CHAPTER 12
1639, 1640.
THE TOBACCO NATION. THE NEUTRALS.
A CHANGE OF PLAN. SAINTE MARIE. MISSION OF THE TOBACCO NATION.  WINTER JOURNEYING. RECEPTION OF THE MISSIONARIES.  SUPERSTITIOUS TERRORS. PERIL OF GARNIER AND JOGUES.  MISSION OF THE NEUTRALS. HURON INTRIGUES. MIRACLES.  FURY OF THE INDIANS. INTERVENTION OF SAINT MICHAEL.  RETURN TO SAINTE MARIE. INTREPIDITY OF THE PRIESTS.  THEIR MENTAL EXALTATION.
It had been the first purpose of the Jesuits to form permanent missions in each of the principal Huron towns; but, before the close of the year 1639, the difficulties and risks of this scheme had become fully apparent.  They resolved, therefore, to establish one central station, to be a base of operations, and, as it were, a focus, whence the light of the Faith should radiate through all the wilderness around.  It was to serve at once as residence, fort, magazine, hospital, and convent.  Hence the priests would set forth on missionary expeditions far and near; and hither they might retire, as to an asylum, in times of sickness or extreme peril.  Here the neophytes could be gathered together, safe from perverting influences; and here in time a Christian settlement, Hurons mingled with Frenchmen, might spring up and thrive under the shadow of the cross.

The site of the new station was admirably chosen.  The little river Wye flows from the southward into the Matchedash Bay of Lake Huron, and, at about a mile from its mouth, passes through a small lake.  The Jesuits made choice of the right bank of the Wye, where it issues from this lake, gained permission to build from the Indians, though not without difficulty, and began their labors with an abundant energy, and a very deficient supply of workmen and tools.  The new establishment was called Sainte Marie.  The house at Teanaustayé, and the house and chapel at Ossossané, were abandoned, and all was concentrated at this spot.  On one hand, it had a short water communication with Lake Huron; and on the other, its central position gave the readiest access to every part of the Huron territory.

During the summer before, the priests had made a survey of their field of action, visited all the Huron towns, and christened each of them with the name of a saint.  This heavy draft on the calendar was followed by another, for the designation of the nine towns of the neighboring and kindred people of the Tobacco Nation.  The Huron towns were portioned into four districts, while those of the Tobacco Nation formed a fifth, and each district was assigned to the charge of two or more priests.  In November and December, they began their missionary excursions, for the Indians were now gathered in their settlements, and journeyed on foot through the denuded forests, in mud and snow, bearing on their backs the vessels and utensils necessary for the service of the altar.

The new and perilous mission of the Tobacco Nation fell to Garnier and Jogues.  They were well chosen; and yet neither of them was robust by nature, in body or mind, though Jogues was noted for personal activity.  The Tobacco Nation lay at the distance of a two days' journey from the Huron towns, among the mountains at the head of Nottawassaga Bay.  The two missionaries tried to find a guide at Ossossané; but none would go with them, and they set forth on their wild and unknown pilgrimage alone.

The forests were full of snow; and the soft, moist flakes were still falling thickly, obscuring the air, beplastering the gray trunks, weighing to the earth the boughs of spruce and pine, and hiding every footprint of the narrow path.  The Fathers missed their way, and toiled on till night, shaking down at every step from the burdened branches a shower of fleecy white on their black cassocks.  Night overtook them in a spruce swamp.  Here they made a fire with great difficulty, cut the evergreen boughs, piled them for a bed, and lay down.  The storm presently ceased; and, "praised be God," writes one of the travellers, "we passed a very good night." 

In the morning they breakfasted on a morsel of corn bread, and, resuming their journey, fell in with a small party of Indians, whom they followed all day without food.  At eight in the evening they reached the first Tobacco town, a miserable cluster of bark cabins, hidden among forests and half buried in snow-drifts, where the savage children, seeing the two black apparitions, screamed that Famine and the Pest were coming.  Their evil fame had gone before them.  They were unwelcome guests; nevertheless, shivering and famished as they were, in the cold and darkness, they boldly pushed their way into one of these dens of barbarism.  It was precisely like a Huron house.  Five or six fires blazed on the earthen floor, and around them were huddled twice that number of families, sitting, crouching, standing, or flat on the ground; old and young, women and men, children and dogs, mingled pell-mell.  The scene would have been a strange one by daylight: it was doubly strange by the flicker and glare of the lodge-fires.  Scowling brows, sidelong looks of distrust and fear, the screams of scared children, the scolding of squaws, the growling of wolfish dogs, this was the greeting of the strangers.  The chief man of the household treated them at first with the decencies of Indian hospitality; but when he saw them kneeling in the litter and ashes at their devotions, his suppressed fears found vent, and he began a loud harangue, addressed half to them and half to the Indians.  "Now, what are these okies doing? They are making charms to kill us, and destroy all that the pest has spared in this house.  I heard that they were sorcerers; and now, when it is too late, I believe it."  It is wonderful that the priests escaped the tomahawk.  Nowhere is the power of courage, faith, and an unflinching purpose more strikingly displayed than in the record of these missions.

In other Tobacco towns their reception was much the same; but at the largest, called by them Saint  Peter and Saint  Paul, they fared worse.  They reached it on a winter afternoon.  Every door of its capacious bark houses was closed against them; and they heard the squaws within calling on the young men to go out and split their heads, while children screamed abuse at the black-robed sorcerers.  As night approached, they left the town, when a band of young men followed them, hatchet in hand, to put them to death.  Darkness, the forest, and the mountain favored them; and, eluding their pursuers, they escaped.  Thus began the mission of the Tobacco Nation.

In the following November, a yet more distant and perilous mission was begun.  Brébeuf and Chaumonot set out for the Neutral Nation.  This fierce people, as we have already seen, occupied that part of Canada which lies immediately north of Lake Erie, while a wing of their territory extended across the Niagara into Western New York.  In their athletic proportions, the ferocity of their manners, and the extravagance of their superstitions, no American tribe has ever exceeded them.  They carried to a preposterous excess the Indian notion, that insanity is endowed with a mysterious and superhuman power.  Their country was full of pretended maniacs, who, to propitiate their guardian spirits, or okies, and acquire the mystic virtue which pertained to madness, raved stark naked through the villages, scattering the brands of the lodge-fires, and upsetting everything in their way.

The two priests left Sainte Marie on the second of November, found a Huron guide at Saint  Joseph, and, after a dreary march of five days through the forest, reached the first Neutral town.  Advancing thence, they visited in turn eighteen others; and their progress was a storm of maledictions.  Brébeuf especially was accounted the most pestilent of sorcerers.  The Hurons, restrained by a superstitious awe, and unwilling to kill the priests, lest they should embroil themselves with the French at Quebec, conceived that their object might be safely gained by stirring up the Neutrals to become their executioners.  To that end, they sent two emissaries to the Neutral towns, who, calling the chiefs and young warriors to a council, denounced the Jesuits as destroyers of the human race, and made their auditors a gift of nine French hatchets on condition that they would put them to death.  It was now that Brébeuf, fully conscious of the danger, half starved and half frozen, driven with revilings from every door, struck and spit upon by pretended maniacs, beheld in a vision that great cross, which as we have seen, moved onward through the air, above the wintry forests that stretched towards the land of the Iroquois.  

Chaumonot records yet another miracle.  "One evening, when all the chief men of the town were deliberating in council whether to put us to death, Father Brébeuf, while making his examination of conscience, as we were together at prayers, saw the vision of a spectre, full of fury, menacing us both with three javelins which he held in his hands.  Then he hurled one of them at us; but a more powerful hand caught it as it flew: and this took place a second and a third time, as he hurled his two remaining javelins.  .  .  .  Late at night our host came back from the council, where the two Huron emissaries had made their gift of hatchets to have us killed.  He wakened us to say that three times we had been at the point of death; for the young men had offered three times to strike the blow, and three times the old men had dissuaded them.  This explained the meaning of Father Brébeuf's vision." 

They had escaped for the time; but the Indians agreed among themselves, that thenceforth no one should give them shelter.  At night, pierced with cold and faint with hunger, they found every door closed against them.  They stood and watched, saw an Indian issue from a house, and, by a quick movement, pushed through the half-open door into this abode of smoke and filth.  The inmates, aghast at their boldness, stared in silence.  Then a messenger ran out to carry the tidings, and an angry crowd collected.
"Go out, and leave our country," said an old chief, "or we will put you into the kettle, and make a feast of you."

"I have had enough of the dark-colored flesh of our enemies," said a young brave; "I wish to know the taste of white meat, and I will eat yours."

A warrior rushed in like a madman, drew his bow, and aimed the arrow at Chaumonot.  "I looked at him fixedly," writes the Jesuit, "and commended myself in full confidence to Saint  Michael.  Without doubt, this great archangel saved us; for almost immediately the fury of the warrior was appeased, and the rest of our enemies soon began to listen to the explanation we gave them of our visit to their country." 

The mission was barren of any other fruit than hardship and danger, and after a stay of four months the two priests resolved to return.  On the way, they met a genuine act of kindness.  A heavy snow-storm arresting their progress, a Neutral woman took them into her lodge, entertained them for two weeks with her best fare, persuaded her father and relatives to befriend them, and aided them to make a vocabulary of the dialect.  Bidding their generous hostess farewell, they journeyed northward, through the melting snows of spring, and reached Sainte Marie in safety.

The Jesuits had borne all that the human frame seems capable of bearing.  They had escaped as by miracle from torture and death.  Did their zeal flag or their courage fail? A fervor intense and unquenchable urged them on to more distant and more deadly ventures.  The beings, so near to mortal sympathies, so human, yet so divine, in whom their faith impersonated and dramatized the great principles of Christian truth,  virgins, saints, and angels, hovered over them, and held before their raptured sight crowns of glory and garlands of immortal bliss.  They burned to do, to suffer, and to die; and now, from out a living martyrdom, they turned their heroic gaze towards an horizon dark with perils yet more appalling, and saw in hope the day when they should bear the cross into the blood-stained dens of the Iroquois.  

But, in this exaltation and tension of the powers, was there no moment when the recoil of Nature claimed a temporary sway? When, an exile from his kind, alone, beneath the desolate rock and the gloomy pine-trees, the priest gazed forth on the pitiless wilderness and the hovels of its dark and ruthless tenants, his thoughts, it may be, flew longingly beyond those wastes of forest and sea that lay between him and the home of his boyhood.  Or rather, led by a deeper attraction, they revisited the ancient centre of his faith, and he seemed to stand once more in that gorgeous temple, where, shrined in lazuli and gold, rest the hallowed bones of Loyola.  Column and arch and dome rise upon his vision, radiant in painted light, and trembling with celestial music.  Again he kneels before the altar, from whose tablature beams upon him that loveliest of shapes in which the imagination of man has embodied the spirit of Christianity.  The illusion overpowers him.  A thrill shakes his frame, and he bows in reverential rapture.  No longer a memory, no longer a dream, but a visioned presence, distinct and luminous in the forest shades, the Virgin stands before him.  Prostrate on the rocky earth, he adores the benign angel of his ecstatic faith, then turns with rekindled fervors to his stern apostleship.

Now, by the shores of Thunder Bay, the Huron traders freight their birch vessels for their yearly voyage; and, embarked with them, let us, too, revisit the rock of Quebec.