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Title: Pre Marquette. Priest, Pioneer and Adventurer.
Author: Repplier, Agnes (1855-1950)
Date of first publication: 1929
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1929
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 15 March 2014
Date last updated: 15 March 2014
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1166

This ebook was produced by Al Haines




[Transcriber's note: Because of copyright considerations, the
decorations by Harry Cimino (1898-1969) have been omitted from this
etext.]






  PERE
  MARQUETTE

  _Priest, Pioneer
  and Adventurer_


  _by_

  AGNES
  REPPLIER

  _Litt.D._



  _Decorations by
  Harry Cimino_



  _Doubleday, Doran,
  and Company, Inc.
  Garden City, N.Y._




  COPYRIGHT, 1929
  BY DOUBLEDAY, DORAN & COMPANY, INC.
  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT
  THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS
  GARDEN CITY, N.Y.




  TO
  J. McSHAIN
  A WISE AND KIND FRIEND




  CONTENTS


  CHAPTER

  I  THE LURE OF THE UNKNOWN
  II  THE MISSISSIPPI
  III  JACQUES MARQUETTE
  IV  THE INDIANS
  V  NEW FRANCE
  VI  IN THE WILDERNESS
  VII  ST. IGNACE
  VIII  ON THE EVE
  IX  THE DEPARTURE
  X  THE GREAT RIVER
  XI  THE ILLINOIS
  XII  SOUTHWARD
  XIII  THE RETURN
  XIV  THE LAST MISSION
  XV  THE END
  XVI  WHAT FOLLOWED PRE MARQUETTE'S DEATH
  XVII  THE QUESTION OF AUTHENTICITY
  XVIII  "THE INDIANS OF THE PRAYER"
  XIX  UNFADING HONORS OF THE DEAD
  INDEX




{1}

_Chapter I_

THE LURE OF THE UNKNOWN

When those mystery-laden words, _Terra Incognita_ and _Terra
Inhabitabile_ disappeared from the maps of the world, geography lost
its charm and traveling its most audacious inspiration.  There are
ancient globes in the library of the Vatican which show us in every dim
line what chances of discovery lay in wait for the hardy voyager of the
Middle Ages.  Fleets of tiny ships sail over uncharted seas.  Boreas
blows gales from his swollen cheeks.  Lions and elephants stroll
through vast tracts of land, indicating by their presence the absence
of more civilized inhabitants.  A sense of spaciousness and wonder
pervades these representations of what is to-day a familiar and
congested earth.  Small wonder that the adventurous boy who {2} gazed
at them six hundred years ago was consumed by the same spirit which now
sends scientists to the jungle and aviators to the Pole.  And the maps,
the wonderful, entrancing maps, free of crisscross railways, and
huddled towns, and everything that blinds and confuses the unhappy
school child of to-day.  The Hereford map, sacredly guarded in Hereford
Cathedral, dates from 1280.  It was deemed of surpassing value, and was
faithfully copied for two hundred years.  It puts Jerusalem in the
centre of the world, the place of honor; with the Terrestrial Paradise,
beautifully battlemented, on a circular island near India, and the
Tower of Babel midway between the two.  Paris appears as bold as brass
and just where it belongs; but there is no London in the smashed little
England which does not afford room for a town.  A vast Ethiopia gives
breathing space and a chance for surmise; and a representation of the
Last Judgment surmounts the whole.  All the old maps show the
Terrestrial Paradise; but its whereabouts was left to the fancy of the
scholar artist.  A crude map of the Ninth Century (one of the treasures
of the Strassburg {3} library) places it east of India, and an early
Icelandic map fits it snugly into Ceylon.

Nearly two hundred years before the Hereford map was outlined, Roger of
Sicily, the redoubtable "Great Count"--warrior, ruler, and something of
a scholar as well--caused a map of the world to be engraved on a disk
of silver which weighed four hundred pounds.  Here were plainly marked
the countries, inhabited or uninhabited, of the known earth; coast
lines and table lands, seas, gulfs, and rivers.  The Roman roads, or
what was left of them, were measured by miles; and the distance by
water from port to port was adroitly guessed at.  It is to be forever
regretted that this triumph of Eleventh Century scholarship should have
been made of silver.  A baser metal might have survived to this day;
but Sicily was fought over for a thousand years, and the great disk was
stolen by invaders, or melted down to pay for arms and soldiers.

When the Old World had ceased to be a mystery, the New World was
discovered.  When the old waterways had grown familiar, Columbus
crossed the Atlantic, Vasco da Gama {4} doubled the Cape of Good Hope,
and Balboa discovered the Pacific.  Here, indeed, were fresh fields of
adventure.  Here were seas for hardy navigators, lands of promise for
intrepid exiles, freedom and space for the rover, wealth for the
covetous, and souls to be saved for the missionary.  How can we
conceive the wonder which thrilled Europe when all these possibilities
dawned upon its vision?  How can we conceive the experience of sighting
a new continent or a new ocean--the suffocating rapture of that moment,
the trembling awe?  Keats, being a poet, was able to feel in fancy
these strange emotions, and to convey them, in some sort, to our souls:

  ... like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
  Look'd at each other with a wild surmise,
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.


Henry James confessed that, as a little boy, he was both mystified and
thrilled by the phrase "east" or "west" of Greenwich.  Why was
Greenwich of such supreme importance that the rest of the world lay
east or west of it? he asked himself again and again, having the
distaste of an intelligent child for seeking information from {5}
adults.  "The vague wonder that the childish mind felt on this point
gave the place a mysterious importance, and seemed to put it into
relation with the difficult and fascinating parts of geography,--the
countries of unintentional outline, and the lonely-looking places on
the atlas."

The fact that Charles the Second built the Greenwich Observatory, at
the instigation of Sir Jonas Moore and Sir Christopher Wren, gives the
lie to Rochester's oft-repeated witticism, and proves that his
"sovereign lord" could and did do the wisest of wise things when he was
so minded.

The early American maps have few "lonely looking places," because the
untrammeled fancy of the cartographer filled them with pleasing and
appropriate devices.  In the _Narrative and Critical History of
America_, edited by Mr. Justin Winsor, librarian of Harvard University,
there are maps which would have stirred the heart of little Henry
James, or of any other imaginative child.  Wherever there is space to
spare, we find Indians firing arrows, or bears strolling ominously.
Fishes of terrifying aspect {6} swim the seas.  They are huge enough to
swallow at a gulp the little ships with curly sails like the ships in
illuminated manuscripts.  On every side is a suggestion of the peril
that was the daily portion of the exile.  If there were freedom for
all, it was paid for with audacity and endurance.  Everybody had a
chance to live dangerously and to die valorously.  A great many people
availed themselves of both privileges.

The vast scale on which nature had built this strange New World was
overwhelming and terrifying to the pioneers.  They came from the
neighborly towns of Europe to boundless stretches of wilderness and
black savage mountains.  They exchanged the lovely little rivers which
carried no hint of danger for fierce wide waters running they knew not
whither, impeding progress, and threatening destruction.  The French
settlers in Canada learned the meaning of a word they had used lightly
all their lives--cold.  They found out how easily they could die of it
in the frozen woods, and how short a time it took the ever-falling snow
to bury them out of sight.  And ever and always there was the menace of
hostile Indians; tribe after tribe engaged in {7} ceaseless warfare
with one another, but predisposed to turn their arms against the
invader.  The red men taught the white men the full significance of
another word, till then but dimly apprehended--cruelty.  It was not a
gentle age in which these wanderers lived.  Terrible things were done
in Europe under sanction of the law.  But the Hurons and the Iroquois
showed the reckless strangers precisely how much pain a human body
could be made to bear before death signed its release.  They
illustrated this favorite theme with the help of Indian captives,
compelling the attention of the French.  They were prepared to extend
the practice when time and opportunity served.

To all such dangers and privations the adventurers opposed a dauntless
courage and a steady purpose.  The great fur-trading corporation known
as the Company of the Hundred Associates established itself firmly in
Quebec, and controlled all New France--or as much of it, at least, as
was controllable.  Land was granted on terms so easy that the poorest
farmer could buy.  The woods were full of animals, and the trappers
earned much money by their hard and {8} perilous work.  It has always
been the boast of Canada that a man who could not make a living for
himself and his family in that country was not worth keeping alive.
This was as true in the Seventeenth Century as it is true in the
Twentieth.  But then, as now, men were needed for the purpose.  It was
no place for weaklings.  And because the settlers were men, hardy,
vigorous, fearless, abstemious, and ambitious men, they found interests
that far exceeded profitable farming and trapping.  French engineers,
searching for copper, penetrated deeper and deeper into the wilderness.
French priests, eager for converts, followed them step by step.  And
French explorers, fired by rumors of undiscovered lakes and rivers, of
lands more fertile than the frost-bitten fields of Canada, of tribes
richer and more civilized than the cruel savages who surrounded them,
made journeys of astonishing length with pitifully meager outfits.  The
white man, like the red man, was expected to fend for himself in the
wilds.  He set forth, untroubled because undismayed; confident in his
own prowess and in fate.  The lure of the unknown drew him on.




{9}

_Chapter II_

THE MISSISSIPPI

To the Spaniard belongs the honor of discovering the Mississippi.
Spain was aware of the existence of the great river in 1519.  From a
host of early and brave explorers, from Pineda, from Narvaez, from
Cabeza de Vaca, and from the Peruvian, La Vega, came word of its
certain magnitude, and of its possible course.  The Rio del Espritu
Santo it was called, a name given it by Francisco de Garay, Governor of
Jamaica.  Parkman says that on early Spanish maps it is often
indistinguishable from other affluents of the Gulf of Mexico.
Nevertheless, it was a magic word on Spanish lips and in Spanish
hearts.  Its breadth, like the height of Niagara Falls, was madly
exaggerated, and wild stories were told of its slow, resistless current
which no river bed could hold.  The Reverend Francis Borgia Steck, who
has written a lengthy {10} treatise on the discovery and rediscovery of
the Mississippi, is of the opinion that Spanish cartographers marked
the river plainly on their maps, but gave it little prominence because,
fearing always the encroachments of France, they had no mind to call
her attention to this waterway.

In 1537 Hernando de Soto was empowered by Charles the Fifth to conquer
and colonize Florida.  He had been a brave and able captain under
Pizarro in Peru.  He had enriched himself with the treasure wrung from
the Inca, Atahualpa.  It is said that he was on friendly terms with
that hapless ruler, and that he was absent from Caxamalca when Pizarro,
having gained possession of wealth so fabulous that it was like a
golden dream, ridded himself of his royal prisoner by having him
strangled in the great square of the city.  De Soto quarreled bitterly
with his commander when he heard of this savage crime, and soon
afterward returned to Spain.  He took with him, however, his share of
plunder, squandered it lavishly in Seville, married a lady of noble
birth, and became a man of consequence.  Then there came to him reports
of {11} gold in the lovely peninsula coveted by the Spaniards.
Cupidity once more wrung his heart.  Memories of the Inca's treasure
chamber haunted him night and day.  He sold his property, and went back
to the New World with the Emperor's authority to seize and to hold, and
with six hundred fighting men packed into nine small ships.  Eight
secular priests and four friars accompanied the expedition.

On Pentecost Sunday the sailors sighted the shores of Tampa Bay which
the commander christened commemoratively La Bahia del Espritu Santo.
Landing, he took formal possession of Florida in the name of Spain, and
sent out two exploring parties to ascertain the wealth and the temper
of the inhabitants.  The wealth they found to be mythical, the temper
exceedingly uncertain.  Here were no rich towns, no peaceful Peruvians
waiting to be despoiled; but a wild country, tangled woods, feverish
swamps, and brave Indians, friendly or hostile as the case might be,
but always ready to repel attack.  Difficulties and dangers multiplied.
De Soto's dwindling army lost hope and spirit.  For three years he
shared the hardships of his soldiers, {12} leading them hither and
thither, now searching for gold (dim rumors of which reached him from
time to time), now seeking the best sites for the never forgotten
project of colonization.  Finally the river of his dreams became for
him the river of fate.  It was on its shores that he died, a defeated
and disheartened man.  It was in its muddy waters that his corpse was
sunk, fastened and weighted in a hollow tree.  It was down its current
that the three hundred survivors of the expedition fled terror-stricken
from the wreckage of their hopes.

Two things of great interest are left to us from this unsuccessful
expedition: a passage describing De Soto by one of his followers, the
anonymous "Gentleman of Elvas," and a passage describing the
Mississippi in flood by Garcilaso de la Vega.  The description of De
Soto corresponds exactly with the description of another and greater
adventurer, La Salle, whose tragic fate was also bound up with the
mysterious and baffling river.  "De Soto," says the Gentleman of Elvas,
"was dry of speech and inflexible of purpose.  He wished to know what
others thought, and he listened to what others said.  {13} But he did
not like to be opposed; he invariably acted as he thought best; and he
bent all his comrades to his will."

The description of the flooded Mississippi was not written until forty
years after the event; but the impression it left upon La Vega's mind
was vivid and permanent.  "The great river," he wrote, "began early in
March to widen rapidly.  It overflowed the level land, and rose to such
a height that only the tops of the tallest trees were visible.  It was
a beautiful thing to see the vast stretch of water covering the fields
for twenty leagues and more.  Indians went to and fro in their canoes.
They protect their homes by building them on heavy piles, or
sometimes--as in the case of chiefs--on artificial mounds.  The flood
reached its highest point on the twentieth day of April.  Before the
end of May it had subsided, and the river was running within its
natural boundaries."

The control of the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Mississippi was as
vital to Spain as was the control of the St. Lawrence to France.  In
the spring of 1540, while De Soto was still pursuing his visionary
schemes, Francisco Vasa de {14} Coronado was dispatched from Mexico by
the Viceroy, Mendoza, with instructions to visit the Indian towns,
which were reported to be fabulously rich (the finding of gold was an
obsession with the Spaniards), to study the conditions of the country
with a view to colonization, and to report upon the great river, the
Rio del Espritu Santo.  He was accompanied by a picked body of
horsemen, two hundred and sixty in number, sixty foot soldiers, and no
less than a thousand Mexican Indians, who looked after the supplies,
guarded the sheep and cattle, scouted, cooked, and made things easy for
their masters.  Coronado had no better fortune than De Soto.  He found
no wealthy towns and few friendly Indians.  He knew nothing about
colonization, and he cared less.  As for the river, though accounts of
it reached him from time to time, he never gained its banks.  De Soto
at least beheld it before he died, and found a grave beneath its
waters.  Coronado seems to have done nothing but eat up his provisions
and return home, a broken and discredited man.  For a stream of its
magnitude, the Mississippi was singularly elusive.

{15}

Meanwhile, in the Far North, wandering Indian tribes carried from
trading station to trading station stories of the vast river which few
of them had seen, but of which all had heard.  France and England,
having plenty to occupy them at home, were tardily colonizing their
territorial claims in the New World.  The first adventurers, it must be
remembered, did not want to go up and down North America; they wanted
to go across and reach China, that land of desire.  The English wasted
a vast deal of time and labor in trying to find the mythical Strait of
Anian, which they thought connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
It found a place on the early Dutch and Flemish maps, having been put
there, not because it existed, but because it was desired.  Even
Champlain hoped and believed that Canada (New France) would offer "a
favorable passage to China."  He traced somewhat waveringly on his map
a river flowing to the south, which he took on credit from the Indians,
and he came near to its final discovery when he sent Jean Nicollet on a
mission of peace to the Winnebagoes who had quarreled with the friendly
Hurons.

{16}

Nicollet was the interpreter at Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence; a man
of great courage, great natural ability, and comprehensive ignorance of
all save Indian languages and Indian ways, which was what he needed to
know.  He was received with such warmth of hospitality that one hundred
and twenty beavers were devoured at a single feast.  Having
accomplished his purpose, he made his fearless way to the Wisconsin
River, which he descended so far that he was--according to savage
guides--but three days' journey from the "Great Water."  By this they
meant the Mississippi River.  He thought they meant the sea.

Other adventurers came as near, or nearer, to the goal.  Colonel Wood
of Virginia and Captain Bolton believed mistakenly that they had
reached it.  Pierre Esprit Radisson, a native of St. Malo, and his
brother-in-law, Mdard Chouart des Grosseilliers, wandered from the
shores of Lake Superior into an unknown land peopled by unknown tribes,
and brought back the strange tale of a "forked river," one branch
flowing westward, and one southward toward Mexico.  The French priests,
Pre Jogues, {17} Pre Raymbault, Pre Mnard (who was lost in the
wilderness), and Pre Allouez all pushed their missions closer to the
mysterious river, the discovery of which became a matter of pride and
purpose with the Jesuit order.  To its zeal for souls it was beginning
to add a zeal for knowledge of the barbarous land it was striving
assiduously to civilize.

The first half of the Seventeenth Century had witnessed the
missionaries' staunchest labors and their heaviest trials.  Outposts
had been established and destroyed.  Jesuit priests had suffered great
hardships, and had been butchered with hideous cruelty.  From 1660 the
aspect of things changed.  "The epoch of the saints and martyrs was
passing away," writes Francis Parkman; "and henceforth we find the
Canadian Jesuit less and less an apostle, and more and more an
explorer, a man of science, and a politician."  The map of Lake
Superior, published in 1671, he pronounces "a monument of Jesuit
hardihood and enterprise."  Their yearly reports sent to France
contained observations on the winds, currents, and "tides" of the Great
Lakes; speculations on subterranean {18} outlets; accounts of copper
mines; and here and there descriptions from hearsay of the mighty
river, "wide, deep, beautiful, and worthy of comparison to our great
St. Lawrence," which flowed southward, "perhaps to the Gulf of Mexico,
perhaps to the Vermilion Sea," and which, "with the help of God and of
the Blessed Virgin," should soon be made known to the world.




{19}

_Chapter III_

JACQUES MARQUETTE

On the 10th of June, 1637, there was born of a proud and ancient line
in a proud and ancient little city of France Jacques Marquette,
destined to make famous a name which had been honorable and
distinguished for five centuries.  Laon, his birthplace, was one of
those fortified French towns which has had an unbroken record of combat
from the time the Romans built their first watchtower on its rocky
eminence to the ghastly and glorious years of the World War.  It forced
back the Vandals; it held its steep and strongly fortified ridge
against the invading Huns.  There are some old Latin
hexameters--probably the work of a belligerent monk--which tell how the
savage hordes, failing of easy victory, passed by the stern little
citadel to seek for richer and more defenceless spoil.

If Laon cannot claim to be "virgin of {20} English," like St. Malo and
other guarded strongholds, it never failed to drive out the invader.
If it fell twice before German onslaughts, it rose twice triumphant
from defeat.  During the Hundred Years War it was snatched from France
by the Burgundians, recaptured by the French, lost to the English, and
recovered finally after the consecration of Charles the Seventh.  Henry
the Fourth besieged it successfully in 1594.  Beneath its walls
Napoleon met defeat.

No city of the Middle Ages fought harder than did Laon for the communal
charter, so dear to the burgher's heart, so necessary to his manhood
and to his well-being.  The immemorial quarrel between feudal lord (in
this case a lord bishop) and rebellious commoner assumed its gravest
aspect in this warlike town; and the final victory of the burgher
brought him long years of prosperity.  Far back, in 515, St. Rmy, the
"Apostle of the Franks," built a church which took rank as a cathedral,
and the hamlet was raised to the dignity of a bishopric.  To its famous
school, which became a center of learning in the Twelfth Century, there
thronged {21} students from every part of France.  Their numbers, it
was said, far exceeded the numbers of the townspeople.  Here came the
rhetorician, William de Champeaux, and here came the renowned Abelard
to study theology under Anselm.  Three popes Laon sent to Rome, among
them Urban IV, who, as a boy, had been a chorister in the cathedral,
who had accompanied St. Louis to the Holy Land, had shared his
captivity in Damascus, and had been proclaimed Patriarch of Jerusalem.

The first Marquette mentioned in the annals of Laon is one Vermand, a
follower of that singularly ineffective prince, Louis the Seventh.  The
second is Jacques Marquette, a faithful and devoted servitor of John Le
Bon.  When the French king was taken prisoner at the battle of
Poictiers, and was treated by the victorious Black Prince with a
ceremonious and beautiful chivalry which thrilled Froissart's courtly
heart with joy, Marquette followed his sovereign's fallen fortunes in
England, and afterward labored valiantly to raise the money for his
ransom.  In return he was made a high official of Laon, and we find his
descendants wearing {22} three martlets, the city's ancient insignia,
upon their coat of arms.  In 1590 Nicholas Marquette, an influential
and far-seeing magistrate, espoused the cause of Henry of Navarre with
so much ardor that he was banished from Laon, only to return with added
wealth and honors when the great king was crowned.  A Marquette was a
member of the States General when that assembly met in Paris before the
French Revolution, and three fighting members of the family served
under La Fayette in America.  Altogether a long record and a brave one.

For many years Laon remained a scholastic as well as a valorous little
city, and the Marquettes were by way of being scholars as well as
soldiers.  Jacques Marquette, the discoverer of the Mississippi, was
the son of the astute Nicholas who had been raised to civic eminence by
Henry the Fourth.  He was the youngest of six children.  Through his
mother, Rose de la Salle, he was related to the justly famous Jean
Baptiste de la Salle, founder of the order of the Brothers of the
Christian Schools, a society of laymen who nobly devoted themselves to
{23} teaching the poor boys of France.  Jacques received all there was
of education in those days.  He studied in the Jesuit schools at Nancy
and at Pont--Mousson, evinced a strong leaning toward a religious
life, and entered the Jesuit novitiate at seventeen.  There followed
twelve years of incessant work at Rheims, Charleville, and Langres.  As
novice and as priest, as student and as teacher, Pre Marquette showed
a singular aptitude for languages, an open, friendly, and conciliating
disposition, and an ardent desire to carry the torch of faith into the
dark places of the world.  New France was naturally the goal of his
ambition.  Since 1611 the Jesuits had labored in that arduous field,
and since 1632 they had established a chain of missions stretching from
Quebec to the Great Lakes.

Every year there was published in Paris a volume of Jesuit
_Relations_--letters and diaries sent by missionaries to their
superiors.  They contained information concerning the warring Indian
tribes, accounts of life in the wilderness, reports of climate, soil,
products, and the fur trade, rude maps of the country so far as it was
{24} known, appeals for teachers and funds, and--most illuminating of
all--plain, pitiless narratives of the deaths suffered by French
priests at the hands of hostile savages.  These _Relations_, which are
now the source of much valuable knowledge, and which are freely quoted
by Parkman and other historians, were issued in duodecimo volumes by
Sebastian Cramoisy, and are known to collectors to-day as "Cramoisys."
They were widely read, especially in court circles, and were productive
of great results.  The rich sent money for the missions.  Convents
despatched vestments, church linen, rosaries, prayer books, and pious
pictures.  Teaching and nursing orders offered their services to the
colonists at Quebec and Three Rivers.  Young Jesuit priests dreamed
ardently of the day when their lives should be dedicated as a
sacrificial flame on the altar of Christian faith.

Among them Pre Marquette waited, and hoped, and prayed, and resigned
himself anew each year to the will of his superiors.  It was this
implicit obedience, this absolute self-annihilation that made the order
as serviceable as an army.  Each unit did its part, but did it as a
{25} soldier does, with reference to all the other units under one
command.  Parkman, who has left no phase of Canada's early history
unexplored or unrecorded, explains very clearly and accurately the
driving power of the first French missionaries.  "The lives of these
Canadian Jesuits," he says, "attest the earnestness of their faith, and
the intensity of their zeal.  It was a zeal bridled, curbed, and ruled
by a guiding hand.  Their marvelous training kindled enthusiasm and
controlled it, roused into action a mighty power, and made it as
adaptable as those great natural forces which modern science has
learned to awaken and to govern."

It is hard to think of Pre Marquette, so sensitive, so keen, so alive
to pleasure and to pain, as resembling a natural force; but he had been
molded into the desired shape, and the process had given him added
strength and increased tenacity of purpose.  He was twenty-nine when
the summons came, and he was ordered to report in Quebec for missionary
duty.  Joyfully he sailed from France; and on the 20th of September,
1666, it was tersely recorded in the books of the Canadian Jesuits:
"Pre Jacques {26} Marquette arrived in good health, on the seventh
ship."  His chance had come; and he had need of all the good health and
all the good spirits he could muster, to say nothing of all the good
fortune that lay in wait, to speed him on his way.




{27}

_Chapter IV_

THE INDIANS

It cannot be said that the French missionaries went in ignorance to
meet their fate.  The Jesuit _Relations_ are as outspoken as any
narratives ever given to the world.  From their pages, reinforced by
the reports of traders, Parkman drew material for a volume which only
the stout of heart and strong of stomach can bear to read in its
entirety.  He says repeatedly that details are omitted because they
will not bear telling; but no man's fancy can conjure up tales more
hideous than those which have been set down for our enlightenment.  The
Indian tribes warred perpetually and senselessly upon one another; and
the first great bitterness tasted by the priests was their inability to
save Indian captives from being burned at the stake, or painstakingly
tortured to death.  Pre Paul Le Jeune, who lived for months with the
Algonquins and went with them into the woods for their hard winter {28}
hunting, failed to bring them so near to Christianity that they would
abate one jot of this ritual of torture.  "There is no cruelty
comparable to that which they practise upon their enemies," he wrote
dejectedly, after long months of experience.

The danger to the missionaries lay in their being surprised by a
hostile tribe when they were laboring to convert a friendly one.  If
they founded a mission, sowed a field or two with corn and beans,
established some faint semblance of order, and gathered the children
(their only hope) into a school, then there swooped down upon them a
stronger body of savages, who burned the village, and destroyed in a
few hours the work of patient years.  Pre Jean de Brbeuf, who came of
a noble Norman family, and Pre Gabriel Lalemant met their terrible
deaths (the most appalling on record) when St. Ignace, a Huron
settlement, was raided by the Iroquois.  Pre Isaac Jogues, a scholar
and a man of parts, was captured by the Iroquois when accompanying a
party of Huron traders to Quebec.  He survived tortures which should
have killed a dozen men, escaped, and fled to {29} France, only to
return when his wounds were healed to the field of his labors, and to
be eventually butchered by the Mohawks.

The word Iroquois has been for so long associated in our minds with all
that is terrible in savagery that we are apt to lose sight of the fact
that other tribes were little less cruel and a great deal less able and
sagacious.  "The Iroquois," says Francis Parkman, "were the Indians of
Indians."  They came of mixed stock, the welding together of five
nations, which were in turn divided into eight powerful clans.  Could
they have understood that the white man was the red man's great
antagonist, they might have delayed the encroachment of civilization
and the decay of their own people; but they lent their aid alternately
to France and English colonists, and waged relentless war against
savages who might have been their friends.  When the Iroquois
exterminated the Hurons, and with them the most fruitful field of the
Jesuit missionary's labor, they lost their own foothold in the land of
their inheritance.  As raiders they continued to molest; but, weakened
in numbers and in purpose, the day of their dominance was over.

{30}

It is from the _Relations_ that we learn of their ferocity, and it is
from the _Relations_ that we learn of their courage and endurance.
They were cruel after fashions of their own.  The torture of prisoners
was an Indian institution, a ceremony which gave hard-won pleasure to
the victor, and to the captive a chance to show what mettle he was made
of.  But when Iroquois warriors took Algonquin babies, spitted,
roasted, and ate them before their mothers' eyes, they used their
imaginations.  This was not the old simple process of inflicting pain
upon the body of a man fastened to a stake for that purpose.  This was
a device to create suffering through love, through an emotion as strong
in the Indian mother's heart as in the white woman's.  It had the
depraved malevolence of a corrupt civilization rather than the robust
barbarity of the savage.

On the other hand, the Jesuits express with one accord their admiration
for Iroquois intelligence and stoicism.  "They steal through the woods
like foxes," wrote Pre Jerme Lalement, "they fight like lions, and
they disappear like a flight of birds."  When on the warpath they {31}
managed to subsist on a little parched corn and maple sugar, lighting
no fires, and bearing the extremes of hunger, exposure, and fatigue
with mute impassivity.  Absolutely courageous themselves, they
respected courage in their enemies.  Guillaume Couture, one of the
devoted laymen called _donns_ who gave their services without pay to
the missionaries, was captured by the Iroquois when in attendance on
Pre Jogues.  He so delighted the savages by the seeming unconcern with
which he bore hours of torture that they adopted him into the tribe,
undeterred by the fact that he had promptly shot the first warrior who
laid hands on him.  For three years he lived as an Indian,
uncomfortable but deeply respected; and helped to negotiate the peace
treaty of Three Rivers before returning to civilization.

On one point the priests expressed themselves with an emphasis which
seems to carry a reproach--the decorous fashion in which Iroquois
women, and Indian women generally, dressed.  Whether in the coarse and
dirty clothing of every day, or gaily attired for feasts, they were
covered up with a completeness which gave the {32} good fathers much
satisfaction.  "Modesty," wrote Pre Claude Chauchetire, "is natural
to them."  The band of dyed eelskin which fastened their heavily
greased hair was often their only bit of color.  That was bright red,
as soft and flexible as ribbon.  He doubts--and with reason--whether
the most pious of French ladies were as irreproachably decent in their
attire.

Full justice is done in the _Relations_ to Indian hospitality, which
was like the far-famed hospitality of the Arabs.  If they had food,
they shared it freely and as a matter of course with their neighbors.
The smoky wigwams were open to all comers.  The scanty larders were at
the disposal of all.  To the stranger in their midst were assigned the
choicest portions of a meal.  No one was refused a share.
Improvidently gluttonous when food was plenty, the savages could fast
indefinitely when food was scarce.  Pre Le Jeune says that the Indians
who paddled his canoe ate at sunrise and at nightfall a bowl of pounded
maize mixed with water.  This was all.  When the meal gave out, they
went on paddling for several days without breakfast or supper, making
no complaint and showing no signs of {33} exhaustion.  The
thrice-hammered hardihood of their sinewy frames was proof against
famine and fatigue.

The Frenchmen were no match for the savages in this regard.  They
learned to live on very little food, but their strength failed.  They
learned to eat nauseous substitutes for food, but these their stomachs
promptly rejected.  In summer time and in the villages the Indians
enjoyed a good and varied diet.  Game and fish were plentiful.  So were
wild rice and maize.  Wild cherries, very small, wild plums, very sour,
and wild grapes, very good, were delicacies to be enjoyed.  The squaws
planted peas, beans, and pumpkins.  There was never any lack of nuts,
and the Indians had learned the art of tapping the maple trees for
sugar.  The porridge called sagamit, corn meal pounded and boiled, was
eaten twelve months in the year.  Flavored with meat, fish, or oil, it
was palatable.  Without these condiments it was coarse and insipid.
The Mohawks gave Pre Hennepin, a priest of the Rcollet order, a bowl
of sagamit mixed with little frogs, which they held in high esteem,
but which he had infinite difficulty in swallowing.  {34} He fared
better when dining with a Sioux chief on a mess of wild rice boiled
with whortleberries.  This he found delicious.  Pre Franois Le
Mercier tells us that when he gave the newly arrived Jesuit, Pre
Chastellain, some ears of freshly roasted corn, his guest, to whom our
great American dish was a novelty, vowed that he had never dined better
in his life.

These were the high lights of the Indian cuisine.  It was a different
tale in the long winter months, when the streams were frozen hard and
the forests buried in snow, and when a little parched corn, hidden away
in pits, was all that was left of the harvests.  The braves who went
far into the woods for game lived on the borderland of starvation.  The
less enterprising who stayed in the villages sometimes starved
outright.  "Harden thy heart against hunger," said an Algonquin chief
to Pre Le Jeune.  "Thou wilt be two, three, and four days without
food.  Take courage always!"  This was no fancy picture, as the
Frenchman found to his cost.  The time came when, if he had the skin of
an eel for his day's supply, he considered that he had {35}
breakfasted, dined, and supped luxuriously.  Nor was his experience
without its droll side.  He had saved some bits of eelskin, which was
flexible, intending to use them in patching up his torn cassock; but,
when hunger pressed, he ate his patches; and he confesses that if the
whole garment had been as edible, there would not have been much of it
left.

One must be trained from childhood to endurance, or, with the best will
in the world, one does not long endure.  A diet of eelskin, varied,
when luck was good, by dried moose meat, "hard as wood and dirty as the
street," brought Pre Le Jeune to the doors of death.  Pre Louis
Andr, who spent a winter on the shores of Lake Huron, escaped
starvation by eating acorns and _tripe de roche_, a species of lichen
which when boiled dissolved itself into a black glue, nauseous, but not
devoid of nourishment.  He returned to Three Rivers in the spring, his
ardor unabated, but his digestion permanently impaired.

Harder to bear than hunger and cold were the filth of the Indian
lodges, filled with smoke {36} that had no egress, the noise and
confusion of the Indian village, the painful lack of privacy and
decorum.  In council the braves behaved with savage dignity.  "They do
not all talk at once, but one after another, listening patiently."  But
their home life was a perfected miracle of dirt, disorder, and
discomfort.  The children were quieter than French children; but they
were numerous, and the lodges were small.  The hungry flea-bitten dogs
intruded their unwelcome presence.  The medicine men naturally hated
the missionaries who threatened to undermine their influence, and
strove unceasingly to stir up a spirit of antagonism.  If the summer
months were sickly, or the winter was unusually hard, if game was
scarce, or an early frost destroyed the harvest, the medicine men
pointed out that these misfortunes were due to the malignant presence
of the "black robes"; and the Indians, who had been wont to charge such
calamities to their heathen priests and to their heathen gods, now
hastened to lay the blame upon the Christian priests who had come
unbidden to preach to them of an unknown God.

Fear, the blind unreasoning fear of superstition, {37} rules the savage
heart.  It ruled the heart of the stoutest brave as well as of the
feeblest child.  Whatever was unknown was deemed to be malevolent.  An
Indian woman would watch a priest like a hawk, lest he should baptize
her dying infant.  Those drops of water, she believed, would hasten
death.  The sign of the cross was dreaded as invoking peril.  The grave
abstracted manner in which the missionaries read their breviaries
awakened lively apprehension.  Why should the strangers fix their
profound attention upon those little black books unless they were
pronouncing incantations?  Finally, to quiet this recurrent suspicion,
the priests chanted the Latin lines aloud.  This was fatiguing, but it
rendered their devotions safe.  The Indians, to whom had been denied
the gift of song, were correspondingly eager to sing.  They sang loudly
and lugubriously upon all occasions.  They sang when they were hungry
to distract their minds from this disagreeable circumstance.  They sang
triumphantly when they returned from the warpath, and their prisoners
sang defiantly to show that they did not fear death.  The Huron chiefs
sang for hours to {38} convince Pre Chaumont and Pre Dablon of their
good-will.  Therefore, when the daily portion of the breviary was
intoned, it became friendly instead of formidable.  Music did have
charms to soothe the savage breast and banish its alarms.

One fact was clear to the missionaries' minds: the Indians were hard to
convert.  Every spare moment was spent in studying the language of the
tribe to which they had been sent.  The quickest way was to winter in
an Indian village, where their very lives depended upon their being
able to make themselves understood.  This sharpened their intelligence.
The _donns_ sometimes acted as interpreters; but we find Pre Le Jeune
beseeching his Provincial in Paris to send him assistants who had a
turn for study.  To understand what the savage was saying, to answer
him promptly, to speak his bewildering jargon so that it sounded both
suave and authoritative--this, said the wise priest, was to win his
confidence, to subdue his arrogance, and perhaps to enlighten his soul.

One French word remained untranslatable.  The Iroquois, Hurons, and
Algonquins had no term for God.  Manitou and Oki meant anything {39}
endowed with supernatural powers.  It might be a snakeskin, or a rock
daubed with a hideous painting.  The priests were compelled to use some
roundabout phrase, such as "He who lives in the sky," or "the Ruler of
all men"; and the constant reiteration of such phrases impressed upon
the savage mind the conception of a Supreme Being.  "The Great Spirit,"
says Parkman, "became a distinct existence, a pervading power in the
universe."  Tribes of Indians who were never Christianized fitted into
their welter of superstitions the idea of a vast controlling force,
all-powerful and unseen.  Some of them went so far as to endow this
force with moral attributes.  To them, at least, the Great Spirit was a
dispenser of justice; wise, watchful, and beneficent.

The Jesuits found that belief in a future life was universal among the
Indians; but they had great difficulty in picturing to them a Paradise
so alluring as the happy hunting-ground which the souls of brave men
reached after overcoming dangers and difficulties.  They were equally
unpersuasive when they threatened future punishment, for the very good
reason that no Indian {40} could be brought to believe that he deserved
it.  He was, in his own eyes, a blameless being.  True he stole.  True
he lied.  True he treated his wives as beasts of burden, and
occasionally punished their unfaithfulness by cutting off their ears
and noses.  Pre Marquette reported that he had seen several women who
bore the marks of their misconduct.  True he was undeviatingly cruel to
his prisoners of war.  These things, however, represented the customs
of the tribe.  His father and his grandfather before him had lied, and
stolen, and mutilated their wives, and tortured their enemies.  Why
should a white man come from a far land to preach a code of ethics
which offended his self-esteem?  Why should he be troubled by such
unfriendly words?

On the other hand, the savages showed a lively interest in all the
appurtenances of civilization; in the little hand-mills which the
Jesuits had brought with them into the wilderness, and which ground the
parched corn into fine meal; in the mysterious clocks, the magnets, the
prisms, and the magnifying glasses.  Pre Brbeuf writes that the
Hurons called his clock the "Chieftain {41} of the Day."  They would
squat before it for an hour, and sometimes for several hours, that they
might enjoy the supreme delight of hearing it strike.  They asked him
what it said, and he told them that at noon it said "Time for dinner,"
and at four o'clock, "Go away."  This they remembered; and if, after
the Indian custom, they helped to eat his scanty meal, they obediently
arose and departed at the stroke of four, leaving him in peace.

A flea, magnified to the dimensions of a beetle, entranced the Indians
of New France as it entranced the Thibetans of Lhasa.  Readers of Pre
Huc's delightful volumes, _Souvenirs d'un Voyage dans la Tartarie, le
Thibet, et la Chine_, will remember that the author asked a lama for
the loan of a flea to be shown under the microscope.  The lama
consented to furnish one if the priest would promise it should come to
no harm.  This pledge given, he proceeded gently to extract the desired
insect from the innermost folds of his capacious robes.  It was a
robust specimen, strong and active; but unfortunately it failed to
survive the exhibition; a circumstance which {42} so distressed its
original proprietor and the surrounding crowd that they would not
permit another live insect to be put under the lens.  No such
tenderness animated the Indian's breast.  Pre Le Jeune tells us that
the Iroquois ate the fleas and lice with which they were infested; not
that they liked to eat them, but in order to get even with the pests.
It was their rudimentary notion of poetic justice.

There was one circumstance which added unfairly to the manifold
troubles of the missionary.  With the coming of French traders came
French brandy, which the Indians at first rejected with horror, but
learned too soon to love.  They were singularly sensitive to its
influence because, unlike most savages, they made no intoxicating drink
of their own, and because their quality of imagination rendered them
susceptible to any control which raised their spirits and lent them a
transient gayety.  That, drinking at all, they should drink to excess
was inevitable.  Moderation is the virtue of the civilized.  What
should these poor children of nature know of its supreme value?  They
could starve with composure; but they never ate moderately when they
{43} had a chance to be gluttonous.  Their simple idea of enjoying
anything was to take too much of it.  This being fully understood, the
Jesuits opposed with all the forces at their command the sale of brandy
to the Indians.  For years it was rigidly forbidden; and, although the
law was sometimes evaded, it was never openly defied.  In 1665 Daniel
de Rmy, Sieur de Courcelles, was appointed governor of New France, and
M. Jean Talon received at the same time the post of intendant.  Both
were men of distinction and ability; both had much at heart the
advancement and prosperity of the colonists.  Talon did his utmost to
encourage agriculture and promote the fisheries; but when it came to
the more profitable field of trading he was soon at odds with the
missionaries on the all-important subject of prohibition.  The
intendant was far from desiring drunken Indians; but he ascertained
that when the French traders refused brandy to the savages they took
their furs to the Dutch traders, who, having no scruples and no
intrusive legislation, supplied them with all they wanted.

Here was a grievous state of affairs.  Talon {44} represented to the
Jesuits in Quebec that not only was the fur trade suffering, but that
Dutch ministers seized the opportunity to instruct the Indians in the
Protestant faith.  Surely it was the duty of the order to save its
converts, or its possible converts, from heresy.  Even this argument
failed to move the astute priests from their position.  They probably
felt themselves to be more than a match for Dutch parsons, but no match
at all for French cognac.  They continued to resist its sale to the
savages with so much vigor, and they were so ably seconded by the Vicar
Apostolic, Monseigneur de Laval, that it was a matter of three years
before the intendant carried his point, and had the inhibition
repealed.  Along with the repeal went a law setting a penalty for
drunkenness, which was a little like throwing children in the sea and
forbidding them to drown.  Talon also established a brewery in Quebec,
with a view to diminishing the sale of spirits; but beer, though a
safeguard for the colonists (who had the constitutional temperance of
the French), was no possible protection for the Indians.  In the first
place, it could not reach them; and in the {45} second place, it could
not give them the sensations they desired.  They were not seeking for
sobriety.

Such were the snowy wastes for which Pre Marquette had yearned as for
the promised land, and such were the savages whom he ardently hoped to
convert to Christianity.  He had qualities which promised a fair
measure of success--courage, intelligence, sympathy, and a talent for
friendliness.  The Indians had qualities which responded to adroit and
generous treatment.  "The populous and stationary tribes," says
Parkman, "had their code of courtesy, whose requirements were rigid and
exact; nor might any infringe it without the ban of public censure.
Indian nature, inflexible and unmalleable, was peculiarly under the
control of custom.  Established usage took the place of law; was, in
fact, a sort of common law, with no tribunal to expound or enforce it.
In these wild democracies--democracies in spirit though not in form--a
respect for native superiority, and a willingness to yield to it, were
always conspicuous."

Meeting courage with courage and courtesy {46} with courtesy,
establishing and maintaining friendly relations with Hurons, Ottawas,
and Algonquins, young, ardent, and adventurous, Pre Marquette went
into the wilderness to accomplish greater things than he had dreamed of
in his long years of study and desire.




{47}

_Chapter V_

NEW FRANCE

In 1666 Quebec was a small, strongly fortified town, where peace
reigned, and life, though hard, was not devoid of pleasure and
excitement.  A church, a hospital, a convent of Ursulines (always the
most adventurous of nuns), the well-built houses of the governor and of
the intendant, the big bare dwelling of the Jesuits, the soldiers'
barracks, and the great warehouse for furs, were its salient features.
The garrison lent to the little gray streets an air of gay virility.
The amenities of civilization, so dear to the French heart, were
tenderly preserved.  On New Year's Day, letters of compliment were
exchanged, with such gifts as could be brought from France or
manufactured at home.  The nuns sent to the priests candies, rosaries,
and pies, all of their own making.  The priests sent to the nuns
devotional books and little statues of saints.  The governor sent {48}
presents of a practical order--capons, pigeons, wild turkeys, and
prunes--to priests and nuns.  The priests and nuns gave to their
protgs and working people books, _souliers sauvages_ (moccasins),
handkerchiefs, sweetmeats, and an occasional bottle of brandy.  Formal
visits were exchanged, and the Indians were feasted as well as the
resources of the white men would permit.  The good-will of a pioneer
community, which was also a polite community, found its natural
expression in giving.  The pages of the _Relations_ are filled with
kindly deeds.  One day Mme de la Plterie sent the Jesuits two dozen
napkins and two sheets.  A week later another benefactress sent them
four brasses (a brasse was nearly two metres) of red cloth, a brasse
and a half of blue cloth, and several thousand porcelain beads, all of
which were destined as presents for the Indians.  When the Ursulines
received boxes from France they shared the contents generously with
their neighbors, sending on one occasion a whole keg of prunes to the
priests, who did not often enjoy such an abundance of this esteemed
delicacy.  Wax candles were in great demand.  Four of them in iron
candlesticks burned on the {49} altar at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve
in the Jesuit chapel.  The bitter chill was moderated by two great iron
kettles full of fire.  The music was good: a violin, a flute--somewhat
out of tune--and the best male voices the little town could yield.

There was even a pathetic attempt to reproduce the gaieties of home.  A
maypole was planted on May Day in front of the church (shade of
Governor Endicott!), and hung with such odds and ends of ribbon and
silk as could be spared for its adornment.  The birth of a royal child
in France was celebrated in far-away Canada with a procession or a
play.  The warehouse served as a theater, and here an ambitious troupe
gave Corneille's splendid tragedy, _The Cid_.  Most of the Jesuits
attended this performance, "out of deference to Monsieur the Governor
who took pleasure therein" (poor exile from Paris!), "_as did also the
savages_."  Later in the winter a ballet was produced.  No priest or
nun was present at this entertainment; but it has the kindly mention it
deserves.  To stage a ballet in midwinter in a Quebec warehouse needed
courage, as well as enterprise and art.

{50}

If amusements were few among these pleasure-loving people, and luxuries
unknown--unless prunes can be accounted a luxury--there was plenty of
wood for burning, and plenty of game and grain for food.  The fisheries
were marvelous.  Forty thousand eels were brought into Quebec in a
single season.  They were sold at half an ecu a hundred, so that nobody
who liked eels needed to go hungry.  It is piteous to think of Pre Le
Jeune in the woods with an eelskin for his day's rations, and forty
thousand of these succulent fishes in the markets of Quebec.  To the
Ursulines were assigned the cargoes of reputable girls and young women
who came to New France to be married and rear much needed families.
The year before Pre Marquette's arrival, one ship brought over
eighty-two of these candidates for matrimony, most of whom--so say the
_Relations_--had been taught housewifery by the capable nuns of France.

If Quebec seemed rude and wild to the town-trained eyes of Pre
Marquette, he was soon to know what rudeness and wildness really meant.
Three weeks were allowed him for rest after a voyage rich in
discomfort.  Then, as the long {51} Canadian winter was beginning to
draw in, and traveling, always difficult, would soon become dangerous,
he was sent seventy-seven miles southwest to the trading station of
Three Rivers, admirably situated at the confluence of the St. Lawrence
and the St. Maurice, and one of the earliest settlements of New France.
Tadoussac, on the mouth of the Saguenay, was probably the only other
outpost which did as big a business with French and Indian trappers.
On October 10th Pre Franois Le Mercier, superior at Quebec, wrote
with customary conciseness in the _Relations_: "Pre Jacques Marquette
goes to Three Rivers to be a pupil of Pre Druillettes in the
Montagnais language."  This sounds simple when we read it; but it meant
that the young priest's troubles had begun.  The great and often
insuperable barrier to the missionary's work was his difficulty in
mastering the Indian dialects.  They had to be studied without grammar
or dictionary.  They had to be understood with ease, and spoken with
fluency.  Learned French Jesuits discovered to their sorrow that they
could never hope to make themselves intelligible to the savages.  They
were {52} compelled to return to France, or to confine their
ministrations to the French settlers in America.  We find Pre Le Jeune
confessing ruefully that Pre Brbeuf has far outstripped him in study.
The language of the Montagnais he considered especially exasperating,
because it had so many different ways of saying the same thing.  Where
one word or expression sufficed for the French, the opulent Indians had
a dozen.  "When you know the parts of French or Spanish speech and how
to combine them," he wrote, "you know the languages.  Not so with us.
Stock your memory with all the words which stand for objects, learn the
knot or syntax that joins them, and you are still an ignoramus.  For
besides the names of individual things, there are an infinite number of
words that signify several things together.  And these compound terms
have no relation, or alliance, or affinity in sound with the simple
terms which signify the things apart.  It is a tiresome abundance."

Pre Marquette's aptitude for mastering tongues was now to stand him in
good stead.  This had been his great distinction throughout long years
of study; and if he was never again {53} to speak the polite languages
of Europe which he had acquired with so much zeal, the talent remained
and could be turned to fresh account.  Within a few years he learned
six Indian dialects.  In all of them he could make himself understood.
In some of them he could be persuasive.

And persuasiveness was a winning card with savages whose pride was
quickly wounded and whose suspicions were easily aroused.  Tact was
required to keep them in good humor, and dignity to win and hold their
regard.  The rules and regulations laid down by the first missionaries
for the guidance of their successors are minute, punctilious, amusing,
and infinitely wise.  If a priest is traveling with Indians, he must be
careful never to make them wait for him when embarking in their canoes.
If his broad-brimmed hat annoys them, he must take it off and wear a
nightcap.  He must eat at break of day and at sunset, and he must eat
the sagamit as it is prepared, however tasteless and dirty.  It would
be well for him to take the portion of food that is offered.  He may
not desire it all at first; but, as he grows accustomed to its {54}
nastiness, it will not seem too much.  He must not offer to paddle
unless he is prepared to paddle all day; and he must not lend an Indian
any portion of his clothing unless he has made up his mind to do
without it for the rest of the journey.  He must not give any outward
indication of his fatigue or discomfort.  Finally, he must not ask his
fellow travelers too many questions, nor make too many observations,
nor seek too indefatigably to learn Indian phrases.  This annoys the
taciturn savages.  "Silence is a good equipment for a journey."

When living in a native village, the priest is warned that he must be
gay and affable without undue familiarity.  He must never complain of
the food.  He must not be too long in saying his prayers.  He must
visit the Indians in their lodges lest they feel themselves slighted.
He must accept at once such attentions as may be shown him.  If he is
offered the best place by the fire, or the choicest morsel of food, he
must take it without ceremony.  He must show no annoyance when the dogs
bark or the babies scream.  "Nothing is lost by caressing the children,
by {55} praising the young men and the hunters, by respecting the old,
and by honoring the dead."

Admirable counsel, all of it!  If now and then the missionary must have
felt like a candidate for office at election time, the greatness of the
end he had in view ennobled his tireless efforts to conciliate.

One equipment for a forest life was lacking in Pre Marquette.  He was
not physically strong.  Pre Brbeuf and Pre Jogues were men of iron
constitution as well as iron will.  They bore cold and hunger with a
stoicism that matched the Indians'.  They bore torture and death with a
scornful dignity that surpassed the Indians' utmost efforts.  But Pre
Marquette, when sent at the age of thirty-one to his first mission at
Sault de Ste. Marie, the land of the Ottawas, and one of the farthest
outposts of New France, was a short, slightly built man, hardened,
indeed, to exposure and inured to fatigue, but with no great reserve of
strength.  His singleness of purpose carried him far.  His natural
gaiety of disposition, his love of adventure, his universal
friendliness, his quiet and {56} sincere piety smoothed the roughness
of his way.  But he was singularly ill-fitted to live on acorns, or
eelskins, or _tripe de roche_, or any such appalling substitutes for
the simple and nourishing food of France.

Happily the latest treaty of peace with the Iroquois, a treaty
concluded in the year of Pre Marquette's arrival in Quebec, insured a
fair measure of safety for the missionaries, provided they did not
venture into the dangerous territory on Lake Erie, or push their canoes
into that still more dangerous lake.  The hostile savages had promised
to keep off the warpath, and they held to their promise; but they did
not propose to have their country invaded by French traders whom they
cordially hated, or by Indian traders under French protection.  This
inhospitable attitude was singularly inconvenient for Pre Marquette
and his little party of two _donns_ and a strong young Canadian boy.
It compelled them to travel slowly and painfully by river routes
instead of on the Great Lakes.  It necessitated long carries and
endless delays.  They waited until they could join other voyagers bound
for the same destination; then in birch-bark {57} canoes, kneeling on
rush mats, they braved the heady currents of the St. Lawrence and
Ottawa rivers, making little progress, beaten back by adverse winds,
and stopping every few days for parleys, or for barter with the savages
who thronged the water's edge.

Mr. Reuben Thwaites has traced with care every mile of Pre Marquette's
ten weeks' journey, so rich in discomfort and adventure.  The portage
trail to Lake Nipissing, the passage through French River to Lake
Huron, the beautiful, dangerous trip amid the islands of Georgian Bay
and along the shores of the lake beyond.  "Upon their right, pine
forests mantled the bluffs, and swept down grandly to the water.  Upon
their left, the green waves stretched to the horizon."  The canoes,
those gallant little boats that seemed so frail yet weathered so many
gales, that were so light and buoyant on the water and so uncommonly
heavy to carry on land, that could be so easily overloaded yet must
hold all that the wilderness could not supply, were at last nearing
their journey's end.  They entered the crooked little "River of St.
Mary," and wound their way to their final {58} destination, the
cataract known as the Sault de Ste. Marie, and the large village of
Ojibwas, which was the heart and center of the Ottawa mission.

Twenty-seven years before Pre Marquette's arrival, two French Jesuits,
Pre Jogues and Pre Raymbault, had founded this mission and had
reported that the savages were friendly and well disposed.  Nineteen
years later, Pre Mnard on his way to Lake Superior and his death, had
visited the Sault.  In 1664 Pre Louis Nicolas was sent as a missionary
to the Ottawas, and Pre Marquette was his successor in the field.  It
was an important post and one of the great centers of the fur trade.
Indeed, for nearly two hundred years Indian and white trappers brought
their pelts to be sold in its warehouses to French, English, and
Americans.

It was also a spot of wild and savage beauty.  Not much space in the
_Relations_ is devoted to the charms of nature.  The missionaries had
other and more important things to write about.  But if Pre Marquette
is obstinately silent on this point, we find a really enthusiastic
paragraph from the pen of his associate, Pre Dablon, who is smitten to
the heart by the glory of falling {59} waters, of rapids, and of steep
pine-clad hills.

"What is commonly called the Sault," he writes, "is not a high
cataract, but a rushing current of water from Lake Superior.  Checked
by the rocks which dispute its passage, it plunges headlong over them
in a dangerous cascade like a set of giant steps half a league in
width.  The speed is fearful until the rocks are passed, when the water
broadens out into a beautiful and gently flowing river, full of islands
which divide it and increase its width, so that in some places the eye
cannot see across."

It was at the foot of these rapids that the Indians fished for the
famous atticameg, called by the appreciative Frenchmen "whitefish."
The sport was difficult and dangerous.  The fishermen, standing upright
in their canoes, which were swept hither and thither by the whirling
waters, plunged into their depths a net shaped like a pocket, and
fastened to a stout rod.  Watching keenly for their prey, they scooped
it up with a sudden strong jerk of the wrist and landed it in the
canoe, provided they were not overturned themselves, which very often
happened.  The fish were so plentiful that, during the {60} spring
months, nomadic Indians came from far and wide to feast upon this
delicate and abundant fare.

In all that related to sport; in the fisheries, in the wild life of the
woods, in the brilliant birds and aggressive insects, the missionaries
took a keen and intelligent interest; and of these things they made
full reports in the _Relations_.  We know how ingeniously the Indians
constructed their weirs for catching eels, and how skilfully they
harpooned the fish at night, floating silently in their canoes, with
flaming torches fastened to the prows.  An expert harpooner could spear
three hundred eels in a night.  Cut into strips, and carefully smoked
by the squaws, these delicacies supplied food in the frozen winter
months, when the moose were few and shy.  That amazing little animal,
the beavers, was to the Frenchmen a source of wonder and delight.  A
"master builder" they called it, whose two-story home far excelled the
miserable dwelling places of the Indians.  "The materials of which it
is composed are wood and mud so well joined and bound together that we
{61} have seen the savages sweat in midwinter when trying to break it
open with their hatchets."

Of all the narratives that fill the many volumes of the _Relations_,
those of Pre Le Jeune make the best reading.  The Jesuits wrote with
unvarying clearness, though not with unvarying conciseness.  Their
reports have a convincing sincerity.  There was plenty to be told, and
the telling of it was done at leisure.  When Pre Marquette's turn
came, he described his great adventure with careful accuracy,
heightened at moments into eloquence.  But Pre Le Jeune was that _rara
avis_, a real writer.  He came to Quebec as superior of the Canadian
missions; but being consumed by a desire for first-hand knowledge, he
spent many months in Indian villages and at Three Rivers.  He was
earnest, ardent, and extraordinarily observant.  It was said of him
that he carried "a will of steel in a heart of fire."  He was not a
sentimentalist, and he cherished few illusions concerning fundamental
savagery.  But neither was he a defeatist.  Happily, the word had not
been invented in his day.  From him we get the most graphic accounts of
Indian {62} life, and from him we get the best descriptions of the
North American fauna, so strange, so repellent, and so fascinating to
the Frenchmen's eyes.  He tells his provincial in Paris about the
bears, the porcupines, the flying squirrels, and the raccoons--for the
last of which he has only the Indian name.  He then proceeds to
describe two familiar objects so admirably and with so deft a touch
that the brief paragraphs should be quoted in full:

"There is also a low animal, about the size of a little dog or cat.  I
mention it here, not on account of its excellence, but to make of it a
symbol of sin.  I have seen three or four of them.  It has black fur,
very beautiful and shining, and upon its back are two white stripes
which join at the neck and at the tail, making an oval.  The tail is
bushy and handsome, like that of a fox, and is curled proudly back.  It
is more white than black, and at the first glance you would say,
especially when it walks, that it ought to be called Jupiter's little
beast.  But it is so stinking, and casts so vile an odor, that it is
unworthy of being called the beast of Pluto.  No sewer ever smelled so
bad.  I would not have believed it if {63} I had not smelled it myself.
Your heart fails you when you catch sight of the creature.  Two have
been killed in our court, and for several days afterwards there was
such a dreadful stench throughout the hut that we could not endure it.
I believe the sin smelled by Saint Catherine of Siena must have been
exactly like it."

And to counterbalance this justly dreaded animal comes something
beautiful and beloved:

"The most engaging little object I have seen is called by the French
either the fly-bird, because it is scarcely larger than a bee, or the
flower-bird because it lives upon the honey in flowers.  It is one of
the rarities of this land, and a little prodigy of nature.  God seems
to me to have wrought more wonderfully in this tiny bird than in the
most powerful beast.  When it flies, it hums like a bee.  It can hold
itself in the air, and stick its bill into a flower.  The bill is long,
and the plumage of a mottled green.  Those who call it the flower-bird
would, I think, come nearer to the truth if they called it the flower
of birds."

Were ever wild things more faithfully, more charmingly, or more
alarmingly described!

{64}

From Pre Marquette we hear little of animal life, and still less of
the beauty of his new abode.  His concern was for the savages he had
been sent to serve.  He found the Ojibwas friendly, and--for
Indians--gentle; but the Ottawa mission embraced a dozen surrounding
tribes who came to the Sault to fish and to trade.  His first reports
have the optimism of inexperience, modified by a certain canniness
which went hand in hand with his lifelong and inextinguishable
enthusiasm.  He is amazed at the readiness of his flock to listen to
his words, he is delighted at their seeming acquiescence; but he doubts
if ancient superstitions are easily overcome, and he is not without a
suspicion that what they really desire is to please him in a matter of
small moment.  The stubborn scorn of the Hurons about Three Rivers
sometimes yielded to argument or entreaty; and such converts remained
firm in their faith.  But here there was no hatred to overcome.  The
sanguine young priest confesses that the children are his hope and the
dying are his certainty.  Like many a missionary before him, he
realizes that deathbed baptisms yield a "sure harvest."

{65}

In the meager comforts possible to such a life, the Sault ranked high.
What with the abundance of fish, the patches of land cultivated by the
Ojibwa squaws, and the continual presence of traders, there was variety
of food as well as of company.  Nevertheless, midwinter found the
Indians here, as elsewhere, insufficiently fed.  If Pre Marquette is
silent on this interesting point, Pre Le Mercier, who visited the
mission, is outspoken and explicit.  He confesses that he envies the
savages their capacity to eat three days' food when game is plenty, and
to fast three days when game is scarce.  He is firmly of the opinion
that pounded fish bones are a poor substitute for pounded corn, and he
makes certain dark allusions to a "moss that grows on the rocks," which
can mean nothing else but the terrible "_tripe de roche_," which was
like black glue, and which played havoc with the sensitive stomachs of
the French.

The chapel in which Pre Marquette said his daily mass was a strongly
built hut adorned with forest greenery, and with such pictures and
altar linen as could be carried so many miles from Quebec.  In the eyes
of the Indians it had the {66} splendor of a cathedral.  Here he
preached, here he taught the children, and here he baptized eighty
infants, some of whom "went to Paradise."  The percentage of deaths
among Indian children was always high.  This weakened the tribes
numerically, but strengthened them physically.  The boys and girls who
fought through the first years of cold, exposure, hunger, neglect, and
the perilous ministrations of the medicine men, must have been hard to
kill.  The girls grew into women, strong enough to bear the burdens
laid upon them.  The boys were well fitted for the

  ... life of shocks,
  Dangers and deeds,

in which they took delight.




{67}

_Chapter VI_

IN THE WILDERNESS

In the summer of 1669 Rn Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, a French
gentleman of good lineage to whom had been granted a tract of land at
La Chine, nine miles from Montreal, abandoned security and wealth to go
adventuring over the wild Canadian wastes.  His seigniory was a
valuable one.  He was a man of mark and authority.  But, being the
stuff of which explorers are made, he could not content himself with
even a semi-civilized life.  Indian traders, en route to Montreal, told
him tales of a mighty river emptying into the sea.  This he conceived
to be the "Vermilion Sea" (the Gulf of California), and the old, old
vision of a route to the East fired his vivid fancy.  An accomplished
woodsman, fearless, indefatigable and adroit, a man of acute
understanding who spoke several Indian languages with ease, he seemed
eminently {68} fitted to carry the Lilies of France into the fertile
lands that border the Great Lakes.  It was said of him that his words
were few and precise, that he was able to distinguish between the
things he knew absolutely and the things he knew in part, and that he
never pretended to know the things of which he was ignorant.  To him
belongs the honor of discovering the Ohio River, and to him Parkman
ascribes the discovery of the Illinois.  He hoped to go farther than
these waterways could take him.

Frontenac, the martial and heroic governor of New France, was La
Salle's friend and backer.  So too was the Seminary of St. Sulpice, a
community of ecclesiastics, "models," says Parkman, "of a discreet and
sober conservatism," who held in Montreal the influential position that
the Jesuits held in Quebec.  The Seminary helped to supply La Salle
with funds for his expedition; and, when he started, he took with him
two Sulpician missionaries, Pre Dollier de Casson (generally called
Pre Dollier) and Pre Galine.  The latter, as it chanced, was a
lively writer as well as a born adventurer, and his letters are gayer
than most ecclesiastical {69} correspondence.  From him we learn that
La Salle, who presumably feared nothing, made an honorable exception in
the case of rattlesnakes.  These reptiles inspired in him a sick and
shuddering abhorrence, and the sight of three of them crawling up a
rock threw him into a fever.

The speed and lightness of the birch canoes, their perfect adaptation
of means to an end, so delighted Pre Galine that he made up his mind
to take one of them back to France if ever he were happy enough to
return.  Paddling all day on river or on lake, and sleeping all night
on the bare bosom of mother earth, filled this rather exceptional
priest with a deep sense of exhilaration.  "As for food," he writes
blithely, "it is enough to make one want to burn all the cookery books
that ever were written; for in the woods of Canada one is able to live
well without bread, wine, salt, pepper, or spice."

"Living well" meant living on sagamit, seasoned with meat or fish
"when we can get them"; and, notwithstanding La Salle's superb health
and Pre Galine's light-heartedness, all the members of the party were
suffering from some form of malady when they reached Irondequoit {70}
Bay, and a village of friendly Senecas who feasted them plentifully,
and sent them gifts of pumpkins and wild berries.  Here the sight of a
prisoner tortured for six dreadful hours effectually sobered Pre
Galine, who strove vainly to beg or buy the victim from his captors,
and who was as keen to leave as he had been keen to arrive at a spot
made hateful to him.  In the next Indian settlement on Lake Ontario
they encountered Louis Joliet, one of the most daring and adventurous
of fur traders, who was destined to share with Pre Marquette the glory
of discovering the Mississippi.  It was Joliet's account of Christian
Indians living on the Upper Lakes which induced the two Sulpicians to
turn their steps toward the forbidden Lake Erie.  La Salle's goal was
the Ohio.  They parted reluctantly.  The leader went on his perilous
way.  The priests and the traders wintered unobserved on the shores of
the lake, in a log cabin which they built for themselves.  Here, buried
in the snows, they lived securely if monotonously on a diet of nuts
which they had gathered, plums which they had dried, and game which
they killed in abundance.  When the spring came, they made their way,
{71} after manifold adventures and mishaps, to the Sault de Ste. Marie,
and to Pre Marquette's mission in the wilderness.

It was a curious meeting.  The Sulpicians, after four months of savage
life, a hard journey, and a shipwreck which had swept away most of
their possessions, considered that the Jesuits were enjoying the sweets
of civilization.  They had a square log fort for a habitation.  Part of
it was their home, and part of it was a real chapel, where the children
came every day to learn their prayers, and where the ragged visitors
were invited to hear vespers sung.  A tract of land had been cleared
and planted with corn, beans, and pumpkins.  Fish was to be had for the
asking.  It was May, and the wooded slopes were beautifully green.  The
dancing waters sparkled in the sun.  It must have seemed like Paradise
to the way-worn travelers who would gladly have prolonged their stay,
but who were bound for missions of their own.  Change, indeed, lay in
wait for all.  Pre Galine and Pre Dollier returned to Montreal for
fresh orders from their Superior.  There Pre Galine, aided by Joliet,
who furnished him with some rough drawings, {72} made the earliest
known map of the Upper Lakes.  Pre Marquette, a pawn in the great game
of civilization, was sent a few months later far away from the beauty
and safety of the Sault to the lonely, landlocked harbor of Chequamegon
Bay, and the jutting breakwater christened in 1665 La Pointe du Saint
Esprit.

This was the spot first visited by the fur traders, Radisson and
Groseilliers, who came so near to robbing Pre Marquette of the glory
of his great discovery.  They swung their canoes into its quiet waters
in the autumn of 1659, built themselves a strong little log hut, which
enjoyed the proud distinction of being the earliest dwelling place
erected by white men on Lake Superior; and, undeterred by cold, danger,
and privation, traded long and loyally with the Indians.  Six years
later, Pre Allouez was sent from Quebec to start the first mission on
this desolate coast.  He gave La Pointe its French name, and
ministered, as best he could, to the spiritual needs of half-a-dozen
Indian villages, widely scattered, and populated by Ojibwas,
Pottawattomies, and Kickapoos, to say nothing of fugitive Hurons and
Ottawas, who, like {73} Orestes, were forever flying from the malignant
fury of the Iroquois, and who had sought this refuge because the
adjacent swamp lands offered a retreat from their hereditary foe.

As Pre Allouez had grown old, feeble, and a trifle discouraged in the
exercise of his calling, Pre Marquette, who was young, healthy, and
brimming over with zeal, was chosen to succeed him in this farthest
outpost of French trade.  He went with joyful alacrity, relishing the
loneliness and danger as welcome factors in a great game, and precisely
the things he had come to the New World to meet.  Even the snow and ice
of an early and exceptionally severe winter failed to chill his
enthusiasm.  From La Pointe he wrote a long and minute letter to his
Superior, Pre Le Mercier, who forwarded it to France, where it was
embodied in the _Relations_, and added one more page to the slowly and
patiently gathered materials of Canadian history.

It is a sober narrative, but not without high lights and exultant
passages.  Already the youthful missionary had seen enough of the
Indians to mistrust their facile acceptance of his teaching, and
already he had learned that, once really {74} Christianized, they led
lives of amazing simplicity and goodness.  The women especially heard
in his words some promise of help in their drudgery and degradation.
When he succeeded in persuading a brave to take back his wife whom he
had cast off because he had wearied of her, other wives lifted up their
heads, and looked a trifle more confidently into the future.

As usual his great trouble lay with that virulent plague of all savage
life, the medicine men.  They were an established institution.  Their
"cures" though inefficacious, were familiar and more or less diverting.
If a woman's fever failed to moderate after a dance of questionable
decency had been performed in her wigwam, the dancers at least had
enjoyed themselves, the spectators had been entertained, and, as one
old brave sagely remarked, it made no difference anyhow whether the
woman lived or died.  If an ill man grew worse after his body had been
greased and he had been held over a blazing fire, the spectacle had
been an exciting one, and it was to the medicine men's credit that
their patient was not dead.  The Hurons were too far advanced for such
nastiness and folly; but the {75} Ottawas were still addicted,
according to Pre Marquette, "to foulness, incantations, and sacrifices
to evil spirits."

A month's journey from La Pointe lay two great villages of Illinois
Indians.  They numbered eight or nine thousand, and were too strong to
fear attack.  Their fertile lands yielded abundant crops.  The forest
supplied them with game.  The braves were mighty warriors who
trafficked in slaves captured from weaker tribes.  Worshippers of the
sun and of the powers of the air, they were less grossly superstitious
than their neighbors.  Neither were they fierce or cruel, although they
punished unfaithful wives with severity.  Their language was not unlike
that of other Algonquin tribes, and Pre Marquette devoted his spare
hours (few and far between) to perfecting himself in its intricacies.
Wandering Illinois hunters bade him visit their land and teach their
people.  With their old enemies, the Sioux (called in the _Relations_
Nadouessi), they were now on good terms; and the Sioux promised to
permit the missionary to pass safely through their territory, and to
give him the calumet, or peace pipe, as a token of good-will.  {76}
Indeed, these far-off friendly tribes, who had no intercourse with
English or Americans, were eager to conciliate the unknown and
mysterious power of France.  "If the savages could learn to love God,"
wrote Pre Marquette, "as easily as they learn to fear the French,
Christianity would conquer the land."

From the Illinois, from the Sioux, from those strange nomads, the
Kilistinaux, who built no villages, planted no land, set no traps, but
lived by the chase and by bartering pelts, Pre Marquette heard more
and more of the great river, "a league wide," and flowing southward
through lands where the winters were not of an icy coldness like those
of New France, but mild and pleasant, and where the fertile soil bore
two crops of maize a year.  The savages dwelling on its banks traded
with white men who prayed, as did the French priests, with rosaries,
and who were summoned to prayer by the ringing of bells in their
churches.  The Indian name of the river was becoming familiar to the
missionaries, though it suffered many vicissitudes at their hands.
Messipi was the most frequent form of spelling, Missip was a popular
abbreviation, {77} Mitchisisipi appears on early maps, and Misisipi was
a thrifty saving of consonants.  Pre Dablon wrote it painstakingly
Messi-Sipi; and only in 1671 do we see it beautifully correct, with all
its flowing syllables in order.

The Jesuits were well aware of France's eagerness to spread her
colonies westward and southward, and of the supreme importance of a
waterway.  Pre Marquette was only one of many who dreamed of
discovering this way and so simplifying all future explorations.  Two
things were imperatively needed: light and strong canoes and the
backing of temporal and spiritual authorities.  For the first he was
already making tentative bargains with the Indians, and wondering more
than once if they could be trusted to keep their word.  For the second
he relied upon the fact that Pre Dablon had in 1670 been appointed
Superior General of all the Jesuit missions in New France, and there
was no cleric or layman in the country more keen than he to learn the
course and outlet of the unknown river.

It was a period tense with expectation.  Pre Marquette was divided
naturally enough between the heady ambition of the explorer and {78}
the sober zeal of the missionary.  In one and the same paragraph he
wrote to Quebec that he hoped to carry the light of faith to savage
tribes "that have long waited for this happiness"; and that the finding
of the "Mesippi" will afford "a certain knowledge of the Southern or of
the Western Sea into which it empties."  He was not much given to
analyzing his own mind or motives.  Generations of fighting ancestors
had bequeathed to him simple ways of thought.  Perhaps, too, a hardy
life in the woods, filled with work and sprinkled with dangers, is not
conducive to self-dissection.  Pre Marquette's letters are apt to
close with some such line as "wherever God does us the grace to lead
us," the finality of which is the summing up of earthly hopes and fears.




{79}

_Chapter VII_

ST. IGNACE

It was a warlike outbreak on the part of the Sioux ("the Iroquois of
the North") that drove the Hurons and Ottawas from La Pointe, and that
drove Pre Marquette along with them, because of the many Huron
converts whom he could not bear to leave.  The Ottawas had been mad
enough to provoke hostilities, and the Sioux were not foes to be
lightly disregarded.  They were strong, brave, generous in their
fashion, and supremely competent.  Their use of sweating baths in
illness proves them to have been possessed of common sense.  These
baths are minutely described by Pre Hennepin, who was long held a
captive, and who attributes to them his recovery from a prostrating
fever and lameness.  Heated stones were piled in small huts closely
covered with buffalo skins.  In these huts the patients were laid,
while water poured over {80} the stones produced a dense vapor.  This
treatment, repeated two or three times a week, wrought many cures.
Savages who discovered for themselves that steam baths are more
medicinal than indecent dances must have been fairly intelligent.

When these lordly Indians promised to Pre Marquette a safe conduct
through their territory, he had returned the compliment by sending them
some religious pictures, the best and brightest his scanty stock
afforded.  Before taking the warpath, the Sioux restored these pictures
to their owner, intimating at the same time that, while they would no
longer permit the Hurons or the Ottawas to remain at La Pointe, they
would give them time to depart in safety--and in haste.  A formal
ceremony like this was beyond measure dear to the Sioux heart, and to
the hearts of all Indians.  It is a thousand pities that heraldry was
unknown to them.  Of all the institutions of civilization it would have
given them the purest delight.  It would have expressed to perfection
their love of display, their sense of dignity and importance.

Not for a moment did the offending tribes {81} mistake the purpose of
their ceremonious enemy, or underrate their own peril.  From the
surrounding villages stores of meal and dried fish were collected.
Canoes were built in frantic haste.  Skins, rush mats, arms, food,
clothing, the simple furnishings of savage homes, the still simpler
tools of savage agriculture, were packed in bales and consigned to the
frail crafts which were the fugitives' only hope.  The Ottawas resolved
to go to Manitoulin Island in the northern waters of Lake Huron, a spot
with which they were tolerably familiar.  The more numerous Hurons
decided, after many councils, to risk a return to their old home on
Michillimackinac Island, admirably situated at the junction of Lake
Huron and Lake Michigan, and so famous for its fishing that it was
called in Indian parlance, "the birthplace of all fishes."  From this
abode of plenty they had once been rudely driven by the Iroquois.  They
greatly feared their ancient and cruel enemy; but, for the moment, they
feared the Sioux more.  Scylla was a threat, but Charybdis was a deadly
certainty.

Michillimackinac (no people in the world {82} were so profuse with
their syllables as were the Indians) had witnessed many vicissitudes.
It was, in the words of Pre Dablon, who had established there the
mission of St. Ignace, "an island of note."  The wind-swept waters of
the lakes were of an icy coldness.  The winter climate was as genial as
Greenland.  But the light sandy soil grew maize and pumpkins, and the
high rocks made observation points from which approaching enemies could
be seen twenty miles away.  As for the fishing, Pre Dablon assures us
that wherever else fish might be found, the island was their only real
abode.  They were casual inmates of other waters.  Herring, carp, pike,
whitefish, "golden fish," and sturgeon could be caught without effort.
Trout--or something which he calls trout--were terrifyingly abundant,
and most terrifyingly overgrown--three feet and more in length.  They
were so fat that the Indians, who loved grease, had difficulty in
eating them, and so plentiful under the ice that a skilful harpooner
could pierce half a hundred in three hours.

The vantage point of the island was its accessibility to traders who
passed through the {83} narrow strait on their way to and from the
Georgian Bay.  "It is the key for the people of the South," says Pre
Dablon, "as the Sault is the key to the people of the North.  For in
these regions there are only two passages by water for the many tribes
who must seek one or the other if they want to reach the French
settlements."

On the island itself, or on the adjacent mainland (the matter is still
in dispute) Pre Marquette, invincibly determined and invincibly
patient, built a third log chapel, resembling as closely as possible
the chapels at the Sault and at La Pointe.  The Hurons, ever mindful of
their precarious position, built a fort and a palisade to defend as
best they could their utterly defenseless homes.  A Huron village in
1672 was not wholly unlike a Bornean village to-day, except that in
Borneo a whole community is sheltered under the same roof, in a sort of
one-story apartment house, fairly well built and moderately
comfortable; whereas a Huron lodge held, at the most, half-a-dozen
families.  Each family had its own fireside, with the result that all
the inmates were dried like herring in the smoke.  {84} Each family had
what privacy a partition of bark or skins could give it.  Each family
had its own bunks, and its own private supply of food, which was freely
shared, its own dogs, its own children, its own dirt, and fleas, and
lice, and mosquitoes.  These last were common property.

Fleas and lice were not unknown to the missionaries in their own land;
but mosquitoes were a novelty and the plague of their lives.  Pre Le
Jeune describes them as "little flies, troublesome in the extreme," by
which he feared he should be devoured alive.  The tender French skin
offered no resistance to their virulence, and even the tough and
seasoned Indians regarded them with strong disfavor.  According to the
theology of the Natchez, one of the punishments that lay in wait for
the ill-doer was to be exposed after death to their bites.  Instead of
a happy hunting-ground with plenty of game on which to gorge himself,
he would wander naked in swamp lands, with plenty of mosquitoes to feed
on him.

Pre Marquette, like all the missionaries, lived in a lodge of his own;
but his parochial visits enabled him to enjoy to the utmost the {85}
Huron housekeeping.  It was said of Pre Hennepin that he had an
especial art in soothing the shrieking Indian children.  Pre Marquette
claimed no such distinction.  He taught the poor little things, and
heard them say their prayers, and administered what simple remedies he
had for their disorders.  He tried to keep himself clean without
offending too deeply the Indian preference for dirt; and he made
headway, slow but sure, against the wall of ignorance and stolid
indifference which centuries of savagery had induced.  In 1672 he wrote
a long letter to Pre Dablon, describing his labors, his
encouragements, and his disappointments.  It is noticeable that he
calls the Hurons Tionnontateronnons, and the Ottawas Outaouasinagaux.
We have reason to be grateful that these interminable words, dear to
the Indian's heart, and tripping lightly, if gutturally, from his
tongue, have been merged into a few general and abbreviated terms.  The
mere pronouncing of so many syllables, to say nothing of writing them,
must have taxed a Frenchman's memory and patience.

"One needs the grace of perseverance," wrote Pre Marquette, "in
dealing with savage minds {86} that are without knowledge and without
steadfastness.  God alone can give them light and firmness while we
stammer in their ears the words of Christian faith.  It is all too easy
for them to slip back into the grossness and superstition in which they
and their fathers before them have been reared.  Nevertheless, when I
was away for a fortnight last summer, my little flock came daily to the
chapel to pray.  The children sang their hymns, and asked over and over
again when I was coming back.  On my return, men and women gathered to
meet me, and accompanied me joyfully to the chapel.  I trust that what
they do now from respect and custom, they will one day do with keener
faith and love.

"I gladly attended their great pumpkin feast [it sounds like
Thanksgiving Day], and bade them be grateful to God for their plentiful
harvests.  In the autumn I paid many visits to the fields; and, as we
have no church bell, I make a daily round and summon my parishioners to
prayer.  The hunting this year has been unusually good.  The woods have
been full of bears, stags, beavers, and wildcats.  Nowhere has there
been a lack of food."

{87}

Then follows a recital of the missionary's efforts to rid the Indian
mind of its most tenacious superstition, a profound and apprehenhensive
belief in dreams.  Freud would have welcomed the Hurons to his heart,
would have told them shocking things, and have intensified their dismal
sense of uneasiness.  Sir Arthur Mitchell would have found in them an
illustration of his theory that we are all decadent in our dreams.
Marcel Foucault would have traced the connection between such dreams
and the appointed destruction of the tribe.  But the French Jesuits,
assured that the chaotic anarchy of dreamland, in which the sanest of
us is mad, has no bearing upon the ordered realities of life, contented
themselves with telling the savages repeatedly, and not very
successfully, that dreams meant nothing at all.  Pre Le Jeune says
that the implicit reliance of the Hurons and the Algonquins upon their
dreams made them as undependable as the weather.  Pre Charlevoix, who
published in 1744 an account of his wanderings in Canada, tells us of
an Indian who, having dreamed that he had lost a finger, promptly cut
it off the next day, thus meeting {88} fate a little more than halfway.
Pre Marquette, by dint of argument and ridicule, succeeded at last in
convincing the hunters that if one of them chanced to dream about a
bear, it was no good reason for refusing to kill a bear the next day.
Perhaps the instinct of the chase lent weight to the missionary's
words.  They bore fruit in a decrease of superstitious fear and an
increase of coveted game.

Other interests the Frenchmen had in the wild life they lived.  These
were scientific rather than spiritual.  The winds and the tides were
objects of keen curiosity and careful comment.  "This island," wrote
Pre Marquette, "is surrounded by three great Lakes which seem to be
incessantly playing at ball with one another.  The winds from the Lake
of the Illinois no sooner subside than they are hurled back by the Lake
of the Hurons, and those from Lake Superior are the highest and
fiercest of all.  In the autumn and winter months there is a succession
of storms; and with these mighty waters all about us, we seem to be
living in the heart of a hurricane."  The tides, or what appear to be
tides, he ascribes to the action of the winds, "which drive {89} the
waves before them in a recurrent flow and ebb."  He also thinks it
possible that Lake Superior has a subterranean outlet.  "We have
discovered a great discharge of water gushing up from the bottom of the
Lake, and making whirlpools in the strait that lies between the Lake of
the Hurons and that of the Illinois."

It was, however, the all-important subject of copper mines that deeply
interested priests, _donns_, and traders.  The French coveted this
precious metal, and the Indians guarded it with profound and jealous
care.  They had uses of their own for it, and they held it to be a
sacred, or semi-sacred substance, dear to the heart of a somewhat vague
but powerful and malignant deity.  The pits on the Isle Royale and on
the southern shore of Lake Superior yielded to their primitive mining
lumps of copper from which they fashioned spearheads, arrowheads,
knives, and occasional ornaments.  Pre Lallemont, writing in 1640,
waxed eloquent over the amethyst-studded rocks that bordered the mighty
lake, and over the pieces of copper, as big as a man's fist, which he
had seen again and again.  Pre Le Jeune wrote to his Superior that
{90} copper was in use by the savages; but that they did not know, or
would not tell, the whereabouts of the mines.

It is from Pre Allouez and Pre Dablon that we get the most vivid
accounts of the sacredness in which this beautiful metal was held.
Pre Allouez wrote in 1667 that he had seen large lumps of copper lying
on the bed of Lake Superior, and plainly visible through the clear
water.  The Algonquins called these lumps the "riches of the gods," and
believed they brought good fortune if undisturbed.  Some of the braves
possessed lumps of their own, which they cherished carefully, and which
they bequeathed with solemnity to their sons.  Pre Dablon told at
length the weird story of the floating island which moved hither and
thither with the variable winds, and which was the abode of a god.
Four Indians, landing on this island, and unaware of its sacred and
unstable character, built a fire on the smooth stones which covered its
shore, and proceeded to cook their fish.  When they had eaten and the
fire had cooled, they discovered that what they had taken for stones
were pieces of pure copper; and, {91} hastily rembarking, they carried
the precious metal away with them.  Scarcely, however, had they left
the land when a voice like angry thunder sounded in their ears: "Who
are these robbers," it said, "who steal the toys of my children?"
Terrified beyond measure, they turned back and replaced the copper on
the beach; but it was too late.  They had laid profane hands on a
sacred thing, and the injured god was not to be so easily appeased.
Three of the savages sickened and died on their way home; and the
fourth had barely time and strength to reach his village and relate his
adventure before he, too, paid the price of sacrilege.  For imagination
and a sense of fear--that motive power of heathen creeds--this tale
rivals Lord Dunsany's "Gods of the Mountain," and "A Night in an Inn."
But Lord Dunsany's vagabonds are stout-hearted liars and dare-devils.
The poor Indians sinned in ignorance and failed to escape their doom.

It was the search for copper which prompted Talon to send Daumont de
Saint-Lusson in 1670 to trade with the Indians on the shore of Lake
Superior, and to take formal possession of the {92} country in the name
of Louis the Fourteenth.  Saint-Lusson was accompanied by one of the
ablest and most daring of French _voyayeurs_, Nicolas Perrot, who at an
age when the modern youth is being slowly and amply educated, had
traveled far into the wilderness, had established friendly relations
with Indian tribes whose languages he spoke fluently, and had written a
lively account of his adventures.  It is thanks to him, and to that
indefatigable chronicler, Pre Dablon, that we know the details of the
impressive ceremonies with which the fleurs-de-lis were raised on one
of the green and lovely hillsides of the Sault de Ste. Marie.

Fifteen Frenchmen composed Saint-Lusson's meager following.  Fourteen
Indian tribes had been summoned to the great pow-wow, and the braves
came in goodly numbers, fired with curiosity and misgiving.  It was
June.  The Sault was at its fairest.  The French soldiers were fully
armed.  Three Jesuits gave the ceremony a semi-sacerdotal character.  A
great cross of wood was raised and solemnly blessed, while the
Frenchmen, uncovered, sang the _Vexilla Regis_.  Then a post of fine
cedar bearing the royal arms {93} engraved on a copper plate was
erected, and the Frenchmen sang the _Exaudiat_.  Then Pre Allouez made
a lengthy address to the assembled Indians.  He spoke of the Christian
creed and what the cross stood for.  He spoke of the power of France,
of the magnificence of the French monarch, of his unquestioned
authority, his beautiful cities, his wealth, his armies, his victories.
"Being well versed in the language of the savages," wrote Pre Dablon
in the _Relations_, "he was able to adapt himself to their
understanding, and the account he gave of the king's incomparable
greatness so overwhelmed them with astonishment that they were smitten
to silence, not having words in which to express their wonder."

This effect being produced, Saint-Lusson arose, sword in hand, and
declared the country with its lakes and rivers to be the property of
His Most Christian Majesty, and the natives to be his subjects and
vassals, "bound to obey his laws and follow his customs."  In return
they were to receive "succor and protection from the incursions and
invasions of their enemies."  The nations of Europe were notified in
formal {94} phraseology that they might not settle upon any part of the
land without the concurrence of France.  Saint-Lusson's words were
faithfully translated by Perrot, who acted as interpreter.  At their
close the soldiers fired a volley of musketry and shouted _Vive le
Roi_!  The savages yelped with sudden terror at the noise of the guns,
and then subsided into dignified apathy.  A feast closed the day, a
great bonfire was lighted, and the _Te Deum_ solemnly sung, "to thank
God on behalf of the poor Indians who were now subjects of so great and
powerful a monarch."  The next morning the French retired in good
order, and the braves returned to their tribes, having first carefully
removed the royal arms which they feared might be in the nature of a
charm.  The _beau geste_ had been made with punctilious propriety, and
everything remained as it had been before.

Yet not quite the same, for among the little group of Frenchmen was
Louis Joliet, who accompanied Saint-Lusson on his further expedition
along the shore of Lake Superior, and learned more and more about the
river that only Indian eyes had seen.  All that was told him he {95}
reported faithfully to Talon.  The intendant was ill at ease at hearing
nothing from La Salle, whom he had sent--with the help of the
Sulpicians--on an expedition to the southwest, hoping that he would
"some day find the passage to Mexico."  La Salle had, after his
fashion, disappeared in the wilderness.  None knew whether he were
living or dead.  It was necessary to find another pioneer to take up
his task, and that was an easy matter in New France where the love of
adventure ran high, where nobody calculated on living long, and where
everybody was keen to do something with life while he had it.  The
colonists were imperfect men; but very few of them reached perdition by
way of safety.




{96}

_Chapter VIII_

ON THE EVE

In 1672 the Seigneur de Courcelles, Governor General of New France, was
succeeded in office by a man whose name is stamped indelibly upon the
troubled history of his time.  Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac, was
a soldier of distinction and a devoted servant of France.  He was also
a far-seeing man of affairs, who succeeded in diverting a great deal of
Indian trade from the rapacious English and Dutch settlers to the
equally rapacious French.  The fort which he built on Lake Ontario, and
which bore his name, gave protection to his countrymen by holding the
restive Iroquois in check.  Parkman admits that as a negotiator with
these proud, sensitive, and warlike Indians, Frontenac was without a
peer.  He knew how to enforce respect and win regard.  "He seems to
have had an instinctive perception of the treatment they {97} required.
His martial nature, his clear, decisive speech, his frank and downright
manner, backed as they were by a display of force which in their eyes
was formidable, struck them with admiration, and gave tenfold effect to
his words of kindness.  His predecessors had never ventured to address
the Iroquois as 'Children,' but had always called them 'Brothers.'  Yet
an assumption of paternal authority on the part of Frontenac was not
only taken in good part, but was received with apparent gratitude.
They thanked him for that which from another they would not have
endured."

With wise counsel, briefly imparted, with generous promises and lavish
gifts, with veiled threats underlying his most suave and gracious
words, Frontenac prevailed upon the Iroquois to permit the erection of
his fort and storehouses at Cataraqui.  They agreed to leave his
soldiers unmolested and to send their pelts to his traders.  As a
striking proof of their confidence, they dispatched two young boys and
two girls, children of chiefs, to be educated in Quebec, the boys in
the Governor's own household, the girls in the convent of the
Ursulines.  {98} Well might this astute negotiator have written to
France: "I may boast of having impressed the five nations with respect,
fear, and good-will."

The order of succession is noticeable.  Frontenac had his way because
back of his friendly advances, back of his costly gifts, back of his
real desire to conciliate and be at peace, was the invincible
determination to win by war what he could not gain by diplomacy.  As
long as the Iroquois refrained from violence they had no surer friend
than the governor.  It is probable that he had a better feeling for
them than for his French associates--his quarrels being many and
vigorous.  But he managed to make them understand what they had never
understood before--that neither the white man, nor the white man's
Indian allies, could be molested with impunity.  The result of this
original point of view, coupled with a rigorous respect for their own
rights and some delicate concessions to their pride, was a long respite
from war, and a splendid chance to increase the activities of trade.
Frontenac enriched himself, but he also helped to enrich France.

{99}

The tale of his last years is briefly told.  While he ruled, all went
well; but he had at least as many enemies as friends, and they never
rested until he was recalled to France in 1682.  His successor, La
Barre, was most unfortunately chosen.  Possessing neither courage nor
prudence, he managed to lose in ten months the fruits of ten years'
diplomacy; and by the time he was superseded by the Marquis de
Dnonville the once peaceful country was aflame with war.  Dnonville
had courage to spare, but no adroitness and no perception of Indian
character.  He angered the Iroquois without intimidating them, which
was a grievous thing to do.  They became more and more restive, more
and more threatening.  There were raids on Huron and Algonquin
villages, ambushed attacks which cost the lives of French traders, a
steady loss of commerce, a deepening sense of danger everywhere.  All
this was little to the fancy of the French king; and, after seven years
of disorder and bloodshed, Frontenac was conjured to return to his post
and, by force of counsel or by force of arms, bring the Five Nations
once more under subjection.

{100}

It needed force of arms.  Frontenac tried patiently and vainly to patch
up a peace, hold back the encroachments of the British, and restablish
his old firm and friendly relations with the Indians.  The Iroquois
were ready to promise amity to the French, but not to the hated
Algonquins.  Frontenac liked the Iroquois, and had no especial fancy
for the Algonquins; but honor and wisdom alike forbade him to sacrifice
friend to foe.  At the age of seventy-six, this redoubtable old warrior
took the field against an enemy whose strength he knew, whose qualities
he respected, and whom he had warned twenty-four years before to
refrain from provoking the hostility of France.  The campaign was brief
and decisive.  The red men far outnumbered the white, and were fearless
fighters; but the French were better armed and better led, and the
discipline of frontier life enabled them to bear exposure, hunger, and
fatigue with an almost savage unconcern.  They carried the war swiftly
and terribly into the enemy's country, attacking and burning the
palisaded villages as though they had been stacks of straw.  The
inmates fled to the forests; but the forests afforded no safety {101}
to beaten Indians who had other Indians for foes.  The Iroquois saw
their homes destroyed, their braves slain, their children captives,
their places of retreat beset by hostile tribes.  They were compelled
to sue for peace, accepting terms instead of dictating them, and
realizing in bitterness of spirit that the white chief who had given
them their choice of friendship or of war had kept both his promises
and his threats.  Frontenac received the cross of Saint Louis from
France, and the heartfelt gratitude of his countrymen in Canada.  Two
years later he died.

This was the man who coperated cordially with the plans of the
intendant, Talon, for the development of Canadian trade and the
enlargement of the Canadian domain.  This was the man who listened with
keen interest to the intendant's tale of the mysterious Mississippi,
and of his cherished plans for its discovery.  They were to be his,
alas! no longer, for he was on the eve of returning to France.  His
useful and interesting life in the New World was over.  He could but
leave to his successors the duty of carrying on the work which {102} he
had begun, and the joy of fulfilling hopes which he had only dreamed.
Frontenac, who never made the mistake of despising experience, listened
attentively to his words and implicitly followed his counsel.  When
Talon proposed Joliet as the best leader for the Mississippi venture,
the governor acquiesced in his choice, and wrote to Colbert that he was
fortunate to find at hand a young man discreet and experienced.  "The
sieur Joliet is very skilful in these kinds of discoveries, and has
already been near the great river of which he promises to ascertain the
course.  We shall have certain news of it this summer, and perhaps of
copper mines as well."

Louis Joliet was the son of a wagon maker in the service of the Company
of the Hundred Associates.  A hardy, bright-eyed boy, he had attracted
the attention of the Quebec Jesuits, who took him into their school and
educated him--they hoped--for the priesthood.  But the lad, though
satisfactorily decent and devout, had in him the instincts of the
rover.  He could never have waited, as Pre Marquette had {103} waited,
twelve years in servitude.  He wandered from the start--over to France,
which he found tame, back to Canada, and far into the perilous woods.
As trader, explorer, guide, and interpreter, he had learned all that
the wilderness could teach.  The never-ending search for copper mines
kept him well employed, and his admirable knowledge of the Indian
languages helped him in the buying of furs.  Parkman says that he had
no commanding qualities, which is probably true; but as friend and
comrade he was unequalled.  Twelve years younger than Pre Marquette,
the two men had been friends whenever they had a chance, which was not
often.  Both were fearless, sanguine, resolute, and conciliating.  In
both hearts there burned the inextinguishable zest for adventure.

This zest, as I have already said, was part of the missionary's outfit.
Without it, the corresponding zest for saving souls would have been
painfully thwarted.  It is one thing to obey an order and faithfully
perform a task.  It is another to leap to the task with a happy sense
of destiny fulfilled.  The heads of the great religious houses {104}
knew very well the kind of priests to send abroad and the kind to keep
at home.  Sometimes, indeed, they failed to curb the resistless
_wanderlust_.  A case in point was the famous Franciscan friar, Pre
Hennepin, who seems to have been a free lance, as unfettered and as
uncertain as the winds or weather.  It was he who discovered and named
the Falls of St. Anthony, then a sheer descent of sixty feet, beneath
which, veiled in mist and foam, dwelt Oanktayhee, the much feared God
of the Sioux.  It was he who wrote with characteristic exaggeration the
first account of Niagara Falls, which had been marked on Champlain's
map nearly fifty years earlier, but of which only confused and absurd
reports had reached Europe.

Pre Hennepin, it is said, derived his passion for roving from the
French and foreign sailors who frequented the ports of Calais and
Dunkirk.  Perhaps he also learned from them the art of embroidering a
narrative.  Certain it is that he never wearied of their company; and
if they showed signs of wearying of his, he sought to obtain by stealth
the pleasure which he dared not openly claim.  "Often," he confesses,
"I hid {105} myself behind tavern doors while they were talking about
their voyages.  The tobacco smoke made me dizzy and ill; but I did not
care.  I could have listened whole days and nights, without eating or
sleeping, to their stories of the sea and of far-away countries."

With something of this ardor, Pre Marquette, teaching his Indian
children and attending his pumpkin feasts at St. Ignace, listened to
all that wandering savages had to tell about the Mississippi.  A year
before, Pre Dablon had written from hearsay an account of the river,
"deeming it proper to set down all that we have learned, even at
second-hand."  He described it as circling the Great Lakes and flowing
southward to the "Vermilion Sea."  "Some Indians assure us that three
leagues from its mouth it is broader than is the St. Lawrence at
Quebec.  They say, moreover, that in this vast extent of country there
are boundless prairies without trees or bushes, so that the inhabitants
are obliged to use turf or sun-dried dung for fuel.  Twenty miles from
the sea the forests grow thickly.  Some warriors from the South, the
Maskoutens, describe the shores of this river, {106} and the country
inland, as populated by many tribes who differ in language and customs,
and who are ceaselessly at war with one another.  The Nadouessi [Sioux]
are the most numerous, powerful, and widely scattered.  Their villages
may be found for more than a hundred leagues."

Just why and when Pre Marquette was chosen to be Joliet's associate in
the voyage of discovery we do not know.  It was customary for a priest
to accompany every expedition, partly because it emphasized the
possible conversion of the Indians, and partly because discipline and
experience had made the missionaries adepts in dealing with
temperamental savages.  Pre Marquette's name may have been suggested
by Joliet himself, or by the fathers of the mission in Quebec with whom
he was in close conference before his departure.  A single line in the
_Relations_ tells us that Frontenac and Talon were "well pleased" that
the young Jesuit should be one of the party.  Five lines in Pre
Marquette's journal tell us almost as briefly that on the 8th of
December, 1672.  "Monsieur Jollyet arrived with orders from Monsieur
the Count de Frontenac, governor of New France, {107} and Monsieur
Talon, our intendant, bidding him accomplish this discovery with me."

This is the extent of our information, and it is enough.  There were
missionaries in plenty with a wider experience, a better knowledge of
woodcraft, a keener eye, and a readier pen.  But Pre Marquette
possessed four great qualifications for the job.  He was young--only
thirty-three.  He spoke half-a-dozen Indian languages.  He was cautious
as well as fearless.  Above all, he had evinced in the three missions
to which he had been sent a talent for friendliness.  His eager, open,
simple manner disarmed suspicion.  His candor and kindness produced
good-will.  If his parishioners at St. Ignace came to church because
they liked him, might not the unknown tribes, through whose territory
he was compelled to pass, like him well enough to refrain from
murdering his party?  It was a reasonable conjecture.

Therefore was Joliet commissioned to carry to St. Ignace the
appointment from Frontenac, and a letter from the Jesuit superior
bidding the quiet little priest fare forth on his extraordinary quest.
It may be noted that the Jesuits {108} placed as much confidence in
Joliet as they did in their own son.  In the _Relations_ of 1673 there
is a report sent from Quebec to France commending him highly as one
possessed of every qualification for the task, and as the best man whom
Frontenac could have found.  "He has both tact and prudence, which are
the chief characteristics required for the success of a voyage as
dangerous as it is difficult.  He has the courage to dread nothing
where everything is to be feared."

It was on the feast of the Immaculate Conception that Joliet reached
Machillimackinac with the gleeful tidings.  The auspiciousness of the
date thrilled Pre Marquette's soul with the happiest anticipations.
His fervent devotion to the Mother of God, his daily prayers for her
intercession and her aid, had brought him this signal favor.  Of all
the Indians whom he had so far encountered none had seemed to him so
intelligent or so promising as the Illinois.  His heart had gone out to
them from the first, and it was to reach them that he had begged a safe
conduct through the country of the Sioux, and had sent as propitiatory
gifts the bright little {109} pictures that had been so ceremoniously
returned.  Now his way must take him into their villages, scattered, he
knew, on or near the beckoning river.  If he made the journey in safety
he would say to them: "Twice have you sent for me, and I have come."
If he perished en route--well, that was an everyday occurrence in the
wilderness.  "I found myself under the blessed necessity of exposing my
life for this long cherished cause," he wrote with simple sincerity and
very evident delight.

But although the conversion of heathen tribes is understood to be the
aim and end of a missionary's existence, it is impossible to read Pre
Marquette's narrative (Joliet's was unhappily lost in the swollen
waters of the St. Lawrence) without a pleasant realization that the
sentiment uppermost in the hearts of these two young men was a keen
anticipation of the remarkably venturesome voyage, its risks and its
rewards.  They were about to penetrate into the unknown.  They were
bound on a magnificent errand.  They had been selected from dozens of
other young men to perform a signal service for France.  They were
abandoning comparative comfort (food {110} and shelter) for real
hardships, and comparative safety for certain danger.  What wonder that
Pre Marquette closes an account of their meager equipment with these
exhilarating words: "We were ready to do and suffer everything for so
glorious an undertaking."




{111}

_Chapter IX_

THE DEPARTURE

The amazing thing about the little party that left St. Ignace on the
17th of May, 1673, was the simplicity of its preparations.  In these
days when few explorers sally forth without motion-picture cameras to
show them climbing mountains, crossing deserts, shooting lions, or
driving dog teams, it is amusing to note the rigid economy with which
the two young Frenchmen and their five assistants cut down their outfit
to sheer necessities.  Two canoes had to carry the adventurers, their
arms and ammunition, their food, their extra clothing, their carefully
protected materials for reports and map making, and what gifts they
could add for friendly Indians by the way.  The canoes were made after
the Canadian fashion, of birch bark, cedar splints, and ribs of spruce
roots covered with yellow pine pitch.  They were light and strong.
{112} Four men could carry them across portages, and in smooth water
they could be paddled at the rate of four miles an hour.

Indian corn and smoked meat constituted the provisions--the corn being
an essential, the smoked meat a luxury.  Great care had been taken,
however, to ascertain routes, and ensure as much protection as the
nature of the voyage permitted.  "Because we were going to seek strange
countries," wrote Pre Marquette in his journal, "we took every
precaution in our power, so that if our undertaking were hazardous, it
should not be foolhardy.  We obtained what information we could from
savages who had frequented those regions, and we traced out from their
reports a map of the unknown lands.  On it we indicated the rivers we
were to navigate, and the tribes we were to visit.  Also the course of
the Great River, and the direction we were to follow when we reached
it.  Above all, I placed our expedition under the care of the Holy and
Immaculate Virgin."

Thus equipped, and with light hearts beating bravely, the travelers
started on a fair May morning, while the faithful Indians of St. Ignace
{113} lined the shores to bid them farewell.  The canoes went skimming
through the straits of Michillimackinac, and skirted the northern
shores of Lake Michigan.  So delightful was it to be at last
adventuring that the men paddled all day long without fatigue and with
no cessation of pleasure.  When night fell they landed on the edge of a
forest, drew up their canoes, built a fire, and discussed over their
evening meal their plans for the next day, and the fashion in which
they had best approach the first Indians whose villages lay along their
route.

These savages bore a good name for friendliness, and for the simple
decencies of life.  They were known as the Malhoumines, or Maloumineks,
or Oumaloumineks; but as all three words were equally distressful to
French ears, the traders had christened them _la Nation de
Folle-Avoine_, because of the so-called wild oats--which Parkman
identifies as wild rice--which grew abundantly in their land, and
formed their staple diet.

It must be confessed that the rice interested Pre Marquette more
keenly than did the Indians.  The monotonous insipidity of {114}
sagamit made a new dish almost as exciting as a new river.  He
describes at length in his journal the laborious method of preparing
the grain, and its excellence as food.  It grew in swamps and in
shallow, muddy streams, emerging from the water in June, and rising
several feet above the surface.  Early in September the savages pushed
their canoes through the ricefields and shook down the long slender
grains, which made up in size what they lacked in plumpness.  These
were dried for days upon a wooden grating under which smouldered a slow
fire, then packed in skin bags and trodden long and vigorously under
foot.  When winnowed and fairly clean, the rice was either boiled in
water and seasoned with fat, or pounded into flour and eaten as
porridge.  It will be remembered that a Sioux chief gave Pre Hennepin
a mess of wild rice boiled with whortleberries, and that the famished
priest thought he had never eaten anything so good.  Pre Marquette was
equally pleased with this simple and nourishing fare.  He held, with
reason, that savages who would take pains to procure and prepare their
food had in them an essential element of civilization.

{115}

Except the rice, however, the _Folle-Avoine_ had no help or
encouragement to give their visitors; only words of terrified warning.
The unknown, which is ever a lure and a stimulus to civilized man,
holds for the savage nothing but superstitious fear.  The Indians
implored the Frenchmen to go no farther on their perilous quest.  They
said that the surrounding tribes were unfriendly and warlike; that each
and all of them were on bad terms with their neighbors; and that the
braves who roamed the forests would kill any white man they met.  Also
that the heat on the banks of the great river was heavy and
pestilential, dealing death to strangers.  Also that the river
itself--did they ever reach it--was full of strange monsters, huge
enough to overturn their canoes, and voracious enough to devour the
canoeists.  And, as if this were not enough, its shores were defended
by a demon whose dreadful voice could be heard for miles, and who slew
both men and beasts that ventured in his path.

These terrible tales were received by Pre Marquette with soothing
words, and by Joliet with unrestrained laughter.  The young men {116}
promised, however, to be always on their guard.  They bargained for as
much rice as they could carry (the new crop being on its way), bade
farewell to the _Folles Avoines_ and turned their canoes into the mouth
of Green Bay, then known as _la Baye Sale_, and also as _la Baye des
Puants_, because of rank odors usually associated with salt marshes.
Pre Marquette concluded that the vapors arising from mud banks must be
held accountable for this pungent smell.  Still another and a more
somber name had been given to the stormy estuary by the French who
called it _la Porte de la Mort_, because of the high winds and
roughened waters which had overturned many canoes and drowned many
traders.  It was with infinite precaution that the adventurers skirted
the shores, noticing the rhythmic rise and fall of a tide which they
could ascribe to no cause, and about which Pre Marquette writes rather
charmingly in his journal:

"The mouth of the Bay is thirty leagues in depth and eight in width.
It narrows gradually to a point, and we could easily observe the
movements of a tide that ebbs and flows like that of the sea.  Whether
or not there are winds, the {117} precursors of the Moon and attached
to her suite, which agitate the waters and set them in motion, I do not
know.  All I can say is that when the Bay is smooth, and the Moon
mounts above the horizon, the little waves rise and fall in obedience
to her laws."

There was ample time in which to make these observations, for the
voyagers tarried a while in the vicinity of Green Bay, finding there
both friends and matters of interest.  The Fox River emptied into the
Bay, and nothing could be more beautiful than the broad, slow stream,
spreading into vast marshes where fields of wild rice swayed and
glistened in the sun.  Flocks of birds--ducks, teal, and brant that
were busy stealing the harvests, rose in clouds and whirled around the
canoes which had disturbed their feast.  Some miles beyond, where the
river narrowed and ran swiftly over jagged rocks, and between high
wooded banks, was the Mission of St. Franois Xavier, founded by Pre
Allouez in 1669.  It was not easy to reach, because in shallow places
the rocks cut the canoes, and wounded the feet of the men, who were
constantly compelled to lift their little boats into {118} deeper
water.  Very different work this from the smooth paddling through rice
swamps; but bit by bit the rapids were passed, the banks sloped gently
to the river's edge, a tall cross caught Joliet's eager eye, and the
third section of Pre Marquette's journal begins triumphantly: "Here we
are at the village of the Maskoutens."

The "Fire Nation" (so the word Maskouten is usually translated) was one
of three tribes inhabiting this pleasant spot.  The Miamis were a
trifle more intelligent, the Kickapoos a trifle less.  None of the
three were warlike, although the Miamis bore the reputation of being
good fighters.  They were also good-looking for savages, tall, strong,
and shapely.  The long lovelocks they wore falling over their foreheads
gave them, in Pre Marquette's opinion, a pleasing appearance.  They
had a charming habit of listening attentively and with seeming
intelligence to all the missionaries told them.  Sometimes, indeed,
they were so interested in the instructions of Pre Allouez, who had
the gift of eloquence, that they would not let him go to bed at night,
but sat in solemn circles waiting to hear more; and the sleepy priest
could not in conscience {119} resist this gratifying thirst for
enlightenment.

The heathen gods worshipped by these Indians were numerous and
diversified.  The Sun and the Thunder, gods of the first water, were
aloof, mysterious, and all-powerful, benignant or death-dealing
according to their will.  But there were also hosts of lesser deities,
friendly for the most part, and not unlike the multitudinous little
gods of Rome.  They looked after the beasts, birds, and fishes, thus
providing food for men.  The Indians, like the Europeans, naturally
considered their own wants to be of more importance, and better worth
the consideration of heaven, than the welfare of the brute creation.

As hunters and fishers the tribes that dwelt near Green Bay were
exceptionally fortunate.  The winters were, indeed, very severe; but
bears and wildcats (the latter big, fierce, famished, and defiant)
inhabited the woods, which were free from underbrush and easily
traversed.  Deer though few and shy, were occasionally found stealing
by night to the water's edge.  With summer came berries in abundance.
With autumn, {120} wild plums and wild grapes, which, to the distress
of the missionaries, were often gathered and eaten before they were
ripe; the Indians being too impatient or too hungry to wait on the
leisurely processes of nature.  The thought of the excellent wine which
might have been made out of these highly flavored grapes caused Pre
Marquette a pang of regret.  He had the Frenchman's natural taste for
horticulture.

Flocks of wild fowl, as hungry and as greedy as the savages, dived into
the river to snatch the unripe rice before it showed its head above the
water, and were caught by cunningly spread nets.  It was no infrequent
matter to see birds and fish ensnared in the same toils.  "This kind of
fishing is both pleasant and profitable," wrote Pre Dablon with the
heartless enthusiasm of the sportsman.  "It is wonderful to see a duck
and a pickerel, a bass and a teal, entangled in the same meshes.  The
Indians live royally on this manna for nearly three months of the year."

The weirs built across the Fox River were also enthusiastically praised
by Pre Dablon, who held with reason that nature and necessity can make
the rudest savages experts in the art of {121} keeping alive.  These
weirs, as he describes them, seem to have been not unlike those so
ingeniously contrived by the fisherman prince in _The Misfortunes of
Elphin_.  A palisade of stakes was erected across the stream, leaving
room for little fishes to pass freely, but imprisoning the bigger ones
between rude hurdles.  Alongside of these hurdles a light scaffolding
was raised--like Prince Elphin's little bridge--and, clinging to it,
the Indians scooped up the fish with the usual pocket-shaped nets.
"They coax the fish into the mouths of their nets," is the priest's way
of intimating that they were uncommonly adroit at the business.

What with the hunting, the fishing, and the ricefields, the mission of
St. Franois Xavier was as well placed as that of the Sault de Ste.
Marie.  In the autumn, neighboring tribes of Indians came to share in
the abundance, and to all who could understand them the missionaries
preached with fervor.  Perhaps the beauty of the wooded slopes pleased
the savages as well as they did the Frenchmen, for there were legends
to the effect that the first Indians of North America, the single tribe
from which had sprung {122} such infinite diversity, lived on these
green and fertile banks, secure and happy as were Adam and Eve in
Paradise.  "It is delightful to see the village and its surroundings,"
wrote Pre Marquette in his journal.  "On every side are fields of
maize, stretches of prairie, and groves of noble trees.  The huts are
made of rushes, pleasant enough at this season, but woefully inadequate
when winter brings heavy rain and snow.  The best that can be said of
such building material is that it is very light.  Huge bundles of
rushes are carried by the hunters into the woods, and woven into some
sort of shelter.  In the center of the village stands the cross, a
beautiful and consoling sight.  At its feet the savages have heaped
bows and arrows, pelts and dyed snakeskins, as offerings to the
Christian God."

Two more treasures the Maskoutens possessed: a mineral spring, the
waters of which Pre Marquette drank freely, though without any
especial knowledge of their qualities; and a plant which was held to be
a sovereign remedy for snake bite.  This plant had been shown to Pre
Allouez as a mark of confidence.  It bore several {123} stalks, about a
foot high, with long leaves, and a white blossom which Pre Marquette
likened to a wallflower.  "The root," he wrote, "is very pungent, and
tastes like powder when crushed by the teeth.  It must be masticated,
and laid upon the bitten part.  Snakes have so great a horror of this
flowering weed that they writhe away from any Indian who has so much as
handled it."

The historian, Shea, in a note to his translation of Pre Marquette's
journal, identified this weed as a plant called by the French _Serpent
 Sonnettes_.  He was of the opinion that it really served as an
antidote to snake bite, whether applied as a poultice or taken
internally; and he added that a drop or two placed in a snake's mouth
killed the creature instantly.  Editors of the _Relations_, however,
admit that such remedies were common among the Indians, that it is not
possible to distinguish one from another, and that the virtues of all
have been greatly exaggerated.  Long familiarity with the methods of
medicine men had probably accustomed the patient savages to
inefficacious treatment.  {124} Moreover, the North American continent,
while sufficiently endowed with venomous serpents, has had very few
deadly varieties.  Consequently a fair proportion of bitten Indians
recovered, and attributed their cure to incantations or to poultices,
according to the custom of the tribe.

The first necessary proceeding on the part of the two adventurers was
to summon the headsmen of the Maskouten village to a pow-wow.  They
knew well that nothing could be done to advance their expedition
without grave argument and dignified persuasion.  Next to talking
themselves, the Indians adored listening to talk.  When hunting or on
the warpath, when pursuing or pursued, when journeying amid perils and
privations, they were sullen, taciturn, and preoccupied.  But on all
state occasions they were as long-winded as are modern committees and
subcommittees, conclaves and conferences.  The Maskoutens accepted Pre
Marquette's invitation with alacrity.  They gathered in attentive
groups to hear what the Frenchmen had to say, and--incidentally--to
receive what gifts they had to offer.

{125}

Joliet was the spokesman of the occasion.  He was as familiar with the
Algonquin language as was his companion, and very eager and animated.
He told his audience that he had been sent on a quest by the powerful
Governor of Quebec, who represented the all-powerful King of France;
that Pre Marquette, like Pre Allouez, was preaching the word of God;
and that it behooved them to give him what help they could in his
mission.  He asked for guides who would conduct the party to the
Meskousing (Wisconsin) River, which flowed into the Mississippi.  He
assured them that this assistance would promote friendly relations with
the French, and he ceremoniously presented them with gifts, the nature
of which is not mentioned in the journal.  Like all journals that ever
were written, it is disposed to be mute whenever our curiosity is
aroused.

The Indians made a lengthy and appropriate reply to Joliet's speech.
They expressed their good-will, and also their astonishment that the
white men should have sent so small an expedition on so big an errand.
They promised the asked-for guides, and--not to be outdone in {126}
generosity--they gave to the two young leaders a mat of finely woven
rushes, which served them as a bed for the remainder of the voyage.

On the 10th of June the little party left the pleasant village which
had harbored them so kindly.  A third canoe accompanied them, bearing
two Miami Indians who knew the narrow channels through reed beds and
rice swamps, and who gave much needed help in the difficult portage
that lay between the Fox River, which had shrunk to a sluggish creek,
and the Wisconsin, which was to carry them to their destination.  This
done, the savages returned home, and the Frenchmen, well supplied with
food, turned their canoes into the unknown stream.  "We left behind us
the waters that flowed toward Quebec," wrote Pre Marquette, "and
entered those that flowed toward the Mississippi.  Before we embarked
we began all together a fresh novena to the blessed and Immaculate
Virgin, promising to say it daily, and placing ourselves and our voyage
under her loving care.  Then, with a few words of encouragement to our
men, we set gaily forth."

The goal was nearly won.




{127}

_Chapter X_

THE GREAT RIVER

Had Pre Marquette possessed a facile pen, his early letters might have
been more lively, more engaging, and, possibly, more prolix.  He had
the habit of observation common to his order; he looked attentively at
everything he saw, and he noted down whatever he deemed of interest or
importance; his comments were rational, his temper was flawless; but he
lacked the delight of the born naturalist, and the half-conscious humor
of the born chronicler.  The rapture with which Pre Le Jeune gazed at
the humming bird, the amusement with which Pre Du Perron watched the
savages trying on his hat and his shoes, were alike unfamiliar to Pre
Marquette, whose heart was gay as a child's, but whose words were the
words of soberness.

We cannot lay too much stress upon the {128} intimate knowledge
afforded us by the _Relations_.  From them we learn how the strange new
world affected highly educated Frenchmen who exchanged civilization for
savagery, who maintained their orderly habits while lacking the
decencies of life, and who were upheld by the joyous conviction that
they were doing the work of God.  Some of them took delight in the wild
beauty of the country; some of them had a sympathetic understanding of
its inhabitants; all of them expressed a nave surprise at the bigness
of everything except the fruits of the earth, which were
disappointingly small.  The fish that bumped against Pre Marquette's
canoe in the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers seemed to him terrifying
monsters.  The first sight of a young elk filled Pre Le Jeune with
glowing admiration for its great height and stately bearing, the pride
of its uplifted head, the delicate grace of its budding antlers.  The
size and ferocity of the wildcat--which yet resembled the cherished
pets of France--horrified and alarmed him.  On the other hand, the wild
cherries were no larger that the pit of a French cherry, the wild
grapes were as tiny as they were delicious, {129} and the little round
wild apples were about the size of a cultivated plum.  Pre Marquette
mistook one of them for an olive.  What wonder that Pre Du Perron
wrote to his superior that America had nothing in common with France
but the four elements, "out of which are all things made."

This was doubtless Joliet's way of thinking; but, unlike the
missionaries, he preferred his elements to be on a large American
scale.  Plenty of water to swamp his frail little boat, plenty of sky
to look down on him, plenty of earth stretching on either side,
unknown, impenetrable, and full of the zest of danger.  It is a
thousand pities his papers were lost, for they would have bravely
supplemented Pre Marquette's diary.  Every word we hear of him bears
witness to his courage and quick intelligence, to the strength of his
vigorous young body, to the resoluteness of his finely tempered soul.
The long days of paddling were to him a sport, the strangeness of his
surroundings increased his pleasure, the greenness of the scattered
islands tempted him daily to land and explore their recesses.  Pre
Marquette placed absolute reliance on his sense and {130} experience.
He was, as a rule, the spokesman in their conferences with the Indians,
and he took the lead in guiding the canoes through the heady waters and
dangerous shoals of the Wisconsin.

For seven days the adventurers pursued their way, keeping as close to
the shore as the shoals permitted, camping at night around a woodman's
fire, catching no fish and sighting no small game.  The savages whom
they encountered from time to time evinced a friendly disposition, and
sold them dried deer's meat to eke out their corn and rice.  They could
see the deer wandering over the shallow hills, and marveled at their
numbers.  Walnut, oak, and basswood trees grew close to the edge of the
stream.  Day by day navigation became more difficult.  The river
broadened, the current grew stronger, the canoes spun along with
ominous rapidity.  On the 17th of June they entered a wilderness of
waters, and knew that their race was won.  Only the Mississippi could
present this vast expanse of wind-blown waves.  Only the Mississippi
could have its shores a mile apart.  They were traveling at last upon
the great river, which was to be the river of mystery no longer.

{131}

It was with "inexpressible joy," wrote Pre Marquette, that he realized
his good fortune in bringing the expedition to this successful
conclusion.  Not that it was concluded.  It was in reality just
beginning.  But the discovery had been made, and made for all time,
unless death blotted out the seven discoverers and their records with
them.  They could not waste much leisure on mutual congratulations,
because everybody's attention was devoted to keeping the canoes afloat.
Their first rude welcome was given them by a huge fish which struck one
of the little boats with such force that its inmates feared they had
wrecked it on a submerged tree.  This experience was repeated again and
again, and once a swimming animal--evidently a mountain lion--terrified
them by its nearness and by its angry aspect.

From the time the Mississippi was sighted Pre Marquette's diary, which
had been brief and episodic, expanded into voluminous details.  He
seemed to feel the importance of reporting every item concerning the
river, its banks, the wild life he encountered, and above all the
Indians who lived upon its shores.  Even the {132} strange variety of
fishes was a source of amazement to one who had had small experience as
a fisherman.  The catfish that he saw hurtling through the waters did
not in the least resemble the ugly, greedy, little objects for which
small boys angle on the Schuylkill's banks.  They were big, strong,
fleet, and much given to flapping with all their might against the
intrusive canoes.  Now and then the men let down nets and caught
grotesque creatures which they did not venture to eat because of their
unnatural appearance.  "One of them," wrote the diarist, "is very
extraordinary indeed.  It resembles an overgrown trout with a much
bigger mouth.  Near its nose which is small, as are also its eyes, is a
bone shaped like a woman's busk, three fingers broad and as long as my
arm, at the end of which is a disk a hand's breadth in width.  The
weight of the disk frequently causes the fish to tumble backward when
it leaps out of the water."

Parkman identifies this curious catch as a spade fish, or spoonbill,
and he admits that its aspect is "eccentric."

For eight days the canoeists paddled warily {133} southward, mindful
always of the ill accounts they had heard of the surrounding savages.
They took every precaution against attack, landing in sheltered spots,
extinguishing their fires as soon as their evening meal was cooked,
sleeping in the canoes, and keeping a sentinel always on guard.  The
banks of the river became bare, the islands were thickly grown.  Gray
geese sailed across the sky, and herds of buffalo came to the water's
edge to drink.  These "pisikious," or wild cattle, were familiar to
Joliet; but Pre Marquette had never seen them before, and he was
astounded by their size and numbers.  One of the Canadians shot a young
bull, but it was so "corpulent" (corpulentz) that the seven men had
great difficulty in moving the body and butchering it for food.
Determined that the people at home should know exactly what a buffalo
was like, Pre Marquette described it in his diary with an accuracy
which would have enabled an artist reader to make a creditable sketch.

"The animal's head is huge; the horns a foot and a half apart, black in
color, and much longer than those of French cattle.  Under the {134}
neck there is a heavy dewlap, and on the back a moderately high hump.
The head, neck, and part of the shoulders are half hidden by a thick
and hideous mane which falls over the eyes, and must interfere with
sight.  The remainder of the body is covered with a coat of curly hair,
stronger and thicker than a sheep's wool.  The pisikiou sheds his hair
in summer time.  The hide then becomes as soft as velvet, and the
savages make robes and rugs of it, dyeing them with bright colors.  The
flesh and the fat are excellent eating, and constitute the most highly
prized dish at feasts.  The creatures are fierce and dangerous.  If an
Indian fires at one with either bow or gun, he instantly flings himself
face downward in the thick grass.  Otherwise the wounded animal would
charge at him furiously.  Its legs are short and thick; and, except
when rage lends it speed, it does not run swiftly.  These wild cattle
are scattered about the prairies in herds.  I have seen as many as four
hundred in a herd."

On the 25th of June the explorers saw for the first time human
footprints on the soft earth, and a narrow trail leading through a
tangle of low bushes to the open land beyond.  They took {135} counsel
with one another, and decided that this trail should be followed.  It
was not only the river they had come to seek, not only its direction
and outlet which concerned them, but also the unconverted savages who
dwelt upon its banks, and who might subsequently be brought to the
faith.  The two young leaders deemed it expedient that they should go
alone upon this somewhat perilous errand.  A couple of men would at
least create no alarm.  Their very helplessness would be a guarantee of
good faith.  They felt tolerably confident that they could make
themselves understood in whatever language the Indians spoke.  If harm
came to them, the five experienced woodsmen left in the canoes must
make their way home as quickly as possible, and take to Quebec the
precious records of their discovery.

There is something very simple and gallant in this straightforward
following of duty.  It is plain that both Pre Marquette and Joliet
were disturbed as to the consequences of their act.  They were in utter
ignorance of their surroundings.  Yet, as it chanced, that unknown
trail led them, not only to a pleasant experience, but to {136} an
understanding which brought safety in far more dangerous encounters.
It was the beginning of a friendship which lasted until the death of
the missionary.  Truly Cardinal Newman spoke the words of wisdom when
he said, "The best prudence is to have no fear."




{137}

_Chapter XI_

THE ILLINOIS

The Indians who lived in the two villages, one close to the river and
one perched on an adjoining hill, were Illinois, that friendly and
intelligent tribe who, from the first, had aroused Pre Marquette's
interest and won his affection, whom he had promised to visit and hoped
to convert.  Ignorant of this happy circumstance, he and Joliet made
their cautious way along the path until they sighted the settlement,
and could hear the noisy hubbub common to all savage communities.  They
then thought it well to announce their presence, which they did by
shouting with all their might.  The startled Indians poured out of the
lodges and stared in amazement at the strangers, who stood quite still,
smiling as though unafraid and sure of a welcome.

There was a long pause, a hushed silence, a {138} careful scrutiny.
Then, relieved in their turn of apprehension, the kindly disposed
savages bethought themselves of the proper ceremonies with which
visitors should be received; and, to gain time, they sent four old men,
who walked very slowly toward the intruders.  Two of them carried
handsomely decorated tobacco pipes, the calumets which stood for
friendship and good-will.  They waved these pipes solemnly in the air,
and made a dumb show of smoking them as they advanced at a snail's pace
and in silence.  When they were quite near, Pre Marquette asked to
what tribe they belonged, and heard the answer with joy.  The four
deputies then gravely invited the Frenchmen to enter the village, and
preceded them with formal and courteous gestures.  At the entrance of
the first lodge stood a warrior, naked and upright, his arms extended,
his hands spread, as though to shield himself from the piercing rays of
the sun.  He was highly dramatic, and he was also highly complimentary,
for he said that the great brilliancy of the skies was due to the white
men's coming.  "How beautiful is the sun when you visit our abode, O
strangers from beyond the sea!  The village {139} awaits you, and
beneath our roofs you shall rest in safety and in peace."

The gratified travelers then entered the lodge, which was crowded with
braves and squaws who stared at them intently and in silence.  Only now
and then was heard the low polite murmur: "How good it is our brothers
that you should come to us!"  Pipes were brought and smoked, the
Frenchmen leading, and all the braves taking their turn.  This consumed
an hour, after which an invitation arrived from the second village on
the hill.  The chief who dwelt there desired the presence of the
newcomers, and would hold a council with them.

Up the hill they went, Pre Marquette and Joliet, accompanied by a
concourse of savages, few of whom had ever seen a white man before.
All were eager to get a good look at these mysterious, pallid,
self-possessed beings, who spoke their tongue and maintained a gravity
equal to their own.  Indians lined the road.  Indians led the way,
turning and retracing their steps every few moments, to gaze again and
again upon the strangers.  They made no noise whatever--an emphatic
token of respect.  The {140} dogs were banished.  The children who
accompanied their mothers watched round-eyed and silent.  At the door
of the biggest lodge of the village stood the chief himself with two of
his councillors, all three erect and naked, all three holding calumets
in their outstretched hands.  Really, considering that they had been
taken by surprise, the Illinois were doing the thing in style.

Once inside this second lodge, which was immediately filled with
spectators, Pre Marquette decided that the time had come for him to
open the council with a speech.  Accordingly he produced four gifts
(again he omits to tell us what they were), and with each gift he made
a formal and appropriate oration--the kind that Indians loved.  With
the first he told his hearers that he and the Sieur Joliet and five
companions were journeying peacefully to visit the nations that dwelt
by the great river which he hoped to follow to the sea.  With the
second he spoke of the God of the Christians, who had made white men
and red, who willed that white men and red should know and worship Him,
who was all-wise, all-powerful, all-just, and all-merciful, {141} and
to whose word they must listen attentively.  With the third he gave
what information he could about Frontenac, the great warrior sent from
France, who had enforced peace throughout his demesne, and compelled
even the Iroquois to keep away from the warpath.  With the fourth he
begged his hosts to tell him all they knew of the Mississippi, of the
lands that lay between him and the sea, of the distances he must
traverse, of the tribes he must encounter.

When he had finished the chief arose, drew forward a little slave whom
he intended to present to the strangers, and, resting his hand upon the
child's head, expressed his sense of the honor which had been done him.
The gravity of his manner and accent contrasted oddly with the
extravagance of his words.  He began by thanking the Frenchmen for
their visit, and for the blessings which had manifestly accompanied it.
"Never before," he said, "has the earth been so beautiful or the skies
so bright as to-day.  Never has our river been so calm, or so clear of
rocks, which your canoes have removed in passing."  (This was a happy
touch.)  "Never has our tobacco tasted so sweet, or our corn {142}
flourished so greenly as now.  Here is my son whom I give you as proof
of my affection.  I beg you to show kindness to me and to my people.
You know the Great Spirit who has made us all.  Come and dwell with us
that we may know Him too, and that He may give us life and vigor."

This preamble being over, a calumet was produced, a particularly sacred
calumet made of red sandstone and hung with feathers.  It was presented
to Pre Marquette with the assurance that it would be recognized as a
token of friendship, not only by the Illinois, but by any other tribes
that might be encountered.  Nevertheless, the chief--dropping suddenly
into plain speech--counseled his visitors to turn back.  Behind them
lay home and safety.  Before them lay manifold dangers to which they
were exposing themselves without cause.

Having proffered this sound advice, and being quite sure it would not
be followed, the hospitable savage closed the council with a feast,
which was served with much ceremony on the floor of the lodge.  The
first course was a huge wooden platter of sagamit richly flavored with
fat.  Spoonfuls of this porridge were carefully fed {143} to the
guests, as if they had been small children and incapable of helping
themselves.  A platter of broiled fish followed and was handled in the
same fashion.  Attentive Indians picked up pieces of the fish, blew on
them until they were cool enough to eat, and placed the morsels in the
mouths of the patient priest and of Joliet, who grimaced but submitted.
A large dog was served next.  It was deemed a delicacy, and had been
freshly slain for this great occasion; but, seeing that his visitors
seemed strangely reluctant to partake of it, the courteous chief
ordered it to be removed, and replaced by a dish of buffalo meat.  The
choicest--that is the fattest--pieces of this meat were put in the
white men's mouths; and when they could eat no more the feast was
mercifully concluded.

This feeding of guests was a matter of strict etiquette among all the
Illinois.  They never permitted strangers to raise their hands to their
mouths, but considered that they showed them the utmost respect by
saving them this labor.  They fed La Salle at Peoria with spoonfuls of
sagamit and lumps of dried elk's meat, which he received unwillingly
from their filthy fingers.  {144} Perhaps it was only the recollection
of the universal dirt which made part and parcel of savage life which
enabled him to overcome his squeamishness.  After all, in a land where
nobody and nothing was washed, and where the cleanest of the bark
dishes were those licked dry by the dogs, why should a little extra
grime tempt him to a rude rejection of the rites of hospitality?

The preference of the savages for fat and grease was also singularly
trying to their white guests.  In some tribes a male infant was forced
to swallow a pellet of fat as soon as it was born, and before it took
the breast.  Pre Le Jeune admitted that the sight of an Indian biting
greedily into a lump of cold hard grease, "as though it had been an
apple," turned his stomach.  He remembered, however, the words of a
French peasant, who said that if he were a king he would live on fat;
and he realized the craving of the underfed for this form of
nourishment.  Indians who survived a winter diet of flavorless corn
meal, coarse dried fish, and dried elk's meat, as hard and as
unpalatable as wood fibre, naturally welcomed the soft succulence of
fat.  Indians who starved through a winter on eelskins {145} and _tripe
de roche_ found exquisite pleasure in scraping the cold grease from a
platter, and devouring the last unsavory scrap.

"Various are the tastes of men," as Akenside sagely remarked, under the
impression that he had discovered this great truth.  Pre Huc, when
hospitably entertained by the Thibetans, felt the utmost reluctance in
eating the pieces of quivering white fat--choice morsels from the tails
of sheep--which were heaped upon his plate, and which he could not in
courtesy refuse.  Dr. William H. Furness describes a rude game played
by the Head-Hunters of Borneo at which he unwillingly assisted.  The
young men sat in a ring on the ground, and the girls carried around
dishes heaped with lumps of cold, coarse animal fat.  The men were
compelled to devour as many lumps as the girls thought fit to feed
them.  The first few went well enough.  Then, as lump followed lump,
came distaste, repugnance, nausea, to the amusement of the unrelenting
tormentors, who took a pitiless delight in the misery they were
inflicting.  The Borneans are _bon-vivants_ as compared with
Seventeenth Century American Indians.  They have no winters of cold and
{146} semi-starvation to fit them for such dreadful pleasantries.

It was to be expected that Pre Marquette should have nothing but
praise for the Illinois, from whom he received nothing but kindness.
He placed them unhesitatingly at the head of all the tribes that he had
known.  They had, he thought, an air of humanity, of embryonic
civilization, which made other Indians seem doubly savage by their
side.  They were gentle, tractable, receptive, and intelligent.  They
were liberal in disposition, and reasonable in character.  In a
word--and he said it with enthusiasm--they were men.

Other reports are less favorable.  The Illinois were part of the great
Algonquin nation, and, like all Algonquins, were loyal to France, well
disposed toward Christianity, and very much afraid of the Iroquois.  La
Salle, who had dealings with them, found them to be as fickle as they
were friendly, as undependable as they were intelligent; useful allies,
but "capricious and uncertain."  They were good hunters and fair
fighters, making long journeys in search of {147} slaves, whom they
obtained by force or by barter and sold to other tribes.  The little
boy, mellifluously called "my son" by the chief who presented him to
Pre Marquette and Joliet, was doubtless the spoil of some such raid.

In the matter of sexual morality the Illinois were rather below than
above the average.  Their principal contribution toward right living
was the inexorable severity with which they cut off the ears or noses
of their errant wives.  This duty performed, they felt they had done
their part in maintaining a high social standard.  The squaws were
modestly dressed and very industrious, planting good crops of Indian
corn, beans, and squashes.  The lodges, though filthy, were large and
rainproof, with rush mats for chairs and beds.  The cooking utensils
were made of wood, the spoons and ladles of bone.  The proudest
possessions of the braves were guns, which they bought with their best
pelts, and which they used in the light-hearted fashion of Mr. Winkle,
unconcerned about marksmanship, and rightly considering that the smoke
and noise would make them sufficiently alarming to their enemies.
{148} For serious hunting, for the pursuit of deer and buffalo, they
depended upon bows and arrows, with which they were exceedingly expert.

The medicine men of the Illinois appear to have been the stupidest of
impostors, whose pretensions were so absurd, and whose frauds were so
barefaced, that only custom and tradition could have imposed them upon
fairly intelligent savages.  Nevertheless, they were treated with
respect and liberality.  "The Indians," observed Pre Marquette, "think
that the effect of the remedies administered to them is in proportion
to the richness of their gifts."  It was always well for the savage
brave to keep on the right side of these sorcerers, who--if they could
effect no cures except in so far as they were able to persuade patients
that they _were_ cured--might still do many a good or ill turn,
according to their bent.

It is interesting to note that among certain tribes, noticeably the
Hurons, the medicine men believed, or professed to believe, in
suppressed desires as firmly as if they had been Freudians of to-day.
Pre Du Perron says that a soothsayer, summoned to heal a sick Huron,
would gaze into a tortoise-shell, or perhaps into a fire, for a {149}
long time, striving by concentration of mind to learn what it was that
his patient unconsciously wanted.  Having found his clue, he would
triumphantly announce that a fire feast, a dance, a string of beads, or
a bit of eelskin was the thing imperatively required, and every effort
would be made to provide it.  An Indian journeyed for miles to beg Pre
Du Perron for a piece of red cloth which the medicine man demanded for
a sick child.  The missionary had no red cloth, and the boy died.

Pre Jouvencey found traces of this belief among the Algonquins.  He
was immensely interested in its pseudo-scientific character, and
described it with careful accuracy.  "They [the Indians] believe that
there are two main sources of disease.  One of these is in the mind of
the patient himself, which unwittingly craves something, and will vex
the body of the sick man until he possesses it.  For they hold that
there are in every man certain inborn desires, often unknown to
himself, upon which his happiness depends.  For the purpose of
ascertaining such innate and ungratified appetites, they summon
soothsayers, who, as they think, have a {150} supernaturally imparted
power to look into the inmost recesses of the mind."

If this be not modern, where shall we turn for modernity?  The only
archaic touch about it is the sex of the invalid.  For whereas, in the
world of to-day, women are the profitable patients of all kinds of
healers, spiritual, mental, and professional, it was the Indian
warrior, or perhaps the Indian boy, whose suppressed desires awakened
so much concern.  The squaws were pretty well accustomed to suppressing
all desires, conscious or otherwise, and too hard at work to think a
great deal about them.  If they fell sick, there was always the
solacing thought, so navely expressed by the old Ottawa chief to Pre
Marquette, that it made no especial difference whether they lived or
died.

Nothing about the Illinois interested the missionary so deeply as the
ritual which had been woven around the calumet, the sacred pipe which
figured in all treaties and rejoicings, in all preparations for war,
and in all covenants to promote peace.  Our debt to the Indians for the
discovery and use of tobacco, of that {151} inestimable solace in a
hard--and sedative in a noisy--world, is so great that no heart is wide
enough to hold it, and no words are warm enough to give it proper
expression.  Therefore it is a pleasure to know that to many of these
Indians the pipe was an august and holy thing, the emblem of all they
held hallowed and dear.  Pre Marquette, who was later to owe his life
to the protection of the calumet, regarded it with unqualified
admiration.  He devoted pages of his journal to describing the rites
and ceremonies in which it played a part.

"There is a calumet for peace," he wrote, "and a calumet for war.  They
are distinguished by the colors of the feathers with which they are
adorned--scarlet standing for war.  Both are fashioned from red stone,
polished like marble and carefully drilled so that one end serves as a
receptacle for the tobacco, while the other fits into a hollow wooden
stem, two feet long and as thick as an ordinary walking stick.  This
stem is hung with the heads of birds of gay plumage, and with
bright-hued feathers.  Less honor is shown to the crowns and scepters
of kings than {152} is paid by the savages to this sacred emblem.
Carrying one, a warrior may walk in safety though surrounded by his
foes."

As a proof of the holiness of the calumet, it was held aloft during the
ceremonial dances of the early summer, and offered with all due
reverence to the sun, in case that luminary should have a mind to
smoke.  And until these dances had been performed, and the sun so
honored, the Indians scrupled to eat fresh fruits, or to bathe--after
eight unwashed months--in the cooling streams.  There was a rhythm, a
dignity, a savage pride about these dances which made them very
impressive to such Frenchmen as had not set their hearts upon a ballet.
The surroundings and accessories were singularly picturesque.  The
green of the mighty forests, the blue of the wind-swept skies, the
great open space around which old men, squaws, and children clustered
thickly, the presiding manitou in a place of honor with trophies of war
heaped high about it--everything that could suggest to the spectator
the serious beauty of a rite which was both tribal and religious.

The mock combats with which the dance {153} ended were the red men's
nearest approach to drama.  Warriors armed with bows and arrows
attacked other warriors whose sole defence was the calumet, which they
embraced ardently when they fled to covert, and waved triumphantly when
they turned to pursue the pursuers.  All this was done in ordered
fashion, and to the accompaniment of drums and rhythmic chanting.  It
may be observed that Pre Marquette was the only missionary who ever
had a good word to say for Indian music.  He stoutly maintained that it
had a charm which could not be reproduced; and that the alternate drone
and howl which drove more sensitive listeners to frenzy pleased the ear
when heard in the open air.  There was, as he doubtless observed,
plenty of space between singer and audience, and there were the free
winds of heaven to dissipate the sound.

The entertainment invariably ended with an oration, "a lofty discourse"
delivered by a warrior who held the calumet, and who recounted the tale
of his battles and victories.  Sometimes he was succeeded by other
warriors who had the same story to tell, and who told it with the same
solemn fervor.  After all, there are certain points {154} of
resemblance between these dead-and-gone savages and the civilized men
who have succeeded them.  Our perpetual speech-making is in line with
theirs.  Our oratory is on the same general order.  Our complacency is
no less apparent for being thinly veiled.  Even the giving of rewards
strikes a familiar note.  Prizes are the order of our day, as they were
of that day long past, when the French priests saw beaver skins and
beaded belts presented with ceremony to the Indians who had borne a
part in the dance.  There are new things under the sun; we could show
them to Solomon if he visited us; but speech-making and prize-giving
are not among the novelties.




{155}

_Chapter XII_

SOUTHWARD

There is little doubt that fear of the Iroquois, who had been
restlessly encroaching on their neighbors' hunting grounds, made the
Illinois particularly eager for such protection as the power of France
could give them.  Although the Iroquois had so concentrated their rage
upon the Hurons that only scattered remnants of that once numerous
tribe survived, yet the original quarrel--which had started as was
usual in a hunting feud--had included the Algonquins, who, having been
the thrice foolish aggressors, had suffered bitterly for their folly.
So, at least, says Pre Charlevoix, that courtly Jesuit who was sent by
the Duc d'Orlans to write a report of New France, and to gather what
information he could concerning the manners and customs of its
inhabitants.

Pre Charlevoix collected his material--as did Froissart--from
observation and from {156} hearsay; and his lively, if not always
trustworthy, narrative has been a source of supply to all the
historians who have succeeded him.  One volume is dedicated to His Most
Serene Highness, Monseigneur le Duc de Penthivre; and another to
Madame la Duchesse de Lesdiguires, that charming and distinguished
Frenchwoman who wrote delicate verse and loved cats.  The beautifully
drawn, if somewhat incomprehensible, maps are occasionally inscribed
with the names of great French noblemen, and the books are models of
extravagant typography.  They show even more plainly than do the
_Relations_ the keen interest which France took in her Canadian
colonies and the surrounding savages, in the trade established, and in
the explorations that opened up new and great possibilities for the
future.

Pre Charlevoix could find no words too strong to express his
admiration for the courage, intelligence, and simplicity with which
Pre Marquette and Joliet had conducted their expedition.  Especially
he marveled at the skill which kept their canoes afloat on the
roughened waters of the Mississippi, a feat beyond his {157} power or
that of his Indian guides.  They were compelled to take to a raft, and
had plenty of trouble with that.  The great river fascinated his
imagination.  He wrote about it again and again, as though striving to
expand his readers' minds to fit this mighty theme.  Two things were
clear to his understanding: the impetus to French trade afforded by an
accurate knowledge of its course, and the impracticability of living
within reach of its waters at flood time.  The farther south he went,
the greater this danger appeared to him.  He could conceive of no
barrier strong enough to hold back the swollen current, fed by so many
tributaries; and he warned colonists to keep at a safe and respectful
distance from a stream which would outrun them in the race for life.

No consideration of the glories or of the perils to come vexed the soul
of Pre Marquette when he and Joliet bade farewell to the friendly
Illinois villages on a quiet summer afternoon.  Their job was a simple
thing--to find the river, which they had done; and to keep on it as
long as they could, which they were doing.  It must be granted that
they had enjoyed marvelous {158} good fortune.  No serious obstacle had
presented itself, no danger that was not easily overcome.  Day after
day the travelers placed themselves anew under the protection of the
Blessed Virgin, and day after day she shielded them from harm.  They
landed often and explored the lonely, beautiful shores.  A tranquil
pleasure, akin to that of a botanist (although he knew no botany),
filled Pre Marquette's heart.  He examined and described every fruit
and flower he saw, and they were many.  Mulberries, indeed, he greeted
as old friends, and pronounced to be as fine as they were in France,
although no silkworms profited by the heavy foliage.  Chincapins--not
yet ripe--interested him greatly.  But for persimmons he had no praise,
which is hardly surprising if he ventured to eat them in July.  The
names of these things were of course unknown to him; but they are
generally recognizable from his descriptions.  There was one plant,
however--a species of cactus--which puzzled him as much as it puzzles
us to-day.  "Its root resembles a bunch of small turnips held together
by delicate fibers.  It has the flavor of a carrot."  (Never was there
so bold a taster of unfamiliar {159} products!)  "From this root
springs a leaf as wide as my hand, half a finger thick, and deeply
spotted.  From this leaf spring other leaves like the sockets of
chandeliers in French salons.  The flowers grow in clusters.  They are
bell-shaped and bright yellow."

Before reaching the mouth of the Missouri the canoes passed the famous
painted rocks, so familiar in later reports.  They seem to have
thrilled Pre Marquette with a horror amounting to fear.  The great
height and strange outlines of the rocks and the crude vigor of the
paintings had in his eyes something monstrous and unnatural.  He could
not believe that Indians had climbed that perpendicular wall, and he
could not believe that Indians had designed those huge and fearsome
beasts.  "They are as big as calves," he wrote, "and have antlers like
deer.  Their faces are rather like the faces of men, with tigrish
mouths and red eyes, hideous to behold.  Their bodies are covered with
scales, and their tails are so long that they pass over their heads and
down between their legs, terminating like the tails of fishes.  The
colors used are red, green, and black."

{160}

It is to be regretted that the sketch made by Pre Marquette of these
monsters has disappeared.  He was a fair draftsman, and he claimed to
have caught a good likeness.  A partial copy of his drawing ornaments a
map made some years later by order of the intendant, Duchesneau.  Other
missionaries described the paintings in much the same terms, though
Pre Charlevoix considered that they owed their origin to a caprice of
nature which so often molds rocky heights into rude effigies of men and
beasts.  The savages recognized this resemblance, and went to great
pains to improve on it, utilizing the mass of stone as a particularly
precious and august manitou, to which they made offerings of arrows,
spears, and pelts.  Pre Jean Franois de St. Cosm, a Jesuit priest
who was subsequently killed by Indians, wrote in 1699 that incessant
rains had dimmed and blurred the colors, although the monsters were
still objects of veneration.  Traces of them remained for another half
century, when they gradually disappeared.  Parkman was infinitely
amused by the proposal of some enthusiasts in his day to repaint the
figures as described by Pre Marquette.  The difficulty of {161} the
task, rather than its utter and complete inexpedience, induced them to
abandon the design; and when the historian passed that way in 1867, the
rock once deified by Indians bore a huge and harmless advertisement of
"Plantation Bitters." Even this he felt was better--because
genuine--than a fake manitou, which had no longer a _raison d'tre_,
and the original of which had been regarded by the pious missionary as
a symbol of deadly sin.

Nothing can be more vivid than the brief paragraph in which Pre
Marquette describes the Missouri River; the speed and fury with which
it emptied itself into the Mississippi, the tangled masses of trees and
bushes which it tossed to and fro on its current, the rapids which came
near to swamping his canoe, the agitation of the greater stream under
the impetuous onslaught of the lesser.  Pekitanou'i, which signifies
"muddy water," was the appropriate name given to the Missouri, and by
this name it went until 1712; although in the letters of the Rcollet
missionaries it is generally spoken of as the "River of the Osages,"
and on early French maps it appears indiscriminately as the "Rivire
des {162} Osages," the "Rivire des Emissourites," and the "Rivire des
Oumessourites"--a wide and perplexing choice.  The Ohio enjoys the same
variety of titles.  On Pre Marquette's map it is the "Ouabouskiaou"
(he had a passion for vowels), and on others the Ouabache.  But the
intelligent Iroquois called it Ohio, or "Beautiful River," and so we
know it to-day.

Joliet was keen to explore the Missouri, for he had learned from the
Indians that great prairies lay along its banks, prairies stretching
unbrokenly for ten and fifteen leagues.  There were villages, too, in
plenty, and Pre Marquette sighed that he could not visit them.  Ever
and always his mind was full of the possible converts who dwelt in the
darkness of idolatry, and ever and always he comforted himself with the
thought, "I will return and teach them."  Had he lived to be a hundred
instead of dying at thirty-eight, he could never have reached in the
flesh the savages he embraced in the spirit.  The knowledge that
thirty-seven villages of the Chaouanons, or Shawanoes, lay on the east
bank the Mississippi, and that he was compelled to pass them by,
distressed him sorely; the more {163} so because the Chaouanons were a
comparatively gentle and harmless people, indifferent fighters, and
living in perpetual fear of the Iroquois.  Pre Marquette likens them
to a flock of sheep, innocent of wrong-doing, but incapable of
protecting themselves.  Therefore the Iroquois periodically burned
their villages, and took as many prisoners as they pleased.  The only
safety of the assaulted ones lay in flight; and they must have become
adepts in the art of running away, of vanishing, Indian fashion, into
the depth of familiar and friendly forests which hid them from pursuit.

Three days after escaping the perils of the Missouri, the adventurers
encountered the demon against which they had been warned at every stage
of their journey.  Its home was a deep and narrow chasm close to the
shore and walled in by perpendicular rocks twenty feet high.  Through
this chasm the water forced its way, to be repeatedly checked and
hurled back with great force and a furious din.  The savages believed
that the spirit which dwelt under these churning waves was a thing of
evil.  It resented the presence of men and threatened their
destruction.  The noise {164} and commotion, the leaping waters which
in storm or flood time must have been terrible to behold, were to them
the menace of an angry god whom no offerings could propitiate and no
ingenuity could outwit.

The presence of iron ore on the river's banks attracted Joliet's
attention, and the Canadians sought carefully for every indication of
mines.  They also noted the beds of sticky and brightly tinted clay,
purple, violet, and red, which furnished the dyes used by Indians to
color their dress, their decorations, their weapons, and themselves.
Squaws were permitted to wear dyed ornaments, like the scarlet eelskin
ribbons which Pre Chauchetire found so pretty and becoming; but the
privilege of using cosmetics, like the privilege of having suppressed
desires, was re served exclusively for the braves, who availed
themselves of it as freely as do civilized women to-day.  Pre Le Jeune
admitted that when he first saw the painted warriors at Tadoussac, he
could think of nothing but French harlequins at carnival time.  The
natural color of the Indians, the uniform reddish tint, "not unlike
that of beggars in the south of France who are {165} half-roasted by
the sun," he thought extremely handsome; and he marveled the more that
they should disfigure themselves with patches and stripes of red and
blue, "as though they were masquerading."  "The colors used are bright
and strong like those of our masks," he wrote to his Provincial.  "The
least conspicuous braves had one black bar like a wide ribbon reaching
from ear to ear, and three little black stripes on each cheek."

Red was the color of battle, and the savages would no more have thought
of taking the war path without daubing themselves with red paint than
civilized soldiers would think of fighting in mufti.  Pre Le Moyne
says that the Hurons and Algonquins admitted other tints, each warrior
having his own set of colors and his own set of patches and stripes,
which he retained for life.  Pre Mathurin Le Petit describes the
Natchez as being so liberally supplied with this precious red clay that
they painted, not only themselves, but their arrows, their tomahawks,
and even the poles ornamented with red plumes which they carried like
pennons into the fray.  The dye was equally vivid and permanent, as
{166} Pre Marquette discovered when he tried a little of it on his
paddle, and it lasted for fifteen days.  The mildness of the summer
weather--too hot, indeed, at noontide--the comparative gentleness of
the current, and the beauty of the low-lying lands on either side of
the river would have made this part of the voyage an unbroken delight
to the explorers had it not been for the mosquitoes.  These terrible
little pests grew more numerous and more alert day by day and night by
night.  "We have entered their territory," wrote Pre Marquette; "we
are intruders in their abode."  At night the Canadians protected
themselves Indian fashion by building fires and smoking the insects
away; but in the daytime--being compelled to hug the shore--they had no
chance of escape.  The most they could do was to paddle steadily on,
suffering in silence, and keeping a sharp lookout for danger.

Mosquitoes occupy a prominent place in the _Relations_.  They were
considered to be the worst feature of the swarming insect life in the
American woods.  The large flies stung furiously, and the pain of the
sting lasted for days.  The gnats were too small to be seen, but
managed to make {167} themselves felt.  But the mosquitoes were so
persevering and so poisonous that hardened woodsmen were made ill by
their bites.  The only harmless things were the butterflies and
fireflies, the latter more beautiful and brilliant than the glowworms
of France.  Pre Brbeuf, bravest of men and most stoical of martyrs,
was of the opinion that mosquitoes ranked with hunger, fatigue, and
"the stench of tired-out savages"--four things difficult to endure.
Pre Le Moyne, who was of a humorous turn, wrote that it was "a
pleasure sweet and innocent beyond conception" to sleep on the bare
ground, under such shelter as the trees afforded, while drenching rain
washed the mosquitoes from his suffering body.

Eight days after Pre Marquette and Joliet had left the hospitable
Illinois they sighted their next Indians, a score or so of braves armed
with guns and lining the river bank.  The Canadians dropped their
paddles and picked up their muskets, ready to meet the attack; but the
priest, holding aloft the calumet, called out in the Huron tongue some
words of peaceful greeting.  The response was unintelligible; but the
savages, who {168} seemed more disconcerted than angry, made signs to
the canoes to draw in to the shore.  This was done, and, after some
hesitation on both sides, five of the seven white men landed warily,
leaving two of the party to guard their precious possessions.  Back of
the bushes that fringed the bank lay a row of wigwams, and into one of
these they were invited to enter.  Confiding in the sacred rites of
hospitality, they obeyed, and were at once offered such food as the
savages had on hand--dried buffalo meat softened with bear's grease,
and some wild white plums which Pre Marquette thought delicious.  A
handful of fruit, a dish of tender young squash, a freshly roasted ear
of corn, these were the rarest of delicacies, and were always mentioned
in the missionaries' letters with an enthusiasm which speaks volumes
for their ordinary fare.

Joliet, who had a wide acquaintance with wandering Indian tribes,
failed to recognize his hosts, who vouchsafed no information about
themselves, and are given no name in the report.  They
spoke--imperfectly--the Huron tongue, and the squaws dressed with the
comparative neatness of Huron women; but the braves wore {169} their
hair long, and tattooed their bodies after the fashion of the Iroquois.
They traded with both French and Spaniards, which accounted for their
possession of guns, and also for their knives, porcelain beads, and the
heavy glass flasks in which they carried powder.  They told Joliet that
he was within ten days' journey of the sea; and, although this
experienced traveler had learned to place little reliance upon
distances as measured by Indians, it was heartening to hear something
definite, even if that something were not true.  He and Pre Marquette
gave what gifts they could afford to their entertainers, and started
with fresh courage.  A spirit of hopefulness diffused itself over the
party.  Their hearts were light, their canoes spun rapidly down the
river.  Perhaps, after all, the final goal was near.

Lofty and beautiful forests had succeeded the prairies; but the
incessant bellowing of buffaloes showed that beyond the woods lay open
spaces, and the hunting that Indians loved.  Small game was plentiful.
The Canadians shot quail, and a brilliant little paroquet, red, green,
and yellow.  Everything was going well, and that sense of security
which is apt to be the forerunner {170} of danger filled all hearts.
Suddenly from the wooded shore came piercing and discordant yells.
Wigwams could be dimly discerned under the heavy trees, and savages
armed with bows and tomahawks (happily no guns) swarmed to the water's
edge.  To turn back was impossible; so, commending themselves anew to
the care of the Mother of God, the adventurers stopped paddling and
snatched their arms, while Pre Marquette waved the precious calumet,
and tried vainly to make himself heard above the din.  Some of the
Indians leaped into canoes and sought to surround the intruders; others
with drawn bows lined the shore; and a few young athletes essayed to
swim out to the white men, but were beaten back by the heady current.
A club whizzed past Pre Marquette's head and fell harmless into the
water.  It was a disturbing moment.

Joliet signed to his men to hold their fire.  His keen and practised
eye had observed one thing clearly.  The savages were apprehensive.
The very noise and uproar showed that what they wanted to do was to
frighten the supposed intruders, and save their village from assault.
He {171} knew that the first shot would be the signal for battle, and
that while six good marksmen could make fearful havoc, the final
victory would not be theirs.  The massed attack of the heavy wooden
canoes would overturn their lighter barks, and fling their occupants
into the river.  He saw that although the bows were bent, and the
strings taut, the arrows were not launched.  Then he looked at his
friend.  The little priest stood upright and very still.  The hand that
held the calumet did not tremble.  His face wore a smile as friendly
and assured as though he were being welcomed by his converts of St.
Ignace.  Joliet had no confidence in Indians, but he had perfect
confidence in Pre Marquette.  If the missionary felt that all was
right, all would be right without doubt.  One does not have a genius
for making friends in order to die at the hands of an enemy.

Meanwhile, a small group of braves, older men who had been steadily
regarding the calumet, moved to the river's edge and entered a canoe,
laying down their arms as a token of amity.  They paddled a few rods
and made signs to the strangers to approach.  This Joliet did, not
because he wanted to, but because it seemed {172} doubly dangerous to
refuse.  Slowly and apprehensively the seven voyagers landed and looked
about them.  The silent savages returned their scrutiny, holding their
bows in readiness.  Pre Marquette composedly addressed himself to the
seemingly friendly braves.  He and Joliet tried one tongue after
another, but none were intelligible to these Mitchigameans, a small and
war-like tribe who lived in a few scattered villages on or near the St.
Francis River, and who were subsequently, according to Pre Charlevoix,
adopted by the stronger and better equipped Illinois.  In fact, an old
warrior who understood, though he could hardly be said to speak, that
language, was unearthed to confer with the white men.  Through him the
priest offered the customary gifts, and informed the chiefs that he and
his friend were following the Mississippi to the sea.  A truce being
thus established, the Indians offered their visitors a supper of fresh
fish and sagamit, and invited them to spend the night in one of the
lodges, promising to escort them the next day to a more populous
village eight leagues down the river.  Joliet would have dispensed with
both the hospitality and the {173} escort had he been given the choice,
and even Pre Marquette admitted that he passed "an anxious night."

The morning, however, brought renewed hope and confidence.  The
travelers embarked early, and ten savages in a strong, clumsy canoe
accompanied them.  Word must have been sent during the night to the
neighboring Indians, who were not Mitchigameans, but belonged to the
Akansas or Arkansas tribe.  Before the village was reached, two canoes
were sent out to meet and greet the strangers.  In one of them stood a
formidable warrior holding the calumet.  He gravely presented to Pre
Marquette and to Joliet a cake of Indian corn baked in the ashes, and
sang "very agreeably" while they ate it.  On landing they perceived
that preparations had been made for a ceremonious reception.  Clean
rush mats had been spread on the floor of the chief's lodge.  Around in
a solemn circle sat the older braves; back of them the young men; and
back of them as many boys, squaws, and children as could force an
entrance.  Through an interpreter who was fairly familiar with the
Illinois tongue, Pre Marquette made an address, punctuated as usual
{174} by gifts.  He told his audience of the Christian creed which it
behooved them to embrace, and of the great French king who had sent
him, and others like him, to teach them this holy faith.  He asked how
far away was the sea, how navigable was the river, and how well
disposed were the tribes that dwelt upon its banks.

With commendable politeness the chief replied that the priest's words
were grateful to his spirit, and begged him to remain in the village
and tell his people of the great unknown God.  He then said that the
sea was not more than ten days' journey, and that the Canadians in
their light canoes could cover the distance in half that time.  But he
warned them that every step would be increasingly dangerous, that the
Indians were hostile and well armed, that the white men were not of
their country nor of their speech, and that it was highly improbable
that they would be allowed to proceed on their way.  In proof of his
words he admitted that his village was surrounded by unfriendly tribes,
that his people were debarred from trading with white men, and that
they were compelled to part with their hides to other Indians in
exchange for knives, hatchets, {175} and beads.  They dared not venture
up or down the river, nor far into the interior to hunt the wild
cattle, because their enemies were strong and well armed.  They feared
to provoke hostility against which they had no adequate defense.

The poverty of these savages was apparent to the experienced eyes of
their guests.  True the day was spent in feasting--that was
imperative--but the food, except for some ears of ripe corn, was
unpalatable and served without ceremony.  Platters of sagamit and
dog's flesh succeeded each other for hours, and all present scrambled,
though not rudely, for a portion.  The braves, handsome and well
formed, wore only loincloths.  Their hair was short, their ears and
noses pierced and hung with beads.  The women made a valiant attempt to
cover themselves with pieces of mangy skin.  They dressed their hair in
long braids, but had no ornaments.  Beads were too precious to be
wasted on them.  The wigwams were made of bark, and raised several feet
above the soft and spongy earth.  The only signs of abundance were the
fields of maize, which grew thick, green, and beautiful.  The only art
was {176} pottery, great earthen jars, well made and well shaped, in
which the corn was cooked.  This pottery was superior to that of any
Northern tribe.  Specimens of it are to be found to-day in American
museums.

The Arkansas Indians had not always been the feeble remnant described
by Pre Marquette.  They are said to have been descendants of the
Aztecs; and their ancestors are supposed to have come from Mexico, via
the Rio Colorado, and the headwaters of the Platte or the Arkansas
River.  They had been formidable warriors in their day; but too few in
numbers to cope with hostile tribes.  Later explorers have much to say
in their praise.  Pre Charlevoix christened them "_les beaux hommes_,"
and pronounced them to be the tallest and best-made natives of America.
Pre Znobe Membr, a Rcollet missionary who accompanied La Salle on
many expeditions, visited one of their villages in 1682, and wrote
enthusiastically to his superior of their many good qualities.  The
squaws, indeed, were timid, and took to the woods if a white man showed
his face; but the braves were "gay, civil, and freehearted....  The
young men, though the most {177} alert and spirited we had seen, were
nevertheless so modest that not one of them would take the liberty of
entering our cabin; but all stood quietly at the door.  They are
graceful and erect.  We could not but admire their beauty.  Nor did we
lose the value of a pin while we were among them."

This reads like a fancy sketch.  Pre Marquette's experience was less
happy, and more in accord with Indian life and character.  During the
night some of the braves proposed that the seven white men should be
slain, and their possessions--of no great value save for the coveted
guns and canoes--be divided among the murderers.  To this the chief
would by no means consent.  The strangers were his guests; he had fed
them, he had smoked with them the pipe of peace, he had made himself
responsible for their safety.  Early in the morning he came with the
interpreter to the wigwam in which they slept, and warned them of their
danger, promising that he would protect them as long as they remained
in the village.  He emphasized his words by gravely dancing the calumet
dance in their presence; and to make {178} assurance doubly sure he
presented to them the sacred pipe which was the counterpart of the one
they already possessed.

The Frenchmen and Canadians held a council of war.  The time had come
for them to decide whether they should risk all by a further advance,
or return with the certain knowledge they had gained.  It was a
difficult decision to reach.  Joliet and Pre Marquette had set their
hearts upon following the Mississippi to the sea.  This had been their
cherished hope from the beginning.  This would be the one perfect
conclusion of their adventure.  But they were not adventurers only.
They were trusted agents sent by their civil and religious authorities
to ascertain the course of the great river which had hitherto been a
matter of hearsay to the colonists of New France.  This they had
accomplished.  Their maps and carefully kept records would clear the
way for all subsequent navigators.  They knew now that the Mississippi
did not flow into the Vermilion Sea but into the Gulf of Mexico.  They
knew what opportunities for trade it offered, and what dangers lined
its way.

Not for a minute did Joliet believe the Indians {179} who kept
repeating that they were within ten days' journey of the sea.  He was
right in his mistrust.  Seven hundred miles lay between them and this
hoped-for goal.  The season was far advanced.  It was still mild and
warm in the latitude they had reached; but the autumnal storms of the
South were as much to be feared as the frost and snow which awaited
them in the North.  It was evident that none of the languages they
spoke would be of any service to them among the strange tribes they
might encounter.  And far more dangerous than the probable hostility of
the savages was the assured hostility of the Spaniards, who, if less
murderous, were more intelligent, who would in all likelihood detain
them as prisoners, and who would certainly destroy any papers which
facilitated the encroachments of the French.

It will be observed that the spirit of the missionary and the spirit of
the explorer--even when united in one man--were wholly and very
properly dissimilar.  In those devout days the simple and primitive
conception of a missionary was a man who went at his own risk to
convert the heathen to Christianity.  He did not expect to {180} be
comfortable, and he did not expect to be safe.  Neither his country nor
his church expected him to be comfortable or safe.  They offered him no
protection; and, if they regretted his barbarous death, it was no part
of their program to punish his murderers.  He was supposed to seek,
rather than avoid, the crown of martyrdom.  Sometimes he did seek, or
at least welcome, it valiantly.  When Pre Brbeuf wrote to his
superior: "The will of God be done in all things.  If He appoints us
now to die, ah, what a good hour for us!" he did no more than express
the supreme emotion of his soul.  He kissed the stake to which he was
to be bound, an action akin to that of Father Campion saluting the dark
hill of Tyburn where he knew that he would one day suffer a death of
agony.  Pre Lalemant, who was given a chance of escape, refused to
leave Pre Brbeuf, and died in torments by his side.

These men had a single duty to perform.  Their business was to stick to
their posts and take what was coming to them.  They were gallant and
passionate lovers of souls, and so, in truth, was Pre Marquette.  He
was not without a shadowy dream of martyrdom, though the day for such
{181} dark glories had passed.  But it was not as a possible martyr,
nor, primarily, as a priest, that he had been sent on his present
errand.  The task that had been assigned to him and to Joliet was one
of practical utility.  They knew that they had no right to imperil its
success for the sake of adventure.  They were not free men like La
Salle and Tonty, who could go wherever danger led them.  They were
servants of the Church and of the State, acting under orders,
responsible for the lives of their men and for the safe delivery of
their papers.  Reluctantly they turned their backs upon the resplendent
vision of the sea, and prepared to return to Quebec.




{182}

_Chapter XIII_

THE RETURN

Paddling against the current of the Mississippi was a very different
thing from floating down the stream.  Retracing the course was at once
more difficult and less interesting than the southward journey, when
every day brought fresh sights and fresh adventures.  The canoeists
threaded their way among small islands, seeking smooth and navigable
water.  Now and then they entered bayous which took them inland,
growing narrower and more sluggish until they were choked by fallen
trees, or ended in a swamp.  Then the canoes were turned back, and an
anxious search made for the lost channel.  The nights were chill, the
shores malarial.  Sometimes the travelers feared to land and build a
fire.  They mixed their meal with a little cold water, and slept as
best they could in the canoes, wrapped in mist and a prey to poisonous
insects.

{183}

Joliet's hardihood was proof against fatigue and fever.  His spare
young frame had grown as lean as a hitching post.  His skin was
bronzed, his watchful blue eyes looked weary and burned out.  But his
health and his vitality were unimpaired.  He was inured to endurance.
The five Canadian boatmen, about whom little has been said, appear to
have been as brave as they were faithful.  Their confidence in their
leaders was never shaken, their courage never failed.  Their
namelessness, like the namelessness of the "unknown" soldiers who sleep
in state, is an added call for our regard.  All that we know about them
is that they did their work like men.  Pre Marquette also did his work
like a man.  Day by day he paddled conscientiously; but day by day his
stroke grew feebler.  Night by night he lay quietly by his comrade's
side, and arose wan and unrefreshed.  Joliet, who observed him keenly,
thanked Heaven they were homeward bound.  He measured the priest's
strength with the miles that lay before them, and, as they won their
slow way northward, he sometimes feared it was a race with death.

Happily the Illinois River offered a {184} comparatively quick and safe
route to Lake Michigan.  Once they had entered its mouth, the worst of
their dangers and difficulties were over.  The air grew keener and more
invigorating.  The grand army of mosquitoes remained encamped on the
banks of the Mississippi.  Noble forests and rich grassy plains lined
the shores between which they passed.  Game was abundant, and Joliet no
longer feared to land and build his camp fire by the water's edge.
Pre Marquette's journal reflected once again his old delight in the
wild life about him.  "We have seen nothing to compare to this river,"
he wrote joyously.  "For over sixty-five leagues it runs wide, deep,
and still, fringed with woods and prairies.  Everywhere we see cattle,
elk, deer, wildcats, bustards, swans, ducks, and small birds.  Now and
then we glimpse a beaver.  There are many little lakes and streams."

Seven miles below the present town of Ottawa lay a village of Illinois
Indians, and here the travelers stayed three days to rest and replenish
their stores.  It was a fair-sized settlement of seventy-four lodges,
each containing several families who lived in their own compartments
and cooked by their own fires.  All were well {185} disposed toward the
French, and all--after the urbane fashion of friendly savages--begged
the priest to come back and live with them.  They also proffered an
escort to the shores of Lake Michigan, an attention very gratefully
received, as insuring swifter progress and much needed help over the
portages.  A young chief and half-a-dozen braves composed this escort,
and with their aid the white men reached the lake in safety.  Mr.
Thwaites says that historians are divided in their opinions as to which
portages were used, there being a choice between the watersheds of the
Chicago and the Calumet rivers; but to the ordinary reader this point
is of little moment.  The lake was gained, the Indians returned to
their village, and the two battered canoes bravely confronted the high
winds and rough waters which impeded their progress for a hundred and
fifty miles.

Nothing could be more beautiful than the scenery which the travelers
passed.  Nothing could be more temperamental than the weather they
encountered.  Sometimes they paddled merrily in sheltered coves;
sometimes they skirted high bluffs stretching far into the lake; {186}
sometimes they were driven by storms to land and cover themselves as
best they could with the travel-worn reed mat.  There was a well-known
Indian portage, now a canal, between Lake Michigan and Sturgeon Bay.
It was two miles long, and led through forests of mighty pines.  With a
supreme and final effort the seven exhausted men shouldered the canoes,
paddles, mat, provisions, and all their precious belongings, and
crawled at a snail's pace over those unending miles.  When they emerged
from the woods and saw the waters of Sturgeon Bay lapping the shore,
they gave a great cry of joy and thanksgiving.  Past were their
dangers, anxieties, and fatigues.  The way lay straight to the St.
Franois Xavier mission, that abode of peace and plenty, with its rapid
river, its fisheries and fields, its towering cross, and the friends
that awaited their coming.  Before the first frosts of winter had
blighted the corn, the adventurers, gaunt, spent, and triumphant, knelt
at the foot of the cross, giving thanks to God and to the watchful
Virgin who had thrown her mantle of protection around them, and brought
them safe to harbor.

{187}

Here they stayed.  Pre Marquette had been transferred to this mission,
and found himself treated with tender care and indulgence.  The season
was too far advanced for Joliet to hope to reach Quebec, and both men
needed time to make out their separate reports: Pre Marquette's for
his superior general, Joliet's for Frontenac.  Their maps were drawn
with as much care as an imperfect knowledge permitted.  Their facts
tallied, their observations were no doubt very different.  Much space
was given by the missionary to the possible conversion of the Indians,
the Illinois Indians especially.  His report closes with a simple
account of a dying child brought to him at the water's edge, and
baptized before its soul took flight.  Upon this incident he lingers
lovingly.  Glancing back over the arduous and exciting months, over the
two thousand five hundred miles--an incredible distance--which he and
his friend had covered in their bark canoes, over perils, privations,
and the glorious hour of discovery, the thing which emerged with happy
distinctness in his memory was the face of that dying baby.  He had
been long a pioneer.  Now he was again a priest.

{188}

It was natural that Joliet should have been keen to present himself as
soon as he could before the Governor of New France.  He felt sure of
his welcome, sure of the worth of his intelligence, sure of his reward.
He was compelled to wait until the Mackinac Straits were clear of ice,
and the waterways as safe as they were ever likely to be.  His
impatience deepened with every week of delay, and when he could bear it
no longer, he embarked with his faithful crew of boatmen and the Indian
boy who had been given to him and to Pre Marquette by the chief of the
Illinois, and who was probably being taken to school in Quebec.
Despite his eagerness, he did not go straight to his destination, but
explored the shores of Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario,
stopping at Fort Frontenac where (according to Shea) he met La Salle,
and told him the story of his great discovery.  It was the middle of
July when he left the fort and started for Montreal.  The St. Lawrence
ran high, and the winds were mercilessly strong.  Nevertheless, the
canoe, which had done such good service, rode gallantly day after day
until the La Chine rapids were {189} reached.  They were impassable.
Eight miles from the city, at the very doors of safety, a violent gust
overturned the little boat, whirling it round and round like a leaf in
the gale.  Two of the three boatmen and the young Indian were drowned.
Joliet, hard to kill, kept himself afloat until the waves dashed him on
a rock, from which he was rescued by some fishermen and carried to
shore, a saved but ruined man.

There is something heroic and heartrending in a letter written to
Frontenac by this unconquered adventurer who all his life was fortune's
toy but never fortune's slave.  His carefully prepared report, his map,
his personal observations, the hardly acquired fruit of so much toil
and peril, were lost.  He had nothing to show for his labors but
himself.  "I had escaped every danger," he wrote.  "I had suffered no
harm from Indians.  I had passed many rapids.  I was nearing home, full
of joy at the success of a long and difficult voyage.  There seemed
nothing more to fear when a sudden gale capsized my canoe.  I lost two
men and my box of papers when I was within sight of Montreal which I
had left two years before.  {190} Nothing remains to me but my life,
and the ardent desire to employ it in any service you may please to
direct."

It is worthy of note that Joliet, in the full tide of his troubles,
deeply lamented the drowning of the little Indian who had been
entrusted to his care.  He did not mention him in his letter to the
governor; but he wrote to Monseigneur de Laval of his grief at the
death of this child, who had very promising qualities.  "He was ten
years old, quick-witted, diligent, obedient, and endowed with an
excellent disposition.  He had learned to speak French, and was
beginning to read and write that language."

The loss of Joliet's papers was a terrible calamity to him, and a very
real misfortune for the French colonial government.  His was the
official report, and doubtless more detailed than Pre Marquette's.
Lacking it, the missionary's journal became of supreme importance;
though Joliet, on reaching Quebec, wrote at Frontenac's request a
second report, and drew a second map, for both of which he relied upon
his memory.  On the map he traced the Mississippi to the Gulf of
Mexico, and named it "Rivire Buade" in {191} honor of the governor.
The region lying between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi he named "La
Frontenacie," and the Arkansas River was christened "Rivire Bazire,"
after M. Charles Bazire, receiver general of the king's revenues in
Quebec.  Altogether a courtly piece of work, which was destined to be
replaced by one still courtlier; for on a later map which was sent to
France the Mississippi was renamed, by Frontenac's orders, "Rivire
Colbert," after the great French minister, and "La Frontenacie" became
"La Colbertie."  It may be observed that Pre Marquette had originally
christened the Mississippi "Rivire de la Conception," in honor of the
Immaculate Virgin; but renaming places has always been a French
passion.  The streets of Paris bear witness to it, just as the streets
of London bear witness to England's picturesque conservatism.

Pre Dablon, aghast at the misfortune which had befallen Joliet, did
not wait until the report commanded by Frontenac had been written; but
lost no time in taking down all the details of the expedition which the
shipwrecked explorer could remember and dictate to him.  In both {192}
narratives Joliet stressed the undeviating course of the Mississippi,
its general navigability, the presence of iron ore, and the richness of
the southern soil.  Being himself an incorrigible wanderer who would
have hated to cultivate any soil, he employed every artifice to
persuade settlers that cultivating the prairies would be little short
of Paradise.  "A farmer," he said, "need not there spend years cutting
and burning timber as in New France.  The very day he arrived he could
start ploughing his ground; and if he had no cattle, those of the
country would serve his turn.  He could moreover use their skins, and
make cloth of their hair, finer than the red and blue blankets of the
Iroquois.  He could raise good grapes and graft trees.  Hemp grows in
abundance without planting.  In a word, he would find in this country
all that is necessary for life and comfort, except salt, which is easy
of transportation."

To this roseate picture were added details still more alluring.  The
bison, which Pre Marquette had regarded with unqualified alarm, were
described as "easy to kill" and very good to eat.  Quail, partridges,
snipe, and turkeys awaited {193} the hunter's gun.  Apples, plums,
mulberries, and chestnuts were abundant.  The savages were "modest,
affable, and obliging."  The squaws were "very reserved and
industrious.  They have their noses cut off if they do wrong.  They
raise watermelons, pumpkins, and squashes of all kinds.  Also three
crops of corn in a year.  One crop is gathered while another is
springing from the ground."

It was doubtless a matter of regret to Joliet that he was compelled to
admit that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of Mexico, and not
into the more desirable Gulf of California.  But he had hopes to offer
even in that direction.  "It would have been very fortunate," wrote
Pre Dablon at his dictation, "if the limit of our discovery had been
the Vermilion Sea which gives entrance to the sea of China and Japan.
One need not, however, despair of reaching this water with the help of
the Mississippi.  The land is covered with lakes and broken by rivers
which communicate with one another, and afford marvelous means of
transportation."

Joliet's narrative awakened profound interest in France.  Colbert was
as alive as Frontenac had {194} been to the value of the great
discovery, and to the importance of planting French trading stations
along the river's bank.  If the discoverer received no immediate
reward, he was not forgotten.  If the governor's attitude toward him
remained somewhat chilly, this may have been, as Parkman thinks, the
result of hostility to the Jesuits, preference for the Sulpicians, and
friendship for La Salle; or it may have been a natural impatience on
Frontenac's part with men who met with disasters.  He himself had been
buffeted by fate, but he had always come out triumphant from the fray.
It was what he expected of his followers.

It is to M. Pierre Margry, director of the Archives of the Marine and
Colonies in Paris, and an indefatigable student of historic byways,
that we owe what knowledge we possess of Joliet's subsequent career.
In 1675 he married Claire Bissot, a cousin of the receiver general
after whom he had so astutely named the Arkansas River, and the
daughter of a wealthy trader who dealt with the Indians of the far
north.  In the interests of his father-in-law he traveled to Hudson
Bay--distances being {195} nothing to him--in the summer of 1679.  Here
he found three English forts, manned by sixty soldiers, an armed
English vessel carrying twelve guns, and a number of small trading
boats.  The commander of the force, aware that men of experience,
sagacity, and courage are hard to come by, offered him liberal
inducements to remain and throw in his lot with theirs; but Joliet was
nothing if not French.  He returned to Quebec, and reported the
presence of these formidable rivals.  Unless they were dispossessed,
the trade of New France was bound to suffer grievously.

The result of this unwelcome information was the forming of a new
company, designed and equipped for the Hudson Bay trade.  Joliet's
loyalty was rewarded with a grant of the islands of Mignan, which was
supplemented the following year by a grant of the large and valuable
island of Anticosti in the estuary of the St. Lawrence.  Here he
established fisheries on a vast and lucrative scale, here he made a
useful chart of the St. Lawrence, and here he built himself a home.
For eight years that jade Fortune smiled blandly on him.  He grew rich.
He maintained a large establishment.  The wagoner's son became a {196}
person of importance.  Then the blow fell as suddenly and blightingly
as it had fallen on the triumphant young discoverer of the Mississippi.
There was open warfare between the English and French colonists.  Sir
William Phipps, afterward Governor of Massachusetts, had taken Port
Royal by surprise in 1690, and was sent with an augmented force against
Montreal and Quebec.  Joliet was away, no one knows where.  His island,
his fisheries, his home, lay defenceless in the invader's path.  Phipps
landed, burned all the buildings--easy work--and carried away as
prisoners the Canadian's wife and mother-in-law.  He was subsequently
defeated by Frontenac, and forced to an ignominious retreat; but this
repulse came too late to help Joliet, who for a second time saw his
hopes defeated, his work ruined, and himself a harassed and beggared
man.

After 1690 there is a hiatus in his history, and little more remains to
be told.  We know at least that his energy was unimpaired, for four
years later, in 1694, he was again in Labrador, in the service of the
whale fisheries and the seal trade.  From this perilous voyage he
returned safely, {197} and Frontenac made him royal pilot of the St.
Lawrence.  He also received the appointment of hydrographer at Quebec,
together with a small seigniory which is said to be still in the hands
of his descendants.  He died in 1700, being then only fifty-five years
old.  A hard, merry, tragic, and always hazardous existence.
Apparently he was not much richer at the time of his death than he had
been in his resourceful and venturesome youth.  He was buried on one of
the islands of Mignan, and the world he had helped on its way was
content for the time--but for the time only--to forget him.

Nothing can be less worth while than to dispute the respective claims
of Pre Marquette and Joliet as leaders of their expedition, unless it
be to dispute their claims as discoverers of a river that had been
already discovered.  Yet, strange to say, these are the two points
which have engrossed historians, to the exclusion of more interesting
matter.  The Reverend Francis Borgia Steck, whose treatise is by far
the most exhaustive study of the subject which has yet been published,
devotes thirty-five closely printed pages to proving that Joliet was
the {198} official head of the party, and thirty-three pages to proving
that the finding of the Mississippi was a rediscovery only.  He
supports these two points, which appear to him all-important, with
every possible argument and every available authority.  When we have
read both chapters with close attention, we find ourselves--as often
happens after prolonged disputation--precisely where we were in the
beginning.

The expedition which met with such signal success was very quietly
conducted.  We know all about it, principally because there is so
little to be known.  Frontenac, at Talon's suggestion, sent Joliet, as
he had sent La Salle, to discover the Mississippi.  How and why Pre
Marquette was selected as his associate in the enterprise is not clear,
and becomes no clearer on investigation.  It is amazing to learn that
for the last half century an argumentative generation has tossed the
question of leadership to and fro, hotly contesting the claims of the
young priest and of the young trader, neither of whom seems to have
made any claim of his own.  The Jesuits have naturally supported their
son.  Lay writers have supported the layman.  The dispute is of {199}
necessity limited to official supremacy.  It is impossible to say that
either of the men assumed control of the party.  Such a statement would
be a pure surmise.  One thing, however, is sure.  If they had fought
for the command as vigorously as their supporters have fought for them,
the Mississippi would have waited for subsequent discoverers.

It is to Charlevoix's narrative that we can trace the first definite
assertion of Pre Marquette's leadership.  It has no backing beyond a
sentiment on the writer's part that, if he were not the head of the
expedition, he should have been.  This point of view has been repeated
more than once.  The Jesuit was better born and better educated than
Joliet.  He was older, which was no advantage.  He was a "black-robe,"
which was a very great advantage indeed.  A half-century of hard and
heroic work had won for the French missionaries a fair degree of
respect from savages who had begun by hating and mistrusting them.  In
a knowledge of Indian languages and of Indian ways both men were
unusually well equipped.  Both had friendly and reasonable
dispositions.  Neither was in any sense {200} of the word a great
pioneer.  By the side of heroic figures like Champlain and La Salle
they appear (though they did find the river of mystery) as players of
lesser parts in the combat that civilization was waging against the
forces of nature and savagery.

That they played their parts harmoniously was a supreme asset.  It was
not in the spirit of rivalry but in the spirit of friendship that Pre
Marquette and Joliet went on their quest.  Little they dreamed of the
battles that would be waged in their names.  They seem to have been
what Santayana says Englishmen are: "artists in rudimentary behavior,
ideal comrades in a tight place."  If they had no great breadth of view
or boldness of design, they were rational, good-tempered, brave, loyal
and advisable.  The parting at St. Franois Xavier's was final; but
each must have carried through life a warm regard for the other.  They
had faced side by side difficulties and dangers; they had enjoyed side
by side the fulfilment of their hopes.  Common friendships have little
to compare with such a bond between high-hearted and generous men.

The destruction of Joliet's papers, which left {201} Pre Marquette's
journal the only record of the voyage, must be held responsible for the
supremacy which was for years accorded to the priest.  Not that he was
at the time the recipient of much attention, or that the journal
attracted widespread notice.  It did not reach Quebec until the autumn
of 1674.  Perhaps some returning missionary or trader took it in
charge.  Perhaps it was entrusted to Ottawa Indians who made many
visits to the French settlements.  People in those days did not clamor
impatiently for news.  They were accustomed to wait, and they had
acquired the art of waiting with composure.  Pre Dablon had learned
from Joliet that the expedition had been successful, that Pre
Marquette's health had broken under the strain, that he was resting and
recuperating at Green Bay.  Four months later he received the report
which he forwarded to France after making a careful copy.  The
accompanying map he appears to have kept, as it is still preserved in
the archives of St. Mary's College, Montreal.  In the course of
time--that is, some years after Pre Marquette's death--the report was
published in Paris; but the original manuscript was lost or destroyed
like thousands {202} of other original manuscripts in that easy-going
age.  Pre Dablon's copy fared better, and reposes securely in the
college archives.

As for the second burning question, the discovery or rediscovery of the
Mississippi, it offers no field for dispute.  De Soto discovered the
great river.  It might have proved his fortune if it had not proved his
grave.  He had known of its existence from De Vaca's report, just as
Pre Marquette and Joliet had known of its existence from the repeated
reports of savages.  He saw it with his own eyes, just as Pre
Marquette and Joliet saw it with theirs.  Parkman says that the
knowledge De Soto gained at the price of his life "was never utilized,
and was well-nigh forgotten."  The statement is only partially correct.
Spain, though strongly urged to colonize Florida, never made any
determined effort to do so.  Her first expeditions had been singularly
unsuccessful, and later on her home troubles were of a nature to hamper
colonial activities.  Under that most unlucky monarch, Philip the
Second, she became incapable of any strong constructive work in the New
World.  Nevertheless, she did not forget the Mississippi (which for her
was the Rio del {203} Espritu Santo), nor did it ever cease to be an
object of speculation and ambition to her adventurous sons.

When Louis de Moscoso, who succeeded De Soto in command, returned to
the City of Mexico, and told the viceroy, Mendoza, of his leader's
death and of the loss of one half of the expeditionary force, these
melancholy tidings were in some measure offset by his account of the
river down which he and his men had sailed in boats of their own
building to the northern shore of the gulf.  From that day forth the
Mississippi, under its Spanish name, reappears continually in Spanish
documents.  In 1557 Pietro de Santander advised the speedy colonization
of Florida (the gulf coast being then largely and loosely known by that
name), giving as an inducement the existence of its great waterway.
"There is in this region a river called Espritu Santo which has eight
leagues of mouth, and flows five hundred leagues from its source."  In
1565 a Spaniard named Castaeda, who twenty years before had
accompanied Coronado on his bootless expedition, wrote an account of
it, and of the river which he had never seen, but of {204} which he had
heard a vast deal.  He described it as flowing from the far north and
fed by many tributaries, so that, when it entered the Gulf of Mexico,
its current was so vast and strong that De Soto's men lost sight of the
land before the water ceased to be fresh.

It was one thing, however, to know that the river was there and another
thing to find it.  If the Mississippi had been a mountain stream, or
the elusive Fountain of Youth, it could not have hidden itself more
successfully from white men's eyes.  La Salle, who a century later
followed its lower waters to the sea, failed to rediscover it when he
returned from France in 1684, and perished in the search.  The
Spaniards had De Vaca's account of the Narvaez expedition, and the
vivid stories told by La Vega and the "Gentleman of Elvas."  They had
maps galore.  If, as Parkman says, the river was indistinctly marked on
Spanish maps, and if, as Father Steck says, this was done purposely
from a desire to lie low, its existence was nevertheless recognized by
all the great cartographers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries.
Early maps were indeed better calculated to please than to instruct, to
awaken interest {205} than to impart accurate information.  It may be
that Spain's principle of lying low resulted in a particular vagueness
concerning some of her possessions in the New World.

Nevertheless, Gerard Mercator, Abraham Ortelius, and Cornelius Wytfliet
all marked the great river on their maps, and all showed it flowing
southward.  Its Spanish name was familiar to Frenchmen, and Pre Dablon
wrote to Paris: "It is very probable that the river which geographers
call St. Esprit is the Mississippi which has been navigated by Sieur
Joliet."  On later and less scholarly maps it was sometimes traced
without being named, and sometimes named without being traced, which
was a trifle confusing.  Nowhere was it so completely ignored as to
prove that its existence had faded from men's minds.  Nowhere do we
find any indication that the Spaniards were following up their great
discovery by explorations, by colonization, or even by the
establishment of trading stations.  If the river had not been lost, it
seems tolerably certain that no one knew where to find it.

This was the state of affairs when Pre Marquette and Joliet set out on
their quest.  There was {206} no doubt in their minds, or in the minds
of Frontenac and Talon, that the Mississippi existed, that it flowed
southward, and that the Indians who had named it were familiar with its
banks.  Its identity with the Rio del Espritu Santo was not at the
time taken into consideration.  The business of the explorers was to
ascertain its whereabouts, to trace its course, to discover into what
body of water it emptied.  If into the Gulf of Mexico, well and good.
If into the Gulf of California, so much the better.  The South Sea was
ever and always the hoped-for goal.  But under any circumstances the
standard of France must be planted over the fertile lands of the
southwest, the outposts of French trade must be extended.  The
discovery, if discovery it were, was meant to bear practical fruit.

Was it a discovery?  Father Steck points out that the French give a
wider meaning to the verb _dcouvrir_ than standard usage permits to
its English equivalent.  Frontenac wrote to Colbert that Joliet, whom
he had selected for the Mississippi venture, was "a man very skilful in
these kinds of discoveries."  Joliet had then discovered nothing.  What
Frontenac meant was that he had {207} made careful and successful
explorations.  In the last century the Reverend Jules Tailhan, S.J.,
discussing the rival claims of pioneers in the Western world, said that
"La Salle completed the discovery of the Mississippi begun by Joliet
and Marquette."  This would have made it possible for the river to have
been discovered three times.  Benjamin Sulte in his _Mlanges
Historiques_, published in 1919, expands that possibility.  He states
that the Mississippi "has been discovered [_a t dcouvert_] at least
six times in sections."  Only a river of its length could have
furnished such a succession of thrills.

To the English, however, a place once discovered remains discovered
unless it be again lost to the knowledge of civilized men.  The
Mississippi was never so lost; yet Pre Marquette and Joliet were
practical discoverers when on that afternoon in June their canoes
entered the vast slow current, and they beheld with awe and transport
its unlovely, terrifying expanse.  They brought the great waterway into
the undisputed possession of white men.  They turned it from a thing of
mystery into a thing of reality, from a straggling line and some
letters on a map into {208} an adjunct of civilization and a
magnificent artery of trade.  Rumor and savage tales crystallized into
a splendid certainty.  The French were not disposed to conceal the
river, or to underrate its significance.  If settlements were slow, if
perils were many, if difficulties were disheartening, the chance had
come, the discovery had been made for all time, the birch-bark canoes
had led the way for mighty traffic to follow, and two young men had
left their names to a country which has never ceased to hold them in
honor.




{209}

_Chapter XIV_

THE LAST MISSION

While Joliet was struggling with fate, and Frontenac was preparing to
add a finer luster to his governorship, Pre Marquette was resting
quietly at St. Franois Xavier's and slowly regaining his strength.  He
was as unteased by ambition as by anxiety.  The impersonal attitude of
the Jesuit priest was never better illustrated than in the case of this
French missionary.  In obedience to his superior's orders he had gone
upon a quest.  He had been glad to go because he was young and ardent.
He had striven with all his might to reach his goal.  He had returned
successful, had sent in his papers, and was now waiting with a serene
mind the next move in the game.  The consequences of his discovery
(beyond the possible Christianizing of savages) did not deeply concern
him.  No recognition of his services came from France.  Enlightened and
{210} amiable societies which distribute medals were probably rare in
those days.  If praise reached him from the civil or ecclesiastical
authorities of Quebec--to that much at least he was entitled--we know
nothing about it.  Had anyone told him that his name would be a
familiar one for centuries to come, he would have felt such a statement
to be pure absurdity.

Nevertheless, in the sedate and serious soul of this unsolicitous
priest there lingered one desire with which his associates were
perfectly well acquainted, and which was about to be gratified.  In the
autumn of 1674 he received orders to found a new mission among the
Illinois, those friendly and intelligent Indians who had been from the
first the cherished children of his heart.  He had shown himself to be
remarkably adroit in his dealings with all savages, and this had been
attributed by his superiors to the wide friendliness of his outlook,
which had enabled him to see their not very conspicuous virtues, and to
his conciliating manner, which tempered the dignity of the priest with
the cordiality of the comrade.  The most favorable pictures we have of
the Indians are drawn by missionaries.  It {211} was but natural that
traders should have regarded them with suspicion.  The great principle
of giving little and getting much, which is the foundation of all
trade, is ill calculated to produce good-will.  To the pioneer farmer
the natives were dangerous neighbors, cordially feared and hated.  The
priests who had nothing to lose but their lives, and nothing to gain
but salvation, were able to take a more comprehensive and less
prejudiced view.  If they emphasized the unpleasantness of personal
contact with unwashed, lice-covered, rude, and licentious savages, they
did justice to certain qualities, noble in themselves, and which dimly
outlined a sense of social responsibility.

So it was that when the Arkansas Indians proposed to kill Pre
Marquette and Joliet, their chief refused to permit his hospitality to
be violated.  So it was that the Illinois sought by courtesy and
hospitality to secure the protection of France.  Pre du Perron, who
lived on terms of uncomfortable intimacy with the Hurons, admitted that
they were "importunate, childish, lying, proud, and lazy"; but hastened
to add that they were also "patient, loyal, generous, and {212}
hospitable."  Their improvement under salutary influences is vouched
for by a dozen missionaries; and Pre Charlevoix adds the weight of his
testimony a full half century after Pre du Perron's death.  He can
find no praise strong enough for the Christian Hurons, for the ordered
simplicity of their lives, and for a goodness "which seems to be
natural to them."  They had even learned--the squaws especially--to
sing hymns softly; and this Pre Charlevoix considered a sign and
symbol of civilization.  He had lived too long in courtly and
fastidious French society to acquire the superb indifference of the
missionaries to the desecration of music and of art.  Indian singing
appeared to him just what it was--"tiresome, fatiguing, monotonous,
disagreeable, and ferocious."  The devotional daubs which passed for
pictures in the Rcollet church of Quebec, and which, like devotional
daubs all the world over, gave pious pleasure to those who looked upon
them, offended his cultivated taste.  In vain he was reminded that the
savages were not critical, and that the paintings, though ill done,
awakened correct emotions in the minds of the congregation.  He merely
replied that when {213} pictures were as bad as that, they ought to be
removed from the sight of men.

In regard to the almost universal trait of thievishness, Pre
Charlevoix admits that even in his day the Indians, especially the
unconverted Indians, would steal; but he adds that if the squaws
ventured to do so--and were found out--they were punished.  It was also
his experience that whenever he complained to a chief that he had been
robbed, the indignant sachem saw to it that his property was promptly
restored.  The only drawback to this method of obtaining restitution
lay in the fact that he was expected to make a handsome present to the
chief, and a lesser one to the thief who had been deprived of his
spoils, so that he was not much better off than if he had submitted to
the original loss.  It was a little like the modern system under which
stolen property is regained, and detective and burglar share in the
reward.

Parkman's insistence upon the Indians' aptitude for such elementary
politics as suited their mode of life is the result of his familiarity
with the missionaries' reports.  The observance of certain conciliating
rites and ceremonies, the swift {214} and sure recognition of
leadership, the code of public courtesy which contrasted oddly with
private and personal rudeness, the obedience to unwritten laws which
differed in different tribes--these things are all matters of comment
in the _Relations_.  Pre du Perron was of the opinion that the savages
showed more intelligence, and exhibited more tricks and subtleties in
trade and formal intercourse with white men, than did the shrewdest
merchants and citizens of France.  Pre Brbeuf balanced their petty
thefts with their generous hospitality, their swinish gluttony with the
"perfect quiet and dignity" with which they bore hunger that bordered
on starvation.  Above all, he observed in them a desire to strengthen
the union among friendly tribes by feasts, by exchanging visits and
gifts, and by councils without end.  They would have been at home and
at ease in Geneva.

These efforts at unity among friends were nullified by the hostility of
enemies.  Tribe warred against tribe, and inherited quarrels were
cherished as sacredly as inherited truces.  The savages, thinly
scattered over an immense area, speaking strange tongues, differing
widely in customs and {215} intelligence, and depending for their lives
upon their accustomed hunting grounds, were not sufficiently far-seeing
to spare themselves the perpetual waste of war.  Their only method of
replenishing their exhausted strength was by the adoption of conquered
enemies into a conquering tribe.  This meant that the conquerors were
obliged to forego, in the interests of public welfare, the anticipated
pleasure of torturing their captives to death.  The adopted Indians
remained faithful to their new comrades.  An ancient code bound them to
loyalty for life.

In this connection, Parkman tells a strange and tragic tale.  The
Eries, living on the south shore of Lake Erie, had captured an Onondaga
chief of great repute.  He offered himself for adoption as the
alternative of being burned at the stake.  The matter was discussed in
council, and, in view of the courage and sagacity of the captive, his
offer was accepted.  There was a young Erie squaw then absent from the
village.  Her brother had been recently killed by the Senecas, who,
like the Onondagas, belonged to the Iroquois nation.  It was decided
that the captured warrior should be given to her as a brother in the
place of the one {216} she had lost.  Accordingly, he was released and
handsomely decorated with feathers and beads.  The pipe of peace was
smoked, and when the girl returned she was told that a new relative
awaited her.  Furiously she refused to accept him, and demanded as her
right that he should be put to death.  In vain the headsmen of the
village argued with her.  In vain she was shown the handsome young
Onondagan.  Nothing could move her from her purpose, and the custom on
which she based her claim was an ancient one.  Even a squaw had certain
privileges which might not be denied.  The captive was stripped of his
finery, bound to the stake, and burned before her eyes.  Verily "the
hearts of women are as the hearts of wolves."  It may be added that the
Iroquois took a bloody revenge for the death of the warrior; but of the
girl's fate we know nothing.

Such were the characteristic inconsistencies of the savages with whom
Pre Marquette had invariably succeeded in establishing cordial
relations.  He had lived among them for only nine years, and those nine
years had been divided among different tribes; but he had made many
friends and some converts wherever he had {217} been sent, and the
Illinois mission promised him a fruitful field of labor.  His health
was thought to be restablished; and in October, 1674, he started with
two French boatmen, one of whom had accompanied him to the Mississippi,
for a village on the upper waters of the Illinois.  The season was late
for such a journey.  Storms and adverse winds delayed them from the
start.  Once past the heavy portage that lay between Sturgeon Bay and
Lake Michigan they embarked on the lake in company with a little fleet
of canoes, five carrying Pottawattamy Indians and four carrying
Illinois.  All were bound for the same destination, and the Illinois
evinced their good-will by advising Pre Marquette to keep his boat
close to theirs.  They knew the lake and he did not.

The diary written at this period is fragmentary.  Conditions were not
favorable to composition, and the brief notes were to be expanded later
on into one of those voluminous reports which enabled Quebec and France
intelligently to control their missions.  The events of the journey
were of a simple order: game killed, meals eaten, and the best of many
bad sites chosen for the night's camp.  Once, when they had built their
fire, there came {218} looming through the dusk the tall figure of an
Indian carrying the carcass of a deer slung over his shoulders.  It
proved to be an Illinois warrior, whose name, as spelled phonetically
by Pre Marquette, was Chachagwessiou, and who generously shared his
spoil with the wayfarers.  Once the priest wandered too far inland, and
found himself unable to retrace his steps or cross a deep and rapid
stream.  His boatmen had much difficulty in rescuing him; and rising
winds held them stormbound on the banks of this stream for four and
twenty hours.  Once they were delayed five days by the turbulence of
the lake waters, and by the first snowstorm of the season.  A boatman
named Pierre busied himself in mending an Indian's gun; and the priest
took the opportunity to instruct the savages--who had elevated a
wolfskin to the dignity of a manitou--in some of the simpler truths of
Christianity.

By the 22d of November the cold had grown intense, and the snow lay a
foot deep on the ground.  Game was scarce, but Pierre, who was as
skilful a hunter as a boatman, managed to shoot three bustards and
three wild turkeys, the latter a much esteemed delicacy.  Hard though
{219} conditions were, the travelers met a party of Mascouten Indians
encamped for the winter in nine small wigwams, and keeping themselves
alive and vigorous where white men would have died.  They feasted or
starved according to their luck in the chase, and they regarded the
inclemency of the long winter with stoical unconcern.  Comparing his
feeble strength with theirs, Pre Marquette was lost in wonder at the
hardihood which forced nature's hand, and bid defiance to her rulings.

For more and more clearly it was borne in upon the priest's mind that
the task which had been set him, and which he had accepted with so much
gladness, was beyond his power of fulfilment.  The first day of
December found him weak but able to paddle, and pleased with the
smoothness of the water.  "Navigation on the lake is now fairly good
from one portage to another," he wrote cheerfully.  "There is no
crossing to be made, and we can land anywhere, keeping out of the reach
of the wind.  The prairies are very fine and there is no lack of deer."
On the fourth they entered the Chicago River, and ascended it two
leagues when ice blocked their way.  On {220} the eighth, the feast of
the Immaculate Conception, Pre Marquette was too ill to say mass.  A
halt was called, and a council held.  To stay in this bleak spot meant
countless hardships, but to press on meant death.  It was decided to
remain.  The boatmen cut down trees, and built a log hut like the one
in which Joliet and the two Rcollet priests, Pre Dollier and Pre
Galine, had passed the winter on the shore of Lake Erie.  Compared to
the hunting wigwams of the Indians, it was a real shelter; and, if one
did not mind being choked and blinded by smoke, it could be kept warm.
As for game, the hard frost made the deer easy to track (four were
killed in four days), and brought the starving birds close to their
doors.  "We contented ourselves with killing three or four turkeys out
of the many that came about our cabin because they were dying of
hunger.  Jacques [the second boatman] shot a partridge, which was
exactly like those of France, except that it had two ruffs of three or
four long feathers which covered its neck."

The little party were not wholly isolated from their fellow men.  The
Illinois Indians with the hunter, Chachagwessiou, who had traveled in
{221} their company, were indeed compelled to press on to their
village.  They had been trading with the French, and were carrying back
the much needed goods for which they had sold their pelts.  But other
savages passed the hut, and with these Pre Marquette eagerly
conversed, sharing his game with them, refusing them powder which he
could not spare, and trading tobacco for three fine oxskins, under
which he and his companions lay snug and warm in the long winter nights.

Nothing could exceed the passionate desire of the Indians for French
tobacco.  They had always held this precious plant in high esteem.  The
Hurons and the Tionontates, a tribe allied to the Algonquins, grew it
most successfully.  Indeed the Tionontates were usually called the
Petuns or Tobacco nation because it was their only harvest, and made
them, according to savage standards, affluent.  We have seen that in
the calumet dance the Illinois offered a puff at the sacred pipe to the
sun, conceiving that no greater honor could be shown even to a god.
Pre Allouez says that the Outaouacs, before starting to hunt, to fish,
or to fight, held a ceremonious feast in honor of the sun.  A long
harangue was made to the luminary, {222} and as a crowning rite the
chief broke a cake of tobacco into two pieces and cast them in the
fire.  While they burned and the smoke curled upward, the braves cried
aloud, calling attention to the magnitude of their sacrifice.

It is greatly to the credit of these untutored savages that they should
have discerned the superiority of French tobacco, prepared with the
careful art of civilization, and that they should have preferred a
delicate and ephemeral pleasure to the satisfaction of sharper needs or
grosser appetites.  Wandering Illinois cast their beaver skins, the
most valuable of their pelts, at Pre Marquette's feet, asking in
return a handful of this precious commodity.  In the account books of
the Jesuits, tobacco figures prominently; the invoice of the Illinois
mission in 1702 showing among other items thirty pounds of this
valuable merchandise.  The entries in the _Journaux des Jesuites_,
which were never published with other _Relations_, tell how many pounds
of tobacco were given away in Quebec to visiting Indians, who always
expected _douceurs_.  Whether the governor desired to conciliate or to
reward, he made the same welcome presentation.  A sum of money was
{223} set aside every year for "gifts"; and in 1702 the biggest
expenditure charged to this account was for tobacco--the reason given
being that the savages were "passionately fond of it."

The hunters were not Pre Marquette's only visitors, for word of his
whereabouts had been carried over the frozen wilds, and from the
Illinois village many leagues away came solicitous Indians, bringing
him a generous share of their scanty winter stores, meal, pumpkins, and
dried meat.  Also twelve beaverskins as a token of esteem, and a rush
mat.  They encouraged the sick man to remain in their country "until he
died," and probably thought that day was not far distant.  In return
for their kindness Pre Marquette presented them with appropriate
gifts, and this time we are told what they were: one hatchet, two large
knives, three clasp knives, a quantity of glass beads, and two double
mirrors.

On the 16th of January a French surgeon, or at least a Frenchman who
claimed to be a surgeon, made his unexpected appearance at the cabin
door.  He and a trader named Pierre Moreau, usually known as La
Taupine, were wintering eighteen leagues away; and he had bravely {224}
journeyed that distance, accompanied by an Indian guide, to give what
help he could.  He brought with him some meal and some dried
blueberries, the nearest approach to a delicacy which a winter in the
woods afforded.  A little fruit was at all times a rare boon, and a
bunch of French raisins represented the highest peak of luxury.  Even
in the missions they were usually reserved for the sick.  The visitor
stayed several days, and returned to his post, having duly confessed
his sins and communicated.  He carried messages to the waiting
Illinois.  In the spring the priest would be with them.

In the spring he was with them, but many hard weeks had still to be
weathered.  Pre Marquette and his companions began a novena to the
Blessed Virgin, begging urgently that she would help him keep his word.
He had set his earnest soul upon starting this new mission before he
died.  By the middle of February the surrounding savages were making
ready for their long journey to the trading stations.  As soon as the
lake became navigable they would start.  There was no real lack of
food.  Partridges were shy but could not escape good marksmen, and
deer, wasted by {225} hunger, were all too easily killed.  Sometimes
the poor creatures were so lean that their carcasses were left lying in
the snow.  With the first thaw of March, flocks of pigeons made their
appearance.  Everything pointed to a breaking up of the ice; but the
three householders had no conception of the speed and violence with
which ice broke.  On the night of the 28th they heard the loud
cracking, and listened undisturbed.  On the 29th the water, released
from its winter bondage, rose so high that the hut was flooded.  There
was barely time to drag out their few possessions and reach a hillock,
where they slept on the ground under cover of the friendly oxskins.

This was the signal for departure.  Pre Marquette's health had greatly
improved.  The dysentery which had so long wasted his strength was
gone.  He gave thanks to his dear Protectress, and made ready to leave
the lonely spot where he had passed nearly four months.  So much has
been written about the hardships of those four months, so desolate is
the picture in our minds of the rude hut open to winds and weather, of
the heavy rains, the bitter cold, the sick man lying on a mat and
sustaining life upon the kind of food his {226} faithful boatmen were
able to provide, that it is salutary and heartening to read the brief
paragraph in which the priest himself sums up his experience:

"The Blessed and Immaculate Virgin has taken such care of us during our
wintering that we have not lacked provisions, and still have left a
large sack of corn and some fat.  We also lived very pleasantly, and my
illness did not prevent my saying mass every day.  We were unable to
keep Lent, except on Fridays and Saturdays."

That brief line, "We also lived very pleasantly," is unsurpassed in
letters.  It sums up the life story of the man who wrote it.  In all
ages men have been found who met "their duty and their death" with
heroism, who did all that men could do, and bore all that men must
bear.  But, for the most part, they have been aware of their deeds and
of their sufferings.  Pre Marquette failed to see himself in a heroic
light.  His voyage of discovery had been blessed by success, for which
he took little credit.  His winter in the woods was an ordinary
happening, and regrettable only because it delayed the work he was so
keen to begin.

At any rate, it was over, the water-logged hut {227} being no longer
habitable.  Therefore on the 31st of March the three travelers took up
their interrupted journey.  They carried the canoe over the muddy
portage which led to the Des Plaines River, only to find the low-lying
land flooded to the depth of twelve feet.  All they could do was to
seek a spot high enough for safety, and wait there ten days until the
water fell.  They were joined by the French surgeon who had essayed,
with the help of an Indian boatman, to carry his beaver skins to
Quebec, but had found the river unnavigable.  The little party lived on
the precious corn saved by Pre Marquette from his winter's store, and
on the wild ducks which they shot daily.  The surgeon decided to make a
cache of his pelts--that is bury them in a spot carefully marked--and
to accompany the priest to his destination.  His companionship was of
great service.  By the second week of April the floods had subsided,
the portages were fairly firm and dry, and the journey, now a short
one, was light-heartedly resumed.  Floating down the Des Plaines until
its junction with the Illinois was reached, the two canoes cautiously
descended this stream still swollen by heavy rains.  On its {228} shore
lay the village that Pre Marquette had come so far and striven so hard
to reach; and here, according to an old letter of Pre Dablon's, the
tired little missionary was received "as an angel from heaven."




{229}

_Chapter XV_

THE END

Prior to 1650 no French missionary had been received by any Indian
tribe as an angel from heaven.  The priests who were sent to the New
World were compelled to encounter and, if possible, to overcome the
natural hostility with which all men, savage and civilized, regard the
interloper.  To none of us is it given to welcome strange neighbors,
strange tongues, strange customs, strange and intrusive points of view.
The Indians proved no exception to this rule.  They were fairly well
satisfied with themselves, tolerant of their own shortcomings, and
rigidly faithful to traditions.  Their attitude toward the priests
varied from superstitious fear and senseless hatred to sullen hostility
and contemptuous indifference.  At worst this meant for the early
Jesuits a cruel death; at best hard labor and sorrowfully scant returns.

{230}

Time, however, works wonders, and patience rules the world.  Little by
little the savages grew accustomed to the presence of the black-robes
from whom they had nothing to fear, whose ways were the ways of order
and seemliness, and whose unknown God might perhaps do as well by them
as the manitous in which they had placed a somewhat fluctuating
confidence.  The religious beliefs of the American Indians were not
deep-rooted, their religious fervor went no farther than a pathetic
demand for the immediate necessities of life.  Parkman says that they
swore no oaths, "probably because their mythology held no being
sufficiently distinct to swear by."  Nevertheless, we glimpse
occasionally in their legends a significance which is purely spiritual.
An Algonquin warrior told the Rcollet priest, Pre Chrtien Le Clerc,
the story of a great chief who, after strange and terrible adventures,
won back from the spirit world the soul of his dead son.  It was given
to him enclosed in a small globular wallet, and was to be inserted into
the breast of the lad.  On regaining his village the chief entrusted
this precious treasure into the keeping of a squaw, who, Pandora-like,
opened the wallet; {231} whereupon the soul, scorning the joys of
living, fled back to the happier realms of Death.

The tale bears a singular resemblance to the far famed miracle of St.
Philip Neri, who in 1584 brought back to life the young son of Prince
Fabrizio Massimo.  The boy was but fourteen years old.  He came of an
ancient race that traced its line back to the days of pagan Rome.  St.
Philip looked at him lying childlike on his pillows, his eyes, open,
the red color creeping back into his waxen face, and asked him
pityingly, "Will you stay here, or will you return whence you came?"
The boy answered, "I will return whence I came."  And when the saint
had blessed him, his soul, like the soul of the young Algonquin savage,
took flight a second time for eternity.

If the Indians were slow to understand and accept the preaching of the
missionaries, they were quick to observe their superior husbandry, and
the increased comfort that came of decent living.  It had never been
their custom to fertilize the ground on which the squaws raised a
scanty harvest of corn, beans, and squash.  When the exhausted soil
could bear no longer, the village moved on and cleared a fresh space.
Now they {232} saw with amazement the fertile fields which surrounded
every mission.  Pre Le Jeune raised rye and barley with great success,
and even succeeded in growing a little wheat.  Two rows of apple and
pear trees he planted, and most of them lived to bear fruit.  Pre
Marquette's watchful concern for his harvests is evidenced in all his
letters, in the delight with which he attended the pumpkin feasts of
St. Ignace, in his prayers of thanksgiving for the abundant crops.

As for such ingenious contrivances as clocks, hand mills for grinding
corn, sharp knives which opened and shut, needles and thread for the
repair of garments, these things seemed to the savages perfected
miracles of craft.  Even habits of cleanliness and decency had in their
eyes something unnatural, something which appertained to beings of
another order.  When a feasting Indian found his fingers to be
uncomfortably coated with grease, he wiped them on the hair of the
nearest dog, or on his own hair if there were no dog at hand.  That the
priest should cleanse his soiled hands, or wipe them dry with a piece
of stuff, was absurd but noteworthy, a great deal of trouble, {233} but
not without pleasing results.  The Seventeenth Century was not, like
the Twentieth, an age of ritualistic ablutions.  In fact, from the time
that the Roman baths fell into disrepair until the English rediscovered
and vaunted to the skies the physical benefit and moral significance of
tubbing, nobody in Europe washed much.  It will be remembered that in
1712, thirty-seven years after Pre Marquette's death in the
wilderness, Addison's "Citizen of London" notes on alternate days in
his diary: "Tuesday.  Washed hands and face."  "Wednesday.  Washed
hands, but not face."  Thus carefully avoiding extremes.

There is all the difference in the world, however, between washing now
and then and not washing at all.  The Indians, save for a few sick
Sioux who had their ailments sweated out of them, considered bathing as
a summer experience.  In hot weather they plunged into the streams and
pools.  In cold weather they just as naturally kept out of them.  It
was part of the Jesuit discipline to take no notice of this or of other
savage idiosyncrasies; and the studied politeness of the missionary's
bearing found favor in the eyes of a {234} proud and sensitive race
which was never without an understanding and appreciation of dignity.

The dominant motive underlying all these minor considerations was, of
course, fear of the Iroquois.  Only France was able to cope with this
terrible foe who conquered, not by means of superior numbers, but by
sheer force of will and ferocity.  So overwhelming was the terror they
inspired that when the trembling Hurons asked Pre Le Jeune if the
Iroquois could ever be admitted into the Christian Paradise, and he
said yes, they refused to be baptized.  The happy hunting ground of the
savage was purely parochial.  No outsiders were admitted.  The Hurons
would not risk Heaven in company with their ancient enemy.

Fear was forgotten and hope was paramount when Pre Marquette entered
Kaskaskia, his last mission, and one that rivaled in beauty St.
Franois Xavier and the Sault de Ste. Marie.  Here were no glittering
cascades like the Sault, no steep rocks and wooded banks like those of
St. Franois; but a quiet river and broad prairies, broken here and
there with groves of oak and chestnut.  The village lay back from the
shore, {235} sheltered and half hidden by trees, well built, and very
populous even for an Indian settlement.  It comprised--counting as
Indians count--six hundred fires, that is six hundred families, all
well stocked with children.  The braves numbered fifteen hundred.  The
fishing was fair, the hunting good.  Pelts were bartered for guns,
tobacco, hardware, and coveted finery.

Happy to have reached his destination, and conscious that the sands of
his life ran fast, Pre Marquette lost no time in getting to work.  He
went from wigwam to wigwam, ascertaining the temper of the savages,
their intelligence, and their good-will.  He conversed with the elders
smoking in small and solemn circles, with the squaws diligently weaving
rush mats like the one which had been sent him in the woods, with the
young men enacting, in Indian fashion, the roles of idle and
industrious apprentices.  The industriously disposed fashioned
arrowheads (guns were costly and rare), bound them to their shafts with
buffalo sinews, and polished their well-oiled bows.  The idle gambled
like Hogarth's youths, using pebbles or cherry stones instead of coins,
and staking all they possessed--including {236} occasionally their
docile wives.  It was a noteworthy circumstance of village life that
the savages seldom quarreled among themselves.  Their quarters were
close, and they must have been continually in one another's way.  We
cannot imagine councils without dissension, hunting and courtship
without rivalry, games of chance without occasional discord.  But these
untutored redskins could have given to any nation of Europe a lesson in
harmonious relations.  Being always threatened with danger from
without, they knew the need of unity within.

Having acquainted himself in some measure with his flock, Pre
Marquette proceeded to give a series of _confrences_, simple
instructions to small groups of braves, usually men of mature years and
seeming importance.  Finding them well disposed, he took heart and
arranged for a great council to be held with all the pomp and ceremony
that Indians prize.  His preparations were the more lavish because this
meeting was meant as a prelude to the work his successor must carry on.
He was breaking the ground and sowing the seed.  The harvest, he was
aware, would be gathered by other hands than his.

{237}

A wide, unsheltered prairie was chosen as the site for the council.  It
was held at Easter time, under clear skies, and with the promise of
summer in the mild air.  All the rush mats and deerskins the village
afforded were spread upon the ground.  Pieces of Chinese taffeta, to
which were attached four large pictures of the Blessed Virgin, were
raised on high, and gazed at with fond delight by their possessor who
had brought them from St. Franois Xavier's, had protected them from
the rains and snows of winter, and had saved them from the floods of
spring.  Now Our Lady smiled down upon a curious and impressive scene.
Five hundred sachems sat in a circle around the priest.  A thousand
young braves stood in a larger circle beyond.  The squaws and children
pressed as close as they could.  The dogs, to their own wonderment,
found themselves excluded.  Pre Marquette spoke to this concourse of
the Faith, of its beauty and holiness, of France as the upholder of the
Faith, of his own affection for the Illinois which had brought him so
far to serve them.  He was the simplest of men, but he must have had
the art to make his meaning clear and his words persuasive.  The
Indians {238} listened attentively.  Ten gifts he made them, parting
with the last of his stores to lend emphasis to this great occasion.
Several of the chiefs replied with assurances of welcome and regard.
They expressed their desire for the protection of France, their
readiness to listen to the preacher, their hope that he would remain
and befriend them.

On Easter Sunday Pre Marquette said Mass in the open air with the
savages gathered about him.  He may have been heavy-hearted to think
that this field of work so long desired and so full of promise was to
be snatched from his failing hands.  Doubtless he recalled the two
villages of Illinois that he had striven to reach from La Pointe,
before the anger of the Sioux had driven him and his flock into exile;
and the great village on the banks of the Mississippi, where he and
Joliet had met so warm a welcome.  This was his third experience with
the Indians whom he had proudly called _les hommes_, and it was
destined to be as fleeting as its predecessors.  He knew himself to be
a dying man.  The last remnant of his strength had been expended upon
the council.  He would {239} never preach again.  He greatly desired to
confess and receive extreme unction before the end came.  He greatly
desired to see the face of a fellow priest by his bedside.  And with
all his heart he longed to plead the cause of the Illinois and of the
new mission, which he had christened the Immaculate Conception, before
his superiors.  It was, he felt sure, worthy of their utmost endeavors.

The chiefs were reluctant to see him go.  Again and again he told them
of the good-will of France.  Again and again he adjured them to
remember his words, and to receive with kindness the successor whom he
promised to send them.  They listened silently to all he said.  They
appointed a bodyguard to accompany him as far as possible on his way.
They gave him as much food as his canoe could carry.  They bade him
farewell with serious and respectful solicitude.

Pre Dablon's account of the homeward journey, taken of course from the
reports of the two boatmen, is detailed without being explicit.  We
know that Michillimackinac was their destination, and that the eastern
shore of Lake Michigan {240} was unfamiliar to any of the party.
Parkman says it was a savage and desolate land.  Pre Dablon says
nothing whatever about it.  The sick priest could give no help in
paddling.  He lay prostrate in the canoe, saying now and then a few
words of encouragement, and rallying his spiritual forces for the end.
Every day he murmured the rosary, and every night one of the men read
to him the exercise of his order.  The care with which they tended him
proved his hold upon their hearts.  They ardently desired to escape
from the solitude that hemmed them in; but, strive as they might, their
progress was slow, and death was bound to outstrip them in the race.

On the 18th of May the canoe passed the mouth of a small and rapid
stream with sloping banks.  On the left shore was a gentle eminence
crowned by oaks.  Pre Marquette asked his companions to land.  His
hour had come, and the little hill would make a fitting site for his
grave.  Quickly they beached the canoe, and with the practised
dexterity of woodsmen built a shed of saplings, branches, and bark.  To
this poor shelter they carried the dying man, and laid him on a mat by
the side of a freshly lighted fire.  When he had {241} rallied a little
he gave them a few simple directions for his burial, thanked them for
the care and devotion they had shown him ("the charities which they had
exercised in his behalf"), and confessed them both--his last priestly
function.  Then he bade them sleep, saying he would call them, or ring
his little mass bell, when he grew worse.  Three hours later they heard
the summons and hastened to his side.  He whispered to one of them to
take the crucifix from his neck, and hold it before his eyes.  Faintly
he breathed familiar words of prayer: "_Sustinuit anima mea in verbo
ejus_."  "_Mater Dei, memento mei_."  When he ceased, and the watchers
thought the spirit had fled, one of them cried in a loud voice, "Jesus,
Mary."  At the sound of those beloved names Pre Marquette's eyes
opened wide.  Distinctly he repeated them: "Jesus, Mary," and died.

It was a fitting end to a life of unostentatious sacrifice.  And it was
an end crowned, as life had been, by all that makes the value of
existence.  Pre Marquette was a humble toiler in the field, but that
which had been given him to do he had accomplished.  He had surrendered
in {242} youth those natural ties that bind men happily to earth, but
he had won affection wherever he went.  He died on the bare ground in a
savage solitude; but grief watched by his bed, and tears of sorrow fell
upon his grave.




{243}

_Chapter XVI_

WHAT FOLLOWED PRE MARQUETTE'S DEATH

To the mission of St. Ignace at Michillimackinac the two boatmen, whom
we know as Pierre and Jacques, carried the tidings of Pre Marquette's
death.  They brought with them his last fragmentary diary and his few
poor possessions, save only his crucifix and his rosary, which were
buried with him.  They told of the winter in the woods, of the brief
sojourn at Kaskaskia, of the great council and the friendliness of the
Indians, of the journey homeward, the death in the wilderness, the
grave marked by a wooden cross on the shores of Lake Michigan.  One of
them recounted with tears how the day after the burial he had been
smitten with a violent illness which unfitted him for traveling, and
how he had knelt by the new-made grave praying for recovery, and
reverently pressing a piece of the sod to his {244} laboring breast.
Immediately the sickness abated and the pain ceased.  Moreover, the
natural sorrow which had filled his heart was changed into a joy which
did not forsake him during the remainder of his journey.  After giving
their testimony and saying farewell to St. Ignace, the men disappear
forever from the _Relations_.  Their task was done, their tale was
told, and nothing remains to us but an ineffaceable record of fidelity.

For two years the body of Pre Marquette lay by the lonely lake.  The
site of the grave was well known to wandering Indians, and little by
little legends clustered about it.  These were told by savage to
savage, and finally by savage to white man.  Pre Charlevoix repeats
them seriously.  Parkman says that in 1847 an old Algonquin squaw
remembered to have heard in her childhood how the waters of the little
river rose and encircled the mound, making it an islet; and how the
boatmen were fed miraculously in the wilderness, having been promised
by the priest that they should never want.

In 1677 a party of Kiskakon Indians, a feeble tribe allied to the
Ottawas, was hunting on the shores of Lake Michigan.  Some of them had
been {245} instructed by Pre Marquette when he was toiling in the
melancholy mission of St. Esprit; and he had left, according to his
wont, an ineffaceable impression upon their minds.  They saw the wooden
cross which marked their friend's grave, and they resolved to carry his
bones away from this desolate spot, and restore them to his countrymen
at St. Ignace.  When the spring came this resolution was fulfilled.
The Indians disinterred the body, cleansed the bones according to their
custom, dried them carefully in the sun, packed them in a rude box of
birch bark, and started on their journey to Michillimackinac.  Other
canoes joined the little fleet.  A common purpose drew the savages
together.  Even a few Iroquois added their numbers; and on the 8th of
June the missionaries of St. Ignace saw a procession of thirty canoes
moving slowly and in orderly fashion toward their "island of note" at
the junction of the two lakes.

Pre Henri Nouvelle and Pre Philippe Pieron, who were in charge of
the mission, embarked in a canoe and went out to meet their visitors.
Word had reached them of the Indians' purpose, and they carefully
questioned the Kiskakons {246} to make sure that they really had the
remains of Pre Marquette in their keeping.  Convinced on this point,
they intoned the _De Profundis_, and led the procession to the shore,
which was lined with waiting savages.  The birch-bark casket was
carried into the log chapel, and lay there, covered with a pall, for
twenty-four hours.  Then, after a requiem mass had been sung, it was
buried beneath the chapel floor.  Indians came in numbers to pray by
the grave, sure that the kind priest would never forget them and never
refuse his aid.

Two years after the interment, La Salle's schooner, the _Griffin_,
sailed into the quiet port of St. Ignace, and her commander--a splendid
figure in his scarlet cloak--knelt devoutly by the missionary's tomb.
A very different visitor this from anyone the mission had ever received
before.  His ship, strongly if clumsily built, carried five small
cannon which roared a most disconcerting and terrifying salute.  The
carved monster at her prow had the air of an angry manitou.  To Indian
eyes this "floating fort" was a marvel of marvels.  They swarmed about
her in their canoes, wondering, admiring, fearing, and {247} devoutly
wishing her elsewhere.  Little they dreamed that she was destined to be
shorter lived than the frailest of the frail barks that danced on the
quiet waters, and that her disappearance would always remain a mystery.
Laden with furs she was sent by La Salle to Niagara, and was never
heard of again.  Her loss was one of the heaviest blows of his brave
and calamitous life.  He believed that she was treacherously sunk by
her own crew, who stole her cargo; and this belief was strengthened by
a story that reached him of white men carrying valuable furs who had
been plundered and killed by nomadic savages in the country of the
Sioux.  The evidence was inconclusive, but the tragedy was one of
everyday occurrence.  It was at no time an easy matter to convey stolen
goods over the Canadian wilds.

In 1700 the St. Ignace chapel was burned down.  Frontenac the great had
died two years before, and the Iroquois, who had respected and feared
him, permitted themselves to grow arrogant when the weight of his
authority and the certainty of his reprisals no longer dominated their
councils.  Pre Engelran, then head of the Michillimackinac mission,
was an adroit {248} peace-maker who had been employed several times on
difficult and dangerous errands.  Now the new governor, Callires, sent
him to persuade the scattered tribes of the North to come to the
council at Montreal, and to consent to an exchange of captives.  In
this he was eminently successful (save that the Iroquois failed to keep
any of the promises they made), and the council was attended by more
than thirteen hundred savages, representing thirty-one tribes.
Callires addressed them in French, and the Jesuit interpreters
repeated his words in as many languages as they knew.  The presentation
of thirty-one belts of wampum was followed by many peaceful speeches
and by much secret disagreement; by elaborate ceremonies, by smoking,
feasting, and a smothered sense of discontent.  "Thus," says the French
chronicler, La Pothrie, "were the labors of Count Frontenac brought to
a happy consummation."  He thought so, doubtless; but the authority of
Frontenac was missing.  No one else could compel the Iroquois to play a
fair game.

When Pre Engelran returned to Michillimackinac, he found his chapel in
ruins, and set himself to build a new and larger one on a {249}
different site.  Pre Marquette's bones were left undisturbed; and as
the years went by, and the mission grew into a great trading station,
their whereabouts was forgotten.  Men had as little thought of the
priest as of the trader who had opened for them the waters of the
Mississippi.  It took a more leisurely generation to call to mind the
importance of the service they had rendered.  As the West expanded, and
cities sprang up in the wilderness they had traversed, the names of
Marquette and Joliet became familiar words to thousands of Americans.
Finally, in 1877 it occurred to the rector of St. Ignace to search
under the site of the old log chapel for the missionary's remains.  He
found some small fragments of bone which had been interred there two
hundred years before.  Part of these relics are now preserved in the
church of St. Ignace, and part in the Marquette Jesuit College of
Milwaukee.

The character of Pre Marquette is so distinctly outlined in his diary,
in the records of his fellow missionaries, and in the few salient
events of his life, that we see him as clearly as if we knew a great
deal instead of very little about him.  {250} Simple, sincere, ardent,
and sanguine, he reached by virtue of sympathy the understanding that
older and more astute men gain by experience.  He was able to throw
himself into the lives of others, see with their eyes, hear with their
ears, feel with their hearts.  "He was a Frenchman with the French,"
wrote Pre Dablon, "a Huron with the Hurons, an Algonquin with the
Algonquins.  He disclosed his mind with childlike candor to his
superiors, and he was open and ingenuous in his dealings with all men."
His singular tranquillity was the fruit of his confidence in God.  "I
have no fear and no anxiety," he wrote from La Pointe.  "One of two
things must happen.  Either God will adjudge me a coward, or He will
give me a share in His cross, which I have not yet carried since I came
to this land.  I hold myself surrendered to His will."

The line, "His cross, which I have not yet carried," written in the
beginning of the missionary's career, is a little like the line, "We
also lived very pleasantly," written at its close.  It took a good deal
to make Pre Marquette feel that he was having a bad time.  Yet the
outward circumstances of his brave and toilsome existence {251} were
for the most part frankly unendurable.  Twenty-three years ago a
cheerful American author published in _Harper's Magazine_ a paper
entitled "The Pleasant Life of Pre Marquette."  I read that paper to
learn what the word "pleasant" implied, and found that the writer was
not referring to inward grace or to outward accomplishment.  He seemed
to think that two hundred and fifty years ago a missionary's days and
nights might be agreeably spent among the savages of North America, and
that the Canadian woods were a little like the forest of Arden:

  Under the greenwood tree
  Who loves to lie with me,
  And tune his merry note
  Unto the sweet bird's throat?

That Pre Marquette died at thirty-eight from exposure and bad food,
and that he suffered greatly for two years before he died, are facts
worthy of consideration.  It is the noble privilege of the pioneer to
make light of hardships (otherwise there would have been no pioneers);
but we who love comfort and worship luxury are not warranted in sharing
this point of view.

The Harper article was illustrated with {252} drawings of early maps
which needed only a little elucidation to make them deeply interesting.
All the reproductions of Pre Marquette's map of the Mississippi differ
from one another.  Sometimes the river staggers along, a faint and
wavering, line.  Sometimes, as in Thvenot's amended map, it runs
straight as a poker.  Sometimes a couple of lakes are dimly outlined on
a scale that suggests immensity.  A charming map of Michillimackinac,
the work of an unknown hand, has rows of wigwams, and a neat little
fishing fleet of canoes inscribed "_La Pche du Poisson Blanc_."  This
follows the old ingenious and instructive method of map making.  It
needs only the words "_brumeuse_," "_tnbres_," "_froidure_," to
complete the information which adventurous voyagers required.

The good-will which Pre Marquette encountered wherever he went, the
faithful service given him, the friendships that cheered him on his
way, and the ineffable serenity that brooded over his last hours--these
things were not in accord with the usual fate of explorers.  For the
most part they did not deserve them, but when they did, fortune too
often ruled adversely.  The {253} great and cruel Spaniards reaped the
harvest of hate that they sowed; but the Frenchman, La Salle, was
defeated by circumstance.  Like Champlain he dreamed of a passage
through the "Vermilion Sea" to the coveted coast of China.  Like
Champlain he was a superb adventurer, meeting the unknown with joyful
defiance, and the known with tried and true courage.  Like Champlain he
was a ready fighter and an indifferent trader.  Both men added to the
power and prestige of France; but from the point of view of the French
Treasury both men were unsatisfactory.

By the side of these makers of history Pre Marquette's place in
American annals is small and well defined.  His name is indelibly
associated with La Salle's because the Mississippi was for both the
river of fate.  If to the priest and to Joliet belong the glory of
discovering its northern waters, La Salle took up the perilous voyage
at the point where they turned back, and followed it to the sea.  The
Arkansas and the Natchez Indians befriended him, a circumstance which
Pre Membr, who was his companion for many months, attributed to his
tactful and engaging {254} manner with savages.  This Rcollet
missionary was a firm friend, an apt writer, and an all too venturesome
hunter.  His nave amazement that such fearsome creatures as alligators
should be hatched from eggs like ducklings was equalled by his unwise
contempt for wounded buffaloes.  He gave one of them a careless poke
with the butt of his gun, and the justly incensed animal delayed dying
long enough to knock him down and trample upon him so vigorously that
he was three months recovering from his injuries.

The story of La Salle's colony at Starved Rock, of La Barre's stupid
and jealous hostility, of the visit to France and the generous help
accorded by Louis XIV (who knew a man when he saw one), of the unhappy
quarrel with Beaujeu, the commander of the little fleet, of the storms
that swept the Gulf of Mexico, and the failure to find the mouth of the
Mississippi--these things are matters of history.  From the day that La
Salle landed at Matagorda Bay until the shameful moment when he was
ambushed and shot by two of his own sailors, disaster followed disaster
with cruel monotony.  What his proud and sensitive spirit must have
endured in those months no one {255} knows; but we have the word of
Joutel, the engineer and an honest man, that his heart was high and his
outward calm unbroken.  His death was unavenged, no steps being taken
to punish his assassins beyond an order for their arrest should they
return to Canada to be arrested, which they were not in the least
likely to do.  Indeed, two of the six were promptly murdered by their
accomplices.  It is as bloody and brutal a tale as any that pioneer
annals have to tell.

Pre Charlevoix, who can find no praise keen enough for La Salle's
heroic qualities, his resolution, resourcefulness, and endurance,
laments that he should have lacked one virtue essential to the
adventurer, the art of inspiring confidence in his associates.  No man
is so wise that he can afford always to reject advice, and no man is so
self-sufficing that he can afford always to dispense with affection.
La Salle was "_juste mais pas bon_."  If, as Pre Membr asserts, he
showed tact in dealing with savages, he consistently refused in his
intercourse with white men to soften the harsh contacts of life.
Haughty and autocratic, he brooked no criticism of his plans and no
opposition to his will.  He was but forty-four when he {256} died, and
he had crowded into a few years the work of a dozen lifetimes.  "To
estimate aright the marvels of his patient fortitude," says Parkman,
"one must follow his track through the vast scene of his interminable
journeyings--thousands of weary miles of forest, marsh, and river,
where again and again, in the bitterness of baffled striving, the
untiring pilgrim pushed onward toward the goal which he was never to
attain.  America owes him an enduring memory; for in this masculine
figure she sees the pioneer who guided her to the possession of her
richest inheritance."

America has cherished the memories and perpetuated the names of all her
pioneers.  To these men of incarnate energy and will she owes the
fullness and keenness, no less than the subjugating luxuries, of modern
life.  They awaken our amazed regard, they shame our puny energies:

  A short life in the saddle, Lord,
        Not long life by the fire.

was their inspiring choice.  The magic quality of physical danger which
"doubles the strength of the strong, the craft of the cunning, the
nobility {257} of the noble," made them the wonder-workers of the
wilderness.  Layman as well as priest mocked at hardships.  Priest as
well as layman courted wild hazards.  Pre Brbeuf and Pre Jogues were
warned to fly before the hostile Iroquois; but they found that path
impossible.  They were drawn to peril as we are drawn to safety, for it
was in the teeth of peril that souls were to be saved.  Pre Marquette,
who had always before his eyes the life and death of St. Franois
Xavier, conceived that, by comparison with his great exemplar, his own
days were ignominiously safe, and at least comparatively comfortable.
Yet to him also privation was a privilege and danger a lodestar.  His
life cannot be reasonably called a pleasant one; but perhaps it came as
near to being happy as it is in the nature of human life to be.




{258}

_Chapter XVII_

THE QUESTION OF AUTHENTICITY

Exception has been taken to the use of the word "journal" as applied to
Pre Marquette's account of the Mississippi expedition.  It has been
pointed out that the narrative is not, meticulously speaking, a diary;
the entries are not dated properly and consecutively; we are left, not
merely in doubt, but in ignorance, as to the exact days on which many
of the events occurred.  The most that can be claimed for it is that it
presents a continuous report, expanded from such rough notes as could
be jotted down day by day on the difficult and hazardous voyage which
presented few opportunities for tranquil composition.  It is on this
understanding that what is really a chronicle--though written sometimes
in the present tense--has been alluded to by historians as a journal;
and it is on this understanding that the word journal is used by Edna
Kenton in editing {259} The _Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents_,
published in 1925.  The admirable arrangement of this volume, the
clearness of the type and the thoroughness of the indexing, make it as
agreeable as it is serviceable to the student.  Miss Kenton points out
in her introduction that most of the documents she presents were
written under circumstances which precluded finish or dignity of style.
She marvels that such direct, vivid, and illuminating pages should have
been penned "amid a chaos of distractions."

More revolutionary, however, than all the protests urged against the
use of the word "journal," the use of the word "discovery," and the use
of the word "leader," is the theory advanced by the Reverend Francis
Steck that Pre Marquette never wrote the narrative published under his
name.  The only evidence that can be adduced in support of this theory
is the undoubted fact that no manuscript of the so-called journal in
the priest's handwriting is known to exist.  But if all authorship were
denied on such ground, what masses of prose and verse, ascribed
confidently to writers dead and gone this many a year, would stand
orphaned before the world.  Father Steck's {260} other arguments are
unconvincing.  He points out that the title of the report sent to
France by Pre Dablon, and published by Thvenot in 1681, reads:
_Narrative of the Voyages and Discoveries of Father James Marquette of
the Society of Jesus, in the year 1673, and the following_, and not
"Narrative _written_ by Father James Marquette," which would have been
conclusive.  But as the priest speaks of himself throughout its pages
in the first person--"Monsieur Joliet and I held another council to
deliberate upon what we should do."  "I told the people of the
Folle-Avoine of my design to go and discover those remote nations that
I might teach them the Mysteries of our holy Religion"--there can have
been no doubt in the minds of Thvenot or of his public as to the
authorship of the journal.

The internal evidence cited by Father Steck is even less conclusive.
He does not, for example, think that Pre Marquette would have likened
the bone of a fish to a woman's busk.  The comparison appears to him an
unseemly one.  Nor does he think that the priest would have written of
the calumet dance: "The slow and measured steps, the rhythmic sound of
the voices and {261} drums, might pass for a fine opening of a ballet
in France."  What should a pious missionary know of French ballets?
Very little, evidently, if he thought the solemn Indian rite resembled
one.  But is the allusion to a ballet or a busk (neither of them things
intrinsically evil) so disconcerting as to cast doubt upon the
authenticity of a manuscript?  Heaven forbid that I should accuse Pre
Marquette--of all men who ever walked the earth--of indecorum!  But it
does seem to me that, after seven years' face to face acquaintance with
the crude lusts of savagery, a priest might cease to be mincing in his
speech, might even come to think of busks and ballets as harmless
appurtenances of civilization.

Father Steck's hypothesis would be incomplete if he did not find an
author for the journal which he denies to Pre Marquette.  "The
function of historical criticism," he admits, "is not only to tear
down, but also to build up."  And, having torn down the missionary, he
proceeds to build up in his place the ever serviceable Joliet.  His
supposition briefly stated is this.  Pre Marquette never kept a diary
or wrote a report of the expedition.  Although a faithful {262}
correspondent when there was nothing in particular to relate, he
elected to be silent when he knew that he would be called on to recount
the one important adventure of his life.  Joliet, on the other hand,
wrote two reports, one of which he carried with him on his disastrous
journey to Montreal, and the other he left in Pre Marquette's keeping
at Green Bay.  After the shipwreck in the La Chine rapids, Pre Dablon
wrote to Green Bay asking for the missionary's journal to supply the
needed information.  Pre Marquette was "disconcerted," as well he
might be, because he had kept no journal; but he sent in its place the
copy of Joliet's report with a few added notes of his own.  Pre
Dablon, conceiving the interests of his order to be of greater worth
than his honesty as a priest or his honor as a man, rewrote the
narrative under Pre Marquette's name, and sent it under Pre
Marquette's name to Paris.  As a consequence it was published in 1681
as Pre Marquette's journal, and has been accepted as Pre Marquette's
journal ever since.

It is an ingenious theory, but it leaves a good deal unexplained.  Why
did Joliet write to Frontenac that, having lost two men and his box
{263} of papers, nothing remained to him but his life and an ardent
desire to employ it in any service the governor might direct, when what
_did_ remain was a perfectly good copy of the lost documents?  Why did
he not tell Frontenac that there was this safe and sound copy
which--the waterways being open--could have been easily procured from
Green Bay?  Why did he say nothing about it when he wrote, at
Frontenac's request, his imperfect recollections of the expedition?
Why did he say nothing about it when he wrote on the 10th of October,
1674, to Monseigneur de Laval: "Only for the shipwreck, Your Grace
should have a curious relation.  Nothing, however, was left but life."
Finally, why did Pre Marquette begin the unfinished journal of his
last voyage with a memorandum stating that he had received orders to
proceed to the mission of La Conception among the Illinois, and that,
in compliance with his superior's request, he had sent him "copies of
my journal concerning the Mississippi river."  And why, when the
journal was published by Thvenot, did not Joliet expose the fraud, and
claim the manuscript as his own?

Mr. Andrew Lang, in one of his critical {264} papers, alludes to the
plays "fondly attributed to Shakespeare by his contemporaries."  It
does present a certain basis for belief.  The journal fondly attributed
to Pre Marquette by his contemporaries, and by successive generations
of readers, remains his journal unless some conclusive evidence of
another hand be presented to the world.  The question of leadership is
of no importance.  The question of discovery or rediscovery is of no
importance.  The question of authorship is of supreme importance,
involving, as it does, the truthfulness of Pre Marquette, the honesty
of Pre Dablon, and the common sense of Joliet.  It is an easy matter
to accuse a man who has been dead for several centuries of fraud, but
it is a sorry thing to do on the strength of a conjecture.  It is an
easy thing to say that a man did not write a work attributed to him,
but it is doubtful wisdom to say it unless there be proof to offer.
The noble tradition of profound research, lucid thinking, and balanced
accuracy which is the scholar's heritage gives to speculation its place
in the free world of thought, but accepts no conclusions which are not
based upon evidence.




{265}

_Chapter XVIII_

"THE INDIANS OF THE PRAYER"

The earliest mention of the Illinois in Pre Marquette's letters occurs
when he was stationed at the mission of La Pointe, on Chequamegon Bay.
They had not then captured his heart and fancy; but he had encountered
some hunters of the tribe who seemed to be "of a tolerably good
disposition," and he had begun to study their language.  The one thing
definite and unusual that he had to say about them was that they "kept
their word inviolate."

I have already pointed out that missionaries and traders were, as a
rule, less biased in favor of these intelligent Indians than was Pre
Marquette.  La Salle placed little confidence in their friendship; but
it was La Salle's unhappy fate to be forever disappointed in his
friends.  Pre Charlevoix wrote about them with ill-concealed {266}
irritation.  What annoyed him was that they could not be brought to see
their own shortcomings, in which respect they were remarkably like all
civilized nations to-day.  He enumerated their many bad
qualities--fickleness, treachery, deceit, thievishness, brutality, and
gluttony.  He was convinced that other tribes disliked and despised
them.  But were they humbled or cast down on that account?  Not a whit!
They were "as haughty and self-complacent" as if they had been the
model Indians of North America.  But--and it is the biggest "but" on
record in these pages--once converted to Christianity, they mended
their ways and never relapsed into heathenism; and once allies of
France, they never went over to her foes.

So was Pre Marquette justified in his trust.  Pre Charlevoix admitted
that the Illinois were "the only savages that never sought peace with
their enemies to our prejudice."  This loyalty was all the more
praiseworthy because it was unusual.  The Indians pursued as a rule a
wavering and childish policy in their relations with the warring white
men.  They were capricious foes and uneasy friends, as troublesome
often in one role {267} as in the other.  But the Illinois stood firm
in their allegiance, realizing intelligently that France was their only
bulwark against the Iroquois.  In return the French did all in their
power to protect them.  The indomitable Henri de Tonty, bravest and
wiliest of fighters, received a grievous wound at the hands of an
Iroquois warrior while pleading their cause in the enemy's camp.
Parkman gives a ghastly account of La Salle nearing the Mississippi in
1680, and finding in a trampled meadow the half-consumed bodies of
Illinois squaws bound to stakes, and all the other hideous tokens of a
prolonged orgy of torture.  Scattered members of the tribe joined his
colony at Starved Rock in 1682, placing themselves gladly under his
protection.  It is said that this ill-omened spot owed its name to a
band of Illinois braves who took refuge on its summit from the
encircling Pottawattamies, and who perished there of starvation rather
than yield to their foes.

One cause of good-will between the French and these faithful allies was
the fact that a number of Canadian settlers married women of the tribe,
finding them "intelligent and tractable," {268} the latter quality
induced no doubt by the discipline to which they had been subjected.
When in 1725 it was thought advisable to send a small party of friendly
warriors to France, the Illinois chief, Chikagou, was one of the number
chosen.  These splendid "savages of the Mississippi" were much admired
and fted in Paris, and went back laden with gifts.  The Duchess
d'Orlans presented Chikagou with a handsome snuffbox, which
unserviceable _cadeau_ was cherished by the urbane chief as his most
precious possession.  He refused to part with it to would-be buyers,
even for tobacco.  "An unusual circumstance among Indians," comments
one of the missionaries.  "For the most part, they quickly tire of what
they have, and passionately desire what they see but do not possess."
One more proof--if proof were needed--of the universal sameness of
mankind.

In still another regard the Illinois chief resembled the travelled
gentleman of to-day.  He wanted naturally to tell his people of the
wonders he had seen; of the height of the French houses, five cabins
piled one on top of another until they reached the summit of the
tallest tree; of the {269} multitude of people in the streets, as
numerous as blades of grass on the prairies or mosquitoes in the woods;
of the strange huts made of leather and drawn by horses in which men
and women went on journeys; of the French king's palace at Versailles.
What, one wonders, could a North American Indian have thought, or said,
of Versailles!  It would have been an unalloyed pleasure for poor
Chikagou to talk of these things if only his hearers could have been
brought to credit them; but this they refused to do.  They said simply
that they did not believe in such marvels, and went their scornful way.

It was after the Louisiana massacre in 1730 (two hundred French
settlers killed by the Natchez Indians, aided and abetted by the
supposedly friendly Yazous) that the fidelity of the Illinois was
tested and stood the test.  The Tchikachas, always restless and
hostile, thought this a good time to seduce them from their fealty; but
the Illinois, wise as well as staunch, refused all proposals, and sent
a delegation to New Orleans to express their grief at the massacre, and
their unbroken loyalty to France.  Chikagou accompanied this
delegation.  He brought with {270} him two calumets, differently
decorated, which he laid on a mat of deerskin edged with porcupine
quills.  "Here," he said, "are two messages, one of religion, and one
of peace or war as you shall determine....  We have come a great
distance to weep with you for the death of the French, and to offer our
warriors to strike those hostile nations whom you may wish to
designate.  You have but to speak.  _We are of the prayer_.  Grant then
your protection to us and to our black-robes."

It was a triumphant hour for the spirit of the little dead missionary
lying in his forgotten grave at St. Ignace.

If there still survive Americans who remember reading "Hiawatha" when
they were young, they may have recognized in the flowery speech of the
Illinois chief to Pre Marquette and Joliet the words of welcome which
Longfellow put into the mouth of his hero when the first priest, "With
the cross upon his bosom," came drifting to the shore.  Shea's
_Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley_, which was
published three years before "Hiawatha," contains the full text of Pre
Marquette's journal in French and {271} in English.  With this text
Longfellow was evidently familiar.  The superb extravagance of the
chief's remarks seemed to him natural and reasonable in the mouth of a
friendly savage, and he turned them into the balanced singsong of his
verse:

  Then the joyous Hiawatha
  Cried aloud and spoke in this wise:
    "Never bloomed the earth so gayly,
  Never shone the sun so brightly
  As to-day they shine and blossom,
  When you come so far to see us.
  Never was our lake so tranquil,
  Nor so free from rocks and sand-bars;
  For your birch canoe in passing
  Has removed both rock and sand-bar.
    Never before had our tobacco
  Such a sweet and pleasant flavor,
  Never the broad leaves of our corn-fields
  Were so beautiful to look on,
  As they seem to us this morning,
  When you come so far to see us."


It may be cynically observed that the warmth of Hiawatha's greeting is
robbed of its personal flavor by the fact that he himself was departing
at once from the land to which he so cordially {272} welcomed the
stranger.  He bequeathed the black-robe as a blessing to his people;
but he took himself as fast and as far as he could from the
encroachments of civilization.  Nevertheless, it is pleasant to record
that the name of Pre Marquette, who is briefly mentioned in a note to
"Hiawatha," is indelibly associated with a poem which has been read for
many years, translated into many tongues, and accepted by many
Americans as an epic of Indian life and of the noblest Indian
traditions.

The survival of such traditions was attested over and over again by
missionaries who could not have cherished many illusions about the
savages they knew so well; but who were, nevertheless, as I have
pointed out, their most generous critics.  When the romance with which
poets and novelists had encircled the red man faded in the cold north
light of history, it became the fashion, and has remained the fashion,
to strip him bare of every vestige of goodness.  The list of his
misdeeds is naturally a long one.  I find an English biographer, Mr. F.
J. Huddleston, author of _Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne_, quoting with
approval the sweeping charges of Mr. J. W. Steele, {273} and declaring
them applicable to every generation of North American Indians:

"Brave only in superior numbers or in ambush, honest only in being a
consummate hypocrite, merry only at the sight of suffering inflicted by
his own hand, friendly only through cunning, and hospitable never;
above all sublimely mendacious and a liar always, the Indian, as he
really is to those who, unfortunately, know him, seems poor material
out of which to manufacture a hero, or frame a romance.  The one
redeeming fact upon his record is that he has never been tamed and
never been a servant.  Neither has the hyena."

It is always easier to be calumniatory than discriminating; but even
allowing for the deterioration caused by intercourse with white men,
this picture seems a trifle overdrawn.  The Indians were certainly
cruel, as are all savage people.  They were liars, as are most people,
savage and civilized.  They were friendly to their friends, as are all
the people of the world.  But to deny them hospitality and courage is
to run counter to evidence.  Of course they fought from ambush when
they could do so.  Fighting was not for them {274} anything resembling
cricket.  It was not the thin red line of courage.  It was a grim,
unpitying affair, carrying infinite possibilities of disaster.  They
loved it because they had the instinct of untutored men; but they would
not have loved it if they had not possessed some quality of courage.
The circumstances under which they fought made them in their simple
fashion strategists; and Mr. Huddleston himself admits that strategy,
when practised by savages, is commonly spoken of as treacherous.

Unhappily for the Indian's reputation, the one offense of which he was
guiltless was authorship.  The white man did all the telling.  We know
about his side of the question; but for the red man's side we depend
upon an occasional speech (probably misquoted) in council.  If the
native American could have penned year by year the annals of his people
since the first coming of the European, what reading it would have made
even for Mr. Steele!  The history of the Cherokee Indians in Georgia
(one instance out of many) is tragic with injustice.  The partition of
their land--granted them by the federal government--was like the
partition of Poland on a pitifully {275} small scale.  Yet John
Marshall was their only friend, and he was powerless to help them.

Mr. Huddleston says that Mr. Steele is "a great authority on Indians,"
but so were the Jesuits who lived and died among them, and whose
records are as free from sentiment as from hostility.  It would not
have been easy to wax sentimental over savages whose personal habits
were so remarkably offensive to the eyes, ears, and noses of the
civilized.  Yet the missionaries, after years of dreadfully close
contact, admitted over and over again the existence of qualities which
compelled their admiration.  Pre Marquette, indeed, had always a
friendly word to say for his charges; but Pre Marquette was fairly
fortunate in his experiences, and very fortunate in his temper and
disposition.  Pre Brbeuf not only lived among Indians, but met his
death at their hands.  His voice deserves a hearing.

"The savages," he writes in the _Relations_, "are liars, thieves,
pertinacious beggars, and inordinately lazy.  Yet they understand how
to cement union among themselves.  On their return from fishing,
hunting, and trading, they exchange gifts.  If one has had better luck
than his {276} neighbors, he spreads a generous feast.  Their
hospitality is without bounds.  They never close their doors upon a
stranger, and, having once received him into their cabins, they share
with him whatever they chance to have.  Their patience in poverty,
famine, and sickness is beyond understanding.  I have seen this year
whole villages reduced to a small daily portion of sagamit; yet never
an irritable action, and never a word of complaint."

This is enough.  If there is one thing more than another which our
superb civilization understands it is the art of complaining.  The
crumpled rose leaf has become more than the hardiest body can endure.
Early in the present century, Henry Adams, who could complain with the
best of us, wrote in bitterness of spirit: "Prosperity never before
imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by
anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous,
querulous, unreasonable, and afraid."

This was in 1905.  In less than a quarter of a century we have grown
infinitely more prosperous and infinitely more powerful.  We have
learned what speed really is.  Mr. Adams did not {277} know the meaning
of the word.  Are we now even-tempered, self-controlled, tolerant,
reasonable, and fearless?  Has the eternal push, the coercive drive
which spins us on our way made us so nobly receptive to those qualities
which the best minds have bequeathed to the highest civilizations
that--seen from our lofty eminence--the savage and the hyena are one?
To the modern man who is intelligent enough to be modest it would seem
that the Indian who accepted without useless complaint what Santayana
calls "the brutal, innocent injustice of nature," had learned at least
part of the law of life, and was qualified to teach at least one lesson
to the nations which held him in scorn.




{278}

_Chapter XIX_

UNFADING HONORS OF THE DEAD

When Bancroft said of Pre Marquette: "The people of the West will
build his monument," he could have had no conception of the scale on
which his prophecy was to be fulfilled.  Literally and figuratively the
people of the West have built that monument over and over again, and
they are building it still.  In 1887 the state of Wisconsin was
authorized to place a statue of the explorer in the Hall of Fame in
Washington.  The work was done and well done by an Italian sculptor,
Signor Trentanove.  A bronze replica was erected in the town of
Marquette, Michigan.  A few years ago Chicago honored Pre Marquette
with an imposing monument, the work of Mr. Hermon A. MacNeil.  It
represents the missionary with upraised cross and outstretched arms, as
though in the act of preaching.  On one side of him stands the rugged
figure of Joliet; on the {279} other a North American Indian carrying
heavy burdens.  The bronze reliefs which embellish the Marquette
Building in Chicago, and which tell the tale of the discovery of the
upper waters of the Mississippi, are also the work of Mr. MacNeil.
They have a highly decorative quality, and serve to keep the memory of
the expedition and of its glorious results before the minds of men.

If all these representations appear a little dramatic, a little florid
and robust, it is because no one could hope to reproduce in bronze or
marble, or in the pages of any narrative, the simplicity which
characterized the Mississippi voyage, the meagerness of its
accessories, the directness of its procedure, the unassuming behavior
of its leaders.  Seven men in two birch-bark canoes traveled
twenty-five hundred miles in unknown waters and amid unknown lands,
with no accurate knowledge of their course, and no outfit that would be
considered an outfit in these days.  Of all the tributes that have been
paid to Pre Marquette, the most striking to my mind is the giving of
his name to a railway system in Michigan.  The mere sight of this
road's time tables, ornamented with a picture of a {280} particularly
snorty and smoke-blowing engine, makes one think anew of the two little
boats threading their slow and difficult way through the dangerous
currents of the Mississippi.  Had the priest been granted a prophetic
vision of this iron monster, it could not have amazed him more than the
hearing of his own name on travelers' lips.  Yet one of the clearest
images which Mr. Guedalla carried away with him from the West, and
inserted into that kaleidoscope medley of impressions and reflections
which he calls _Conquistador_, is the picture of a "big friendly Pre
Marquette train filling the entire perspective, as its tall polished
sides took the level light of a winter afternoon."  How little
perspective a small battered canoe would have filled!  The "Pre
Marquette Railway Company"!  What strange combinations and contrasts
our speeding world presents!

Two counties, five towns and villages, and one river bear the
missionary's name.  They are scattered through five states.  The river
is a little one, as American rivers go, and the villages have space and
time for spreading.  But the city of Marquette in Michigan combines the
allurements {281} of a summer resort with big docks on the south shore
of Lake Superior, and a spirited export of iron ore.  In Milwaukee the
Marquette University plays an important role, not only in the education
of youth, but in social service, and the "welfare" projects that keep a
busy city humming.  It gives every year a Certificate of Distinctive
Civic Service to the man or woman who has most benefited the community;
and this honor, though carrying with it no medal, no money, and no
notoriety, is highly prized by its recipient.

Finally, there seems to be an increasing desire to erect mementoes on
the sites sacred to Pre Marquette's last journey and last hours.
After the handful of bones had been disinterred from their grave at St.
Ignace, a marble monument--pronounced tasteless by most visitors--was
reared over the spot where they had lain.  This, however, is far from
satisfactory to Marquette University, which has resolved to build a
more imposing memorial on the shore of Lake Michigan.  The exact
locality of Pre Marquette's grave was long a matter of dispute, being
the kind of thing which people dispute about; but it {282} now seems
tolerably certain that the priest died and was buried near the present
city of Ludington on the eastern shore of the lake.  Here will be
erected a granite shaft overhanging the expanse of water upon which his
tired eyes rested day after day as the little boat bore him to his
appointed grave.

If Joliet has fewer monuments and no railway system to his credit, his
name is just as familiar to our generation.  It is borne by
half-a-dozen towns and villages in the United States and in Canada, and
by at least one city progressive enough to provide reading matter for
earnest Americans.  The capital of Will County, Illinois, and only
thirty-seven miles from Chicago, Joliet manufactures everything from
tin plates to steel.  Its limestone is among the best of limestones,
its prison is one of the handsomest in the state, and more barbed wire
(horrid stuff!) is made there than anywhere else in the country.  It
has articles written about it in serious periodicals: "Joliet
Recognizes its Boy Problem"; "History and Social Science Curriculum in
the Joliet Township High School"; "Practical Religion in Joliet: Church
Sponsors Athletic Association." {283} It has enlightened newspapers
that lay the blame for all youthful misconduct upon the city's
shoulders.  It has a "Greater Joliet Recreational Bureau," which sees
to it that boys and girls are taught "life recreational activities,"
with efficiency scores and efficiency prizes.  It is so modern and
up-to-date that even to read about its educational system makes one's
own serenely neglected childhood appear as remote as the childhood of
little Louis Joliet playing robustly in the snowdrifts of Quebec.

It is typical of the hold that Pre Marquette has taken upon the
popular mind that when in June, 1926, the sumptuous "Red Special"
carried the bishops and cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church to the
great congress in Chicago, more than one newspaper and periodical
seized the occasion to harken back to the first white man's dwelling
raised on the city's site--the forlorn cabin which sheltered the
missionary and his two boatmen in the winter of 1675.  The contrast
between the bare-legged and bedraggled fisherman who let down his nets
in the Lake of Gennesaret, and the Roman basilica which bears that
fisherman's name, is no sharper than the {284} contrast between the
shabby priest in his patched and stained cassock saying mass in a
windowless, chimneyless hut, and the pomp and splendor which
characterized the Chicago ceremonies.  A cross marks the spot where
those early masses were said, and where the long grim winter passed
"very pleasantly" for the sick man to whom spring was bringing a last
release.

Just as indicative of the tenacity with which we bear in mind our early
adventurers was the sending of American and French boys (winners of
oratorical contests on "The French Pioneers of America") into the far
Northwest to follow the trail of those brave and hardy men.  Jean
Nicollet, interpreter and peacemaker, who lived eight years among the
Algonquins; Radisson and Groseilliers, who may have looked unwittingly
upon the Mississippi; Pre Allouez, who explored the shores of Lake
Superior; La Salle the great; Tonty of the iron hand; Pre Marquette
and Joliet, discoverers of the unknown river; the names of these men,
and of many more, were beacon lights to the boys who read with delight
of their adventures, and who were made to understand the nature of the
debt we owe them.

{285}

M. Andr Maurois, who has told us--and shown us--how to write
biographies, says that in every life there is a hidden rhythm.  The
biographer's business is to discover this mysterious music, and to note
its correspondence with outward circumstances, its response to any
influence, seen or felt, which strikes an impelling note:

  Surely whoever speaks to me in the right voice, him or her
      I shall follow,
  As the water follows the moon, silently, with fluid footsteps,
      anywhere around the globe.

M. Maurois's conception of this command and submission goes deeper than
do Walt Whitman's beautiful lines.  He sees natural, spiritual, and
social forces play their part in coercing the human soul.  Throughout
Shelley's life, for example, there is the silver sheen, the permeating
power of water, which allures, threatens, provokes, and finally
prevails, freeing Ariel from bondage.

In the annals of Pre Marquette, short and simple as those of the poor,
the rhythm of life beats evenly and with uniform steadiness.  It is
true that only a few years of this life are exposed to our gaze.  Of
his childhood and youth we know {286} nothing.  Of his early manhood in
the Jesuits' schools of France we know nothing.  Of his first
missionary labors in Canada we have the imperfect record of a few
letters which grow longer and more detailed as the work expands.  Of
the two years into which were crowded his one great adventure, his one
supreme triumph, his one defeated desire, and his final surrender, we
know enough to satisfy us.  The letters, the narrative of the
Mississippi voyage, and the last journal are very much alike.  None of
them reveal the grace of authorship.  None of them show the faintest
trace of humor.  The North American woods were better set for tragic
than for comic happenings; but here as elsewhere there were contrasts
and absurdities at which other missionaries were only too glad to
laugh.  In fact, the need of laughter, and consequently the habit of
laughter, deepens with deepening discomfort and danger.  The humor of
the trenches, when the world was at war, amazed those only who were
unacquainted with this salutary truth.

The letters, the narrative, and the journal of Pre Marquette are the
work of an eager, yet sedate and scholarly man, patiently and minutely
{287} observant, gentle with the gentleness of understanding, wise with
the wisdom of sobriety.  Above and beyond all, they are balanced and
composed.  They show a soul at peace with itself because of its
unquestioning acceptance of God's will.  This docility corresponded
with the docility of nature, so that his life's rhythm was one with the
rhythm of the forests that engulfed him and the vast river that bore
him to his fate.  It also lifted him to the heights of pagan, as well
as of Christian, philosophy.  Pre Marquette may never have read
Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius; yet both these masters would have
recognized their pupil.  The sweet surrender of the soul which made
Epictetus say, "My impulses are one with God's; my will is one with
his," was the keynote of the Christian priest's serenity.  And day by
day he followed unconsciously the counsel in which Marcus Aurelius sums
up the whole worth and contentment of living: "Take pleasure in one
thing and rest in it, in passing from one act to another, thinking of
God."




{289}

INDEX


Abelard, Pierre, 21.

Adams, Henry, 276.

Addison, Joseph, 233.

Akenside, Mark, 145.

Algonquins, Indian tribe, 27, 30, 38, 46, 75, 90, 100, 146; belief in
suppressed desires, 149; 155, 165, 221, 230, 231, 244, 250, 284.

Allouez, Claude Jean, Jesuit missionary, 17, 72, 73, 90, 117, 118, 122,
125, 221, 284.

Andr, Louis, Jesuit missionary, 35.

Anian, mythical strait of, 15.

Anselm, Saint, 21.

Arden, forest of, 251.

Ariel, 285.

Arkansas, Indian tribe, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 253.

Arkansas, river, 176, 191, 194, 211.

Atahualpa, Inca of Peru, 10.

Aztecs, 176.



Balboa, Vasco Nuez de, discoverer of Pacific Ocean, 4.

Bancroft, George, historian, 278.

Bazire, Charles, receiver general of revenues, Quebec, 191.

Beaujeu, commander of French ship, 254.

Beavers, master builders, 60.

Bissot, Claire, married to Joliet, 194.

Black Prince, 21.

Bolton, Captain, adventurer, 16.

Borneo, Head-hunters of, 145.

Buffaloes, description of, 133, 134.

Brbeuf, Jean de, Jesuit missionary, 28, 40, 52, 55, 167, 180, 214,
257, 275.



Calais, 104.

California, Gulf of, 193, 206.

Callires-Bonnevue, Louis Hector de, Governor of New France, 248.

Calumet, significance of, 75, 138, 140; given by Illinois chief to Pre
Marquette, 142; 150; description of, 151; Calumet dance, 152, 153; 170,
171, 173, 177, 221, 260, 270.

Campion, Edmund, S. J., 180.

Canada, New France, 8, 15, 87, 103, 255, 282, 286.

Canoes, 68, 111.

Castaeda, Spanish adventurer, 203.

Cataraqui, fort and trading station, 97.

Catherine, of Siena, Saint, 63.

Caxamalca, city of Peru, 10.

Champeaux, William de, 21.

Champlain, Samuel, 15, 104, 210, 253.

Chaouanons, Indian tribe, 162, 163.

Charles, Fifth, Emperor, 10.

Charles, Second, England, 5.

Charles, Seventh, France, 20.

Charleville, French town, 23.

Charlevoix, Pierre Franois Xavier, S. J., traveler and chronicler, 87,
155, 160, 172, 176, 199, 212, 213, 244, 255, 265, 266.

Chastellain, Pierre, Jesuit missionary, 34.

Chauchetire, Claude, Jesuit missionary, 32, 164.

Chaumont, Pierre Joseph Marie, Jesuit missionary, 38.

Chequamegon Bay, 72, 265.

Cherokee, Indian tribe, 274.

Chicago, 278, 279, 282, 283, 284.

Chicago river, 185, 219.

Chikagou, Illinois chief, 268, 269, 270.

China, 15, 193, 253.

Colbert, Jean Baptiste, statesman, 102, 191, 193, 206.

Colorado, river, 176.

Columbus, Christopher, 3.

Copper, Indians' use of, 89; sacred ore, 90, 91.

Corneille, Pierre, 49.

Coronado, Francisco Vasa de, Spanish adventurer, 13, 203.

Cortez, Hernando, 4.

Courcelles, Daniel de, sieur de Courcelles, Governor of New France, 43,
96.

Couture, Guillaume, French donn, 31.

Cramoisy, Sebastian, French publisher, 24.



Dablon, Claude, Jesuit missionary, and Superior General of the Canadian
missions, 38, 58, 77, 82, 83, 85, 90, 92, 93, 105, 120, 191, 193, 201,
202, 205, 239, 240, 250, 262, 264.

Damascus, 21.

Dancing, Indian, 152, 153.

Dnonville, Marquis de, Governor of New France, 99.

De Soto, Hernando, 10-14, 16, 202-204.

Des Plaines, River, 227.

Dollier, Dollier de Casson, commonly called Dollier, Rcollet
missionary, 68, 71, 220.

Dreams, Indian superstitions concerning, 87.

Druillettes, Gabriel, Jesuit missionary, 51.

Duchesneau, intendant of New France, 160.

Dunkirk, 104.

Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, 91.

Du Perron, Franois, Jesuit missionary, 127, 129, 149, 211, 214.

Dyes, Indian, 164, 165.



Elvas, "gentleman of," 12, 204.

Engelran, Jesuit missionary, 247, 248.

Epictetus, 287.

Erie, Indian tribe, 215.

Erie, Lake, 56, 70, 188, 215, 220.

Espritu Santo, Bahia del, 11.

Espritu Santo, rio del, Spanish name for the Mississippi, 9, 14, 203,
205, 216.



Fat, love of savages for, 144.

Fishing, Indian experts, 59, 82, 120, 121.

Florida, 10, 11, 202, 203.

Foucault, Marcel, 87.

Fox, river, 117, 120, 126.

France, 217, 234, 237, 239.

French, river, 57.

Freud, Sigmund, 87.

Froissart, Jean, chronicler, 21, 155.

Frontenac, Louis de Buade comte de, Governor of New France, 68, 96;
successful treatment of Iroquois, 97-99; war with Iroquois, 100-101;
death, 101; 102, 106, 107, 108, 141, 187, 189, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196,
197, 198, 206, 247, 249, 262, 263.

Furness, William H., 2nd, 145.



Galine, Rcollet missionary, 68, 69, 70, 71, 220.

Gama, Vasco da, Portuguese navigator, 3.

Garay, Francisco de, Governor of Jamaica, 9.

Geneva, 214.

Gennesaret, Lake of, 283.

Georgia, 274.

Georgian Bay, 57, 83.

Good Hope, Cape of, 4.

Green Bay, 116-118, 201, 262, 263.

Greenwich, Observatory, 5.

Grosseilliers, Mdard Chouart des, 16, 72, 284.

Guedalla, Philip, 280.



_Harper's Magazine_, 251.

Head-Hunters of Borneo, 145.

Hennepin, Louis, Franciscan missionary and adventurer, 33, 79, 85, 104,
114.

Henry, Fourth, of France, 20, 22.

Hiawatha, 270-272.

Hogarth, William, 235.

Huc, Abb Evariste Regis, French missionary, traveler in the Far East
and author, 41, 145.

Huddleston, F. J., 272, 274, 275.

Hudson Bay, 194.

Humming bird, description of, 63.

Hundred Associates, Company of, 7, 102.

Hundred Years War, 20.

Hurons, Indian tribe, 7, 15, 28, 29, 39, 40, 46, 64, 74, 79, 83, 87;
belief in suppressed desires, 148-149; 155, 165, 211, 221, 234, 258.

Huron, Lake, 35, 57, 81, 188.

Huron, villages, 83-84.



Illinois, Indian tribe, 75, 76, 108, 137; friendly reception of Pre
Marquette and Joliet 139-142; method of feeding guests, 143;
characteristics, 146-148; 150, 155, 167, 172, 184, 187, 210, 211, 217,
220, 221, 222, 224; welcome Pre Marquette to Kaskaskia 135-138; 239,
263, 265; loyalty to France, 266-270

Illinois, river, 183, 217, 227.

Illinois, state of, 282.

Immaculate Conception, feast of, 108, 220.

Irondequoit Bay, 69.

Iroquois, Indian tribe, comprising five allied nations, 7, 28, 29;
cruelty and intelligence, 30, 31; 38, 42, 56, 81, 96, 99, 141, 146,
155, 163, 169, 192, 215, 216, 234, 245, 247, 248, 257, 267.



Jamaica, 9.

James, Henry, 4, 5.

Japan, 193.

Jerusalem, 21.

Jesuits, religious order of, 17, 25, 43, 51, 87, 229.

Jogues, Isaac, French missionary, 16, 28, 31, 55, 58, 257.

Joutel, French engineer, accompanying La Salle, 255.

Jouvency, Joseph, S. J., scholar and historian, 149.

Joliet, Louis, discoverer with Pre Marquette of the upper waters of
the Mississippi, 70, 71, 94; appointed by Frontenac to search for the
great river, 102; 106, 107, 108, 109; starts on the voyage of
discovery, 111; 115, 118; spokesman in council with Maskoutens, 125;
129; Enters the Mississippi, 130; 135; visits friendly Illinois,
137-143; 147, 156, 157, 162, 164, 167-173, 178, 181, 183, 184; returns
to St. Franois Xavier's, 186; 187; starts for Quebec, 188; wrecked in
St. Lawrence, 189; 190-193; married Claire Bissot, 194; grant of
Anticosti island, 195; home and fisheries burned by English, 196;
Death, 197; question of leadership, 198-199; 200-202, 205-207, 209,
211, 220, 238, 249, 253, 261-264, 270, 278, 282-284.

Joliet, town of, 282-283.



Kaskaskia, Illinois Indian village, 234, 243.

Keats, John, 4.

Kenton, Edna, English editor of Jesuit "Relations," 258, 259.

Kickapoos, Indian tribe, 72, 118.

Kilistinaux, nomad Indian tribe, 76.

Kiskakon, Indian tribe, 244, 245.



La Barre, Le Fvre de, Governor of New France, 99, 254.

Labrador, 196.

La Chine, 67.

La Chine rapids, 188, 262.

La Fayette, Marie Jean Paul Roch Yves Gilbert Motier, 22.

Lalemant, Gabriel, Jesuit missionary, 28, 89, 180.

Lalemant, Jerme, Jesuit missionary, 30.

Lang, Andrew, 263.

Langres, 23.

Laon, birthplace of Pre Marquette, 19-22.

La Pothrie, French chronicler, 248.

La Salle, Jean Baptiste de, 22.

La Salle, Rn Robert Cavelier, sieur de, 57, 68, 69, 70, 95, 143, 146,
176, 181, 188, 194, 198, 200, 204, 207, 246, 247, 253-255, 265, 267,
284.

La Salle, Rose de, 22.

Laval de Montmorency, Franois de, Vicar Apostolic and first Bishop of
New France, 44, 190, 263.

Le Clerc, Chrtien, Rcollet missionary, 230.

Le Jeune, Paul, Jesuit missionary, 27, 32, 34, 35, 38, 42, 50, 52, 61,
84, 87, 89, 127, 128, 144, 164, 232, 234.

Le Mercier, Franois Joseph, Jesuit missionary, 34, 51, 65, 73.

Le Moyne, Simon, Jesuit missionary, 165, 167.

Le Petit, Mathurin, Jesuit missionary, 165.

Lesdiguires, la Duchesse de, 156.

Lhasa, 41.

London, 191.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 270, 271.

Louis, Fourteenth, of France, 92, 254.

Louis, Ninth, of France, Saint, 21.

Louis, Seventh, of France, 21.

Louisiana, 269.

Ludington, 282.



Mackinac, Straits of, 188.

MacNeil, Hermon, A., 278, 279.

Manitoulin, Island of, 81.

Marcus Aurelius, 287.

Margry, Pierre, 194.

Marquette Building, Chicago, 279.

Marquette, Jacques, Jesuit missionary and discoverer of the upper
waters of the Mississippi; birth, 19; 22-24; sent to Quebec, 25; 40,
45, 46, 50; sent to Three Rivers, 51; 52; sent to Sault de Ste. Marie,
55; 56-58, 61, 64, 65, 70, 71; sent to La Pointe du Saint Esprit, 72;
73-78; driven from Saint Esprit by the Sioux, 79; 80; Mission of St.
Ignace on Michillimackinac Island, 83; 84, 85, 102, 103, 105-110;
starts on voyage of discovery, 111; 112-116; reaches Mission of St.
Franois Xavier, 118; 119, 120, 122-129; enters the waters of the
Mississippi, 130; 131; description of buffalo, 133-134; 135; visits
Illinois village, 137; 138-140, 146-148, 150, 151, 153, 156-163,
166-169; encounters hostile Mitchigameans, 170; 171-173, 176-178, 180;
turns back, 181; 183, 184; again at the Mission of St. Franois Xavier,
186; 187, 188, 190-192, 197-202, 205, 207, 209, 211, 216; sent on last
mission to Illinois Indians, 217; 218, 219; winter in the woods,
220-226; 227; arrives at Kaskaskia, 228; 232-238, 240; death 241;
242-245; interment at St. Ignace, 246; 249-253, 257, 258; authenticity
of journal, 259-264; 265, 266, 270, 272, 275, 278, 279-281, 283-287.

Marquette, Nicholas, 22.

Marquette, "Pre Marquette Railway Company," 280, 281.

Marquette, town of, 278, 280.

Marquette University, Milwaukee, 249, 281.

Marquette, Vermand, 21.

Marshall, John, Chief Justice Supreme Court, 275.

Maskoutens (Fire Nation), Indian tribe, 105, 118, 122, 124, 219.

Massachusetts, 196.

Massimo, Prince Fabrizio, 231.

Matagorda Bay, 254.

Maurois, Andr, 285.

Medicine men, Indian, 36, 74, 148, 262.

Membr, Znobe, Rcollet missionary, 176, 253, 255.

Mnard, Rn, Jesuit missionary, 17, 58.

Mendoza, Pedro de, Viceroy of Mexico, 14, 203.

Mercator, Gerard, Flemish geographer, 205.

Mexico, 176.

Mexico, City of, 203.

Mexico, Gulf of, 9, 13, 14, 16, 178, 190, 193, 204, 206, 254.

Miamis, Indian tribe, 118, 126.

Michigan, Lake, 81, 184-186, 191, 217, 239, 243, 244, 281.

Michigan, State of, 278-280.

Michillimackinac, Island of, 81, 108, 239, 243, 245, 247, 248, 252.

Michillimackinac, Straits of, 113.

Mignan, Islands of, 195, 197.

Mississippi, river, discovered by Spain, 9; 10, 12; in flood, 13; 14,
16, 22, 70, 76, 78, 105, 128, 129; Pre Marquette and Joliet enter its
waters, 130; 131, 132, 141, 156, 161, 162, 172, 178, 182, 184, 190-193,
196, 198, 199, 202-207, 217, 238, 249, 252-254, 258, 263, 267, 279,
284, 286.

Missouri, river, 159, 161, 162, 163.

Mitchell, Sir Arthur, 87.

Mitchigameans, Indian tribe, 172, 173.

Mohawks, Indian tribe, 29, 33.

Montagnais, Algonquin tribe, 51, 52.

Montreal, 67, 68, 188, 189, 196, 201, 248.

Moore, Sir Jonas, mathematician, 5.

Moreau, Pierre, French trader, 123.

Moscoso, Louis de, Spanish adventurer, 203.

Mosquitoes, 84, 166, 167.



Nadouessi, Sioux Indians, 75.

Nancy, 23.

Napoleon Bonaparte, 20.

Narvaez, Panfilo de, Spanish commander, 9, 204.

Natchez, Indian tribe, 165, 253, 269.

Nation de Folle-Avoine, 113, 115, 116.

Neri, Philip, Saint, miracle of, 231.

New France (Canada), 7, 24, 51, 55, 76, 178, 188, 192, 195.

Newman, John Henry, Cardinal, 136.

New Orleans, 269.

Niagara, 247.

Niagara Falls, 9, 104.

Nicolas, Louis, Jesuit missionary, 58, 68.

Nicollet, Jean, French interpreter and explorer, 15, 284.

Nipissing, Lake, 57.

Nouvelle, Henri, Jesuit missionary, 245.



Oanktayhee, god of the Sioux, 104.

Ohio, river, 68, 70, 162.

Ojibwas, Indian tribe, 58, 64, 65, 72.

Onondagas, Iroquois tribe, 215, 216.

Ontario, Lake, 70, 96, 188.

Orestes, 73.

Orlans, Duc d', 155.

Ortelius, Abraham, Flemish geographer, 205.

Ottawa, river, 68, 70, 162.

Ottawa, town of, 184.

Ottawas, Algonquin tribe, 46, 55, 58, 72, 74, 79, 81, 150, 201, 244.

Outaouacs, Ottawas, 221.

Outaouasinagaux, Ottawas, 85.



Painted rocks, 159-161.

Paris, 191, 205.

Parkman, Francis, 9, 17, 24, 25, 27, 29, 39, 45, 68, 103, 132, 160,
194, 202, 204, 213, 215, 230, 240, 244, 256, 267.

Penthivre, Duc de, 156.

Peoria, 143.

Perrot, Nicolas, French adventurer, 92.

Peru, 10.

Philip, Second of Spain, 202.

Phipps, Sir William, 196.

Pieron, Philippe, Jesuit missionary, 245.

Pineda, Spanish adventurer, 9.

Platte, river, 176.

Poictiers, 21.

Poland, 274.

Pont--Mousson, 23.

Port Royal, 196, 201.

Pottawattomies, Algonquin tribe, 72, 217, 267.

Pumpkin feast, St. Ignace, 86.



Quebec, 7, 23-25, 28, 44, 49-51, 56, 61, 68, 72, 78, 97, 102, 105, 106,
108, 126, 135, 181, 187, 188, 190, 191, 195-197, 201, 210, 212, 217,
222, 227, 283.



Radisson, Pierre Esprit, French explorer, 16, 72, 284.

Raymbault, Charles, Jesuit missionary, 17, 58.

Rcollet, church, Quebec, 212.

"Relations," Jesuit letters and reports published in Paris, 24, 27, 30,
32, 51, 58, 60, 61, 73, 106, 108, 123, 128, 156, 166, 214, 222, 244,
259, 275.

Rmy, Daniel de, Sieur de Courcelles, Governor of New France, 43.

Rmy, Saint, "Apostle of the Franks," 20.

Rheims, 23.

Rice, wild, 113, 114.

Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 5.

Roger of Sicily, the "Great Count," 3.



Saguenay, river, 51.

St. Anthony, Falls of, 164.

St. Cosm, Jean Franois de, Jesuit missionary, 160.

Saint Esprit, La Pointe de, Jesuit mission, 72-74, 80, 83, 238, 245,
250, 265.

St. Ignace, Jesuit mission, 28, 82, 105, 107, 112, 171, 232, 243,
244-246, 249, 270, 281.

St. Lawrence, river, 13, 18, 51, 57, 105, 109, 188, 195.

Saint-Lusson, Simon Franois Daumont, sieur de, French officer, 91;
takes formal possession of shores of Lake Superior in the name of
France, 92-94.

St. Malo, 16, 20.

St. Mary's College, Montreal, 201.

St. Sulpice, Seminary of, Montreal, 68.

Santander, Pietro de, 203.

Santayana, George, 200, 277.

Sault de Ste. Marie, 55, 58, 59, 65, 71, 72, 83, 92, 121, 234.

Schuylkill, river, 132.

Senecas, Indian tribe allied to Iroquois, 70, 215.

Seville, 10.

Shakespeare, William, 264.

Shea, John D. Gilmary, historian, 123, 270.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 285.

Singing, Indian, 153, 212.

Sioux, Indian tribe, 34, 75, 79-81, 108, 114, 233, 238, 247.

Skunk, description of, 62, 63.

Snake bite, Indian remedies for, 122.

Spain, 10, 11, 202, 205.

Speech-making, Indian love of, 154.

Starved Rock, 267.

Steck, Francis Borgia, 9, 197, 204, 206, 259-261.

Steele, J. W., 272, 274, 275.

Sturgeon Bay, 186, 217.

Sulpicians, religious order, 194.

Sulte, Benjamin, French historian, 207.

Superior, Lake, 16, 58, 59, 72, 88-91, 94, 281, 284.

Superior, early Jesuit map of Lake, 17.

Sweating baths, Sioux Indians', 79.



Tadoussac, trading station, 51, 164.

Tailhan, Jules, S. J., 207.

Talon, Jean Baptiste, intendant of New France, 43, 44, 91, 95, 101,
106, 198, 206.

Tampa Bay, 11.

Tchikachas, Indian tribe, 269.

Thvenot, Melchisedech, French compiler and publisher, 252, 263.

Thibetans, 145.

Three Rivers, trading station, 16, 24, 31, 36, 51, 61, 64.

Thwaites, Reuben Gold, 57, 185.

Tionnontateronnons, Hurons, 85.

Tionontates, Petuns or Tobacco nation, 221.

Tobacco, our debt to Indians, 150, 151; Indians' love of French
tobacco, 221, 222.

Tonty, Henri de, adventurer, 181, 267, 284.

Trentanove, Gaetano, sculptor, 278.



Urban, fourth, Pope, 21.

Ursuline nuns, 47, 48, 97.



Vaca, Cabeza de, Spanish adventurer, 9, 202, 204.

Vega, Garcilaso de la, Peruvian historian, 9, 12, 13, 204.

Vermilion Sea (Gulf of California), 18, 67, 105, 178, 193, 253.



Washington, D. C., Hall of Fame, 278.

Whitman, Walt, 285.

Winnebagoes, Indian tribe, 15.

Winsor, Justin, librarian Harvard University, 5.

Wisconsin, river, 16, 125, 126, 128.

Wisconsin, state of, 278.

Wood, Colonel, adventurer, 16.

Wren, Sir Christopher, 5.

Wytfliet, Cornelius, Dutch geographer, 205.



Xavier, mission of St. Franois Xavier, 117, 121, 186, 200, 209, 234,
237.

Xavier, Saint Franois, 257.



Yazoos, Indian tribe, 269.



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