Columbus and Other Heroes of American DiscoveryD'Anvers, N.
History
Columbus and Other Heroes of American Discovery
D'Anvers, N.
America -- Discovery and exploration; North America -- Discovery and exploration
The murder of Jogues was the signal for another Indian war; and for
a time the French missionaries and laymen alike were absorbed in the
primary duty of the defense of their own lives and of those dear to
them. Through all the tumult and confusion which ensued, however, the
geographical student may, by eager searching, trace the continuous
opening up of new districts, and on the blank map which was spread out
before us when we began our narrative, we may ♦jot down the names of
many a river and lake almost unconsciously discovered by the white men,
in the very height of their struggle.
♦ ‘dot’ replaced with ‘jot’
The storm broke first on the village of St. Joseph, now almost
entirely Christianized. The able-bodied members of the community
were away at the chase; the women and children fell an easy prey to
the Mohawk warriors. Father Daniel, the head of the mission, while
administering the last rites of the church to the dying and the dead,
fell at last beneath the poisoned arrows of the Iroquois, and was
finally dispatched by a blow from a hatchet. Next St. Ignatius and
then St. Louis were overpowered, and in the latter our old friend
Brébœuf and his companion Sallemand met their death, the first after
three, the second after seventeen hours of torture.
From St. Louis, the tide of invasion swept westward to Georgian
Bay, where the Hurons had made a feeble effort to rally. Again they
were defeated, and in their despair they sent a message by Father
Dreuillette, a zealous missionary who had long been at work among the
north-west tribes, to New England, with an entreaty for succor. But,
as we shall presently see when we return to the colonies on the coast,
the energies of the newly-formed federation were all required to meet
the necessities of home defense, and no help came to the sufferers in
the north. Dreuillette worked his way back by a new route to the St.
Lawrence, that was all. Three years of almost constant massacres, in
which many a noble death was met, alike by native converts and their
teachers, were at last succeeded by a lull. The Iroquois were sated
with bloodshed; or, as some of the French authorities tell us, their
hearts had been touched by the teaching of some of their prisoners.
In any case, peace was made in 1650, and it was scarcely concluded,
before a missionary was ready to risk his life by making a fresh
effort to convert the men at whose hands his brethren had already
suffered so much.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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