Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1635 to 1650, part 2
In 1743 came Louis d'Ailleboust and his wife, both zealously bound by the same vows as devotees, bringing word of more funds for Ville Marie, as Montreal was called.
Montmagny's warning of Iroquois proved all too true.
Within a year, in June, 1743, six workmen were beset in the fields, only one escaping.
Because his mission was to convert the Indians, Maisonneuve had been ever reluctant to meet the Iroquois in open war, preferring to retreat within the fort when the dog Pilot and her litter barked loud warning that Indians were hiding in the woods.
Any one who knows the Indian character will realize how clemency would be mistaken for cowardice.
Even Maisonneuve's soldiers began to doubt him.
"My lord, my lord," they urged, "are the enemy never to get a sight of you?
Are we never to face the foe?"
Maisonneuve's answer was in March, 1644, when ambushed hostiles were detected stealing on the fort.
{79} "Follow me," he ordered thirty men, leaving D'Ailleboust in command of the fort.
Near the place now known as Place d'Armes the little band was greeted by the eldritch scream of eighty painted Iroquois.
Shots fell thick and fast.
The Iroquois dashed to rescue their wounded, and a young chief, recognizing Maisonneuve as the leader of the white men, made a rush for the honor of capturing the French commander alive.
Maisonneuve had put himself between his retreating men and the advancing warriors.
Firing, he would retreat a pace, then fire again, keeping his face to the foe.
His men succeeded in rushing up the hillock, then made for the gates in a wild stampede.
Maisonneuve was backing away, a pistol in each hand.
The Iroquois circled from tree to tree, near and nearer, and like a wildwood creature of prey was watching his chance to spring, when the Frenchman fired.
The pistol missed.
Dodging, the Indian leaped.
Maisonneuve discharged the other pistol.
The Iroquois fell dead, and while warriors rescued the body, Maisonneuve gained the fort gates.
This was only one of countless frays when the dog Pilot with her puppies sounded the alarm of prowlers in the woods.
What were the letters, what the adventures described by the Jesuits, that aroused such zeal and inspired such heroism?
It would require many volumes to record the adventures of the Jesuits in Canada, and a long list to include all their heroes martyred for the faith.
Only a few of the most prominent episodes in the Jesuits' adventures can be given here.
When Pierre le Jeune reached Quebec after the victory of the Kirke brothers, he found only the charred remains of a mission on the old site of Cartier's winter quarters down on the St. Charles.
Of houses, only the gray-stone cottage of Madame Hebert had been left standing.
Here Le Jeune was welcomed and housed till the little mission could be rebuilt.
At first it consisted of only mud-plastered log cabins, thatch-roofed, divided into four rooms, with garret and cellar.
One room decorated with saints' images and pictures served as chapel;
another, as {80} kitchen; a third, as lodgings; the fourth, as refectory.
In this humble abode six Jesuit priests and two lay brothers passed the winter after the war.
The roof leaked like a sieve.
The snow piled high almost as the top of the door.
Le Jeune's first care was to obtain pupils.
These consisted of an Indian boy and a negro lad left by the English.
Meals of porridge given free attracted more Indian pupils; but Le Jeune's greatest difficulty was to learn the Indian language.
Hearing that a renegade Indian named Pierre, who had served the French as interpreter, lodged with some Algonquins camped below Cape Diamond, Le Jeune tramped up the river bank, along what is now the Lower Road, where he found the Indians wigwamming, and by the bribe of free food obtained Pierre.
Pierre was at best a tricky scoundrel, who considered it a joke to give Le Jeune the wrong word for some religious precept, gorged himself on the missionaries' food, stole their communion wine, and ran off at Lent to escape fasting.
[Illustration: PIERRE LE JEUNE] When Champlain returned to receive Quebec back from the English, more priests joined the Jesuits' mission.
Among them was the lion-hearted giant, Brébeuf.
If Champlain's bush lopers could join bands of wandering Indians for the extension of French dominion, surely the Jesuits could dare as perilous a life "for the greater glory of God,"--as their vows declared.
{81} Le Jeune joined a band of wandering Montaignais, Pierre, the rascal, tapping the keg of sacramental wine the first night out, and turning the whole camp into a drunken bedlam, till his own brother sobered him with a kettle of hot water flung full in the face.
That night the priest slept apart from the camp in the woods.
By the time the hunters reached the forest borderland between Quebec and New Brunswick, their number had increased to forty-five.
By Christmas time game is usually dormant, still living on the stores of the fall and not yet driven afield by spring hunger.
In camp was no food.
The hunters halted the march, and came in Christmas Eve of 1633 with not so much as a pound of flesh for nearly fifty people.
From the first the Indian medicine man had heaped ridicule on the white priest, and Pierre had refused to interpret as much as a single prayer; but now the whole camp was starving.
Pierre happened to tell the other Indians that Christmas was the day on which the white man's God had come to earth.
In vain the medicine man had pounded his tom-tom and shouted at the Indian gods from the top of the wigwams and offered sacrifice of animals to be slain.
No game had come as the result of the medicine man's invocation.
Le Jeune gathered the people about him and through Pierre, the interpreter, bade them try the white man's God.
In the largest of the wigwams a little altar was fitted up.
Then the Indians repeated this prayer after Le Jeune: Jesus, Son of the Almighty .
.
.
who died for us .
.
.
who promised that if we ask anything in Thy name, Thou wilt do it--I pray Thee with all my heart, give food to these people .
.
.
this people promises Thee faithfully they will trust Thee entirely and obey Thee with all their heart!
My Lord, hear my prayer!
I present Thee my life for this people, most willing to die that they may live and know Thee.
"Take that back," grunted the chief.
"We love you!
We don't want you to die."
"I only want to show that I am your friend," answered the priest.
Le Jeune then commanded them to go forth to the hunt, full of faith that God would give them food.
{82} But alas for the poor father's hopes and the childlike Indian vow!
True, they found abundance of food,--a beaver dam full of beaver, a moose, a porcupine taken by the Indian medicine man.
Father Le Jeune, with radiant face, met the hunters returning laden with game.
"We must thank your God for this," said the Indian chief, throwing down his load.
"Bah," says Pierre, "you 'd have found it anyway."
"This is not the time to talk," sneered the medicine man.
"Let the hungry people eat."
And by the time the Indians had gorged themselves with ample measure for their long fast, they were torpid with sleep.
The sad priest was fain to wander out under the stars.
There, in the snow-padded silences of the white-limned forest, far from the joyous peal of Christmas bells, he knelt alone and worshiped God.
For five months he wandered with the Montaignais, and now in April the hunters turned toward Quebec with their furs.
At three in the morning Le Jeune knocked on the door of the mission house at Quebec, and was welcomed home by the priests.
The pilgrimage had taught him what the Jesuits have always held--the way to power with a people is through the education of the children.
"Give me a child for the first seven years of its life," said a famous educator, "and I care not what you do with him the rest of his years."
Missions and schools must be established among the tribes of Hurons and Iroquois.
Consequently, when Champlain sent his soldiers in 1634 to build a fort at Three Rivers, they were accompanied by three Jesuits, chief of whom was Jean de Brébeuf, lion-hearted, bound for the land of the Hurons.
The chapel bells of Quebec rang and rang again in honor of the new Jesuit mission--morning, noon, and night they chimed in airy music, calling men's thoughts to God, just as you may hear the chimes to-day;
and the ramparts below Quebec thundered and reëchoed with salvos of cannon when the missionaries set out for Three Rivers.
{83} At Three Rivers waited the Indians of the Up-Country.
The Jesuits embarked with them for the land of the Hurons.
The priests traveled barefoot to avoid injuring the frail bark of the canoes.
Barely had farewell cheers faded on the river, when the canoes spread apart.
With pieces of buckskin hoisted on fishing rods for sail, and a flipping of paddles as naked, bronzed arms set the pace, the voyage had begun.
Heroism is easy with chapel bells ringing; it is another matter, barefoot and with sleeves rolled up.
It was the same trail that Champlain had followed up the Ottawa.
Only Champlain was assured of good treatment, for he had promised to fight in the Indian wars; but the Jesuits were dependent on the caprice of their conductors.
Any one, who, from experience in the wilds, has learned how the term "tenderfoot" came to be applied, will realize the hardships endured--and endured without self-pity--by these scholarly men of immured life.
The rocks of the portage cut their naked feet.
The Indians refused to carry their packs overland and flung bundles of clothing and food into the water.
In fair weather the voyageurs slept on the sand under the overturned canoes; in rain a wigwam was raised, and into the close confines of this tent crowded men, women, and children, for the most part naked, and with less idea of decency than a domestic dog.
Each night, as the boats were beached, the priests wandered off into the woods to hold their prayers in privacy.
Soon the canoes were so far apart the different boats did not camp together, and the white men were scattered alone among the savages.
Robberies increased till, when Brébeuf reached Georgian Bay, thirty days from leaving Three Rivers, he had little left but the bundles he had carried for himself.
Brébeuf had been to the Huron country before with Etienne Brulé, Champlain's pathfinder; but of the first mission no record exists.
Brébeuf found that Brulé had been murdered near the modern Penetang;
and the Indians had scarcely brought the priest's canoe ashore, when they bolted through the woods, leaving him to follow as best he could.
{84} Take a map of modern Ontario.
Draw a circle round Georgian Bay, running from Muskoka through Lake Simcoe and up into Manitoulin Island.
Here, on the very stamping ground of the summer tourist, was the scene of the Jesuits' Huron mission.
[Illustration: GEORGIAN BAY] When Brébeuf's tall frame emerged from the woods, the whole village of Ihonateria dashed out to welcome him, shouting, "He has come!
He has come again!
Behold, the Black Robe has come again!"
Young braves willingly ran back through the forest for the baggage, which the voyageurs had thrown aside; and at one o'clock in the morning, as the messengers came through the moonlit forest, Brébeuf took up his abode in the house of the leading chief.
Later came Fathers Davost and Daniel.
By October the Indians had built the missionaries their wigwam, a bark-covered house of logs, thirty-six feet long, divided into three rooms, reception room, living quarters, church.
In the entrance hall assembled the Indians, squatting on the floor, gazing in astonishment at the religious pictures on the wall, and, above all, at the clock.
{85} "What does he say?"
they would ask, listening solemnly to the ticking.
"He says 'Hang on the kettle,'" Brébeuf would answer as the clock struck twelve, and the whole conclave would be given a simple meal of corn porridge; but at four the clock sang a different song.
"It says 'Get up and go home,'" Brébeuf would explain, and the Indians would file out, knowing well that the Black Robes were to engage in prayer.
No holiday in the wildwoods was the Jesuit mission.
Chapel bell called to service at four in the morning.
Eight was the breakfast hour.
The morning was passed teaching, preaching, visiting.
At two o'clock was dinner, when a chapter of the Bible was read.
After four the Indians were dismissed, and the missionaries met to compare notes and plan the next day's campaign.
