During the next five years the Jesuits extended their missions among the Hurons till almost every town had resident priests. They established on the shores of the river Wye a central station, which by 1648 had grown into a prosperous community with buildings which would accommodate sixty persons. Pioneers went out to neighboring nations. Brébeuf and a companion journeyed to the Neutral Nation which lived north of Lake Erie and west and south of Lake Ontario, but were met with strong opposition stirred up by the superstitious Hurons, who conceived that it would be an easy and safe method of getting rid of the priests to have their neighbors kill them. The two escaped after great hardship and danger. Isaac Jogues and Charles Garnier went with attendants to the Tobacco Nation, which lived two days’ journey distant to the southwest, but were as rudely repulsed. Jogues was a young man of indomitable will to whom hard tasks seem always to have been assigned because of his complete self-surrender and consequent power. To him fell, nevertheless, in the autumn of 1641 the pleasant duty of visiting a tribe in the far west who had invited the priests to come to them. At Lake Nipissing in September the Jesuits met certain savages called Ojibways, who urged the “black-gowns” to visit them in their homes, and gave directions for the journey. In accordance with this invitation Jogues and Raymbault, with a small Huron escort, set sail on Lake Huron and after a voyage of seventeen days reached the rapids where dwelt their friends at the location of the modern Sault Ste. Marie. Here they found about two thousand savages who welcomed them cordially and looked and listened with awe as the priests celebrated mass and explained their doctrines. They invited the Fathers to take up their abode with them, saying that they would “embrace them like brothers and profit by their words,” but the Jesuits could not be spared from their other work. Jogues listened with interest to tales of a great lake beyond the Sault, which it took nine days to cross, and of a great river beyond, where dwelt mighty nations, “who,” the Fathers reported to Paris, “have never known Europeans or heard of God.” They could not stay, but sailed away, naming the place of their sojourn Ste. Marie after the mission from which they came. They were not the first white men to visit this strait. Nicolet, a voyager and trader, had travelled with Brébeuf in 1634 as far as the Huron mission and had then pushed on alone to the foot of these rapids and thence along the shores of Lake Michigan, greeted everywhere by crowds of wondering savages. It was left, however, to these pioneer missionaries to give to this important waterway the name which it still bears.