The "Relations" of Jesuits are among our most precious chronicles in America. With these the history of the north--the valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi--begins. The coureurs de bois may have anticipated the priests in some solitary places, but they seldom made records. Doubtless, like Nicolet, they told their stories to the priests when they went back to the altars for sacrament, so that even their experiences have been for the most part preserved. But when we know under what distracting and discouraging conditions even the priest wrote, we wonder, as Thwaites says, that anything whatever has been preserved in writing. The "Relations" were written by the fathers, he reminds us, [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations," 1:39, 40.] in Indian camps, the aboriginal insects buzzing or crawling about them, in the midst of a chaos of distractions, immersed in scenes of squalor and degradation, overcome by fatigue and improper sustenance, suffering from wounds and disease, and maltreated by their hosts who were often their jailers. What they wrote under these circumstances is simple and direct. There is no florid rhetoric; there is little self-glorification; no unnecessary dwelling on the details of martyrdom; and there is not a line to give suspicion "that one of this loyal band flinched or hesitated." "I know not," says one of these apostles [Footnote: Fr. Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 39:55.] in an epistle to the Romans (for this particular letter went to Rome), "I know not whether your Paternity will recognize the letter of a poor cripple, who formerly, when in perfect health was well known to you. The letter is badly written, and quite soiled because in addition to other inconveniences, he who writes it has only one whole finger on his right hand; and it is difficult to avoid staining the paper with the blood which flows from his wounds, not yet healed: he uses arquebus powder for ink, and the earth for a table." This particular early American writer, besides having his hand split and now one finger-nail or joint burned off and now another, his hair and beard pulled out, his flesh burned with live coals and red-hot stones, was hung up by the feet, had food for dogs placed upon his body that they might lacerate him as they ate, but finally escaped death itself through sale to the Dutch. Two other chroniclers of that life of which they were a part, were two men of noble birth: the giant Brébeuf, "the Ajax of the mission," a man of vigorous passions tamed by religion (as Parkman says, "a dammed-up torrent sluiced and guided to grind and saw and weave for the good of man"); and in marked and strange contrast with him, Charles Garnier, a young man of thirty-three, of beardless face--laughed at by his friends in Paris, we are told, because he was beardless but admired by the Indians for the same reason--of a delicate nature but of the most valiant spirit.