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Updated: May 15, 2025
Indeed, one whole village was composed largely of Hurons and Petuns. The mission was not confined to the Onondagas; the Cayugas, Senecas, and Oneidas were included; and the new field seemed rich in promise. But it soon became evident that the fickle Iroquois were not to be trusted.
It came at last, fraught with tragedy. From 1636 to 1642 Father Isaac Jogues had been engaged in missionary work in Huronia. He was a man of saintly character, delicate, refined, scholarly; yet he had borne hardships among the Petuns enough to break the spirit of any man. He had toiled, too, among the Algonquin tribes, and at one time had preached to a gathering of two thousand at Sault Ste Marie.
The new mission-house they named Ste Marie; and from this central station the missionaries went forth in pairs to the farthest parts of Huronia and beyond. The missions to the Petuns and the Neutrals, however, ended in failure. The Petuns hailed Garnier and Jogues as the Famine and the Pest and the priests barely escaped with their lives.
Some fled to Ste Marie, some toiled through the snows of spring to the villages of the Petuns, some fled to the Neutrals and Eries, some to the Algonquin tribes of the north and west, and some even sought adoption among the Iroquois. Ste Marie stood alone, like a shepherd without sheep: mission villages, chapels, residences, flocks all were gone. The work of over twenty years was destroyed.
But the Petuns were presently to share the fate of the Hurons; and Garnier and Chabanel, who were stationed at St Jean, were to perish as had Daniel, Brebeuf, and Lalemant. During the autumn Ragueneau learned that a large body of Iroquois were working their way westward towards St Jean.
In 1648 eleven or twelve mission stations stood throughout Huronia, among the Algonquins, and among the Petuns, now settled in the Blue Hills south of Nottawasaga Bay. Seven of these stations had chapels and in six it had been found necessary to establish residences. In some of the villages, such as Ossossane, the Christians outnumbered the pagans.
In 1673 a site affording more land was given them on the St Charles river about nine miles from the fortress. Here at Old Lorette a chapel was built for them and here they remained for twenty-four years. The war-lust of the Five Nations remained still unsatiated. They continued to harass the Petuns, who finally fled in terror, most of them to Mackinaw Island.
This murderer, an apostate Huron, afterwards confessed the crime, declaring that he had committed it because nothing but misfortune had befallen him ever since he and his family had embraced Christianity. For some months after the death of Garnier and Chabanel the Jesuits maintained the mission of St Mathias among the Petuns in the Blue Hills.
He was not to remain long at Sault Ste Marie; for he had heard 'the call of the west'; and in the summer of this year he set out for the mission of St Esprit, at La Pointe, on the south-west shore of Lake Superior. Here there was a motley collection of Indians, among them many Hurons and Petuns, who had fled to this remote post to be out of reach of the Iroquois.
Ten years were to pass before missionary work was renewed among the Iroquois ten years of disaster to the Jesuits and to the colony. In these years, as we have already seen, the Hurons, Petuns, and Neutrals were destroyed or scattered, and the French and Indian settlements along the St Lawrence were continually in danger.
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