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 Two Missionary Priests 
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 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." 
 
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