USA > Michigan > Mackinac County > Two missionary priests at Mackinac: a lecture delivered at the village of Mackinac for the benefit of St. Anne's Mission in August, 1888 ; The parish register of the Mission of Michilimackinac : a paper read before the Chicago Literary Club in March, 1889 > Part 1
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TWO MISSIONARY PRIESTS AT MACKINAC.
THE PARISH REGISTER AT MICHILIMACKINAC.
The University of California Library
H. Morse Stephens
University of California
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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from Microsoft Corporation
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TWO MISSIONARY PRIESTS AT MACKINAC,
A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE VILLAGE OF MACKINAC FOR THE BENEFIT OF ST. ANNE'S MISSION, IN AUGUST, 1888.
THE PARISH REGISTER OF THE MISSION OF MICHILIMACKINAC,
A PAPER READ BEFORE THE CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB IN MARCH, 1889.
EDWARD OSGOOD BROWN.
CHICAGO: BARNARD & GUNTHORP PRINTERS. 1889.
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TWO MISSIONARY PRIESTS AT MACKINAC.
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OST of us, I suppose, who come to Mackinac are in- duced to do so chiefly, and perhaps altogether, by its natural characteristics. The invigorating air, the extended and beautiful land and water view, the iron in these northern rills, the health that is borne upon the breeze, the pines, those " trees of healing," these are the things that draw us from the crowded market place or forum, from the cities' dust and cin -. ders, and keep us lingering here delighted, until duty relent- lessly calls us home again.
But for all that, I venture to think that there is hardly one of us who does not consciously or unconsciously feel the power of that human sympathy which-as Ruskin has in one of his papers beautifully set forth-glorifies the Alps and the Rhine and makes them to the traveler far surpassing in interest and attraction the Sierras and the Amazon. And here in Mackinac, to those who know and are touched by the interest of its history, we inay and must feel keenly this sympathy. As I walk on the bluffs and look out on the beautiful panorama spread out before me, this fairy isle itself, and the whole fair country around about, once known as Michilimackinac, the winding shores and the heavy woods of the Northern and Southern. Peninsulas, the silver straits between, and the low-
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lying islands near, my thoughts fly back from the natural beauties around me to the distant past, and
" Visions of the days departed, shadowy phantoms fill my brain, They who live in history only, seem to walk the earth again."
For Michilimackinac was two hundred years ago the centre of human effort, as grand, as noble, and to my mind as interest- ing and romantic, too, as ever can be associated with Swiss mountain or German river.
It is not my purpose in this paper to enter into any general description or panegyric of the Jesuit missions in North America. I only want to remind you that even before the May- flower entered Massachusetts Bay, the Priests of the Society had carried, not with a blare of trumpets but with the solemn tones of the Gregorian chant, the cross and the fleur de lis to- gether into the wilderness of Maine and Canada. In all this great North Western country never a river nor an inland sea was explored, never a cape nor a headland turned or doubled but it was a black-gowned Jesuit father, in his birch canoe armed with his crucifix and his breviary, who led the way. In these later days, repairing the neglect of two hundred years, historians like Dr. Shea and Mr. Parkman have told this story so often and so well, that these men have received the honor so justly their due, and have obtained perchance what they never sought, an earthly immortality.
For although these priests were explorers, adventurers and discoverers, heroes in many a physical danger and many a hair- breadth escape, it was no earthly glory they coveted. They came, devoted, eager, intense, with but one great object be- fore their hearts and eyes, to snatch from everlasting misery, the poor and ignorant and wicked; to set before those who
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were in darkness a great light; to break to those who were in the shadow of death the bread of life eternal.
They received, so far as this world went, the reward of their virtual martyrdom in life, their actual martyrdom often, in their deaths, by seeing the foundations laid, as they believed, of a Christian Empire of the Huron and Algonquin peoples; by hearing hymns to the Virgin sung in tongues unknown to civ- ilization; by bestowing upon the humblest savage neophyte in the sacred wafer, all that the Church could give to the might- iest kings of Europe.
Was not this bloodless crusade worthy all the adornments of historic art in literature or painting?
But it is not alone with the Jesuit Missions that the romance in the history of Michilimackinac is connected.
A little later it was from the neighborhood of this region here, as the centre in the north, as from Kaskaskia and old Fort Chartres, on the Mississippi, in the south, that the dominion of France in the New World radiated. It was from here that the great king was, by his viceroys and commanders, to sit in power and do justice and equity throughout this fair northern lake country.
There came a time when " bigots and lackeys and pan- ders, the fortunes of France had undone," when this power, in the beginning so great, promising so much for the glory of France, nay, for civilization and humanity, was met, opposed and in the providence of God, overcome, by the less promising, the more material, the harder and less attractive English civ- ilization from the eastern coast.
We most of us at least rejoice in the result, but we can none of us I think forbear sympathy with or withhold our interest from
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the vanquished, nor can we fail to recognize that nobler minds and aims seemed to rule those who declared in the name of Louis XIV. that " His majesty could annex no country to his crown, without making it his chief care to establish the Christian religion therein; " than those who could with cold calculation, like some of the Governors of Massachusetts Bay and Virginia, declare themselves opposed to the civilization and education of the Indians on the ground that it might injure the trade and material interests of the colonies.
On June 14, 1671, at the Sault Saint Marie, from here not fifty miles to the north as the crow flies, while representatives of fourteen tribes of Indians looked on in wonder, and four Jesuit Fathers led the French men-at-arms in the singing of the Vexilla Regis, the Sieur de Saint Lusson, commanding in this region for the king, set up side by side a great wooden cross, and a pillar to which were attached the royal arms of France. Then drawing his sword and raising it towards Heaven, he exclaimed:
" In the name of the Most High, Mighty and Redoubted Monarch, Louis, Fourteenth of that name, most Christian King of France and of Navarre, I take possession of this place Sainte Marie du Sault, as also of lakes Huron and Superior, the island of Manitoulin, and all the countries, rivers, lakes and streams contiguous and adjacent thereunto, both those which have been discovered, and those which may be discovered hereafter, in all their length and breadth, bounded on the one side by the seas of the north and west and on the others by the south sea, declaring to the natives thereof that from this time forth they are the vassals of his Majesty, bound to obey his laws and follow his customs, promising them on his part all succor
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and protection against the intrusions and invasions of their enemies, declaring to all other potentates, princes, sovereigns, states and republics, to them and their subjects, that they can- not and are not to seize or settle upon any parts of the afore- said countries save only under the good pleasure of His Most Christian Majesty and of him who will govern in his behalf, and this on pain of incurring the resentment and the efforts of his arms. Long live the King !"
These were high-sounding words indeed, but when spoken, they were no idle ones. Not only the power of the greatest kingdom on earth was pledged to make them effective, but the Holy Church herself, the Mother of Kings, seemed to stand behind them in blessing and confirmation.
We know what remains of it all. But it adds to the charm of life at Mackinac to me, that inevitably my thoughts are car- ried back to that June day and its pageant, two hundred years ago, when I hear upon the lips of some wandering half-breed, still lingering the accents of France; and when at the Mission of St. Anne the gospel is read in French as well as in English, and I am reminded that Holy Church has not forgotten her part of the duty then assumed, although performed now for so few of her lowliest children.
And even here does not end the charm of the historical as- sociation which hovers about Mackinac.
A half century and more after the dominion of France in this new world had waned, flickered and gone out, these Straits of Michilimackinac were still the scene of romantic and absorbing adventure. Hither thronged still the Indian tribes of the West, no longer untouched by the greed for gain or the vices of civilization, but from far and near, seeking at Michili-
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mackinac to profitably exchange the products of the chase for the things that had become indispensable to their life, and hither came to meet them and barter with them, the fearless spirits of the frontier, skilled alike in woodcraft and in trade, but hardly less wild and hardy than their savage customers.
The place was busy, full of a restless activity and energy, which made it important and interesting when the site of the great metropolitan city which lies now 350 miles to the south was but the Chicago portage, an outpost of Michilimackinac.
I have lately examined with great interest the parish reg- isters of the mission here-the Mission of St. Anne de Mich- ilimackinac, and as I read with outward eye the mere record of baptisms and marriages and burials from 1695 to the present day, between the lines I seemed to see with men- tal vision, the whole strange story of the place, with its record of high aims and noble purposes, seemingly thwarted and failing, only to result in the end in success far beyond the early dreams of priest or soldier.
My mind was full of this, when my friend, the parish priest, appealed to me to prepare a paper for an entertainment to be given for the benefit of the mission, a request I was glad to accede to.
I determined for this paper then to attempt a brief sketch of two figures in the history of this mission, equally, it seems to me, worthy our regard and admiration; both, although more than a century apart-servants at the altar here; both French- men of illustrious descent, and of the older and nobler school of thought and manners-one, the very founder of the mission here-the prototype in a line of earnest and devoted men of the earlier time, who carried on the work he gloriously be-
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gan; the other at once the closing figure of that line, and the herald and pioneer in a new régime and a new order, a con- necting link in other words, binding the church in the west, which was the companion and adjunct of French civilization and dominion, with the Catholic Church in America as it stands to-day, chiefly English speaking and English thinking, its altars served with loyal and patriotic lovers of American ideas and American institutions, a free church in a free state.
The first of these men whom I have described, you, of course, could name. It could be no other than the Jesuit, Jacques Marquette, to whom belongs the high honor of being the first explorer and discoverer (after De Soto) of the Mis- sissippi river and valley, and of whose character and life, his zeal, his ability and his devotion there has been much written and said since the discovery and publication of his manuscript journals by that prince among American scholars, Dr. John Gilmary Shea.
The second one of whom I would speak is perhaps less known to most of you, but to my mind, as I have said, he is equally an interesting and admirable figure in the history of the American Church. It is the Sulpician priest, Gabriel Richard.
The life and labors of these two men then, I shall attempt briefly to sketch for you to-night.
Jacques Marquette was born in 1637, in the city of Laon, a fortified city of France, on the mountain side near the river Oise.
His family was distinguished and ancient, entitled to armo-
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rial bearings, and furnishing most of the local officers of the crown in the city and the department around. A more inter- esting fact to us is that three of this same family from the same region of country served and died in the French army in America, during the Revolutionary war.
We are told that his mother was Rose de la Salle, and re- lated to Jean Baptiste de la Salle, the founder of the Brothers of The Christian Schools, for centuries as it is to-day the greatest and most efficient institute in the world for the gra- tuitous instruction of the young. I do not know that any in- vestigation has ever been made to determine whether or not he was in the same line related to that paladin of adventurous discovery, who with dauntless courage and miraculous endu- rance, pursued to the end the explorations which Marquette began, that " heart of oak and frame of iron," Robert Cavalier de la Salle, a native of the same part of France. It would be interesting to know.
At the age of seventeen Jacques Marquette entered the So- ciety of Jesus. Filled with the most intense devotion to the Blessed Virgin, with his piety shaped in the ecstatic school of Loyola and his mind inflamed with the reports which the fathers on the various missions were sending to their superiors in France, his whole soul was bent even during his long no- vitiate upon some foreign mission, and in 1666, he eagerly sought and received the orders which sent him across an almost unknown ocean to labor among the Indians of North America.
Arriving in September of that year at Quebec, he applied himself immediately to the study of the Indian languages in use among the tribes under the especial care of the already
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established missions. He seems to have had wonderful lin- guistic ability, and must also have had wonderful applica- tion, for of these most difficult savage dialects he had mastered six, so as to speak them with considerable fluency, when, in April, 1668, Father Dablon, the superior of the missions, ordered him to the Ottawa mission, established at the Sault Ste. Marie. After a voyage of great difficulty and hardship he arrived at this place, and there, afterward joined by Dablon himself, Marquette labored among the two thousand Indians of various tribes who, attracted by the excellent fishing, there frequently assembled, to separate from time to time for their periodical hunting parties through the wilderness. He found them docile and easily induced to accept his guidance. But his zeal and energy and his unusual linguistic ability, so neces- sary for a successful missionary, marked him out for a more difficult undertaking still, and from the Sault he was sent in August, 1669, to the mission of the Saint Esprit, at Lapointe, near the western end of Lake Superior. Here his task was more discouraging at first, for his knowledge of the dialect there most used was not so perfect, but he soon had acquired over his flock, composed partly of Ottawas and partly of Hurons, a great and growing influence.
And now through parties of Illinois and Sioux, who came from far to the westward, beyond the Mississippi river, Mar- quette began to hear of the Great River, broad, deep, beautiful, compared by these men who knew them both, to the St. Law- rence. They told him, also, of the many tribes which dwelt along its banks, and his mind was filled with a burning desire to preach to them the gospel they had never heard.
Always prudent, however, in his intrepidity, anxious, as he
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himself says, that if his expedition already planned must be dangerous it should not be foolhardy, from this time on, Mar- quette, from every Indian who spoke to him of the Mississippi, begged all the information he could get, and from many took rude sketches of the river and its principal tributaries, so far as they were known to his informant.
Already the way of reaching this great river by the stream now called the Wisconsin was known to the Jesuit Fathers. From the Fox river running into Green Bay, to the headwat- ers of the Wisconsin running into the Mississippi, there is a comparatively easy portage near the place where now in Wis- consin stands the town of that name. Over this portage, Allouez, one of Marquette's fellow missionaries, in one of his tours had lately gone, finding in the Wisconsin a beautiful river, he says in his report, running south-west, and in the space of a six days' journey, as he was told, joining the great river of which he had heard so much.
But Marquette did not at first expect to take this route. His Illinois mission and the exploration of the Mississippi he intended to make by joining in the autumn a band of the Illinois, who from the west came each year by land to Lapointe, crossing the Mississippi in their journey. But these expectations were doomed to disappointment, for aroused to resentment by alleged injuries inflicted on them by the Ottawas and Hurons, the Sioux, always fierce and revengeful, broke into open war with the tribes who formed Father Marquette's flock at La- pointe. The Ottawas and Hurons were no more able to with- stand the Sioux from the west, than they had been a quarter of a century before the Iroquois from the east, and they fled in dismay from Lapointe, separating as they went. The Ottawas took refuge in the Island of Manitoulin-the Hurons,
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remembering that years before they had found temporary respite from Iroquois prosecution, and an abundance of game and fish, at and near the Island of Michilimackinac, came here for the second time to find refuge; and here in 1671 came with them their devoted priest and teacher, Jacques Marquette.
It is impossible to tell with absolute certainty even on the closest investigation, whether it was on the Island of Mackinac, or on the mainland known now as Point St. Ignace, that Father Marquette and his Indian flock first established themselves.
I am inclined to think that it was on the island that the first rendezvous was made, but that very shortly after, it was thought best to make the permanent settlement upon the mainland, and that there, in 1672, a chapel had been built sur- rounded by the cabins of the Indians, the whole village being enclosed within a stockade, for better protection against enemies.
Father Charlevoix, and following him evidently, later writers have expressed surprise at Father Marquette's selecting what they term so undesirable a place for his mission and the settle- ment of the Hurons. To justify their surprise they speak of the intense cold and the sterility of the soil.
Charlevoix says that Father Marquette determined the choice of the spot, but Father Marquette himself says that the In- dians had previously signified their design to settle here, led by the abundance of game, the great quantity of fish and the adaptability of the soil for maize, the Indian's chief agricult- ural product.
But apart from the question whether Father Marquette located the Indians rather than the Indians Father Marquette, Charlevoix seems to me to speak with less sagacity than is usual in a Jesuit priest, in so expressing himself. If Father
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Marquette did determine the place of settlement, it seems to me easy to understand.
These missionaries were men of cultivation, learning and re- finement. Their sense of the beautiful and their love for it, we may be sure were strong. For the sake of their holy religion, and in their burning zeal, they had voluntarily exiled themselves from the world of art and artistic beauty. The rainbow light that falls through cathedral windows, the almost celestial music that trembles through the aisles, the painting and the architecture that aid to raise the enrapt soul from earth to heaven, they had left behind in Europe forever. They had doomed themselves to much that was hateful and disgusting, to sodden forests and smoky wigwams, to filthy food and un- clean companions, but they preserved, as all their relations and * all their history shows, their love of beauty; nature to them must take the place of art. Would it have been strange that Father Marquette should have been glad to settle where alter- nated the glories of a wonderfully beautiful winter landscape, with those no less grand of these shining summer seas? On the contrary, we may well imagine him, when first he gazed from the bluffs upon this country called Michilimackinac, exclaiming, as Scott makes King James, of Loch Katrina:
" And what a scene were here, For princely pomp or churchman's pride ! On this bold brow a lordly tower, In that soft vale a lady's bower ! On yonder meadow far away, The turrets of a cloister gray ! How blithely might the bugle horn Chide on this Lake the lingering morn ! And when the midnight moon should lave Her forehead in the silver wave, How solemn on the ear would come The holy matin's distant hum !"
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Until the 17th of May, 1673, Marquette labored at this mis- sion with abundant and encouraging results, to judge from his letter to his superior in 1672. He says that he had almost five hundred Indians about him, who wished to be Christians, who listened with eagerness to his teaching, who brought their children to the chapel to be baptized, and came regularly to prayers. Be the wind or cold what it might, many Indians came twice a day to the chapel. When he was obliged to go to the Sault for a fortnight, they counted the days of his ab- sence, repaired to the chapel for prayers as though he were present and welcomed him back with joy.
" The minds," he writes, " of the Indians here are now more mild, tractable and better disposed to receive instruction than in any other part."
But the Illinois mission that he had planned, and the Great River that he wished to explore and dedicate to Mary, were al- ways in his thoughts, and it was with great joy that in the spring of 1673, he heard that he had been ordered by his su- perior to turn over the mission at Michilimackinac to a suc- cessor and himself accompany Louis Joliet, designated by the governor of Canada, in the exploration of the Mississippi.
On the 17th of May, 1673, he embarked from Michilimacki- nac with Joliet and five men, in two birch canoes, on his famous voyage. Its chief purpose was to learn of the tribes who dwelt along the banks of the great river, to map it, with its principal tributaries, to determine its general direction and to ascertain where it emptied, whether as some thought into the Atlantic Ocean or as more supposed into the Gulf of Cali- fornia. That it ran through 1,500 miles of country to empty itself into the Gulf of Mexico no one, it would seem, suspected.
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I have not time as I would like to detail this first voyage down the Mississippi, but to all of you, if you have not read it, I commend the story of the voyage as you will find it in Parkman's Discovery of the Great West, or better still in the literal translation of Marquette's own report to be found in Shea's Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi.
There you will read with pleasure, I know, how following the north shore of Lake Michigan where the wilderness in places is as wild now as then, they ascended Fox river from Green Bay, and made the portage to the headwaters of the Wisconsin, how there they bade adieu with brave hearts to the waters that connected them with Quebec and Europe, and kneeling to offer in a new devotion their lives and their labors, their discoveries and all their undertakings to the Blessed Vir- gin, launched themselves upon the stream that ran to the Mississippi and then they knew not where, to countries un- known and unnamed.
You will see how carefully they noted the physical char- acteristics of the river and the country and the social customs of the tribes they found, how intrepidly they met hostile savages and hideous wild beasts, how zealously they preached Christ and his Church to those who would hear, how they wondered at the pictured monsters on the cliffs near the mouth of the Missouri, (which the late Judge Breese of Illinois, in 1842, said were still the wonder of travelers, and which seem in 1850 to have been in some parts visible, but which Parkman declares in his time had given place to a mammoth advertise- ment of Plantation Bitters,) how then the Missouri with its turbid floods came near to swamping their frail boats, how finally they reached the mouth of the stream now called the
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Arkansas, and having accomplished the object of their mission, and made sure of the further course of the river, and that its mouth was at the Gulf of Mexico, where, as they knew, the Spaniard had fortifications and settlements, turned back and paddled the weary length of the Mississippi again, to its junc- tion with the Illinois. The journey too up the Illinois river, which the Indians told them was a nearer and easier route to Lake Michigan than the Wisconsin, and the villages of the Illinois which they found and preached to, and to which Marquette promised to return the following year, are most graphically described; described like the rest of the journey, tersely, simply and unpretendingly as by a scholar and a man of careful observation and practical sense. So, too, is told the portage through Mud Lake, from the Desplaines to the Chi- cago, from which, perhaps, the first white men who were ever on the site of Chicago, Marquette and his companions emerged on Lake Michigan and rowed along its western shore until they reached Green Bay and the mission of St. Francis Xavier.
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