Père Marquette/Chapter 6

In the summer of 1669 Réné Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, a French gentleman of good lineage to whom had been granted a tract of land at La Chine, nine miles from Montreal, abandoned security and wealth to go adventuring over the wild Canadian wastes. His seigniory was a valuable one. He was a man of mark and authority. But, being the stuff of which explorers are made, he could not content himself with even a semi-civilized life. Indian traders, en route to Montreal, told him tales of a mighty river emptying into the sea. This he conceived to be the "Vermilion Sea" (the Gulf of California), and the old, old vision of a route to the East fired his vivid fancy. An accomplished woodsman, fearless, indefatigable and adroit, a man of acute understanding who spoke several Indian languages with ease, he seemed eminently ​fitted to carry the Lilies of France into the fertile lands that border the Great Lakes. It was said of him that his words were few and precise, that he was able to distinguish between the things he knew absolutely and the things he knew in part, and that he never pretended to know the things of which he was ignorant. To him belongs the honor of discovering the Ohio River, and to him Parkman ascribes the discovery of the Illinois. He hoped to go farther than these waterways could take him.

Frontenac, the martial and heroic governor of New France, was La Salle's friend and backer. So too was the Seminary of St. Sulpice, a community of ecclesiastics, "models," says Parkman, "of a discreet and sober conservatism," who held in Montreal the influential position that the Jesuits held in Quebec. The Seminary helped to supply La Salle with funds for his expedition; and, when he started, he took with him two Sulpician missionaries, Père Dollier de Casson (generally called Père Dollier) and Père Galinée. The latter, as it chanced, was a lively writer as well as a born adventurer, and his letters are gayer than most ecclesiastical ​correspondence. From him we learn that La Salle, who presumably feared nothing, made an honorable exception in the case of rattlesnakes. These reptiles inspired in him a sick and shuddering abhorrence, and the sight of three of them crawling up a rock threw him into a fever.

The speed and lightness of the birch canoes, their perfect adaptation of means to an end, so delighted Père Galinée that he made up his mind to take one of them back to France if ever he were happy enough to return. Paddling all day on river or on lake, and sleeping all night on the bare bosom of mother earth, filled this rather exceptional priest with a deep sense of exhilaration. "As for food," he writes blithely, "it is enough to make one want to burn all the cookery books that ever were written; for in the woods of Canada one is able to live well without bread, wine, salt, pepper, or spice."

"Living well" meant living on sagamité, seasoned with meat or fish "when we can get them"; and, notwithstanding La Salle's superb health and Père Galinée's light-heartedness, all the members of the party were suffering from some form of malady when they reached Irondequoit ​Bay, and a village of friendly Senecas who feasted them plentifully, and sent them gifts of pumpkins and wild berries. Here the sight of a prisoner tortured for six dreadful hours effectually sobered Père Galinée, who strove vainly to beg or buy the victim from his captors, and who was as keen to leave as he had been keen to arrive at a spot made hateful to him. In the next Indian settlement on Lake Ontario they encountered Louis Joliet, one of the most daring and adventurous of fur traders, who was destined to share with Père Marquette the glory of discovering the Mississippi. It was Joliet's account of Christian Indians living on the Upper Lakes which induced the two Sulpicians to turn their steps toward the forbidden Lake Erie. La Salle's goal was the Ohio. They parted reluctantly. The leader went on his perilous way. The priests and the traders wintered unobserved on the shores of the lake, in a log cabin which they built for themselves. Here, buried in the snows, they lived securely if monotonously on a diet of nuts which they had gathered, plums which they had dried, and game which they killed in abundance. When the spring came, they made their way, ​after manifold adventures and mishaps, to the Sault de Ste. Marie, and to Père Marquette's mission in the wilderness.

It was a curious meeting. The Sulpicians, after four months of savage life, a hard journey, and a shipwreck which had swept away most of their possessions, considered that the Jesuits were enjoying the sweets of civilization. They had a square log fort for a habitation. Part of it was their home, and part of it was a real chapel, where the children came every day to learn their prayers, and where the ragged visitors were invited to hear vespers sung. A tract of land had been cleared and planted with corn, beans, and pumpkins. Fish was to be had for the asking. It was May, and the wooded slopes were beautifully green. The dancing waters sparkled in the sun. It must have seemed like Paradise to the way-worn travelers who would gladly have prolonged their stay, but who were bound for missions of their own. Change, indeed, lay in wait for all. Père Galinée and Père Dollier returned to Montreal for fresh orders from their Superior. There Père Galinée, aided by Joliet, who furnished him with some rough drawings, ​made the earliest known map of the Upper Lakes. Père Marquette, a pawn in the great game of civilization, was sent a few months later far away from the beauty and safety of the Sault to the lonely, landlocked harbor of Chequamegon Bay, and the jutting breakwater christened in 1665 La Pointe du Saint Esprit.

This was the spot first visited by the fur traders, Radisson and Groseilliers, who came so near to robbing Père Marquette of the glory of his great discovery. They swung their canoes into its quiet waters in the autumn of 1659, built themselves a strong little log hut, which enjoyed the proud distinction of being the earliest dwelling place erected by white men on Lake Superior; and, undeterred by cold, danger, and privation, traded long and loyally with the Indians. Six years later, Père Allouez was sent from Quebec to start the first mission on this desolate coast. He gave La Pointe its French name, and ministered, as best he could, to the spiritual needs of half-a-dozen Indian villages, widely scattered, and populated by Ojibwas, Pottawattomies, and Kickapoos, to say nothing of fugitive Hurons and Ottawas, who, like ​Orestes, were forever flying from the malignant fury of the Iroquois, and who had sought this refuge because the adjacent swamp lands offered a retreat from their hereditary foe.

As Père Allouez had grown old, feeble, and a trifle discouraged in the exercise of his calling, Père Marquette, who was young, healthy, and brimming over with zeal, was chosen to succeed him in this farthest outpost of French trade. He went with joyful alacrity, relishing the loneliness and danger as welcome factors in a great game, and precisely the things he had come to the New World to meet. Even the snow and ice of an early and exceptionally severe winter failed to chill his enthusiasm. From La Pointe he wrote a long and minute letter to his Superior, Père Le Mercier, who forwarded it to France, where it was embodied in the Relations, and added one more page to the slowly and patiently gathered materials of Canadian history.

It is a sober narrative, but not without high lights and exultant passages. Already the youthful missionary had seen enough of the Indians to mistrust their facile acceptance of his teaching, and already he had learned that, once really ​Christianized, they led lives of amazing simplicity and goodness. The women especially heard in his words some promise of help in their drudgery and degradation. When he succeeded in persuading a brave to take back his wife whom he had cast off because he had wearied of her, other wives lifted up their heads, and looked a trifle more confidently into the future.

As usual his great trouble lay with that virulent plague of all savage life, the medicine men. They were an established institution. Their "cures" though inefficacious, were familiar and more or less diverting. If a woman's fever failed to moderate after a dance of questionable decency had been performed in her wigwam, the dancers at least had enjoyed themselves, the spectators had been entertained, and, as one old brave sagely remarked, it made no difference anyhow whether the woman lived or died. If an ill man grew worse after his body had been greased and he had been held over a blazing fire, the spectacle had been an exciting one, and it was to the medicine men's credit that their patient was not dead. The Hurons were too far advanced for such nastiness and folly; but the ​Ottawas were still addicted, according to Père Marquette, "to foulness, incantations, and sacrifices to evil spirits."

A month's journey from La Pointe lay two great villages of Illinois Indians. They numbered eight or nine thousand, and were too strong to fear attack. Their fertile lands yielded abundant crops. The forest supplied them with game. The braves were mighty warriors who trafficked in slaves captured from weaker tribes. Worshippers of the sun and of the powers of the air, they were less grossly superstitious than their neighbors. Neither were they fierce or cruel, although they punished unfaithful wives with severity. Their language was not unlike that of other Algonquin tribes, and Père Marquette devoted his spare hours (few and far between) to perfecting himself in its intricacies. Wandering Illinois hunters bade him visit their land and teach their people. With their old enemies, the Sioux (called in the Relations Nadouessi), they were now on good terms; and the Sioux promised to permit the missionary to pass safely through their territory, and to give him the calumet, or peace pipe, as a token of good-will. ​Indeed, these far-off friendly tribes, who had no intercourse with English or Americans, were eager to conciliate the unknown and mysterious power of France. "If the savages could learn to love God," wrote Père Marquette, "as easily as they learn to fear the French, Christianity would conquer the land."

From the Illinois, from the Sioux, from those strange nomads, the Kilistinaux, who built no villages, planted no land, set no traps, but lived by the chase and by bartering pelts, Père Marquette heard more and more of the great river, "a league wide," and flowing southward through lands where the winters were not of an icy coldness like those of New France, but mild and pleasant, and where the fertile soil bore two crops of maize a year. The savages dwelling on its banks traded with white men who prayed, as did the French priests, with rosaries, and who were summoned to prayer by the ringing of bells in their churches. The Indian name of the river was becoming familiar to the missionaries, though it suffered many vicissitudes at their hands. Messipi was the most frequent form of spelling, Missip was a popular abbreviation, ​Mitchisisipi appears on early maps, and Misisipi was a thrifty saving of consonants. Père Dablon wrote it painstakingly Messi-Sipi; and only in 1671 do we see it beautifully correct, with all its flowing syllables in order.

The Jesuits were well aware of France's eagerness to spread her colonies westward and southward, and of the supreme importance of a waterway. Père Marquette was only one of many who dreamed of discovering this way and so simplifying all future explorations. Two things were imperatively needed: light and strong canoes and the backing of temporal and spiritual authorities. For the first he was already making tentative bargains with the Indians, and wondering more than once if they could be trusted to keep their word. For the second he relied upon the fact that Père Dablon had in 1670 been appointed Superior General of all the Jesuit missions in New France, and there was no cleric or layman in the country more keen than he to learn the course and outlet of the unknown river.

It was a period tense with expectation. Père Marquette was divided naturally enough between the heady ambition of the explorer and ​the sober zeal of the missionary. In one and the same paragraph he wrote to Quebec that he hoped to carry the light of faith to savage tribes "that have long waited for this happiness"; and that the finding of the "Mesippi" will afford "a certain knowledge of the Southern or of the Western Sea into which it empties." He was not much given to analyzing his own mind or motives. Generations of fighting ancestors had bequeathed to him simple ways of thought. Perhaps, too, a hardy life in the woods, filled with work and sprinkled with dangers, is not conducive to self-dissection. Père Marquette's letters are apt to close with some such line as "wherever God does us the grace to lead us," the finality of which is the summing up of earthly hopes and fears.