USA > Michigan > Marquette County > Beard's directory and history of Marquette County with sketches of the early history of Lake Superior, its mines, furnaces, etc., etc > Part 8
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For a time he was permitted a place in the dirty camp of Le Bouchet, the chief of the band, and who had so cruelly aban- doned him. But this aged and feeble servant of God was soon thrust out and forced to spend the long and bitter cold winter on that inhospitable shore, in a little cabin, built of fir branches, piled upon one another, through which the winter winds whistled freely, and which answered the purpose, " not so much," says the meek missionary, " to shield me from the rigor of the storm, as to correct my imagination, and persuade me that I was sheltered." Want, famine, that frequent curse of the improvident tribes that skirt the great "Northern Lake," came, with its horrors, to make more memorable this first effort to plant the cross by the waters of Lake Superior.
" O the long and dreary winter !
O the cold and cruel winter !
Ever thicker, thicker, thicker, Froze the ice on lake and river ; Ever deeper, deeper, deeper,
Fell the snow o'er all the landscape, Fell the covering snow, and drifted.
Through the forest, round the village, Hardly, from his buried wigwam,
Could the hunter force a passage ; With his mittens and his snow-shoes, Vainly walked he through the forest ;
Sought for bird and beast, but found none, Saw no track of deer nor rabbit, In the snow beheld no foot-print , In the ghastly, gleaming forest, Fell,-and could not rise from weakness, Perished there,-from cold and hunger.
O the famine and the fever !
O the wasting of the famine ! O the blasting of the fever !
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O the wailing of the children !
O the anguish of the women !
All the earth was sick and famished,
Hungry was the air around them ;
Hungry was the sky above them ;
And the hungry stars in heaven,
Like the eyes of wolves, glared at them."
Yet, the good father found sources of consolation even here, and desired not to be taken down from the adorable wood.
A few adults listened to his words of love, and some dying infants were baptized.
Spring came and relieved the pressure of physical suffering, and hopefully did the missionary labor on.
The band of partially christianized Hurons, -- who, on the destruction of their nation, had sought refuge from the Iroquois in these northern fastnesses,-were now at Bay de Noquet ; and they sent for Father Mesnard to come and administer to them the rites of religion. It was a call he could not resist, although warned that the toil of the journey was too great for his failing strength, and that dangers beset his path. He replied, "God calls me thither, I must go, if it costs me my life."
He started ; but on the 10th of August, 1661, while his only attendant was getting the canoe over a portage, he wandered into the forest, and was never seen more.
Whether he took a wrong path and was lost in the wood, or whether some straggling Indian struck him down, was never known.
Thus ended the life of Father Mesnard, the first christian mis- sionary who labored within the bounds of our commonwealth. Although possessed of no striking qualities, yet, by his fervent piety, by his faithful and incessant toil ; by his calm endurance, of hardship and suffering ; by his noble christian courage ; by his earnest faith and christian hope, he had become one of the most useful missionaries in the new world; commanding the respect of his superiors, the love of his equals, and the veneration of the Indians.
As a pioneer in our own State, Michigan should cherish his memory, and seek to perpetuate a knowledge of his virtues. But
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as yet, not a stream, not a bay, not a headland, bears his honored name; and on the shores of the great lake where he first raised the cross, that emblem of our faith, even his existence is hardly known.
Hardships, discouragements, persecutions and death, seemed only to excite the Jesuits to renewed and more energetic effort to carry the gospel to the poor Indian.
FATHER ALLOUEZ.
In 1665, Claude Allouez left Quebec to commence a chris- tian mission on the shores of Lake Superior. He may well be called the founder of north western missions ; the real pioneer of christianity and civilization in the region bordering on the great northern and western lakes.
He had not that cultivated intellect ; that refined taste ; that genial heart ; that elevation of soul ; that forgetfulness of self ; that freedom from exaggeration, that distinguished father Mar- quette ; but he was a strong character, of dauntless courage ; of ceaseless and untiring energy ; full of zeal ; thoroughly acquainted with the Indian character, and eminently a practical man. For a full quarter of a century, he was the life and soul of the mis- sionary enterprise in Wisconsin and Illinois, and to some extent, Michigan.
On his voyage to the Sault, he was subjected,-as was gener- ally the case with the missionaries until the arm of French power was distinctly felt in those remote regions,-to the keenest insult and to the coarsest brutality from his Indian conductors. He reached the Sault early in September. He passed on beyond. For a whole month he coasted along the shores of the Great Lake, which he named de Tracy, in honor of the Marquis de Tracy, then in command of Canada as governor, and in October, at Chegonnegon, the beautiful La Point of our day, he raised the standard of the cross, and boldly preached its doc- trines.
The Hurons, in search of whom father Mesnard lost his life, some of the converts of father Mesnard, and many heathen bands, gathered around the solitary priest, and listened to his
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words ; yet they opened not their hearts readily to "the prayer."
He visited remote tribes, and after seeing how broad was the harvest, and how ripe for the sickle, he descended, in 1667, to Quebec, for more laborers. Quickly he moved ; promptly he acted.
In two days after his arrival, he was on his way back to his beautiful northern field, with an additional priest and a lay brother in his company.
He remained at La Point until father Marquette took his place, in the fall of 1679, when he founded the mission of St. Francs Xavier at Green Bay.
After father Marquette's death, he succeeded him in the Illinois mission, and afterwards founded the mission of St. Joseph, on our own beautiful river of that name.
It does not fall in with our purpose to trace the interesting career of this man, and point out his abundant labors and untir- ing zeal as a missionary, or his valuable services as an explorer ; for our own soil was but incidentally the field of his efforts.
FATHER MARQUETTE.
But of all the men whose names are connected with the early history of Lake Superior, there is none toward whom we turn with so warm a love and so high a veneration as to James Marquette.
His cultivated mind, his refined taste, his warm and genial nature, his tender love for the souls in his charge, his calm and immovable courage in every hour of danger, his cheerful sub- mission to the little privations and keen suffering attending the missionary life, his important discoveries, his devotion to truth, his catholic spirit, and last but not least, his early, calm, joyous and heroic death, all entitle him to that high place in the regard of posterity which his memory has been slowly, but surely acquiring.
Marquette was born in 1637. He was of gentle blood, having descended from the most notable family in the small, but ancient and stately city of Leon, in the north of France.
The family have for centuries, been eminent for a devotion
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to military life, and three of its members shed their blood upon our own soil during the war of the Revolution.
ยท Through the instructions of a pious mother, he became, at an early age, imbued with an earnest desire to devote himself to a religious life.
At the age of seventeen he renounced the allurements of the world, and entered the society of Jesus. As required by the rules of the order, he spent two years in those spiritual exercises prescribed by their great founder. Then, for ten long years, he remained under the remarkable training and teaching of the order, and acquired that wonderful self-control, that quiet repose, that power of calm endurance, that unquestioning obedience to his superiors ; that thirst for trial, suffering and death that marked the Jesuits in this, the golden age of their power.
He took for his model in life the great Xavier, and, like him, longed to devote his days to the conversion of the heathen, and like him, to die in the midst of his labors, in a foreign land, alone.
Although he had not that joyous hilarity of soul; that gay buoyancy of spirit ; and that wonderful power over men, that so distinguished the Apostle to the Indies ; yet, he had much of that sweetness of disposition, that genial temperament, that facile adaptation to circumstances, that depth of love, and that apostolic zeal which belonged to that wonderful man.
Panting for a missionary life, Marquette, at the age of twenty-nine sailed for New France, which he reached September 20,1666.
Early in October, he was placed under the tuition of the celebrated Father Dreuillette at " Three Rivers" to learn the native language.
After a year and a half of preparation, he left for the Sault St. Mary to plant the first permanent mission and settlement within the bounds of our State.
There were then about 2,000 Indians at this point; the facility with which they could live by fishing, making it one of the most populous places in Indian territory.
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They were Algonquins, mostly Chippeways, and received the teachings of the good father with great docility, and would gladly have been baptized, but the wise and cautious missionary withheld the rite until he could clearly instruct them in christian duty. In the following year, he was joined by Father Dablou, when the first christian church on Michigan soil was erected. But he was not long to remain in this first field of his labors. In obedience to orders from his superiors, in the fall of 1669 he went to La Pointe, to take the place of Allouez, who proceeded to found a mission at Green Bay. For a whole month, through much suffering and in constant peril of his life, he coasted along the shores of Lake Superior, contending with fierce winds, ice and snow.
At La Point, he found 400 or 500 Hurons, a company of Ottawas and some other tribes.
The Hurons had mostly been baptized; and, he says "still preserve some Christianity." "Other tribes," to use his own language, " were proud and undeveloped " and he had so little hope of them that he did not baptize healthy infants, watching only for those that were sick.
It was only after long months of trial that he baptized the first adult, after seeing his assiduity in prayer, his frankness in recounting his past life, and his promises for the future.
Here an Illinois captive was given to him, and he imme- diately commenced to learn the language from this rude teacher, and as he gradually acquired a knowledge of it, his loving heart warmed towards the kind hearted and peaceful nation, and he longed to break to them the bread of life.
"No one," he exclaims, " must hope to escape crosses in our missions, and the best means to live happy is not to fear them ; but in the enjoyment of little crosses hope for others still greater. The Illinois desire us, like Indians, to share their miseries and suffer all that can be imagined in barbarism. They are lost sheep, to be sought through woods and thorns."
Here it was, in the heart of this Northern winter, surrounded by his Indians, talking in a broken manner with his Illinois captive, that he conceived the idea of a voyage of discovery.
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He hears of a great river, the Mississippi, whose course is southward. He says, this great river can hardly empty into Virginia, and we rather believe that its mouth is in California. He rejoices in the prospect of seeking for this unknown stream, with one Frenchman and this Illinois captive as his only companions, if the Indians will, according to their agreement, make him a canoe. This discovery, he says, will give us a complete knowledge of the southern and western sea.
But his further labors at La Pointe and his plans of present discovery were suddenly terminated by the breaking out of war.
The fierce Dacotahs, those Iroquois of the West, who inspired the feeble tribes about them with an overpowering awe, threatened to desolate the region of La Pointe.
The Ottawas first left, and then the Hurons, who seemed destined to be wanderers upon the face of the earth without a spot they could call their own, turned their faces to the east.
Their hearts fondly yearned for that delightful home, from which they had been so cruelly driven twenty years before. And we may well imagine that the devoted missionary longed to labor in that field, made sacred by the blood of Daniel, Brebeuf, Lallemant, and others.
But the dreaded Iroquois were too near and too dangerous neighbors for such an experiment, and with their missionary at their head, they selected for their home the point known as St. Ignace, opposite Mackinaw.
Bleak, barren and inhospitable as was this spot, it had some peculiar and compensatory advantages. It abounded with fish, and was on the great highway of a growing Indian commerce.
Here, in the summer of 1671, a rude church, made of logs, and covered with bark, was erected, and about it clustered the still ruder cabins of the Hurons. Near the chapel and inclosing the cabins was erected a palisade to defend the little colony against the attacks of predatory Indians.
Thus did Marquette become the founder of Mackinaw, as he had before been of Sault St. Mary. Some of the Hurons were still idolators, and the Indians were weak and wayward, but he looked upon them with parental love.
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" They have," he writes, in 1672, " come regularly to prayers and have listened more readily to the instructions I gave them, consenting to what I required to prevent their disorders and abomi- nations. We must have patience with untutored minds who know only the devil; who, like their ancestors, have been his slaves, and who often relapse into the sins in which they were nurtured." "God alone can fix their feeble minds and place and keep them in his grace, and touch their heart while we stammer at their ears."
A large colony of Ottawas, located near the mission, although intractable, received his faithful and loving attention, thus, "stammering at their ears," and trusting that God would reach the heart, the good father, through privation, suffering and inces- sant toil, subjected to every caprice, insult and petty persecution, labored for two years, cheered by the privilege of occasionally baptising a dying infant, and rejoicing in a simple, mournful, loving faith in its death. Hearing of a sick infant, he says, " I went at once and baptized it, and it died the next night. Some of the other children, too, are dead, and are now in heaven. These are the consolations which God sends us, which make us esteem our life more happy as it is more wretched."
Here, again, his attention was called to the discovery of the Mississippi, which he sought, that new nations might be open to the gospel of peace and good will.
In a letter to his superior, after speaking of his field of labor, he says : "I am ready to leave it in the hands of another mis- sionary, and go, on your order, to seek new nations towards the South Sea, who are still unknown to us, and teach them of our great God, whom they have hitherto unknown."
His fond wishes in this regard were about to be gratified. The news of the great river at the westward, running to the southern sea, had reached the ears of the great Colbert, and through him, of Louis XIV. himself.
They did not fail to see the infinite advantage of discovering and possessing this great element of territorial power.
The struggle for dominion in America between the English and the French, was then pending. If the English settlements,
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then feeble and scattered along the Atlantic coast, could be hemmed in by a series of French posts, from the " Great Lakes" to the Southern Sea, France would control the continent, and ambitious schemes of Britain would be nipped in the bud.
Colbert authorized the expedition, and was ably seconded by the wise energy and sagacious forecast of Count Frontenac and of Talon, Governor and Intendant of New France.
Jolliet, a young, intelligent and enterprising merchant, of Quebec, and Marquette, were appointed to execute the project.
In the fall of 1672, Jolliet arrived at Mackinaw with the joyful news. Marquette had, as he says, long invoked the " blessed virgin" that he might obtain of God the grace to be able to visit the nations of the Mississippi.
He is enraptured at the good news that his desires are about to be gratified ; that he is to expose his life for the salvation of those nations, and especially of the Illinois.
They were not to leave until spring During that long dreary winter on that desolate point, he spent his leisure time in gathering from the Indians all possible information of the unknown region they were about to visit, and tracing upon the bark of the birch, maps of the courses of rivers, and writing down the names of the nations and tribes inhabiting their banks, and of the villages they should visit.
On the 17th of May, 1673, in two bark canoes, manned by five men, and stocked with a small supply of Indian corn and dried venison, the two explorers left Mackinaw.
"Our joy at being chosen," says the good father, "for this expedition, roused our courage and sweetened the labor of rowing from morning till night." And merrily over the clear waters of Lake Michigan did they ply the paddle of their light canoe.
" And the forest life was in it ; All its mystery and magic; All the brightness of the birch tree, All the toughness of the cedar, All the beech's supple sinews, And it floated on the water
Like a yellow leaf in autumn, Like a yellow water lily."
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At Green Bay, the friendly Indians did all in their power to prevent the further progress of the expedition. They pictured to the courageous explorers, the fierce Dacotahs with their long black hair, their eyes of fire, and their terrible tomahawks of stone ; who never spared strangers.
They told of the wars then raging, and the war parties on every trail. They described the danger of navigation, of fright- ful rapids and sunken rocks, of fearful monsters that swallowed up men and canoes together; of a cruel demon that stops the passage and engulfs the navigator who dares to invade his dominion; of excessive heats that would infallibly cause their death.
The good father told them that the salvation of souls was concerned, and that in such a cause he would gladly lay down his life ; that of the dangers they described, they had no fear.
On went the travelers, toilfully ascending the Fox River, dragging their canoes up the rapids, over sharp stones that lacerated their bleeding and unprotected feet.
In ten days from leaving Mackinaw, they had passed the portage; had launched their canoes upon the waters of the Wisconsin and commenced its descent towards the Mississippi.
For seven days they floated down its crystal waters. Vine- clad islets, fertile banks, diversified with wood, prairie and hill, alive with deer and moose, delight their vision, but no human being is seen.
On the 17th of June, 1673, with joy, " which," says the good father, "I cannot express," they entered the great river, and the longed-for discovery is made, and the "Father of Waters" is given to the civilized world.
It is true that De Soto, in that fool-hardy and sadly unfortu- nate expedition, that has added a thrilling chapter to American history, had, 130 years before, discovered the lower Mississippi, but it seems never to have been revisited, and the very knowledge of it had died out.
For seven days more the joyous adventurers floated down its broad bosom, following its gentle curves, before they saw a human being.
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The scenery has changed. The islands are more beautiful. There is little wood, and no hill ; deer, moose, bustard and wingless swans abound. As they descend, the turkey takes the place of smaller game, and the buffalo of other beasts. Although the solitude becomes almost insupportable, and they long to see other human faces than their own, yet they move with caution. They light but little fire at night, on shore, just to prepare a meal, then move as far as possible from it, anchor their canoes in the stream and post a sentinel, to warn them of approaching danger.
Finally, on the 26th of June, they discover footprints by the water side, and a well beaten trail leading off through a beauti- ful prairie, on the west bank.
They are in the region of the wild and dreaded Dacotahs, and they conclude that a village is at hand. Coolly braving the danger, Marquette and Jolliet leave their canoes in charge of the men ; they take to the trail, and in silence for two leagues they follow its gentle windings, until they come in sight of two Indian villages.
Having committed themselves to God, and implored his help, they approach so near that they hear conversation, without being discovered, and then stop and announce their presence by a loud outcry. The Indians rushed from their cabins, and see- ing the unarmed travelers, they after a little, depute four old men to approach them, which they do very slowly.
Father Marquette inquires who they are, and is rejoiced to learn that they are Illinois. He can speak to them in their own language.
They offer the pipe of peace, which is here first named the " calumet." They are most graciously received at the first village.
An old man, perfectly naked, stands at the cabin door, with his hand raised toward the sun, and he exclaims, " How beauti- ful is the sun, O Frenchmen, when thou comest to visit us. Our town awaits thee, and thou shalt enter all our cabins in peace." There was a crowd of people who devoured them with their eyes. They had never before seen a white man. As the travelers
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passed to another village, to visit the chief sachem, the people ran ahead, threw themselves upon the grass by the wayside, and awaited their coming, then again ran on before in order to get a second and third opportunity to gaze at them.
After several days stay with this kind and hospitable people, our adventurers pass on down the river as far as Arkansas, when finding that they could not safely proceed further, they commenced to retrace their steps on the 17th of July, just one month after entering the Mississippi, and just two months after leaving Mackinaw.
They ascend the beautiful Illinois, which is now, for the first time, navigated by civilized men. They are delighted at the fertility of the soil, with the beautiful prairies and charming forests which swarm with wild cattle, deer, bustards, swans, ducks, and parrots. They stop at an Illinois town of seventy- four cabins and Father Marquette promises to return and instruct them in the truth of religion.
One of the chiefs, with his young men, escort the company to the lake at Chicago, and they return to Green Bay.
Thus ended that eventful voyage that added the delightful region of the upper Msssissippi to the geography of the known world, and gave to France advantages which, had they not been prodigally thrown away, in the wicked folly of the reign of Louis XV., might have given to America a widely different history.
Jolliet, with his journal and maps, passed on to Quebec, but he lost all his papers by the capsizing of his canoe, before reaching there.
Marquette remained at Green Bay to recruit from a disease brought on by his exhausting toils and his many exposures.
From here he forwarded a report of his journey to his supe- rior. It was drawn up with admirable skill and a genuine mod- esty that became his magnanimous soul. The map accompany- ing the report, drawn, as it was, without surveys and without instruments, is wonderful for its accuracy of outline. Indeed, this may be said of most of the maps of that period, which were drawn up by the Jesuits, who, while they seemed mainly to have in view the conversion of the savages, yet proved themselves to
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be the most valuable of discoverers, and the most careful of observers.
It was not until late in October, 1674, that Marquette was so far recruited as to attempt to perform his promise to the Illinois.
He then left Green Bay with two French voyageurs for his companions, but before he reached Chicago, by the slow process of coasting the shores of a stormy lake, at an inclement season, his disease, a chronic dysentery, returned upon him with its full force.
The streams by which he expected to reach his mission ground were frozen, and he was too weak to go by land. Here, in this then solitude, but where now stands a city with over 300,000 inhabitants, alone with his two voyagers, in a rude cabin which afforded but slender protection from the bitter inclemen- cies of the season, in feeble health, living on the coarsest food, with a consciousness that he was never to recover, he passed the long winter of 1674-5.
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