A MONTAGNAIS CHIEF. 



Frontispiece. 



NIHIL OB3TAT 

S. M. McGRATH, CHANC. 

IMPRIMATUR. 

+ NEIL MCNEIL 

ARCHBISHOP OF TORONTO 



COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1920 

BT 
J, M. DENT & SONS, LTD., TORONTO 



By the same author 



EARLY MISSIONS IN WESTERN CANADA 
THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE NIAGARA PENINSULA 
PIONEERS OP THE CROSS IN CANADA 
DAYS AND NIGHTS IN THE TROPICS 
It AY*\ - BY PATH AND TRAIL 

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN UTAH 
HERS AND THERE IN MEXICO 
TRAVEL TALKS 
ESSAYS IN OCCULTISM 
PRE-HISTORIC MAN IN AMERICA 



THE CROSS-BEARERS 
OF THE SAGUENAY 



BY THE VERY REV. 

^m HARRIS 

D.D., LL.D., LITT.D. 




MCMXX 

LONDON AND TORONTO 
J. M. DENT Sr SONS, LIMITED 



TO THE REVEREND M. CLINE, M.A. 
WITH THE WARMEST ASSURANCE 
OF MY DEEP PERSONAL REGARD 
AND ESTEEM. 



CONTENTS 



Preface 

Chapter 

Chapter 

Chapter 

Chapter 

Chapter 

Chapter 



BOOK I. Tadousac and the Franciscans 

I. INTRODUCTION . , . 

II. TADOUSAC TO-DAY 

III. TADOUSAC IN EARLY TIMES 

IV. THE DOOM OF THE TRADING POST 
V. THE COMING OF THE FRANCISCANS 

VI. WITH THE SAVAGES . .' 



BOOK II. The Montagnais 

Chapter VII. THE ALGONQUINS 

Chapter VIII. THE MONTAGNAIS 

Chapter IX. THE MONTAGNAIS TRIBE . - 

Chapter X. TENT LIFE OF THE MONTAGNAIS 

Chapter XI. SUPERSTITIONS AND MYTHS OF THE 
MONTAGNAIS . ; ", 

Chapter XII. THE MONTAGNAIS MEDICINE-MAN 
Chapter XIII. RELIGION AND MORALS 
Chapter XIV. OTHER CHARACTERISTICS . 



61 
69 
75 
81 

87 

99 

121 

135 



BOOK III. Trail-Breakers and Path-Finders 

Chapter XV. THE MISSIONARIES .... 149 

Chapter XVI. SETTING OUT FOR LAKE ST. JOHN . 157 

Chapter XVII. ON THE WAY TO PIOUGAMI . . 161 

Chapter XVIII. THE "RivER OF DEATH" . . .165 

Chapter XIX. OTHER PATH-FINDERS . .173 

Chapter XX. THE FATE OF THE IROQUOIS . .179 

Chapter XXI. THE TRAIL-BREAKER . . . .183 

Chapter XXII. THE LONE PRIEST . . 193 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

A MONTAGNAIS CHIEF .... Frontispiece 

WARPING A BOAT Facing page 81 

ON LAKE MISTASSINI 87 

SCAFFOLD BURIAL 88 

CHI-CHI-KOUE ........ 100 

APPLYING YELLOW PAINT . . . . . .111 

EXTRACTING THE EVIL MANITOU 126 

RIVER PORTAGE 161 

THE CARRY ^ . ' . . . . . . . 162 

MOUNTAIN PORTAGE 187 

SANSON'S MAP . '.. 203 

On the Paper Wrapper is an illustration of RATTLES, which 
are mentioned on page 101. 



BOOK I. 



AND 
THE FRANCISCANS 



Pref 



ace 



The eminent Jesuit, Father T. J. Campbell, 
in his authoritative work, Pioneer Priests 
Among the Algonquins has done more than 
any living man to perpetuate the memories 
of the intrepid and self-sacrificing Jesuit 
missionaries whose names illumine the history 
of Canada, and whose achievements for God 
and civilization almost stagger belief. The 
lives and works of these saintly men are a 
great Christian Odyssey. Around their mem- 
ory is a halo of superhuman glory the glory 
of prophets, rather than that of merely dis- 
tinguished men. Father Campbell deals 
largely with the religious and spiritual side of 
the missionaries. This volume treats ex- 
clusively of the Montagnais (the Quebec 
Algonquin) tribes, of the scenery of the forests 
and lakes east and north of the Saguenay 
River, and of the secular achievements of the 
pioneer missionaries. 

A word or two of explanation is necessary 
as to the use of the name Recollet as used in 
the pages of this book. The many and vari- 
ous names adopted by different branches of 



8 PREFACE 

the Franciscan tree are confusing. The 
word Franciscan is the family name common 
to all the members of the seraphic order 
whether they be religious, religieuses, or 
simply tertiaries, that is, members of the 
third order. From the venerable Franciscan 
tree, planted by Saint Francis in 1209, came 
many branches, each bearing a different 
name. In 1517 Pope Leo X. formed these 
denominational societies into one body and 
conferred upon it a generic name, the Friar 
Minors of the Regular Observance. The 
members of some of these absorbed com- 
munities considered the articles of the Char- 
ter or Constitution too severe, and His Holi- 
ness Leo X, when appealed to, permitted 
these Protestants to form a separate congre- 
gation with its own constitution which 
adopted the name of Friars Minors Conven- 
tuals. 

Many members of the Regular Observance, 
encouraged by the zeal of holy and illustrious 
men, asked for a more rigorous Rule and 
formed, with Papal consent, the societies 
called The Reformed, The Alcantarins, and 
The Recollets. In 1897, Leo XIII. sup- 
pressed the Recollets, the Alcantarins and 
the Reformed by uniting them with the 
Observants, conferring on the consolidated 
body the generic name of Friars Minors. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 9 

There are now in the great Franciscan 
family but three independent communities 
with a "General" for each branch residing at 
Rome. These are the Friars Minors; the 
Friars Minors Conventual, and the Friars 
Minors Capucins. The Friars Minors, the 
Conventuals, and the Capucins (or as we say, 
Capuchins), are three different branches of 
the Franciscan Order, but the Friars Minors 
is the only body to which the word Franciscan 
is by custom applied. 

In presenting to the public this volume I 
gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to 
Mr. Simon Lapointe, K.C., of Chicoutimi, 
Quebec, for valuable assistance when I was col- 
lecting material for the chapters on Tadousac 
and the Saguenay River; also to Thomas 
Mulvey, Esq., M.A., Under-Secretary of State, 
for topographical maps of the Lake St. John 
and Mistassini regions. I may add that to 
avoid the repetition of almost unpronounce- 
able names the seven or eight families or 
tribes of Quebec Algonquins are grouped 
under the common name of Montagnais. 

THE AUTHOR. 



CHAPTER I. 
INTRODUCTION 

In all history there are no more valuable 
or edifying pages than those recording the 
lives and labours of the Franciscan and Jesuit 
missionaries among the Indian tribes of 
Canada in the seventeenth and early 
eighteenth centuries. The intense faith, zeal 
and self-abasement of these great men com- 
mand our admiration and respect, though 
the heroism of their self-effacement and self- 
sacrifice can hardly be appreciated to-day. 
When reading the annals (recording the 
achievements and discoveries of the adven- 
turous men) of these early times in New France 
we ought to remember that the missionaries 
confronted the perils of the wilderness that 
they might make known to savage man the 
sublime doctrines of Christianity and raise 
him to a plane of decency and clean living, 
while the aim of the coureurs de bois and 
the officers of the fur companies was the 
accumulation of wealth which was made 
possible by trade with the Indians. 

The missionaries went everywhere, search- 
ing out the most obscure places and tribes, 
and venturing their lives for the salvation of 

11 



12 INTRODUCTION 

souls, for God and France. Long before 
anthropology became a science and the 
"Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of 
Man" was accepted as an axiomatic truth, 
the missionary fathers preached to the tribes 
the unity of the human race that "God 
hath made from one all mankind to dwell 
upon the face of the earth." They ventured 
in frail barks on waters often tempestuous 
and dangerous; they penetrated a vast wild- 
erness extending in unbroken continuity from 
Tadousac to Lake Superior ; they surrendered 
themselves with the resignation of martyrs 
to hunger, cold, and often to brutal treat- 
ment ; they ate and slept in miserable huts 
of bark and endured without protest or 
complaint the horrors of Indian winter lodges 
full of all abominations ; of uncleanness, of 
smoke, dogs, vermin and stench. 

Filled with apostolic zeal, they offered to 
God, on behalf of perishing souls, the sacrifice 
of bodily repose, of all the refined enjoyment 
of Christian society, of Christian civilization 
and of life itself, that they might "win all 
to Christ." Truly, may we say of them 
what Jesus, the son of Sirach, said of the just, 
the men of mercy of his day : "Their bodies 
are buried in peace and their names liveth 
from generation to generation." Their love. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 13 

for the souls of the savages, their marvellous 
zeal, their heroism under cold, privation, 
hunger and a lingering death are abiding 
proofs of what may be endured by men of 
faith, and of the grace of God nfluencing 
and fortifying the soul of man. 

These French missionaries were men of 
great heart and steady purpose. Every man 
of them was educated, trained and fitted for 
the accomplishment of one great end the 
Christianizing and civilizing of the savage 
hordes to whom they were sent. If the 
recognition of a common bond which unites 
the races of the earth and the units of these 
races in one humanity be one of the noblest 
truths known to our race ; if to endure a life- 
time of suffering in order to lead into the light 
the men and women seated in the shadow of 
death, to remove the barriers which ignorance, 
prejudice and false conceptions of the dignity 
of man and the sacredness of human life have 
erected constitute greatness of oul, then these 
heroic priests reached the level of greatness, 
and posterity will some day immortalize them 
in granite and marble. 

If, to be a saint is to actualize and make 
real, visible, palpable and substantial our 
conception of all that constitutes evangelical 
perfection, then these missionaries Francis- 
cans and Jesuits have earned and are en- 



14 INTRODUCTION 

titled to all the honours of canonization. 
But these brave and saintly men did not 
confine their time and talents exclusively to 
teaching, instructing and civilizing the roving 
hordes of inhospitable regions. Many of 
them opened up unexplored territories and 
cut the trails to unknown lands. Of these was 
Jean Dequen, who ascended the Saguenay 
and discovered Lake Kenogami, Bell River 
and Lake St. John. Of these also were 
Father Buteux who, in 1651, reached first 
of white men the St. Maurice and sources 
of the Matawin in the land of the Attika- 
megues, and Fathers Dablon and Druillettes 
who, in 1661, were the first to break the way 
to the head waters of the Nekouba river. Of 
these also was Charles Albanel, who scaled 
the height of land and tramped and canoed 
overland from the St. Lawrence to the Hudson 
Bay. They explored the territory from 
Tadousac to the Mistassini and from Quebec 
to Labrador. They charted the newly- 
explored land, described the tribes they had 
visited, the botany of the country, named 
rivers and mountains, and bequeathed to 
us an accurate map of the land as it then 
was. 

Nothing apparently escaped their obser- 
vation and search. Father Albanel records 
the physical peculiarities of James' Bay its 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 15 

brackish water, its shallowness, the incredibly 
long reflux of its tide, the charm and softness 
of the climate, the flora and fertility of the 
land. 

Father Crepieul descends to the minutest 
details, even to the study and examination of 
the foetal fawn of a moose "no bigger than 
a man's thumb." "I was filled with admira- 
tion for the wisdom of the Creator," he writes, 
"who can enclose in so small a compass so 
many different parts all so well adapted to 
their functions." 

Father de Beaulieu, one of the greatest 
mathematicians of his time, passed hours 
by torch light dissecting and examining 
the anatomy of the wild animals brought to 
camp by his Montagnais companions and 
hunters. 

They gathered medicinal plants (les simples) 
catalogued and classified them. They opened 
the first path through the Laurentides from 
Lake St. John to Quebec. This is shown on 
Father Laure's wonderful map of 1730 and 
Bellin's chart of 1774. They began the first 
model farm in Canada, some of the fruit trees 
of which, at the mouth of the Metabat- 
chouan, Lake St. John, were standing in 1889. 
They opened at Tadousac the first school 
for Indian children, wrote catechisms and 
translated prayer books and books of devotion 



16 INTRODUCTION 

into Huron and Algonquin, and taught the 
Indian children music and singing.* 

They did more. From Tadousac, Chicou- 
timi and the missions of the North they sent 
accurate descriptions of the lands they visited 
and the tribes they instructed. They described 
Lake Mistassini, gave the names of the tribes 
living on its shores, and left us invaluable 
treatises on the habits, manners and customs 
of the Algonquins of the St. Lawrence. When 
the Franciscan, or Jesuit missionaries fear- 
lessly penetrated uncharted lands, they 
were confronted with almost insuperable 
obstacles. The land was to be explored, the 
tribes to be civilized, superstition to be 
eradicated and the faith to be preached. 
And there is no record of failure in their 
noble mission. 

They plunged into unexplored regions with 
no weapons but a breviary and a crucifix, no 
guide but a compass, and often with no other 
companions than their own zeal and the 
grace of God. They went from tribe to tribe 
canoeing lakes and rivers, scaling mountains, 
encompassed by privations, surrounded by 
desolations of solitude and by an unbroken 

* Father Labrosse writes in his Relation, 1778 : "I taught 
many savages to read, write and sing by note, to assist properly 
at Mass and at the Ceremonies of Vespers." 

He distributed thousands of catechisms and devotional 
leaflets, written in Algonquin, among the various tribes. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 17 

and pathless wilderness, "God also bearing 
them witness by signs and wonders, and 
divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost 
according to His will." Heb. 2 : 4. 

They were confronted with toils and diffi- 
culties of an unaccustomed experience, and 
blazed the trail, in many instances, with their 
own blood. In savage encampments and 
among scattered tribal families they raised 
aloft the cross with the appealing image of 
the Crucified Christ, "Whose head was bowed 
down even as droops the yellow head of 
corn." 

The extent of the territory covered by the 
zeal and marvellous energy of the missionaries 
is almost incredible. Across the repellent 
breasts of barbarous regions these saintly 
and wonderful men wandered, instructing, 
teaching, preaching, toiling, and dying in 
camps or in forests, showing on the whole 
such a record of bravery and zeal as to invite 
the admiration of heroic souls and men of 
lofty courage. And amid all their dangers, 
labours, and trials, they were mapping the 
land, describing rivers and mountains and 
recording the habits of the Indians with an 
accuracy of detail and a fidelity to truth that 
have withstood the examination of the keenest 
critics. Separated from the world, from 
ambition, from home, honours and ecclesiastic 



18 INTRODUCTION 

promotion, they became very near and familiar 
friends with God. We may, without exag- 
geration, repeat of them what Thomas a 
Kempis said of the martyrs of the early 
church : "Saints and friends of Christ, they 
served our Lord in hunger and thirst, in cold 
and nakedness, labour and weariness, in 
watching and fastings, in prayers and holy 
meditation, in persecution and reproach. "" In 
nightly hours borrowed from days of self- 
sacrifice, they wrote for those who were to 
come after them narratives and letters, essays 
on native manners, descriptions of the land, 
of the customs, ceremonies and rites of the 
tribes. 

They mapped and delineated whole regions, 
named mountains, rivers and valleys, and 
left us an invaluable library on aboriginal 
man and savage nature. In this incompar- 
able collection are included dissertations on 
botany, geology, zoology, ethnology, and on 
tribal languages and dialects. 

They omitted nothing. In their edifying 
letters we find accurate descriptions of locali- 
ties and of natural curiosities, a wealth of 
historical and legendary information, reports 
on manners and customs, interspersed with 
characteristic anecdotes and bits of folk-lore. 
Their writings have proved of inestimable 
value to secular historians who have enlarged 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 19 

the sphere and are now exploiting the abori- 
ginal past. There is not in the history of 
heroic endeavour a more inspiring chapter 
than that which records the deeds of self- 
denial, the apostolic labours and the affection 
of these lonely priests for their spiritual 
children of the forest. To a fervor that was 
intense and an abnegation that was entire, 
they added a devotion that was indefatigable 
and admirable. They brought to the dis- 
charge of their exalted office an unselfishness 
that was apostolic and a fortitude under 
privation and suffering which, since Apostolic 
times, have hardly a parallel in human history. 
Of the brave and saintly soldiers of the Cross 
who fought the wilderness in Canada in those 
early days many won the crown of martyrdom. 
All these were slaughtered in savage fields for 
the faith and fell beside the standard of the 
Cross, breathing loyalty to God and man in 
their last agonies. The words of the inspired 
writer are seldom more fittingly applied 
than to these voluntary victims for God and 
Christian civilization : "The souls of the just 
are in the hands of God, and the torment of 
death shall not touch them. In the sight of 
the unwise they seemed to die ; and their 
departure was taken for misery and their 
going away from us for utter destruction. 
For though in the sight of men they suffered 
torture, yet is their hope full of immortality." 



CHAPTER n. 

TADOUSAC TO-DAY. 

Hidden among firs and boulders on a 
sloping spur of the primordial Laurentides 
reposes the picturesque French-Canadian vil- 
lage of Tadousac. Situated on the eastern 
bank of the mysterious Saguenay near its 
confluence with the St. Lawrence, it presents 
a most inviting retreat, a sylvan resort whose 
soft witchery fascinates, and whose early 
history compels both attention and respect. 

This ancient and attract 've v llage houses 
a population of six hundred souls. It has a 
number of handsome villas and, during the 
summer months, is liberally patronized by 
tourists and health seekers. Here the St. 
Lawrence 300 miles from the sea and 120 
miles below Quebec is twenty-one miles 
wide, and on a cloudless day the mountains 
of the south shore are sharply outlined and 
loom large against a deep blue sky. The 
white-painted houses of Cacouna are clearly 
visible and at Riviere-du-Loup may be seen 
the Hospital of the Precious Blood and the 
church of St. Patrice, whose roof of polished 
tin reflects the brightness of a glorious 
Canadian sun. 

21 



22 TADOUSAC TO-DAY 

Champlain's description of the Bay of 
Tadousac, the mountains rising majestically 
around the entrance to the Saguenay and 
the dark forest encompassing the weird place, 
would fit, without a change of word, the 
topographical conditions as they exist to-day.* 
It is sufficient for our purpose to record the 
contour of the mountains, the flow and width 
of the Saguenay, the sand dunes and receding 
forests which have not altered since the 
memorable morning of May 24th, 1603, 
when the daring explorer moored his ship, 
La Bonne-Renommee, in the Bay of Tadousac. 

THE WITCHERY OF TADOUSAC. 

I well remember the pleasant morning I 
entered the cleanly-kept, yet primitive village 
park and from its southern rim began to get 
command of a prospect which, as it then 
appeared in the lambent light and sunshine, 
seemed to me a perfect scene of natural and 
ravishing beauty and of quiet but rugged 
grandeur. The majestic St. Lawrence slowly 
moving to the sea, the dunnish purple-grey 
clouds trembling over the Saguenay, the 
opalescence of the calm bay, the village 

* Champlain's history of his explorations, fortunately, is 
extant. In it, among other experiences of absorbing interest, 
are recorded the events and stirring incidents so intimately 
associated with Tadousac from 1603 to 1631. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 23 

feathered with spruce, the everlasting and 
awe-inspiring mountains towering to imperial 
heights, and the pine forest stretching end- 
lessly to the north, formed a colossal scene 
of wondrous beauty. From where I stood I 
gazed upon a magnificent landscape unfolding 
itself, a fascinating and alluring panorama of 
rivers, mountains, islands and forest. The 
view was rich, full and complete, and on all 
sides the prospect embraced variety, sublimity 
and beauty. 

The air I breathed was fragrant with the 
odour of pine, of balsam-fir, juniper and 
spruce. The repose and isolation of my 
retreat, the sensual softness of the lambent 
air, and the calm of the hour filled the park 
with a dreamy drowsiness of pleasant languor. 
It was a veritable siesta of nature on a ravish- 
ing summer's day. The peaceful quiet of 
the woods was like unto the peace of the 
Lord, and the summer mists drifting in from 
the lordly St. Lawrence, encompassed me 
round about. The shades of the dead visited 
me and my memory was carried back to the 
long ago, when traders, savage hunters, and 
Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries mingled 
here indiscriminately together and laid the 
foundations of our history. 

Before me rolled le Grand Fleuvethe St. 
Luwrence sown with fir-covered islands and, 



24 TADOUSAC TO-DAY 

among them, beyond the range of my bino- 
culars, Isle aux Coudres, where, on September 
7th, 1535, Jacques Cartier with his men 
landed, and the chaplain of his ship, La 
Grande Hermine, offered up the Holy Sacrifice. 
To my right, buttressed for seventy miles by 
granite walls of primordial rock, flowed the 
dark-brown waters of the gloomy Saguenay 
bearing to the St. Lawrence contributions 
surrendered by far-away northern lakes, rivers 
and streams. 

Northward stretched the rock-pine, fir and 
spruce lands and, between forest and river, 
hidden like a plover's nest among rocks, 
reposed the ancient village, through which a 
virgin rivulet purls night and day. 

From my position on the rim of a granite 
platform I looked down upon the residence of 
Monsieur le Cure, half hidden in birch trees, 
the summer hotel, the comfortable homes of 
the friendly people, the school and the parish 
church of Ste. Croix, on the consecrated altar 
of which the "Clean Oblation" is daily 
offered. Many of these buildings dominate 
the sandy beach, whose waters at high tide 
almost overlap their foundations. 

The story of the patronal name of the fine 
church carries us back to the days when 
Father Dequen, in 1641, raised the first cross 
at the head of the bay. Father Buteux, who 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 25 

succeeded him, transplanted the cross to a 
more elevated site, where, seen by the ships 
far out in the St. Lawrence, it symbolized the 
conquest of the land for Christ and Chris- 
tianity. Carried on the brawny shoulders 
of a Montagnais chief and followed by the 
missionary and his bronzed converts, the 
great cross of cedar was raised on a position 
commanding a view of the Saguenay and the 
St. Lawrence. Henceforth Tadousac became 
known as the Mission of the Holy Cross 
Sainte-Croix. 

In 1648 an humble frame church was built, 
to which came four times every day, for 
instruction and prayers, large numbers of 
Indian neophytes and catechumens. "In 
this church," as we read in the Relation of 
Father Le Jeune, "instructions were given 
and praises to God sung in Huron, Algonquin, 
and in the Montagnais and Miscouin lan- 
guages." Nine hundred Indians assembled 
in the summer of 1649 in and around this 
church of the Holy Cross. When, in 1668, 
Bishop Laval visited Tadousac, he confirmed 
one hundred and forty-nine Indians, members 
of different tribes and clans. 

From where I stood I saw the venerable 
and modest little Algonquin chapel, so ten- 
derly apostrophised by Octave Cremazie, 
under the magic of whose pen "common 



26 TADOUSAC TO-DAY 

things took on beauty like a dress and all 
the land was an enchanted place." 

This unpretentious and ancient chapel is 
filled to repletion with memories of the times 
when black-robed priests and fur-clad hunters 
of Peribonka exchanged friendly greetings 
outside its sacred walls. 

In these early days Tadousac now an 
attractive summer resort was known to 
Basque fishermen and French traders under 
the name of Traite de Tadoussac The Tadou- 
sac Trading Post for Tadousac was the 
great mart to which furs and peltries were 
brought by Algonquin hunters from Northern 
forests. They gathered here from uncharted 
and mysterious regions ; from lands where 
the mighty hunters those spectral heroes of 
the Nibelungenlied would have revelled ; 
from the dark and mysterious forests whose 
weird silence was like unto that of the gloomy 
regions of which De Quincey dreamed and the 
Minnesingers sang. Then Tadousac was 
famous and known over nearly all Europe. 
Hakluyt in his book The Principal Navigations 
and Voyages, 1610, refers to it as a place of 
importance, and in the early maps it is 
marked as the capital of the kingdom of 
Saguenay. 

Hither came, in these unremembered days, 
the brayed (clothed with breech-cloth) Mon- 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 27 

tagnais, Papinichois and Bersiamites, with 
their squaws, babies and wolfish dogs, carry- 
ing their furs and peltries in bundles and 
packages. They canoed the River of Death 
(Saguenay); they skirted the northern shores 
of the St. Lawrence; they came by path and 
trail, over mountains, rivers, and swales, 
and when they entered Tadousac, raised 
their tents and shacks and opened la traite 
the trade. On the green sward, on shelving 
granite, by the doors of their lodges they 
displayed priceless furs furs of the black 
squirrel and lynx, of the otter, fox, mink, 
fisher, and marten. They also brought down, 
by canoe and pack, pelts of the bear, caribou 
and moose, which they traded for knives, 
hatchets, iron arrow tips, tobacco, swords, 
kettles, blankets, clothes, biscuits, raisins, 
and porcelain beads. Then, after months of 
haggling and bartering, and when the market 
was sold out, these Algonquin wild men and 
women Bersiamites, Pore-Epics, Kenogami 
and Papinichois returned to the Labrador 
coast, to Chicoutimi, Peribonka and the 
Maskoubiti forests. 

And once again silence, loneliness and aban- 
donment possessed the deserted place, and 
from Tadousac to Chicoutimi, for seventy 
miles, there was but a desolation of wilder- 
ness through whose mountainous body of 



28 TADOUSAC TO-DAY 

imperishable granite the sullen Saguenay 
rolled its gloomy waters. 

To this historic trading post also came 
the Franciscan friar Paul Huet, who, pro- 
tected from a swarm of mosquitoes by two 
sailors armed with spruce branches, said 
Mass in a bark chapel; and Father Gervais 
Mohier, who fled into the woods when, for 
the first time, he heard the yelps, barks, and 
ferocious cries of naked and painted Mon- 
tagnais, armed with spears, scalping knives 
and battle clubs, engaged in the blood-curdl- 
ing war-dance. 

From Tadousac went out the priest ex- 
plorers of Lakes Kenogami, St. John and Mis- 
tassini and the overland Expedition, or- 
ganised, in 1674, by Father Albanel for the 
discovery of Hudson's Bay. For a hundred 
years and more Tadousac was the head- 
quarters for all the missionary and exploring 
expeditions organized to instruct the tribes 
and exploit the vast regions north of the 
St. Lawrence. It was to this centre of trade 
that the Algonquin converts to the Faith 
came, from the forest lands of the Lower 
St. Lawrence and the highlands of Nekouba, 
for instruction and to receive the sacraments. 

On a plot of ground, now included in the 
humble graveyard of Tadousac, Pierre de 
Chauvin, Lieutenant of the King, built the 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 29 

first house erected in Canada, and thirty years 
after the erection of Chauvin's house, Tadou- 
sac became the missionary centre from which 
the Jesuit fathers left to evangelize the north- 
ern tribes and the wandering families trading 
with the Esquimaux. 

To Tadousac came also in these early 
times Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries 
to instruct the Montagnais, when the tribes 
from the far north annually descended to 
barter their furs with French traders. From 
here departed for regions of eternal solitude 
to preach to the nomadic bands of Algonquins, 
the Franciscan friar Dolbeau, and the Jesuit 
missionaries Dequen, Nouvel, Bailloquet, 
Dablon, Druillettes and Albanel. 

In the course of time, civilization entered 
the Tadousac and Saguenay regions and began 
to tame the stubborn soil. In places the land 
is cleared ; pulp mills are eating up its forests ; 
settlements and villages are appearing. 

On a commanding site, overlooking the 
wonderful Saguenay, nine miles below the 
last of the great rapids or falls, French-Can- 
adian energy has built a city, the name of 
which perpetuates the memory of the Algon- 
quin Chicoutimi, in whose precincts are great 
pulp mills, and a cathedral and seminary unsur- 
passed for solidity and architectural effect by 
any ecclesiastical buildings east of Montreal. 



CHAPTER III. 
TADOUSAC IN EARLY TIMES. 

On September 1st, Jacques Cartier, the 
discoverer of Canada, approached the Sague- 
nay and anchored in the Bay of Tadousac. 
In his Bref-Recit, or brief narrative of his 
voyages, he tells us that he was astonished 
to see spouting at the mouth of the river 
a shoal of white whales, "a kind of fish," 
he declares, " which no man had ever heard of, 
or ever before seen." These white whales, 
(porpoises) called beluga, may be seen to-day 
playing around the entrance of the Saguenay. 
Further on in his Bref-Recit he tells us that, 
at a later time at the mouth of the Saguenay, 
he "met with four boats full of wild men, 
who as far as we could perceive, very fearfully 
came towards us, so that some of them went 
back again, and the others came so near us 
that they might hear and understand one of 
our wild men, upon whose word they came 
to us."* 

To the Bay of Tadousac came in 1600 the 

* The Indians whom Cartier brought to France when return- 
ing from his first voyage and who were now, on his second voyage, 
acting as interpreters. 

31 



32 TADOUSAC IN EARLY TIMES 

ship of Pierre de Chauvin, who had been a 
distinguished Captain in the service of Henry 
IV., while as his lieutenant in command of 
another boat was Francois Grave or Font- 
Grave and the Sieur de Monts who came out, 
as Chauvin's guest, to see the country. At 
Tadousac, Chauvin established a trading 
post, leaving sixteen men in possession, osten- 
sibly as settlers. Suffering with cold and 
hunger, some of them deserted and, consorting 
with the Montagnais, married Indian women, 
while a few eked out a miserable existence at 
the post, awaiting the return of the ship 
which came in 1602. 

Font-Grave complained that when he was 
at the entrance to the Saguenay his ship was 
fired upon by Basque or Spanish fishermen 
and traders who, for many years, before the 
coming of Chauvin, Font-Grave, or De Monts, 
trafficked with the Montagnais of the Sag- 
uenay for furs. 

To this place came Samuel Champlain, 
explorer, coloniser, and Governor of New 
France. His vessel, La Bonne-Renommee, 
anchored in the Bay of Tadousac, May 24th, 
1603. From here he sailed up the Saguenay 
for seventy-five miles to the rapids beyond 
Chicoutimi and, near here, on the western 
side of the Saguenay, he formed an alliance 
against the Iroquois, with the Ottawa Algon- 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 33 

quins, the Montagnais of the Saguenay and 
the Etchemins of New Brunswick who were re- 
turning with a hundred reeking scalps torn from 
the heads of Mohawk and Seneca warriors. 

Tadousac in 1615 was declared, with Que- 
bec and Three Rivers, to be an official trading 
post of the Company of Merchants, and in 
1763, it attained to the dignity of "First of 
the King's Posts," and became the capital of 
the Kingdom of Saguenay. 

To Tadousac came in 1639 the saintly 
Madame de la Peltrie accompanied by three 
nuns, to open at Quebec the first Ursuline 
Convent in the New World. 

Here in July, 1629, a few days after the 
surrender of Quebec to Admiral Louis Kertk, 
occurred the pitiful death and awful mutila- 
tion of the body of Captain Jacques Michel, 
a French Calvinist, a brave and experienced 
officer, who held command under Kertk. 

Some days after the capitulation of Quebec, 
Champlain and the Jesuit Fathers, Masse, 
de Noue and John de Brebeuf, were brought 
to Tadousac as prisoners of war, for which 
post Admiral Kertk and his Lieutenant 
Michel had already sailed. Admiral Kertk, 
addressing himself to the priests, is reported 
by Champlain to have said : 

"Gentlemen, you had certainly some busi- 
ness in Canada, if it was only to enjoy what 



34 TADOUSAC IN EARLY TIMES 

belonged to M. de Caen, of which you have 
dispossessed him." 

"Pardon me, sir," responded Father Bre- 
beuf, "it was only the pure intention of pro- 
moting the glory of God which brought us 
here, exposing ourselves to all dangers and 
perils for that object, and the conversion of 
the savages of this country." 

Michel, interrupting him, cried out: 

"Yes, yes, convert the savages; rather it 
was to convert the beavers." 

To which the Father impulsively replied : 

"That statement is false." Michel, lifting 
his hand to strike, said : 

"Only for respect to my General, I'd knock 
you down for giving me the lie." 

Brebeuf replied: 

"Pardon me, sir, I did not intend to give 
you the lie. I would be very sorry to do so, 
the language I used is that of the schools 
when an untenable question is proposed, not 
considering it an insult. Therefore I ask 
you to pardon me, and to believe that I did 
not use the term with any intention of wound- 
ing your feelings." 

Michel was furious and indulged in so much 
profanity and vile language that Champlain 
said to him : 

"Bon Dieu! How boldly you curse and 
swear for a Reformer." 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 35 

"I know I do," exclaimed Michel, "but 
I'd rather be hung than that I should let 
another day pass without cuffing that Jesuit." 

That night Michel, with a few companions, 
drank heavily and, when in a drunken stupor, 
was struck with apoplexy and died miserably 
the following day. He was buried with all 
the honors due to his rank as captain of his 
ship. When his body was laid to rest in a 
grave filled in with the earth and stones of 
Tadousac, taps were sounded and the granite 
walls of the Saguenay returned the salute of 
guns fired over his remains. 

Three years after Michel's burial, the 
Jesuit Father, Paul Le Jeune, landed at 
Tadousac on his way to Quebec. Passing the 
grave of Michel one morning, he was informed 
by his Indian companion that the Montagnais 
had taken the body from the grave and fed 
it to their dogs. "They exhumed the body, 
hung it on the limb of a tree, and then, cutting 
it in pieces, fed it to the dogs." 

Father I/e Jeune than adds: 

" 1 1 is not a good thing for a man to blaspheme 
against God and His elect nor to conspire against 
his King, nor be a traitor to his country.* 

*Relation, 1635, par Paul le Jeune. 
Voyages de la Nouvelk-F ranee, par Champlain I. Ill ch. VI, 

p. 255. 

Les Jesuits et La Nouvelle-F ranee, par Camille de Rochemon- 
teix. Tome Premier, ch. II, p. 174. 



36 TADOUSAC IN EARLY TIMES 

From 1615 to 1628 Tadousac was visited 
every summer by devout - Recollet mission- 
aries who instructed in Christian doctrine 
the representatives of the remote tribes who 
annually assembled at the post to meet the 
French traders. 

In 1633, the Jesuit Fathers succeeded the 
Recollets and established missions among 
the tribes of the interior and on the northern 
and southern shores of the St. Lawrence 
from Malbaie to Labrador, and from Ile-Verte 
to the Baie des Chaleurs. 

The primitive chapels of Tadousac were 
rude enclosures of brush and bark. In 1648, 
Father Dequen built the first frame chapel 
which was replaced in 1659 by a brick or stone 
building. This church was destroyed by 
fire in 1665, and replaced in 1671 by Father de 
Crepieul. The picturesque little frame chapel 
now beside the humble cemetery of Tadousac, 
was built by the Jesuit priest, Father Co- 
quart in 1747. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE; DOOM OF THE TRADING POST. 

It is interesting to note, when examining 
the Jesuit Relations, the attention the Fathers 
gave to every detail which concerned localities, 
the Indians and the missions. For instance, 
in the Relation for 1663-65, we read, that at 
Tadousac in the early days of April: "Two 
or three days before Easter, a third comet 
appeared," and that: "At the same time, we 
had news from Fathers Gabriel Druillette 
and Henry Nouvelle, who wintered with the 
savages around Tadousac and have already 
baptised among them about fifty persons." 

"On the fifteenth of October, 1663, at nine 
o'clock in the evening, there was an earth- 
quake which caused a great cracking of the 
slates on our house. This shock was preceded 
by a report louder than that of two hundred 
cannon, which continued for about the space 
of a Miserere." 

"On Saint Mathias' day, 24th February, 
1665, the shocks were so violent around 
Tadousac that the savages and one of our 
Fathers who was wintering in the neigh- 
bourhood with them, declare that they were 
not less severe than those felt at Quebec in 

37 



38 DOOM OF THE TRADING POST 

that famous earthquake which occurred in 
the year 1663." 

In the Relation for 1669-70, we read: "I 
was quite surprised at seeing one good man 
whom I wished to instruct for confession. 
'It is sixteen years,' said he to me, 'since you 
baptised me at Tadousac, and taught me 
what it was necessary to believe, what I must 
do and what to shun, and what I must pray 
for, in order to be saved. Since that time, 
I have carefully followed your instructions, 
and I do not know that I have forgotten 
anything." 

The strong and long arm of Ecclesiastical 
law and civil enactments reached out, even 
in those primitive times, as far as Chicoutimi 
and Tadousac. In 1659, the zealous and 
daring missionary, Father Albanel, had per- 
formed a marriage without observing all the 
formalities and rubrics prescribed for the 
administration of the Sacrament. There was 
something more than a "great sensation" 
caused, for the good priest was perilously 
near losing his sacerdotal faculties. The 
Relation reads: "April, Feast of St. Mark, 
1659, Father Albanel arrived from Tadousac. 
Before leaving Tadousac, he had married a 
Frenchman named Francois Pelletier to a 
Christian savage woman without publishing 
any banns, and without giving notice of it 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 39 

to the relatives, or to Monseigneur, the 
Bishop, or to Monsieur the Governor; this 
caused a great sensation." 

Possibly, Father Francois de Crepieul had 
this case in mind when, nearly twenty years 
after the event, he wrote his instructions for 
those preparing for the Montagnais missions : 
"Long prayers in public are not to be recom- 
mended, and marriages of white men to Indian 
women ought not to be celebrated, if the 
approval of the Bishop has not been obtained." 

Tadousac, in the 17th century, was not only 
the headquarters of the fur trade and the 
center for the missions of the Saguenay and 
Lake St. John territories, but a port where 
the European ships to and from Quebec 
called, and from which departed the undaunt- 
ed missionary Fathers for the tribes hunting 
in northern and north-eastern forests. 

Although a missionary center and a trading 
post of great importance, Tadousac was, from 
time to time, abandoned to solitude, was 
eaten up by forest fires and its population 
ravaged by pestilence and small-pox. Before 
it became a permanent missionary station 
it was a rendezvous for the fur traders and a 
place to which the Algonquins came to barter 
their furs and peltries. Here also came a 
Franciscan or Jesuit Father from Quebec 
who, for the two or three months that the 



40 DOOM OF THE TRADING POST 

fur market was open, instructed the Indians, 
perfected their knowledge of the Algonquin 
dialects and cultivated the friendship of many 
of the savages from northern regions. 

When the market was sold out, the traders 
sailed for France or went on to Quebec. The 
Montagnais returned to their hunting lands 
accompanied often by the missionary, and 
Tadousac was abandoned to its rocks and 
solitude. In the Relation for 1652, we read: 
"Tadousac is deserted except at the time of 
the arrival of the ships. Then a mission is 
given to the wandering barbarians who as- 
semble there from various parts, from a dis- 
tance of three hundred miles and more, and 
are instructed for two or three months." 

In 1661, Iroquois warriors entered Tadousac 
and, after slaughtering the inhabitants who 
failed to escape, including three French fisher- 
men, burned the post, the Church and the 
warehouse. The Indians of the surrounding 
lands, fleeing from the wrath of the Iroquois, 
fled for refuge to their kinsmen the Papin- 
achois, and not until the return of Father 
Druillettes, in 1663, did they venture to come 
back. 

In 1702, the Superior General of the missions 
of New France, unable to spare a priest for 
Tadousac, closed the Saguenay mission. It 
was re-opened in the month of June, 1720, by 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 41 

Father Laure and from that time until now 
Tadousac has always had the ministrations 
of a priest. In his Relation, written in 1720, 
Father Laure says: "There was never in Tad- 
ousac more than one French house and a few 
lodges of savages who came here to exchange 
their furs." 

Again writing in 1733 he tells us: "At the 
mouth of the river is the chief trading place 
or capital of the Province of Saguenay. 
This is Tadousac, consisting of one wooden 
house and a store. It must be admitted that 
the situation is very fine and well suited for 
a place to build a city. The post is attractive 
and healthy. It was at one time a thriving 
mission where as many as three thousand 
Indians assembled to trade and to whom three 
Jesuit Fathers ministered." In this interest- 
ing letter he dwells on the beauty of Tadousac 
in summer time, "its thousand diminutive 
trees and wild flowers," the cooling breezes, 
the canoes and ships passing up and down 
the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay. He 
regrets that there were only twenty-five Mont- 
agnais families living there, and mourns over 
the destruction by fire of the Chapel of the 
Holy Cross. 

In 1670 Tadousac was consumed by a 
forest fire which for three days ravaged the 
Saguenay lands. This fire destroyed the 



42 DOOM OF THE TRADING POST 

only house and store in the place, the Indian 
chapel and the small building where the 
missionary Fathers slept and took their 
meals during the late spring and early summer 
while the savages were trafficking with the 
traders. 

When Father Charlevoix, the historian 
and traveller, visited Tadousac in 1721, he 
saw "no house, nor habitation nor sign of 
life," and when the botanist, Andre Michaux, 
entered the harbour, in 1803, on his way to 
Lake Mistassini, there was only a solitary 
shelter a Montagnais "wind-break" in the 
deserted post. 

If the bodies of all who died of fever, small- 
pox and other diseases in the historic place 
since Cartier's landing in 1535, could be re- 
materialised, reconstructed and built into a 
pyramid, the base of the pyramid would be as 
broad, and bulk as large as the foundation 
of Cape Trinity and its apex would reach 
as high as that of Cape Eternity. When, 
in 1657, Father Albanel was leaving Tadousac 
to winter with the moose hunters, east of 
Lake Kenogami, he mourned that of twelve 
hundred savages who camped around the 
mouth of the Saguenay in the spring of 1655, 
eleven hundred perished of a loathsome con- 
tagious disease. 

The Relation for 1670 records that "Father 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 43 

Albanel spent most of the past winter among 
the dead and dying in Tadousac and its 
neighbourhood. During this terrible winter 
two hundred and fifty Christian Indians died 
from small-pox in ten weeks." 

In the history of Tadousac two facts 
challenge our attention and respect. It was 
for nearly two centuries the place of trade to 
which converged almost every summer fur- 
laden representatives of the wild tribes of 
Papinachois, Montagnais, Misstassini, Outa- 
bitibec, Esquimaux, Etchemins, Gaspians, 
Algonquins and smaller bodies from the 
Seven Islands and inland forests north of the 
St. Lawrence River. But the fame and name 
of the fascinating village is forever embedded 
in our Canadian annals by reason of its 
intimate association with the early missions. 
When we enter the period embracing the 
heroic lives and illustrious names of the great 
Franciscans and Jesuits who, departing from 
Tadousac, devoted themselves" to civilizing 
and Christianizing the wandering hordes of 
the uncharted regions of northern wastes, we 
enter again the "Cycle of Roman Martyrs." 

The splendid self-sacrifice, devotion, and 
immolation of these saintly men invest this 
village with properties of consecration. Their 
sanctity and heroism dignify and ennoble the 
annals of the sacred ground. Henceforth 



44 DOOM OF THE TRADING POST 

"its history," writes Arthur Buies in his 
delightful monograph Le Saguenay et la Basin 
du Lac Saint- Jean, "is hardly any other than 
that of the missions which were held here 
from 1640 to 1782 by the Jesuit Fathers and 
after 1782 by secular priests." 

Beginning with 1615, when the Franciscan 
and Recollet Fathers assumed charge of the 
Tadousac mission, the very stones speak to 
us of God, of immortality, of Redemption 
of all that enlarges the horizon of the soul 
even to the infinite. The study of the lives 
of the early missionaries show in high relief 
to the man of plastic imagination the sanct- 
ity of a Dolbeau, the heroism of a Le Jeune 
and the religious intrepidity of a Dequen, a 
Dablon and an Albanel, heroes and saints 
who, for love of perishing souls, for God and 
France, dared the wilderness and challenged 
the spectres of cold, starvation and death. 

On treading its consecrated soil the annals 
of its past inspire the mind with a laudable 
desire to trace anew the footsteps of these 
saintly men and to salute its mountains, 
unconscious witnesses of their courage and 
holiness. The venerable Indian Chapel and 
the very stones of the place are sanctified by 
the footprints of apostles and martyrs who 
here nourished the plant of Christian civiliza- 
tion. They are all mementoes, not alone of 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 45 

a sacred antiquity, but of the inspired efforts 
of great souls to energise and realize the sub- 
lime hope of our .Divine Lord "that we all 
may be one." 

Where stood the primitive bark chapel 
raised in 1648, by the Montagnais neophytes 
of Father Dequen, there arises to-day an 
attractive stone temple built by the gener- 
osity of another race. The first white priest 
and his Indian converts have been in their 
graves for almost three hundred years, but, on 
the consecrated altar of the white man's 
church, there is offered to-day the same un- 
changeable Sacrifice in the same unchange- 
able language that the great priest offered to 
the same adorable God centuries ago. Be- 
tween this Church and Father Coquart's 
Montagnais Chapel of 1747 is the humble 
grave-yard sown with unpretentious monu- 
ments to the memory of the dead whose bodies 
are here returning to their primitive elements. 
In this consecrated plot of ground no man 
may separate the dust of Algonquin men and 
women from that of the Bretons, Normans and 
Canadians whose remains are here interred. 
Here, among Indians and whites, they should 
have buried the body of Pere Labrosse and, 
over all, raised a monument of Laurentian 
granite. And into this monument should be 
chiselled these words from the Epistle of 



46 DOOM OF THE TRADING POST 

St. Paul to the Romans: "The sufferings of 
this world are not to be compared with the 
glory to come that shall be revealed to us." 
(Rom. VIII, 15). 



CHAPTER V. 
THE COMING OF THE FRANCISCANS. 

"In 1624, five Recollet missions had been 
established at Tadousac, Quebec, and Three 
Rivers; at Carhagouha, in the Huron country, 
and among the Nipissings. There was an- 
other, in Acadia, on St. John River (New 
Brunswick)."* 

Before we enter upon the narrative re- 
cording the labours and sacrifices of the 
Franciscans on the Montagnais missions, we 
ought to know something of the reasons which 
moved Champlain to petition for them, and 
the intricate process through which the pet- 
ition passed and was finally granted. 

After Champlain had given to the land 
and the few houses he had built upon it the 
name Quebec, he was moved by his strong 
Catholic instincts and faith to procure priests 
for his colony and missionaries for the Cana- 
dian tribes. " Having noticed in my previous 
voyages," writes Champlain, " that the people 
whom I visited are without any knowledge of 
God or religion, having neither faith nor laws 

* Jesuit Relations, Vol. IV., p. 259. The Recollet Fathers 
were Franciscans, members of what was called "The Rule of 
strict observance." 

47 



48 COMING OF THE FRANCISCANS 

to govern them, but living like brute beasts, 
I am of the opinion that it would be for me a 
grave fault if I did not endeavour to employ 
some means by which they could come to the 
knowledge of the true God. For this reason 
I am determined on my return to seek for 
some good religious priests who are filled with 
zeal and have at heart the glory of God." 

In 1614 he appealed to the Franciscan 
Fathers of the Province of Saint-Denis, 
France, to accept the honour of sending 
priests of their Order to evangelize the savages 
of New France and minister to the settlers in 
and around Quebec. While the Franciscans 
cheerfully acceded to his request, they in- 
formed him that before they could commit 
themselves to the laudable enterprise, certain 
formalities had to be complied with and per- 
missions obtained from the ecclesiastical and 
civil authorities. 

Fortunately the Council, known as the 
States General, was then in session at Paris, 
and among the members were the Cardinals, 
Archbishops and Bishops of the Royal Domain. 
The Prelates, when Champlain's petition was 
presented to them, readily granted his re- 
quest and offered to contribute to the expense 
of the mission. 

The Minister General of the Franciscans 
now appealed to His Holiness, Pope Paul V., 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 49 

for his approval. He was supported in his 
address to the pontiff by the King of France, 
who wrote to his Holiness that he would be 
much pleased to have the Franciscans sail 
for Canada and assume the responsibility of 
establishing religion in the new country "to 
make known to the savages the doctrines of 
the Catholic Church, and to administer 
baptism and the other sacraments.* 

By a brief dated May 26th, 1615, Paul V. 
granted permission to the Franciscans to 
leave for Canada, attaching to the authoriza- 
tion a codicil specifying their privileges and 
the limitations of their authority on the 
Canadian mission. The four members of 
the Saint Denys' House of the Franciscans 
who volunteered for foreign service after 
finishing a spiritual retreat of seven days, 
bade good-bye to their relatives, brethren and 
friends, and entered, bare-footed, on the road 
to Honfleur, from which port they sailed 
April 24th, 1615, for Canada. While they are 
experiencing a rough time on a tempestuous 
sea, let us learn something about them. 

The Superior of the heroic little band, 
Denys Jamet, was a man of undaunted cour- 
age, virtue, and zeal. At the time he volun- 
teered for the mission to which he was now 

* Les Franciscans et le Canada, Vol. I. 



50 COMING OF THE FRANCISCANS 

sailing, he held the Presidency of the Mon- 
astery of Montargis, an office he willingly 
surrendered to obey what he believed to be 
a call from God. 

His companion, Joseph Le Caron, before 
taking the Vows of St. Francis, in 1610, had 
been for years a diocesan priest and Preceptor 
to the Duke of Orleans. When he expressed 
a wish to be chosen for the Canadian mission 
he was well-informed on the severity of the 
climate, the immensity of the forests and the 
degradation of the Indians. 

Jean Dolbeau was only a few years ordained 
to the priesthood, was burning with apostolic 
zeal and inflamed with an ardent charity. 
He was destined to be the first to experience 
the trials and hardships of a winter with the 
savages. 

Pacifique Duplessis had been a druggist 
for some years before he asked to be admitted 
to the Order as a lay-brother. He was a 
faithful and useful man, of great piety and 
zeal, but unfortunately he died and was buried 
at Quebec three years after coming to the 
country. 

On May 25th, 1615, their ship anchored in 
the harbour of Tadousac, where the Francis- 
cans landed and rested for a few days. The 
land offered them no hospitable welcome. 
A desolation of sand dunes, innumerable 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 51 

storm-washed boulders, an endless forest 
shrouded in darkness and tenanted with wild 
beasts, and menacing mountains bristling 
with dwarfed pines and birches invited them 
to prolonged suffering and friendly graves. If 
they recoiled with sadness from the forbidding 
face of their adopted country, it was but a 
momentary manifestation of human weakness. 
Falling on their knees they invoked the 
protection of the Guardian Angels of the 
land and sang a Te Deum of praise and 
thanksgiving to God, Who had made choice 
of them for the arduous work of the Canadian 
mission. These devoted men were the pion- 
eers of the Cross in New France. Champlain, 
who had crossed the Atlantic with the Fran- 
ciscans, accompanied them on their way to 
Quebec, where they arrived on June 2nd. 
Encouraged by Champlain, the Fathers began 
and in three weeks completed, the Church of the 
Immaculate Conception, the first sacred struc- 
ture erected in Canada. On June 25th in the 
presence of Champlain and his sailors, Father 
Dolbeau with solemn rites offered up the Holy 
Sacrifice the first Mass celebrated in the city 
of Quebec.* . 

*The first Mass said in New France if Cartier had no priest 
on blardtss^fp on a his first or second voyage-was, accordmg 
to Champlain, offered up at Riviere des F 
'"Isolations of Laverdiere (1615, p. 16, note 1 ; also Vol. 



52 COMING OF THE FRANCISCANS 

From 1615, when the Franciscans landed in 
Canada, till the year 1629, when Quebec sur- 
rendered to the English, they were the pion- 
eers of the faith in the country. In 1615, 
Le Caron left Quebec to evangelize the 
Hurons of the Georgian Bay regions. Jamet 
alternated between Quebec and Three Rivers, 
ministering to the French at these posts, 
while good brother Pacifique attended to the 
temporalities of their little home at Quebec, 
instructed the Indian children, and baptized 
dying infants. Father Dolbeau, after a brief 
stay at Quebec, sailed for Tadousac, where he 
opened the first mission to the Algonquins. 



CHAPTER VI. 
WITH THE SAVAGES. 

DOLBEAU. 

On December 2nd, 1615, Father Dolbeau 
sailed for Tadousac and in the depth of winter 
entered at once on his mission to the Mon- 
tagnais. Never did apostolic man face a 
more trying experience or enter upon a 
more severe apprenticeship. Unfamiliar with 
the Montagnais dialects, which presented 
almost unsurmountable difficulties of con- 
struction and pronunciation, unseasoned 
to the severity and hardships of a Canadian 
winter and untrained to the use of the snow- 
shoe, the heroic missionary almost succumbed 
to starvation and the horrors of tribal encamp- 
ments. While Le Caron was entombed in 
Huron forests, one thousand miles to the 
west and Champlain was exploring the upper 
Ottawa and Georgian Bay regions, Father 
Dolbeau, in company with a band of Bersiam- 
ites, snow-shoed the territory north-east of the 
Saguenay, instructing as best he could the 
wandering families he encountered. 

Compelled at times to live in a filthy 
shack, in which were crowded promiscuously 

53 



54 WITH THE SAVAGES 

together savage men, women and children 
crawling with vermin ; to sleep in brush cabins 
where the smoke was suffocating; to drag his 
sleigh on snow shoes through the darkling 
woods and, when game was scarce, to eat 
only once in two or three days, the heroic 
priest endured a purgatory of suffering, pati- 
ently borne, unlike anything his French 
imagination had pictured. Unable to endure 
the hardship of travel over snow and ice and 
the abominations of a Montagnais lodge, his 
health broke down. Suffering the severe 
pains of smoke-blindness, he was brought 
back to Tadousac. From Tadousac he sailed 
for Quebec, where he remained till he recovered 
his sight and health. 

Undaunted by his terrible experience, the 
brave Franciscan, on the opening of spring, 
again left for the Montagnais country, visiting 
the camps of the Papinachois, the Bersiam- 
ites and outlying bands of the Labrador 
Esquimaux. La Potherie records that many 
years after the death of this exemplary priest, 
traces of his travels and many of the salutary 
effects of his instructions remained with the 
Gulf savages.* 

LE CARON. 

The saintly Dolbeau was succeeded at 

* Histoire de I'Amerique: M. de Bacqueville de la Potherie, 
Vol. II. p. 173. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 55 

Tadousac in 1618 by the Huron missionary 
Father Joseph Le Caron, the friend of Champ- 
lain and one of the most sympathetic and 
admirable personalities among the many Fran- 
ciscan Fathers who, from 1615 to 1629, 
followed the tribes through the Canadian 
wilderness. Undeterred by the advice of 
Champlain, this remarkable priest accomp- 
anied a number of Huron Indians who were 
returning from Three Rivers to their hunting 
grounds on the Georgian Bay. Arriving at 
Caragouha in the Georgian Bay region, half- 
starved and exhausted from the hardships 
of the voyage, he began at once to study the 
Huron language. After acquiring a partial 
familiarity with the Huron gutturals, he tried 
to instruct the savages in the essential truths 
of religion and to teach the children how to 
pray and to sing. 

He was the first apostle of the Hurons and, 
except Etienne Brule, the first white man who 
ever penetrated the Huron forests. On August 
12th, 1615, he celebrated at Caragouha the first 
Mass ever offered up in Canada west of Mon- 
treal. He remained with the Hurons nine 
months, when he was called, or went of his own 
volition, to France on business connected with 
the Canadian missions. Returning in 1617, 
he passed the winter 1618-19 with the Mon- 
tagnais at Tadousac. Here he devoted him- 



56 WITH THE SAVAGES 

self heart and soul to the training of the 
Indians. He dwelt upon the disorders which 
prevailed among them, taught them how to 
make the sign of the Cross, how to say the 
beads, the ordinary prayers and the ten com- 
mandments, and imparted to them general 
ideas of the Christian religion. He opened a 
school where he taught the children the 
rudiments of education and how to sing the 
Canticles and Chants of the Church. In 
time he acquired a thorough knowledge of the 
Montagnais language, which enabled him to 
extend the sphere of his labours and to write 
a Montagnais grammer and vocabulary. 
Never was there a more tender-hearted and 
lovable priest than this humble and gentle 
friar. He was dowered with a peculiar and 
exquisite sweetness of nature which seems 
to have enchanted everyone with whom he 
came in contact. To him and his companions 
on the missions, Canada and the Church owe 
a deep debt of gratitude. 

RETURN OF THE FRANCISCANS TO FRANCE. 

In 1629, after the surrender of Quebec, the 
Franciscan fathers returned to France. They 
were the first to break the path and open a 
way through the forests of Quebec and Ontario. 
The Franciscans were never wanting in the 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 57 

hour of trial; they were eminently men of 
practical minds of action and business, of 
letters and science. Their education and 
training had taught them the knowledge of 
themselves, called by St. Francis "a mysteri- 
ous and excellent study," and their travels 
and association with civilized and savage men ' 
taught them the knowledge of their fellow- 
men. The Franciscans were not only the 
first missionaries to Canada, but they were the 
first teachers and the first to open schools in 
our Dominion. The school which they open- 
ed in their monastery of Our Lady of the 
Angels at Quebec was the beginning of all 
the schools in Canada. They also compiled 
grammars and dictionaries of the Montagnais, 
Algonquin and Huron languages. 

"In presence of the heroism and indomit- 
able faith of these first missionaries," writes 
Dr. Anderson in his History of the Anglican 
Church in the Colonies, "we would prove false 
to history and to truth if we allowed a narrow- 
minded spirit to influence us in withholding 
the homage of our respect and admiration." 
When in the month of October, 1916, Quebec 
and its citizens dedicated the splendid monu- 
ment they raised on the Place-d' Armes 
perpetuate and honor the memories and names 
of Denys Jamet, Jean Dolbeau, Joseph Le 



58 WITH THE SAVAGES 

Caron and Pacifique Duplessis, spiritual sons 
of St. Francis d'Assisi, they won the applause 
of all who admire courage, faith, sincerity, 
and divine zeal. 



BOOK II. 

THE MONTAGNAIS 



CHAPTER VII. 
THE ALGONQUINS. 

Before we begin to study the habits, man- 
ners and customs of the particular tribes and 
sub- tribes, with whom the missionary Fathers 
from Tadousac were brought into intimate 
contact, it is expedient to know something 
of the parent tree of which these tribes were 
the offshoots and branches. 

The Algonquin family covered, at one period 
in its history, a larger territory than any other 
aboriginal people with whom our American 
ethnologists deal. 

WHENCE CAME THEY ? 

Back into the dark night of the ages the 
densest obscurity conceals all that we know or 
can know of the Algonquin Indians. "They 
were here before the time of Carder." Under 
these words is hidden a measureless eternity. 
The mountains, tree-wrapped, desolate and 
storm-swept, were here before Egypt was or 
Methuselah born, but when did the red man 
first scale them, when came he here and why? 
Is he of a race older than our own, whose 

61 



62 THE ALGONQUINS 

forebears escaped the Deluge or whose land 
the destroying waters left untouched? 

Who are these men of an indigenous race, 
who waste away while we grow strong, who 
retire when we move forward, who die where 
we survive, and become poor as we prosper 
and grow rich? 

A people who have no literature, who leave 
no monuments, who have no national or tribal 
memories of the past, are a people who have 
no history. "Our Indians," wrote the great 
Archbishop Tache of St. Boniface, in 1868, 
"have no chronicles, no annals, no written 
monuments, no records of any kind whatso- 
ever." That this statement, alluding to the 
past of the tribes of the Northwest, applies to 
savages wherever found, we learn from the 
writings of travellers and explorers of every 
age. " I could find no monuments or marks of 
antiquity among these Indians (of Guiana)" 
writes the naturalist Waterton, in his "Wan- 
derings in South America,'' "I have seen 
nothing amongst them which tells me that 
they existed here for a century; though for 
aught I know to the contrary they may have 
been here before the Redemption. Were I, 
by any chance, to meet the son of the father 
who moulders here, he could tell me that his 
father was famous for slaying tigers and ser- 
pents and caymen, and noted in the chase 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 63 

of the tapir and wild boar, but that he re- 
members little or nothing of his grandfather." 

Similarly, for us the Algonquins, before 
Champlain's coming and the time of the mission- 
ary fathers, were as if they were non-existent. 
Indeed, from the fragmentary information 
in our possession, we only know that all the 
great tribal families of America have had, 
like the nations of Asia and Europe, their 
days of prosperity and failure. Some divi- 
sions of the aboriginal race had, before their 
descent to savagery, produced from within 
themselves chroniclers of their past history. 
Such are the Aztecs of Mexico and the Mayas 
of Yucatan and Chiapas. 

Nearly all the tribal nations inhabiting 
America before its discovery have disappeared, 
leaving no documentary or monumental re- 
cords. Their deeds and their past have no 
historians. Their achievements and their 
lives are but legends like unto those which 
the Chinese include in their Annals, but which 
they expressly designate as "Parts outside 
of History." The pre-Columbian history of 
the American Indian is embraced in the 
enigmatical words " Pre-historic America." 
The history of the tribes o the Canadian 
Wilderness before the dawning of the six- 
teenth century is a blank, and the great 
events and deeds in their lives are buried 
beyond the hope of a resurrection. 



64 THE ALGONQUINS 

CLASSIFICATION AND DIVISION. 

When in 1647 Father Dequen canoed the 
Saguenay on his way to Lake St. John, the 
Algonquin family by geographic classification 
fell into four tribal divisions. These were : 

1. Eastern Division, embracing all the 
Algonquin tribes living along the Atlantic 
Coast. 

2. Central Division, including tribes and 
tribal family groups hunting in Ohio, Michigan, 
Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin. 

3. Northern Division, extending from the 
extreme northwest of the Algonquin area 
to the far west, and claiming as their 
hunting reserves both banks of the Ottawa, 
all lands north of the Great Lakes and regions 
on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. 

4. Northeastern Division, embracing the 
tribes roaming through the forests of eastern 
Maine, the Maritime Province's and all the 
eastern and northeastern lands of Quebec 
Province. 

In this article we are concerned only with 
that group of the fourth division which 
includes the Montagnais, Bersiamite, Nas- 
capee, Mistassini, Papinachois, the Atti- 
kamigues or White Fish, and groups of fami- 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 65 

lies and sub-tribes, affiliated with or federated 
with the stronger and more numerous bodies. 

These tribes, known to the French as Les 
Algonquins Inferieurs, to distinguish them 
from the western tribes of the Great Lakes, 
are the only members of the national body 
which interest us at present, and with which 
we will deal in this review. But, before 
doing so, we may remark incidentally that 
the history of the Algonquins embraces the 
names of some great men. Among them is 
King Philip, who threatened the expansion of 
the Puritan colony ; Pontiac, who laid siege to 
Detroit and whom Parkman honoured with 
a biography; Black Hawk and Francis, the 
Prophet; and Tecumseh, the celebrated 
Shawnee warrior and orator, whom John D. 
Hunter, who was present when Tecumseh 
addressed the Osage warriors, admitted was 
the greatest orator he had ever heard. 

As a rule, it is impossible to discriminate 
accurately between tribes, family groups and 
sub-tribes, for, in the regions north and north- 
east of Tadousac, the Indians were often 
grouped into small communities, each band 
taking its name from a river, stream, lake or 
hill. 

There are now no living representatives of 
some of the smaller bodies mentioned in the 
Jesuit Relations. All the members of the 



66 THE ALGONQUINS 

Algonquin family, living in the time of Father 
Le Jeune in what is now the Province of 
Quebec, were retrograding through being too 
long confined within narrow limits and through 
intermarriage among themselves. From a 
state of arrested development they began 
slowly to decay and the records of all the 
races of ancient and modern times show that 
when a people begin to experience the effects 
of decay the end is not, ethnologically, far off. 

As the early explorations of the Jesuit 
missionaries advanced north and east of the 
Saguenay River the Algonquin tribes of these 
desolate regions were the first to feel the 
effect of contact with a superior race. These 
tribes were nomadic and lived by fishing and 
hunting. 

From the time of Champlain's defeat of 
the Onondagas in 1609, the hostility of the 
Iroquois to the Algonquins became deadly 
in its malignity. The formation of the Iro- 
quois confederacy, early in the seventeenth 
century, had assumed such strength and 
proportions that in 1648 the Algonquins 
renewed their appeal to the French for pro- 
tection. 

While the great central fact of our early 
history was the unalterable loyalty of the 
Iroquois to the English, the French could 
never be sure of the unshaken friendship 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 67 

of the Algonquins. They were dispersed 
over an immense territory and unable to unite ; 
they lacked cohesiveness and the power to 
concentrate. They were disorganised and 
undisciplined, and, while their relations with 
the French were always friendly, one or two 
of the tribes, for example, the Fox tribe, were 
not to be trusted. 

For intelligence, courage and physical en- 
durance, the Algonquins were not surpassed 
by the Hurons or Iroquois, but, unable to 
organize, they failed to use the power and 
influence which belong to organised bodies. 
The alliances between themselves were with- 
out permanent cohesion. Even against the 
Iroquois their ruthless and common enemy 
they were incapable of combination. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE MONTAGNAIS. 

The group of linguistically and closely 
related Algonquin tribes of the territory now 
included in the Province of Quebec was called 
by the early French, Montagnais High- 
landers or Mountaineers from the hilly char- 
acter of the country they inhabited. 

Although Dr. James Mooney, of the Bureau 
of American Ethnology, has from his great 
Indian lore and research, given us the names 
of the Montagnais tribes, it is impossible to 
make a complete classification, for the dia- 
lects of many of the tribes and sub-tribes 
perished with them. The information that 
has come down to us is not full enough to 
furnish us with sufficient data to make re- 
liable history. The sources of information 
are so remote as to be indistinct and to leave 
us in doubt whether certain bodies were con- 
federacies, tribes, families, or bands. From 
the Relations of Fathers Dequen, Albenal, 
Le Jeune and Crepieul, we cannot always 
distinguish with unerring accuracy between 
settlements of one tribe and bands of another. 
It was always difficult to discriminate between 
tribes, bands and villages of the Mistassini 

69 



70 THE MONTAGNAIS 

and Lake St. John regions. They were 
continually shifting their habitats and were 
grouped only temporarily in communities and 
villages, and this makes a geographic classi- 
fication extremely difficult. Even the dia- 
lects of some of the tribes are known only 
by a few words found in the letters and manu- 
scripts of the Jesuit missionaries and early 
explorers. Some of the sub-tribes have en- 
tirely perished and have left no traditions. 

THEIR HUNTING GROUNDS. 

We have no reliable information on the 
boundaries of the lands over which the nine 
Montagnais tribes hunted and fished. From 
the mouth of the Saguenay to Lake St. John 
they claimed the regions on both sides of the 
river, including the present counties of Charle- 
voix and Chicoutimi. Their hunting grounds 
also covered a territory east and west of the 
Peribonka River, and the forests around the 
Ashuapmuichan, Mistassini and Mistassibi 
rivers. They also laid claim to all lands of 
Lake St. John county as far as the height of 
land line running from File Axe Lake to 
Lake Albanel and eastward to Manuan Lake. 
They roamed all over the northern watershed 
of the St. Lawrence, east of Tadousac, till 
they touched the territory of the Nascapees, 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 71 

who, on the north-east, came in immediate 
contact with the Esquimaux of Labrador. 

In Father Laure's wonderful map, drawn 
in 1731, the Montagnais hunting-grounds 
covered all the territory from Lake Nekouba 
on the west to the shore of Lake St. Barnaba, 
and from the River St. Lawrence to Lake 
Mistassini. It was a region covered with 
forests, mountains, lakes, rivers, swamps and 
swales. Writing of the awful desolation of 
wilderness, as it was in 1641, Father Lalemant 
says, "Father Gabriel (Druilettes) went with 
the Montagnais, eighty or a hundred leagues 
from Quebec, into the land of shades, so to 
speak; that is to say, amid frightful mountains 
and forests, where the sun never looks upon 
the earth except by stealth." 

THE MONTAGNAIS TO-DAY. 

To-day the Montagnais roam over the 
southern watershed of Quebec Province as 
far as the southern parts of the Labrador 
Peninsula. They number about 3,000 and 
are regularly visited by the Oblate Fathers, 
who, in 1843, succeeded the Jesuits. Lew 
Wallace, in his Long Labrador Trail, says of 
those he met at Lake Michikamauin : "They 
are all under the influence of the Roman 
Catholic Church and are most devout in the 
observance of their religious obligations. 



72 THE MONTAGNAIS 

To the north, between Eastmain River and 
Petite Kapan Lake, the territory belongs to 
the Nascapees, a Montagnais buffer tribe, 
which, for four centuries, has been inter- 
mittently at war with the Esquimaux of 
Labrador and the Ungava Bay country. 

While the early Jesuit missionaries occasion- 
ally got in touch with them, it was not until 
1856 that permanent missions were opened 
among them by Fathers Babel and Arnauld. 
These Oblate missionaries established missions 
at Nekupan and Petetskupan on the North 
West River, and at the Hamilton Inlet and 
Seven Islands opposite Anticosti. 

Father Lemoine, who for many years lived 
with the Nascapees, published, in 1910, his 
Dictionnaire Francais- Montagnais, including 
a grammar of the language. 

ANIMAL LIFE. 

Innumerable animals roamed over and 
filled this vast wilderness, among which 
which were the lynx and the fox, beaver, 
otter, porcupine, groundhog, squirrel, wolf, 
muskrat, bear, raccoon, moose, marten, rabbit, 
skunk, flying-squirrel, mink, weasel, mole, 
and field-mouse. There were snakes, lizards 
and frogs of many species and varieties. 
Add to these a countless number of birds, 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 73 

such as swans, brant and wild geese, cranes, 
teal, divers of many kinds, ernes, bitterns, 
herons, woodcocks, sandpipers, plovers, snipe, 
partridges, wild pigeons, starlings, eagles, 
turkeys, swallows, martins, ravens, crows, 
woodpeckers, hawks, and other birds of prey; 
quails, blackbirds, and ducks of at least 
twenty varieties, and an infinite number of 
smaller birds, which with almost all bird life, 
winged for the south every autumn, and 
returned as summer was coming to the land. 
The rivers and lakes teemed with fish, so 
that everywhere, in the air, on the land, 
and in the water, there was superabundant 
life. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE; MONTAGNAIS TRIBE. 

When, in 1647, Father Dequen stood - 
first of white men on the shore of Lake St. 
John, the Montagnais lived in brush or bark 
cabins of primit ve construction. In summer 
the young boys and girls went entirely naked, 
the men wore only the brayer or breech-cloth, 
but the women were, as a rule, decently 
dressed. In winter they all clothed them- 
selves with the furs of animals and wore shoes 
or moccasins of untanned leather. They were 
expert snowshoers, canoe and bowmen, sus- 
tained fatigue and hardship with Spartan 
stoicism, and knew intimately the habits and 
haunts of birds and animals. 

Speculation, theories, examination of early 
documents and investigation into all known 
sources of information fail to inform us when 
the Montagnais first entered into possession 
of their territory, whence they came, and 
from whom they inherited their language. 
We know nothing of their past; of their origin 
we have not even a tradition or a legend. 
All that we know of them we have learned 
from the letters of the French missionary 
priests who consorted with them in their 

75 



76 THE MONTAGNAIS TRIBE 

degradation, conformed to their ways of liv- 
ing, wintered with them, accompanied them 
in their wanderings, and endured the horrors 
of savagery that they might lift them to a 
plane not merely of civilization, but of Chris- 
tian decency and morality. 

Contact with them in more recent times has 
taught us nothing. Their past is impene- 
trable to the eye of historic research, for the 
origin of the Montagnais, like that of the 
Mayas of Yucatan, is veiled by the mists of 
a very remote past. 

Among them there was no social organiza- 
tion or system of government. The chiefs 
and elders of the Montagnais assembled in 
the open, or in a large lodge, and talked over 
the matters affecting the interests and welfare 
of the people. Their decisions, however, 
compelled no obedience, for every man deemed 
himself free and independent, and did that 
which he considered best for himself. Each 
man's liberty was absolute and. inviolable. 
A Montagnais realised Rousseau's conception 
of a perfect and "ideal man." He was un- 
tainted by civilization, did what he liked, was 
moved only by natural impulses, and if, accord- 
ing to the French deist: "I'homme qui reflechit 
est un animal deprave" " The man who medi- 
tates is a depraved animal," then, if the Mon- 
tagnais was not a free and independent man, 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 77 

there was no absolute freedom or indepen- 
dence upon the earth. There were, however, 
tribal laws and conditions with which, for his 
own safety, he considered it wise to conform. 
Among the Montagnais, murder, ingratitude, 
cowardice, and stealing from a tribal compan- 
ion were crimes punishable by death, by 
severe penalties, or by humilation. They 
knew nothing of morals and their acts and 
conduct were not regulated by any law higher 
than that of self or tribal preservation. 

When a member committed murder, he was 
punished, not by the tribe, but by the rela- 
tions of the murdered man, who demanded 
"blood for blood" without trial or conviction. 
Ingratitude of a serious nature was sometimes 
punishable with death. When a prisoner of 
a tribe with whom the Montagnais was at 
war was captured in battle and adopted by 
a family of the village, he was treated as a 
member of the tribe. If he escaped and was 
recaptured, he was burned at the stake. 

At times they executed cowards, for coward- 
ice was a blot upon the scutcheon of the whole 
tribe. The coward was put to death, pro- 
bably as an example to the boys ripening into 
warrior manhood. 

When, in 1643 the Bersiamites returned 
from a victorious campaign against the enemy, 
Etinechkwat, one of their number, acted, 



78 THE MONTAGNAIS TRIBE 

while the fight was on, a coward's part. 
When the warriors returned to their own 
people they were greeted by old men, women, 
and maidens with great rejoicings. Etinech- 
kwat quietly withdrew from the ceremonies 
of the camp, and, in sullen silence, sat down 
on a fallen tree near the river. Then, and 
apparently without design, the young girls 
and children danced and romped towards 
the river and came to the place where the 
young man was seated. Then Pieskaret, 
chief of the Bersiamites, walked carelessly 
through the dancing group and, standing 
before Ktinechkwat, said to him : 

"By your cowardice in front of our enemies, 
you have disgraced us. You must die." 
The festivities instantly stopped, and the 
warriors and boys of the camp gathered 
around victim and executioner. An ominous 
silence fell, like a shroud upon all. Etinech- 
kwat, without a word of explanation, or pro- 
test, rose to his feet, bared his breast, and the 
war chief struck. The body was carried 
outside the camp and buried. The cere- 
monies recommenced, and all but the dis- 
graced father and brother of the dead man 
passed the night in feasts and dances. 

Cowardice and treachery were regarded by 
all the Montagnais tribes and clans as damning 
and unforgivable capital offences. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 79 

The Naskopees were for many years inter- 
mittently at war with the Esquimaux of Lake 
Mackimau. In their skirmishes with the 
enemy " surprises " frequently happened. To 
understand a surprise or Chestwak, a word 
of explanation is necessary. From childhood 
the Montagnais boy learned to imitate the 
calls and cries of birds and animals. A 
hostile band of Montagnais or Esquimaux 
would, with extraordinary courage and se- 
crecy, draw near to the camp or village of 
the enemy, when an expert caller of the party 
would imitate the gobbling of the wild turkey 
in the spring, the clucking of the wood-hen 
in the summer when her young are feeding, 
the howling of the wolf, the bark of the fox or, 
indeed, the call or cry of any animal. Hear- 
ing the call or cry, the young men of the camp 
would snatch up their bows and arrows, rush 
into the woods, and be ambushed by the 
enemy. 

In the month of April, 1671, three young 
men of the Naskapees were lured into the 
woods by the gobbling of a turkey- 
cock. Two of them were killed and 
their scalps lifted; the third fled without fir- 
ing an arrow or striking a blow. During 
the race for camp his shouts aroused the 
warriors, who rushed out in pursuit of the 
Esquimaux, following them for hours, but 



80 THE MONTAGNAIS TRIBE 

failing to overtake them. On their way home, 
however, they encountered a number of 
Esquimaux hunters, whom they killed and 
scalped. 

That afternoon, when the returned warriors 
sat smoking with the elders of the village, 
Pentagouret, the one who ran away, came to 
join them under the spreading shade of a 
friendly elm. When he sat down, the others, 
without a word, rose and went off in a body. 
The young orphan girl whom he loved and 
who loved him tenderly in return, refused 
to speak to him. That night he left the camp 
and his tribe and disappeared forever. 



CHAPTER X. 
TENT LIFE OF THE MONTAGNAIS. 

When Father Dequen, in 1647, came to the 
beach of Lake St. John and looked out upon 
its pleasant waters, a numerous band of the 
Porcupine tribe lived in a village on land 
opposite Peribonka Point. The habits, 
traits of character, customs, morals and 
manners of the Porcupines or Piougami with 
whom the Jesuit missionary came into im- 
mediate contact were those of all their 
Algonquin kinsmen in their primitive state 
from Tadousac and Kenogami to Lake Mis- 
tassini. The Montagnais of that time cabin- 
ed in wretched huts and were grouped to- 
gether in scattered villages and temporary 
camps. These miserable squattings were 
never permanent, for when conditions became 
unfavourable, or a contagious disease threat- 
ened the lives of the community, they burned 
their shacks and moved to another site. 
Their cabins, being merely shelters of bark in 
winter and cedar branches in summer, were 
raised in a few hours. 

SOCIAL LIFE. 

In winter these bark huts were heated by 
a ground fire, the smoke of which escaped by 

81 



82 TENT LIFE OF THE MONTAGNAIS 

an opening in the roof. At times, when the 
air outside was piercingly cold and the winds 
unfavourable, the smoke in the lodge became 
so suffocating and dense that the women and 
children were compelled to lie low, breathing 
as best they could with their faces to the 
earth. Within these wretched cabins there 
were no separate rooms or even skin divisions, 
no beds, no seats, no conveniences of any kind 
save filthy mats and the skins of animals 
captured in the chase. 

They knew nothing of bread, salt, pepper, 
condiments or relishes of any kind. Their 
half wild and mongrel dogs were tormented 
with fleas, and their own hair and bodies 
were infested with lice. Their vermin in- 
fested hair was parted in the middle and 
drooped long over their shoulders and backs. 
Summer and winter they were at war with 
fleas and lice. "Why do you eat the lice you 
pick from your bodies and heads?" asked 
Father Le Jeune of a grizzled old warrior. 
" I eat them because they eat me." he answered. 

WOMEN AND CHILDREN. 

The care of the lodge, the dressing of skins, 
the cutting and gathering of firewood in a 
Porcupine encampment was the woman's 
work. She and her children gathered nuts 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 83 

and wild berries in season, grubbed for worms 
and field mice and cooked the food. She 
fleshed and cleaned the hides, cut and fibre- 
sewed the moccasins, and made garments for 
her children. Knowing nothing of metal 
pot, or oven, she either dug a hole in the 
ground which she plastered and fired, boiled 
water in a birch-bark vessel, called orougan, 
or found a hollow stump or log which served 
her for a stove or fire-place. With stones 
heated in the fire she boiled the water in the 
hole or hollow block, and threw into it scraps 
of rabbit flesh, fish, fragments of bear meat, or 
deer flesh, and on this stew fed her husband 
and children. 

She also contributed her share in the making 
of canoes and snowshoes. Four trees yielded 
their wood to the making of a canoe. There 
was birch for the sheeting, spruce for fibre- 
thread to sew the bark, white cedar for ribs 
and lining, and pine for pitch to fill seams and 
cracks. After the man had stripped and 
fashioned the bark, shaved the ribs and mould- 
ed the form, the woman sewed the bark and 
pine-pitched the seams. And so with the 
snowshoe. The frame was cut and fashioned 
by the man from the young birch tree and the 
babiche the lacing made of caribou hide, 
was cut, crossed and fastened by the woman. 

When the men were on a long hunt or took 



84 TENT LIFE OF THE MONTAGNAIS 

the war-path for an enemy's country, the 
women and children remained in their camps 
and villages. The squaws passed the time in 
gossip, making moccasins, weaving fish nets 
and preparing furs for winter clothing. The 
boys and girls fished in the streams, trapped 
birds, chased squirrels and amused themselves 
with various games. 

THE WARRIOR. 

The husband posed as a hunter and warrior, 
and his warrior's dignity scorned to stoop to 
menial work. His days in camp or village 
were given to slothful ease, to gambling and 
gossiping with his neighbours, to hunting and 
fishing, and to attending feasts when he danced 
all night and devoured everything set before 
him. 

When the weather was very cold and the 
winds whistled round the camp, he sat on a 
bearskin by the fire fashioning bows and 
arrows, rat and rabbit sticks, chipping flint 
arrow tips, and making traps and nets. He 
made his own canoes and paddles, his own 
snowshoes, his weapons, offensive and de- 
fensive, his spear and war club, his scalping 
knife of flint or bone, his stone pipes and his 
amulets. 

Though counted "poor fighters" by the 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 85 

Senecas, the Montagnais had all the fighting 
instincts and courage of the Algonquin. If 
killed in battle and his companions were 
unable to carry away his body, his scalp was 
torn from his head by the enemy, and his 
carcass left in the woods to be eaten by wolves. 
When the tribe was at peace with those 
outside its hunting grounds, the warrior who 
did no injury to others, who lived at peace 
with his companions, who gave and attended 
feasts and took a leading part in the dancing 
festivals and the tribal orgies, was always 
popular and stood well with his neighbours. 
The tribal orgies were generally boisterous 
carousals, when at times, men and women, 
young men and maidens abandoned themselves 
to nude dances and shameful impudicities. 



CHAPTER XL 

SUPERSTITIONS AND MYTHS OF THE 
MONTAGNAIS. 

The superstitions of the Montagnais were 
the same as those which influenced the lives 
of all eastern Algonquins. They believed 
in ghosts, in spirits or manitous dwelling in 
the air, in the forest, rivers and lakes. They 
had recourse to drums, breathings, songs, 
eat-all-feasts, divination by fire, sweats, pyr- 
rhic dances, lodges for consulting spirits and 
innumerable methods for obtaining good luck 
on the hunt, securing the cure of disease, 
gaining the good will of their okis and finding 
out if any enemies were lurking in the forests. 

Curious or exceptional natural formations 
were altogether avoided or became objects of 
fear and dread to which propitiatory offerings 
were made. Often they deposited at the 
openings of deep and gloomy caves, by the 
side of rushing cataracts, or at the trunks of 
tall and isolated trees their offerings of pieces 
of deer skin, or the body of a beaver, to obtain 
the goodwill of the spirits dwelling in and 
guarding the caves, cataracts and trees. 

The Mistassini paddlers warned Father 
Albanel not to look too long upon a distant 

87 



88 SUPERSTITIONS AND MYTHS 

island in the lake, lest the spirits dwelling on 
t should be angry. The Montagnais of Lake 
Papmjimoucani, a delightful sheet of water 
north-east of Lake St. John, told Father Laure 
that under its waters lived many spirits and 
that, when the waters were unsafe for a 
canoe, the spirits were quarrelling among 
themselves. 

The caves, huge boulders and rough lands 
on the northern shore of "Grand Mistasins" 
were said by the Mouatchich tribe to be haunt- 
ed by ghosts and evil spirits, who on dark 
nights swarmed upon the lake in spirit canoes. 
The cataracts of the upper Saguenay were 
haunted by Windigoes or demented spirits 
of great stature to whom the Pore-Epic 
Indians made offerings of bear flesh. 

Among the Mistassini the spirit of a drown- 
ed member of the tribe was an object of pity, 
for he could not enter the Happy Hunting- 
Grounds, but was condemned to haunt the 
water in which he was drowned. When his 
body floated ashore it was wrapped in a moose 
hide, carried by canoe to a small island and 
given a tree, or scaffold burial. Ever after- 
wards when a hunting or fishing Indian ap- 
proached the island he deposited near the tree 
supporting the body of the drowned hunter 
some food or a few arrows as tokens of 
sympathy. 



2. 




CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 89 

The Montagnais in order to placate the 
spirits celebrated feasts of the deer, moose, 
salmon, wild-goose, and an annual feast of 
the Great Bear. They also held at irregular 
intervals their war-dance, snake-dance, fire- 
dance, mask or false-face dance, bear-dance 
and dance for the dead. 

There is an interesting Montagnais myth 
woven around the false-face dance. After 
the world and its people and animals were 
made by Kitcheoub, he went away for a time. 
When he came back he walked through the 
great and small trees till he came to a place 
where there were no trees. While he was 
looking around he saw, coming from the east, 
an ugly long-haired fellow, with a red face and 
a big mouth twisted to the left side. When 
he came near, Kitcheoub spoke and asked : 

"Where did you come from?" 

Now this man's name was Skaniiwak and his 
ugly face was like a mask, so he spoke and said : 

" I own this world and I was here before 
you." Then Kitcheoub said to him: 

"I made this place and all the world and 
I own everything." 

" May be you did make it, but I have been 
here always and I am stronger than you," 
said Skanjiwak. 

"I'd like you to show me that you're the 
stronger," said Kitcheoub. Then the man 



90 SUPERSTITIONS AND MYTHS 

with the ugly face asked him to go with him 
to a place between two mountains. And 
when they came to the place the man with 
the false-face raised his voice and told one of 
mountains to rise up and come close to them, 
and it came. 

This astonished Kitcheoub, but not to be 
outdone by False-face he shouted to the other 
mountain to come on, and it came, and came 
so close that Kitcheoub and Skanjiwak could 
just squeeze out. 

Then Kitcheoub said to False-face, "If I 
were you I'd leave this country, for you are 
so ugly that when the children see you they'll 
run away and die of fear." The False-face 
said he would, on condition that from now on 
all the Montagnais would be his grand- 
children and that he was to be their grand- 
father. "I will do my best," he told Kit- 
cheoub, "to keep them from getting sick, and 
I will save them from great storms, for I'll 
command the winds that blow here to go 
high up in the sky and stay there." Now, 
Kitcheoub, looking him in the face, spoke to 
him : "I know you have power to help the 
Montagnais, so we, you and I, will make a 
bargain. The Montagnais will be your grand- 
children and you will be their grandfather. 
They will from this time make a dance in their 
villages forever. And they will call it the 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 91 

False-face Dance.. So now and here, near 
the two mountains, we close this bargain, 
which will last as long as you and I and the 
Montagnais last." Skanjiwak then opened 
his mouth and said : " It is to be. Now you 
must know I will have some one to help me. 
My brother, who is all black and my cousin 
who is half black and half red, will help me 
to care for the Montagnais." Kitcheoub and 
Skanjiwak then separated. The one told the 
other : "I am going to the setting sun," and 
False-face said to him, "I go where the sun 
rises." Now, the place where they separated, 
one from the other, was where the trees grow 
tall and the winds never blow too strong, that 
is, near File Axe Lake. And this day among 
the pagan Montagnais it is the practice to 
paint one side of the face black and the other 
red and to twist the mouth to one side when 
asking Skanjiwak for some favour. 

LEGEND OF THE BEAR BOY. 

A long time, a very long time ago, a Mon- 
tagnais and his squaw went into a great forest 
to hunt bears and to trap foxes. They 
brought along with them their little boy, and 
when they came to where the big pines grew 
they made a wigwam of bark and branches. 
Now, when the squaw went to the river for 



92 SUPERSTITIONS AND MYTHS 

water and her man was away hunting, a bear 
came and carried away their baby boy, and, 
when they shouted and searched they could 
not find their child. Six years later the man 
and his squaw were trapping and hunting in 
the same woods near the same place where 
their baby was lost. They had two dogs 
with them, one very fat and one very lean. 
The fat dog was fat, for the hunter was fond 
of it, and the lean dog was lean because the 
man half-starved him. But this half-starved 
dog had a good heart and the fat one had a 
bad heart. One morning the lean dog said 
to the fat dog : "If I were you I would tell 
Kon-went-ha, our master, where the cave of 
the bear is, for Kon-went-ha feeds you well, 
and he would like to find his little boy." 
Now the hunter in his wigwam heard the dogs 
talking outside and the next time he fed 
them the entrails of a deer he gave the lean 
dog two shares. This made the lean dog feel 
stronger and, to the surprise and anger of the 
fat dog, Kon-went-ha kept on feeding two 
shares to the lean dog. 

On the third day after he had heard the 
dogs talking to each other this man went 
away to hunt with the two dogs. When they 
came to a certain place the lean dog lay down 
and whined. And when Kon-went-ha called 
the lean dog away he would run back to the 
same spot and lie down and whine. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 93 

This made the man examine everything 
carefully. Soon he found a hole in the side of 
a hill and this hole was the entrance to a 
bear's den. Kon-went-ha poked a long pole 
into the hole and made a big noise. Then 
a she-bear came out and the man killed her, 
but the lean dog kept on whining for there 
were cubs in the cave. The man poked 
again and the cubs came out and they too 
were killed, but the dog still kept on whining. 
Kon-went-ha poked once more with the long 
stick. Then he heard someone in the cave 
saying, "Don't kill me, father, I'm your son." 
The man then called to him : "Put out your 
paw and show it to me." At once a little 
hand appeared all covered with hair. Kon- 
went-ha took hold of the little hand and 
pulled out a little boy who began to cry and 
to say, "Don't let the dogs bite me, don't let 
the dogs eat me." The child, who was hairy, 
walked on all four hands and feet and acted 
like a bear. Now before the she-bear left the 
cave she spoke to the little boy and said : 
"When your father sees that you are so hairy 
he will not like you, so tell him to gather 
berries, especially blackberries, and to pound 
them and soak them in water and then wash 
you in the water when all the hair will come 
off." 

This the father did and the hair came off, 



94 SUPERSTITIONS AND MYTHS 

and the boy grew up to be a great warrior and 
hunter. Now because the bear was good to 
him and did not kill the boy his tribe pro- 
claimed a dance every year in honour of the 
bear. And this was the beginning of the bear 
dance, so long ago that our old men do not 
remember it. 



THE DANCE OF THE UTTLE MEN. 

Among the pagan tribes hunting in the 
forests of Labrador and the lands bordering 
it on the east, there is a superstitious fear 
of mysterious beings, which, like the lepre- 
chauns of Ireland, the goblins,, gnomes and 
sprites of England, the jhinns of Asia and the 
jumbies of Africa, are occasionally seen and 
spoken to by hunters and travellers. They 
are strange-looking, little creatures, some- 
times covered entirely with hair, and at other 
times and places dressed in fantastic raiments. 
These pigmies were called yag-odin-eny-oyaks 
by the Iroquois of the west, and yamas by the 
Quiche Indians of Yucatan. It would be 
interesting to trace the history of the origin 
of this mythical dwarf and the universality of 
the belief in him among all primitive peoples. 
These little men were called by the Montag- 
nais Owat-we-gats, and once a year the tribe 
gave a dance to retain their good will. It 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 95 

was the custom to kill the first bear of the 
season, and as the pigmies were fond of soup, 
pieces of bear meat were cut up, boiled with 
roots and vegetables and served at the feast 
which was given before the dance. The 
dance of the Little Men consisted of a peculiar 
ceremony during the first part of which several 
songs were sung and dances entered into by 
the squaws. This dance of the squaws took 
place in a darkened tent, and consisted of 
alternate shuffles forward and back to the 
sound of a drum. Meanwhile the men were 
indulging in their own songs and dances. 
Then at a given signal they rushed into the 
tent of the squaws and a carnival of lewd 
dances ensued. The dance lasted from an 
hour to two hours and was held in a large 
tent built for the purpose. 

ORIGIN OF THE) TOAD. 

Told by Mistigoit, a Montagnais half-breed, from Carbonneau Lake 

Once there was an Indian and his wife and 
they had a baby, and there was also an old 
squaw who looked after the baby and stole it. 
Of course, in the olden times, the Indians used 
to put their babies on boards (Indian cradles) 
which were decorated with beads and nice 
cloth. The old people (the two old couples, 
the man's parents and the wife's parents) 



96 SUPERSTITIONS AND MYTHS 

and the young married man went away and 
left this young woman all alone, and she lived 
there alone. For a long time she waited, and 
one night when she was sitting by the fire 
feeling so sad and lonely, her son, whom the 
old squaw stole, came back. She told her son, 
"You were stolen from me when you were 
small." Of course her son did not know she 
was his mother. This baby had a little dog 
before he was stolen. She talked to her son 
and told him what to do. She said, "When 
you go back to the squaw who stole you, 
pretend that you are sick, and tell her that you 
want the board that you were put on when 
you were small. She will give you one made 
of cedar, but you will say to her, " not that one, 
I want the one with the beads on." And the 
old squaw who stole him gives him the one 
with the beads on, and he said, "I am well 
now." 

He went back to his mother and she told 
him what to do again. "You will pretend 
you are, sick again. She will ask you, 'Why 
are you sick ? ' and you will say, ' I want you 
to dance,' and she will. Tell her 'to lift her 
dress very high,' and you will see the spot 
where the dog bit her when she stole you away, 
and you will then believe she stole you and 
that I am your mother." The son did this. 

He went back to his mother again and she 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 97 

told him what to do again. "You go back 
again to the old woman who stole you, and 
you will go out hunting and kill one deer, and 
you will tie it very tightly to a tree so that 
she can't untie it. And while she is busy 
trying to untie the deer, you and I will go 
away and you will put an old strap beside the 
deer, which will answer her when she speaks 
to you. She will yell out, saying, 'Are you 
there yet, my son ? ' and the strap will answer, 
and you and I, before we leave, will kill two of 
her children, and we will put them at her door 
and will put their livers in their mouths, and 
when she returns to the camp she will be 
awful mad (enraged) when she sees her two 
children killed." This was so, and when the 
old witch returned she put a piece of buckskin 
on the fire and burnt it. The boy and his 
mother ran away and the old witch ran after 
them, and as she got very close to them, the 
boy had a bow and arrow, and the mother told 
him to put a mark on the ground, and the 
ground will split, and she (the witch) will lift 
up her dress to try and jump over, and she 
will fall in where the ground is open. And it 
was so. The woman whose son was stolen 
said to the witch, "You will be called Toad 
forever. You are not allowed to live when 
you steal people. You will be called Toad 
forever." 



CHAPTER XII. 

MONTAGNAIS MEDICINE-MAN. 

The medicine-man was an important func- 
tionary among the Montagnais Indians, and 
aspired to the possession of extraordinary 
power and knowledge. It is almost im- 
possible, however, from the information 
furnished us by the Jesuit missionaries, to 
draw a line separating the practice of medicine 
among them from their other superstitious 
practices and observances. 

Their priests were doctors, their doctors 
priests, and the two officials and offices were 
combined in the autmoin or medicine-man. 
Montagnais pathology was largely, if not 
wholly, mythical, and their therapeutics 
or methods of healing diseases consisted of 
natural remedies and incantations. They 
had a knowledge of some medicinal properties 
in certain plants, barks, and roots, and they 
understood the beneficial effects follow' ng 
emetics, purgatives, baths and poultices, but 
they did not apply their knowledge by any 
reasonable system of remedies. No rational 
system of medicine obtained among them, nor 
indeed, among any of the Algonquin or Huron 
tribes. 

99 



100 THE MONTAGNAIS MEDICINE-MAN 

The Montagnais apparently recognized 
three kinds of disease. There was a sickness 
that came from the cravings of a spirit within 
the sick man for some special article, for an 
eat-all-feast, for a war dance or a hunt. 
There was a disease following a spell cast upon 
a person by a sorcerer, or an enemy, or pro- 
duced by some small object, a lock of hair, an 
animal's claw, a human nail injected into the 
body of the patient while asleep and in which 
a wicked imp dwelt and tormented the sick 
man or woman. And there were diseases 
which were called natural and treated by 
natural remedies. 

When an individual of the tribe became ill, 
his relatives called in the medicine-man who 
determined the kind of sickness which afflicted 
him. If the medicine-man declared the sick- 
ness to be natural he prescribed either poul- 
tices, emetics, steam baths, applications of 
warm water, powdered roots or a particular 
herb. If no cure followed, the autmoin or 
medicine-man pronounced the sickness to be 
the result of an evil spirit dwelling in some 
small article which a sorcerer had hidden in 
the body, or part of the body of the sick man 
while he slept or was delirious. 

The autmoin now lays aside his office as a 
doctor and assumes the character of a magi- 
cian, or priest. Dressed in fantastic trappings 




THE CHi-Ciu-Kou 



Facing p. 100. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 101 

or sometimes entirely naked, the autmoin 
enters the lodge of the sick man carrying with 
him his drum and his Chi-chi-koue, or rattle, 
containing pebbles or knuckle-bones of the 
black bear. He begins by dancing and sing- 
ing. He boasts of his power to cure, of the 
strength and goodwill of his oki, or familiar 
spirit, he leaps in the air, twists his body, 
contorts his features and begins his incanta- 
tions, beating the drum and rattling his Chi- 
chi-koue. He now bounds forward to the sick 
man, asks where he feels pain and, applying 
his mouth to the affected part, sucks out a 
feather, a bird's claw, a human nail or some 
small and weird thing which he has already 
hidden in his mouth. Rising, he shouts aloud, 
throws the thing into the fire, and commands 
the evil spirit never again to enter the patient. 

Father Dequen remarks that very often 
the sick person was cured by suggestion, or 
by the belief that the oki, the cause of his 
illness, had left him. 

At times the autmoin removed with a sharp- 
pointed bone or piece of flint something already 
hidden in his own hand. But, apart from his 
supersititions, his belief in the effects of 
enchantments and incantations and his con- 
fidence in his dreams and manitous or okis in 
producing disease or restoring him to health, 
the Montagnais Indian, like all other Algon- 



102 THE MONTAGNAIS MEDICINE-MAN 

quins, was well acquainted with the anatomy 
of the human body. The practice of their 
hunters cutting up animals killed in the 
chase made them familiar with the viscera 
and internal organs of beasts of prey. They 
had, in their vocabulary, appropriate and 
distinct names for the heart, lungs, liver, gall, 
spleen, windpipe and other functiona organs. 
Experience, derived from examining the 
vital organs of animals killed in the hunt, 
taught them that the heart was the centre of 
life and the distributing reservoir of the blood. 
Besides their knowledge of the names of the 
important organs of the human body, they 
knew their positions, had definite ideas of 
their use, and, partially, of the manner by 
which they performed their functions. The 
Montagnais when first visited by Europeans 
was a primitive man, a man of nature, and 
was by his occupation and environment a 
healthy man. He generally lived to an ad- 
vanced age unless he was drowned, killed by 
accident or fatally wounded in a battle with 
his enemies. Much of his splendid health 
was owing to his stamina as a child, for a child 
born of healthy parents has the strength to 
resist disease. The treatment of children of the 
Montagnais tended to perpetuate hereditary 
firmness of constitution. Their first food was 
their mother's milk, with which they were 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 103 

nourished for two years and sometimes longer. 
To harden them against the influence of great 
heat and cold the natural enemies of health 
and life among the Algonquins they were dip- 
ped every morning in cold water. To preserve 
his shape and for convenience of moving from 
place to place on land and water the child was 
strapped to a board or laid in a frame of rods 
covered with buckskin and carried on the 
back of its mother until it was a year or 
two old. From this treatment and from 
simple and wholesome nourishment much 
vigour was imparted to the body of the child. 
The diet of the Montagnais varied with the 
seasons of the year. In summer they lived on 
fish, roots and berries, and in winter on the 
flesh of wild animals, trapped or captured on 
the hunt. They had no special hours for 
eating, but ate only when they were hungry. 
They knew nothing of salt, pepper or condi- 
ments. When Father Dablon met the Mon- 
tagnais and the Mistassini tribes in the 
forests east of Lake Nemiskau, they were 
suffering from a disease brought on by want 
of nutritious food. The prevailing diseases 
among them were anemia, and lung and 
bowel complaints, due to lack of nourishing 
food, to exposure to extremes of wet and cold, 
and to breathing, in winter, spring and fall, 
the smoke and foul air of their wigwams. 



104 THE MONTAGNAIS MEDICINE-MAN 

NATURAL REMEDIES AND MATERIA MEDICA OF 
THE ALGONQUINS. 

As previously stated, primitive man, or the 
man of nature, was by his occupation and envir- 
onment, a healthy man. Deformed children, 
or idiots, were almost unknown among the 
tribes. Their women never perished in child- 
birth, and suffered very little in parturition. 
Eight hours after the birth of her child the 
mother was ready for her ordinary Mu ties. 
The men were hardened by exposure to all 
kinds of weather, and by hunting and fishing, 
which protected them against disease and gave 
them remarkable recuperative powers when 
attacked by any malady. 

Their active life in the open air saved them 
from heart and kidney diseases, and from 
appendicitis and many other maladies to 
which civilized man is and will always be a 
victim. Moreover, aboriginal man of Canada 
knew nothing of alcohol, of condiments, spices, 
or opiates. He was not a salt user. The 
Mexican and Central American tribes were 
able to distil alcohol from the maguey and 
from other plants, but the Canadian Indian 
had not the material from which he could 
manufacture intoxicating liquor, and as a 
beneficent result, he was necessarily a sober 
man and protected from alcoholic poison. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 105 

But he was not altogether immune to disease, 
to plagues and epidemics. John Josselyn, in 
his " Account of Two Voyages to New England," 
writing (1674) of the maladies to which the 
Indians of New England were subject, says : 
"In New England the Indians are afflicted 
with pestilent fever, plagues, consumption of 
the lungs, falling sickness, King's evil, and a 
disease in the back with us known as empye- 
ma." Fevers and dysentery were also com- 
mon complaints among the tribes, but until 
the entry of the white man upon their lands, 
smallpox, scurvy and venereal diseases were 
unknown. 

His life as a hunter, canoeman and warrior 
was at times a life of accidents, or wounds and 
broken limbs. In his sickness and under the 
pain of his wounds he or his friends sought the 
help of nature and of the skilful men of his tribe. 
Knowing nothing of medical science, and hav- 
ing no literature to perpetuate the discoveries 
of his ancestors, primitive man acquired most 
of his knowledge in treating disease and 
wounds from his own experience, from tradi- 
tion, or from the experience of his tribal com- 
panions. When his malady baffled his skill 
and failed to yield to ordinary remedies, he, 
quite naturally, invoked the aid of familiar 
spirits, of devils and shamans. But to these 
he appealed only in dire straits. --For his 



106 THE MONTAGNATS MEDICINE-MAN 

ordinary maladies and for reducible fractures 
he had his own remedies, taken from the 
woods around him. For example, he cured 
acidity of the stomach by eating grains of corn 
steeped in lye or by swallowing small doses of 
an absorbent earth which he found on the 
banks of rivers. In inflammation or inflam- 
matory troubles he drew blood, though he 
knew nothing of chemistry or the principles 
of physiology. 

The remedies of the Canadian Indians were 
entirely the results of their experiences. 
When an unknown disease made its appearance 
among them they experimented with drugs, 
emetics, laxatives and emollients, and when 
these failed they built their hopes on charms, 
on supernatural powers, and on the incanta- 
tions of the shamans. When their ordinary 
medicines failed to effect a cure in any disease 
they called in the autmoin or shaman, who, 
failing to cure by his skill and experience, 
invoked his oki, or familiar spirit, to help him 
to drive out of the body of the sick man the 
little devil that tormented him. 

The Indians knew nothing of the circula- 
tion of the blood, but they did know that 
blood and respiration were necessary for life. 
They believed the brain gave birth to thought, 
and directed their daily acts. They were, by 
necessity, great hunters, and were familiar 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 107 

with the situation of the vital organs in man 
and animal. When hard on the trail of a 
deer or when pursued by his enemy over 
poorly watered lands, the Indian suffered 
severely from blood-spitting. When this hap- 
pened, to stop the hemorrhage he chewed and 
swallowed, while on the run, the Hon-kos-kao- 
ga-sha, an astringent root which he carried 
with him when leaving his tent. They suffered 
at times from severe hemorrhages, the result 
of wounds, accidents, or other causes. To 
stop the bleeding they bandaged the parts 
affected with a cataplasm of scrapings ob- 
tained from the skins of animals mixed with 
swamp moss. 

In tumefactions, fevers, and inflammations 
they had recourse to blood-letting, and used 
sharp flint knives or pointed bones, having, if 
drawing blood from the arm or leg, previously 
applied a ligature in the same manner as do 
our own surgeons. After the operation they 
bound over the wound a piece of the soft skin 
of a fawn or a mink. Into wounds where pus 
had collected they squirted water with the 
mouth and sucked out the poison deposited 
by the bite of a rattlesnake or any poisonous 
reptile. They then made an incision with a 
sharp flint and cauterized the wound with a 
very hot stone. They were not often troubled 
with old sores, the fungus parts of which they 



108 THE MONTAGNAIS MEDICINE-MAN 

treated by cautery or by the application of fire, 
contending that a burn would get well of itself, 
while old sores were exceedingly difficult to cure. 
They were acquainted with the benefits of 
muscular relaxation in dislocations of the 
limbs, and knew how to replace a displaced 
joint. When suffering from frost bites they 
applied to the parts affected a resinous plaster 
made from the sappine. They knew how to 
make and apply splints to a broken arm or leg 
and to inject astringents into wounds, and 
how to keep up suppuration. As they had no 
favourite theories of medical practice to 
defend, and no schools of medicine, they de- 
pended largely upon experience in the appli- 
cation of their remedies, and, as a last resort, 
on the power of the shaman and his familiar 
oki. With the diseases of his body, for 
which the sick man could account, he had 
recourse to restoratives and natural remedies, 
such as fasting, dieting, medicinal plants and 
copious sweating, but if he became satisfied 
that he was the victim of some exceptional 
malady, the origin of which he was unable to 
explain, he sent for the shaman to learn the 
cause of his sickness and to avert its evil 
effects. 

NATURAL REMEDIES. 

The earliest mention of the application of 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 109 

Indian remedies to severe illness occurs in the 
"BrefRecit" of Jacques Cartier, the discoverer 
of Canada. The Recit gives a detailed report 
of a mysterious epidemic which carried off 
many of Cartier's men when he wintered near 
Quebec in 1535. Perceiving that his own 
surgeons could do nothing, Cartier asked help 
from the Indian chief, Donnacona. The chief 
gave to Cartier branches of a tree (supposed 
to be the white spruce or Canadian Epinette 
blanche), told him to boil the leaves and bark 
and to give to the sufferers frequent and 
copious drinks of the decoction, and to 
poultice the stomachs of the sick with the 
residue of the wet leaves and bark. 

"After five or six days, writes Cartier, "the 
medicine produced an effect that all the 
doctors of Louvain and Montpellier could not 
have brought about in a year if they had had 
all the drug-shops of Alexandria at their dis- 
posal." 

The Indians understood the importance of 
drawing blood in fevers, . local pains and 
inflammations, employing in the operation 
flint knives, or pointed bones. They began 
the cure of most of their acute maladies by 
bleeding, purging and sweating. In their 
treatment of fevers they first administered a 
strong emetic and then gave the patient 
liberal doses of sweating teas and warm 



110 THE MONTAGNAIS MEDICINE-MAN 

drinks. When the fever was broken they 
administered bitters and other tonic medicines 
to prevent its recurrence.* 

Consumption among the Northern Ontario 
Algonquin tribes was a lingering and common 
disease. They invariably experimented with 
warm drinks of Indian-physic, large draughts of 
hot water and herbal teas. They also had re- 
course to the steam-bath to induce sweating, 
and abstained from flesh-food, subsisting 
principally on the gruels prepared from 
parched cornmeal. For ordinary colds and in 
all high fevers they believed that a moderate 
fast and abstinence from the flesh of animals 
was best for the patient, saying that " to give 
food to a fever is to keep it alive." The 
cough-root or Indian balsam was included 
among their most valuable remedies for colds 
and incipient consumption and swellings. 
They stripped from the tree the outer bark, 
using only the inner. The juice was deemed 
by them to be helpful in bowel complaints. 
The inner bark when chewed and swallowed 
helped to support life when periods of famine 
visited the tribe. 

*The practice of anointing the body with fat and oil was 
common to the savages of all lands. In warm climates it was 
said to promote health and longevity by checking excessive per- 
spiration. The Montagnais generally used bear's grease mixed 
with alluvial clay, a mixture which resembled the colour of their 
skins. The application, they contended, helped to lessen the 
sensibility of their nerves and to keep open the pores of the skin . 






^/ w \v* 

*-% 




'8 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 111 

When a child was attacked by whooping- 
cough they gave liberal doses of the infusion 
of spikenard, which was also administered for 
asthma and pains in the breast. The roots 
and leaves of the sumach were administered 
as a decoction for many complaints, but 
especially for dropsy which, before European 
traders visited them, was an uncommon 
disease among the Indians. Our Algonquin 
and Huron Indians were not often or grie- 
vously afflicted with swellings, tumors, or 
boils. When they appeared they were generally 
allowed to reach a crisis and disappeared 
without the aid of applications of any kind. 

In pleurisy the patient was freely bled and 
sweated, and bags of hot ashes applied to his 
body. From the hardships of their lives when 
on the hunt, and exposure on the water in all 
kinds of weather, the Indians suffered more 
perhaps from rheumatism and consumption 
than from any other disease known to civilized 
man. Rheumatism, from its pain and fre- 
quent visitations, drove the Indians to seek 
amelioration and help in any remedies, but 
chiefly in hot unctions of bear's oil, warm 
infusions, rubbing with skins taken from 
beavers, just trapped, and in steam-sweats. 

THE; STEAM-SWEAT. 
Among all the Indian tribes of America, 



112 THE MONTAGNAIS MEDICINE-MAN 

sweating and fasting were believed to be 
most efficacious remedies and to be endowed 
with great curative properties. They resorted 
to many methods to produce a sweat, such as 
heavy blanketing, warm infusions, etc., but 
the common and most highly prized was the 
steam sweat. To produce a steam-sweat, 
they built around eight or ten collected stones 
as large as ordinary pails a small lodge of skins 
or bark and as nearly air tight as they could 
make it. This tent was, when possible, 
thrown up near a lake or river, preferably on 
a sloping hillside. Before closing the entrance 
to the tent they made an excavation in the 
ground, in which they built a strong fire of 
cedar, spruce or balsam, and into this fire they 
cast the stones. Meanwhile a friend of the 
patient brought in pots of water and retired, 
closing tightly the entrance after him. When 
the fire had heated the stones to a "white 
heat," the patient, entirely nude, slowly 
emptied pots of water on the stones till the 
tent was filled with steam. Within this 
inferno the Indian sat and sweated while the 
steam retained its heat. Calling to his friend 
for his blanket he now walks or is assisted to 
his house and goes to sleep after swallowing 
copious draughts of tea made from dittany or 
other herbs. When the steam-bath was taken 
for an ordinary cold or as a luxury, the bather 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 113 

when leaving the hot-house often plunged 
into the lake or river, and suffered no ill-effects 
from the plunge. 

Asthma, owing to their frequent colds, the 
severity of a northern climate and the hard- 
ships of their lives, was not an uncommon 
disease. In securing relief from this annoying 
complaint the Indians were very successful. 
They began with the vapour-bath, then re- 
sorted to blisterings, fomentations and sleep- 
ing draughts. At times the sufferer got relief 
by applying to the breast, or the back, small 
bags of hot ashes or by inhaling the vapour 
arising from hot water in which certain herbs 
had been steeped. They had great faith in, 
and used freely for asthma, a small plant 
known to them as the Wesh-ke-hah. An in- 
fusion of its roots and shoots, in doses of a half 
pint at intervals of twenty minutes, gave 
almost instant relief. It produced a gentle 
moisture on the skin, easier respiration and 
relief from all difficulty of breathing. In 
twenty or thirty minutes a profuse sweating 
followed, attended with an expectoration of 
phlegm and an entire relief from pain. 

For ulcers and tumors the Montagnais 
applied to the affected parts poultices made 
from the bark of the hazel-nut tree. From 
the roots of the sassafras the Indians made a 
cooling drink which they used when attacked 



114 THE MONTAGNAIS MEDICINE-MAN 

by fevers or colds. When afflicted with snow, 
or smoke blindness, they steeped the pith of 
the sassafras sprouts or roots in water and 
with it bathed their eyes. 

The Seneca snake-root was considered a 
valuable remedy by the Hurons and cognate 
tribes. It was prepared and used sometimes 
as a powder, at other times as an infusion and 
given warm to induce sweating or to help in 
the discharge of mucous from throat and lungs. 
It was given to children when suffering from 
difficulty of breathing, and drunk generously by 
consumptives. Its Indian name was Agga-shu. 

Prickly Ash (Han-to-la), was one of the 
most valuable remedies known to the Algon- 
quins, for the cure of rheumatism. They 
freely chewed the inner bark, and the roots of 
the tree they boiled, and drank liberal draughts 
of the water during the day. The inner bark 
steeped for hours in bear's oil, they applied as 
poultices and as embrocations. Combined 
with snake-root and the bark of the wild 
cherry tree the Chippewas and other Algon- 
quin tribes made use of the Indian turnip for 
coughs and fevers. The turnip was called by 
them E-haw-sho-ga (bite the mouth). In ivy 
and sumach poisoning they used the fire- weed. 
The poisoned parts were rubbed with leaves 
of the plant, bruised and crushed so that the 
sap moistened the skin freely. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 115 

In diseases of children the Angelica root, 
boiled and strained, was frequently used. 
Anise (Tut-te-see-hau) was eaten to expel 
gases from the stomach. For colds, asthma, 
and pleurisy, they drank bear's oil, and 
Seneca snake root steeped for hours in an 
extract of mild liquorice. 

The Buck-eye nut (Tar-ton-ga-on-ba) , and 
its leaves boiled, were taken as a remedy for 
diarrhoea. The inner bark of the black 
locust tree (E-hau-waJi), they chewed and 
swallowed, which acted as an emetic. In 
cases of colic they chewed the rinds or hulls of 
black walnut (He-ne-ska). For swellings and 
inflammations they bruised and applied the 
leaves of the black snake root, which in almost 
all cases gave immediate relief. 

In fevers of a low type they gave the bark of 
the dogwood tree (Shen-don-shu-gah) , in com- 
bination with bitters of various kinds. In 
cases of debility when accompanied with 
stomach trouble, in palpitations of the heart 
and dropsy, they administered decoctions of 
gentian root (Ton-ga-shin-gd) in combination 
with dogwood and wild cherry bark. 

In bowel complaints the Indians adminis- 
tered an infusion of the dewberry roots 
(0-ga-she-ga). The dittany (Mas-tin-jay) was 
freely used by the Attiwandarons or Neutrals, 
and highly esteemed by them as a sudorific in 



116 THE MONTAGNAIS MEDICINE-MAN 

coughs, colds and fevers. Indian physic (Sku- 
ten-na-jay) known to us as Bowman's root, 
was highly valued for its emetic and sudorific 
virtues and as a cure for low fevers and bowel 
complaints. 

TOBACCO. 

Probably the first mention of the use of 
tobacco by an Indian tribe is recorded in the 
"Bref Recit" of Jacques Cartier. "One of 
their herbs," he tells us, "they value very 
highly. The squaws gather it in great 
quantities for winter consumption. It is 
dried in the sun and carried in a small fur bag 
around the neck. They are constantly reduc- 
ing it to powder and putting it into a bowl of 
stone or wood in which they place a live coal 
and draw in the smoke through a tube. We 
tried to imitate them and afterwards tasted 
the powder, but we found it as hot as pepper." 
When questioned by Cartier, the Indians said 
smoking was good for them and kept them 
warm. 

Among all the tribes tobacco was supposed 
to possess many wonderful properties, was 
helpful in diseases and for the cure of wounds. 
In hunger and thirst and great fatigue it was 
smoked or chewed freely and always, they 
claimed, with beneficial effect. 

The Indians boiled it with the chips of swamp- 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 117 

oak and applied it as a discutient 'n abscesses 
and in local inflammations. The leaves were 
warmed, placed upon the parts affected, and 
moistened by an infusion from time to time. 
They also applied them as embrocations to 
swellings, eruptive and cutaneous diseases. It 
was frequently used in dropsy, and, as a ver- 
mifuge, was applied to the abdomens of 
children. 

The Canadian tribes, as a body, understood 
the use and the benefit derived from emetics, 
cathartics and the steam-bath. Fasting was 
practised by them as a cure, or an alleviation, 
in certain diseases, and as a necessity, when 
peculiar favours were to be asked from their 
manitous, or familiar spirits. However, in the 
application of their remedies and in the value 
attached to these remedies and agencies, there 
were differences of opinion among them and 
even among the healers of the same tribe, as 
among our own physicians. " Sorcery, prayer, 
songs, exhortations, suggestions, ceremonies 
and certain specifics and mechanical pro- 
cesses," writes Mr. A. Hrdlicka, of the U.S. 
National Museum, " are employed only by 
the medicine-men or medicine-women ; other 
specific remedies are proprietary generally 
among a few old men and women in the 
tribe ; while many vegetal remedies and 
simple manipulations are of common know- 



118 THE MONTAGNAIS MEDICINE-MAN 

ledge." It may be added that the medicinal 
properties of many of the herbs, roots and 
plants familiar to the Indians before the dis- 
covery of Canada, were known, for the first 
time,- to our own sixteenth century doctors, 
and, for the first time also, were then trans- 
mitted across the sea and now hold an honour- 
able place in European pharmacopoeias. 

SURGERY AND TREATMENT OF WOUNDS. 

The Montagnais were well acquainted with 
the anatomy of the human body, and were 
very successful in the treatment of wounds. 
Their skill in treating wounds was chiefly 
exercised by close attention to the injured 
part, and the frequent application of washes 
and cataplasms which kept the wounded parts 
clean. 

When a warrior was severely wounded in a 
battle or on the hunt his companions carried 
him off the field ori sleds in winter and in sum- 
mer by canoe or litter. These stretchers or 
litters were made by lashing together two poles 
with cross-pieces. If the warrior suffered 
great pain a bed of moss or of tender branches 
was made in the litter. 

Wounds were always kept clean, and when 
necessary were sutured with threads from the 
inner bark of basswood, or a fibre from the 
long tendon of a deer's leg. The wash or 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 119 

lotion used for cleansing wounds was a muci- 
laginous extract of the slippery elm. 

Arrow-heads or any foreign substance when 
deeply embedded were extracted by a forceps 
made from split willow. 

For fractures they made splints out of bark. 
The bark was padded with moss and so 
adjusted to the broken limb that there was no 
friction from the ends of broken bones. 

To burns they applied a poultice made of 
boiled spruce. 

Amputations were never practised by the 
tribes. They never used extension or counter- 
extension, and yet deformity or shortening 
was rare. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

RELIGION AND MORALS. 

The Montagnais knew nothing of morals or 
of a moral law. The Montagnais boy or girl, 
before arriving at the age of reason, had lost 
even the adumbration and all consciousness 
of morality. The unpartitioned tent, the 
filthy stories, the indecent conversations, the 
promiscuous familiarity of brothers and sisters, 
of husband and wife or wives, the nakedness 
and libertinage of the young men in tent and 
camp, destroyed all sense of modesty and 
instinct of shame in the child.* If an innate 
feeling of reserve or an exceptional instinct of 
modesty induced a young girl to absent her- 
self from the shameless feast, or lascivious 
dance, she became the target for the jibes and 
taunts of her companions, and was forced by 
jeering laughter and ridicule to conform to the 
tribal customs. 

For a girl to confess to a feeling of shame 
was to expose herself to the contempt of her 
companions. Modesty in mother, wife or 
daughter was exceptional and opposed to the 

*"They become addicted to a most shameful habit of life 
even before they are of an age to know the shame attached to 
it." Father G. Marest, Lettres Edif. 

121 



122 RELIGION AND MORALS 

traditions and practices of her people ; and so 
strong was the tradition and firm the fixity of 
tribal opinion that a maiden who aspired to 
purity of body or chastity of thought was 
regarded by her companions as eccentric, or as 
one deranged. 

The Jesuit missionaries complained that 
their nomadic life, their habitual impurities, 
their hardness of heart and plurality of wives, 
made it extremely difficult to Christianize 
them.* 

The religion of the Montagnais, if we may 
employ the word to include a tissue of ridicu- 
lous practices and absurd ceremonies, was a 
conglomerate of superstitions intimatly asso- 
ciated with spiritism and with their fears and 
dreams. They worshipped and made suppli- 
cation to the sun, moon, and stars, accom- 
panied by speeches, appeals and addresses. 
Among their divinities were included the 
"Great Hare "- primitive father of all Algon- 
quins and countless spirits or demons called 
Manitous. 

They peopled the entire universe with 
spirits and believed that great storms, thun- 
der, lightning, eclipses and all meteoric 
phenomena were caused by their Manitous. 
They regarded the beaver, the bear and the 
rattlesnake as superior divinities among the 
animals, by reason of their exceptional intelli- 

"Lettre de Paule le Jeune au Pere Provincial. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 123 

gence. At times they offered to these ani- 
mals, to the sun, the moon and their familiar 
spirits gifts of fur and berries to obtain their 
protection and to solicit their goodwill. They 
believed the soul lived forever after leaving 
its body; that in the spirit world a body would 
be given to the soul so that it might enjoy 
all the pleasures of eating, dreaming, hunting, 
sleeping and companionship with its friends. 
The Jesuit Missionary Fathers, who were 
men of high intelligence and of experienced 
observation, record in their letters so many 
examples of communication with demons 
among the Algonquin tribes that to doubt 
them would imperil the credibility of all 
history. And as if to confirm the instances 
given in the Relations, that magician of the 
pen, J. C. Tache, records in his delightful 
book, Forestiers et Voyageurs, many examples 
supporting the contention of the missionaries. 
However much these examples of spirit inter- 
ference may do violence to our sense of pro- 
bability, or incredulity, as well authenticated 
manifestations of preternatural powers they 
cannot be ignored ; nor can they be disregarded 
as a malign influence acting on the Montagnais 
mind since they prejudiced it so powerfully 
against the creed and morality inculcated by 
the Jesuits.* 

*Relations, Pere le Jeune, 1639. 

Dequen, 1665. 



124 RELIGION AND MORALS 

Unless we assume a wonderful familiarity 
with natural magic, it is difficult to explain, 
without ultra-mundane interference, many 
of their feats and prodigies. 

We can understand how they could, with 
wonderful accuracy and with astonishing 
foresight, predict changes of the weather; 
how from solitary meditation and long prac- 
tise they could become adepts in sleight-of- 
hand tricks. With what we have seen done 
by our own travelling magicians and presti- 
ditators, we may understand how they could 
spit fire and swallow burning coals; walk 
naked through burning brush; plunge their 
arms to the shoulders in kettles of boiling 
water; stand barefooted on hot coals; allow 
themselves to be bound with ropes and shake 
themselves loose as if the knotted ropes were 
twines of spool thread. 

Assuming that these savages of the forest, 
having had no communication for ages with 
other races, were of themselves able to invent 
and perform these feats or tricks, how may 
we interpret the prodigies seen and recorded 
by Carver, de Brasseur, John Tanner and 
missionary priests. 

By what sleight-of-hand or jugglery were 
they able to plunge knives into vital parts of 
their bodies, vomit quarts of blood, drive a 
stake or a flint knife into a man and to all 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 125 

appearance kill him and then restore him to 
life again? How were they able by will power 
to set fire to bark lodges and to men's furs, 
and by a wave of their hands and a call of 
their voice put out the fire which left no marks 
of burning? 

Nor will trickery, ventriloquism, animal 
magnetism and expert knavery serve to 
explain their lodge communication with de- 
mons as recorded by Paul Le Jeune, and other 
Jesuit missionaries. Before consulting his 
familiar spirit, the Shaman built a conical 
lodge which he covered with deer or bear 
skins. When he entered this hut the Shaman 
closed every opening and began his incanta- 
tions or appeals to his Manitou. The spirit 
appears, the lodge poles shake and bend with 
a force impossible to one man. Then are 
heard strange noises. At one time they come 
from the tent, at another from down in the 
earth, and then sounds and voices are heard 
by the spectators as if in their very midst. 
Some one in the crowd asks for information 
on some topic. He hears a voice from the 
tent answering his questions and the answers 
are either uniformly correct, or like the 
replies given at our modern spirit seances, of 
an ambiguous nature. The Shamans who 
embraced Christianity, positively insisted after 
their conversion that they neither shook the 



126 RELIGION AND MORALS 

lodges, bent the poles nor answered the 
questions. 

Intimately associated with the superstitious 
practices of the Algonquins was the medicine 
man. The word medicine was in universal 
use among the tribes of Canada, and, in all 
their dialects and languages, represented 
preternatural power. "Medicine-man" is a 
derivative, or a corruption, of mide-wiwin, 
an order of shamans, or priest-doctors among 
the Algonquins, who claimed to have had 
power to foretell the future, to cure diseases 
and to expel evil okis. The medicine-man was 
a sorcerer, an expert conjurer and a consul ter 
of spirits, and professed to heal diseases by 
incantations. As nearly all diseases were the 
result of the action of an evil spirit that had 
entered the body or part of the body of the 
sick man or woman, a cure could not be 
effected until this malevolent imp was expelled 
by the shaman or medicine-man. The sha- 
man's methods of healing, when acting as a 
priest, had no direct affinity with the adminis- 
tration of any kind of drugs, or with the per- 
formance of even the slightest surgical opera- 
tion. His treatment had no connection with 
therapeutics, he felt no pulse and administered 
no remedies. If at times he used a drug 
internally or externally, it was some secret 
preparation of his own and was possibly an 



GROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 127 

aid to the incantations or superstitious cere- 
monies by which he exorcised the possessed. 
His methods of effecting a cure partook of 
singing, howling, beating the drum, and 
dancing around the sick person. He com- 
manded the evil oki to depart from the patient 
and appealed to his own oki or manitou to 
help him in driving away the evil one. Some- 
times he applied his mouth to the affected 
part of the sick person, either directly or by 
means of a tube, and, rising, took from his 
mouth a pebble of peculiar shape or a piece of 
bark which he claimed to have sucked from 
the body of the sick person. 

But it was chiefly as an augur or oracle 
that his services were in demand. When 
consulted as an oracle he resorted to his 
medicine-bag. This little bag or purse con- 
tained either a snake's skin, a deer's tail, the 
feather of an eagle, human hair, or some 
bright metallic substance, an oddly-shaped 
pebble or anything, in fact, which might 
suggest itself to him as an acceptable fetich. 

The shaman was a clever conjurer and an 
expert sleight-of-hand performer. By his 
extraordinary feats of legerdemain he mysti- 
fied his audience and strengthened his influence 
with the members of his clan. He contended 
that the feats he accomplished were due to 
the power of his oki, his protecting spirit, 



128 RELIGION AND MORALS 

and in some instances he made good his 
claim. 

If we wave aside entirely the preternatural 
or spirit influence, how may we explain away 
the extraordinary feats witnessed by John 
McLean, the Hudson Bay runner, who, 
towards trie close of the last century, wintered 
with the Algonquins of the Nipigon Bay 
region? 

McLean records that he was present at a 
great medicine-feast fete de Medecine 
when two shamans of different clans openly 
contested for the supremacy of their respec- 
tive gods, "the Great Hare," and "the Great 
Turtle." It may be well to explain here the 
Algonquin tradition forming the foundation 
of their belief in these two divinities. 

The Algonquins contend that the earth 
and all living things were made by Kitcheoub 
the Great Hare. In time there appeared 
in the forests the great tiger Kitchi-mijibi, 
who devoured animals, and the great buffalo 
Midjibichiki, who ate up all the grass and 
plants. Now Kitcheoub, fearing that the 
tiger and buffalo would devour everything on 
the earth, sent great rains and floods which 
destroyed all living things, including the great 
tiger and the great buffalo. 

Then came Midj-ikine, the Great Turtle, 
who, after searching the lakes and deep rivers 



. CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 129 

found th'e Great Beaver and got him to assist 
him in reconstructing and restocking the earth. 
When everything was finished the Great Hare 
came down and was pleased to see that the 
earth was again covered with trees and plants 
and the forests filled with animals. He 
pronounced everything to be good and well 
done. But to show that all things belonged 
to him he took a branch from the Mascoubina 
tree and a branch from the pinbine tree and 
stuck one branch in his right ear and the other 
in his left ear. For this reason the Great 
Hare is always represented to the Algonquins 
with the two branches for ears. 

From that time there began to exist a 
mutual dislike between Kitcheoub and Midji- 
kine. The Great Hare paid no attention to 
the appeals made to him by the shamans of 
the Great Turtle, and the Great Turtle would 
not in any way assist the shamans of the Great 
Hare. 

Such was the state of affairs when at a 
medicine feast, Ouabouss, the Hare sorcerer, 
challenged Miskouades, shaman of the Turtle, 
to a trial of magic strength. 

Late in the afternoon, when the sun was 
slowly sinking to the western horizon and the 
wild beasts of the darkling forest were resting, 
an Algonquin crier summoned the warriors 
to witness the contest. The hunters and 



130 RELIGION AND MORALS 

fighters, bronzed to the hue of Etruscan 
statues, formed a living circle in the middle 
of which sat on bear skins Ouabouss and 
Miskouades. Then advanced Lone Wolf, 
chief of the Ojibwas, who proclaimed aloud 
the conditions governing the magic contest. 
Then Bounding Elk, master of ceremonies, 
chanted the medicine-song, and rattled his 
Chichigoue, while the spectators shouted in 
unison: Hi! Ho! Ha! Hi! Ho! 

When Bounding Elk had ended his song, 
the warriors squatted in a circle, and in silence, 
waited for the trial of magic strength to begin. 
Then arose Ouabouss and, looking into the 
eyes of Miskouades, said in low gutturals: 
"A rope made of elm-wood is strong and 
cannot be broken ! " " The hide of the buffalo 
is tough and thick," answered Miskouades, 
"and cannot be torn." Then the old men, 
the warriors, and hunters, bowed their heads 
in assent and said one to the other: "They 
both tell the truth," and turning to the young 
men, a grizzled old warrior ordered them to 
bring pine branches and deer skins and make 
tents for the two shamans. 

When the tents were built the young men 
securely bound, hand and foot, the two sha- 
mans with elm cords, and strong thongs of 
buffalo hide. They carried the bound men, 
each to his own tent, closed every opening 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 131 

and joining the circle sat with the warriors 
who awaited amid intense silence for the 
reappearance of the tightly roped shamans. 
Suddenly there came from the lodges weird 
and mysterious voices and strange noises; 
then the lodges began to sway from side to 
side, to move ominously and to shake as if 
agitated by a strong wind. Presently ap- 
peared, from out the lodges, the shamans, 
dripping sweat, and visibly tired out. The 
branches and deer skins forming the lodges 
were removed, the ropes binding the men 
examined and, on the identical places where 
the bodies of the shamans were deposited, were 
the ropes intact with all their knots exactly 
as they were when the young men bound the 
shamans. 

Then the circle of warriors was re-formed 
each man occupying his own place. Up rose 
the chief of the Ojibwas and said aloud: 
"Kitchevub made the world but Midjikine 
re-made it. Those to whom they speak are 
powerful." And to this statement all the 
Algonquins agreed, saying: "It is true." 
Then spoke up the shaman of the Great Hare : 
" The rattle-snake bites to kill, when he bites 
death follows." "The Little Beaver also 
kills when he is swallowed," responded Mis- 
kouades. "You speak the truth," chorused 
the Ojibwas. 



132 RELIGION AND MORALS 

Then a young warrior entered the circle 
carrying a cedar box covered with a piece of the 
hide of a caribou, and a birch-bark bowl half 
filled with water on which floated four "little 
beavers."* The shaman of the Great Hare 
lifted the cover from the cedar box, plunged 
his hand in, and drew out a rattle-snake. 
Holding the writhing and wriggling snake by 
the neck he turned to the seated Algonquins 
and asked: 

"Is not this snake a rattle-snake?" 

"Yes, it's a rattle-snake," said they all. 

Ouabouss now violently shook the snake 
and, holding his bare arm to its mouth the 
snake fastened to it. With the serpent 
suspended from his arm he three times made 
the circuit within the ring formed by the 
O jib was, then tore the snake from his arm and 
sat down. 

The shaman of the Great Turtle rose to his 
feet and, holding in his hand the birch-bark 
bowl, passed before the seated warriors, 
inviting each one to examine it carefully. 
Returning to the centre of the ring he asked 

*The Algonquins of the Nipigon forests gave the name Little- 
beavers to the half-winged water insects called skaters. They 
belong to the Hydroceras family and live on the surface of pools 
and stagnant waters. They zig-zag on the water with lightning 
rapidity and when, by accident, two or three of them are swal- 
lowed by a drinker they destroy life. The Indians are very care- 
ful when drinking from a pool to strain, or, with a sharp eye, 
examine the water. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 133 

"Are not these which you see little beavers?" 
"They are surely little beavers," they an- 
swered back. The shaman raised the bowl, 
and when he had swallowed its contents 
handed the empty vessel to an aged hunter, 
who cried aloud: "Miskouades of the Great 
Turtle has swallowed the little beavers!" 

For an hour they all remained seated. No 
sound save the wash of the waters or the 
bark of the lone wolf broke the silence of the 
forest. Then, Sotriosken, chief of the clan 
of the Great Hare, rose up, and addressing 
the warriors said: "Kitcheoub and Midjkine 
are all-powerful, let us not do anything to 
make them angry with us. The poison of 
the little-beaver and the bite of the snake do 
not bring death all at once, let us wait till 
to-morrow." When dawn came, the Algon- 
quins broke camp and left for their hunting- 
grounds near Loon Lake. With them went 
Ouabouss, shaman of the Great Hare and 
Miskouades, Medicine-man of the Great 
Turtle, hale and hearty and seasoned for the 
hunt. 

The great missionary and scholar, Father 
Le Jeune, after a brief experience with the 
Montagnais medicine-man, says: "Most of 
them are deceivers and charlatans ; however, I 
am inclined to think that some among them 
really have communication with the devil." 



134 RELIGION AND MORALS 

He then relates some extraordinary feats 
accomplished by them, resembling the oc- 
currences at the tomb of the Jansenist, Paris, 
at the cemetery of St. Medard. * 



'Relation, 1633. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 
THE HAPPY HUNTING GROUNDS. 

When a warrior died, all his hunting, war 
and fishing gear, his tobacco pouch and pipe 
were buried with him, for the Montagnais 
believed all material things to be possessed 
of souls. If the warrior was a popular chief, 
a great fighter or hunter, his obsequies were 
celebrated with savage pomp and splendour. 
They clothed the body in costly furs and 
lavished ornaments, such as bracelets of copper 
and pendants for nose and ears, upon it. They 
painted the face of the dead man in brilliant 
colours to conceal the pallid hue of death and 
to impart to the countenance an air of life. 
A gorget hung from his neck and rested on 
his breast, his bow and quiver were by his 
left arm; his stone tomahawk was in his belt, 
and his pipe was in his mouth. A kettle filled 
with food, a box of vermillion paint and gifts 
from his friends lay near the grave to be 
buried with the warrior. Thus outfitted, 
the brave was sent on his long journey to the 
spirit-world to meet the great chiefs of his 
nation who had preceded him to the "Happy 
Hunting Grounds." 

135 



136 OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 

When, in the summer of 1647, Father 
Dequen was present at the burial of a Mon- 
tagnais, he asked a grizzled old warrior why 
they interred with the dead man his weapons 
and other articles. "Why?" answered the 
old man, "because he will want them in the 
spirit world. It is true the bodies of the 
pots, skins, knives and weapons remain in 
the grave with the dead man, but their spirits 
follow him, and, wherever he may be he makes 
use of them." 

In the "Happy Hunting Grounds of the 
world of Shades were wild animals spirit 
animals which the departed Montagnais," if 
he were a good hunter, a brave and neighbour- 
ly man when on earth, hunted with his 
spirit bow, arrows and knife. 

Existence in the spirit land was, for the 
Montagnais, life in this world idealized and 
made better. It was their life on earth raised 
to a higher and happier plane. It consisted 
of an abundance of food and game, additional 
health of body and fleetness of limb, with no 
frosts or ice and no worry or fear of attack 
from an enemy. These were the supreme 
consolations of the Montagnais' heaven. The 
pleasures of the spirit life were those of earth 
intensified, and were but a continuation of 
the carnal gratifications of human appetites 
and human passions. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 137 

The Heaven of the Montagnais was like 
unto the pagan Elysium, where "life is easiest 
to man, and no snow is, nor storm, nor any 
rain," or to the "Paradise of Mahomet," 
with temporal conditions improved and the 
pleasures of earth intensified and prolonged 
forever. This heaven lay far beyond the 
southern horizon where the climate was mild 
and balmy, the breezes refreshing and game 
abundant. This was the land to which the 
kindly neighbour, the good hunter, and the 
brave warrior went after death. The coward- 
ly, the selfish and the bad man was interned 
in a land of perpetual snow, ice and wet 
winds, where he shivered from cold and was 
always thirsty and half starved. 

When the soul of a man or a woman but 
not that of a child left its body it lingered 
for a time around the camp or village, haunt- 
ing the woods and waiting for another soul 
to accompany it on its long journey to the 
spirit land. For some nights after a death 
in the camp a Montagnais never went alone 
into the forest if any one were dangerously 
sick, for he was afraid of meeting a ghost 
waiting for the soul of the dying man or 
woman. Many of the men claimed to have 
met and spoken with the ghosts of the dead 
whom they unwillingly encountered when 
compelled to be abroad on dark nights. 



138 OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 

Nothing, not even the hope of good luck in 
battle or the hunt, could tempt a Montagnais 
to pass near a grave or enter a graveyard on 
a dark night. 

The members of the Montagnais tribe were 
strongly attached to one another ; they helped 
each other with generous liberality. The 
children of a family were affectionate and 
obedient to their parents, and, among the 
units of the tribe there was an admirable 
solidarity. Their intercourse with each other 
was always marked by respect and civility, 
and in times of stress and famine, the hunters 
divided with all others whatever chance or 
the fortunes of the hunt cast in their way. 
"Among them there is an affability and a 
courtesy almost incredible."* 

TREATMENT OF PRISONERS 

To their enemies they were ruthless in the ir 
savagery. Affrighted man recoils with horror 
from the torture of their prisoners, as recorded 
by the eloquent Le Jeune. It is impossible 
for the perverted ingenuity of man to devise 
more terrible methods of inflicting suffering 
on human beings than those to which centuries 
of experience and familiarity with torture had 

* Relation, 1636. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 139 

trained the Algonquins to mutilate the living 
bodies of their victims. 

The demons of Dante inflicted on lost 
souls no greater suffering than the torture of 
blood and horror applied by the Montagnais 
to his brother man. If the great poet were 
present at the mutilation of an Iroquois 
prisoner by the Algonquins, and saw women 
with long streaming hair, hanging breasts and 
distorted faces encouraging their husbands, 
sons and brothers to torture, cut to pieces 
and slowly burn to death a helpless victim, he 
would not be constrained to appeal to his 
imagination for the examples in his Inferno. 
His description of the horrors of Hell pale 
before the reality of Indian torture. 

The great priest and missionary Father Le 
Jeune, in his Relation, 1632, gives a vivid 
word painting of what he saw and heard of 
an Iroquois prisoner done to death by Algon- 
quin malignity. 

While the mutilated victim was broiling 
upright in a slow fire, the spectators and 
torturers flung into his face ribald laughter, 
jeers, insults and mockeries, and the women 
and girls bribed the young men with gifts 
"to be permitted to torment the poor victim 
to their heart's content."* 

* Relation, 1632. 



140 OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 

Father Le Jeune, transfixed with horror, 
averted his eyes from the devilish cruelty, 
and unable or unwilling to endure the awful 
spectacle he returned to his cabin. 

The Frenchman who remained to see the 
death of the Iroquois and to witness the end 
under accumulating horrors, told Le Jeune 
that the fiendishness of the women and girls 
in the application of torture to the expiring 
man surpassed belief. 

After the Iroquois had expired, the Mon- 
tagnais tore out his heart and, giving it to 
the little children to eat, reserved the charred 
and mutilated body for themselves, their 
sisters, wives and daughters. 

When all was over the dismembered bones 
of the Iroquois lay scattered around the place 
of torture. Dogs lapped the blood and de- 
voured the pieces of flesh left here and there 
upon the ground. 

When the body was not eaten by the human 
wolves, the men and women, whipped into a 
frenzy of ferocity, trampled it into a bloody 
compost and fed it to the dogs. By a strange 
and insoluble perversion of nature, life, 
social intercourse, the hunt itself could offer 
to the Algonquin, the Huron or the Iroquois 
no pleasure, no joy, to be compared with the 
fiendish pleasure the torture of his enemy 
furnished him. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 141 

In this wonderful Relation of 1632, Le Jeune 
relates that he saw an Iroquois warrior, 
writhing in his agonies, break away from his 
torturers and rush for the river to drown 
himself. He was seized before reaching the 
water and brought back to the stake where the 
skin was stripped from him in ribbons. Once 
again he broke his bonds and again he ran 
for the river. Retaken, his scalp was torn 
from his head and coals of fire heaped upon 
the naked skull. 

The retaliation of the Iroquois on their 
Montagnais prisoners was equally appalling. 

For how many centuries these sanguinary 
deeds were perpetrated in the forests of Amer- 
ica, we do not know. We only know that for 
unnumbered years men and women, "made 
into the image and likeness of God," endured 
tortures surpassing belief tortures inflicted 
on man by man, on woman by woman. 

The Jesuit priest who entered the forest of 
these wild beasts and cried aloud : " Love your 
enemies: do good to them that hate you," 
was wise to carry with him into the wilderness 
a divine promise of an eternal reward or an 
assurance of supernatural protection. 

Withal, it is impossible for the meditative 
man not to experience a feeling of pity and of 
deep sorrow for them in the foulness of their 
lives, in their filth and squalor and, above all, 



142 OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 

in their unspeakable cruelty. Victims of 
inheritance, heirs to superstitions of the gross- 
est kind, bound by centuries of tradition 
"They trod the winepress of the fierceness of 
the wrath of God the Almighty" for unnum- 
bered years. There is here a great mystery, 
the mystery of the immutability of the laws 
of God. 

When we add that the Montagnais were 
compelled by their wandering lives, by the 
intense cold, and by the menace of starvation to 
leave at times in their frozen camps, their sick, 
their old and feeble to perish by hunger and 
frost, you will have a fairly accurate history 
of the manners, customs and traits of char- 
acter of all the Montagnais tribes. 

This was the land, this was the climate, 
and such the people the Jesuit missionaries 
attempted to restore to decency, to manhood, 
to Christianize and lift to a plane of partial 
civilization. That their courage, zeal, and 
heroism did not in the beginning meet with 
the success commensurate with their hopes 
was due not so much to the dense ignorance 
and roving habits of the tribe, as to the op- 
position of the Medicine-men, their inveterate 
attachment to their superstitions, and to a 
plurality of wives. Moreover, among other 
trials which confronted the missionary fathers - 
were the difficulties of the tribal dialects; 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 143 

the proud and shiftless character of the 
wandering families; their instinctive horror of 
all restraint; their idleness and weakness for 
gambling; but above all and over all their 
attachment to self-government the personal 
independence that resented all outside inter- 
ference and their inveterate opposition to 
anything or anyone insisting upon a change 
in their beliefs, their habits and their practices. 

OPPOSITION TO CHANGE 

This is not to be wondered at since it is a 
permanent and universal phenomenon of 
human nature that it abhors a change from 
that to which it is accustomed and with 
which it is satisfied, to the new and the un- 
tried. The most remarkable fact in the 
history of the human race is the relatively 
small number who will agree to change their 
institutions, laws and usages. Even to-day 
there are many civilized and partially civilized 
races which refuse to accept our Christianity 
or our civilization. The entire Mohammedan 
world detests our Christianity, and the negroes 
of equatorial Africa are opposed to our 
civilization. Our creed and our ways of 
living are disliked by all those who are, ac- 
cording to our thinking, barbarous or savage. 
The uncounted populations of China, Persia, 



144 OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 

Thibet, and Egypt, loathe and despise our 
civilization. There are few phenomena more 
remarkable than the stubborn incredulity 
and disdain with which a man belonging to 
cultivated Chinese society listens to the boast- 
ed superiority of our European civilization. 
His confidence in his state and superiority is 
established against his experience of our 
military triumphs, and against our acknow- 
ledged scientific inventions and discoveries, 
which overcame the exclusiveness and national 
pride of the wily Japanese, but who refuse to 
accept our religion and our social code. 

There is to-day in India a potential minor- 
ity, trained in the councils of British profess- 
ors and statesmen, many of them educated 
in English universities and familiar with the 
literature of Europe, who will not permit a 
finger to touch the very subjects with which 
European civilization and legislation is now 
concerned social and religious customs and 
usage. There can be no controversy over the 
fact that the enormous mass of the Mo- 
hammedan and East Indian population hates 
and dreads any change which would infringe 
upon its social life and religion. 

By a universal law, man's evolution, while 
progressive, is very slow, and the religion, 
superstitions, and habits of a race change 
not with years, but with centuries. An 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 145 

absolute intolerance of religious and political 
change characterizes the largest part of the 
human race, and has marked the whole of it 
for the longest portion of its history. Even 
in regard to habits, mankind is very slow to 
change. The complete civilization of a race 
is always slow and insensible in its progress. 



BOOK III. 

TRAIL-BREAKERS 
AND 

PATH-FINDERS 



CHAPTER XV. 

THE MISSIONARIES 

When, by the Treaty of St. Germain-en- 
Laye, signed March 29th, 1632, Canada was 
returned to France, the land was once more 
opened to missionary enterprise. In obedi- 
ence to a promise made to the Franciscans, 
the great Jesuit Order commissioned its sons 
to leave France and advance to the spiritual 
conquest of Canada. Early in April, 1632, 
Fathers Paul Le Jeune and Anne de Noue 
sailed from the Port of Honfleur for Quebec. 

The following winter Father de Noue ac- 
companied a party of Attikamegue moose 
hunters and almost perished from cold and 
exposure. He came of a distinguished family 
whose influence obtained for him the office 
of page at the court of the King. After he 
was promoted an officer of the Royal House- 
hold, he resigned his position with its honours 
and possibilities and, at the age of twenty-five, 
entered a Jesuit novitiate. Though gifted 
with talents of a high order, he could never 
learn to speak the Montagnais tongue, and 
when brought back to Quebec by the hunters, 
seriously sick, half starved, and almost fam- 
ished from exposure, he was not again per- 

149 



150 THE MISSIONARIES 

mitted by his Superior to enter upon the 
field of the Algonquin missions. 

PAUL LE JEUNE 

A greater name than that of Paul Le Jeune 
is not written across the pages of Canadian 
history. His face, as it has come down to 
us in engravings and paintings, carries on it 
the evidence of goodness and an expression of 
strength and benignity. Born and baptised 
a Calvinist, be became a convert to the 
Catholic Church, and, under the influence of 
grace and in answer to what he deemed to be 
a supernatural call, he entered the Jesuit 
novitiate at Rouen in 1613. After complet- 
ing his studies he was called to the priesthood 
in 1631 and, soon after his ordination, he was 
notified of his appointment on the Canadian 
Mission. 

Writing to the Provincial of the Jesuits, 
Paris, in acknowledgment of the letter of 
appointment he had received, he says: "The 
joy and happiness I felt in my soul was so great 
that I believe I have experienced nothing like 
it for twenty years, nor has any letter been so 
welcome to me.* 

The distinguished author of Les Jesuites 
et La Nouvelle-France writes of this wonderful 

*Relation, 1632. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 151 

priest: "By a strange contrast this apostle 
of large and generous nature was gifted with a 
will of steel and a heart of fire. He was 
endowed with an accurate spirit of method 
and precision and a gift of observation truly 
remarkable. Nothing escaped his keen sense 
of penetration, which embraced the minutest 
details . " * ' ' He was , ' ' writes B en j amin Suite 
in his History of the French Canadians, " a man 
of very great merit, a facile writer, a close 
observer and a priest full of zeal and piety, f 

Soon after landing in Quebec he began the 
study of the Montagnais language "a lan- 
guage of poverty and riches; poor in so far 
as the savages have no words to give ex- 
pression to a thousand things known to the 
people of Europe, but it is a language well 
suited for the savage and for the things and 
ideas with which he is familiar. ' ' In this same 
Relation of 1633 he adds: "If I am ever to 
know the Montagnais language I must live 
with the savages, for he who thoroughly 
understands and speaks their language will 
have great influence over them." 

So the brave and zealous priest left Quebec 
in October, 1633, with twenty Montagnais, 
men, women, and children, on their way for 
Tadousac. Here they were joined by eight 

t Vol. II., P. 44. 
"Vol. I., p. 191. 



152 THE MISSIONARIES 

or nine Chicoutimi hunters and, late in No- 
vember, they all departed for the moose 
regions of Lake St. John. And now for the 
first time Paul Le Jeune, "the Father of the 
Canadian Missions," as an eminent student 
of Colonial times calls him, began to ex- 
perience the horrors of life in winter with 
savage hunters. The year before he was 
present with Father Dequen at the torture, 
mutilation and burning of an Iroquois prisoner 
whom they failed to purchase and against 
whose horrible mutilation the priests protested 
in vain. 

All the Relations of the Jesuits dealing with 
the persons and events of these early days are 
full of fascination, deep interest and informa- 
tion, but, without exception, Father Le Jeune's 
letters or Relations, written in 1632 and 1634, 
are the most complete, pathetic and informa- 
tive on savage customs, superstitions and 
habits of any found in the Burrows' com- 
pilation. How he was able, unless providen- 
tially protected, to survive the severity of the 
terrible winters, the long and trying marches 
of the roving horde, the horrors of the starved 
and frozen camp, the vermin and filth, foul 
language,* smoke, and the shocking indecen- 
cies of a Montagnais lodge staggers belief. 

*"I did not think," he writes, "that the mouth of the savage 
was so foul." 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 153 

"It was impossible" he writes, "to stand 
erect in this improvised hut. One had always 
to sit down or lie prostrate on the ground 
with one's head resting on a bank of snow. 
The winds blew in upon us through a hundred 
openings. The famished and flea-infested 
dogs ran in and out. The smoke was so thick 
that I lay for hours stretched on my breast 
breathing with my mouth to the earth. The 
heat and stench were at times insupportable." 
In this pathetic letter he says that at times he 
almost died of hunger "la faim m'a pense 
tue" and adds that of a hundred priests not 
ten could live through a like winter or survive 
a similar experience. 

Through the woods, zig-zagging here and 
there, they carried on their backs or dragged 
on toboggans their scanty and wretched 
belongings, bundles of tent-bark, skins of the 
beaver and bear and pans and hatchets ob- 
tained in trade with the French. Father Le 
Jeune, almost worn out with exhaustion, 
carrying on his shoulders his own bundle, 
followed the band on snowshoes. Before 
the darkness of night fell upon the forests 
they built shelters and around blazing log 
fires men, women and children huddled to- 
gether. Then, if the day's hunt was favor- 
able, they ate, if not they starved till the 
following day. The famished dogs rushed in 



154 THE MISSIONARIES 

and out searching for food. Smoke filled the 
lodge and at times the heat and stench were 
so oppressive that Le Jeune, fearing suffoca- 
tion, passed out into the darkness of the woods 
in search of relief. 

He tells us that the immorality of the 
language, the indecency of the postures of the 
men and women, and the rudeness and vul- 
garity of all was shocking. This martyrdom 
lasted for him the entire winter and when the 
wonderful priest, sick and worn to attenuation, 
was brought in a canoe to Quebec, his Mon- 
tagnais companion, Mestigoit, carried him 
ashore in his arms. But he mastered the 
Montagnais language while with the hunters, 
and became familiar with their savage cus- 
toms, their tribal laws and superstitions, 
"a knowledge," he writes, "which will be 
of great service to us all in bringing the 
savages into the fold of Jesus Christ." 

Reading over this extraordinary Relation 
one is constrained to ask : What result did he 
hope to achieve by voluntarily surrendering 
himself to these unspeakable indignities and 
such sustained physical suffering? The ex- 
istence of the Montagnais horde with whom 
he wintered was a hell of foul licentiousness, 
of nameless lusts, of hunger, disease and 
physical sufferings, and there was no hope 
for betterment, save in annihilation, or re- 
construction, or rather, in resurrection. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 155 

This highly educated and devout priest, 
Paul Le Jeune, who entered this barren 
desolation of savagery and devoted himself 
to the training and uplifting of these brutal- 
ized men and women, was either a fool or a 
saint. But this wonderful man who came to 
live and companion with these savages was a 
Jesuit priest, and though terrible things have 
been said and written about the Jesuits, 
their bitterest enemies have never pilloried 
them as fools. "When we have delivered 
our attacks," writes the deist Marcellac 
"we must, as honorable foes, acknowledge that 
they are, as a body, the greatest scholars and 
most fearless missionaries known to the world." 

Of the great names which illumine the pages 
of Canadian history there is not one entitled 
to more honour and distinction than that of 
the heroic and saintly Paul Le Jeune. When 
he died humanity and the church lost a com- 
manding personality. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

SETTING OUT FOR LAKE ST. JOHN 

When in 1877, the Jesuit College which 
had been built in Quebec city two hundred 
and fourteen years before, was torn down to 
furnish a site for the new City Hall, the 
wreckers found, buried under the sanctuary, 
the remains of the body of Father Jean 
Dequen, who died on the eighth of October, 
1659, a victim of charity, from a fever con- 
tracted while administering the last Sacra- 
ments to an Algonquin convert. 

Jean Dequen was born at Amiens, France, in 
1603. After his ordination to the priesthood 
in 1632 he heard the Macedonian call of the. 
Canadian savages and hurried across the 
3,000 miles of water to their assistance. He 
arrived in Quebec in 1635 and, in order that 
he might have leisure to study the language 
of the Algonquin- tribes, he began teaching in 
the Jesuit College, Quebec. Following his 
career we hear of him among the Indians at 
Sillery and Three Rivers. From these centres 
he made intermittent visits to the forest tribes. 

In May, 1641, nineteen years before his 
death, this wonderful priest founded the first 
permanent mission at Tadousac for the Mon- 

157 



158 SETTING OUT FOR LAKE ST. JOHN 

tagnais and Bersiamites. Though welcomed 
cordially by the savages then camping among 
the hoary rocks of Tadousac some of whom 
were converts to the Faith, he was not fav- 
ourably impressed by the appearance of the 
place. "A land so barren," he writes, "that 
there is hardly soil enough to bury the dead, 
but the mission of Tadousac will be a fine 
field for the work and will yield fruit in season : 
sooner or later the word of God will have its 
effect." 

The morning after his coming among them, 
the Montagnais peeled the bark from birch 
trees and raised a humble chapel where for 
months he slept, instructed the adults, bap- 
tized the infants and daily offered the Holy 
Sacrifice. 

Early in July, 1647, he learned from an 
Indian, who had come down from Chicoutimi, 
that two of his Tadousac converts were Iving 
sick in a camp on the shores of Lake Pioua- 
garni. The camp was one hundred and 
twenty-five miles from Tadousac and in a 
region where he was more likely to encounter 
a pack of wolves than the society of men. 

From the day he came to Tadousac this 
intrepid priest entertained the lofty hope 
of sometime penetrating the unexplored and 
unknown wilderness north of the Saguenay, 
and visiting the hunting grounds of the 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 159 

northern tribes. Possibly, the expectation 
of obtaining some valuable information about 
the lands and tribes north and east of the 
inland lakes where the sick men lay, may have 
fortified the resolve he now made to visit 
them at Lake Piuagami. For "the work of 
the Jesuits," writes Edmund Roy in his in- 
formative and delightfully impressive book, 
Voyages au Pays de Tadousac, was not entirely 
confined to the conversion of the Indians. 
Apostles and soldiers of the Cross, they ven- 
tured everywhere seeking the most obscure 
tribes and places, and exposing their lives 
for the salvation of souls, for God and France." 

When Father Dequen made known his wish 
to, visit the sick men at Piougami, the Mon- 
tagnais hunters at Tadousac told him he was 
about to undertake a voyage beset with great 
hardships and difficulties. They pictured the 
length of time it would take, the long portages 
from river to river, the falls and rapids he 
would encounter and the suffering he must 
endure from swarms of mosquitoes and black 
flies. 

Unmoved by their appeals and unterrified 
by the hardships of the voyage, the Jesuit 
remained firm in his resolve to answer the call 
of the sick. Two of his Tadousac converts 
volunteered to accompany him. Freighting 
a canoe with provisions for five days they 



160 SETTING OUT FOR LAKE ST. JOHN 

embarked early on the morning of July llth 
and began the ascent of the Saguenay River, 
near where it opens its gloomy portals opposite 
Pointe-Noire. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

^N THE WAY TO PIOUGAMI 

The air was cold and bracing, with a touch 
of mountain purity in it, when, in the dawning 
morning, the canoe swung into midwater and 
began the ascent of the river. The bronzed 
and long haired paddlers were long, lank and 
wiry men, agile and strong as panthers, broad 
of shoulders, and had muscles tough as whip 
cords. 

The forest was yet asleep when they swept 
by Cap La Boule. When the sun arose above 
the mountains they were passing Anse a David. 
Amid a silence, broken only by the swivelling 
whistle of a flock of wild ducks and the swish 
and dip of the paddles, they rounded Grande 
Pointe as the sun was crossing the meridian. 
Peace was everywhere in the bays, on the 
mountains and on the river which waveless, 
if not tideless, flowed beneath them. 

As the day waned and the river grew mys- 
teriously gloomy, they paddled into a hospi- 
table bay, built their fire, and made camp for 
the night. A pillar of light reflected on the 
water from a fire on the eastern side of the 
river apprised them that a Montagnais 
hunter and his squaw were bivouacking there 

161 



162 ON THE WAY TO PIOUGAMI 

till morning. When the priest and his guides 
had eaten their frugal supper they knelt 
down, adored God, said aloud their evening 
prayers and laid them down to welcome rest. 
Launching their canoe at break of day, they 
sailed, that afternoon, through the shadows of 
Capes Eternity and Trinity and late in the 
evening of the second day swept by Le 
Tableau and camped for the night in the 
friendly harbour of Anse Rouge. Arriving at 
the outlet of the Chicoutimi, they portaged 
the rapids and following the river entered 
Lake Kenogami. The Jesuit was the first 
white man to gaze upon its pleasant waters. 
Crossing the lake, which is practically an 
extension of Kenogamiche, they came to La 
Belle-Riviere, down which they floated into 
the little inland sea of Piougami, which, 
twelve years after Dequen's discovery, Father 
De Crepieul called Lake St. John. The 
valiant priest and his Montagnais guides had 
canoed and portaged west and north-west from 
Tadousac one hundred and twenty-five miles, 
covering the distance in five days and four 
nights. 

LAKE ST. JOHN 

This romantic lake, where so many legends 
and weird stories of northern solitudes have 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 163 

been born, is about eighty-five miles in cir- 
cumference and twenty-eight miles in length, 
and into it flow many rivers and streams, 
some of which have their sources at the 
height of land dividing the territories of 
Quebec and Hudson Bay. Late in spring, 
the melting snow and five large rivers flowing 
into it raise its level twenty-five feet; for it 
has only one outlet where, by a double 
course of tumbling and foaming rapids, the 
Saguenay bears its waters to the St. Law- 
rence through towering mountains and a 
wealth of scenery unsurpassed on the contin- 
ent of America. 

This was Dequen's first view of the magni- 
ficent body of water called Piougami by the 
Indians. The Lake is one of the most 
picturesque and beautiful inland basins on the 
American continent. Surrounded on three 
sides by richly wooded mountains whose trees 
are, morning and evening, mirrored in its 
waters, the lake is dotted with evergreen 
islands and is rimmed with sand and pebble 
beaches. Streams and rivers from the rock 
and forest regions of the North, as if attracted 
by its beauty, pay generous tribute to it, 
and the great Saguenay receives its super- 
abundant wealth. Father Laure says that 
when he visited it in 1732 the lake was full 
of fish, the country surrounding it very 



164 ON THE WAY TO PIOUGAMI 

beautiful, the landscape picturesque and the 
soil good. Since then no great cities or large 
towns have defiled its primitive beauty. 
The industrious and peace-loving habitant 
has ploughed and sown the grain of civilization 
in its fertile valley and advanced his conquest 
of the soil as far as Petite Peribonka and Lake 
Mathieu, but beyond that, all is now as it 
was when Father Albanel challenged its 
untamed and forbidding spirit of savagery. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE "RIVER OF DEATH." 

What of the Saguenay up which Father 
Dequen paddled? 

Whoever has sailed up the river at night 
will remember the solemn and awe-inspiring 
majesty of the profound silence everywhere 
around him, when all nature seemed in repose, 
and God, as on the seventh day, was resting. 

The contour and face of the land has not 
altered much since the daring Jesuit, two hun- 
dred and seventy years ago, passed up the 
river. The gigantic hills, the bays and mar- 
gins of the twenty-five streams and rivers 
feeding the wonderful Saguenay, are still 
robed in black and white spruce, Canada 
larch, and jack pine; with willow, birch, alder, 
and lichens. Now, as in those early times, 
the Caribou moss in season droops from the 
branches and clothes the trees with mar- 
vellous weaving. 

Here and there in miniature valleys and on 
sloping hill-sides civilization has built its 
villages and its isolated homes and is culti- 
vating the arable land; with axe and station- 
ary saw it is attacking the balsam, spruce, and 
pulp pine. On a high and inviting level of 

165 



166 THE "RIVER OF DEATH" 

Cape Trinity, Catholic piety has raised an 
heroic statue of the Virgin Mother of God, 
whose prayerful attitude symbolizes her con- 
tinual appeal to her divine Son that He would 
bless and consecrate the land and its people. 

These are the only changes man and time 
have wrought, for while the great earthquake 
of 1663 altered the face of nature in other 
places, here the strength, solidity and bulk 
of these everlasting mountains remained un- 
changed. The might and majesty of these 
colossal members of the great Laurentian 
family; the ancient forests dressing the im- 
perishable mountains; the flow and tide and 
solemn majesty of this River of Death and the 
shape, form and towering height of Capes 
Trinity and Eternity, are as they were aeons 
before Champlain's ship, in 1603, furrowed 
the waters from Tadousac to Chicoutimi. 

The Saguenay drains from the north and 
south thirty thousand square miles of terri- 
tory.* It is, in places, more than one 
thousand feet deep; is navigable for seventy- 
five miles; and is, from Chicoutimi to the St. 
Lawrence, grimly bastioned on both sides with 
high protective walls of imperishable granite. 
Tide water which, at Chicoutimi, rises to a 
height varying from eight to twenty-two 

'Report of the Commission for the Control of Running 
Waters in Quebec, 1913. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 167 

feet, begins to recede when thirty-five miles 
from the Grande Decharge. When and how 
this wonderful river was formed; when and 
how its battlemented sides were upraised, 
no one has been able to inform us. Possibly 
it was as it is now before God said: "Let us 
make man to our image and likeness," and 
may continue to be as it now is when time 
shall be no more. 

When, first of white men, Dequen ascended 
the Saguenay to Lake St. John, he inspected 
with admiring and critical eye the windings 
of the river, the towering mountains, the 
islands, bays and inlets, and wondered at 
its beauty and the wealth of forest life through 
which he sailed. It is almost impossible for 
us to-day to recall or to conceive the teeming 
richness of forest, stream, lake and river 
which gave life to the wilderness in the 
time of the daring Jesuit. Through the 
darkling woods where, side by side, rose in 
marvellous profusion birch, pine, spruce, and 
fir, roamed deer, moose, bear and caribou, 
and there too prowled the wolf, the lynx, and 
smaller fur-bearing animals. Here also, in 
river, stream and lakelet swarmed beavers, 
minks, otters and musk-rats. The waters 
teemed with edible fish and succulent food 
which furnished abundant sustenance to the 
wild geese, ducks and loons which floated 



168 THE "RIVER OF DEATH" 

on their surface. Beyond Kenogami an eter- 
nal silence reigned, broken only by the cry 
of the loon or the bark of the hungry wolf. 
The solitude was primeval and the soil virgin, 
unprofaned by the foot of the stranger. 
Down this great river in those early days 
came, from far-away regions, savage Mis- 
tassini and Algonquin traders, whose swarthy 
skins were feeding grounds for vermin, mos- 
quitoes, black flies and midges. They carried 
no provisions, for the forest yielded them an 
abundance of game and the waters supplied 
them with a liberal allowance of fish. 

The rush of the water escaping from Lake 
St. John is momentarily stopped and divided 
by Alma Island, which splits the flow, throw- 
ing it to right and left and forming what are 
known as Le Grande Decharge and La Petite 
Decharge. When hurrying to greet the river 
twelve miles further down, the waters become 
foaming torrents rushing against rock and 
boulder, tumbling and tossing into falls, 
cataracts, cascades and rapids, till they are 
received in the welcoming bosom of the 
Saguenay, which peacefully and solemnly 
bears them away to the majestic flow of the 
mighty St. Lawrence. 

Every year in autumn the banks and lands 
of the Upper Saguenay are a fascination of 
colour. When the hills are veiled in rosy 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 169 

clouds and shafts of golden sunlight shoot 
down upon the purple shadows resting on 
the river ; when the yellow leaves of the poplar, 
the brown and white of the birch, the red and 
purple of the young maple and the green of 
the pine and fir mingle their tints and hues, 
then a glorious blaze of colour flames over a 
magnificent panorama of lake and river and 
valley. Just before the leaves of the maple 
and birch begin to fall the trees are wonder- 
ful in their wealth of colour. Everything 
that has been written anywhere on the charm 
and beauty and luxurious richness of Canadi- 
an woods in autumn may here be seen in 
riotous variety and perfection. 

But the orange, purple, russet and crimson 
of the forest are ever surpassed in beauty 
by the gorgeous spectacle of the clouds when 
the sun is sinking to rest. Then the eastern 
sky is like unto a lake of blood, and the ancient 
mountains are coloured in deep purple and 
violet. When the orb dips and disappears 
spires of glory rest upon the hills and waves of 
red and amber roll over the atmospheric sea. 
But a still more wonderful scene is presented 
when, on certain days in winter, the air 
congeals minute globules of aqueous vapour 
and, forming sleet, crusts with ice and icy 
needles the shrubs and under brush of the 
woods, the stems, sprays and branches of 



170 THE "RIVER OF DEATH" 

deciduous trees. Then is formed by the hand 
of God a coral forest which, when touched by 
the brilliant light of the sun, is transformed 
into a park of diamonds and amethysts. 
It is a scene of surpassing beauty, commonised 
to the dwellers of the Upper Saguenay by 
familiarity, but transcending by its unequalled 
charm the possibility of reproduction on can- 
vas. 

When snow and winter have fallen upon the 
dark forest and river, the silence of the night 
is like unto that which was upon the earth 
when God said: "Let there be Light." The 
long twilights which in summer blend night 
and day into one are now followed for six 
months by short days and long nights. Vege- 
tation is arrested in its growth and all nature 
sleeps. The frozen Saguenay is blanketed 
with snow ; snow falls everywhere on the 
mountains, on the valleys, on the ice-bound 
waters, on the trees, and stays with them. 
Myriads of icicles hang from branches and 
ledges, and, in places, the faces of the water- 
worn rocks shine like sheets of mica. The 
snow-covered boulders, piled up and jagged, 
like huge and unchangeable heaps of ice, are 
memorials of the terrible and lasting ravages 
of primordial times. 

For days, it may be for weeks, a mysterious 
calm rests upon the river, when, without 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 171 

premonition or warning, ominous and threa- 
tening clouds darken the heavens. Then the 
trees on the mountains sway as if the power 
moving them acted from the earth. A tem- 
pest of rushing wind strikes the mountains, 
and a storm of whirling snow lashes the 
forest and sweeps high over the frozen river. 
When the storm has passed, night shrouds 
the land, the moon and stars come out and 
shed a cold, steel-blue light on forest, 
mountain and river. For sixty miles, the 
hard frozen and granite-bound Saguenay is a 
petrified road of white marble under whose 
surface the waters of Lake St. John, uncon- 
quered by storm or frost, move peacefully to 
their destiny. 



CHAPTER XIX. 
OTHER PATH-FINDERS. 

Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in his preface to the 
second volume of The Encyclopaedia of Canada, 
pays a very fine tribute to the heroism of the 
early Jesuit missionaries to the Canadian 
tribes : "Intrepid, brave and courageous as 
were the hunters, and traders, of French 
Canada, still more intrepid, brave and coura- 
geous were the missionaries. Wherever the 
hunters went they had been preceded by 
missionaries who more than once had traced 
their way with their blood. No more heroic 
pages can be found than those which relate 
the labours and sufferings of these men who 
sacrificed for the greater glory of God every- 
thing that makes life dear." True, these 
undaunted and saintly men were splendidly 
dowered with all the virtues and qualities 
the ordeal and severity of their lonely lives 
demanded. Trained to obedience from boy- 
hood, educated in a severe school of mental 
discipline and deeply imbued with the highest 
ideals of Christian life, they directed, as Sir 
Wilfrid says, all their actions to the " Greater 
Glory of God." 

When they volunteered for the Imperial 

173 



174 OTHER PATH-FINDERS 

Guard of the Catholic Church they knew the 
roughness of the road and the difficulties and 
hardships of the campaign of life upon which 
they were entering. It was a road rough and 
thorny, to be trodden with bleeding feet and 
aching brow. It was a long battle with the 
elements and with the passions, appetites 
and opposition of savage man. It was a life 
of which the Cross is the symbol and the 
Crown of Thorns the emblem. 

Many of them were cut off in the noon of 
their day, but when one of them bowed to 
triumphant death another stepped into the 
breach and took his place. Not one of them 
was laid to rest in the pleasant land of France, 
or in the sepulchre of his ancestors. 

Conspicuous among the names of these 
great Jesuit priests, who braved the winter 
horrors of tribal life in those early days, are 
those of Claude Dablon and Gabriel Druil- 
lettes. 

The distinguished author, Father T. J. 
Campbell, S.J., says of Dablon : "He was 
the wisest, most eminent and most experienced 
of all of those who were entrusted with the 
onerous task of providing means to carry on 
the great work which the Jesuits had set for 
themselves in Northern America." 

Early in the winter of 1660 a Mistassini 
Indian came to Quebec by way of Tadousac 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 175 

to invite the Algonquins of Sillery to attend 
the annual fair of the Nekouba tribe. In 
conversation with Father Druillettes he inci- 
dentally mentioned that he and others of his 
people had been to the Northern Sea (Hudson 
Bay) and that he had met there many Mon- 
tagnais Indians who had fled from the wrath 
of the Iroquois. For many years the exis- 
tence of the Sea of the North was known to the 
Jesuits of Quebec, for in the Relation of 1661, 
we read : "For a long time we have believed 
that to our rear lies the Sea of the North, that 
it cannot be far from the Sea of China, if only 
the gateway can be found." 

With characteristic enterprise the Jesuits, 
with the co-operation of the civil officials of 
Quebec, organized an exploring party and on 
June 1st, 1661, Dablon and Druillettes left 
Tadousac with forty canoes and sailed the 
Saguenay to Lake St. John. The party 
remained here three or four days to make 
repairs and to outfit anew for the long and 
perilous voyage through regions "unknown 
to the French," and "into which no French- 
man had ever gone." 

On June 19 they began the ascent of the 
Chamouchouan River, and after much suffer- 
ing and great labour entered, early in July, 
upon Lake Nekouba. In the Relation, which 
gives the history of the expedition, Father 



176 OTHER PATH-FINDERS 

Dablon says : "Nekouba is famous because 
of its annual fair to which the savages from 
far and near come every year to trade one 
with the other. When coming here we passed 
through forests which on account of their 
extent and silence and of the rough and 
dangerous paths and portages would dis- 
courage the most experienced travellers." 
Further on in the same letter he adds : "We 
have met here members of eight or nine tribes 
many of whom never saw a Frenchman or 
heard of God ; others who had been baptised 
at Tadousac or Lake St. John have for many 
years mourned the absence of their priests. 
We have now had the great consolation of 
preaching the gospel to many tribes, of 
baptising many children, instructing many 
adults and hearing the confessions of many 
penitents." The missionaries were enthu- 
siastic in their admiration of the land, the 
scenery and climate of the Lake St. John re- 
gion, but, as they advanced towards the north, 
they suffered from great heat and the smoke 
of bush fires and said the land they passed 
through was hilly and of poor soil. 

When the fathers were preparing to con- 
tinue their journey to the North Sea, their 
guides refused to accompany them. Runners 
entered Nekouba during the night and re- 
ported that the Iroquois had slaughtered the 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 177 

nation of the Escuriel and were ambushing 
the Rupert River. The fair at once was 
closed and the visiting savages departed in 
haste for their own lands. The Jesuits were 
compelled to return to Tadousac and thus 
ended what the Journal of the expedition 
termed "The first voyage made towards the 
Sea of the North." 



CHAPTER XX. 

THE FATE OF THE IROQUOIS. 

The Jesuit Relations put it beyond all 
doubt that the Iroquois of western New York, 
notably the Mohawks and Senecas, defeated 
the hopes of converting and civilizing the 
Indians of all Canada east of the Rocky 
Mountains. From Lakes Ontario and Michi- 
gan to Tadousac and Lakes Nekouba and 
St. John covering an immense territory 
the fighting men of the redoutable Iroquois 
Confederacy slaughtered, pillaged and burned. 
In their ruthless savagery they spared no 
man, no woman, no infant at the breast, and 
the print of an Iroquois moccasin portended 
calamity. Returning from the slaughter of 
the Hurons in 1649, they came back and the 
Tiontates the Tobacco Nation fled their 
hunting grounds. In 1651 they wiped out 
the Neutrals of the Niagara Peninsula. The 
same winter a war party of the Iroquois fell 
upon the Attikamegues or White Fish of the 
Upper St. Maurice and with unparalleled 
ferocity, slaughtered them, tearing out the 
eyes and girdling the lips of the old men and 
women, leaving them to starve to death in 
the forest. 

179 



180 FATE OF THE IROQUOIS 

In 1654 they annihilated the entire Erie 
nation and burned hundreds of them at the 
stake. They destroyed the Andastes of the 
Susquehanna, reducing the few who escaped 
to the condition of fugitives and outcast 
They extinguished the Peorias and in 1680 
they fell -upon the Illinois and mercilessly 
slaughtered them, a remnant only escaping to 
the west across the Mississippi. 

Inflated with the pride of conquest they 
crossed the Mississippi and challenged the 
Sioux to combat. The formidable raiders of 
the western prairies were ready for them. 
Tradition says that when the Iroquois ad- 
vanced to give battle, Malahuk, chief of the 
Ogallalah Sioux, strode forward and said to 
the Mohawks : "What have you come for ?" 
"We came to hunt," answered the Iroquois. 
'So have we," spoke back Malahuk. "And 
what animals are you hunting ?" "Men," 
was the haughty reply. "You have found 
them," shouted Malahuk, chief of the Ogal- 
lalahs, and with bows and arrows, tomahawk 
and scalping knife the fight opened. After 
hours of desperate fighting the Iroquois went 
down to a bloody defeat. Malahuk's warriors 
spared a few of the Iroquois whose hands they 
cut off. They told the mutilated victims to 
take the trail for their distant homes and say 
to their countrymen, "If you hope to conquer 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 181 

the Sioux, send men, not women, to fight 
them." This defeat was the beginning of 
the decline of the fighting strength of the 
Iroquois. General Sullivan's and Colonel 
Broadhead's raids into their hunting lands in 
1779 were followed by famine ; then whiskey 
and debauchery ended the tragedy. 

What mystery lies behind it all ? Had the 
savages of America accomplished the purpose 
of God when He delivered the continent to 
them, or did God in His mercy have pity on 
them and permit them to end forever by 
their own hands a national existence that, 
when the white man came, was a hell of 
savagery, of merciless cruelty and foul licen- 
tiousness ? 



CHAPTER XXI. 

THE; TRAIL BREAKER. 

In the year 1650 Father Charles Albanel, 
one of the great Jesuit missionaries of his time, 
fixed his headquarters for the Montagnais 
missions at Tadousac. When winter set in he 
followed on snowshoes his Indian converts on 
their hunting expeditions through dense forests 
over frozen lakes and rivers, saying mass 
when he could on an altar stone placed on a 
cedar stump or wind-swept rock. Every year 
for five months of winter he companioned with 
them, ate out of the dish they ate from, slept 
with them under the same wind-break, in- 
structed them in the doctrines of the church 
and night and morning led them in prayer. 

When spring opened and the ice was 
thinning they all returned to Tadousac, where 
the priest again entered his daily routine of 
visiting the sick, instructing the children in 
the catechism, and guarding the morals of his 
catechumens. One morning in the summer 
of 1670 while on his way to visit a band of his 
people camping in the woods forty miles from 
Tadousac, Father Albanel met a Mistassini 
Indian who said he had left the shores of the 
Sea of the North (Hudson Bay), early in May, 

183 



184 THE TRAIL BREAKER 

and that there he had seen a great ship 
anchored. Albanel sent to the authorities at 
Quebec the substance of the conversation he 
had had with the Mistassini. The Intendant 
Talon requested Father Lallement, Superior 
of the Canadian mission, to summon Albanel 
to Quebec, for, if the story was true, and the 
ship an English ship, then the commercial and 
religious supremacy of France in the regions 
north and west of Lake Nekouba was threa- 
tened. 

While waiting for Albanel, Talon heard 
from two Algonquin hunters passing through 
Quebec that there were two ships in James' 
Bay and that the English were preparing to 
build a fort on the mainland. 

When Albanel arrived in Quebec, Talon at 
once .commissioned him to visit the tribe of 
the Kilistones inhabiting the forests around 
James' Bay, to invite them to trade only with 
the French and to send a deputation from their 
nation to Quebec. The Intendant also in- 
structed him to raise the French flag in the 
Hudson Bay territory and to take possession 
of the region in the name of the King of 
France. 

It would have been impossible for the 
Intendant to have chosen a better leader for 
the expedition than Father Albanel. For 
twenty years he had lived with the Indians ; 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 185 

he had explored the territory from Tadousac 
to Lake St. John and for hundreds of miles 
on both shores of the St. Lawrence ; he was 
familiar with the Algonquin dialects, knew 
the habits , ways of living, and superstitions 
of the savages ; he was a brave man, an 
heroic and exemplary missionary. But he 
was now about to enter upon a voyage of 
exploration repeatedly attempted by others 
who had to confess to failure. Even the 
Jesuit Fathers of Quebec, as early as 1640, 
were of the opinion that the only feasible 
route to Hudson Bay was by way of Lake 
Huron. 

In 1657, the Agent-General of the Govern- 
ment, Jean Bourdon, accompanied by a body 
of expert Montagnais guides, failed in his 
attempt to enter Hudson Bay territory. So, 
too, did the great Jesuit missionaries, Dablon 
and Druillettes, who in 1661 were forced to 
return from Nekouba. In 1663, the Notary 
Public, Pierre Duquet, attempted to enter 
Hudson Bay territory by way of the Mistassini 
River and was compelled to return without 
accomplishing his object. A rough map, 
made by a Jesuit priest in 1657, showed six 
routes by which it might be possible to cross 
the height of land into Hudson Bay lands. 

On August 22, 1671, a canoe sailed out of 
Tadousac bearing the party of explorers made 



186 THE TRAIL BREAKER 

up of Father Albanel, a French gentleman, 
Paul Denis, Sieur de St. Simon (Denys de St. 
Simon), a Frenchman whose name is not men- 
tioned in the Relation, and six Montagnais 
Indians. Advancing by way of Chicoutimi, 
they crossed Lakes Kenogami and St. John. 
On the 2nd of September they camped "near 
the mouth of Lake St. John, which was known 
as Piougami." On the 7th the party reached 
the end of the lake, and on the 17th "five 
canoes bearing Attikamegues and Mistassi- 
riens came and joined us." 

Father Albanel has left us an interesting 
account of the lake and its surroundings r 
"A beautiful region," he writes, "the land 
being very fertile with fine prairies. It is the 
country of the otter, moose, beaver, and, 
above all, the porcupine. It was formerly 
the place between the two seas of the east 
and north, whither all the nations used to 
repair for purposes of trade. I have seen 
more than twenty nations gathered there." 

Here the party entered into winter quarters 
and remained until June 1st, 1672, when they 
again took to their canoes and headed for the 
north. "Our party," writes Albanel in the 
Relation, 1671-72, "now numbered nineteen, 
of whom sixteen were savages and three 
Frenchmen, in three canoes." They prob- 
ably went up the Chamouchouan River, and 




g 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 187 

by portages, streams and rivers arrived on 
the morning of the eighth at Lake Nekouba, 
discovered by the Jesuit Fathers Dablon and 
Druillettes, and the limit of their famous 
expedition of 1661. Pushing on from Nekou- 
ba they reached Palistakau and the "divide," 
where the waters flow in opposite directions 
and where a little tongue of rocky soil 
"separated the lands of the north from those 
of the south." 

At this place a Mistassini chief held up the 
expedition and demanded tribute before he 
would permit the party to advance. That 
evening Albanel summoned the chief and his 
leading warriors to meet him in council. 
When all were assembled the Jesuit stepped 
to the centre and said : " Sesibahoura, Chief, 
here are two presents, but I am not giving 
them to you to purchase the passage of this 
river, or this lake. The French have delivered 
your hunting lands from the raids of your 
enemy, the Iroquois. They have won the 
right to go and come through all this land with 
entire freedom. Moreover, God, whom you 
acknowledge to be your master and mine, 
gives me the right of free passage everywhere, 
for He sent me to make Him known through- 
out all these regions. No tribe or nation has 
ever demanded anything of my brothers when 
they entered and freely passed through its 
territory to instruct them." 



188 THE TRAIL BREAKER 

On June 18, Father Albanel discovered and 
coasted Lake Mistassini, which, with the 
regions around it, he minutely describes. 
Skirting the lake they found the entrance to 
the Nemiskan, now Rupert's River, and fol- 
lowing its flow arrived June 28th, 1672, at 
James' Bay, an inlet of Hudson Bay, or Sea 
of the North. 

"Hitherto," writes Albanel, "this journey 
was considered impossible for the French, 
who had already three times attempted it, 
but, unable to surmount the obstacles they 
met, had been forced to abandon it in despair 
of success." This expedition of the daring 
priest brought to an end the era of discoveries 
in the lands lying north of the St. Lawrence 
River. By land and water the explorers 
travelled, going and coming, two thousand 
two hundred miles, encountered four hundred 
rapids and two hundred portages, and accom- 
plished the voyage in the almost incredible 
time of sixty-three days. 

The brave priest passed five days with the 
Hudson Bay tribes, who, in 1661, had sent a 
deputation to Quebec requesting that one or 
two Jesuit missionaries might visit and in- 
struct them.* In his valuable letter or 
Relation he mentions the variety and abun- 

* NOTE. Deputies of the tribes of Hudson Bay came again 
to Quebec, in 1671, on the same mission. 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 189 

dance of wild fruits grov/ing everywhere, the 
fertility of the land, the mildness of the 
climate and the wealth of forest life. 

This expedition of Father Albanel opened a 
way for all time through the northern forests 
and, closing an era of discovery, made it 
possible to map and exploit the territories 
between the St. Lawrence and Hudson Bay. 
Lord Strathcona in his "Histpry of the 
Hudson's Bay Company," makes an honour- 
able concession when he admits that "the 
Hudson's Bay Company owed its inception to 
the explorations and activity of the French. 
In the days of the French Regime, before 
Canada was transferred to England, the mis- 
sionaries and fur-traders penetrated far into 
the interior, and their reckless courage, intre- 
pidity and resource in the face of dangers and 
difficulties that can hardly be appreciated at 
the present time, must command admiration. 
The laudable object the missionaries had in 
view was the extension of the gospel among 
the Indians." 

The following year this brave and zealous 
priest, now in the fifty-seventh year of his 
age, left Tadousac for Hudson Bay in fulfil- 
ment of a promise he had made to the Indians 
of that region. On this expedition he suf- 
fered severely from cold, hunger, and dis- 
appointment. Unable from weakness and 



190 THE TRAIL BREAKERS 

the effects of a bad fall to hold the pace of his 
savage companions he was abandoned in the 
woods and left to his own resources. Streng- 
thened by the food a wandering band of Mis- 
tasinis gave him, he recovered sufficiently to 
start again on his journey, and after weeks of 
anxiety and suffering came to the shores of 
Hudson Bay. Not until the expiration of 
two years, after a report was circulated in the 
streets of Quebec that he had been killed by 
savages and only when all hope of his return 
was abandoned, was it known that he was a 
prisoner in England, where he was held till 
1676. 

From his second expedition Father Albanel 
reaped but a harvest of disappointment and 
regret. In the Relation for 1762 we are in- 
formed that on his first voyage to the coast 
he baptized two hundred savages, enlisted 
the co-operation and good-will of the chiefs 
and elders, and proved by experience that the 
two special obstacles superstition and im- 
morality to the conversion of the Indians 
were not insuperable difficulties. He refutes 
the impression which obtained at Quebec and 
Three Rivers relating to the bareness of the 
land and the the severity of the seasons : " They 
are mistaken," he adds, "who believe that 
ice and snow and great cold make this land 
uninhabitable, or that there is no wood here 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 191 

with which to build houses or to heat them. 
They hold this opinion because they have not 
seen or been informed of the existence of the 
great forest growth of the country, nor of the 
rich plains and fertile prairie lands covered 
with all kinds of grass suitable for cattle. I 
can truthfully say that here in June I saw wild 
roses as beautiful and fragrant as those of 
Quebec. The air here is mild and pleasant to 
breathe and the season, it seemed to me, more 
advanced than at Quebec." 

This remarkable priest, Charles Albanel, 
was eventually appointed to the missions of 
the West, where for many years he devoted 
himself to the conversion of the Algonquins 
of the Lake Superior regions. He lived to 
the remarkable age, for a Jesuit missionary, 
of seventy-nine, dying January, 1696, at 
Sault Ste. Marie. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 
THE LONE PRIEST. 

If irrefutable proofs were not advanced, or 
documents of unquestionable reliability in 
existence, no one could be charged with un- 
reasonable incredulity if he hesitated to 
believe in the possibility of any man volun- 
tarily entering upon a career of sustained 
suffering which tested human endurance to 
its limit, and persevering for thirty years in a 
life filled to repletion with physical pain, with 
exposure to cold and hunger, and exposed to 
all the abominations of savagery. 

Nor is it easy, with our knowledge of human 
nature, to understand how Father De Crepieul 
could, after a winter of bitter experience with 
his savage companions in the Saguenay forests, 
indite this request to his spiritual superior at 
Quebec : "The great favour which I ask of 
you, my reverend father, is to permit me to 
remain here another year, during which time 
God, I hope, will give me the strength and 
courage to repair by additional sufferings the 
faults I may have committed during the 
past year.'" 

Only a divine man, influenced by the life 

^-Relations of 1664. 

193 



194 THE LONE PRIEST 

of the Apostle to the Gentiles, who became 
all things to all men that he might save all for 
Christ, could endure and cheerfully suffer for 
years the horrors of tribal encampments and 
entire isolation from civilized life. 

Francis de Crepieul was born at Arras, 
France, March 17, 1638. He came of an 
aristocratic family. Renouncing the pros- 
pects of a brilliant career in France he entered 
a Jesuit College and became a novice of the 
Order in 1658. After his ordination to the 
priesthood he sailed for Canada and, at the 
age of thirty- two, entered upon his mis- 
sionary labours in the Saguenay regions. 
For the rest of his life he companioned with 
the Montagnais. 

It is an exception in human experience to 
find united in one personality an enthusiastic 
love for wayward souls and a passion for holy 
enterprises united with great tact and pru- 
dence. But the missionary journals of Father 
de Crepieul testify to an extraordinary com- 
bination of all the qualities which constitute 
greatness of mind and soul with a power of 
sustained endurance to physical fatigue and 
suffering almost beyond belief. Yet, the 
name of this saintly priest and heroic mis- 
sionary is rarely ever pronounced, and is even 
unknown to the educated men of his own 
faith. "The missionaries who laboured in 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 195 

the West," writes Samuel Edward Dawson in 
his book The Saint Lawrence, "suffered in 
their lifetime, and their names are honoured 
by millions, even of people who are strangers 
to their faith. But the names of Dequen, 
Albanel, Laure, and de Crpieul are almost 
entirely unknown." 

The missionary experiences of Father de 
Crdpieul surpass in interest the thrilling 
exploits of the heroes of Homer's Odyssey. 

This great priest, waving from him the 
brilliant prospects of a career in France, 
buried himself alive in the revolting com- 
panionship of wandering hordes who haunted 
like ghosts the solitudes of Eastern Canada. 
To win their souls to Christ, to civilization 
and decency, he went with them to their 
gloomy forests, followed them on snow-shoes 
over frozen river and ice-bound lake, canoed 
through regions hardly explored to-day, en- 
dured the filth and smoke of their wretched 
huts, and all this he did with a resignation 
saintly and heroic. From where the Saguenay 
enters the St. Lawrence, along the tributaries 
of the great river, from Tadousac to the 
Nekouba River, and far down towards the 
Labrador of the Esquimaux, he consorted 
with Montagnais and Algonquin tribes, in- 
structmg, converting, civilizing them, bap- 
tizing their children and burying their dead. 



196 THE LONE PRIEST 

Entering on his missionary career in the 
morning of his priesthood and the noon of 
his manhood, he left Tadousac in the autumn 
of 1671 with a large band of moose hunters 
and for six months stayed with them in the 
forest of the Lake St. John country. For 
days he tramped on snow-shoes through 
almost impenetrable woods and held the pace 
of his bronzed companions whose every fibre 
and muscle were toughened by training from 
childhood. He slept with them, sometimes 
on the snow, in the open and in their suffocat- 
ing cabins ; he ascended high mountains, 
crossed on snow-shoes frozen lakes and rivers, 
confronted often with the spectre of famine. 
With the heroism and resignation of a martyr 
of the early church he submitted to fatigue, 
hunger, cold and privation to save and 
console men and women redeemed by the 
blood of Jesus Christ. 

Everywhere and every day he instructed, 
exhorted and prayed with his Indian com- 
panions and, in the silence of the night, when 
the Montagnais stopped their singing and 
talking and the little children were sleeping, 
this man of God passed out into the cold and 
solitude of the forest to commune alone with 
God in prayer.* 

Late in the Lenten season of 1672 the priest 

^Relation, 1672, 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 197 

and the moose hunters camped on the shore 
of the Lake of the Cross. Here they built a 
temporary oratory of brush and bark, where 
instructions were given and the Holy Sacrifice 
daily offered to God for the living and the 
dead of the tribe. On the night of Good 
Friday they assembled for the Adoration of 
the Cross. Pine torches lighted the forest 
oratory ; a crucifix rested on the humble 
altar between two burning candles. The floor 
of the chapel was covered with fresh pine 
and cedar branches on which the Montagnais, 
clothed in costly beaver and otter skins, knelt. 
Presently their priest rose from his knees and 
delivered a brief instruction on the Crucifixion 
of Jesus Christ and the Adoration of the 
Cross. And when he presented the Crucifix 
for their veneration, the moose-hunters and 
the squaws, carrying on their backs their 
infants, approached the altar, and one after 
the other kissed the Crucifix and silently 
retired. 

When they were all once more in their 
places the dark-robed missionary, holding in 
his left hand the crucifix, addressed them : 
"My beloved children in Jesus Christ, I 
exhort you to walk worthily of God in all 
things pleasing ; being fruitful in every good 
work and increasing in the knowledge of God. 
Giving thanks to God, the Father, who hath 



198 THE LONE PRIEST 

made us worthy to be partakers of the lot of 
the saints in light. Who hath delivered us 
from Satan and the power of darkness, and 
hath translated us into the kingdom of His 
Son, Jesus Christ, by Whose blood we have 
redemption and the remission of sin." 

In all his letters we find no word of repining 
or complaint, except when he refers to the 
sufferings he endured when he was compelled 
by cold and snow-storms to remain days and 
nights with the Indians in the stifling atmos- 
phere of their lodges. "Though the cold was 
very severe," he writes, " and our beds nothing 
but snow covered with fir branches, I could 
endure it, but the smoke is the great cross of 
those who winter with the savages. It is 
especially trying when one is shut up, as we 
were , in a little bark cabin where the wet and 
half -decayed wood used for fuel, the damp 
air, the snow and the occasional winds, render 
the smoke so stinging that, although we may 
avoid a little by constantly maintaining a 
reclining posture as low as possible, yet we 
often lose our eye-sight from weeping ; for 
tears flow incessantly all day long tears so 
burning and stinging that at night the same 
pain is felt as if the eyes were charged 
with salt." 

After a winter of great suffering and hard- 
ships he returned with the Montagnais hunters 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 199 

to Tadousac. It was early morning when the 
canoe of Father de Crdpieul was sighted 
coming down the river followed by the canoes 
of the hunters. A runner hastened to an- 
nounce to the village the welcome news that 
the canoe of the father was near the bend. 
At once the chapel bell was rung, guns were 
fired, and out from every cabin men, women, 
and children appeared and hurried to the 
landing-cove. Every one shook hands with 
him when he alighted and greeted him with a 
friendly "Chtee ! chtee ("-"welcome! wel- 
come !" De Crepieul passed among them, 
shaking hands with every one, saying to each, 
"Koille ! Koille !"-" Good morning ! Good- 
morning !" 

The missionary, followed by his spiritual 
children, hastened to the chapel, where he 
celebrated Mass, surrounded by his Algonquin 
converts. That afternoon he baptized the 
infants born during his absence and gave the 
Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. The 
canticles and hymns were sung in Algonquin 
by the Montagnais ; the men, filling one side 
of the little chapel, sang a verse, then the 
women from their side responded by another 
verse. That evening all repaired to the 
cemetery where the priest blessed the graves 
of those buried since his departure for the 
moose lands. There, in the waning evening, 



200 THE LONE PRIEST 

amid the silence of great solitudes unbroken 
by the peaceful flow of the River of Death, 
these dark-eyed and dark-haired sons and 
daughters of the men and women redeemed by 
the priest from savagery, sang aloud the libera 
and the de profundis for the repose of the souls 
of all those whose bodies, buried in this con- 
secrated ground, were returning to the earth 
from which they came. 

Towards the end of May, 1672, this exem- 
plary priest left Tadousac to visit a Montag- 
nais tribe, known as Papinachois, whose vil- 
lages lay ninety or a hundred miles to the east. 
He went on a visit to them, he informs us, 
because "it was the season for the mission to 
the Papinachois, for which our Lord had left 

me sufficient strength I reached it 

safely just when the savages were returning 
from their winter hunts." After visiting the 
the Bersiamites and the river tribes hundreds 
of miles below Quebec, he again returned to 
Tadousac, and late in the autumn of 1673 
started anew to visit the Montagnais of the 
Lake St. John region. While camping, in 
January, with a band of hunters near the 
mouth of the Peribonka a name made fami- 
liar to us by the brilliant and lamented Louis 
Hemon in his fascinating book, Maria Chapde- 
laine a runner on snow-shoes entered the 
camp and announced that Father Albanel 



CROSS-BEARERS OF THE SAGUENAY 201 

then on his second expedition to Hudson Bay 
had met with an accident and was confined 
to his tent twenty-five miles to the north. 

The next morning after Mass this heroic 
priest, accompanied by two French-Canadian 
hunters and a Montagnais convert, started 
to the help of his brother. The Indian on 
snow-shoes broke the way, the priest and his 
companions following. When they had pene- 
trated the dark woods, tangled underbrush, 
windfalls and branches heavy with snow 
crossed their path and rendered fast travelling 
impossible. 

In the afternoon as they reached a frozen 
lake they ran into a blinding storm of snow. 
The winds, cold and bitter, seemed as if they 
would blow for ever, and, in their anxiety to 
make time, they did not see the dodging, 
hurrying wolves which stole from tree to tree 
to gaze upon them. They pushed on for 
some miles, when, utterly exhausted, De 
Crepieul called a halt. The priest, believing 
that they would all die, had the men fall upon 
their knees and join him in prayer. Then the 
Montagnais returned to the land and brought 
back branches of balsam fir, on which they 
rested, and fell into a sleep which would have 
been their last on earth if two voyageurs sent 
out by Father Albanel had not come upon 
and roused them. "Then," writes De Cr- 



202 THE LONE PRIEST 

pieul, "we resumed our journey, and in spite 
of the wind and snow we reached the place 
where the father was." 

When the wild geese and ducks were return- 
ing from the south he came back to Tadousac, 
from where he wrote to the Superior of the 
Missions, saying : "The life of a Montagnais 
missionary is a long, slow martyrdom, de- 
manding the exercise of almost continual 
patience and mortification ; a life truly peni- 
tent and humiliating, especially in the cabins, 
and on the route with the savages, suffering 
and misery are one's companions on these 
sorrowful and painful missions." 

At last, when wearied with hardship, when 
human endurance had reached its limit, the 
brave priest was brought to Quebec. He 
was for a long time unable to endure confine- 
ment to a room or rest in the bed of a civilized 
man. Accustomed for thirty years to a life 
in the open, the narrow boundaries of Quebec, 
the stuffiness of the air of his room, the closed 
house and the altered conditions of life were 
distasteful to him and almost unbearable. 
Worn out with exposure and austerities, the 
saintly missionary died in the city of Quebec 
in the year 1702. He was laid to rest with 
those other splendid and holy Jesuit mis- 
sionaries "whose bodies are buried in peace 
and whose names live from generation to 
generation." 



PRINTED BY 

THE ONTARIO PRESS LIMITED 
TORONTO, CANADA 



University of Toronto 
Library 




Acme Library Card Pocket 

Uadei Pat. "Rei. Index File" 

Made by LIBRARY BUREAU