F
i
.\" ""Jx^^/i^ 'J^i'v' 'J'l'C* 'i^i'v^ 'J'J'v* '5'1'f' •i^i'i' •J'l^ 'i^t'v* 'J^i'i* 'i'j'^ '5'1'C^ 'J'l'f' '/i\~* •J^i'C^ 'J'l'v* 'J^'^ •Jj'C" '^I'v' 'J'l'^ '^i'C^ '5■^'^ 'J'lC- 'i'l'^ •^iv-
Two Missionary Priests
AT Mackinac.
f »
The Parish Register at
MlCHlLIMACKlNAC.
^!'k^!^^I■?l::^I^^I'?l^!^:bM^i^!•?l:^I^^I■?l^I^::^I^J:^I^^I4^!^^!^^l^^^
:\L
K^Aey
%n
m^i/i
T
i^i33>^^^\S^^
r
cyV. ^^^fla9ia^ C^^^tAe^n^
',')':> 1 ) )
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
MlCHILIMACKINAC,
A PAPER READ BEFORE THE CHICAGO LITERARY CLUB IN MARCH, 1889.
EDWARD OSGOOD BROWN.
CHICAGO:
BARNARD & GUNTHORP'PRINTERS.
1889.
MBMX^
MOBSe STerHEM^
TWO MISSIONARY PRIESTS AT MACKINAC.
MOST 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 dehghted, 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 may 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-
590119
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 MichiHmackinac 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. 1 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 Xh^Jieur 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
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 Httle 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
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 Redoubled
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
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 w^ords 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-
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-
gan; the other at once the closing figure of that Hne, and the
herald and pioneer in a new regime 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-
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-da}^ 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 w^ould 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 lo 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
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
IG
himself says, that if his expedition already planned must be
dangerous it should riot 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,
AUouez, 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,
IF
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 167 1 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
12
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 !"
13
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 w'ished 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
dw^elt along the banks of the great river, to map it, with its
principal tributaries, to determine its general direction and to
ascertain w^here 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.
14
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
15
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 w^hich
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 Ba}- and the mission of St. Francis
Xavier.
This voyage was just four months long, and in it the
travelers had paddled their frail barks over 2,700 miles.
One detail only of this voyage I would quote from Father
Marquette's own account that I may call attention to how
beautifully it has since been used in American literature.
On the arrival at the first village of Illinois, which they
visited on their journey, Marquette had declared to them with
the customary presents and symboHc language, that he came
in peace, that he came to declare to them the greatness and
goodness of the true God, and that the great chief of the
French had subdued the Iroquois and spread peace every-
where.
i6
" When I had finished my speech," says Father Marquette,
*' the sachem arose and laying his hand on the head of a little
slave whom he was about to give us, spoke thus: I thank
thee, Black Gown, and thee. Frenchmen, for taking so much
pains to come and visit us; never has the earth been so beau-
tiful nor the sun so bright as to-day, never has our river been
so calm nor so free from rocks, which 3^our canoes have re-
moved as they passed; never has our tobacco had so fine a
flavor nor our corn appeared so beautiful as we behold it to-
day. Here is my son, that I give thee, that thou mayst know
my heart; I pray thee to take pity on me and all my nation.
Thow knowest the Great Spirit who has made us all; thou
speakest to him and hearest his word; ask him to give me life
and health, and come and dwell with us that we may know him."
Longfellow, recognizing the beauty of this historical speech,
has paraphrased it, or indeed almost literally transcribed it, in
Hiawatha. You will remember the visit of the Black Robe
to Hiawatha and his people:
" O'er the water, floating, flying,
Something in the hazy distance,
Something in the mists of morning,
Loomed and lifted from the water.
Now seemed floating, now seemed flying.
Coming nearer, nearer, nearer.
Was it Shingebis, the diver,
Or the pelican, the Shada,
Or the heron, the Shuhshiih-gah,
Or the white goose, Wau-be-wawa,
With the water dripping, flashing.
From its glossy neck and feathers?
It was neither goose nor diver,
Neither pelican nor heron.
O'er the water floating, flying,
Through the shining mist of morning.
But a birch canoe with paddles.
17
Rising, sinking on the water,
Dripping, flashing in the sunshine;
And within it came a people.
From the distant land of Wabun,
From the farthest realms of morning.
Came the Black Robe chief, the Prophet,
He, the Priest of Prayer, the Pale Face,
With his guides and his companions.
And the noble Hiawatha,
With his hands aloft extended,
Held aloft in sign of welcome,
Waited, full of exultation,
Till the birch canoe with paddles
Grated on the shining pebbles.
Stranded on the sandy margin.
Till the Black Robe chief, the Pale Face,
With the cross upon his bosom,
Landed on the sandy margin.
Then the joyous Hiawatha
Cried aloud and spake in this wise :
Beautiful is the sun, O strangers.
When you come so far to see us;
All our town in peace awaits you,
All our doors stand open for you ;
You shall enter all our wigwams.
For the heart's right hand we give you.
Never bloomed the earth so gayly,
Never shone the sun so brightly.
As to-day they shine and blossom
When you come so far to see us !
Never was our lake so tranquil.
Nor so free from rocks and sand-bars ;
For, your birch canoe in passing,
Has removed both rock and sand-bar!
Never before had our tobacco
Such a sweet and pleasant flavor;
Never the broad leaves of our corn fields
Were so beautiful to look on
As they seem to us this morning
When you come so far to see us !
And the Black Robe Chief made answer,
Stammered in his speech a little,
Speaking words yet unfamiliar;
i8
Peace be with you Hiawatha,
Peace be with you and your people;
Peace of prayer and peace of pardon,
Peace of Christ and joy of Mary!"
Marquette was attacked by dysentery on his homeward voy-
age, and day after day lay exhausted in his canoe, engaged in
prayer and holy meditation. So exhausted and weakened was
he by his toil and his disease, which for a year did not sensibly
abate, that during the autumn and winter of 1673 and the
spring and summer following, he was obliged to remain at the
mission of St. Francis Xavier on Green Bay making no attempt
to return to Michilimackinac, which he doubtless desired to
visit. It was while he was here that he wrote to his superior
his account of the voyage. This became of great importance
when, as it unfortunately happened, Joliet's official report and
map were lost by the overturning of his canoe in the Lachine
Rapids just as he was approaching Montreal at the end of his
long journey.
This relation of Marquette, together with his journal of the
later voyage of which I am about to speak, and some notes
concerning him by his superior, Father Dablon, had afterward
a strange history. Although one copy of the account of the
Mississippi voyage evidently found its way to France and was
published in a mutilated form in 1681, another copy of this
relation and the journal and notes spoken of, lay entirely un-
known in the library of the Jesuit College at Quebec until
about 1800. When Canada became an English dominion, the
Jesuits as a religious order were condemned and the reception
of new members forbidden. The last survivor of them. Father
Cazot, before his death about 1800, took the papers and archives
which lay in his hands and turned them over for safekeeping
19
until happier times, to the Gray Nuns of the Hotel Dieu, who
were not under the ban of the government. These ladies joy-
fully gave up their charge to the Jesuit Fathers who in 1842
re-established the Society in Canada, and in 1852 Marquette's
relation and journal and the notes of Father Dablon, were by
Dr. Shea brought to light and published.
Father Marquette's health having been partially, to appear-
ance at least, re-established, he received the orders which he
solicited to establish the Illinois mission, and on the 25th of
October, 1674, he started, accompanied by two Frenchmen
(" Engages" as these assistants to the missionaries were called)
and by a number of Indians, for the great village of the Illinois,
which he had found on the previous year on the river of the
Illinois, in his journey from the Mississippi to Lake Michigan.
This time the journey was made down the western shore of
Lake Michigan, and Father Marquette walked much of the
way upon the shore, taking boat only w-hen rivers or bays
were to be crossed.
By the middle of November his malady returned and the
winter began, too, to close in around the devoted wanderers.
On the 4th of December, 1674, ^^ reached the Chicago
river, and about six miles from its mouth, unable on account
of his increasing illness to go further, he and his companions
built some kind of a rude cabin, and prepared to spend the
winter. This was the first settlement upon the stream
where now rise the towers of that imperial city, which before
the century is over w411 number a million inhabitants. Jacques
Marquette was undoubtedly the first resident of Chicago, a
claim in itself, had he not other greater ones, to the remem-
brance of posterity. The record of that winter, as told by
20
himself, is a touching proof of the simple piety of this saintly man.
In that forlorn and squalid cabin, in ice and snow, living on
Indian corn and a very little chance game shot by his faithful
French companions, or brought to him by two trappers, who
were camping within fifty miles, (for he had sent his Indians
away to their destination), stricken by a wasting and a mortal
malady, he thanks God and the Blessed Virgin for their care
of him, which had so comfortably housed him, he begins the
Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, he confesses his two com-
panions twice each week, he says the Holy Mass each day,
and he regrets only, as he innocently remarks, that he was
able to keep Lent only on Fridays and Saturdays. One
would have thought that the austerest idea of self sacrifice
would have been perforce satisfied in this winter encampment.
In March, 1675, after a novena to the Blessed Virgin and in
consequence of it as he at all events devoutly believed, he
found himself able to travel and pushed forward for his pro-
posed mission to the Illinois. By the Indians, at their village of
Kaskaskia, he was received, as he says, like an angel from
heaven, and during Holy Week he preached the Gospel to the
thousands there assembled. Formally he opened a mission to
be known as that of the Immaculate Conception, and prom-
ised that some black-robed priest should be sent to take charge
of and prosecute his work.
But his strength was failing fast, he felt himself that his sick-
ness was mortal, and he bade therefore his Indian friends a sad
good-bye and started for his loved mission at Michilimackinac,
there to make arrangements for his successor at the mission
among the Illinois and then, as he hoped, to die in the arms o£
his brethren.
21
From information afforded him by the Indians whom he had
visited he had come to know of another route to the north, a
way, afterward the favorite one of LaSalle in his many jour-
neys. It was by the way of the Kankakee branch of the Illi-
nois, and a portage thence to the St. Joseph River, flowing into
Lake Michigan on its eastern shore at the present site of the
town of that name.
As the party, Marquette and his two faithful companions,
made their way along this shore, the good Father's strength
utterly failed. He lay in his boat, reciting his breviary,
and his companions were obliged to lift him ashore when they
made their nightly encampment. At last when they ap-
proached the promontory now known as The Sleeping Bear,
where stands the present city of Ludington, he could go no
farther. Carried ashore by his companions he confessed them
both; in contrition and penitence he made his own confession in
writing, begging that it should be taken to his brethren, and
with the names of Jesus, Mary and Joseph upon his lips, thank-
ing God that he was allowed to die a member of the Society of
Jesus and a missionary of Christ, this sweet, heroic soul passed
to its reward. His companions buried him on the spot where
he died, and raised a cross above the grave and then kept on
their saddened way to Michilimackinac.
But says the Jesuit relation of 1677:
" God did not choose to suffer so precious a deposit to re-
main unhonored and forgotten amid the woods. The Kiskakon
Indians who for the last ten years have publicly professed
Christianity, in which they were first instructed by Father
Marquette, when stationed at La Pointe du Saint Esprit at the
extremity of Lake Superior, were hunting last winter on the-
22
banks of Lake Illinois. As they were returning early in spring,
they resolved to pass by the tomb of their good Father, whom
they tenderly loved, and God even gave them the thought of
taking his remains and bringing them to our church at the mis-
sion of St. Ignatius, at Michilimackinac, where they reside."
<« They accordingly repaired to the spot, and, after some de-
liberation, they resolved to proceed with their father, as they
usually do with those whom they respect. They opened the
grave, divested the body, and though the flesh and intestines
were all dried up, they found it whole, the skin being in no
way injured. This did not prevent their dissecting it, accord-
ing to custom. They washed the bones and dried them in the
sun. Then putting them neatly in a box of birch bark they
set out to bear them to the house of St. Ignatius. The convoy
consisted of nearly thirty canoes, in excellent order, including
even a good number of Iroquois, who had joined our
Algonquins, to honor the ceremony. As they approached
our house. Father Nouvel, who is Superior, went to meet
them with Father Pierson, accompanied by all the French
and Indians of the place. Having caused the convoy to
stop, he made the ordinary interrogations to verify the
fact that the body which they bore was really Father
Marquette's. Then, before landing, he intoned the ' De
Profundis ' in sight of the thirty canoes still on the water,
and of all the people on the shores. After this the body was
carried to the church, observing all that the ritual prescribes
for such ceremonies. It remained exposed under a pall
stretched as if over a coffin all that day, which was Pentecost
Monday, the 8th of June, (1677). The next day, when all the
funeral honors had been paid it, it was deposited in a little
23
vault in the middle of the church, where he reposes as the
guardian angel of our Ottawa Missions. The Indians often
come to pray on his tomb."
So, in the flower of his manhood, thirty-eight years old,
died, and with such simple and yet touching ceremonies, was
finally buried. Father Jacques Marquette. For a century after-
wards the voyageurs on Lake Michigan, in storm and peril,
besought what they believed to be his saintly intercession.
But the exact site of his grave was not known for nearty
two hundred years, for when the mission was temporarily
abandoned in 1706, the church where reposed his body was
burned.
More than a hundred years later we have a glimpse of
Father Richard looking for its site and the grave of a great
priest, and, half a century later still, in 1877, Father
Jacker, then the priest in charge of the church at Point St.
Ignace, to the general satisfaction of the historical scholars who
investigated the matter, identified not only this site, but found
some relics of the sainted missionary, which now repose in the
chapel of the Marquette College, at Milwaukee; while the
grave at St. Ignace is marked by a plain but tasteful monu-
ment, to tell to all admirers of devotion and courage, and es-
pecially to all who are true sons and daughters of the church,
who may journey thither, that beneath, for two centuries, lay
all that was mortal of that most intrepid soldier of the cross,
Jacques Marquette.
In the year 1792, perhaps led by the threatening condition
of political and ecclesiastical affairs in France, the Superior
General of the Sulpician Order, sent from that country to Bal-
24
timore in the United States a number of young ecclesiastics to
report to the venerable Bishop Carroll and to receive his
orders for the work of the Church in the United States.
The original intention seemed to be that these young men
should found such a seminary as the Sulpicians the world over
are noted for — for the theological training of priests. But the
need was much more urgent, Bishop Carroll thought, for mis-
sionary priests, and most of these young men accepted with
eagerness at the hands of the bishop the offer of such work.
Among them was Gabriel Richard, a young man then of
twenty-eight years, born in Santes in France in 1 764. Like
Father Marquette he came from a highly connected family,
and in his case, too, his mother was from a family illustrious in
the records of the church. At the age of twenty-five he had
entered the Sulpician order.
By Bishop Carroll this young missionary was assigned a
territorial jurisdiction of great extent. He was given as Vicar-
General the pastoral charge of all the settlements m Illinois,
and the missions especially that had been established by the
French in that country during the century succeeding Father
Marquette's first visit to it.
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of looking through the
registers of the old parish churches at Fort Chartres and Kas-
kaskia on the Mississippi river, and found that many of the en-
tries in the latter years of the century were made by Gabriel
Richard.
When a few days ago, I looked through the registers here,
I found again the same familiar hand in at least a hundred en-
tries, reviving in- my mind the interest I had long felt in this
pioneer priest. For I recognized at once the importance
25
which here as there his duties had assumed in the history of
the church in America. There as here h*e had been sent at
once to continue the work of the line of French missions of
the older time, in the many settlements and colonies of French
and Canadians and half breeds and their descendants, who
since the English occupation had fallen into sad need of regular
pastoral care, and to whom that pastoral care to be effective for
good, must be by one of their own race and language, and also
as at least a no less important office, to begin in this western
country the new development and to encourage the new
growth of the Catholic Church from roots to strike more
deeply than the old French missions could, into the newly born
American life and national character.
In 1798, after a labor which became more and more fruitful
as the years went on. Father Richard was withdrawn from
Illinois, and sent to what seemed the still more important and
promising field of Detroit, where the same condition of affairs
as at Kaskaskia, but on a larger scale, called for the same
kind of an ecclesiastical administrator.
From 1794, when he was but thirty-four years old, until
1832, when he died a true martyr's death at the age of sixty-
eight. Father Richard's home and main work were at Detroit,
where he nobly performed the singularly important functions
he was called upon in the Providence of God to fulfill.
Not forsaking the French colonists, the descendants of those
who accompanied Cadillac to Detroit in 1 701 and of those
who subsequently came from Canada, and who still formed by
far the greater number of his parishoners at the old St. Anne's
church, of which his main home work was the pastoral charge,
nor forgetting either the Indian Christians, either around De-
26
troit or in the outlying missions far or near, he nevertheless
thoroughly recognized, that after all in all this country
the controlling tendency of the time was towards the
ascendency and increasing influence and importance of the
great English speaking race that had come under God to
possess the land; and wasting no time in vain regrets over the
more congenial or romantic past, he set his face towards the
rising sun, prophesying of and preparing the ground for the
glorious destiny he saw for the American church of the future.
But like St. Paul, he was ready to be all things to all men,
if haply he might save some, and in the midst of the very
different work, to which I shall hereafter more particularly re-
fer, he found time to be the devoted missionary and pastor of
the almost abandoned Indians and half-breeds and French
voyageurs and traders, who then lived at Michilimackinac.
In 1706, as I have said, the mission at Michilimackinac
was temporarily abandoned. With sad hearts and reluctant
hands the Jesuit Fathers, that their chapel might not
be desecrated, had themselves burned it and their house,
given up their loved labors at Michilimackinac and returned
to Quebec. This was because the French commandant at
Michilimackinac, Cadillac, had removed to and fortified the
present site of Detroit and most of the Indians who had settled
here, led by the material inducements held out by Cadillac,
had followed him there. Some remained, however, and more
returned, and the mission of Michilimackinac was soon re-
established, this time, however on the other side of the straits,
now known as Old Mackinaw. Hither had come the saintly
Jesuit missionaries Marest, Lamorinie, De Jaunay and Le
Franc, laboring zealously and efficiently among the Indians.
27
We catch glimpses of this mission in the pages of Charle-
voix's history, but these parish registers here are the best evi-
dence of the labors and success of these devoted men.
But in 1762 Choiseul drove the French Jesuits from their
colleges, and surrendered the possessions of France in America
to England, and without the magnificent power and energy of
the Society of Jesus behind it, the mission at Michilimackinac
languished, and although not abandoned, the faithful in its
flock were obliged to depend on visits, more or less frequent,
from various missionary priests.
Between 1 762, when Dujaunay left Arbe Croche (now^ Har-
bor Springs) and Michilimackinac, and 1799? when Richard
visited the mission, Gibault, Payet, Ledru, Levadoux, all
names illustrious among the post-Jesuit missionaries to the In-
dians, had, as these registers attest, been here at intervals, and
when they came, there thronged here to meet them the
Christian men and women, French and Indian, of the settle-
ment, often to be married or to have their children baptized,
more often for the supplemental ceremonies, and the blessing
of the Church, on lay baptisms already administered or mar-
riages already contracted before some civil magistrate.
These parish registers here contain some very curious
records during these years, made by lay officials, of baptisms
and marriages and sepultures.
In the matter of baptisms, especially, the people, well in-
structed in the efficacy of lay baptism, in the absence of a
priest frequently applied to those best able to keep a record.
Thus, there is this one entry (in French, which I have trans-
lated) :
"The thirtieth of August, 1781, wsls baptized Domitille,
28
legitimate daughter of Mr. Charles Gazelle and Madeleine
Pascal, his legitimate wife, born the same day at noon.
"John Coates,
'^ Notary Public:'
Immediately below this entry is another still more remark-
able. It is in the same handwriting evidently, that of John
Coates, the notary public. This entry is in English:
" I certify you that, according to the due and prescribed
order of the Church, at noon, on this day, and at the above
place, before divers witnesses, I baptized this child, Charlotte
Cleaves.
" (Signed) P. W. Sinclair,
" Lt. Governor and justice of the Peace,
" Witnesses: William Grant, John McNamara, D. McRa}^,
George Meldrum.
"John Coates,
" Notary Public:''
This last entry, without date as it is, or the names of the
parents, is hardly a sufficient baptismal register to give us
much information for these later days, but it is evidentty the
record of a certificate, insisted upon by the parents and given
to them by Major Sinclair, then commander of the post for
the English Government.
In the memoirs of Augustus Grignon, published in the Wis-
consin Historical Collections, is a passage relating how his
mother, who was a daughter of Charles Langlade, who was
born in Mackinac in 1729, came with her children all the way
in a birch canoe, from Green Bay to Mackinac to have them
baptized by Father Payet, who was making a visit here in
29
1787. These registers confirm this. Six children of Pierre
Grignon, from four months to ten years old, were at that time
baptized.
On one of these missionary visits, came to Michilimackinac, in
1799, the subject of this sketch. Father Richard. He found
here, we are told, about 700 Christians, and spent, as this
register shows, several weeks at least in ministering to their
spiritual necessities. From here he went to Georgian Bay
and to the Sault Ste. Marie, and then, after an absence of four
months, returned to Detroit. The succeeding twenty years of
Father Richard's life were marked by an exceeding^ great
activity; made Vicar-General of Detroit, and given a free
hand, he enlarged and improved all the parochial and mission
schools; he opened an academy of a very high class for the
higher education of women. He also instituted and carried
on a seminary for young men, and endeavored to obtain from
among its pupils fit candidates for the priesthood, of which
he had pressing need. .
In 1805, in a fire which almost entirely de^stroyed the city.
Father Richard's church and presbytery and schools were
burned. But far from discouraging him, the calamity seems
but to have reanimated his zeal, and he soon had rebuilt the
church and re-established his school— supplying the latter with
chemical and astronomical apparatus.
In 1807, believing that the time had fully come, he estab-
lished a series of English sermons given every Sunday in the
Council House of the then newly established Territory of
Michigan.
In 1808 and '9 he visted his bishop at Baltimore, and went
to other eastern cities, bringing back with him a printer, a
30
printing-press and a font of old type. This has been said to
have been the first printing-press west of the Alleghanies.
It certainly was the first in Michigan. On this press were
printed some devotional books, an edition of the epistles and
gospels in French and English, and various educational
books. A copy of one of these small books for children
called Journal des Enfants, printed in French and English on
alternate pages, belongs to me, and is here and is subject to
your inspection. I cannot say much for the typographical
execution, but the matter seems to me useful and good.
Father Vitali, the priest of this mission, owns and uses on
all public services one of the edition of the epistles and gospel
referred to, and this also is here.
In 1 812 Father Richard imported from Europe, for his
church, an organ, the first ever brought to the North-west.
In 181 2 came the English war. Aided by the Indians the
English took Detroit, and one of their first acts was to im-
prison Father Richard, on the ground that he was an instiga-
tor and exciter of anti-English feeling. Sent to a guard-house
on the other side of the river he used his great influence and
experience with the Indians to save the other prisoners from tor-
ture. On his return to Detroit at the close of the war, he found
his flock threatened with famine. Sending away, he procured
and distributed provision and seed; " continuing," as has been
said by another, " as long as the scarcity lasted, to be the liv-
ing Providence of the destitute."
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.
31
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 ap^rt 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 wdth 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 thern 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-
32
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 : 1 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 civiHzation and the
knowledge of Jegus, 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
33
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 an}^ 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
34
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 d3ang 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 w^ould 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.
IT 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 x\merica,
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, w^e 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-
36
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 w^orked 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
1 701. He held out all possible inducements both to the
Christianized and non-christianized Indians about Mackinac to
37
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 17 12, 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, 1 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 ihe building of a new
church in 1 74 1. I do not pretend to have made an}^ 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 171 2 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
38
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
1 741. 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,
1821.
Z9
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 w^estern 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
40
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 hard}^ 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
41
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 w^eek 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 w^hom 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,
w^hich they treated as a mission parish, and the Indian villages
of the Ottawas and O jib ways (half Christian and half pagan)
near by.
This register beginning, as I have said, in 1741, and ending
in 1 82 1, 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
anv record was made at ail.
42
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 ^^ 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-
43
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
thrfee 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 [oi 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 182 1 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 w^as, and for how many
years together, during the most interesting periods, there were
no entries at all to be £ound, 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,
44
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
45
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 fhe 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.
Of course in speaking of these records as throwing light
upon the dissolute character of the settlement, I am not refer-
ring to any of the acts which were happily numerous, where in
the absence of the priest, marriages perfectly valid both under
the civil and ecclesiastical law were contracted in the absence
of the priest, the religious ceremony alone being supplied when
the priest came to the settlement. In these unions there was of
course nothing immoral or censurable, and I think it is hardly
realized to-day how carefully the Catholic church teaches that
the sacrament of marriage absolutely requires neither priest
46
nor witness. The essence of the sacrament is in the consent
of parties. So teach all the theologians. But how perfectly
this w^as understood by the instructed catholics «at Mackinac,
there are some curious entries to attest. One particular case
from which I will hereafter quote, that of Charles Gauthier de
Vierville, could have hardly been better expressed had it been
drawn by a doctor of the Sorbonne. There is another matter
to which I think the register bears interesting testimony. It
has been a too common opinion, springing from prejudice
against the Church, that the Catholic missionaries' apparent
success among the Indians arose from their taking them into
the church without sufficiently instructing them. I think Park-
man even allows himself somewhere to speak of the Catholic
missionary contenting himself with sprinkling a few drops, of
water upon the forehead of his savage proselyte, while the Pro-
testants tried to win him from his barbarism and prepare his sav-
age heart for the truths of Christianity. There is absolutely no
truth in this, and no evidence has ever been cited for it. And this
register, like all the missionary registers, is affirmative proof
of its falsity. There is hardly a case in which an Indian of
adult age, or even above the age of reason is certified to have
been baptized in this record, where special allusion is not made
to his or her previous instruction. " Sufficiently instructed and
ardently desiring baptism " is the certificate of these men who'
were not either in formal or in informal utterances, liars. Even
in times of emergency and danger there is shown a great
anxiety upon the part of the priests that improper and merely
formal baptisms should not be made.
Thus the register shows that in October, 1757, there was
an outbreak of small-pox, to which the Indian settlements were
47
always extremely liable, and that Father Lefranc was very
active in baptizing the infants and small children, and those
persons who were dangerously ill; but even under these cir-
cumstances he almost apologizes for the want of preparation of
his catechumens. Thus, in speaking of two Indians who were
dangerously ill, and who afterwards died, he says " they de-
manded baptism with great earnestness, and promised to be in-
structed and to live as Christians." In this outbreak of the
small-pox there are certificates by Father Lefranc of the bap-
tism of at least thirty children, many of them infants, whom he
says he found " abandoned and dangerously sick with the
small-pox." It is evident that there was a great panic among
the natives at the visitation of this terrible scourge, and that
Father Lefranc, like all the Jesuit missionaries in a like case,
went from cabin to cabin in the Indian village, seeking out the
sick and dying. Although it does not exactly appear (at least
not to me, who cannot tell the diffel-ence between Ojibway and
Ottawa names), I think it is probable that this pestilence oc-
curred in the Indian village nearest the fort — that of the Ojib-
ways, upon the Island of Mackinac.
As I have suggested before, the thoroughness of the in-
struction is evidenced by the character of many of the lay en-
tries which were made during the long absence of the priests
from the church. Here is a literal translation of the one most
elaborate. It is of the marriage of a man of whom I shall
have something more to say hereafter.
"In the year 1779, the first of January, before noon, we, the
undersigned, on the part of Sieur Charles Gautier de Vier-
ville, Lieutenant-Captain and interpreter of the King, son of
Claude Germaine de Vierville and of Therese Villeneuve,
48
his father and mother, deceased, and of Magdeleine Chevalier,
daughter of the late Pascal Chevalier and of Madeline Darch
Eveque, her mother; in order to confirm the alliance which a
virtuous love mutually leads them to contract together, and to
crown the fires that mutual tenderness has lighted in their
hearts, before our Mother, the Holy Church, of which they
are members, and in the bosom of which they wish to live and
die, have gone to the house of Sieur Louis Chevalier, uncle
of the future bride, to remove every obstacle to their desires,
and to assure them, so far as in us lies, of days full of sweet-
ness and of repose. There, in the presence of the future hus-
band and wife, of their relations and of their friends, we have
placed upon them the following conditions, namely : The said
future husband, in the dispositions required by the Holy
.Roman Church, and according to the order which she has im-
posed upon her children, promises to take for his wife and
legitimate spouse Magdeline Chevalier, who, upon her part,
receives him for her husband and legitimate consort, having
the full and entire consent of all their relatives. In virtue of
this, the husband (taking the wife with all her rights for the
future in that part of her heritage which is due to her, and
which must be delivered to her at the first requisition, to be
held in common), in order to increase the property of his
bride, and to show by it the extreme tenderness which he has
for her, settles upon her the sum of a thousand crowns, taken
from the goods w^hich they shall acquire together — in order to
provide for the necessities which the accidents of life may
perhaps cause to arise. The future spouses, to assure for the
alliance which they are contracting — peace, repose and the
sweets of well-being to the last moment of their lives — will
49
and consent, in order that they may taste without trouble the
felicity that they look for, that their property should be pos-
sessed by a full and entire title by the survivor after the death
of one or the other, to be given alter the death of such sur-
vivor to their children, if Heaven, favorable to their desires,
accords them these w^orthy fruits of their mutual love; but if
the survivor wishes to contract a new alliance, in that case the
contracting party must account to inheriting children, and di-
vide with them. If Heaven, deaf to their voice, shall refuse
them a legitimate heir, the last survivor may dispose of all the
goods according to his or her will and pleasure, without being
molested by the relatives either of one or of the other. This,
they declare, is their will while waiting to approve and ratify
it before a notary, and to supplement the ceremonies of mar-
riage by a priest, when they shall have the power to do it."
The provisions here concerning property disposition are ac-
cording to the " custom of Paris," so-called, w^hich governed
in matters of municipal law these Canadian colonies.
There are many other marriage records, not so elaborate,
but not less sufficient to prove the validity of the act, despite
the absence of the priest.
Of course, it was one of the first matters impressed by
the priest, both upon those who were of Christian descent and
upon converts, that lay baptism was not only permissible but de-
sirable in cases of emergency or danger, and it is not surpris-
ing, therefore, to find that situated as these people were, the
larger proportion of the baptisms of children, when they came
to be performed by the priests, were conditional baptisms. That
is, the priest supplied the ceremonies of baptism and baptized
them on condition " that they had not already been baptized,"
50
as in a very great number of cases they undoubtedly had
been by their parents or friends. No very sufficient register
of the numerous lay baptisms made when there was no priest
at the mission was kept, but of course there are some recorded.
A good many of them were either made by the commandant at
the post, by a justice of the peace, or by a notary public, and
certified to under his title, by the person administering the rite.
I have no idea that this was from any feeling upon the part of
the parishioners, simple minded though they were, that these
official gentlemen were any better qualified to administer the
sacrament than others, but because they reasoned that if a
record was to be made at all it had best be made under the
name and signature of those best able both to make it and to se-
cure its preservation. Some of them read a little curiously.
There are a few in English which form the only exception to the
almost universal French in the record.
Upon page 73 appears this in French: " On the 30th day
of August, 1 78 1, was baptized Domitille, the legitimate daugh-
ter of Sieur Charles Gautier and Madeline Pascal his legiti-
mate wife, born the same day at noon. John Coates, Notary
Public."
This is the child of the pair whose nuptials we noted above.
Then occurs this in English : " I certify you that according
to the due and prescribed order of the church at noon on this
day, and at the above place, before fivers witnesses, I baptized
this child Charlotte Cleves. Patrick Sinclair, Lieutenant
Governor and Justice of the Peace. Witnesses: (Signed)
William Grant, John McNamara, George Macbeth, D. McRay,
George Meldrum."
I think, however, of the things shown by the record itself
51
that which interested me most is the light which it throws upon
the question of slavery, both of Indians and of negroes, in
these north-western posts, during the last century and the
beginning of the present.
I have not had the time to carry on such an investigation as
I would like to make concerning its incidents and its character,
but one thing is certain, it must have been a firmly established
and cherished institution despite the boast to the contrary that
has sometimes been made. The negro slaves belonging to
various persons in the community are frequently spoken of in
the register. Sometimes it is a child of two negro slaves who
is baptized, sometimes it is two negro slaves who are married.
Thus, in 1744, Father Coquarz certifies to "baptizing the
daughter of Boncoeur, a negro, and of Margaret, a negress,
belonging to a trader named Boutin, obliged to winter at
Mackinac on his way to the Illinois."
Frequently the word " esclave " is used where it is impos-
sible to determine whether the slave spoken of is red or black.
I was much puzzled for a long time by the use of the words
" Panis " and " Panise," evidently intended from their connec-
tion to signify a male or a female servant of some kind, and as
they were spoken of as ^'-belonging'''' to various people, I
inferred that they signified slaves. What sort of slaves I could
not ascertain, for in no French dictionary, either of ancient or
modern French, could I find any such word. The words did
not seem to be used at all as the name of a tribe, or as a proper
name, but rather as though they signified servants held as
slaves under some different sort of tenure from that denoted
by the word " esclave," and this I thought at first must be so.
I discovered finally their real signification. They are corrupted or
52
alternative forms of " Pawnee," and are evidently used to signify
" Indian " slaves as distinguished from " negro " slaves.
A note which I have found in the Wisconsin Historical Col-
lections, purporting to be taken from the memoir of one Bou-
gainville, published in France, concerning the state of Canada,
says, that "the Panis " (evidently Pawnee) "tribe in America
is in the same position as that of the negroes in Europe."
" The Panis tribe," the author says, " is a savage nation situated
on the Missouri, estimated at about twelve thousand men. Other
nations make war upon them and sell us their slaves. It is
the only savage nation that can be thus treated."
Most of the Indian slaves who are mentioned in the register,
were, at the time of such mention, which is generally that of
their baptism, quite young children. I think that they were
in most cases given or sold to the French or half-breed traders
and voyageurs, by the Ottawas who had captured or bought
them. Whether they were all Pawnees or not, I think very
doubtful. I am inclined to think that as the word " slave "
became generic because so many " Slavs " were sold, the
word " Panis " among the Ottawas and Ojibways was applied
indiscriminately to any slave of any tribe because the majority
of such slaves were Pawnees. However, this is all conject-
ure on my part.
There are two interesting entries in the register concerning
slaves belonging to the church.
On page 29 of the baptismal register appears this certificate :
"To-day, upon the i6th of April, the Feast of the Annuncia-
tion of the Blessed Virgin, in the year 1750, I have solemnly
baptized in the Church of this Mission, Jean Francois Regis,
a young slave of about seven j^ears, given through gratitude to
53
this mission last summer by M. Le Chevalier, upon his safe
return from the extreme West, the said infant being well in-
structed and asking baptism. His godfather was Sieur
Etienne Chenier and his godmother Charlotte Parent. Done
at Michilimackinac the day and year aforesaid. P. Du Jaunay."
Upon page 59 occurs the following: " To-day, Holy Satur-
day, the loth day of April, in the year 1762, I have solemnly
baptized a young negro about 20 years of age, belonging be-
fore yesterday to this mission; sufficiently instructed even to
serve the Holy Mass. After which he made his first com-
munion. In baptism the name of Pierre was given to him.
His godfather was Jean Baptiste called Noyer, voyageur, and
his godmother Mdlle. Martha Cheboyer. Done at Michili-
mackinac the day and year aforesaid." This was signed by
Father De Jaunay. It was a gracious act to give the poor
negro his freedom before baptism.
A monograph upon the subject of slavery in these trading
posts of Mackinac, Detroit, Green Bay, Prairie du Chien and
Chicago, its origin, rise, decline and extinction, and its character
and incidents, it seems to me would be extremely interesting.
One matter of which I would like to ascertain the date is
that of the extinction of Indian slavery. The allusions to the
Pawnee slaves become more and more infrequent, and finally
before the close of the book cease altogether. Father Rich-
ard states of an Indian whom he baptized that he was " au
service " of Charles de Langlade, but he never uses the word.
" slave."
Morgan L. Martin in a historical address at Madison some
years ago said that he saw in 1827 a Pawnee woman at Green
Bay, who within a few days of that time had been a slave,,
but that she then was free.
54
One other thing I think of, which as a suggestion springing
from this register occurs to me might be worked up in an in-
teresting manner, and that is, a discussion of the methods and
course in which the administration of justice was continued
from the French dominion through the English occupation into
the time when the United States took possession of the coun-
try. I do not think that this register throws any particular
light upon it, although there is one, Adhamer St. Martin, whose
entries appear as a justice of the peace during all three of
these periods. He subscribed himself as one of the " Justices
of the Peace of his Majesty " in March, 1796, the American
troops not having then arrived at the post, although it had
been long before distinctly agreed that the United States should
have jurisdiction over Mackinac. After that for a time he
calls himself "Justice of the Peace of this district," and then,
still later, in 1797, he says he is a "Justice of the Peace of
the United States." It may very well be that he received a
renewal of his commission, but the records and the traditions
of Green Bay are very clear to the fact that there some at least
of the officers commissioned by the English Government did
not cease to exercise their functions, nor did the inhabitants
care to question their jurisdiction although they received no
accession of authority. It may have been so also at Mackinac.
So far as the mere contents of the register go, I will call
your attention to but one other matter, and that is to two or
three allusions which are contained in it to Chicago. It was not
till after the close of the entries in this register that Chicago
became any thing to the people of Michilimackinac, but an out-
post known as the Chicago portage, but now that this great
city is here, it naturally becomes interesting to find the refer-
55
ences to it in such a record as this. The first that I noticed is
in the abridgment from the preceding record, with which this
register opens.
For upon the 19th of April, 1735, it appears that there was
baptized Louis, slave of Monsieur de Chignaucourt, aged
twenty years. Beneath the entry, in bitterness of heart, the
priest has written at another time, " Rocambole^ -pj'esentement
afostat et sauvagise a Chikago^'^ which may be translated "a
humbug, at present an apostate, and relapsed into savagery
at Chicago." Thus it will be seen that at a ver}^ early time
Chicago was getting a bad name at other places as the resort
of the criminal classes.
In June, 1846, Father de Jaunay certifies that he baptized
" Louis, the legitimate son of Amiot and of Marianne his wife
of this post; the said infant having been born at the river
Aux plains, near to Chikago, early in October last. The
godfather was Mr. Louis de Lecorn, captain commanding for
the king in this post. The godmother was Madame Marie
Catherine de Laplante, wife of Monsieur Bourassa."
This was a white child; for Arhiot appears to have been a
French trader. Does it not settle the question as to the "first
white native of Chicago " ?
So far I have confined myself to the records themselves,
that is, to what they by and in themselves may be considered
to show or suggest. Pardon me if for a few moments I now
consider them with reference to the interest which they have
for us when viewed in the light of knowledge derived from
other sources concerning the men who figure in this book,
and whose handwriting again and again appears through it.
So considered, there will be no lack of interest in them to
56
those to whom this sort of historical research affords pleasure.
There is always something fascinating in contemporaneous
records and signatures of persons who were pioneers in this
western country, and whose names and deeds were part of our
early history, and I think that this is especially the case where
the records are those of their births, baptisms, marriages, and
deaths.
It is not particularly to the priests who have signed the cer-
tificates in these registers, to whom I am referring, but yet
before I speak of other names more interesting still, let me
call your attention to something that may be said of them.
For instance, we know that Father de Lamorinie, who makes
the first contemporaneous entry in this register in 1741, was
afterwards at the mission on St. Joseph river and, being driven
-from there by the vicissitudes of the French and Indian war,
went to minister to the settlers at the mission of St. Gene-
vieve, not far from the present site of St. Louis.
By virtue of an infamous decree of the Superior Council of
Louisiana, an insignificant body of provincial officers, who un-
dertook in 1763, to condemn the Society of Jesus, and to sup-
press the order within Louisiana, he was seized, although upon
British soil, and with other priests from Kaskaskia and Vin-
cennes, taken to New Orleans, and sent from there to France,
^with orders to present himself to the Due de Choiseul. This
was his reward for the zeal and assiduity and devotion which
he had manifested in his mission.
Father Lefranc and Father Du Jaunay were then left alone
^s the last Jesuit missionaries in this western country.
Father Du Jaunay was at Mackinac at the time of Pontiac's
conspiracy. On the 2d of June, 1763, the Indians attacked
57
Fort Mackinac, massacring most of the garrison, and making
prisoners of the officers, all of which is graphically described
in Parkman's History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac. By
Father du Jaunay, the captured Captain Etherington sent a
letter shortly afterwards to Major Gladwyn, who was then be-
sieged by Pontiac himself in the fort at Detroit, asking for
assistance which, however, Gladwyn was powerless to give^
Du Jaunay went, and of course through his influence with the
Indians was enabled to carry the note into the fort. Captain Ether-
ington says of him in his letter : " I have been very much obliged
to the Jesuit for the many good offices he has done on this
occasion. He seems inclined to go down to your post for a
day or two, which I am very glad of, as he is a very good
man, and has a great deal to say with the savages hereabout,
who will believe everything he tells them on his return."
He begs him to send the priest back as soon as possi-
ble, as they will be in great need of him. In a diary of the
siege of Detroit, published in the Michigan historical collec-
tions, it appears that Father Du Jaunay left Detroit upon his
return upon the 20th of June, 1763. The following is the
entry in the diary : " This morning the commandant gave to
the Jesuit a memorandum of what he should say to the Indians
and French at Michilimackinac, as also to Captain Ethering^
ton, seeing that he did not choose to carry a letter, saying that
if he did and were asked by the Indians if he had one, he
should be obliged to say yes, as he had never told a lie in his
life." After Father Du Jaunay left the mission at Mackinac,
he became superior of the mission at St. Joseph, and remained
in the west until 1774, and then returned to France to die.
In 1825 a missionary visiting the Indian congregation es-
58
tablished at Arbre Croche, remarked that the memory of Father
Du Jaunay was religously preserved among all the tribes, and
the place was pointed out to him where the priest used to
walk while saying his breviary.
In 1822 the chiefs of the Ottawas petitioned the Congress
of the United States to send them Jesuit priests to take the
place, they said, " of Father Du Jaunay, who lived with us in
our village of Arbre Croche, and cultivated a field in our
territory in order to teach us the principles of agriculture and
Christianity."
Father Gibault, whose entries as vicar-general of Louisiana
and Illinois I have referred to, was in Kaskaskia as a resident
priest in 1778, and undertook then a mission to Vincennes on
behalf of George Rogers Clark, and succeeded in inducing its
inhabitants to declare for the Americans.
Gabriel Richard was a most remarkable man in very many
ways. Coming from France, a Sulpician priest, in 1792, he
was sent by Bishop Carroll of Baltimore, to the settlements in
the Illinois for two purposes. First, that as being of the same
race and language, he might give regular pastoral care to the
French and Canadians and their half-breed descendants, who
had, since the English occupation, fallen into such sad need of
it; and, secondly, that he might develop and encourage in
this western country a new growth of the Catholic Church
from roots that should strike more deeply than the old
French missions could into the newly-born American life and
national character. In 1798, after labors which had became
more and more fruitful as the years went on, he was withdrawn
from Illinois, and went to Detroit, and at Detroit, from 1794
until 1832, his aim and main work lay. To-day his statue upon
59
the noble facade of the city hall of Detroit preserves for its
inhabitants his memory as one of the first and most impor-
tant pioneers of Michigan.
He found time as these records show to make pastoral visits
to the almost abandoned Indians and half-breeds, French voy-
ageurs and traders in all the Indian missions about. But, as
I have said, his main work was at Detroit. He was there
given a free hand. He enlarged and improved all the paro-
chial and mission schools; he opened an academy of a very
high class for the higher education of women; he instituted and
carried on a theological seminary; he supplied his schools with
chemical and astronomical apparatus, no easy task at the time
in which he did it. In 1807, realizing that English and the
English tongue were always to be in the ascendency in Amer-
ica, he established a series of English sermons to be given
every Sunday in the council house of the then newly established
Territory of Michigan.
In 1802 he imported from Europe for his church in Detroit
the first organ that was ever brought to the Northwest.
During the war and after the surrender of Detroit, the Eng-
lish imprisoned him upon the ground that he was instigator and
exciter of anti-English feeling.
In 182 1, as we have seen, he was at Mackinac and he also
went to Green Bay. I do not know, but I cannot help con-
jecturing that he was a passenger in the second trip ever made
by a steamboat upon Lake Michigan or Lake Huron. It is
certain that the pioneer steamer, Walk-in-Water, left Detroit
for Mackinac upon July 31, 182 1, and that Father Richard
appears to have reached Mackinac just about the time the
steamer did, in the early days of August. It certainly would be
6o
quite in accordance with his character to have the desire to
make this trip. If he did, he had for a companion the Reverend
Eleazer Williams, so well known in connection with his claim
to be the son of Louis XVI. and the Dauphin of France.
In 1823 Father Richard was elected as a delegate to Con-
gress from the territory of Michigan, the only instance in which
a Catholic ecclesiastic has been offered or accepted such a po-
sition. While in Washington he became a great favorite
amongst his colleagues and in the society of the capital. He
made at least one important speech. It was concerning a pro-
posed appropriation for a military road from Detroit to Fort
Dearborn and the mouth of the Chicago River.
In 1832, in a visitation of the Asiatic cholera at Detroit,
Father Richard, then almost seventy years old, devoted himself
so constantly to the sick and dying, as to cause him finally, en-
tirely worn out, to succumb to the dread disease. By his
dying bed were the saintly Fenwick, his bishop, and his
younger friend and disciple, Frederick Baraga, who after-
wards became the bishop of Marquette, and was destined to
revive in his own person the glories of the very greatest and
earliest of the Indian missionaries.
Of the numerous laymen, soldiers, traders and voyageurs,
whose names and signatures appear frequently in this register,
and concerning whom history has more or less to say, per-
haps the most striking and interesting figure is Charles Michel
de Langlade. The record of his baptism appears in the
abridgment of the old register preserved at the beginning of this,
by which it appears that Charles Michel de Langlade, son of
Monsieur de Langlade, was baptized upon the 9th of May,
1729.
6i
Father Lefranc, in 1754, certifies '-that upon the 12th day
of August, 1754? ^^' ^ missionary priest of the company
of Jesis, received the mutual consent to marriage of
Le Sieur De Langlade and Charlotte Ambroisine Bourassa,
both inhabitants of this post, in the presence of the under-
signed witnesses." To this certificate are subscribed the
names of the principal inhabitants of Mackinac at the time,
including that of " Herbin," commanding at the post. Mad-
emoiselle Bourassa was the daughter of an Indian trader of
substance and standing, recently removed to Mackinac from
Montreal. The register shows that he must have had a large
family, and both Indian and negro slaves.
Following the marriage, occur at intervals, careful certifi-
cates of baptism of various children of Monsieur and of Mad-
ame de Langlade, and in the capacity of godfather and
witness, Charles de Langlade has left his signature scores of
times in this register.
I do not know whether any of you are familiar with his life
but it is one of the most romantic and stirring of any of our
pioneers in the West, and he is known among the inhabitants
of a neighboring state as " the founder of Wisconsin." His
father was Augustin Langlade, who was, at a very early pe-
riod in the eighteenth century, a fur trader at Mackinac.
Augustin Langlade married a sister of the principal chief of
the Ottawas, and Charles de Langlade was therefore a true
half-breed.
His early education in letters was undoubted^ one of the
cares of Father Du Jaunay, but his early education in arms
was, at the solicitation of his savage uncle, intrusted to him.
In 1734, being then but five years old, he was allowed by his
62
father, under the entreaties of the Indians who had taken a
fancy to him, to accompany a war expedition of his uncle
against a tribe allied to the English, his father adjuring him
upon sending him away, to show no fear. When he was six-
teen years of age, his father and he estabHshed a trading post
at Green Bay, Bay des Puants, as it was called in those days.
And from that time the son resided alternately at Green Bay
and at Mackinac, when he w^as not absent upon his numerous
military expeditions.
Against the Sacs and Foxes, at the head of a band of Otta-
was, Langlade made frequent expeditions after the establish-
ment at Green Bay was made, to protect the new settlement
or to revenge and punish depredations.
In 1755 ther^ broke out the Seven Years War. The French
government wisely undertook to secure, in order to aid the
regular troops and the Canadian militia, a contingent of the
savages and coureurs de bois, who were to be found about
the different trading stations. The command was entrusted to
Charles de Langlade. United to the savages by the ties of
blood, by the similarity of habits, famihar with their language
and with their modes of warfare, of proven courage and abil-
ity, Langlade was exactly the man for the situation. He or-
ganized a troop of at least 1,500 Indians and half-breeds, who
rallied willingly under the French flag against the hated Eng-
lish. Among his followers is believed to have been the chief-
tain afterwards so famous, Pontiac, but this is by no means
certain. This most effective body, Langlade led to Fort Du
Quesne, and upon the 9th of July, 1755, ^bout half of his force,
with him at its head, together with 250 Frenchmen under
Beaujeau, who commanded at Fort Du Quesne, marched out
63
from the post and surprised upon the Mononghela river, the army
of Braddock, numbering at least 2,000 men. The terrible
rout of the English army upon that day is too well known to
need re-telling. George Washington, who was present, in
command of the Virginia militia, could only say of it, " we are
beaten, shamefully beaten, by a handful of savages and French-
men."
The share of De Langlade in this victory, the honor of
which really entirely belongs to him, has not been sufficiently
recognized by historical writers, who make Beaujeau its hero,
but the contemporary accounts leave no doubt in my mind of
his rightful claim to the distinction. General Burgoyne, in a
letter to Lord George Germaine, in 1777, speaking of Indian
allies whom he expected, says: '' I am informed that the Ot-
tawas and other Indian tribes, who are two days' march from
us, are brave and faithful, and that they practice war, and not
pillage. They are under the orders of Monsieur de Langlade,
the very man who, with his troops, projected and executed
Braddock's defeat."
In 1756 Langlade was put in charge of a detachment of
French and Indians, and made numerous expeditions from
Fort Du Quesne. In 1757 he came back from the west at the
head of several hundred natives and joined Montcalm, and after
that summer's campaign he received from the Governor of
Canada (Vaudreuil) orders to report at the post in Mackinac
as second in command to Monsieur Beaujeau, who was a
brother of his old comrade at Fort Du Quesne.
In 1759 Langlade left Michilimackinac for Quebec at the
head of a body of Indians, and joined the army of the Marquis
de Montcalm. It is evident that there were times before the
64
fatal day above the Plains of Abraham on the 13th of Septem-
ber, 1759, when, had his advice been followed, the army of
Wolfe might have been entirely destroj^ed, but he was not
allowed the use of that discretion which had proved so valuable
upon the Monongahela. He was at the battle on the 13th of
September and had two brothers shot by his side. Six days
afterwards Quebec surrendered. Langlade thought the
capitulation cowardly, and retired in disgust to Mackinac,
where he found awaiting him a lieutenant's commision in the
French army signed by Louis XV. Again Langlade joined
the army and was present at the last victory of the French and
Canadians on the 28th of April, 1760, upon the same field
where Montcalm had been previously defeated. But the end
was approaching, and the hopelessness of the cause being
recognized, Langlade was sent with his Indian troops back to
the west, where shortty after he received the following letter
from Vaudreuil:
"Montreal, Ninth of September, 1760.
" I inform you, sir, that I have to-day been obliged to capit-
ulate to the army of General Amherst. This city is, as you
know, without defenses. Our troops were considerably di-
minished, our means and resources exhausted. We were sur-
rounded by three armies, amounting in all to twenty thousand
men. General Amherst was, on the sixth of this
month, in sight of the walls of this city. General Murray
within reach of one of our suburbs and the army of Lake
Champlain was at La Prairie Longueil.
" Under these circumstances, with nothing to hope from our
efforts, nor even from the sacrifice of our troops, I have ad-
visedly decided to capitulate to General Amherst upon condi-
65
tions very advantageous for the colonists, and particularly for
the inhabitants of Michilimackinac. Indeed, they retain the
free exercise of their religion; they are maintained in the pos-
session of their goods, real and personal, and of their peltries.
They have also free trade just the same as the proper sub-
jects of the king of Great Britain.
" The same conditions are accorded to the military. They
can appoint persons to act for them in their absence. They,
and all citizens in general, can sell to the English or French
their goods, sending the proceeds thereof to France, or taking
them with them if they choose to return to that country after
the peace. They retain their negroes and Pawnee Indian
slaves, but will be obliged to restore those which have been
taken from the English. The English General has declared
that the Canadians have become the subjects of His Brittannic
Majesty, and consequently the people will not continue to be
governed as heretofore by the French code.
"In regard to the troops, the condition has been imposed
upon them not to serve during the present war and to lay
down their arms before being sent back to France. You will
therefore, sir, assemble all the officers and soldiers w^ho are at
your post. You will cause them to lay down their arms, and
you will proceed with them to such seaport as you think best,
to pass from thence to France. The citizens and inhabitants
of Michilimackinac will consequently be under the command of
the officer whom General Amherst shall appoint to that post.
" You will forward a copy of my letter to St. Joseph and to
the neighboring posts, in order that if any soldiers remain
there they and the inhabitants may conform thereto.
" I count upon the pleasure of seeing you in France with all
your officers.
66
" I have the honor to be very sincerely, Monsieur, your very
humble and very obedient servant,
" Vaudreuil."
In 1 761 the English arrived at Fort Mackinac. The English
officer, Etherington, invited Langlade to reside as before at the
fort, and conferred with him upon all questions of local admin-
istration, a precaution which proved thereafter of great ser-
vice. In 1763, in the conspiracy of Pontiac, Fort Mackinac
was surprised by the Indians and the English massacred. But
before that event Langlade had occasion to warn Etherington
in vain. He was present in the fort at the time of the massacre
but could do nothing to arrest it. Immediately afterwards,
however, learning that Etherington and his second in command
were prisoners and about to be burned at some distance from
the fort, he organized a little band of Ottawas, loyal to him-
self, and rescued the prisoners, defying the drunken victors to
oppose him.
Etherington while a prisoner delegated his authority at the
fort to Langlade.
When the Revolutionary war broke out Charles Langlade,
then almost fifty years of age, was induced by the English, his
old enemies, to attempt to secure, in the interest of the English,
all the Western Indians and to raise an auxiliary force of In-
dians for use in the war. He joined Burgoyne's army in July,
1777. Burgoyne afterwards complained of the conduct — not
of Langlade, but of the savages he led — but Langlade and his
comrade St. Luc declared that the fault lay not with the sav-
ages but with Burgoyne and his want of tact and justice.
In 1778, Langlade raised an expedition to reinforce Lieuten-
ant Governor Hamilton, who was marching upon Colonel George
67
Rogers Clark, after the latter had taken possession of the region
of the Illinois. Langlade secured the assistance even of the
Indians whom the English commandant at Fort Mackinac,
De Peyster, called that " horrid refractory set of Indians at Mil-
waukee." But the expedition was disbanded upon its arrival
at St. Joseph, on the reception of news that Hamilton had sur-
rendered to Clark.
For his services in the Revolutionary War, Langlade was
given a pension by the English Government. He remained
superintendent of the Indians until his death, holding thus an
office which, as I understand it, came from the United States
Government, as well as a pension from England.
He died in Green Bay in 1800, at the age of seventy-one
years. He could enumerate ninety-nine battles and skirmishes
in which during his life he had taken part, and expressed in
his later years regret that he could not have rounded the even
century.
In the course of this paper I have quoted in full the marriage
certificate of Charles Gautier de Vierville. He was the nephew
of Langlade, and almost equall}^ as distinguished. I shall not
have time to sketch his life for you, but it is sufficient to say
that he fought with his uncle upon the Plains of Abraham,
that he was constantly employed during the Revolutionary War
in keeping the Northwestern Indians in line with the English
interest, that for his services in war and Indian diplomacy he
was given a commission as captain by the English govern-
ment, and that after the Revolutionary War and before the ces-
sion of Mackinac to the Americans he was the interpreter for
the Indians at the post. In 1798 he went amongst the earliest
settlers to Prairie du Chien, and there his descendants married
68)
and lived, and to day are its leading citizens in influence and
position.
Langlade's second daughter married Pierre Grignon, and he,
too, figures in this register in man}^ different characters. He
was an Indian trader, who also became one of the very early
settlers at Green Bay, where one of his sons was living a re-
spected citizen in i860 or thereabouts. There are many inter-
esting things that could be said of him, but want of time for-
bids. One thing, however, related by his son, Augustine de
Grignon, a few years before his death, finds confirmation in
this register. In 1 787 you may remember, Father Payet, as I
have said, made a visit to Mackinac. Pierre Grignon was
then at Mackinac, and he deemed it, as a good Catholic, a satis-
factory opportunity to have his children baptized by a priest,
and his own marriage with M'lle De Langlade confirmed and
ratified by the same authority. He therefore sent a messen-
ger to Green Bay and Madame Grignon and six small child-
ren, varying in ages from six months to ten years, were con-
veyed to Mackinac in a birch bark canoe, a distance of almost
two hundred and fift\' miles. When they arrived there they
were duly baptized " under condition " (for in all probability
the ceremony had been properly enough performed by lay
hands), and, as the register sets forth. Father Payet conferred
upon the father and mother the sacrament of marriage after (I
quote) " having received the mutual consent that they had al-
ready given in the presence of witnesses while awaiting an op-
portunity to ratify their alliance before an approved priest and
several witnesses, according to the custom and as it is ordered
by our Mother, the Holy Church."
Pierre Grignon was evidently a thorough-going man, for a
69
few days after this marriage and baptismal ceremony he hunted
up and brought to the priest a natural son of his by a savage
mother, and had him also baptized. The boy was then thir-
teen years of age.
Upon the twenty-third day of May, 1763, two children were
baptized by Father Du Jaunay, and he certifies in the entry
that one was the son of a woman named Chopin, formerly a
slave of Monsieur Le Chevalier, but since sold to an English
merchant ("commercant") named " Henneri," " which woman,,
although not yet baptized, has protested, in presenting her
child for holy baptism, that she had never had any other faith
than that of the Holy Church, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman,
and that her new master had promised not to constrain her on
the subject of religion." Ten days after this baptism, occurred
the frightful massacre at Fort Mackinac, and this English mer-
chant, called " Henneri," had a hard time of it. He has left a
little book from which Parkman, in his conspiracy of Pontiac,
has drawn his entire account of the massacre. It is entitled
" Alexander Henry's Travels." He was the only English
trader who escaped, and he, only after almost incredible suffer-
ings and dangers, and through the assistance of a friendly
Indian. He was concealed at first in the house of Langlade.
It would seem from Henry's account that although Langlade
protected him, he was none too well disposed toward him, but
Langlade's conduct was praised by Etherington and Leslie,
and the prejudice which Henry shows, I think must have
sprung from seeing Langlade so cool and unconcerned regard-
ing his own safety while he (Henry) was in such desperate
peril. In his book he gives an account of one moment dur-
ing the massacre which vividly impresses my imagination.
70
The Indians in the fort were furiously cutting down and
scalping, while yet living, every Englishman they could find.
Langlade was standing at his window calmly gazing at the
scene. Henry managed, by climbing a fence, to secure an
entrance to Langlade's house, and in despair rushed to him
begging for protection. Langlade turned to him for a mo-
ment, and then again directing his gaze from the window,
calmly answered " And what do you think I can do?" To
Henry this seemed a piece of cruel heartleesness, but after all
Henry was concealed in Langlade's house and afterwards
saved, and I think it more probable that Langlade's question
arose not so much from a want of sympathy and compassion as
from that invincible coolness which had braved death too many
times to consider it for any one the worst thing that could be-
fall him.
There are many mentions and signatures in this record of
Jean Baptiste Beaubien, afterwards one of the settlers at Mil-
waukee and Chicago, and of Alexis La Framboise, who, I
think, was afterwards buried under the church at Mackinac
Island. La Framboise was, long before Juneau, a settler at the
present site of Milwaukee. I would like to speak of him
further, but have not time.
I will close this paper, already too long, with two or three
stories about another old pioneer in this western country, whose
name appears in the latter part of these registers.
Under the direction of Father Richard, in 182 1, an election
w^as held, according to the Canadian custom, of marguilliers,
(a sort of wardens), for the parish church at Mackinac.
Among those first elected, it was certified, was Joseph Rollet,
whose name also appears in the register as a witness to several
71
acts of marriage and of baptism. He declined to act. I suspect
that he did not care to incur the possible necessity of pecuniary
contribution which the ofHce would impose upon him. Joseph
Rollet was one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, pioneer
at Prairie du Chien. He was a very noted Indian trader in
this north-western country. His operations extended from St.
Louis and Prairie du Chien to the Red River settlements. He
brought his goods directly from Montreal through the lakes to
Green Bay (of course stopping at Mackinac), and thence
through the Fox river and down the Wisconsin in a fleet of
Mackinac boats, row^ed by French Canadians. He became
finally such a great power in the country that he w^as called
" King Rollet," while the Indians named him " The Pheasant,"
on account of his fast traveling. He may, indeed, have de-
clined the position of marguillier because he was only intermit-
tently at Mackinac, although in 182 1, at the time he was elected,
he had changed his headquarters, which had formerly been at
Prairie du Chien, to Mackinac, by accepting an offer from
John Jacob Astor to join him in the American Fur Company,
and take charge of the trade of that powerful monopoly in the
Northwest. He afterwards again, however, changed his resi-
dence to Prairie du Chien, where, in 1827, Governor Cass ap-
pointed him chief justice of the county. He is said to have
introduced the first swine and the first sheep into Wisconsin,
and was always a pushing, energetic and enterprising man. In
1 814, being thoroughly in sympathy with the English in the
existing war against the Americans, he raised a company of
militia, and in connection with one or two other officers, se-
cured the surrender of the garrison at the American fort at
Prairie du Chien and took them to Mackinac.
72
His reputation however suffered from his alleged over-
keenness in trading with the Indians. Among other stories it
is related, that he persuaded some simple minded Indians (who
held to the belief for a long time), that the weight of his foot
placed in the scale — on the other side of which were piled
furs — was exactly one pound. Among other Indians he se-
cured the name of "five more" because they said, let them
throw off what number of skins they might, in bartering for
an article, his terms were always " five more."
Mrs. Kinzie in her book called " Waubun," tells a capital
story of him. A lady remarked to him one day, she says : " I
would not be engaged in the Indian trade. It seems to me a
system of cheating the poor Indians." " Let me tell you.
Madam," replied he, with great earnestness, " it is not so easy
a thing to cheat the Indians as you imagine. I have been try-
ing it these twenty years, and I have never succeeded."
One more story of him which accounts for my suggestion
of his reason for declining the appointment of marguillier, and
I have done.
One day he was crossing the river, it is said, at Prairie du
Chien, and the ice ran very heavily and very swiftly. He be-
came so alarmed for his safety that he solemnly vowed, that if
spared, he would devote a thousand dollars to the construction
of a Catholic church at Prairie du Chien. After hard work,
he and his companion (La Framboise) succeeded in getting
through the ice and making a landing. One foot was yet in
the boat when Rollet exclaimed, " Collect it if you can. You
haven't got my note."
THIS BOOK I8^^B°^B10V?
^^ OF 25 CENTS
WlL-l- BE ASSESSED DU^' J^^e foURTH
DAY AND TO » • _======
OVERDUE- ^:===^
I,B.l-W0n..T,-40C6930»)
.•iOOllO
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY
m ;
^'^ ».v'^ vV'-i- v^'.^ ^'-i. ^'^ vj'^ vj^i/^ v^'-^ v^l/- v^t/^ v\'/, ^m/, ».vr<, ^m,^ ^t/, ^i^ ^i/.
a\ 4i\ <o
'/iv-"'-v^'^ '/I\'^ -vlx" ^/^-^ %lv^^ •^■Iv'' -i'l'?^!^
>;, ^M^ iM^ •^I^^!^ ^I^ *^!^^I^ ^I'k ^!^ iM^ :M^^I^ j^!^ :J'I^ j'l^ ^!^ ^^1^ :J^!<^ ^1^ ^1^ :^^!^ :J'I^ ^I^ ^I^ ^j'i^ :j'l^:j'!^ ^^!^ >^I^ :^I^ >^I^- ^^1^
^ -S'I>F -^Ix^ ^Ic^ -:^I\^ •S' j'C* •5^1'S' '^H' ^/i^ "ili- Tifi^^/]^ ^I'i' ^liF ^I\F ^Ic^ ^I-f* ^I<* '^I'j* ^I^* ^I\^ •J'l'C* ^I'f" ^I'C' '5^I<' ^I'f* ^I^ VI\^ "^^^ ^A^ ^I<" ^i<* ^I't' ^I^
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11