History of Monroe County, Michigan, Part 4

Author: Wing, Talcott Enoch, 1819-1890, ed
Publication date: 1890
Publisher: New York, Munsell & company
Number of Pages: 882

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Of all the men whose names are connected with the early history of our State, there is none toward whom we turn with so warm a love, so high a veneration, as to Father Jacques Mar- lettes, at Three Rivers, to learn the native lan-

quette. His cultivated mind, his refined taste, his warm and genial nature, his tender love for the souls in his charge, his calm and im- movable courage in every hour of danger, his cheerful submission to the bitter privations and keen sufferings of the missionary life, his important discoveries, his devotion to truth, his catholic faith, and last but not least, his early, calm, joyous and heroic death, all en- title him to that high place in the regard of posterity which he has been slowly but surely acquiring.

Marquette was born in 1637, and was of gentle blood, being 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 devotion to military life, and three of its members shed their blood upon our own soil during the War of the Revolution.

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 its great founder. Then for ten long years he remained under the re- markable training and teaching of the order, and acquired that wonderful control, that quiet repose, that power of calm endurance, that un- questioning obedience to his superiors, that thirst for trial, suffering and death that marked the Jesnits in this golden age of their power. He took for his model in life the great Xavier, and longed like him 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 dis- tinguished the Apostle to the Indies, he had much of that sweetness of disposition, that genial temperament, that facile adaptation to the surrounding circumstances, that depth of love, and that apostolic zeal, that belonged to that remarkable man. Panting for a mission- ary life, at the age of twenty-nine he sailed for New France, which he reached September 20, 1666. Early in October he was placed under the tuition of the celebrated Father Dreuil- guage. After a year and a half of preparation he left for the Sault Ste. Marie, to plant the first permanent mission and settlement within the bounds of our State.

There were then about two thousand Indians at this point, the facility with which they could live by hunting and fishing making it one of the most populous places in the Indian territory. They were Algonquins, mostly Chippewas, and received the teachings of the good Father with great docility and would gladly have been bap- tized, but the wise and cautions missionary withheld the rite until he could clearly instruct them in Christian duty. In the following year

HISTORY OF MONROE COUNTY, MICHIGAN.

he was joined by Father Dablon, 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 pro- ceeded to found a mission at Green Bay. For a whole month, through much suffering and in constant peril of life, he coasted along the shores of the lake, contending with fierce winds, ice, and snow. At La Pointe he found four or five hundred Hurons, a company of Ottawas, and some other tribes. The Hurons had mostly been baptized, and, he says, "still preserve some Christianity." Other tribes were, to use his own language, "proud and undeveloped," and be had so little hope of them that he did not baptize healthy infants, watching only for such as were sick. It was only after long months of trial that he baptized the first adult, after seeing his assiduity in prayer, his frank- ness in recounting his past life, and his prom- ises for the future. Here an Illinois captive was given to him, and he immediately com- menced learning the language from the rude teacher, and as he gradually acquired a knowl- edge of it his loving heart warmed toward the kind-hearted and peaceful nation, and he longed to break to them the bread of life.

" No one," he exclaimed, " must hope to es- cape 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 In- dians-to share their misery, 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 win- ter, surrounded by his Indians, talking in a broken manner with his Illinois captive, that he conceived the idea of a voyage of discovery. He hears of a great river, the Mississippi, whose course is southward. He says this great river can hardly empty into Virginia, and he rather believes that its mouth is in California. He rejoices in the prospect of seeking for this un- known 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 or 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 to be destined to be wan- derers on the face of the earth, without a spot they could call their own-turned their faces toward 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 mis- sionary longed to labor in that field made sacred by the blood of Daniel, Brebeuf, Lale- mant 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 this spot was, it had some peculiar and compensatory advantages. It abounded in fish, and was on the great highway of a growing Indian com. merce. Here, in the summer of 1671, a rude church, made of logs and covered with bark, was erected, and around it clustered the still ruder cabins of the Hurons. Near the chapel, and enclosing the cabins of the Hurons, was erected a palisade, to protect the little colony against the attacks of predatory Indians. Thus did Marquette become the founder of Macki- naw, as he had before been of Sault Ste. Marie.

Some of the Hurons were still idolaters, and the Christians were wild and wayward, but he looked upon them with parental love. " They have," he writes in 1672, " come regularly to prayers, and have listened more readily to the instructions I have given them, consenting to what I have required to prevent their disor- ders and abominations. 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 hearts, while we stammer at their ears."

A large colony of Ottawas located near the mission, and though intractable, received his faithful and loving attention. This stammer- ing at their ears and trusting that God would reach the heart, through privation, suffering,

EARLY MISSIONARIES IN THE NORTHWEST.

and incessant toil, subject to every caprice, in - sult and petty persecution, the good father labored at for two years, cheered by the privilege of occasionally baptizing 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 Su- perior, after speaking of his field of labor, he says : " I am ready to leave it in the hands of another missionary and go on your order to seek new nations toward 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 South Sea, had reached the ears of the great Colbert, and through him of the great Louis XIV. himself. They did not fail to see the infinite advantage of discovering and possessing this great element of territorial power.

The struggle between the English and French in America was then pending. If the English settlements, then feeble, 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 conti- ment and the ambitious schemes of Britain be nipped in the bud. Colbert authorized the expedition, and was ably seconded by the wise energy and sagacious forecast of Count Frontenac, Governor and Intendant of New France. Joliet, a young, intelligent, enter- prising merchant of Quebec, and Marquette, were appointed to execute the project. In the fall of 1672 Joliet 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 visit the nations of the Mississippi. He was enraptured at the good news that his desires were about to be accomplished, that he was 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, tracing upon the bark of the birch maps of the course of rivers, and writing down the names of the tribes and nations in- habiting 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 great Father, " for this expedition, roused our courage and sweetened the labor of rowing from morning till night," and merrily over the waters of Lake Michigan did they ply the paddles of their light canoe-

" And the forest's life was in it, All its mystery and magic, All the lightness of the birch-tree, All the toughness of the cedar, All the larch's supple sinews ; And it floated on the water Like a yellow leaf in Autumn, Like a yellow water-lily."

At Green Bay the Indians did all in their power to prevent the further progress of the expedition. They pictured to the 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 dangers of navigation-of frightful rapids and sunken rocks, of fearful monsters that swallowed up men and canoes together; of a cruel demon who stops the passage and engulfs the navi- gator 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 he had no fear.

On went the travelers, faithfully 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 have passed the portage and launched their canoes upon the waters of the Wisconsin, and commenced their descent toward the Mississippi. For seven

HISTORY OF MONROE COUNTY, MICHIGAN.

days they floated down its crystal waters. Vineclad 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 enter 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 unfortunate expedition that has added a thrill- ing 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 single human being. The scenery has changed ; the islands are more beau- tiful ; there is little wood and no hills. Deer, moose, bustards 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 insup- portable and they long to see other human faces beside their own, yet they move with cau- tion. They light but little fire at night on the shore, just to prepare a meal, then move as far from it as possible, 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 waterside and a well-beaten trail leading off through a beautiful 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 Jol- iet 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 three Indian villages. Having committed themselves to God and im- plored His help, they approach so near they hear the conversation without being discovered, and then stop and announce their presence by a loud outcry. The Indians rush from their cabins, and, seeing 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 re- joiced 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 called

the calumet. They are most graciously re- ceived at the first village. An old man, per- fectly naked, stands at the cabin door with his hands raised towards the sun, and exclaims : " How beautiful is the sun, O Frenchman, 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 passed to an- other village to visit the chief sachem, the peo. ple ran ahead, threw themselves on the grass by the wayside and awaited their coming, and then again ran ahead to get a second and third opportunity to gaze at them. After several. days' stay with this kind and hospitable peo- ple, our adventurers pass down the stream as far as Arkansas, when, finding that they could not with safety proceed any farther, on the 17th of July, just one month after enter- ing the Mississippi and two months after leav- ing Mackinaw, they commenced retracing their steps. They ascend the beautiful Illinois River, which is now for the first time navigated by civilized man. They are delighted at the fer- tility of the soil, with the beautiful prairies and charming forests, which swarm with wild cattle, stag, 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 truths 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 delightful voyage that added the region of the Upper Mississippi 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. Joliet, with his journal and maps, passed on to Quebec, but lost all his papers before reaching there by the capsizing of his canoe. Marquette remained at Green Bay to recruit from a dis- ease brought on by his exhausting toils and his many exposures. From here he forwarded a report of his journey to his Superior, drawn up with admirable clearness and a genuine modesty that became his magnanimous soul. The map accompanying the report, prepared as it was without surveys and without instru- ments, is wonderful for its accuracy of outline.

EARLY MISSIONARIES IN THE NORTHWEST.

Indeed, this may be said of most of the maps of this period drawn by the Jesuits, who, while they seemed to have mainly in view the con- version of the savages, yet proved themselves to 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 ex. peeted to reach his mission ground were frozen, and he was all too weak to go by land ; and here, then a solitude but where now stands a city of seven hundred thousand inhabitants, alone with his two voyageurs, in a rude cabin which afforded but a slender protection from the in- clemencies of the season, in feeble health, liv- ing on the coarsest food, with a consciousness that he was never to recover, he passed the long winter of 1674-75.

He spent much time in devotion, beginning with the exercises of St. Ignatius, saying mass daily, confessing his companions twice a week and exhorting them as his strength allowed ; earnestly longing to commence his mission among his beloved Illinois, yet cheerfully re- signed to the will of God. After a season of special prayer that he might so far recover as to take possession of the land of the Illinois in the name of Christ, his strength increased, and on the 29th of March he left his solitary and desolate wintering-place and in ten days reach- ed his destination. He found the Illinois to the number of six hundred fires, awaiting his arrival. They received him with unbounded joy as an angel from heaven come to teach them " the prayer," and after much private teaching and exhortation to the principal chiefs and from cabin to cabin, he gathered them in grand concourse, and there, on a lovely April day, upon a beautiful open plain, with thou- sands of the tawny sons and daughters of the prairie hanging upon his lips, the dying man preached to them Christ and Him crucified. His persuasive words were received with uni- versal approbation, but his rapidly failing strength warned him that his own days were numbered. He desired to reach his former

mission of St. Ignatius at Mackinaw before his departure, to die with his religious brethren and leave his bones amongst his beloved Hu- rons. He promised the Illinois that some other teacher of " the prayer " should take his place and continue the mission, and bade them a loving and regretful- farewell. They escorted him with great barbarie pomp, contending with one another for the honor of carrying his little baggage. For many days, accompanied only by his two voyageurs, he coasted in his frail canoe along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, his strength rapidly failing and his precious life ebbing away. He became helpless, and was lifted like a child into and from the canoe. His vision, too, failed; but his gentleness, his cheerful joy in the prospect before him, his calm trust in God, never faltered. Daily he recited his breviary. He encouraged his companions and exhorted them to put confidence in the God of their salvation, who would not forsake them. They read to him, at his request, a med- itation on death which he had long before pre- pared for this eventful hour. Often did he with hopeful voice exclaim: "I know that my Redeemer liveth." On the evening before his death, with a face radiant with joy, he told his companions that on the morrow he should die. Calmly and sweetly, as if talking of the death of another, he gave directions as to the disposition of his body. On the following day as he approached the mouth of a river, he pointed out the place of his burial on an emi- nence on its banks. The weather was propi- tious and the voyageurs passed on ; but a wind arose, and they were driven back to the river's mouth, which they entered. He was carried on shore, a fire was kindled, a slight shelter of bark raised and he was laid upon the sand. Here he gave his last instructions, thanked his followers for their faithful and loving service, administered to them the rites of their religion, sent by them his last kind message to his re- ligious brethren, and bade them go and take their rest until his final hour should come. After two or three hours and as he was about to enter his agony, he called them, gave them a last embrace, asked for the holy water, handed one of them his crucifix from his neck, asking him to hold it before him, and with his eye fixed sweetly upon it pronounced his profession of faith, and thanked God that He had granted him the grace to die a missionary of the cross

HISTORY OF MONROE COUNTY, MICHIGAN.

in a foreign land alone. As his spirit was about to pass, one of his companions cried aloud : "Jesus ! Marie !" Aroused by the sound he repeated the words, and as if some glorious object appeared to him, he fixed his dying gaze above and beyond the crucifix, and with a countenance all beaming with a holy rapture, his soul departed without a struggle as gently as if he had fallen asleep.

Thus, on the 18th day of May, 1675, at the age of thirty-eight, after nine years of faithful service in the missionary field, Father Mar- quette departed; and like his great model, the Apostle to the Indies, he died upon a desolate beach, and like him his dying hour was illumi- nated by a radiance from above. The little stream upon whose banks he breathed his last, still bears his honored name, and there will ever be connected with that spot tender re- membrances and hallowed associations. In 1821 our own revered Father Richard paid to it a loving pilgrimage, and erected thereon a wooden cross with an inscription traced in rude characters with a penknife-in its crude simplicity, fit tribute from fit man. But no enduring marble is required to preserve in fresh fragrance the memory of his virtues. His is one of those few, those immortal names, that were not born to die. His mortal remains do not repose in their original resting-place. Two years after his death, the Indians belonging to his mission of St. Ignatius, returning from their winter hunting grounds, stopped at his grave, sought his remains, and, according to an Indian custom, cleaned his bones, placed them rever- ently in a box of birchen bark, and then in a mournful procession the thirty canoes moved on toward Mackinaw. Before reaching the mission they were met by Fathers Pierson and Nouvelle, and all the Indians at the mission, who came out to pay a fond tribute to their best beloved missionary. There the solemn De Profundis was intoned, and then with all appropriate rites the precious remains were deposited in the church. The mission was subsequently moved to old Mackinaw, the rude church has long since disappeared, and the precise spot where the remains of Father Mar- quette now lie mingled with the common dust is not known.

When Marquette left the Sault for La Pointe in 1669, the wise and even Gallic Dablon, then principal of all the Ottawa missions, as the

missions of the Upper Lakes were named, was in charge of the mission at that point. He was succeeded by Father Dreuillettes, who, full of sanctity and zeal, labored there with most wonderful success for nine years. Large num- bers were baptized, and in general council the Indians adopted the God of prayer as their God. Here in 1671 an envoy of the French, accompanied by French soldiers, gathered a grand council of all the northwestern tribes and formally took possession of all the land be- tween Montreal and the South Sea, and Allouez made that remarkable and well-known speech to the Indians in praise of the greatness of the French King, and from that time the Sault be- came a military post. When Marquette left Mackinaw for his great discovery in 1673, Father Pierson was left in charge, and was there in 1677, when he was joined by Father Nouvelle. The mission was a very prosperous one. At what time it was moved across the straits to the site of old Mackinaw and that be- came a military post, I am unable to say, but it must have been about this time (1677). In 1694, when De la Motte Cadillac, the founder of Detroit, was placed in command, Mackinaw was one of the largest villages in Canada. There was a fine fort of pickets, sixty houses, two hundred soldiers, and many other resi- dents. But with the foundation of Detroit in 1701, Mackinaw dwindled into comparative in- significance. Cadillac, a man of great energy and address, drew away most of the Indians, both Ottawas and Hurons; and so complete was the desertion that in 1706 the missionaries, discouraged by this desertion and the licentious- ness of the coureurs de bois, abandoned the post and burned their church. But the French Government would not permit the post to be abandoned, and with the promise of protection the missionaries returned.

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History of Monroe County, Michigan, Part 4

Author: Wing, Talcott Enoch, 1819-1890, ed Publication date: 1890 Publisher: New York, Munsell & company Number of Pages: 882

Author: Wing, Talcott Enoch, 1819-1890, ed
Publication date: 1890
Publisher: New York, Munsell & company
Number of Pages: 882