Glenn

THE OHIO VALLEY-GREAT LAKES ETHNOHISTORY ARCHIVES: THE MIAMI COLLECTION
It is noted that the following works from the Miami Archives should be read and considered within the historical context in which they were composed and printed. The opinions expressed and the language used do not reflect the opinions or standards of the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, but are, rather, indicative of thought in that historical moment during which the documents were published.

ST. JOSEPH'S MISSION (continued - part 4 of 6, manuscript pgs. 41-46)
From THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORICAL REVIEW
written by George Pare

Father Charlevoix in his report had pointed out that success lay in either of two means: the exploration of the upper Missouri River, or the founding of a mission among the Sioux. The latter plan was adopted, but was not put into execution until 1727 when Boucher de Boucherville was commissioned to start a trading-post among the Sioux. When he left Montreal on June 16,1727, he was accompanied by Father Guignas, first missionary to the Sioux, guarding carefully a case filled with his precious geodetic instruments(Ibid., 182).

About the middle of September, the expedition reached Lake Pepin, and began the building of Fort Beauharnois. The Sioux proved to be intractable, and when they appeared to espouse the cause of the Foxes, who had just escaped the punitive expedition of De Ligneris, the French sought safety in the Illinois country. Father Guignas returned to the Sioux in 1731 to spend six years in such misery as excited the pity even of the Indians. Returning to Quebec in 1738, he passed his declining years in teaching, and died, February 6, 1752. (Father Guignas left a journal which can be found in Shea's Early Voyages up and down the Mississippi Albany, 1861).

When Father Guignas left St. Joseph, his immediate successor became Father Jean Baptiste de Saint-Pe. It is evident that he did not remain very long at the St. Joseph Mission for he signs but one entry, dated October 1, 1721. He had been at the Ottawa Mission since his arrival in Canada in 1719, and was destined to remain at Mackinac until 1737. His name appears again in the register under two entries dated September 19, 1734.

From Mackinac Father De Saint-Pe was recalled to Quebec, where he held the office of Superior General of all the Jesuits in Canada from 1739 to 1748, and again from 1754 to 1763. He died in Quebec, July 8, 1770 (Rochemonteix, op. cit., V, 181; Thwaites, Relations, LXVIII, 332).

"In the year one thousand seven hundred and twenty-two, I baptized in the course of the summer 4 Potawatomi children who were at the point of death. They died the same day or shortly afterwards." Thus runs the first entry of Jean Charles Guymonneau, the successor of Father De Saint-Pe. We know little concerning him beyond the fact that he was remarkable not so much for his talents as for his indefatigable zeal. He arrived in Canada in 1715, and was soon sent to the West, probably to the Illinois mission, for he was in Kaskaskia in 1721 when Father Charlevoix went through. His last entry in the St. Joseph Mission register is dated May 2, 1723. He most likely returned to the Illinois Mission, for he died there, February 6, 1736 (Rochemonteix, op. cit., IV, 268; Thwaites, Relations LXVIII, 335).

The next missionary on the St. Joseph River, Charles-Michel Mesaiger, extended his ministrations there over a period of seven years. His first entry is dated September, 1724, and his last, January 26, 1731. Four of his entries occur during the winter months. These, together with the order in which the others are found, make it highly probable that he lived at the mission the greater part of the time during which it was under his care.

In the spring of 1731, Father Mesaiger was called to Mackinac to undertake a dangerous mission. La Verendrye and his sons were soon to start out upon their historical journeys of exploration in search of the Western Sea (see Parkman's Half Century of Conflict Boston, 1893, chap. xvi). Father De Saint-Pe, who had been designated chaplain of the expedition, found himself unable to go, and Father Mesaiger was named in his stead. The explorers pushed on through untold difficulties and hardships as far as the Lake of the Woods, where a fort was built and named St. Charles in honor of their chaplain. Broken in health, Father Mesaiger was obliged to return to Quebec, where he taught mathematics for some years. He was sent to France in 1749, and died in Rouen, August 7, 1766 (Rochemonteix, op. cit.,IV, 204-11).

After Father Mesaiger's departure from the mission, there is no record of priestly ministration until 1734, when Father De Saint-Pe as previously noted, performed two baptisms. In the following year came Jean Louis de la Pierre, a missionary of whom we have only the scantiest details. Arriving in Canada in the summer of 1734, he returned to France between 1746 and 1749, and died there some time after 1756. His first entry in the register is dated July 25, and his last, September 11, 1735 Ibid.,213).

Coming after a lapse of almost three years, the next entry in the register is dated June 21, 1738, and is signed by Pierre Du Jaunay. He had been in the western missions since 1735, and was destined to labor there with but slight intermission for thirty years. The register shows that he officiated at the mission at various intervals from the time of his first entry up to his last, which is dated April 22, 1752.

There is a melancholy interest attached to the name of Father Du Jaunay. Year by year he witnessed the decline of the missions. The natural inconstancy of the Indians coupled with the demoralizing influence of contact with an increasing number of Europeans had almost undone the work of the saintly pioneers. For a time there were only two missionaries left in the entire Ottawa Mission. When Father Le Franc returned to Quebec about 1761, Father Du Jaunay remained alone, the solitary Jesuit in Michigan. A remnant of the Catholic Ottawa had established themselves at L'Arbre Croche, near the present town of Harbor Springs. Here Father Du Jaunay seems to have lived until his return to Quebec in 1765. He spent his declining years as spiritual director of the Ursulines, and died, June 16, 1780, 'full of virtue and good works," (Ibid., V, 54, 218).

In 1825, Father Vincent Badin, curate of Ste. Anne's, Detroit, made a visitation of the old mission ground. The Indians of L'Arbre Croche were overjoyed to see a priest once more. An ancient of the tribe dwelt lovingly upon his memories of Father Du Jaunay, from whom he had received his first communion. He even pointed out to Father Badin the forest path along which the missionary was wont to say his breviary (P. Chrysostomus Verwyst, O.F.M., Life and Labors of Rt. Rev. Frederic Baraga Milwaukee, 1900, 60).

For the space of twenty years Jean-Baptiste de la Morinie was a familiar figure at the St. Joseph Mission. The register shows that he often alternated with Father Du Jaunay, and that from 1752 to 1760, he was the only priest to officiate at the mission. His first record is dated April 24, 1740, and his last, April 2, 1760. He had been laboring at the Ottawa Mission since his arrival in Canada in 1738.

Some time after his last entry, Father De la Morinie is known to have gone to the Illinois mission, where he was stationed at Ste. Genevieve on the Mississippi. His confrere, Farther Du Jaunay, was the last priest at the Ottawa Mission; he himself was to witness the destruction of the Illinois Mission.

In 1762 the French government decreed the secularization of the Jesuits at home and in its colonies. The Supreme Council of New Orleans put the decree into effect on July 3, 1763.

 
The church vestments and plate at New Orleans will be turned over 
to the Capuchins; the church vestments and plate of the Jesuits living 
in the Illinois country will be turned over to the procurator of the King 
in that region; the chapels will be torn down; finally, the above so-called 
Jesuits shall be put on board the first vessel ready to leave for France.  
They are forbidden meanwhile to live in common...(Rochemonteix, op. cit., IV, 398).

We need not go into the distressing details by which this decree was carried out to the letter (See the account of the banishment of the Jesuits in Thwaites, Relations, LXX, 212-301). The Jesuits were deported in the spring of 1764. Old Father Meurin was allowed to remain, provided he took up his residence in Ste. Genevieve on the Spanish side of the river. Father De la Morinie was permitted to come back through Canada, and he soon rejoined his brethren in France. The date of his death is unknown (Rochemonteix, op. cit.,IV, 234, 402, 405; V, 201; Thwaites, Relations, LXX, 310).

There come next in the register three entries written in the tiny characteristic handwriting of Father Pierre Potier. They are dated January 8, 25, and June 12, 1761. By a strange coincidence these entries, the last to be signed by a Jesuit, are by the banal of the sole surviving member of the Society in the entire West.

From 1728, there had been a Jesuit mission in Detroit for the Huron whom Cadillac had enticed thither from Mackinac. Begun at first near the fort, and later moved to Bois Blanc Island, the mission was finally located on the spot now occupied by the buildings of Assumption Parish in Sandwich, Ontario. Father Potier took charge of the mission in 1744, and when the growing number of colonists made a change of status imperative, the mission became a parish, and Father Potier its first pastor in 1768.

From his extant writings, we know Father Potier to have been a painstaking and laborious scholar. He had, moreover, an eager curiosity regarding the western country which led him to travel widely. So methodical an observer could never go on a journey without logging his progress, and to this fact we are indebted for several interesting records of his excursions to distant points. One of them indicates the trail followed by Father Potier from Detroit to Port St. Joseph, jotted down, perhaps, on the very occasion of his replacing Father De la Moronie at the mission. (The Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library has copies of some of these itineraries made from the originals now at the College Sainte-Maerie in Montreal, where the major portion of Father Potier's extant writings are preserved. there are a few Potier items in the Gagnon Collection in the Montreal Municipal Library.)

There is little more to be told of Father Potier. For the next twenty years he managed with scrupulous care the affairs of his parish in Sandwhich. When Father Meurin died in Prairie du Rocher on the Mississippi in 1777, the aged Jesuit in Sandwich became the last of his line. On July 16, 1781, he was found dead before his fireplace. The story of the Jesuit missions in the West begins with Brebeuf paddling up the Ottawa River. It ends with the poor, spent figure of Father Potier dying alone (Rochemonteix, op. cit., V, 59-65).

With the visit of Father Potier might end, also, the history of the St. Joseph Mission, as a mission. The subsequent history of the locality becomes that of a French settlement clustered about Fort St. Joseph.

By her victory on the Plains of Abraham, England tore from France her vast colonial empire. The western posts, among them Detroit, Mackinac, and Fort St. Joseph, were regarrisoned by English troops. They had been of strategic value to the French; they were no less so to their new masters.

When the smoldering hatred of Pontiac against the English flared up in open warfare, Detroit alone of all the posts in the West resisted the besiegers. The story of the lacrosse game which ended in the massacre of the garrison at Mackinac is too well known to need retelling here. There were fourteen soldiers at Fort St. Joseph on the morning of May 25, 1763. By night four of them were on the road to Detroit to be exchanged for Indian prisoners. The other ten had been slain.

The fort was not re-occupied at the close of hostilities, although as a center of strategic and commercial importance, St. Joseph continued to command the watchful attention of the British officials in Detroit and Mackinac. With the opening of the Revolution, this watchfulness was redoubled; from a center of Indian trade and diplomacy St. Joseph became for a time the goal of contending white armies, and even a pawn in Old World diplomacy. From Detroit and Mackinac, British expeditions were launched against the colonists in Kentucky and the French Illinois, and against their Spanish allies in St. Louis; and in their turn armed forces from the Illinois towns and from St. Louis were launched against St. Joseph, as one of the few outposts of Great Britain within accessible striking distance. In June, 1779, Major De Peyster at Mackinac dispatched Lieutenant Bennett with a party of twenty soldiers and sixty traders and Indians to St. Joseph to intercept a hostile force which was reported to be en route from the Illinois via St. Joseph against Detroit. Bennett encamped some weeks at St. Joseph, when increasing disaffection and desertion on the part of his Indian allies caused him to retire in the direction of Mackinac.

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