- western banks of Hudson Bay, which has even yet not been fully explored.
In those vast solitudes, though the missionaries knew it not, dwelt many a strange tribe, living out its destiny in unconscious simplicity. There roamed the Copper, the Horn Mountain, and the Beaver Indians; the Strong-bows, the Dog-ribs, the Hares, the Red Knives, the Sheep, the Sarsis, the Brushwood, the Nagailer, and the Rocky Mountain Indians, waiting the advent of the fur-trader, from whom they were to receive their distinctive appellations, and to whom they were to yield up the treasures of their deserts and of their mountain fastnesses.
Taking a Jesuit named Isaac Jogues, as his companion, and leaving Pigart to continue his work among the Nipissings, Raymbault started for the North-west, and, crossing Lake Huron in a native canoe, the voyage occupying seventeen days, he arrived safely at the mouth of the straits connecting it with Lake Superior, where two thousand natives were eagerly awaiting his arrival.
The point of land on Lake Superior where the white men first stepped ashore appears to have been near the rapid known as the Sault Ste. Marie, at the beginning of the river St. Mary, through which the waters of Lake Superior flow into Lake Huron; and it was probably within sight of the gray and red sandstone cliffs called the Pictured Rocks, which now look down upon the boundary-line between British America and the United States, that Father Raymbault took up his abode, to begin his ministrations among the Chippewayans. Unfortunately, however, his health began to fail him before he had been at work a year, and, after a farewell visit to the Nipissing converts, he retired to Quebec to die.
Jogues, meanwhile, on whom his superiors mantle should naturally have fallen, was working out a very different mission; and though the Chippewayans were not forgotten, and we find Ste. Marie again a missionary station a few years later, it was the fierce Iroquois who were next to receive a Christian minister among them. Sent down the St. Lawrence on a message connected with Raymbault's work, the second missionary, a friendly Huron chief named Ahasisteri, two young French laymen, and some twenty-six Hurons, fell into the hands of a party of Mohawks, who had long been eager for a feast of human flesh, and looked upon the whites and their escort as lawful prey. To quote the quaint Father who sent home an account of the matter, if peace could not be made with the Iroquois, no Frenchman would be safe from "finding a tomb in the stomachs of these savages."
