Père Marquette/Chapter 16

To the mission of St. Ignace at Michillimackinac the two boatmen, whom we know as Pierre and Jacques, carried the tidings of Père 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 ​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 Père 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. Père 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 ​instructed by Père 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.

Père Henri Nouvelle and Père Philippe Pierçon, 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 Kis​kakons to make sure that they really had the remains of Père 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 ​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. Père Engelran, then head of the Michillimackinac mission, was an adroit ​peace-maker who had been employed several times on difficult and dangerous errands. Now the new governor, Callières, 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. Callières 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 Pothérie, "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 Père Engelran returned to Michillimackinac, he found his chapel in ruins, and set himself to build a new and larger one on a dif​ferent site. Père 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 Père 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. ​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 Père 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 Père Marquette feel that he was having a bad time. Yet the outward circumstances of his brave and toilsome existence ​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 Père 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:

That Père 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 ​drawings of early maps which needed only a little elucidation to make them deeply interesting. All the reproductions of Père Marquette's map of the Mississippi differ from one another. Sometimes the river staggers along, a faint and wavering, line. Sometimes, as in Thévenot'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 Pêche du Poisson Blanc." This follows the old ingenious and instructive method of map making. It needs only the words "brumeuse," "ténèbres," "froidure," to complete the information which adventurous voyagers required.

The good-will which Père 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 ​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 Père 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 Père Membré, who was his companion for many months, attributed to his tactful and engaging ​manner with savages. This Récollet missionary was a firm friend, an apt writer, and an all too venturesome hunter. His naïve 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 ​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.

Père 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 Père Membré 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 ​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:

was their inspiring choice. The magic quality of physical danger which "doubles the strength of the strong, the craft of the cunning, the nobility ​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. Père Brébeuf and Père 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. Père Marquette, who had always before his eyes the life and death of St. François 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.