The central mission of Sainte Marie was meanwhile in the flush of prosperity. The buildings included a church, a kitchen, a refectory, large rooms for spiritual instruction and the exercises of retreat, and lodgings for at least sixty persons. Around these principal houses ran a fortified line of palisades and masonry, outside which was a hospital and a large bark hut for the reception of wandering Indians. Here every alternate week the converts from all the Huron villages gathered in immense crowds to attend divine service, celebrated with all the pomp which the resources of the mission allowed, and to partake for three days of the bounteous hospitality of the good fathers. In times of pestilence and famine they flocked hither for relief, and at one time, in a year of scarcity, as many as three thousand received food and shelter at Sainte Marie. Hither, also, two or three times every year, the Jesuits—now twenty-two in number, including four lay-brothers—came together from their outlying missions, to refresh their souls by mutual counsel, and gather strength in prayer and meditation for the work of the next twelve months. To assist in the manual labor of the establishment there were seven hired men and four boys, and as a defence against the dreaded Iroquois the commandant of Quebec had sent them a guard of eight soldiers. They received also much valuable help from the donnés, or "given men"—French laymen, who from pure zeal devoted themselves to the service of the mission, travelling with the fathers on their dangerous journeys, and sometimes sharing—like Goupil, called "the good Réné"—in the glories of their martyrdom. These pious men—"seculars in garb," Father Gamier called them, "but religious in heart"—received no pay except a bare maintenance. There were eleven smaller missions dependent upon Sainte Marie, eight among the Hurons and three among the Algonquins. At several of them there was a church where every morning a bell summoned the dusky converts to Mass, and every evening they met again for prayer. Despite the enormous difficulties of transportation through that tangled wilderness, the fathers had found means to carry with them from place to place large colored pictures, gay draperies, and many a showy ornament for the altar or the walls, which they well knew would invest their rude chapels with an almost irresistible attraction for the savage mind. In many villages the Christians, by the year 1649, outnumbered the pagans. Sundays and feast-days were almost wholly devoted to religious exercises; and if the Indians had not wholly abandoned their barbarous and cruel practices, it is certain that the ferocity even of those who refused to become Christians was sensibly tamed.
But the season of good fortune which followed the martyrdom of Goupil and Jogues was destined to be but short. The increasing hostility of the Iroquois was to be the destruction at once of the Huron nation and of the high hopes which had been built upon that people. Yet it may be questioned whether the Jesuits would have long been left at peace even had these terrible foes kept within the range of their own villages. Even among the Hurons the murmurs of suspicion and dislike had begun to be heard again. The French ceremony of "prayer," said the savages, had blighted the crops, and the mystic rites of the priests had brought famine and desolation upon the nation. There was even a story, widely believed in the Huron lodges, that an Indian girl, baptized before her death, had been to the French heaven, and, after suffering horrible torments there from the pale faces, had made her escape back to earth to deter her countrymen from rushing to the same fate. A young Frenchman in the service of the mission had been treacherously murdered; and though the missionaries by a wise show of resolution had compelled the nation to make satisfaction for the outrage by the ceremonious offering of numerous strings of wampum, and had thus restored their waning influence, it was clear that their position at the best was extremely precarious, and that persecution, if it came not from abroad, would pretty surely be commenced at home. The catastrophe, therefore, when it came, found the priests not unprepared. For years they had carried their lives in their hands, ready to cast them down at any moment. For years they had walked through the valley of the shadow of death, and in the midst of the dark river and in the bitter waters they knew that the almighty Arm was stretched forth to hold them up.
The final act opened at the village of Teanaustayé, or St. Joseph, on the south-eastern frontier of the Huron country. On the 4th of July, 1648, Father Daniel, fresh from his annual retreat at Sainte Marie, had just finished Mass, and his congregation were still kneeling in the church, when the Iroquois burst upon the town and attacked the palisade which surrounded it. The priest, after rallying the warriors to defend their homes, ran from house to house urging unbelievers to repent. A panic-stricken crowd fell at his knees and declared themselves Christians, and he baptized them with water sprinkled from a wet handkerchief, for there was no time to do more. When the palisade was broken down, he showed his flock how to escape at the other end of the town. "I will stay here," said he. "We shall meet again in heaven." He would not fly while there was a soul to be saved in the village. In his priestly vestments he went out to the church-door to meet the Iroquois. For a moment they paused in amazement. Then, pierced with scores of arrows and a musket-ball through the heart, he fell, gasping the name of Jesus. The savages hacked his lifeless body, bathed their faces in his blood to make them brave, and consumed in one great conflagration the village, the church, and the sacred remains.
The following March the missions of St. Louis and St. Ignace were burned by the same terrible enemy. At the latter were two of the Jesuits; Brébeuf, sturdy offspring of a warrior race, with all the soldierly characteristics of his Norman ancestors; and Lalemant, delicate in body and in spirit, yet in the glorious cause no whit less courageous and resolute than his stronger companion. They were seized by their captors, and Brébeuf was bound to a stake, and, as he ceased not to exhort and encourage the convert prisoners, the Iroquois scorched him from head to foot to silence him. That failing, they cut away his lower lip, and thrust a red-hot iron down his throat, yet still he held himself erect without uttering a groan. Lalemant, led out to be burned, with strips of bark smeared with pitch tied about his naked body, broke loose from his guards and cast himself at the hero's feet, crying out in a broken voice: "We are made a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men." He was immediately seized and made fast to a post, and as the flames enveloped him he threw up his arms to heaven with a shriek of agony. Brébeuf, with a collar of red-hot hatchets round his neck and with his hands and nose cut off, had to witness the tortures of his friend and could not even utter a word of comfort. An apostate Indian in the crowd cried out, "Baptize them! baptize them!" Instantly kettles were placed upon the fire, the priests' scalps were torn away, and scalding water was poured slowly over their bleeding heads. Brébeuf's feet were next cut off, strips of flesh were sliced from his limbs and eaten before his eyes, and at last, when life was nearly extinct, the savages laid open his breast, tore out his heart and devoured it, and thronged around the mangled corpse to drink the blood of so magnificent and indomitable a hero. His torments had lasted four hours. Father Lalemant, though a man of extreme feebleness of constitution, survived the torture seventeen hours, writhing through the night in the most excruciating sufferings, until an Iroquois, surfeited with the long entertainment, killed him with a hatchet.
This massacre was the death-knell of the Huron mission—of the mission, that is to say, in the form and extent in which the society had originally designed it. Other villages were burned; two other missionaries, Gamier and Chabanel, were martyred; the entire establishment was withdrawn from Sainte Marie; and the miserable remnant of the Hurons was scattered far and wide. A portion of them, after a winter of starvation, embarked with the surviving missionaries for Quebec, and near that city founded a settlement, in which the Christian faith was preserved and is cherished to this day. Others voluntarily abandoned their nationality and were adopted into the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois, where eighteen years afterward many of them were found to be still good Catholics.
The story which we have briefly traced in its most striking outlines is but one chapter in the long history of the labors, the sufferings, and the glorious achievements of the Jesuits in North America. We would gladly have followed them further in their journeys through the wilderness, traced them with a Huron remnant in the far west, and lingered for a while about their headquarters at Quebec watching the growth of the central establishment which sent forth its apostles to the great lakes on the one hand, and through the forests of Maine to the sea-coast on the other. But we must bring our story to a close. The record of their work has been well preserved in the three books whose titles we have placed at the head of this article. The history by Mr. John G. Shea, to whom Catholics in general and American Catholics especially are under the deepest obligations for his careful and successful researches, is the fullest and, we doubt not, the most correct. The narrative of Mr. Parkman, which we have followed closely, giving in some parts of our article merely an abstract of what he has told in picturesque detail, is written in a charming style, and is valuable as testimony to the exalted character of the missionaries from one who has no sympathy with their faith and is unable to appreciate their piety.
The Iroquois, in destroying the Huron nation, and with it the Algonquins, to whom the Hurons had hitherto served as a bulwark, had destroyed the Jesuit scheme of a Christian Indian empire; but the labor of the missionaries had not been in vain. The seed which they had planted was not allowed to die. The exiles carried the sacred deposit of faith with them in their wanderings, as the Israelites in the wilderness bore the ark of the covenant. Years afterward, when Father Grelon, one of those who escaped from the Iroquois massacre, was travelling in the heart of Tartary, he met a Huron woman who had learned the truth from him in the little chapel at Sainte Marie, and after the final catastrophe had been sold from tribe to tribe until she reached the interior of Asia. She knelt at his feet, and in her native tongue, which she had not spoken nor the priest heard for years, she made her confession. Nor was it only in the fidelity of individuals that the missionaries reaped their harvest. When, after the ruin of their enterprise on the shores of the Georgian Bay, they sent their undaunted preachers among that terrible people who had wrought such havoc, how can we doubt that the blood of Brébeuf and his brethren was permitted to fructify their labors, and that the saintly men who gave their sufferings for the poor savage during so many years pleaded and prevailed in the same great cause after they had entered into their reward?