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 3
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In the meantime he had not forgotten the poor flock at Michilimackinac. He had sent them already once or twice his faithful assistant, Father Dilhet, and at last in 1821, being fifty-seven years old, he again himself braved the hardships of the wilderness to come and visit them.
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He went to Arbre Croche also at this time and was con- ducted by the Indians at his request to the spot where Father Marquette was first buried. To honor the founder of Mackinac and the discoverer of the Mississippi he raised a wooden cross over the spot cutting with his knife upon it,
Fr J MARQUETTE Died here Ist May 1675.
On the following Sunday he celebrated mass on the spot and pronounced an elogium on the great missionary.
Probably he thought Marquette's remains still lay there, but perhaps not, for apart from the view gained of Richard's visit at this time from these registers, we catch a very interesting glimpse of him, in a letter written by Father Jacker in 1886.
He says that a very honest and intelligent Indian, then living, one Joseph Misatago, told him that in 1821 he met Father Richard lost in the woods back of the present site of St. Ignace where he had gone in search of any traces that might exist of a church where it was said a great priest was buried. Whether, however, Father Richard had associated this tra- dition with the final resting place of Marquette is doubtful.
In 1823 the most remarkable episode in the life of this zeal- ous, energetic priest occurred. We have all of us known many Catholic priests who were school-teachers, many that were publishers and musicians, and all of them are in some sense missionaries, but except Father Richard I think no one is known who was a congressman. But in 1823 Gabriel Richard by a large majority was elected as a delegate from the territory of Michigan to the National House of Repre- sentatives. His appearance in Washington created some sen-
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sation, but he was soon a favorite among his colleagues and in the society of the capital.
His appearance at this time has been described by one of his contemporaries: I have not by me the words in which it was done but I know that he is said to have been tall and spare, dignified and ascetic looking, with an intellectual head and piercing black eyes. He was of scrupulous neatness in attire and person.
While in Congress he made at least one important speech.
It was concerning a proposed appropriation for a military road from Detroit to Fort Dearborn and the mouth of the Chicago river, and true to his character as a builder for the future, the sagacious pioneer in the new order of things, as well as the faithful inheritor of the old, he prophesied the future greatness and importance of the settlement upon this location.
But I think we may be sure that of all the official documents which fell under his eye, he found none more interesting than the following petition sent to Congress :
" We, the undersigned chiefs, heads of families and others of the tribe of Ottawas, residing at Arbre Croche, on the east bank of Lake Michigan, take this means to communicate to our father, the President of the United States, our requests and wants. We thank our father and Congress for all the efforts they have made to draw us to civilization and the knowledge of Jesus, redeemer of the red man and the white. Trusting in your paternal goodness we claim liberty of con- science, and beg you to grant us a master or minister of the gospel, belonging to the same society as the members of the Catholic Society of St. Ignatius, formerly established at Mich- ilimackinac and Arbre Croche by Father Marquette, and
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other missionaries of the order of Jesuits. They resided long years among us. They cultivated a field on our terri- tory to teach us the principles of agriculture and Christianity.
Since that time we have always desired similar ministers. If you grant us them, we will invite them to live on the same ground formerly occupied by Father Du Jaunay, on the banks of Lake Michigan, near our village of Arbre Croche.
If you grant this humble request of your faithful children, they will be eternally grateful, and will pray the Great Spirit to pour forth his blessings on the whites.
In faith hereof, we have set our names this day, August 12, 1823.
HAWK,
CRANE,
BEAR.
FISH,
EAGLE,
STAG,
CATERPILLAR,
FLYING FISH."
After Father Richard's election to Congress he came for the third time to Michilimackinac. In August, 1823, as the register here shows, he was among the flock baptizing and marrying and doubtless exhorting, encouraging and confirming, and it is to be presumed, explaining to the inhabitants of this out-of-the-way frontier post, their duties as citizens of the comparatively new-born republic, as well as of the great king- dom not of this world.
With his return to Detroit from this visit his direct personal connection with the mission ends, but he sent thereafter his assistants, Father Badin and Father De Jean, for visitations to his spiritual children here, and since 1830 there has never failed for any considerable time to be a resident missionary priest at Michilimackinac, represented now both by the mission of St. Anne de Michilimackinac on the island itself and by the
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parish church at Point St. Ignace. But it is the church here, removed from the mainland on the Southern Peninsula, that is technically and accurately in the true succession to the first established mission at Michilimackinac.
Father Richard was like Father Marquette, destined for the sublime honors of martyrdom, not technically so called, but it would seem as really and truly as though it were the tomahawk or the fagot instead of disease that wrought their death.
In 1832 the Asiatic cholera devastated Detroit. Night and day Father Richard devoted himself to the sick and the dying of his flock. Although almost seventy years old he gave him- self no rest, and finally worn out, he succumbed to the dread disease. By his dying bed were the saintly Fenwick, his bishop, and his younger friend and disciple, Frederic Baraga, who became afterward the revered Bishop of Marquette.
He is buried beneath the altar of St. Anne's in Detroit. On the noble facade of the city hall in that city, with that of Father Marquette and of LaSalle and of Cadillac, his statue preserves for Detroit his memory.
It seems to me that it would be a graceful and appropriate thing for some lover of Mackinac, some day to place in the mission church of St. Anne de Michilimackinac, a plain mem- orial window, commemorating these two heroic figures con- nected with its history -Jacques Marquette and Gabriel Richard.
THE PARISH REGISTER AT MICHILIMACKINAC.
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I' T is a fair country which lies 350 miles to the north at the other end of Lake Michigan. The " fairy isle " of Mack- inac and the country round about, all once known as Michili- mackinac, with the winding shores and the heavy woods of the Northern and Southern peninsulas of Michigan, the silver straits between, and the picturesque islands all about-form a pano- rama to the charms of which no person is ever insensible.
And to one at all interested in the early history of America, the pleasure which he may derive from the natural advantages of Mackinac is intensified and heightened by the associations which cluster about the country. Human interest and human sympathy always glorify natural scenery, and Mackinac is cer- tainly not wanting in these elements.
For some years past Mackinac Island has been the summer home of my family, and I have escaped from the city's dust and cinders as often and as long as I could to enjoy it with them. One of the pleasantest things connected with my vaca- tions has been the enjoyment of the associations which cluster about the little church of the parish of St. Anne de Michili- mackinac, at which, of course, we are worshipers. I can never help remembering, as I kneel before its altars, that the mission was founded by that heroic and saintly priest, Mar-
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quette; that it was the scene thereafter of the labors of his worthy successors among " the priests of the society " whom two continents have delighted to honor as the most devoted and glorious missionaries; that it was continued through dark and trying times to both church and state when French, and English, and Americans were, by turn, striving for the mastery of the country, and that all that time it has preserved an his- toric, ecclesiastical continuity. Within its sacristy is a set of heavy black vestments, elaborately worked with embroid- ery of the time of Louis XIV. In them mass was perhaps said at the mission when the eighteenth century had hardly begun. A ciborium, too, is used, which was made and sent from France during the reign of the grand monarch, and numerous small articles of church furniture and some rude pictures evidently of the same date can be seen there by the curious for the asking.
The first chapter in the history of Mackinac was but a short one, but it was the most interesting of all. It began when Jacques Marquette, in 1671, following his Huron con- verts, who were flying from the Western and the Southern shores of Lake Superior before the fierce revengeful wrath of the Sioux, settled with them at Point St. Ignace, as he named it, and built a chapel under which he was buried six years after. That chapter closed, to the great grief of Marquette's Jesuit successors who had been in charge of the mission and who had labored among the savage tribes with the most encourag- ing and satisfactory results, shortly after Cadillac, the com- mandant in charge, had removed the garrison to Detroit in 1701. He held out all possible inducements both to the Christianized and non-christianized Indians about Mackinac to
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follow him. But he had quarreled with the Jesuits and would have none but Recollet friars in his new settlement. So in 1706, with sad hearts, to prevent its desecration, the Jesuit fathers burnt their chapel at Pt. St. Ignace, and retired un- doubtedly with all the archives of the mission to Quebec. What has become of the registers which they must have kept, I do not know. If they are in existence, I should think they would have been before this discovered, by some such scholar and investigator as Dr. Shea, who has done so much in bringing to light documents of this time and character.
The next chapter in the history of Mackinac begins when the Mission was re-established in 1712, probably by Father Marest, upon the other side of the straits, near the site of what is now known as Old Mackinac. This was contemporaneous with the re-establishment of the Fort by De Louvigny, sent for that purpose by the Governor General of Canada. It is stated, I know not upon what authority, by those who pretend to know, that a second and new church was built at this post in 1741. I think that this supposition is made principally be- cause of the fact that the first parish register which has come to our times was evidently begun at that date. It may be, however, that there exists evidence of the building of a new church in 1741. I do not pretend to have made any thorough investigation of the matter. Be that as it may, there was some church for the Mission upon the south shore of the straits of Mackinac from 1712 until about 1785, when it seems to have been taken down and its material used in the construc- tion of the mission church at the Island of Mackinac itself, whither the Fort had been by the English removed five years before. This second chapter in the history of Mackinac, as I
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would divide its story, lasted until the American Fur Company had practically taken entire possession of the trading post, and it had ceased to be to any great extent the headquarters of the independent traders and of the old coureurs de bois, the voy- ageurs and their engages.
It was of all this period that I had hoped to find the ecclesi- astical record. It was one of romantic interest, not because, as the previous chapter was, especially connected with the glorious missionary zeal and efforts of the Society of Jesus, but because full of a more worldly but hardly less adventurous spirit. With- in this period occurred the great French and Indian wars, when, as Macauley says, " In order that Frederick the Great might rob a neighbor whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coramandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America." Then came the surrender and cession of Canada to the English, when " bigots and panders and lackeys the fortunes of France had un- done," and after that began the revolt of the American colonies, the final possession of the colonies about Mackinac by the new government and the subsequent struggle with England in which it was again the coveted prize of contending forces. But the earliest register which exists was, as I have said, begun in 1741. It contains a short abridgment of entries from a former register, which is declared by it still to exist in the archives of the mission, but the abridgment is extremely short, and the original from which it is taken, can nowhere be found.
The first contemporaneous entry is the baptism of one Louis Joseph Chaboyer upon October 4, 1741, by Jean Baptiste La- morinie, a missionary of the Society of Jesus, and its last is of a baptism performed by Father Gabriel Richard, in August, I82I.
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It is a mere accident that the register ends just where it does. The space in the book was exhausted and a new one begun by Father Richard at this last date of August, 1821. The time, however, corresponds closely enough with the close of the second chapter in the history of Mackinac, which I have pre- viously indicated. A transcription of this register, I have with me. It is of course in French.
Before we turn to the register itself, I will briefly advert to the character and condition of the settlement at the time this record begins. It was then still in the hands of the French, from which it passed in 1760, but its general character even after the cession, was not changed-English forces however taking the places of the French.
The settlement was of about sixty families, occupying as many houses, clustered about the fort and mission house, and all surrounded by a high wooden palisade. The houses, of picturesque shape and appearance,' were roughly whitewashed and the village was not unpleasing to the eye. It was in the midst of boundless and unlimited forests stretching in every direction. It was then by far the largest settlement in the northern lake region, and the headquarters and center of the trade between the French and the Indians of the West.
The inhabitants besides the few militia soldiers, with their officers and the missionaries, were the descendants of former garrisons and the fur traders with their engages and voyageurs. From Michilimackinac these latter used every autumn to go out with goods for the Indians to exchange for furs, to all parts of the western country where Indians were known to congre- gate. They went in batteaux or birch bark canoes, each boat or canoe with a crew or company of from four to ten. These
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crews were under contract from the traders and received each from $50 to $150 a year and an outfit of a blanket, two suits of coarse clothes and some small articles necessary to the rudest toilet. They were a hardy, adventurous set of men, who could live on meagre fare, row their boats all day, or carry packs of 100 pounds on their backs through the rough trackless woods for weeks together and then spend the nights in music and dancing. In the winter they were generally at their various winter trading grounds; "hyvernements, " these records call them, and in the spring they came back to Mack- inac, very likely to spend in intemperance and dissolute idle- ness during three or four months the hardly earned wages of the rest of the year.
Through the result of their ancestors' intermarriages with the Indians and the less legal relations which were still more common, all classes, even including most of the officers, had more or less Indian blood. Some of the voyageurs were almost entirely Indian, others less so, but almost the entire population of every class in Mackinac in 1741, may safely be supposed to have been in some degree connected by birth or marriage with the savages.
Their morals, as these registers show, were none of the strictest; and " natural" children "by savage mothers," or, " of an unknown father " form perhaps the largest proportion of those whose baptisms are in this register recorded. Con- cubinage was a recognized institution, the obligations incurred by the temporary husband by contract with the parents of the half breed or Indian girl whom he undertook to make his mistress for some limited time were enforced sometimes even by the local jurisprudence, and at all times by the force of
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public opinion. But chastity was not rated high. It is a tra- dition that at about the time this register ends, a local magis- trate before whom a French voyageur was proven to have committed a felonious assault on an Indian girl, condemned the fellow to buy the girl a new frock, as he had torn hers in the scuffle, and to work one week in his (the Justice's) garden. It was more disheartening, undoubtedly, and difficult for the good priests to labor among these people, nominal Catholics, and in whom indeed in many cases, intelligent and instructed faith seems to have been strong, notwithstanding the disso- luteness of their morals, (for which in their better moments they undoubtedly felt remorseful) than it was even to preach to the uncorrupted but pagan Indians.
But they labored hopefully on, as this register shows, doing all they could and dividing their time and labors evidently between the little French and half-breed colony of Mackinac, which they treated as a mission parish, and the Indian villages of the Ottawas and Ojibways (half Christian and half pagan) near by.
This register beginning, as I have said, in 1741, and ending in 1821, purports to be a record of all ecclesiastical matters between those years in the parish of the mission at Mackinac. But it is certainly very far from complete. It is not continu- ous. For many years together at various times there was no priest residing at Mackinac, and although during these inter- vals, there are many curious records attested by laymen as will hereafter be seen, yet it is evident from the comparative number of them, that it was only the more careful and thoughtful who took pains to see during all these years that any record was made at all.
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In 1741, when the first contemporaneous entries were made, Father Du Jaunay and Father de Lamorinie, both Jesuits, were evidently together at the post. In more than one in- stance one served as godfather while the other administered the baptism. In 1743 and 1744 their place was taken by Father Coquarz, another of the later Jesuit missionaries. But from 1744 until 1749, a period nearly contemporaneous with that part of the old French and Indian wars, known as " King George's war," there was evidently no priest in Mack- inac. From 1749 to 1752 Father Du Jaunay was again in charge. In 1752 he was either relieved or visited by Father de Lamorinie and Father Lefranc, and Father Lefranc and Father Du Jaunay seem to have alternated in their charge of the mission from 1752 until 1761.
I suspect that they relieved each other by alternating be- tween the settlement upon the St. Joseph river and the one at Mackinac. But from 1761 until 1765, during which time the British took possession of Mackinac and the massacre and capture of the fort in Pontiac's conspiracy took place, Father Du Jaunay was at the post. I shall allude hereafter to the part which he played during that time. From 1765 until 1768 there was evidently no priest at the mission. In 1768 Father Gibault, styling himself first " Grand Vicar of Louisiana " and again " Vicar General of Illinois," and who, as we know from other sources, held that title from the Bishop of Quebec, visited the post upon his way south to arrange, if possible, the question of jurisdiction concerning the lower Illinois mission with the Capuchins of New Orleans. In 1775 Father Gibault made another brief visit. From that time on until 1786, the period of the Revolutionary War, there was again no clergy-
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man who even made a visit to the settlement. In 1776 and 1777, Father Payet was there for two months in the summer of each year. After that for seven years, no priest visits the church. Then for two or three months a Dominican named Ledru, styling himself " an apostolic missionary priest, " per- forms marriages and celebrates baptisms for a period of two or three months. In 1796 Father Levadoux makes a visit to the mission, styling himself " Vicar general of Monsieur the Bishop of Baltimore." Up to this time, through the great delay pur- posely made by the British in carrying out the treaties of 1783 and 1794, the post at Michilimackinac had not been taken possession of by the Americans. In October, 1796, two com- panies of the United States army (of the Ist infantry) arrived and took possession, and in 1799, the man who, although a Frenchman by birth, may from his career, be called the first distinctively American priest, Father Gabriel Richard, in the course of an extended tour of the north-western missions, ar- rived at Mackinac, where he made a stay of about three months. In 1804 he sent from Detroit his assistant, Father Dilhet. In 1821 and as the subsequent register shows, again in 1823, (the last time just after his election as delegate to the American Congress from the Territory of Michigan) Father Richard was at Mackinac.
When, upon a careful examination of the register, it became apparent to me how scanty it really was, and for how many years together, during the most interesting periods, there were no entries at all to be found, and when I realized further that it was principally, after all, just what it purported to be, a mere record of baptisms, marriages and deaths, lacking many of the other and more interesting features, which, as I remember it,
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are characteristic of the register at Kaskaskia. I was some- what disappointed, and I feared it would be difficult to make the matter which appeared in it as interesting even to you as it was to me; but I have studied it, after all, with considerable care, and there are some observations to be made upon the register or record itself which may throw some light upon questions of interest, or at least suggest such questions for more careful investigation.
I have alluded to the conditions of licentiousness and disso- luteness, and the apparently unlimited indulgence in concu- binage which the record of baptisms of illegitimate children shows; but it did not require this record, of course, to inform any of us of the loose morality of the coureurs de bois and the bushlopers of this frontier trading-post, and the insufficient influence of their nominal religious convictions upon them. I am afraid they would have been pointed out by the Puritans of New England as frightful examples of the effect of Catholic teaching. But of course nothing could have been more unjust. Their vices sprang from the peculiar circumstances of their location and their life, and from the natural temperament of one who has a union of French and Indian blood. Their character and morals undoubtedly made the work of the mis- sionary hard, but it did not detract from its devotion.
By comparing the dates of entries of marriages and baptisms it is easy to see how often when the father or mother of ille- gitimate children brought them for baptism, or when the good priest had successfully sought them out for that purpose, he also succeeded in inducing the father and mother to take upon themselves the bonds of a sacramental marriage. Some in- stances of this occurred, I believe, during each year, when
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priests were present at all, at the mission. I remember one fact which interested me because I know something of a start- ling incident in the life of the father of the children and the subsequent bridegroom. One Louis Hamline, who was a soldier, who followed Charles De Langlade through many campaigns (of Charles De Langlade I mean to say something hereafter ), was in 1777 married by Father Payet to Josette La Sable, a savage woman, some children of theirs having just before that time been baptized. Some years before without being married he had brought other and older children by the same woman to be baptized. I am inclined to think that the exhortations of the good father in 1777 were supplemented by an awakening of conscience for which there was certainly opportunity-as this same Louis Hamline had in that year while setting trout lines through the ice, been carried off by a sudden wind, which detached the ice in a great floe from the land, as frequently happens in the straits of Mackinac. For nine days with great fortitude and endurance he had lived without food until a favorable wind arising, the ice was again blown to the shore.
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