Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/414

394 it would seem as if only special help from heaven could protect him. Thus, destitute of what we call the necessaries of life, even without salt; clinging only to their simple altar furniture; patching their black robes, worn to shreds, with hides and skins; making a common home in what Roger Williams well calls “the filthy, smoky holes” of the natives; eating their loathsome diet, sharing their indecencies and vermin, and supporting life in wilderness exigencies on berries, roots, and even their own moccasons and apparel; tramping through the forests on snow-shoes, through oozy swamps and bogs; paddling the unstable canoe, and bearing without a murmur or regret the most dreaded privations and risks, — these Jesuit Fathers, the crusaders of New France, performed their missions. Rightfully have many of them left their enshrined names on rivers, bays, capes, and estuaries, through all our north and west, festooned in wreaths of admiring homage, as the regions which they opened to the light once were with the vines and mosses of the primeval forest.

The method of life pursued by the Jesuit Fathers in their missionary labors among the natives was substantially as follows: In some instances, in promising fields and with a considerable tribe of Indians, there would be resident two or more of the Fathers. In more cases, however, each was alone, a single man, isolated from his fellows and from civilization, in a remote station, with infrequent intercourse with the world beyond him. Occasionally the Father would have, under the title of a donné, a young lay assistant, equally devoted with himself to his holy work, and able and willing to render him a variety of services, — menial, functionary, and official, — helping in the work of interpretation, of translation, and the instruction and oversight of catechumens. Many instances there were of constancy, devotion, and patient suffering of these lay brethren. As a general thing, the missionary conformed to the mode of life of the savages, — sharing their viands, and bearing their