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Updated: September 11, 2025
We had not been many months resident in Sarnia before we received an invitation from the pagan Chief at Kettle Point, to come to a grand feast which the Indians were preparing in our honour at that place, and to receive Indian names by which we should be incorporated into the Ojebway tribe.
Augustin was at this time about 60 years of age, and his brother Buhkwujjenene eight or ten years his junior. They could trace their ancestry back for four generations. Marie district. The Indians of Garden River were not nearly so far advanced in civilization as those of Sarnia; very little was done in the way of cultivating the soil, and very few of them could speak any English.
Very soon after our arrival at Sarnia we had proposed to the Indian women that they should meet together once a week for needlework and reading, but the scheme was not carried into effect until we had settled in our new house on the Reserve. The first meeting was held in our hall in the summer of 1869.
Shortly after making this tour with Chief Little Pine, arrangements were made for our finally leaving Sarnia and removing our head-quarters to the Indian Mission at Garden River; the Committee of the Church Missionary Society agreed to the change as an experiment, and undertook to support the Mission for one year; but the withdrawal of the New England Company and the fact of so many of the Indians having already been converted by the Roman Catholics, made them a little doubtful as to whether it would be a suitable spot for establishing one of their Missions permanently.
Besides the four hundred Indians on the Sarnia Reserve, there were about one hundred more living at Kettle Point, thirty miles distant, on the eastern shore of Lake Huron. I had not been long settled at Sarnia, when, in company with my interpreter. I started on a first visit to these people. I will describe the journey.
It was decided that it should be a brick building, with a spire, to cost about 1500 dollars. Mr. Jacobs, my assistant, busied himself in the matter, and together we managed to raise the requisite funds; and early in the spring building operations were commenced. However, it was not my destiny to be the pastor of this little brick church among the Sarnia Indians. God was calling me to other work.
Navigation was suspended and the ice had broken up so that the stream could not be crossed on foot nor could the broken cable lying in the bed of the river be mended. "The ingenious young telegrapher suggested signaling Sarnia by giving, with the whistle of a locomotive, the dot-and-dash letters of the Morse telegraph code.
Binding the broken leaves together with wire we managed to get in all right, but the next morning we were delayed an hour while a wheelwright made a more permanent repair. Monday, the 22d, was one of the record days. Leaving London at half-past nine we took the Old Sarnia Gravel for Sarnia, some seventy miles away.
An endeavour was made in 1854 to divide the remaining area, but two years later the battle was renewed, the Great Western building to Sarnia and the Grand Trunk tapping London and Detroit. Between the Great Western and Lake Erie a rival road direct from Buffalo to Detroit was threatened time and again, but was not built until after Confederation.
They seemed also to have a firm belief in dreams. Once I was visiting at a poor miserable little shanty on the Sarnia Reserve, and found an old man and his son both lying very sick. The poor creatures were in a wretched condition, the hovel they were in consisting merely of strips of bark and old boards outside and inside hung with rags and tatters and old cloths of every description.
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