Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1635 to 1650, part 3

By 1645, five mission houses had been established, with Ste.

Marie on the Wye, east of Midland, as the central house.

Near Lake Simcoe were two missions,--St. Jean Ba'tiste and St. Joseph; near Penetang, St. Louis, and St. Ignace.

Westward of Ste.

Marie on the Wye were half a dozen irregular missions among the Tobacco Indians.

Each of the five regular missions boasted palisaded inclosures, a chapel of log slabs with bell and spire, though the latter might be only a high wooden cross.

At Ste.

Marie, the central station, were lodgings for sixty people, a hospital, kitchen garden, with cattle, pigs, and poultry.

At various times soldiers had been sent up by the Quebec governors, till some thirty or forty were housed at Ste.

Marie.

In all were eighteen priests, four lay brothers, seven white servants, and twenty-three volunteers, unpaid helpers--donnés, they were called, young men ardently religious, learning woodlore and the Indian language among the Jesuits, as well as exploring whenever it was possible for them to accompany the Indians.

Among the volunteers was one Chouart Groseillers, who, if he did not accompany Father Jogues on a preaching tour to the tribes of Lake Superior, had at least gone as far as the Sault and learned of the vast unexplored world beyond Lake Superior.

{86} Food, as always, played a large part in winning the soul of the redskin.

On church fête days as many as three thousand people were fed and lodged at Ste.

Marie.

That the priests suffered many trials among the unreasonable savages need not be told.

When it rained too heavily they were accused of ruining the crops by praying for too much rain;

when there was drouth they were blamed for not arranging this matter with their God; and when the scourge of smallpox raged through the Huron villages, devastating the wigwams so that the timber wolves wandered unmolested among the dead, it was easy for the humpback sorcerer to ascribe the pestilence also to the influence of the Black Robes.

Once their houses were set on fire.

Again and again their lives were threatened.

Often after tramping twenty miles through the sleet-soaked, snow-drifted spring forests, arriving at an Indian village foredone and exhausted, the Jesuit was met with no better welcome than a wigwam flap closed against his entrance, or a rabble of impish children hooting and jeering him as he sought shelter from house to house.

But an influence was at work on the borders of the St. Lawrence that yearly rendered the Hurons more tractable.

From raiding the settlements of the St. Lawrence, the Iroquois were sweeping in a scourge more deadly than smallpox up the Ottawa to the very forests of Georgian Bay.

The Hurons no longer dared to go down to Quebec in swarming canoes.

Only a few picked warriors--perhaps two hundred and fifty--would venture so near the Iroquois fighting ground.

One winter night, as the priests sat round their hearth fire watching the mournful shadows cast by the blazing logs on the rude walls, Brébeuf, the soldier, lion-hearted, the fearless, told in a low, dreamy voice of a vision that had come,--the vision of a huge fiery cross rising slowly out of the forest and moving across the face of the sky towards the Huron country.

It seemed to come from the land of the Iroquois.

Was the priest's vision a dream, or his own intuition deeper than reason, assuming dire form, portending a universal fear?

Who can tell?

I can but repeat the story as it is told in their annals.

{87} "How large was the cross?"

asked the other priests.

Brébeuf gazes long in the fire.

"Large enough to crucify us all," he answers.

And, as he had dreamed, fell the blow.

St. Joseph, of the Lake Simcoe region, was situated a day's travel from the main fortified mission of Ste.

Marie.

Round it were some two thousand Hurons to whom Father Daniel ministered.

Father Daniel was just closing the morning services on July the 4th, 1648. His tawny people were on their knees repeating the responses of the service, when from the forest, humming with insect and bird life, arose a sound that was neither wind nor running water--confused, increasing, nearing!

Then a shriek broke within the fort palisades,--"The enemy!

the Iroquois!"

and the courtyard was in an uproar indescribable.

Painted redskins, naked but for the breech clout, were dashing across the cornfields to scale the palisades or force the hastily slammed gates.

Father Daniel rushed from church to wigwams rallying the Huron warriors, while the women and children, the aged and the feeble, ran a terrified rabble to the shelter of the chapel.

Before the Hurons could man the walls, Iroquois hatchets had hacked holes of entrance in the palisades.

The fort was rushed by a bloodthirsty horde making the air hideous with fiendish screams.

"Fly!

Save yourselves!"

shouted the priest.

"I stay here!

We shall this day meet in Heaven!"

In the volley and counter volley of ball and arrow, Father Daniel reeled on his face, shot in the heart.

In a trice his body was cut to pieces, and the Iroquois were bathing their hands in his warm lifeblood.

A moment later the village was in roaring flames, and on the burning pile were flung the fragments of the priest's body.

The victors set out on the homeward tramp with a line of more than six hundred prisoners, the majority, women and children, to be brained if their strength failed on the march, to be tortured in the Iroquois towns if they survived the abuse on the way.

{88} Next westward from the Lake Simcoe missions were St. Ignace with four hundred people and St. Louis with seven hundred, near the modern Penetang and within short distance of the Jesuits' strong headquarters on the River Wye.

At these two missions labored Brébeuf, the giant, and a fragile priest named Lalemant.

Encouraged by the total destruction of St. Joseph, the Iroquois that very fall took the warpath with more than one thousand braves.

Ascending the Ottawa leisurely, they had passed the winter hunting and cutting off any stray wanderers found in the forest.

The Hurons knew the doom that was slowly approaching.

Yet they remained passive, stunned, terrified by the blow at St. Joseph.

It was spring of 1649 before the warriors reached Georgian Bay.

March winds had cleared the trail of snowdrifts, but the forests were still leafless.

St. Ignace mission lay between Lake Simcoe and St. Louis.

Approaching it one windy March night, the Iroquois had cut holes through the palisades before dawn and burst inside the walls with the yells and gyrations of some hideous hell dance.

Here a warrior simulated the howl of the wolf.

There another approached in the crouching leaps of a panther, all the while uttering the yelps and screams of a beast of prey lashed to fury.

The poor Hurons were easy victims.

Nearly all their braves happened to be absent hunting, and the four hundred women and children, rushing from the long houses half dazed with sleep, fell without realizing their fate, or found themselves herded in the chapel like cattle at the shambles, Iroquois guards at every window and door.

Luckily three Hurons escaped over the palisades and rushed breathless through the forest to forewarn Brébeuf and Lalemant cooped up in St. Louis.

The Iroquois came on behind like a wolf pack.

"Escape!

Escape!

Run to the woods, Black Robes!

There is yet time," the Indian converts urged Brébeuf; but the lion-hearted stood steadfast, though Lalemant, new to scenes of carnage, turned white and trembled in spite of his resolution.

{89} "Who would protect the women if the men fled like deer to the woods?"

demanded Brébeuf, and the tigerish yells of the on-rushing horde answered the question.

[Illustration: BRÉBEUF] Before day dawn had tipped the branches of the leafless trees with shafted sunlight, the enemy were hacking furiously at the palisades.

Trapped and cornered, the most timid of animals will fight.

With such fury, reckless from desperation, cherishing no hope, the Hurons now fought, but they were handicapped by lack of guns and balls.

Thirty Iroquois had been slain, a hundred wounded, and the assailants drew off for breath.

It was only the lull between two thunderclaps.

A moment later they were on St. Louis' walls and had hacked through a dozen places.

At these spots the fiercest fighting occurred, and those Iroquois who had not already bathed their faces in the gore of victims at St. Ignace were soon enough dyed in their own blood.

Here, there, everywhere, were Brébeuf and Lalemant, fighting, administering last rites, exhorting the Hurons to perish valiantly.

Then the rolling clouds of flame and smoke told the Hurons that their village was on fire.

Some dashed back to die inside the burning wigwams.

Others fought desperately to escape through the broken walls.

A few, in the confusion and smoke, succeeded in reaching the woods, whence they ran to warn Ste.

Marie on the Wye.

Brébeuf and Lalemant had been knocked down, stripped, bound, and were now {90} half driven, half dragged, with the other captives to be tortured at Ignace.

Not a sign of fear did either priest betray.

One would fain pass over the next pages of the Jesuit records.

It is inconceivable how human nature, even savage nature, so often stoops beneath the most repellent cruelties of the brute world.

It is inconceivable unless one acknowledge an influence fiendish; but let us not judge the Indians too harshly.

When the Iroquois warriors were torturing the Hurons and their missionaries, the populace of civilized European cities was outdoing the savages on victims whose sins were political.

While the Jesuits of Ste.

Marie were praying all day and night before the lighted altar for heavenly intervention to rescue Brébeuf and Lalemant, the two captured priests stood bound to the torture stakes, the gapingstock of a thousand fiends.

When the Iroquois singed Brébeuf from head to foot with burning birch bark, he threatened them in tones of thunder with everlasting damnation for persecuting the servants of God.

The Iroquois shrieked with laughter.

Such spirit in a man was to their liking.

Then, to stop his voice, they cut away his lips and rammed a red-hot iron into his mouth.

Not once did the giant priest flinch or writhe at the torture stake.

Then they brought out Lalemant, that Brébeuf might suffer the agony of seeing a weaker spirit flinch.

Poor Lalemant fell at his superior's feet, sobbing out a verse of Scripture.

Then they wreathed Lalemant in oiled bark and set fire to it.

"We baptize you," they yelled, throwing hot water on the dying man.

Then they railed out blasphemies, obscenities unspeakable, against the Jesuits' religion.

Brébeuf had not winced, but his frame was relaxing.

He sank to his knees, a dying man.

With the yells of devils jealous of losing their prey, they ripped off his scalp while he was still alive, tore his heart from his breast, and drank the warm lifeblood of the priest.

Brébeuf died at four in the afternoon.

Strange to relate, Lalemant, of the weaker body, survived the tortures till daybreak, when, weary of the sport, the Indians desisted from their mad night orgies and put an end to his sufferings by braining him.

{91} Over at Ste.

Marie, Ragueneau and the other priests momentarily awaited the attack; but at Ste.

Marie were forty French soldiers and ample supply of muskets.

The Iroquois was bravest as the wolf is bravest--when attacking a lamb.

Three hundred Hurons lay in ambush along the forest trail.

These ran from the Iroquois like sheep; but when three hundred more sallied from the fort, led by the French, it was the Iroquois' turn to run, and they fled back behind the palisades of St. Louis.

The Hurons followed, entered by the selfsame breaches the Iroquois had made, and drove the invaders out.

More Iroquois rushed from Ignace to the rescue.

A hundred Iroquois fell in the day's fight, and when they finally recaptured St. Louis, only twenty Hurons remained of the three hundred.

The victory had been bought at too great cost.

Tying their prisoners to stakes at St. Ignace, they heaped the courtyard with inflammable wood, set fire to all, and retreated, taking only enough prisoners to carry their plunder.

[Illustration: REMNANTS OF WALLS OF FORT ST. MARY ON CHRISTIAN ISLAND

IN 1891]

Ste.

Marie for the time was safe.

The invaders had gone; but the blow had crushed forever the prowess of the Huron nation.

The remaining towns had thought for nothing but flight.

{92} Town after town was forsaken and burned in the summer of 1649, the corn harvest left standing in the fields, while the panic-stricken people put out in their canoes to take refuge on the islands of Georgian Bay.

Ste.

Marie on the Wye alone remained, and the reason for its existence was vanishing like winter snow before summer sun, for its people fled .

.

.

fled .

.

.

fled .

.

.

daily fled to the pink granite islands of the lake.

The Hurons begged the Jesuits to accompany them, and there was nothing else for Ragueneau to do.

Ste.

Marie was stripped, the stock slain for food.

Then the buildings were set on fire.

June 14, just as the sunset bathed water and sky in seas of gold, the priest led his homeless people down to the lake as Moses of old led the children of Israel.

Oars and sweeps, Georgian Bay calm as glass, they rafted slowly out to the Christian Islands,--Faith, Hope, and Charity,--which tourists can still see from passing steamers, a long wooded line beyond the white water-fret of the wind-swept reefs.

The island known on the map as Charity, or St. Joseph, was heavily wooded.

Here the refugees found their haven, and the French soldiers cleared the ground {93} for a stone fort of walled masonry,--the islands offering little else than stone and timber, though the fishing has not failed to this day.

[Illustration: MAP OF THE GREAT LAKES Showing the territory of the Jesuit Huron missions] By autumn the walled fort was complete, but some eight thousand refugees had gathered to the island.

Such numbers could not subsist on Georgian Bay in summer.

In winter their presence meant starvation, and before the spring of 1650 half had perished.

Of the survivors, many had fed on the bodies of the dead.

No help had come from Quebec for almost three years.

The clothing of the priests had long since worn to shreds.

Ragueneau and his helpers were now dressed in skins like the Indians, and reduced to a diet of nuts and smoked fish.

With warm weather came sickness.

And also came bands of raiding Iroquois striking terror to the Tobacco Indians.

Among them, too, perished Jesuit priests, martyrs to the faith.

Did some of the Hurons venture from the Christian Islands across to the mainland to hunt, they were beset by scalping parties and came back to the fort with tales that crazed Ragueneau's Indians with terror.

The Hurons decided to abandon Georgian Bay.

Some scattered to Lake Superior, to Green Bay, to Detroit.

Others found refuge on Manitoulin Island.

A remnant of a few hundreds followed Ragueneau and the French down the Ottawa to take shelter at Quebec.

Their descendants may be found to this day at the mission of Lorette.

To-day, as tourists drive through Quebec, marveling at the massive buildings and power and wealth of Catholic orders, do they pause to consider that the foundation stones of that power were dyed in the blood of these early martyrs?

Or, as the pleasure seekers glide among the islands of Georgian Bay, do they ever ponder that this fair world of blue waters and pink granite islands once witnessed the most bloody tragedy of brute force, triumphant over the blasted hopes of religious zeal?

{94} CHAPTER VI FROM 1650 TO 1672