Père Marquette/Chapter 8

In 1672 the Seigneur de Courcelles, Governor General of New France, was succeeded in office by a man whose name is stamped indelibly upon the troubled history of his time. Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac, was a soldier of distinction and a devoted servant of France. He was also a far-seeing man of affairs, who succeeded in diverting a great deal of Indian trade from the rapacious English and Dutch settlers to the equally rapacious French. The fort which he built on Lake Ontario, and which bore his name, gave protection to his countrymen by holding the restive Iroquois in check. Parkman admits that as a negotiator with these proud, sensitive, and warlike Indians, Frontenac was without a peer. He knew how to enforce respect and win regard. "He seems to have had an instinctive perception of the treatment they ​required. His martial nature, his clear, decisive speech, his frank and downright manner, backed as they were by a display of force which in their eyes was formidable, struck them with admiration, and gave tenfold effect to his words of kindness. His predecessors had never ventured to address the Iroquois as 'Children,' but had always called them 'Brothers.' Yet an assumption of paternal authority on the part of Frontenac was not only taken in good part, but was received with apparent gratitude. They thanked him for that which from another they would not have endured."

With wise counsel, briefly imparted, with generous promises and lavish gifts, with veiled threats underlying his most suave and gracious words, Frontenac prevailed upon the Iroquois to permit the erection of his fort and storehouses at Cataraqui. They agreed to leave his soldiers unmolested and to send their pelts to his traders. As a striking proof of their confidence, they dispatched two young boys and two girls, children of chiefs, to be educated in Quebec, the boys in the Governor's own household, the girls in the convent of the Ursulines. ​Well might this astute negotiator have written to France: "I may boast of having impressed the five nations with respect, fear, and good-will."

The order of succession is noticeable. Frontenac had his way because back of his friendly advances, back of his costly gifts, back of his real desire to conciliate and be at peace, was the invincible determination to win by war what he could not gain by diplomacy. As long as the Iroquois refrained from violence they had no surer friend than the governor. It is probable that he had a better feeling for them than for his French associates—his quarrels being many and vigorous. But he managed to make them understand what they had never understood before—that neither the white man, nor the white man's Indian allies, could be molested with impunity. The result of this original point of view, coupled with a rigorous respect for their own rights and some delicate concessions to their pride, was a long respite from war, and a splendid chance to increase the activities of trade. Frontenac enriched himself, but he also helped to enrich France.

​The tale of his last years is briefly told. While he ruled, all went well; but he had at least as many enemies as friends, and they never rested until he was recalled to France in 1682. His successor, La Barre, was most unfortunately chosen. Possessing neither courage nor prudence, he managed to lose in ten months the fruits of ten years' diplomacy; and by the time he was superseded by the Marquis de Denonville the once peaceful country was aflame with war. Denonville had courage to spare, but no adroitness and no perception of Indian character. He angered the Iroquois without intimidating them, which was a grievous thing to do. They became more and more restive, more and more threatening. There were raids on Huron and Algonquin villages, ambushed attacks which cost the lives of French traders, a steady loss of commerce, a deepening sense of danger everywhere. All this was little to the fancy of the French king; and, after seven years of disorder and bloodshed, Frontenac was conjured to return to his post and, by force of counsel or by force of arms, bring the Five Nations once more under subjection.

​It needed force of arms. Frontenac tried patiently and vainly to patch up a peace, hold back the encroachments of the British, and reëstablish his old firm and friendly relations with the Indians. The Iroquois were ready to promise amity to the French, but not to the hated Algonquins. Frontenac liked the Iroquois, and had no especial fancy for the Algonquins; but honor and wisdom alike forbade him to sacrifice friend to foe. At the age of seventy-six, this redoubtable old warrior took the field against an enemy whose strength he knew, whose qualities he respected, and whom he had warned twenty-four years before to refrain from provoking the hostility of France. The campaign was brief and decisive. The red men far outnumbered the white, and were fearless fighters; but the French were better armed and better led, and the discipline of frontier life enabled them to bear exposure, hunger, and fatigue with an almost savage unconcern. They carried the war swiftly and terribly into the enemy's country, attacking and burning the palisaded villages as though they had been stacks of straw. The inmates fled to the forests; but the forests afforded no safety ​to beaten Indians who had other Indians for foes. The Iroquois saw their homes destroyed, their braves slain, their children captives, their places of retreat beset by hostile tribes. They were compelled to sue for peace, accepting terms instead of dictating them, and realizing in bitterness of spirit that the white chief who had given them their choice of friendship or of war had kept both his promises and his threats. Frontenac received the cross of Saint Louis from France, and the heartfelt gratitude of his countrymen in Canada. Two years later he died.

This was the man who coöperated cordially with the plans of the intendant, Talon, for the development of Canadian trade and the enlargement of the Canadian domain. This was the man who listened with keen interest to the intendant's tale of the mysterious Mississippi, and of his cherished plans for its discovery. They were to be his, alas! no longer, for he was on the eve of returning to France. His useful and interesting life in the New World was over. He could but leave to his successors the duty of carrying on the work which ​he had begun, and the joy of fulfilling hopes which he had only dreamed. Frontenac, who never made the mistake of despising experience, listened attentively to his words and implicitly followed his counsel. When Talon proposed Joliet as the best leader for the Mississippi venture, the governor acquiesced in his choice, and wrote to Colbert that he was fortunate to find at hand a young man discreet and experienced. "The sieur Joliet is very skilful in these kinds of discoveries, and has already been near the great river of which he promises to ascertain the course. We shall have certain news of it this summer, and perhaps of copper mines as well."

Louis Joliet was the son of a wagon maker in the service of the Company of the Hundred Associates. A hardy, bright-eyed boy, he had attracted the attention of the Quebec Jesuits, who took him into their school and educated him—they hoped—for the priesthood. But the lad, though satisfactorily decent and devout, had in him the instincts of the rover. He could never have waited, as Père Marquette had ​waited, twelve years in servitude. He wandered from the start—over to France, which he found tame, back to Canada, and far into the perilous woods. As trader, explorer, guide, and interpreter, he had learned all that the wilderness could teach. The never-ending search for copper mines kept him well employed, and his admirable knowledge of the Indian languages helped him in the buying of furs. Parkman says that he had no commanding qualities, which is probably true; but as friend and comrade he was unequalled. Twelve years younger than Père Marquette, the two men had been friends whenever they had a chance, which was not often. Both were fearless, sanguine, resolute, and conciliating. In both hearts there burned the inextinguishable zest for adventure.

This zest, as I have already said, was part of the missionary's outfit. Without it, the corresponding zest for saving souls would have been painfully thwarted. It is one thing to obey an order and faithfully perform a task. It is another to leap to the task with a happy sense of destiny fulfilled. The heads of the great religious houses ​knew very well the kind of priests to send abroad and the kind to keep at home. Sometimes, indeed, they failed to curb the resistless wanderlust. A case in point was the famous Franciscan friar, Père Hennepin, who seems to have been a free lance, as unfettered and as uncertain as the winds or weather. It was he who discovered and named the Falls of St. Anthony, then a sheer descent of sixty feet, beneath which, veiled in mist and foam, dwelt Oanktayhee, the much feared God of the Sioux. It was he who wrote with characteristic exaggeration the first account of Niagara Falls, which had been marked on Champlain's map nearly fifty years earlier, but of which only confused and absurd reports had reached Europe.

Père Hennepin, it is said, derived his passion for roving from the French and foreign sailors who frequented the ports of Calais and Dunkirk. Perhaps he also learned from them the art of embroidering a narrative. Certain it is that he never wearied of their company; and if they showed signs of wearying of his, he sought to obtain by stealth the pleasure which he dared not openly claim. "Often," he confesses, "I hid ​myself behind tavern doors while they were talking about their voyages. The tobacco smoke made me dizzy and ill; but I did not care. I could have listened whole days and nights, without eating or sleeping, to their stories of the sea and of far-away countries."

With something of this ardor, Père Marquette, teaching his Indian children and attending his pumpkin feasts at St. Ignace, listened to all that wandering savages had to tell about the Mississippi. A year before, Père Dablon had written from hearsay an account of the river, "deeming it proper to set down all that we have learned, even at second-hand." He described it as circling the Great Lakes and flowing southward to the "Vermilion Sea." "Some Indians assure us that three leagues from its mouth it is broader than is the St. Lawrence at Quebec. They say, moreover, that in this vast extent of country there are boundless prairies without trees or bushes, so that the inhabitants are obliged to use turf or sun-dried dung for fuel. Twenty miles from the sea the forests grow thickly. Some warriors from the South, the Maskoutens, describe the shores of this river, ​and the country inland, as populated by many tribes who differ in language and customs, and who are ceaselessly at war with one another. The Nadouessi [Sioux] are the most numerous, powerful, and widely scattered. Their villages may be found for more than a hundred leagues."

Just why and when Père Marquette was chosen to be Joliet's associate in the voyage of discovery we do not know. It was customary for a priest to accompany every expedition, partly because it emphasized the possible conversion of the Indians, and partly because discipline and experience had made the missionaries adepts in dealing with temperamental savages. Père Marquette's name may have been suggested by Joliet himself, or by the fathers of the mission in Quebec with whom he was in close conference before his departure. A single line in the Relations tells us that Frontenac and Talon were "well pleased" that the young Jesuit should be one of the party. Five lines in Père Marquette's journal tell us almost as briefly that on the 8th of December, 1672. "Monsieur Jollyet arrived with orders from Monsieur the Count de Frontenac, governor of New France, ​and Monsieur Talon, our intendant, bidding him accomplish this discovery with me."

This is the extent of our information, and it is enough. There were missionaries in plenty with a wider experience, a better knowledge of woodcraft, a keener eye, and a readier pen. But Père Marquette possessed four great qualifications for the job. He was young—only thirty-three. He spoke half-a-dozen Indian languages. He was cautious as well as fearless. Above all, he had evinced in the three missions to which he had been sent a talent for friendliness. His eager, open, simple manner disarmed suspicion. His candor and kindness produced good-will. If his parishioners at St. Ignace came to church because they liked him, might not the unknown tribes, through whose territory he was compelled to pass, like him well enough to refrain from murdering his party? It was a reasonable conjecture.

Therefore was Joliet commissioned to carry to St. Ignace the appointment from Frontenac, and a letter from the Jesuit superior bidding the quiet little priest fare forth on his extraordinary quest. It may be noted that the Jesuits ​placed as much confidence in Joliet as they did in their own son. In the Relations of 1673 there is a report sent from Quebec to France commending him highly as one possessed of every qualification for the task, and as the best man whom Frontenac could have found. "He has both tact and prudence, which are the chief characteristics required for the success of a voyage as dangerous as it is difficult. He has the courage to dread nothing where everything is to be feared."

It was on the feast of the Immaculate Conception that Joliet reached Machillimackinac with the gleeful tidings. The auspiciousness of the date thrilled Père Marquette's soul with the happiest anticipations. His fervent devotion to the Mother of God, his daily prayers for her intercession and her aid, had brought him this signal favor. Of all the Indians whom he had so far encountered none had seemed to him so intelligent or so promising as the Illinois. His heart had gone out to them from the first, and it was to reach them that he had begged a safe conduct through the country of the Sioux, and had sent as propitiatory gifts the bright little ​pictures that had been so ceremoniously returned. Now his way must take him into their villages, scattered, he knew, on or near the beckoning river. If he made the journey in safety he would say to them: "Twice have you sent for me, and I have come." If he perished en route—well, that was an everyday occurrence in the wilderness. "I found myself under the blessed necessity of exposing my life for this long cherished cause," he wrote with simple sincerity and very evident delight.

But although the conversion of heathen tribes is understood to be the aim and end of a missionary's existence, it is impossible to read Père Marquette's narrative (Joliet's was unhappily lost in the swollen waters of the St. Lawrence) without a pleasant realization that the sentiment uppermost in the hearts of these two young men was a keen anticipation of the remarkably venturesome voyage, its risks and its rewards. They were about to penetrate into the unknown. They were bound on a magnificent errand. They had been selected from dozens of other young men to perform a signal service for France. They were abandoning comparative comfort (food ​and shelter) for real hardships, and comparative safety for certain danger. What wonder that Père Marquette closes an account of their meager equipment with these exhilarating words: "We were ready to do and suffer everything for so glorious an undertaking."