Jesuits such as Jean de Brébeuf were children of privilege, indulging their hunger for adventure in foreign places. The Hurons saw them as idiots, unable to fend for themselves.
In the early 1600s, the Jesuits tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. Missionary Jean de Brébeuf was the mystic at the centre of these efforts, living among a people who struggled to cope with the norms of the religious order he represented. Ottawa author Mark Bourrie’s Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, is the first secular biography of Brébeuf. Following is an excerpt from the book.
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“Up to Huronia” (excerpted from chapter 2)
The next spring, Brébeuf and Récollet Joseph de La Roche Daillon found some Hurons who would take them up the northern canoe route to Georgian Bay. They packed their clothes and the things they needed for their religious work, including books and chalices for the Mass, and travelled together for a few days up the St. Lawrence. They turned back when they learned a Récollet, Nicolas Viel, had drowned (or been drowned), along with a young Huron convert, in the Rivière des Prairies on his return trip from Huronia. Eventually, though, they connected with Hurons who de Daillon trusted and, along with Fr. Anne de Nouë, began the three-week trip northwest, up the Ottawa River canoe route, on July 25. Their host was a leading civil chief, one of the Hurons with a legal claim to ownership of the trade route because his relatives had been the first Hurons to meet Champlain.
The trip was brutal. Brébeuf quickly learned the Hurons were not his employees, didn’t believe they had a duty to look after him, and didn’t care much whether he made it to their country or not. He was surprised when he found they expected him to lug his own bundles across the route’s many portages. Brébeuf came with a lot of baggage, and sometimes he had to make two or three trips to get it from one landing place to the next jumping-off spot.
The Hurons were absorbed in their work and rarely spoke, even to each other. They had a lot to do, paddling, portaging, wading into the river to push canoes upstream in fast water and watching for Iroquois raiders, and they probably felt very vulnerable until they reached the Morrison Island village of their sometimes ally, Tessouat. Brébeuf felt his big body “cramped in a bark canoe in an uncomfortable position, not being free to turn myself from one side to another, in danger fifty times a day of being upset or dashed upon the rocks.”
He went on. “During the day, the sun burns you. During the night, you run the risk of being a prey to the mosquitoes,” he wrote after the trip. “You sometimes ascend five or six rapids in a day, and in the evening, the only refreshment is a little corn crushed between two stones and cooked in fine clear water. The only bed is the earth, sometimes only in the rough, uneven rocks, and usually no roof but the stars, and all this in perpetual silence.”
He soon realized the Hurons expected him to finish any work that he started. If he began to paddle, he had to keep doing it. If he carried a bundle along a portage, he couldn’t put it down. There was no deference to the priests just because they were French or clergy. While most Jesuits came from wealthy families and were children of privilege indulging their hunger for adventure in foreign places, the Hurons saw them as idiots, unable to communicate, unaware of the forests and the rivers, unable to fend for themselves. Their faces and bodies were covered in hair, which was confirmation of their stupidity. Hurons and Algonquins would see a man with a beard and say in amazement, “Oh, what an ugly man! Is it possible that any woman would look favourably on such a man?”
Still, Brébeuf and many of the other priests insisted on having beards. Some Frenchmen tried to con First Nations people into believing the women of France also had beards, a myth some of them believed until Champlain’s teenaged wife arrived in Quebec in the 1630s. Hurons believed the French had a hard time learning their language because their beards reduced their intelligence. They advised the French to get rid of their body hair so that they might at least rise to the intellectual level of some of the less intelligent Indigenous people in the region (the Hurons believed themselves to be more intelligent and better than any of their neighbours, whether friends or enemies). The French also stunk of garlic. They were just in the way.
The workday was fourteen hours long, with a breakfast of corn grits and a dinner of the same boiled corn. The Hurons called this gruel sagamité, and it was a staple of the people living around the Great Lakes and adjacent regions of the Canadian Shield.
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The Hurons stashed dried corn in clever hiding spots on the way down to Quebec and retrieved this food on the trip back. Brébeuf paid for his with the small metal items he brought. The Hurons were also in a hurry. On this trip, they were hauling hundreds of kilograms of metal trade goods they’d bought in Quebec, and they wanted to get home as quickly as they could. They took a little time to make an offering of tobacco at the Chaudière Falls in Ottawa, which they called Asticou (the Cauldron), and then kept moving upstream.
The days were hot and humid, and the river didn’t do much to cool the air. Instead, it amplified the power of the summer sun and burned the canoeists’ exposed flesh. The nights were miserable. Mosquitos were so bad along the Ottawa River that some people ended up temporarily blind because their eyes were swollen shut for days. If a traveller was injured or sick, there was no place to get help. Villages along the route were very far apart. If the problem prevented a traveller from walking the long portages or doing his share of the work, there was a chance they’d be abandoned to the wolves and the bears.
Except for the reduced likelihood of being attacked by the Iroquois, the route was not any easier after leaving Morrison Island. Brébeuf had to cross more long portages on the Ottawa and between the streams the Hurons used to reach Lake Nipissing. That big lake did have people living on it, the Nipisserians, so there were new people to meet who might have some more interesting food to trade for. Then Brébeuf and the Hurons tackled the fast-flowing French River, with more portages, before reaching Georgian Bay and spending a few days paddling south through its islands.
Brébeuf endured the trip and revelled in its pains. He must have been impressed by the beauty of the Ottawa Valley, with its bold granite escarpments on the northeast (now Quebec) side and its vast forests of old-growth white pines. “What a satisfaction to pass by these rapids, and to climb over these rocks, to him who has before his eyes that loving Savior, harassed by his tormentors and ascending Calvary laden with his Cross. The discomfort of the canoe is very easy to bear to him who considers the crucified one. What a consolation! For I must use such terms, as otherwise I could not give you pleasure. What consolation then to see oneself even abandoned on the road by the wild people, languishing with sickness or even dying with hunger in the woods and of being able to say to God, ‘My God, it is to do your holy will that I am reduced to the state in which you see me.’ ”
Along the way, the Hurons gave Brébeuf the name “Echon” (ee-chon), which was as close as they could come to pronouncing his name using the sounds of the Huron language.
The priests arrived in the Huron country on July 26, 1626. Brébeuf and de Nouë were the first contingent of the 115 Jesuits who would live in that region for the next quarter century. Most would last for one or two years, but a core group, including Brébeuf, made a strong commitment to stay and covert the Hurons.
Brébeuf settled in Toanché, a town near the northern tip of the Penetanguishene Peninsula. Toanché, one of the main towns of the Bear Nation, the largest partner in the Huron Confederacy, was on a plateau overlooking Georgian Bay. It was a breathtaking location, and the people who lived there provided the first real colour Brébeuf had seen since he left Quebec. He saw men and women who painted their bodies with bright pigments whenever they went out in public. Unlike the Petuns and Neutrals, they didn’t cover themselves with tattoos, though some Hurons used hot coals to burn scar patterns on their legs and arms. The longhouses in Toanché and the rest of Huronia were also painted with bright colours. As well, the Hurons hung banners, along with masks and other carvings, on their houses, especially near the doors. Their clothing and jewellery were dyed and embroidered with coloured porcupine quillwork, with bright feathers woven into the soft leather. They coloured the fabric of their clothes, woven things like baskets, and the rush matts on which they slept. This town, and the large tracts of cleared land around it, was exotic, but it must have also made Brébeuf feel like he was finally out of the wilderness.
Toanché had become the jumping-off point for French traders in the region. Its civil chief, Aenons, had a trading network that extended from the Neutral country at the west end of Lake Ontario to Quebec and north to Lake Superior. Champlain had visited him during his Huronia trip when Aenons was a young man. There was one Frenchman already living there, Étienne Brûlé. He had settled in Toanché and was fully assimilated into Huron society. When Brébeuf landed on the stony beach below Toanché, Brûlé had just returned from Lake Superior with a man named Oumasasikweie, whom missionaries called La Grenouille (French for “the Frog”). Oumasasikweie may have been an Ottawa trader from the Beaver Valley on southwestern Georgian Bay and a frequent visitor to Huronia. Brûlé could have been invaluable to the Jesuits, with his knowledge of geography and his fluency in Huron, but Brébeuf wanted him out of the country. Within weeks, Brûlé was back in Quebec, packing to return to France.
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Ottawa’s Mark Bourrie is a lawyer, journalist and historian. He is author of the award-winning Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson; and Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul.
