He had commenced the study of the Abnaki dialect at Quebec; surrounded, as he now was, by the Abnakis themselves, he prosecuted that study with great industry. While acquiring their language, he was also engaged in writing his Abnaki catechism and dictionary. Every day he spent some time in their wigwams, in order to catch from the lips of the Indians the idioms of their language; and he often subjected himself to their merry laugh by uttering some sentence for the proposed catechism in his broken Abnaki, which, as they rendered in the pure idiom, the patient student copied in his book. After two years' labor at St. Francis, he was selected by the superior to succeed the missionary of the Illinois, who had recently died, because that mission required a father who had already acquired some one of the Algonquin dialects.
Before setting out for his Illinois missions, he spent three months at Quebec, studying the Algonquin language. On the 13th of August, 1691, he launched his little bark canoe, for his long and arduous voyage to the West. Slowly they moved onward; he and his companions landed night after night to build their fire and erect their tent, which consisted of their little canoe turned up, as their only shelter from the storms. After those long days of labor and fasting, their slender meals were made upon a vegetable, called by the French tripe de roche.[165] His companions were so exhausted on reaching Michilimackinac that he was obliged to stop and winter there. Well may the historian remark of these expeditions of the Catholic missionaries to the West that "all must feel that their fearless devotedness, their severe labors, their meek but heroic self-sacrifice, have thrown a peculiar charm over the early history of a region in which the restless spirit of American enterprise is going forth to such majestic results."[166]
F. Rale wintered at Michilimackinac with the two missionaries stationed there, one of them having the care of the Hurons, and the other of the Ottawas. Here, with the aid of F. Chaumonot's grammar, he learned sufficient of the Huron tongue—the key to most of those spoken in Canada—to assist the Huron missionary. Scarcely had the spring opened, when F. Rale was urging his canoe along the western coast of Lake Michigan. He passed by the villages of the Mascoutens, Sacs, Outagamis or Winnebagoes, Foxes, and others, till he came to the bottom of the lake. Having reached the Illinois partly by river and partly by portage, he launched his canoe on that river, and glided down its stream one hundred and fifty miles, till he came to the great town of the Illinois Indians. This town contained about two thousand five hundred families, and the rest of the nation were scattered through eleven other villages. F. Rale was welcomed to their country by the greatest of Illinois feasts, "the Feast of the Chiefs," at which the appetite was penanced by feeding on dogs, which were esteemed the greatest of delicacies among the Indians, and of which a large number had been served up on this occasion in honor of their distinguished guest. To every two persons an entire dish was allotted. The father manifests no great relish for the food he received, but he expresses the greatest admiration and astonishment at the powerful eloquence and wild beauty of the oration with which he was regaled on this occasion.
F. Rale devoted himself with zeal to the care of his new flock. His principal difficulty consisted in overcoming in them the practice of polygamy. "There would have been," he writes, "less difficulty in converting the Illinois did the Prayer permit polygamy among them. They acknowledged that the Prayer was good, and were delighted to have their wives and children instructed; but when we spoke on the subject to the braves, we found how hard it was to fix their natural fickleness, and induce them to take but one wife, and her for life." Again, the father writes: "When the hour arrives for morning and evening prayers, all repair to the chapel. Not one, even the great medicine-men—that is to say, our worst enemies—but sends his children to be instructed, and, if possible, baptized." The good missionary had the consolation of baptizing numbers of sick infants before death carried them off, and there were among the adults many devout Christians, to whom the faith was dearer than their lives.
After two years thus spent among the Illinois, his superior recalled F. Rale for other duties about the year 1695. During the return to Quebec, he instructed fully in the faith, and baptized, a young Indian girl, whose edifying death afterwards this zealous father esteemed an ample consolation and recompense for all the trials and hardships of his life. On arriving at Quebec, he was assigned to the mission in the heart of the Abnaki country, which F. Bigot had re-established.
But this field, which F. Rale now entered as a minister of the gospel of peace, had become, during his absence, the scene of war. While he had been laboring on the distant banks of the Illinois, the Abnakis had sustained injuries from their English neighbors which provoked them to take up the hatchet in defence and retaliation. Maj. Waldron, of Dover, had, in 1675, seized four hundred Indians of their tribe, and sold them into slavery in the West Indies. Though deeply incensed at this revolting crime, the Indians remained quiet till 1688, when, upon a breach of the peace of 1678 on the part of the English, they could no longer restrain their fury. The war-cry was sounded through the land, bands of infuriated and injured braves rushed upon the English frontier, Dover was taken, and Waldron himself fell a captive into their hands, and suffered a death most shocking, it is true, but one which all must admit he had deserved as many times over, if that were possible, as there had been victims of his rapacious inhumanity. Pemaquid was next taken, and destruction was visited upon the entire line of frontier settlements. The colonists now proposed a peace, but the Indians had already suffered too much from the violation of treaties. They exclaimed: "Nor we, nor our children, nor our children's children will ever make a peace or truce with a nation that kills us in their halls."
But the Abnakis, unsupported in the war by the French, were finally constrained to accept the offer of peace—a peace as deceptive as former ones had proved.
The following year the great and brave chief Taxus went to Pemaquid, with some others, to propose an exchange of prisoners: admitted into the fort for this purpose, they were treacherously fired upon, two of them were killed, and Taxus killed two of the garrison in cutting his way through to make his escape.
This being the condition of the country at the time that F. Rale was sent there by his superior as missionary to the Catholic Abnakis, it may be easily judged how far that state of things is justly attributable to what Mather calls "the charms of the French friar." From what has already been related, it is quite certain that there existed sufficient causes for war on the part of the Indians without any influence from F. Rale, had he been there to exert it.