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Updated: July 10, 2025
Can the Frenchman tell me why he wishes to go to Michillimackinac? Can he tell me why he spends time from the moon of breaking ice to the moon of strawberries building a lodge of promises, and then when he is just ready to use the lodge blows it down with a breath?" What could I tell him? That I was following a woman? That I had given her my name, and that I must protect her?
Towards the end of May, he set out in canoes from Fort Miami, and reached Michillimackinac after a prosperous voyage. Here, to his great joy, he found Tonty and Zenobe Membre, who had lately arrived from Green Bay. The meeting was one at which even his stoic nature must have melted.
They had rashly changed their plan, and parted company. Rooseboom took the lead, and McGregory followed some time after. Their hope was that, on reaching Michillimackinac, the Indians of the place, attracted by their cheap goods and their abundant supplies of rum, would declare for them and drive off the French; and this would probably have happened, but for the prompt action of La Durantaye.
His associates abandoned him; the merchants on whom he depended for supplies would not send them, and he found himself, in his own words "destitute of everything." His nephew, La Jemeraye, died. The Jesuit Auneau, bent on returning to Michillimackinac, set out with La Verendrye's eldest son and a party of twenty Canadians.
Do to them as they have done to you, do to the English as they would like to do to you, but hold fast to your true father, who will never abandon you. Will you let the English brandy that has killed you in your wigwams lure you into the kettles of the Iroquois? The message is long. Charged with this haughty missive, Perrot set out for Michillimackinac along with Louvigny and his men.
Michillimackinac was, however, their chief resort; and thence they would set out, two or three together, to roam for hundreds of miles through the endless meshwork of interlocking lakes and rivers which seams the northern wilderness. No wonder that a year or two of bushranging spoiled them for civilization.
This was not all. The Ottawas of Michillimackinac, who refused to follow La Durantaye, had changed their minds the next morning, embarked in a body, paddled up the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, crossed to Toronto, and joined the allies at Niagara. "Never," says an eye-witness, "had Canada seen such a sight; and never, perhaps, will she see such a sight again.
At the end of the time mentioned, the celebrated straits of the Michillimackinac, or Mackinaw, as they are almost universally termed, came in sight. The course had been gradually changing toward the eastward, and, luckily for the progress of the fugitives, the wind with it, leaving them always a favorable breeze.
They repaired to the spot, found the grave, opened it, washed and dried the bones and placed them carefully in a box of birch- bark. Then, in a procession of thirty canoes, they bore it, singing their funeral songs, to St. Ignace of Michillimackinac. As they approached, priests, Indians, and traders all thronged to the shore.
I shall write about it to Father La Chaise, that he may set it right. Some remedy must be found; for, if it continues, none of the officers who were sent to Michillimackinac, the Miamis, the Illinois, and other places, can stay there on account of the persecutions to which they are subjected, and the refusal of absolution as soon as they fail to do what is wanted of them.
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