FROM 1635 TO 1650

While Charles de La Tour and Charnisay scoured the Bay of Fundy in border warfare like buccaneers of the Spanish Main, what was Quebec doing?

The Hundred Associates were to colonize the country; but fur trading and farming never go together. One means the end of the other; and the Hundred Associates shifted the obligation of settling the country by granting vast estates called seigniories along the St. Lawrence and leaving to these new lords of the soil the duty of bringing out habitants. Later they deeded over for an annual rental of beaver skins the entire fur monopoly to the Habitant Company, made up of the leading people of New France. So ended all the fine promises of four thousand colonists.

Years ago Pontgrave had learned that the Indians of the Up-Country did not care to come down the St. Lawrence farther than Lake St. Peter’s, where Iroquois foe lay in ambush; and the year before Champlain died a double expedition had set out from Quebec in July: one to build a fort north of Lake St. Peter’s at the entrance to the river with three mouths, in other words, to found Three Rivers; the other, under Father Brebeuf, the Jesuit, and Jean Nicolet, the wood runner, to establish a mission in the country of the Hurons and to explore the Great Lakes.

In fact, it must never be forgotten that Champlain’s ambitions in laying the foundations of a new nation aimed just as much to establish a kingdom of heaven on earth as to win a new kingdom for France. Always, in the minds of the fathers of New France, Church was to be first; State, second. When Charles de Montmagny, Knight of Malta, landed in Quebec one June morning in 1636, to succeed Champlain as governor of New France, he noticed a crucifix planted by the path side where viceroy and officers clambered up the steep hill to Castle St. Louis. Instantly Montmagny fell to his knees before the cross in silent adoration, and his example was followed by all the gay train of beplumed officers. The Jesuits regarded the episode as a splendid omen for New France, and set their chapel organ rolling a Te Deum of praise, while Governor and retinue filed before the altars with bared heads.

It was in the same spirit that Montreal was founded.

The Jesuits’ letters on the Canadian missions were now being read in France. Religious orders were on fire with missionary ardor. The Canadian missions became the fashion of the court. Ladies of noble blood asked no greater privilege than to contribute their fortunes for missions in Canada. Nuns lay prostrate before altars praying night and day for the advancement of the heavenly kingdom on the St. Lawrence. The Jesuits had begun their college in Quebec. The very year that Champlain had first come to the St. Lawrence there had been born in Normandy, of noble parentage, a little girl who became a passionate devotee of Canadian missions. To divert her mind from the calling of a nun, her father had thrown her into a whirl of gayety from which she emerged married; but her husband died in a few years, and Madame de la Peltrie, left a widow at twenty-two, turned again heart and soul to the scheme of endowing a Canadian mission. Again her father tried to divert her mind, threatening to cut off her fortune if she did not marry. An engagement to a young noble, who was as keen a devotee as herself, quieted her father and averted the loss of her fortune. On the death of her father the formal union was dissolved, and Madame de la Peltrie proceeded to the Ursuline Convent of Tours, where the Jesuits had already chosen a mother superior for the new institution to be founded at Quebec Marie of the Incarnation, a woman of some fifty years, a widow like Madame de la Peltrie, and, like Madame de la Peltrie, a mystic dreamer of celestial visions and divine communings and heroic sacrifices. How much of truth, how much of self-delusion, lay in these dreams of heavenly revelation is not for the outsider to say. It is as impossible for the practical mind to pronounce judgment on the mystic as for the mystic to pronounce sentence on the scientist. Both have their truths, both have their errors; and by their fruits are they known.

May 4th, 1639, Madame de la Peltrie and Marie of the Incarnation embarked from Dieppe for Canada. In the ship were also another Ursuline nun, three hospital sisters to found the Hotel Dieu at Quebec, Father Vimont, superior of Quebec Jesuits, and two other priests. The boat was like a chapel. Ship’s bell tolled services. Morning prayer and evensong were chanted from the decks, and the pilgrims firmly believed that their vows allayed a storm. July 1st they were among the rocking dories of the Newfoundland fishermen, and then on the 15th the little sailboat washed and rolled to anchor inshore among the fur traders under the heights of Tadoussac.

At sight of the somber Saguenay, the silver-flooded St. Lawrence, the frowning mountains, the far purple hills, the primeval forests through which the wind rushed with the sound of the sea, the fishing craft dancing on the tide like cockle boats, the grizzled fur traders bronzed as the crinkled oak forests where they passed their lives, the tawny, naked savages agape at these white-skinned women come from afar, the hearts of the housed-up nuns swelled with emotions strange and sweet, the emotions of a new life in a new world. And when they scrambled over the rope coils aboard a fishing schooner to go on up to Quebec, and heard the deep-voiced shoutings of the men, and witnessed the toilers of the deep fighting wind and wave for the harvest of the sea, did it dawn on the fair sisterhood that God must have workers out in the strife of the world, as well as workers shut up from the world inside convent walls? Who knows? . . . Who knows? At Tadoussac, that morning, to both Madame de la Peltrie and Marie of the Incarnation it must have seemed as if their visions had become real. And then the cannon of Quebec began to thunder till the echoes rolled from hill to hill and shook as the mystics thought the very strongholds of hell. Tears streamed down their cheeks at such welcome. The whole Quebec populace had rallied to the water front, and there stood Governor Montmagny in velvet cloak with sword at belt waving hat in welcome. Soldiers and priests cheered till the ramparts rang. As the nuns put foot to earth once more they fell on their knees and kissed the soil of Canada. August 1st was fête day in Quebec. The chapel chimes rang . . . and rang again their gladness. The organ rolled out its floods of soul-shattering music, and deep-throated chant of priests invoked God’s blessing on the coming of the women to the mission. So began the Ursuline Convent of Quebec and the Hotel Dieu of the hospital sisters; but Montreal was still a howling wilderness untenanted by man save in midsummer, when the fur traders came to Champlain’s factory and the canoes of the Indians from the Up-Country danced down the swirling rapids like sea birds on waves.

The letters from the Jesuit missions touched more hearts than those of the mystic nuns.

In Anjou dwelt a receiver of taxes Jerome lé Royer de la Dauversiere, a stout, practical, God-fearing man with a family, about as far removed in temperament from the founders of the Ursulines as a character could well be. Yet he, too, had mystic dreams and heard voices bidding him found a mission in the tenantless wilderness of Montreal. To the practical man the thing seems sheer moon-stark madness. If Dauversiere had lived in modern days he would have been committed to an asylum. Here was a man with a family, without a fortune, commanded by what he thought was the voice of Heaven to found a hospital in a wilderness where there were no people. Also in Paris dwelt a young priest, Jean Jacques Olier, who heard the self-same voices uttering the self-same command. These two men were unknown to each other; yet when they met by chance in the picture gallery of an old castle, there fell from their eyes, as it were, scales, and they beheld as in a vision each the other’s soul, and recognized in each fellow-helper and comrade of the spirit. To all this the practical man cries out “Bosh”! Yet Montreal is no bosh, but a stately city, and it sprang from the dreams “fool dreams,” enemies would call them of these two men, the Sulpician priest and the Anjou tax collector.

Hour after hour, arm in arm, they walked and talked, the man of prayers and the man of taxes. People or no people at Montreal, money or no money, they decided that the inner voice must be obeyed. A Montreal Society was formed. Six friends joined. What would be equal to $75,000 was collected. There were to be no profits on this capital. It was all to be invested to the glory of the Kingdom of Heaven. Unselfish if you like, foolish they may have been, but not hypocrites.

First of all, they must become Seigneurs of Montreal; but the island of Montreal had already been granted by the Hundred Associates to one Lauson. To render the title doubly secure, Dauversiere and Olier obtained deeds to the island from Lauson and from the Hundred Associates.

Forty-five colonists, part soldiers, part devotees, were then gained as volunteers; but a veritable soldier of Heaven was desired as commander. Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, was noted for his heroism in war and zeal in religion. When other officers returned from battle for wild revels, Maisonneuve withdrew to play the flute or pass hours in religious contemplation. His name occurred to both Dauversiere and Olier as fittest for command; but to make doubly sure, they took lodgings near him, studied his disposition, and then casually told him of their plans and asked his cooeperation. Maisonneuve was in the prime of life, on the way to high service in the army. His zeal took fire at thought of founding a Kingdom of God at Montreal; but his father furiously opposed what must have seemed a mad scheme. Maisonneuve’s answer was the famous promise of Christ: “No man hath left house or brethren or sister for my sake but he shall receive a hundredfold.”

Maisonneuve was warned there would be no earthly reward no pay for his arduous task; but he answered, “I devote my life and future; and I expect no recompense.”

Mademoiselle Jeanne Mance, thirty-four years old, who had given herself to good works from childhood, though she had not yet joined the cloister, now felt the call to labor in the wilderness. Later, in 1653, came Marguerite Bourgeoys to the little colony beneath the mountain. She too, like Jeanne Mance, distrusted dreams and visions and mystic communings, cherishing a religion of good works rather than introspection of the soul. Dauversiere and Olier remained in France. Fortunately for Montreal, practical Christians, fighting soldiers of the cross, carried the heavenly standard to the wilderness.

It was too late to ascend the St. Lawrence when the ship brought the crusaders to Quebec in August, 1641; and difficulties harried them from the outset. Was Montmagny, the Governor, jealous of Maisonneuve; or did he simply realize the fearful dangers Maisonneuve’s people would run going beyond the protection of Quebec? At all events, he disapproved this building of a second colony at Montreal, when the first colony at Quebec could barely gain subsistence. He offered them the Island of Orleans in exchange for the Island of Montreal, and warned them of Iroquois raid.

“I have not come to argue,” answered Maisonneuve, “but to act. It is my duty to found a colony at Montreal, and thither I go though every tree be an Iroquois.”

May 8, 1642, the little flotilla set out from Quebec a pinnace with the passengers, a barge with provisions, two long boats propelled by oars and a sweep. Montmagny and Father Vimont accompanied the crusaders; and as the boats came within sight of the wooded mountain on May 17, hymns of praise rose from the pilgrims that must have mingled strangely on Indian ears with the roar of the angry rapids. One can easily call up the scene the mountain, misty with the gathering shadows of sunset, misty as a veiled bride with the color and bloom of spring; the boats, moored for the night below St. Helen’s Island, where the sun, blazing behind the half-foliaged trees, paints a path of fire on the river; the white bark wigwams along shore with the red gleam of camp fire here and there through the forest; the wilderness world bathed in a peace as of heaven, as the vesper hymn floats over the evening air! It is a scene that will never again be enacted in the history of the world dreamers dreaming greatly, building a castle of dreams, a fortress of holiness in the very center of wilderness barbarity and cruelty unspeakable. The multitudinous voices of traffic shriek where the crusaders’ hymn rose that May night. A great city has risen on the foundations which these dreamers laid. Let us not scoff too loudly at their mystic visions and religious rhapsodies! Another generation may scoff at our too-much-worldliness, with our dreamless grind and visionless toil and harder creeds that reject everything which cannot be computed in the terms of traffic’s dollar! Well for us if the fruit of our creeds remain to attest as much worth as the deeds of these crusaders!

Early next morning the boats pulled in ashore where Cartier had landed one hundred years before and Champlain had built his factory thirty years ago. Maisonneuve was first to spring on land. He dropped to his knees in prayer. The others as they landed did likewise. Their hymns floated out on the forest. Madame de la Peltrie, Jeanne Mance, and the servant, Charlotte Barre, quickly decorated a wildwood altar with evergreens. Then, with Montmagny the Governor, and Maisonneuve the soldier, standing on either side, Madame de la Peltrie and Jeanne Mance and Charlotte Barre, bowed in reverence, with soldiers and sailors standing at rest unhooded, Father Vimont held the first religious services at Mont Royal. “You are a grain of mustard seed,” he said, “and you shall grow till your branches overshadow the earth.”

Maisonneuve cut the first tree for the fort; and a hundred legends might be told of the little colony’s pioneer trials. Once a flood threatened the existence of the fort. A cross was erected to stay the waters and a vow made if Heaven would save the fort a cross should be carried and placed on the summit of the mountain. The river abated, and Maisonneuve climbed the steep mountain, staggering under the weight of an enormous cross, and planted it at the highest point. Here, in the presence of all, mass was held, and it became a regular pilgrimage from the fort up the mountain to the cross.

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.

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 lé 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 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.

When Champlain returned to receive Quebec back from the English, more priests joined the Jesuits’ mission. Among them was the lion-hearted giant, Brebeuf.

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.

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.

“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 Brebeuf, 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 reechoed with salvos of cannon when the missionaries set out for Three Rivers.

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 Brebeuf reached Georgian Bay, thirty days from leaving Three Rivers, he had little left but the bundles he had carried for himself.

Brebeuf had been to the Huron country before with Etienne Brule, Champlain’s pathfinder; but of the first mission no record exists. Brebeuf found that Brule 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.

When Brebeuf’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, Brebeuf 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.

“He says ‘Hang on the kettle,’” Brebeuf 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,’” Brebeuf 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.

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 donnes, 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. 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, Brebeuf, 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.

“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.

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 Brebeuf 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 Brebeuf; but the lion-hearted stood steadfast, though Lalemant, new to scenes of carnage, turned white and trembled in spite of his resolution.

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 Brebeuf 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. Brebeuf and Lalemant had been knocked down, stripped, bound, and were now 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 Brebeuf and Lalemant, the two captured priests stood bound to the torture stakes, the gapingstock of a thousand fiends. When the Iroquois singed Brebeuf 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 Brebeuf 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. Brebeuf 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. Brebeuf 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.

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. 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 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.

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?