Père Marquette

Front matter

To J. McShain A wise and kind friend

The Lure of the Unknown

When those mystery-laden words, Terra Incognita and Terra Inhabitabile disappeared from the maps of the world, geography lost its charm and traveling its most audacious inspiration. There are ancient globes in the library of the Vatican which show us in every dim line what chances of discovery lay in wait for the hardy voyager of the Middle Ages. Fleets of tiny ships sail over uncharted seas. Boreas blows gales from his swollen cheeks. Lions and elephants stroll through vast tracts of land, indicating by their presence the absence of more civilized inhabitants. A sense of spaciousness and wonder pervades these representations of what is to-day a familiar and congested earth. Small wonder that the adventurous boy who gazed at them six hundred years ago was consumed by the same spirit which now sends scientists to the jungle and aviators to the Pole.

And the maps, the wonderful, entrancing maps, free of crisscross railways, and huddled towns, and everything that blinds and confuses the unhappy school child of to-day. The Hereford map, sacredly guarded in Hereford Cathedral, dates from 1280. It was deemed of surpassing value, and was faithfully copied for two hundred years. It puts Jerusalem in the centre of the world, the place of honor; with the Terrestrial Paradise, beautifully battlemented, on a circular island near India, and the Tower of Babel midway between the two. Paris appears as bold as brass and just where it belongs; but there is no London in the smashed little England which does not afford room for a town. A vast Ethiopia gives breathing space and a chance for surmise; and a representation of the Last Judgment surmounts the whole. All the old maps show the Terrestrial Paradise; but its whereabouts was left to the fancy of the scholar artist. A crude map of the Ninth Century (one of the treasures of the Strassburg library) places it east of India, and an early Icelandic map fits it snugly into Ceylon.

Nearly two hundred years before the Hereford map was outlined, Roger of Sicily, the redoubtable "Great Count"—warrior, ruler, and something of a scholar as well—caused a map of the world to be engraved on a disk of silver which weighed four hundred pounds. Here were plainly marked the countries, inhabited or uninhabited, of the known earth; coast lines and table lands, seas, gulfs, and rivers. The Roman roads, or what was left of them, were measured by miles; and the distance by water from port to port was adroitly guessed at. It is to be forever regretted that this triumph of Eleventh Century scholarship should have been made of silver. A baser metal might have survived to this day; but Sicily was fought over for a thousand years, and the great disk was stolen by invaders, or melted down to pay for arms and soldiers.

When the Old World had ceased to be a mystery, the New World was discovered. When the old waterways had grown familiar, Columbus crossed the Atlantic, Vasco da Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and Balboa discovered the Pacific. Here, indeed, were fresh fields of adventure. Here were seas for hardy navigators, lands of promise for intrepid exiles, freedom and space for the rover, wealth for the covetous, and souls to be saved for the missionary. How can we conceive the wonder which thrilled Europe when all these possibilities dawned upon its vision? How can we conceive the experience of sighting a new continent or a new ocean—the suffocating rapture of that moment, the trembling awe? Keats, being a poet, was able to feel in fancy these strange emotions, and to convey them, in some sort, to our souls:

. . . like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific, and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise, Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Henry James confessed that, as a little boy, he was both mystified and thrilled by the phrase "east" or "west" of Greenwich. Why was Greenwich of such supreme importance that the rest of the world lay east or west of it? he asked himself again and again, having the distaste of an intelligent child for seeking information from adults. "The vague wonder that the childish mind felt on this point gave the place a mysterious importance, and seemed to put it into relation with the difficult and fascinating parts of geography,—the countries of unintentional outline, and the lonely-looking places on the atlas."

The fact that Charles the Second built the Greenwich Observatory, at the instigation of Sir Jonas Moore and Sir Christopher Wren, gives the lie to Rochester's oft-repeated witticism, and proves that his "sovereign lord" could and did do the wisest of wise things when he was so minded.

The early American maps have few "lonely looking places," because the untrammeled fancy of the cartographer filled them with pleasing and appropriate devices. In the Narrative and Critical History of America, edited by Mr. Justin Winsor, librarian of Harvard University, there are maps which would have stirred the heart of little Henry James, or of any other imaginative child. Wherever there is space to spare, we find Indians firing arrows, or bears strolling ominously. Fishes of terrifying aspect swim the seas. They are huge enough to swallow at a gulp the little ships with curly sails like the ships in illuminated manuscripts. On every side is a suggestion of the peril that was the daily portion of the exile. If there were freedom for all, it was paid for with audacity and endurance. Everybody had a chance to live dangerously and to die valorously. A great many people availed themselves of both privileges.

The vast scale on which nature had built this strange New World was overwhelming and terrifying to the pioneers. They came from the neighborly towns of Europe to boundless stretches of wilderness and black savage mountains. They exchanged the lovely little rivers which carried no hint of danger for fierce wide waters running they knew not whither, impeding progress, and threatening destruction. The French settlers in Canada learned the meaning of a word they had used lightly all their lives—cold. They found out how easily they could die of it in the frozen woods, and how short a time it took the ever-falling snow to bury them out of sight. And ever and always there was the menace of hostile Indians; tribe after tribe engaged in ceaseless warfare with one another, but predisposed to turn their arms against the invader. The red men taught the white men the full significance of another word, till then but dimly apprehended—cruelty. It was not a gentle age in which these wanderers lived. Terrible things were done in Europe under sanction of the law. But the Hurons and the Iroquois showed the reckless strangers precisely how much pain a human body could be made to bear before death signed its release. They illustrated this favorite theme with the help of Indian captives, compelling the attention of the French. They were prepared to extend the practice when time and opportunity served.

To all such dangers and privations the adventurers opposed a dauntless courage and a steady purpose. The great fur-trading corporation known as the Company of the Hundred Associates established itself firmly in Quebec, and controlled all New France—or as much of it, at least, as was controllable. Land was granted on terms so easy that the poorest farmer could buy. The woods were full of animals, and the trappers earned much money by their hard and perilous work. It has always been the boast of Canada that a man who could not make a living for himself and his family in that country was not worth keeping alive. This was as true in the Seventeenth Century as it is true in the Twentieth. But then, as now, men were needed for the purpose. It was no place for weaklings. And because the settlers were men, hardy, vigorous, fearless, abstemious, and ambitious men, they found interests that far exceeded profitable farming and trapping. French engineers, searching for copper, penetrated deeper and deeper into the wilderness. French priests, eager for converts, followed them step by step. And French explorers, fired by rumors of undiscovered lakes and rivers, of lands more fertile than the frost-bitten fields of Canada, of tribes richer and more civilized than the cruel savages who surrounded them, made journeys of astonishing length with pitifully meager outfits. The white man, like the red man, was expected to fend for himself in the wilds. He set forth, untroubled because undismayed; confident in his own prowess and in fate. The lure of the unknown drew him on.

The Mississippi

To the Spaniard belongs the honor of discovering the Mississippi. Spain was aware of the existence of the great river in 1519. From a host of early and brave explorers, from Pineda, from Narvaez, from Cabeza de Vaca, and from the Peruvian, La Vega, came word of its certain magnitude, and of its possible course. The Rio del Espíritu Santo it was called, a name given it by Francisco de Garay, Governor of Jamaica. Parkman says that on early Spanish maps it is often indistinguishable from other affluents of the Gulf of Mexico. Nevertheless, it was a magic word on Spanish lips and in Spanish hearts. Its breadth, like the height of Niagara Falls, was madly exaggerated, and wild stories were told of its slow, resistless current which no river bed could hold. The Reverend Francis Borgia Steck, who has written a lengthy trea- tise on the discovery and rediscovery of the Mississippi, is of the opinion that Spanish cartographers marked the river plainly on their maps, but gave it little prominence because, fearing always the encroachments of France, they had no mind to call her attention to this waterway.

In 1537 Hernando de Soto was empowered by Charles the Fifth to conquer and colonize Florida. He had been a brave and able captain under Pizarro in Peru. He had enriched himself with the treasure wrung from the Inca, Atahualpa. It is said that he was on friendly terms with that hapless ruler, and that he was absent from Caxamalca when Pizarro, having gained possession of wealth so fabulous that it was like a golden dream, ridded himself of his royal prisoner by having him strangled in the great square of the city. De Soto quarreled bitterly with his commander when he heard of this savage crime, and soon afterward returned to Spain. He took with him, however, his share of plunder, squandered it lavishly in Seville, married a lady of noble birth, and became a man of consequence. Then there came to him reports of gold in the lovely peninsula coveted by the Spaniards. Cupidity once more wrung his heart. Memories of the Inca's treasure chamber haunted him night and day. He sold his property, and went back to the New World with the Emperor's authority to seize and to hold, and with six hundred fighting men packed into nine small ships. Eight secular priests and four friars accompanied the expedition.

On Pentecost Sunday the sailors sighted the shores of Tampa Bay which the commander christened commemoratively La Bahia del Espíritu Santo. Landing, he took formal possession of Florida in the name of Spain, and sent out two exploring parties to ascertain the wealth and the temper of the inhabitants. The wealth they found to be mythical, the temper exceedingly uncertain. Here were no rich towns, no peaceful Peruvians waiting to be despoiled; but a wild country, tangled woods, feverish swamps, and brave Indians, friendly or hostile as the case might be, but always ready to repel attack. Difficulties and dangers multiplied. De Soto's dwindling army lost hope and spirit. For three years he shared the hardships of his soldiers, leading them hither and thither, now searching for gold (dim rumors of which reached him from time to time), now seeking the best sites for the never forgotten project of colonization. Finally the river of his dreams became for him the river of fate. It was on its shores that he died, a defeated and disheartened man. It was in its muddy waters that his corpse was sunk, fastened and weighted in a hollow tree. It was down its current that the three hundred survivors of the expedition fled terror-stricken from the wreckage of their hopes.

Two things of great interest are left to us from this unsuccessful expedition: a passage describing De Soto by one of his followers, the anonymous "Gentleman of Elvas," and a passage describing the Mississippi in flood by Garcilaso de la Vega. The description of De Soto corresponds exactly with the description of another and greater adventurer, La Salle, whose tragic fate was also bound up with the mysterious and baffling river. "De Soto," says the Gentleman of Elvas, "was dry of speech and inflexible of purpose. He wished to know what others thought, and he listened to what others said. But he did not like to be opposed; he invariably acted as he thought best; and he bent all his comrades to his will."

The description of the flooded Mississippi was not written until forty years after the event; but the impression it left upon La Vega's mind was vivid and permanent. "The great river," he wrote, "began early in March to widen rapidly. It overflowed the level land, and rose to such a height that only the tops of the tallest trees were visible. It was a beautiful thing to see the vast stretch of water covering the fields for twenty leagues and more. Indians went to and fro in their canoes. They protect their homes by building them on heavy piles, or sometimes—as in the case of chiefs—on artificial mounds. The flood reached its highest point on the twentieth day of April. Before the end of May it had subsided, and the river was running within its natural boundaries."

The control of the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Mississippi was as vital to Spain as was the control of the St. Lawrence to France. In the spring of 1540, while De Soto was still pursuing his visionary schemes, Francisco Vasa de Coronado was dispatched from Mexico by the Viceroy, Mendoza, with instructions to visit the Indian towns, which were reported to be fabulously rich (the finding of gold was an obsession with the Spaniards), to study the conditions of the country with a view to colonization, and to report upon the great river, the Rio del Espíritu Santo. He was accompanied by a picked body of horsemen, two hundred and sixty in number, sixty foot soldiers, and no less than a thousand Mexican Indians, who looked after the supplies, guarded the sheep and cattle, scouted, cooked, and made things easy for their masters. Coronado had no better fortune than De Soto. He found no wealthy towns and few friendly Indians. He knew nothing about colonization, and he cared less. As for the river, though accounts of it reached him from time to time, he never gained its banks. De Soto at least beheld it before he died, and found a grave beneath its waters. Coronado seems to have done nothing but eat up his provisions and return home, a broken and discredited man. For a stream of its magnitude, the Mississippi was singularly elusive.

Meanwhile, in the Far North, wandering Indian tribes carried from trading station to trading station stories of the vast river which few of them had seen, but of which all had heard. France and England, having plenty to occupy them at home, were tardily colonizing their territorial claims in the New World. The first adventurers, it must be remembered, did not want to go up and down North America; they wanted to go across and reach China, that land of desire. The English wasted a vast deal of time and labor in trying to find the mythical Strait of Anian, which they thought connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It found a place on the early Dutch and Flemish maps, having been put there, not because it existed, but because it was desired. Even Champlain hoped and believed that Canada (New France) would offer "a favorable passage to China." He traced somewhat waveringly on his map a river flowing to the south, which he took on credit from the Indians, and he came near to its final discovery when he sent Jean Nicollet on a mission of peace to the Winnebagoes who had quarreled with the friendly Hurons.

Nicollet was the interpreter at Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence; a man of great courage, great natural ability, and comprehensive ignorance of all save Indian languages and Indian ways, which was what he needed to know. He was received with such warmth of hospitality that one hundred and twenty beavers were devoured at a single feast. Having accomplished his purpose, he made his fearless way to the Wisconsin River, which he descended so far that he was—according to savage guides—but three days' journey from the "Great Water." By this they meant the Mississippi River. He thought they meant the sea.

Other adventurers came as near, or nearer, to the goal. Colonel Wood of Virginia and Captain Bolton believed mistakenly that they had reached it. Pierre Esprit Radisson, a native of St. Malo, and his brother-in-law, Médard Chouart des Grosseilliers, wandered from the shores of Lake Superior into an unknown land peopled by unknown tribes, and brought back the strange tale of a "forked river," one branch flowing westward, and one southward toward Mexico. The French priests, Père Jogues, Père Raymbault, Père Ménard (who was lost in the wilderness), and Père Allouez all pushed their missions closer to the mysterious river, the discovery of which became a matter of pride and purpose with the Jesuit order. To its zeal for souls it was beginning to add a zeal for knowledge of the barbarous land it was striving assiduously to civilize.

The first half of the Seventeenth Century had witnessed the missionaries' staunchest labors and their heaviest trials. Outposts had been established and destroyed. Jesuit priests had suffered great hardships, and had been butchered with hideous cruelty. From 1660 the aspect of things changed. "The epoch of the saints and martyrs was passing away," writes Francis Parkman; "and henceforth we find the Canadian Jesuit less and less an apostle, and more and more an explorer, a man of science, and a politician." The map of Lake Superior, published in 1671, he pronounces "a monument of Jesuit hardihood and enterprise." Their yearly reports sent to France contained observations on the winds, currents, and "tides" of the Great Lakes; speculations on subterranean outlets; accounts of copper mines; and here and there descriptions from hearsay of the mighty river, "wide, deep, beautiful, and worthy of comparison to our great St. Lawrence," which flowed southward, "perhaps to the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps to the Vermilion Sea," and which, "with the help of God and of the Blessed Virgin," should soon be made known to the world.

Jacques Marquette

On the 10th of June, 1637, there was born of a proud and ancient line in a proud and ancient little city of France Jacques Marquette, destined to make famous a name which had been honorable and distinguished for five centuries. Laon, his birthplace, was one of those fortified French towns which has had an unbroken record of combat from the time the Romans built their first watchtower on its rocky eminence to the ghastly and glorious years of the World War. It forced back the Vandals; it held its steep and strongly fortified ridge against the invading Huns. There are some old Latin hexameters—probably the work of a belligerent monk—which tell how the savage hordes, failing of easy victory, passed by the stern little citadel to seek for richer and more defenceless spoil.

If Laon cannot claim to be "virgin of Eng- lish," like St. Malo and other guarded strongholds, it never failed to drive out the invader. If it fell twice before German onslaughts, it rose twice triumphant from defeat. During the Hundred Years War it was snatched from France by the Burgundians, recaptured by the French, lost to the English, and recovered finally after the consecration of Charles the Seventh. Henry the Fourth besieged it successfully in 1594. Beneath its walls Napoleon met defeat.

No city of the Middle Ages fought harder than did Laon for the communal charter, so dear to the burgher's heart, so necessary to his manhood and to his well-being. The immemorial quarrel between feudal lord (in this case a lord bishop) and rebellious commoner assumed its gravest aspect in this warlike town; and the final victory of the burgher brought him long years of prosperity. Far back, in 515, St. Rémy, the "Apostle of the Franks," built a church which took rank as a cathedral, and the hamlet was raised to the dignity of a bishopric. To its famous school, which became a center of learning in the Twelfth Century, there thronged students from every part of France. Their numbers, it was said, far exceeded the numbers of the townspeople. Here came the rhetorician, William de Champeaux, and here came the renowned Abelard to study theology under Anselm. Three popes Laon sent to Rome, among them Urban IV, who, as a boy, had been a chorister in the cathedral, who had accompanied St. Louis to the Holy Land, had shared his captivity in Damascus, and had been proclaimed Patriarch of Jerusalem.

The first Marquette mentioned in the annals of Laon is one Vermand, a follower of that singularly ineffective prince, Louis the Seventh. The second is Jacques Marquette, a faithful and devoted servitor of John Le Bon. When the French king was taken prisoner at the battle of Poictiers, and was treated by the victorious Black Prince with a ceremonious and beautiful chivalry which thrilled Froissart's courtly heart with joy, Marquette followed his sovereign's fallen fortunes in England, and afterward labored valiantly to raise the money for his ransom. In return he was made a high official of Laon, and we find his descendants wearing three martlets, the city's ancient insignia, upon their coat of arms. In 1590 Nicholas Marquette, an influential and far-seeing magistrate, espoused the cause of Henry of Navarre with so much ardor that he was banished from Laon, only to return with added wealth and honors when the great king was crowned. A Marquette was a member of the States General when that assembly met in Paris before the French Revolution, and three fighting members of the family served under La Fayette in America. Altogether a long record and a brave one.

For many years Laon remained a scholastic as well as a valorous little city, and the Marquettes were by way of being scholars as well as soldiers. Jacques Marquette, the discoverer of the Mississippi, was the son of the astute Nicholas who had been raised to civic eminence by Henry the Fourth. He was the youngest of six children. Through his mother, Rose de la Salle, he was related to the justly famous Jean Baptiste de la Salle, founder of the order of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a society of laymen who nobly devoted themselves to teaching the poor boys of France. Jacques received all there was of education in those days. He studied in the Jesuit schools at Nancy and at Pont-à-Mousson, evinced a strong leaning toward a religious life, and entered the Jesuit novitiate at seventeen. There followed twelve years of incessant work at Rheims, Charleville, and Langres. As novice and as priest, as student and as teacher, Père Marquette showed a singular aptitude for languages, an open, friendly, and conciliating disposition, and an ardent desire to carry the torch of faith into the dark places of the world. New France was naturally the goal of his ambition. Since 1611 the Jesuits had labored in that arduous field, and since 1632 they had established a chain of missions stretching from Quebec to the Great Lakes.

Every year there was published in Paris a volume of Jesuit Relations—letters and diaries sent by missionaries to their superiors. They contained information concerning the warring Indian tribes, accounts of life in the wilderness, reports of climate, soil, products, and the fur trade, rude maps of the country so far as it was known, appeals for teachers and funds, and—most illuminating of all—plain, pitiless narratives of the deaths suffered by French priests at the hands of hostile savages. These Relations, which are now the source of much valuable knowledge, and which are freely quoted by Parkman and other historians, were issued in duodecimo volumes by Sebastian Cramoisy, and are known to collectors to-day as "Cramoisys." They were widely read, especially in court circles, and were productive of great results. The rich sent money for the missions. Convents despatched vestments, church linen, rosaries, prayer books, and pious pictures. Teaching and nursing orders offered their services to the colonists at Quebec and Three Rivers. Young Jesuit priests dreamed ardently of the day when their lives should be dedicated as a sacrificial flame on the altar of Christian faith.

Among them Père Marquette waited, and hoped, and prayed, and resigned himself anew each year to the will of his superiors. It was this implicit obedience, this absolute self-annihilation that made the order as serviceable as an army. Each unit did its part, but did it as a soldier does, with reference to all the other units under one command. Parkman, who has left no phase of Canada's early history unexplored or unrecorded, explains very clearly and accurately the driving power of the first French missionaries. "The lives of these Canadian Jesuits," he says, "attest the earnestness of their faith, and the intensity of their zeal. It was a zeal bridled, curbed, and ruled by a guiding hand. Their marvelous training kindled enthusiasm and controlled it, roused into action a mighty power, and made it as adaptable as those great natural forces which modern science has learned to awaken and to govern."

It is hard to think of Père Marquette, so sensitive, so keen, so alive to pleasure and to pain, as resembling a natural force; but he had been molded into the desired shape, and the process had given him added strength and increased tenacity of purpose. He was twenty-nine when the summons came, and he was ordered to report in Quebec for missionary duty. Joyfully he sailed from France; and on the 20th of September, 1666, it was tersely recorded in the books of the Canadian Jesuits: "Père Jacques Mar- quette arrived in good health, on the seventh ship." His chance had come; and he had need of all the good health and all the good spirits he could muster, to say nothing of all the good fortune that lay in wait, to speed him on his way.

The Indians

It cannot be said that the French missionaries went in ignorance to meet their fate. The Jesuit Relations are as outspoken as any narratives ever given to the world. From their pages, reinforced by the reports of traders, Parkman drew material for a volume which only the stout of heart and strong of stomach can bear to read in its entirety. He says repeatedly that details are omitted because they will not bear telling; but no man's fancy can conjure up tales more hideous than those which have been set down for our enlightenment. The Indian tribes warred perpetually and senselessly upon one another; and the first great bitterness tasted by the priests was their inability to save Indian captives from being burned at the stake, or painstakingly tortured to death. Père Paul Le Jeune, who lived for months with the Algonquins and went with them into the woods for their hard winter hunting, failed to bring them so near to Christianity that they would abate one jot of this ritual of torture. "There is no cruelty comparable to that which they practise upon their enemies," he wrote dejectedly, after long months of experience.

The danger to the missionaries lay in their being surprised by a hostile tribe when they were laboring to convert a friendly one. If they founded a mission, sowed a field or two with corn and beans, established some faint semblance of order, and gathered the children (their only hope) into a school, then there swooped down upon them a stronger body of savages, who burned the village, and destroyed in a few hours the work of patient years. Père Jean de Brébeuf, who came of a noble Norman family, and Père Gabriel Lalemant met their terrible deaths (the most appalling on record) when St. Ignace, a Huron settlement, was raided by the Iroquois. Père Isaac Jogues, a scholar and a man of parts, was captured by the Iroquois when accompanying a party of Huron traders to Quebec. He survived tortures which should have killed a dozen men, escaped, and fled to France, only to return when his wounds were healed to the field of his labors, and to be eventually butchered by the Mohawks.

The word Iroquois has been for so long associated in our minds with all that is terrible in savagery that we are apt to lose sight of the fact that other tribes were little less cruel and a great deal less able and sagacious. "The Iroquois," says Francis Parkman, "were the Indians of Indians." They came of mixed stock, the welding together of five nations, which were in turn divided into eight powerful clans. Could they have understood that the white man was the red man's great antagonist, they might have delayed the encroachment of civilization and the decay of their own people; but they lent their aid alternately to France and English colonists, and waged relentless war against savages who might have been their friends. When the Iroquois exterminated the Hurons, and with them the most fruitful field of the Jesuit missionary's labor, they lost their own foothold in the land of their inheritance. As raiders they continued to molest; but, weakened in numbers and in purpose, the day of their dominance was over.