Père Marquette/Chapter 4

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. Père Paul Le Jeune, who lived for months with the Algonquins and went with them into the woods for their hard winter ​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. Père Jean de Brébeuf, who came of a noble Norman family, and Père Gabriel Lalemant met their terrible deaths (the most appalling on record) when St. Ignace, a Huron settlement, was raided by the Iroquois. Père 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 ​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.

​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 Père Jerome Lalement, "they fight like lions, and they disappear like a flight of birds." When on the warpath they man​aged 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 donnés who gave their services without pay to the missionaries, was captured by the Iroquois when in attendance on Père 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 ​good fathers much satisfaction. "Modesty," wrote Père Claude Chauchetière, "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. Père 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 ​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 sagamité, 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 Père Hennepin, a priest of the Récollet order, a bowl of sagamité mixed with little frogs, which they held in high esteem, but which he had infinite difficulty in swallowing. ​He fared better when dining with a Sioux chief on a mess of wild rice boiled with whortleberries. This he found delicious. Père François Le Mercier tells us that when he gave the newly arrived Jesuit, Père 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 Père 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 ​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 Père Le Jeune to the doors of death. Père Louis André, 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 ​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 super​stition, 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 con​vince Père Chaumont and Père 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 donnés sometimes acted as interpreters; but we find Père 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 ​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 ​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. Père 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. Père Brébeuf writes that the Hurons called his clock the "Chieftain ​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 Père 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 ​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. Père 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 ​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 Rémy, 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 ​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 ​second place, it could not give them the sensations they desired. They were not seeking for sobriety.

Such were the snowy wastes for which Père 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 ​with courtesy, establishing and maintaining friendly relations with Hurons, Ottawas, and Algonquins, young, ardent, and adventurous, Père Marquette went into the wilderness to accomplish greater things than he had dreamed of in his long years of study and desire.