Père Marquette/Chapter 5

In 1666 Quebec was a small, strongly fortified town, where peace reigned, and life, though hard, was not devoid of pleasure and excitement. A church, a hospital, a convent of Ursulines (always the most adventurous of nuns), the well-built houses of the governor and of the intendant, the big bare dwelling of the Jesuits, the soldiers' barracks, and the great warehouse for furs, were its salient features. The garrison lent to the little gray streets an air of gay virility. The amenities of civilization, so dear to the French heart, were tenderly preserved. On New Year's Day, letters of compliment were exchanged, with such gifts as could be brought from France or manufactured at home. The nuns sent to the priests candies, rosaries, and pies, all of their own making. The priests sent to the nuns devotional books and little statues of saints. The governor sent pres​ents of a practical order—capons, pigeons, wild turkeys, and prunes—to priests and nuns. The priests and nuns gave to their protégés and working people books, souliers sauvages (moccasins), handkerchiefs, sweetmeats, and an occasional bottle of brandy. Formal visits were exchanged, and the Indians were feasted as well as the resources of the white men would permit.

The good-will of a pioneer community, which was also a polite community, found its natural expression in giving. The pages of the Relations are filled with kindly deeds. One day Mme de la Péléterie sent the Jesuits two dozen napkins and two sheets. A week later another benefactress sent them four brasses (a brasse was nearly two metres) of red cloth, a brasse and a half of blue cloth, and several thousand porcelain beads, all of which were destined as presents for the Indians. When the Ursulines received boxes from France they shared the contents generously with their neighbors, sending on one occasion a whole keg of prunes to the priests, who did not often enjoy such an abundance of this esteemed delicacy. Wax candles were in great demand. Four of them in iron candlesticks burned on the ​altar at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in the Jesuit chapel. The bitter chill was moderated by two great iron kettles full of fire. The music was good: a violin, a flute—somewhat out of tune—and the best male voices the little town could yield.

There was even a pathetic attempt to reproduce the gaieties of home. A maypole was planted on May Day in front of the church (shade of Governor Endicott!), and hung with such odds and ends of ribbon and silk as could be spared for its adornment. The birth of a royal child in France was celebrated in far-away Canada with a procession or a play. The warehouse served as a theater, and here an ambitious troupe gave Corneille's splendid tragedy, The Cid. Most of the Jesuits attended this performance, "out of deference to Monsieur the Governor who took pleasure therein" (poor exile from Paris!), "as did also the savages." Later in the winter a ballet was produced. No priest or nun was present at this entertainment; but it has the kindly mention it deserves. To stage a ballet in midwinter in a Quebec warehouse needed courage, as well as enterprise and art.

​If amusements were few among these pleasure-loving people, and luxuries unknown—unless prunes can be accounted a luxury—there was plenty of wood for burning, and plenty of game and grain for food. The fisheries were marvelous. Forty thousand eels were brought into Quebec in a single season. They were sold at half an écu a hundred, so that nobody who liked eels needed to go hungry. It is piteous to think of Père Le Jeune in the woods with an eelskin for his day's rations, and forty thousand of these succulent fishes in the markets of Quebec. To the Ursulines were assigned the cargoes of reputable girls and young women who came to New France to be married and rear much needed families. The year before Père Marquette's arrival, one ship brought over eighty-two of these candidates for matrimony, most of whom—so say the Relations—had been taught housewifery by the capable nuns of France.

If Quebec seemed rude and wild to the town-trained eyes of Père Marquette, he was soon to know what rudeness and wildness really meant. Three weeks were allowed him for rest after a voyage rich in discomfort. Then, as the long ​Canadian winter was beginning to draw in, and traveling, always difficult, would soon become dangerous, he was sent seventy-seven miles southwest to the trading station of Three Rivers, admirably situated at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the St. Maurice, and one of the earliest settlements of New France. Tadoussac, on the mouth of the Saguenay, was probably the only other outpost which did as big a business with French and Indian trappers. On October 10th Père François Le Mercier, superior at Quebec, wrote with customary conciseness in the Relations: "Père Jacques Marquette goes to Three Rivers to be a pupil of Père Druillettes in the Montagnais language."

This sounds simple when we read it; but it meant that the young priest's troubles had begun. The great and often insuperable barrier to the missionary's work was his difficulty in mastering the Indian dialects. They had to be studied without grammar or dictionary. They had to be understood with ease, and spoken with fluency. Learned French Jesuits discovered to their sorrow that they could never hope to make themselves intelligible to the savages. They were ​compelled to return to France, or to confine their ministrations to the French settlers in America. We find Père Le Jeune confessing ruefully that Père Brébeuf has far outstripped him in study. The language of the Montagnais he considered especially exasperating, because it had so many different ways of saying the same thing. Where one word or expression sufficed for the French, the opulent Indians had a dozen. "When you know the parts of French or Spanish speech and how to combine them," he wrote, "you know the languages. Not so with us. Stock your memory with all the words which stand for objects, learn the knot or syntax that joins them, and you are still an ignoramus. For besides the names of individual things, there are an infinite number of words that signify several things together. And these compound terms have no relation, or alliance, or affinity in sound with the simple terms which signify the things apart. It is a tiresome abundance."

Père Marquette's aptitude for mastering tongues was now to stand him in good stead. This had been his great distinction throughout long years of study; and if he was never again ​to speak the polite languages of Europe which he had acquired with so much zeal, the talent remained and could be turned to fresh account. Within a few years he learned six Indian dialects. In all of them he could make himself understood. In some of them he could be persuasive.

And persuasiveness was a winning card with savages whose pride was quickly wounded and whose suspicions were easily aroused. Tact was required to keep them in good humor, and dignity to win and hold their regard. The rules and regulations laid down by the first missionaries for the guidance of their successors are minute, punctilious, amusing, and infinitely wise. If a priest is traveling with Indians, he must be careful never to make them wait for him when embarking in their canoes. If his broad-brimmed hat annoys them, he must take it off and wear a nightcap. He must eat at break of day and at sunset, and he must eat the sagamité as it is prepared, however tasteless and dirty. It would be well for him to take the portion of food that is offered. He may not desire it all at first; but, as he grows accustomed to its nasti​ness, it will not seem too much. He must not offer to paddle unless he is prepared to paddle all day; and he must not lend an Indian any portion of his clothing unless he has made up his mind to do without it for the rest of the journey. He must not give any outward indication of his fatigue or discomfort. Finally, he must not ask his fellow travelers too many questions, nor make too many observations, nor seek too indefatigably to learn Indian phrases. This annoys the taciturn savages. "Silence is a good equipment for a journey."

When living in a native village, the priest is warned that he must be gay and affable without undue familiarity. He must never complain of the food. He must not be too long in saying his prayers. He must visit the Indians in their lodges lest they feel themselves slighted. He must accept at once such attentions as may be shown him. If he is offered the best place by the fire, or the choicest morsel of food, he must take it without ceremony. He must show no annoyance when the dogs bark or the babies scream. "Nothing is lost by caressing the children, by ​praising the young men and the hunters, by respecting the old, and by honoring the dead."

Admirable counsel, all of it! If now and then the missionary must have felt like a candidate for office at election time, the greatness of the end he had in view ennobled his tireless efforts to conciliate.

One equipment for a forest life was lacking in Père Marquette. He was not physically strong. Père Brébeuf and Père Jogues were men of iron constitution as well as iron will. They bore cold and hunger with a stoicism that matched the Indians'. They bore torture and death with a scornful dignity that surpassed the Indians' utmost efforts. But Père Marquette, when sent at the age of thirty-one to his first mission at Sault de Ste. Marie, the land of the Ottawas, and one of the farthest outposts of New France, was a short, slightly built man, hardened, indeed, to exposure and inured to fatigue, but with no great reserve of strength. His singleness of purpose carried him far. His natural gaiety of disposition, his love of adventure, his universal friendliness, his quiet and ​sincere piety smoothed the roughness of his way. But he was singularly ill-fitted to live on acorns, or eelskins, or tripe de roche, or any such appalling substitutes for the simple and nourishing food of France.

Happily the latest treaty of peace with the Iroquois, a treaty concluded in the year of Père Marquette's arrival in Quebec, insured a fair measure of safety for the missionaries, provided they did not venture into the dangerous territory on Lake Erie, or push their canoes into that still more dangerous lake. The hostile savages had promised to keep off the warpath, and they held to their promise; but they did not propose to have their country invaded by French traders whom they cordially hated, or by Indian traders under French protection. This inhospitable attitude was singularly inconvenient for Père Marquette and his little party of two donnés and a strong young Canadian boy. It compelled them to travel slowly and painfully by river routes instead of on the Great Lakes. It necessitated long carries and endless delays. They waited until they could join other voyagers bound for the same destination; then in birch-​bark canoes, kneeling on rush mats, they braved the heady currents of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers, making little progress, beaten back by adverse winds, and stopping every few days for parleys, or for barter with the savages who thronged the water's edge.

Mr. Reuben Thwaites has traced with care every mile of Père Marquette's ten weeks' journey, so rich in discomfort and adventure. The portage trail to Lake Nipissing, the passage through French River to Lake Huron, the beautiful, dangerous trip amid the islands of Georgian Bay and along the shores of the lake beyond. "Upon their right, pine forests mantled the bluffs, and swept down grandly to the water. Upon their left, the green waves stretched to the horizon." The canoes, those gallant little boats that seemed so frail yet weathered so many gales, that were so light and buoyant on the water and so uncommonly heavy to carry on land, that could be so easily overloaded yet must hold all that the wilderness could not supply, were at last nearing their journey's end. They entered the crooked little "River of St. Mary," and wound their way to their final desti​nation, the cataract known as the Sault de Ste. Marie, and the large village of Ojibwas, which was the heart and center of the Ottawa mission.

Twenty-seven years before Père Marquette's arrival, two French Jesuits, Père Jogues and Père Raymbault, had founded this mission and had reported that the savages were friendly and well disposed. Nineteen years later, Père Ménard on his way to Lake Superior and his death, had visited the Sault. In 1664 Père Louis Nicolas was sent as a missionary to the Ottawas, and Père Marquette was his successor in the field. It was an important post and one of the great centers of the fur trade. Indeed, for nearly two hundred years Indian and white trappers brought their pelts to be sold in its warehouses to French, English, and Americans.

It was also a spot of wild and savage beauty. Not much space in the Relations is devoted to the charms of nature. The missionaries had other and more important things to write about. But if Père Marquette is obstinately silent on this point, we find a really enthusiastic paragraph from the pen of his associate, Père Dablon, who is smitten to the heart by the glory of falling ​waters, of rapids, and of steep pine-clad hills.

"What is commonly called the Sault," he writes, "is not a high cataract, but a rushing current of water from Lake Superior. Checked by the rocks which dispute its passage, it plunges headlong over them in a dangerous cascade like a set of giant steps half a league in width. The speed is fearful until the rocks are passed, when the water broadens out into a beautiful and gently flowing river, full of islands which divide it and increase its width, so that in some places the eye cannot see across."

It was at the foot of these rapids that the Indians fished for the famous atticameg, called by the appreciative Frenchmen "whitefish." The sport was difficult and dangerous. The fishermen, standing upright in their canoes, which were swept hither and thither by the whirling waters, plunged into their depths a net shaped like a pocket, and fastened to a stout rod. Watching keenly for their prey, they scooped it up with a sudden strong jerk of the wrist and landed it in the canoe, provided they were not overturned themselves, which very often happened. The fish were so plentiful that, during the ​spring months, nomadic Indians came from far and wide to feast upon this delicate and abundant fare.

In all that related to sport; in the fisheries, in the wild life of the woods, in the brilliant birds and aggressive insects, the missionaries took a keen and intelligent interest; and of these things they made full reports in the Relations. We know how ingeniously the Indians constructed their weirs for catching eels, and how skilfully they harpooned the fish at night, floating silently in their canoes, with flaming torches fastened to the prows. An expert harpooner could spear three hundred eels in a night. Cut into strips, and carefully smoked by the squaws, these delicacies supplied food in the frozen winter months, when the moose were few and shy. That amazing little animal, the beavers, was to the Frenchmen a source of wonder and delight. A "master builder" they called it, whose two-story home far excelled the miserable dwelling places of the Indians. "The materials of which it is composed are wood and mud so well joined and bound together that we ​have seen the savages sweat in midwinter when trying to break it open with their hatchets."

Of all the narratives that fill the many volumes of the Relations, those of Père Le Jeune make the best reading. The Jesuits wrote with unvarying clearness, though not with unvarying conciseness. Their reports have a convincing sincerity. There was plenty to be told, and the telling of it was done at leisure. When Père Marquette's turn came, he described his great adventure with careful accuracy, heightened at moments into eloquence. But Père Le Jeune was that rara avis, a real writer. He came to Quebec as superior of the Canadian missions; but being consumed by a desire for first-hand knowledge, he spent many months in Indian villages and at Three Rivers. He was earnest, ardent, and extraordinarily observant. It was said of him that he carried "a will of steel in a heart of fire." He was not a sentimentalist, and he cherished few illusions concerning fundamental savagery. But neither was he a defeatist. Happily, the word had not been invented in his day. From him we get the most graphic accounts of Indian ​life, and from him we get the best descriptions of the North American fauna, so strange, so repellent, and so fascinating to the Frenchmen's eyes. He tells his provincial in Paris about the bears, the porcupines, the flying squirrels, and the raccoons—for the last of which he has only the Indian name. He then proceeds to describe two familiar objects so admirably and with so deft a touch that the brief paragraphs should be quoted in full:

"There is also a low animal, about the size of a little dog or cat. I mention it here, not on account of its excellence, but to make of it a symbol of sin. I have seen three or four of them. It has black fur, very beautiful and shining, and upon its back are two white stripes which join at the neck and at the tail, making an oval. The tail is bushy and handsome, like that of a fox, and is curled proudly back. It is more white than black, and at the first glance you would say, especially when it walks, that it ought to be called Jupiter's little beast. But it is so stinking, and casts so vile an odor, that it is unworthy of being called the beast of Pluto. No sewer ever smelled so bad. I would not have believed it if ​I had not smelled it myself. Your heart fails you when you catch sight of the creature. Two have been killed in our court, and for several days afterwards there was such a dreadful stench throughout the hut that we could not endure it. I believe the sin smelled by Saint Catherine of Siena must have been exactly like it."

And to counterbalance this justly dreaded animal comes something beautiful and beloved:

"The most engaging little object I have seen is called by the French either the fly-bird, because it is scarcely larger than a bee, or the flower-bird because it lives upon the honey in flowers. It is one of the rarities of this land, and a little prodigy of nature. God seems to me to have wrought more wonderfully in this tiny bird than in the most powerful beast. When it flies, it hums like a bee. It can hold itself in the air, and stick its bill into a flower. The bill is long, and the plumage of a mottled green. Those who call it the flower-bird would, I think, come nearer to the truth if they called it the flower of birds."

Were ever wild things more faithfully, more charmingly, or more alarmingly described!

​From Père Marquette we hear little of animal life, and still less of the beauty of his new abode. His concern was for the savages he had been sent to serve. He found the Ojibwas friendly, and—for Indians—gentle; but the Ottawa mission embraced a dozen surrounding tribes who came to the Sault to fish and to trade. His first reports have the optimism of inexperience, modified by a certain canniness which went hand in hand with his lifelong and inextinguishable enthusiasm. He is amazed at the readiness of his flock to listen to his words, he is delighted at their seeming acquiescence; but he doubts if ancient superstitions are easily overcome, and he is not without a suspicion that what they really desire is to please him in a matter of small moment. The stubborn scorn of the Hurons about Three Rivers sometimes yielded to argument or entreaty; and such converts remained firm in their faith. But here there was no hatred to overcome. The sanguine young priest confesses that the children are his hope and the dying are his certainty. Like many a missionary before him, he realizes that deathbed baptisms yield a "sure harvest."

​In the meager comforts possible to such a life, the Sault ranked high. What with the abundance of fish, the patches of land cultivated by the Ojibwa squaws, and the continual presence of traders, there was variety of food as well as of company. Nevertheless, midwinter found the Indians here, as elsewhere, insufficiently fed. If Père Marquette is silent on this interesting point, Père Le Mercier, who visited the mission, is outspoken and explicit. He confesses that he envies the savages their capacity to eat three days' food when game is plenty, and to fast three days when game is scarce. He is firmly of the opinion that pounded fish bones are a poor substitute for pounded corn, and he makes certain dark allusions to a "moss that grows on the rocks," which can mean nothing else but the terrible "tripe de roche," which was like black glue, and which played havoc with the sensitive stomachs of the French.

The chapel in which Père Marquette said his daily mass was a strongly built hut adorned with forest greenery, and with such pictures and altar linen as could be carried so many miles from Quebec. In the eyes of the Indians it had the ​splendor of a cathedral. Here he preached, here he taught the children, and here he baptized eighty infants, some of whom "went to Paradise." The percentage of deaths among Indian children was always high. This weakened the tribes numerically, but strengthened them physically. The boys and girls who fought through the first years of cold, exposure, hunger, neglect, and the perilous ministrations of the medicine men, must have been hard to kill. The girls grew into women, strong enough to bear the burdens laid upon them. The boys were well fitted for the

in which they took delight.