast country between Lake St. John and Hudson Bay. They were still followed by their devoted shepherds, whom no hardship could discourage. The following year, Crépieul began a mission on Hudson Bay, and here in 1694 his auxiliary Dalmas was killed. Laure (1720-37) left us a monument of his labors in a Montagnais grammar and dictionary. Labrosse, the last of his order at Tadoussac, instructed many of his flock to read and write, and left a legacy of native education, which has lasted unto the present day; he lived and taught long after his order had been suppressed in New France, and died at Tadoussac in 1782.
III. The Quebec and Montreal Missions.
These included the several missions at Quebec, Montreal, Three Rivers, Sillery, Bécancourt, and St. Francis de Sales, which were designed for the wandering Montagnais of the district, those Algonkins of the West who could be induced to come and settle on the lower waters, and in later years such Abenakis of Acadia and Maine as sought an asylum upon distinctively French soil.
We have seen that Récollets were first at Quebec, ministering both to colonists and Indians, and that, in 1625, they invited the Jesuits to aid them. In 1629, the joint mission came to a close through the surrender of Quebec to the English. When the mission was reopened in 1632, Jesuits alone were in charge, their operations being at first confined to the neighboring Montagnais, although they soon spread throughout the entire Canadian field. In 1658, Bishop Laval founded the Seminary of Quebec, whereupon the Jesuits resigned their parishes among the colonists, and thereafter confined themselves to their college and the Indian missions. In addition to their parish work, the priests of the seminary conducted missions in Acadia, Illinois, and on the lower Mississippi.
The year following the return of the Jesuits to Canada, Father Buteux, of that order, began his labors at Three Rivers, which was a convenient gathering-place for the fur trade. The village was frequently raided by Iroquois, but remained until the fall of New France one of the prominent centers of missionary influence. The efforts of Buteux, which lasted until his death at the hands of Iroquois in 1652, met with considerable success. His custom, like that of the other missionaries, was to be present at the French posts during the annual trading "meets," and when the savages returned to the wilderness, to accompany some selected band. In thus following the nomadic tribes, he made some of the longest and most toilsome journeys recorded in the annals of the Society of Jesus, and shared with his flock all the horrors of famine, pestilence, and inter-tribal war.
It was soon realized by the missionaries that but meagre results could be obtained until the Indians were induced to lead a sedentary life. Their wandering habit nullified all attempts at permanent instruction to the young; it engendered improvidence and laziness, bred famine and disease; and the constant struggle to kill fur-bearing animals for their pelts rapidly depleted the game, while the fur trade wrought contamination in many forms. Missionary efforts were at first conducive to the interests of the fur trade, by bringing far-distant tribes within the sphere of French influence; but so soon as the Jesuit sought to change the habits of the natives, to cause them to become agriculturists instead of hunters, and to oppose the rum traffic among them, then the grasping commercial monopoly which controlled the fortunes of New France, and was merely "working" the colony for financial gains, saw in the Jesuit an enemy, and often placed serious obstacles in his path.
In pursuance of the sedentary policy, and also to protect the wretched Montagnais from Iroquois war-parties, the Jesuits, in 1637, established for them a palisaded mission four miles above Quebec, at first giving it the name St. Joseph, but later that of Sillery, in honor of Commander Noël Brulart de Sillery, of France, who had given ample funds for the founding of this enterprise. Here were at first gathered twenty of the Indians, who began cultivation of the soil, varied by occasional hunting and fishing trips, which the missionaries could not prevent. The little town slowly grew in importance, both Algonkins and Montagnais being represented in its population. Three years later, nuns opened a hospital at Sillery, for the reception of both French and Indian patients, and thus greatly added to the popularity of the mission. But in 1646 the nuns removed their hospital to Quebec; a few years later, the church and mission house were destroyed by fire; disease made sad havoc in the settlement; the thin soil became exhausted through careless tillage; Iroquois preyed upon the converts, until at last the Algonkins almost entirely disappeared; and although their place was taken by Abenakis from Maine and Acadia, until the attendance became almost solely Abenaki, the enterprise waned. In 1685, it was abandoned in favor of St. Francis de Sales, a new mission established at the falls of the Chaudière River, not far from the St. Lawrence. Beyond a monument of later days, to the memory of Fathers Massé and De Nouë, whose names are prominently connected with this work, nothing now remains to mark the site of the old Sillery mission.
From St. Francis, the mission work began to spread into Maine. Of its character and extent there, mention has already been made. St. Francis achieved a certain measure of prosperity, as Indian missions go. It became in time a source of serious trouble to the New England borderers, for many a French and Indian war-party was here fitted out against the latter, during the series of bloody conflicts which marked the three-quarters of a century previous to the fall of New France. Finally, in September, 1759, Maj. Robert Rogers descended upon the village with his famous rangers, and in retaliation pillaged and burned the houses, and killed "at least two hundred Indians." New France soon after fell into the hands of the English, and, the Jesuits being suppressed, we hear little more of St. Francis de Sales.