Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/416

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406
MINNESOTA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS.

dialect. The Illinois came, moreover, to this place from sixty leagues southward; and, wrote a missionary, far "beyond a great river that discharges itself as near as I can conjecture, into the sea towards Virginia," Here too was occasionally encamped the Ojibways. As the fear of the Iroquois subsided, some Hurons returned to the Bay of the Puants (Green Bay), and others went back to Sault Ste. Marie, and there, in 1669, the missionaries resolved to make their principal residence at the foot of the rapids.

FIRST MISSION HOUSE AT SAULT STE. MARIE, A.D. 1669.

The voyageurs, at this early period, congregated here, amounted to twenty or twenty-five, and the Jesuits constructed a square of pine and cedar pickets, twelve feet high, with a small log chapel and house within the inclosure.

Gallinée, a Sulpitian priest, who had been with La Salle on Lake Erie in May, 1670, visited the post,[1] and thus described the Ojibways: "The Saulteux, or in the Algonquin, Paouitikoungraentaouak, or the Outchipoué, where the Fathers are established, from the melting of the snow until the commencement of winter, dwell on the banks of a river about a half league in breadth, and three leagues in length, where the Lake Superior empties into Lake Huron. Here the river is abundant in fish, called white, in the Algonquin, Attikamegue."

In 1671, the frail bark chapel at Chagouamigon Bay was abandoned, and missionaries did not again reside in that vicinity, until after one hundred and fifty years.[2]

  1. Margry, vol. i. p. 161.
  2. At the request of the principal trader Lyman M. Warren, In the summer of 1830, Frederick Ayer, who had been one of the teachers under the Rev. William Ferry, Presbyterian missionary at Mackinaw, came to the Island St. Michel, which was now called La Pointe, and established a school for Indian children, and after a short period returned to Mackinaw. The next year, 1831, Mr. Warren, brought up as a missionary, the Rev. Sherman Hall, a graduate of Dart-