IX.

CONVENTS AND HOSPITALS--VILLE-MARIE--MARTYRED MISSIONARIES--VICTORIOUS IROQUOIS--HAPLESS HURONS.

(1635-1652.)

A scene that was witnessed on the heights of Quebec on a fine June morning, two hundred and eighty-three years ago, illustrated the spirit that animated the founders of Canada. At the foot of a cross knelt the Governor, Charles Hault de Montmagny, Knight of Malta, who had come to take the place of his great predecessor, Samuel Champlain, whose remains were buried close by, if indeed this very cross did not indicate the spot. Jesuits in their black robes, soldiers in their gay uniforms, officials and inhabitants from the little town below, all followed the example of Montmagny, whose first words were, according to Father Le Jeune, the historian of those days: "Behold the first cross that I have seen in this country, let us worship the crucified Saviour in his image." Then, this act of devotion accomplished, the procession entered the {130} little church dedicated by Champlain to Notre Dame de la Recouvrance, where the priests solemnly chanted the _Te Deum_ and offered up prayers for the King of France.

The Church was first, the State second. After the service the new governor entered the fort of St. Louis, only a few steps from the sacred building, received the keys amid salutes of cannon and musketry, and was officially installed as head of the civil and military government of Canada, at this time controlled by the Company of the Hundred Associates. Then he was called upon to act as god-father for a dying Indian who desired baptism. In the smoky cabin packed with Indians Montmagny stood by the earnest Jesuit and named the Algonquin Joseph. "I leave you to think," says Father Le Jeune, "how greatly astonished were these people to see so much crimson, so many handsomely dressed persons beneath their bark roofs."

[Illustration: Marie Guyard (Mère Marie de l'Incarnation).]

During the period of which I am now writing we see the beginnings of the most famous educational and religious institutions of the country. The Hotel Dieu was founded in 1639, by the Soeurs Hospitalières from the convent of St. Augustine, in Dieppe, through the benefactions of the Duchess d'Aiguillon, the niece of Cardinal Richelieu. Rich, fascinating, and beautiful women contributed not only their fortunes but their lives to the service of the Church. Marie Madeleine de Chauvigny, who belonged to a noble family in Normandy, married at a very early age a M. de la Peltrie, who left her a young widow of twenty-two years of age, without {132} any children. Deeply attached to her religion from her youth, she decided to devote her life and her wealth to the establishment of an institution for the instruction of girls in Canada. Her father and friends threw all possible obstacles in the way of what they believed was utter folly for a gentle cultured woman, but she succeeded by female wiles and strategy in carrying out her plans. On the first of August, 1639, she arrived at Quebec, in company with Marie Guyard, the daughter of a silk manufacturer of Tours, best known to Canadians as Mère de l'Incarnation, the mother superior of the Ursulines, whose spacious convent and grounds now cover seven acres of land on Garden Street in the ancient capital. She had a vision of a companion who was to accompany her to a land of mists and mountains, to which the Virgin beckoned as the country of her future life-work. Canada was the land and Madame de la Peltrie the companion foreshadowed in that dream which gave Marie Guyard a vocation which she filled for thirty years with remarkable fidelity and ability.

Madame de la Peltrie and Marie Guyard were accompanied by Mdlle. de Savonnière de la Troche, who belonged to a distinguished family of Anjou, and was afterwards known in Canada as Mère de St. Joseph, and also by another nun, called Mère Cécile de Sainte-Croix. A Jesuit, Father Vimont, afterwards superior, and author of one of the _Rélations_, and the three Hospital sisters, arrived in the same ship.

The company landed and "threw themselves on their knees, blessed the God of Heaven, and kissed {133} the earth of their near country, as they now called it." A _Te Deum_ followed in the Jesuits' church which was now completed on the heights near their college, commenced as early as 1635--one year before the building of Harvard College--through the generosity of Réné Rohault, eldest son of the Marquis de Gamache. The first visit of the nuns was to Sillery, four miles to the west of Quebec, on the north bank of the river, where an institution had been established for the instruction of the Algonquin and other Indians, through the liberality of Noël Brulart de Sillery, a Knight of Malta, and a member of an influential French family, who had taken a deep interest in the settlement of Canada and proved it by his bounty. Madame de la Peltrie and her companions, the Jesuit historian tells us naïvely, embraced the little Indian girls "without taking heed whether they were clean or not."

It was during Montmagny's term of office that the city of Montreal was founded by a number of religious enthusiasts. Jérôme le Royer de la Dauversière, receiver of taxes at La Flêche in Anjou, a noble and devotee, consulted with Jean Jacques Olier, then a priest of St. Sulpice in Paris, as to the best means of establishing a mission in Canada. Both declared they had visions which pointed to the island of Mont Royal as the future scene of their labours. They formed a company with large powers as seigniors as soon as they had obtained from M. de Lauzon, one of the members of the Company of Hundred Associates, a title to the island. They interested in the project Paul de Chomedey, Sieur {134} de Maisonneuve, a devout and brave soldier, an honest and chivalric gentleman, who was appointed the first governor by the new company. Mdlle. Jeanne Mance, daughter of the attorney-general of Nogent-le-Roi, among the vine-clad hills of Champagne, who had bound herself to perpetual chastity from a remarkably early age, gladly joined in this religious undertaking. The company had in view the establishment of communities of secular priests, and of nuns to nurse the sick, and teach the children--the French as well as the savages. Madame de Bullion, the rich widow of a superintendent of finance, contributed largely towards the enterprise, and may be justly considered the founder of Hotel Dieu of Montreal.

Maisonneuve and Mdlle. Mance, accompanied by forty men and four women, arrived at Quebec in August, 1641, when it was far too late to attempt an establishment on the island. Governor de Montmagny and others at Quebec disapproved of the undertaking which had certainly elements of danger. The governor might well think it wisest to strengthen the colony by an establishment on the island of Orleans or in the immediate vicinity of Quebec, instead of laying the foundations of a new town in the most exposed part of Canada. However, all these objections availed nothing against the enthusiasm of devotees. In the spring of 1642, Maisonneuve and his company left Quebec. He was accompanied by Governor de Montmagny, Father Vimont, superior of the Jesuits, and Madame de la Peltrie, who left the Ursulines very abruptly and inconsiderately {135} under the conviction that she had a mission to fill at Mont Royal.

[Illustration: Portrait of Maisonneuve.]

On the 17th May, Maisonneuve and his companions landed on the little triangle of land, the Place Royale of Champlain, formed by the junction of a stream with the St. Lawrence. They fell immediately on their knees and gave their thanks to the {136} Most High. After singing some hymns, they raised an altar which was decorated by Madame de la Peltrie and Mdlle. Mance, and celebrated the first great mass on the island. Father Vimont, as he performed this holy rite of his Church, addressed the new colonists with words which foreshadowed the success of the Roman Catholic Church in the greatest Canadian city, which was first named Ville-Marie.

A picket enclosure, mounted with cannon, protected the humble buildings erected for the use of the first settlers on what is now the Custom-house Square. The little stream--not much more than a rivulet except in spring--which for many years rippled between green, mossy banks, now struggles beneath the paved street.

An obelisk of gray Canadian granite now stands on this historic ground. Madame de la Peltrie did not remain more than two years in Ville-Marie, but returned to the convent at Quebec which she had left in a moment of caprice. Mdlle. Mance, who was Madame de Bullion's friend, remained at the head of the Hotel Dieu. The Sulpicians eventually obtained control of the spiritual welfare, and in fact of the whole island, though from necessity and policy the Jesuits were at first in charge. It was not until 1653 that one of the most admirable figures in the religious and educational history of Canada, Margaret Bourgeoys, a maiden of Troyes, came to Ville-Marie, and established the parent house in Canada of the Congregation de Notre-Dame, whose schools have extended in the progress of centuries from Sydney, on the island of Cape Breton, to the Pacific coast.

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Yet during these years, while convents and hospitals were founded, while brave gentlemen and cultured women gave up their lives to their country and their faith, while the bells were ever calling their congregations to mass and vespers, the country was defended by a mere handful of inhabitants, huddled together at Quebec, at Three Rivers, and at the little settlement of Ville-Marie. The canoes of the Iroquois were constantly passing on the lakes and rivers of Canada, from Georgian Bay to the Richelieu, and bands of those terrible foes of the French and their Indian allies were ever lurking in the woods that came so dangerously close to the white settlements and the Indian villages.

In 1642, Father Isaac Jogues was returning from the missions on Lake Huron, with Couture, an interpreter, and Goupil, a young medical attendant--both donnés or lay followers of the Jesuits. They were in the company of a number of Hurons who were bringing furs to the traders on the St. Lawrence, when the Iroquois surprised them at the western end of Lake St. Peter's. The prisoners were taken by the Richelieu to the Mohawk country and Father Jogues was the first Frenchman to pass through Lake George[1]--with its picturesque hills and islets--which in a subsequent journey he named Lac du Saint-Sacrament, because he reached it on the eve of Corpus Christi. The Frenchmen were carried from village to village of the Iroquois, and {138} tortured with all the cruel ingenuity usual in such cases. Goupil's thumb was cut off with a clam shell, as one way of prolonging pain. At night the prisoners were stretched on their backs with their ankles and wrists bound to stakes. Couture was adopted into the tribe, and was found useful in later years as an intermediary between the French and Mohawks. Goupil was murdered and his body tossed into a stream rushing down a steep ravine. Despite his sufferings Father Jogues never desisted from his efforts to baptise children and administer the rites of his Church to the tortured prisoners. On one occasion he performed the sacred office for a dying Huron with some rain or dewdrops which were still clinging to an ear of green corn which had been thrown to him for food. After indescribable misery, he was taken to Fort Orange, where the Dutch helped him to escape to France, but he returned to Canada in the following year.

Bands of Iroquois continued to wage war with relentless fury on all the Algonquin tribes from the Chaudière Falls of the Ottawa to the upper waters of the Saguenay. Bressani, a highly cultured Italian priest, was taken prisoner on the St. Lawrence, while on his way to the Huron missions, and carried to the Mohawk villages, where he went through the customary ordeal of torture. He was eventually given to an old woman who had lost a member of her family, but when she saw his maimed hands--one split between the little finger and the ring-finger--she sent him to the Dutch, who ransomed and sent him to France, whence he came back like Jogues, a year later.

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In 1645 the Mohawks made peace with the French, but the other members of the Five Nations refused to be bound by the treaty. Father Isaac Jogues ventured into their country in 1646, and after a successful negotiation returned to consult the governor at Quebec; but unhappily for him he left behind a small box, filled with some necessaries of his simple life, with which he did not wish to encumber himself on this flying visit. The medicine-men or sorcerers, who always hated the missionaries as the enemies of their vile superstitious practices, made the Indians believe that this box contained an evil spirit which was the origin of disease, misfortune, and death. When Father Jogues came back, he found the village divided into two parties--one wishing his death, the other inclined to show him mercy, and after infinite wrangling between the factions, he was suddenly killed by a blow from a tomahawk as he was entering a long-house, to attend a feast to which he had been invited. His body was treated with contumely, and his head affixed to a post of the palisades of the village. He was the first martyr who suffered death at the hands of the Iroquois.

The "black robe" was now to be seen in every Indian community of Canada; among the Hurons and Algonquins as far as Lake Huron, among the White Fish tribe at the head-waters of the Saguenay, and even among the Abenakis of the Kennebec. Father Gabriel Druillétes, who had served an apprenticeship among the Montagnais, was in charge of this Abenaki mission, and in the course of years {140} visited Boston, Plymouth, and Salem, in the interests of the Canadian French, who wished to enter into commercial relations with New England, and also induce its governments to enter into an alliance against the Iroquois. The authorities of the New England confederacy eventually refused to evoke the hostility of the dangerous Five Nations. Father Druillétes, however, won for Canada the enduring friendship of the Abenakis, as Acadian history shows.

It is impossible within the limited space of this chapter to give any accurate idea of the spirit of patience, zeal, and self-sacrifice which the Jesuit Fathers exhibited in their missions among the hapless Hurons. For years they found these Indians very suspicious of their efforts to teach the lessons of their faith. It was only with difficulty the missionaries could baptise little children. They would give sugared water to a child, and, apparently by accident, drop some on its head, and at the same time pronounce the sacramental words. Some Indians believed for a long time that the books and strings of beads were the embodiment of witchcraft. But the persistency of the priests was at last rewarded by the conversion, or at all events the semblance of conversion, of large numbers of Hurons. It would seem, according as their fears of the Iroquois increased, the Hurons gave greater confidence to the French, and became more dependent on their counsel. In fact, in some respects, they lost their spirit of self-reliance. In some villages the converts at last exceeded the number of unbelievers. By {141} 1647 there were eighteen priests engaged in the work of eleven missions, chiefly in the Huron country, but also among the Algonquin tribes on the east and northeast of Lake Huron or at the outlet of Lake Superior. Each mission had its little chapel, and a bell, generally hanging on a tree. One central mission house had been built at Ste. Marie close to a little river, now known as the Wye, which falls into Thunder Bay, an inlet of Matchedash Bay. This was a fortified station in the form of a parallelogram, constructed partly of masonry, and partly of wooden palisades, strengthened by two bastions containing magazines. The chapel and its pictures attracted the special admiration of the Indians, whose imagination was at last reached by the embellished ceremonies of the Jesuits' church. The priests, thoroughly understanding the superstitious character of the Indians, made a lavish use of pictorial representations of pain and sufferings and rewards, allotted to bad and good. Father Le Jeune tells us that "such holy pictures are most useful object-lessons for the Indians." On one occasion he made a special request for "three, four, or five devils, tormenting a soul with a variety of punishments--one using fire, another serpents, and another pincers." The mission house was also constantly full of Indians, not simply enjoying these pictures, but participating also in the generous hospitality of the Fathers.

It was in 1648 that the first blow descended on this unhappy people who were in three years' time to be blotted out as a warlike, united nation in {142} America. In that year the Iroquois attacked the mission of St. Joseph (Teanaustayé), fifteen miles from Ste. Marie, where in 1638 a famous Iroquois, Ononkwaya, had been tortured. All the people had been massacred or taken prisoners in the absence of the warriors who were mostly in pursuit of a band of Iroquois. Father Daniel, arrayed in the vestments of his vocation, was among the first to fall a victim to the furious savages, who instantly cast his body into the flames of his burning chapel,--a fitting pyre for the brave soldier of the Cross. St. Ignace, St. Louis, and other missions were attacked early in the following year. Fathers Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were tortured and murdered at St. Ignace. From village after village the shrieks of helpless women and men and children, tied to stakes in burning houses, ascended to a seemingly pitiless Heaven. Many persons were tortured on the spot, but as many or more reserved for the sport of the Iroquois villages. Father Brebeuf was bound to a stake, and around his neck was thrown a necklace of red-hot tomahawks. They cut off his lower lip, and thrust a heated iron rod down his throat. It was doubtless their delight to force a groan or complaint from this stalwart priest, whose towering and noble figure had always been the admiration of the Canadian Indians, but both he and Lalemant, a relatively feeble man, showed themselves as brave as the most courageous Indian warriors under similar conditions.

When a party from Ste. Marie came a few days later to the ruins of St. Ignace, they found the {143} tortured bodies of the dead missionaries on the ground, and carried them to the mission house, where they were buried in sacred earth. The skull of the generous, whole-souled Brebeuf is still to be seen within a silver bust in the Hotel Dieu of Quebec. Father Gamier was killed at the mission of St. Jean (Etarita), in the raids which the Iroquois made at a later time on the Tobacco Nation, the kindred of the Hurons. Father Chabanel, who was on his way from St. Jean to Ste. Marie, was never heard of, and it is generally believed that he was treacherously killed and robbed by a Huron.

The Hurons were still numerous despite the losses they had suffered--counting even then more families than the Five Nations--but as they looked on the smoking ruins of their villages and thought of the undying hatred which had followed them for so many years they lost all courage and decided to scatter and seek new homes elsewhere. Father Ragueneau, the superior of the Jesuits, after consultation with the Fathers and Frenchmen at Ste. Marie, some fifty persons altogether, felt they could no longer safely remain in their isolated position when the Hurons had left the country. They removed all their goods to the Isle of St. Joseph, now one of the Christian Islands, near the entrance of Matchedash Bay, where they erected a fortified post for the protection of several thousand Hurons who had sought refuge here. Before many months passed, the Hurons believed that their position would be untenable when the Iroquois renewed their attacks, and determined to leave the island. Some ventured {144} even among the Iroquois and were formally received into the Senecas and other tribes. A remnant remained a few months longer on the island, but they soon left for Quebec after killing some thirty of the bravest Iroquois warriors, who had attempted to obtain possession of the fort by a base act of treachery. A number belonging to the Tobacco Nation eventually reached the upper waters of the Mississippi where they met the Sioux, or Dacotahs, a fierce nation belonging to a family quite distinct from the Algonquins and Iroquois, and generally found wandering between the head-waters of Lake Superior and the Falls of St. Anthony. After various vicissitudes these Hurons scattered, but some found their rest by the side of the Detroit River, where they have been always known as Wyandots. Some three hundred Hurons, old and young, left St. Joseph for Quebec, where they were most kindly received and given homes on the western end of the Isle of Orleans, where the Jesuits built a fort for their security; but even here, as we shall see, the Iroquois followed them, and they were eventually forced to hide themselves under the guns of Quebec. War and disease soon thinned them out, while not a few cast in their lot with the Iroquois who were at last themselves seeking recruits. The Huron remnant finally found a resting-place at Lorette on the banks of the St. Charles, a few miles from the heights of the Capital.

The only memorials now in Canada of a once powerful people, that numbered at least twenty thousand souls before the time of their ruin and {145} dispersion, are a remnant still retaining the language of their tribe on the banks of the Detroit; a larger settlement on the banks of the St. Charles, but without the distinguishing characteristics of their ancestors who came there from Isle St. Joseph; the foundations of the old mission house of Ste. Marie, and the remarkable graves and ossuaries which interest the student and antiquary as they wander in the summer-time through the picturesque country where the nation was once supreme.

[1] It was so called in 1753, after the reigning sovereign of England by an ambitions and politic Irishman, Sir William Johnson, whose name is constantly occurring in the history of the wars between England and France.

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