CHAGOUAMIGON BAY MISSION ABANDONED.
The "Relation of 1670–71," alluding to the mission at the extremity of Lake Superior, describes a difficulty with the Dakotahs or Sioux: “Our Outaonacs and Hurons of the Point of the Holy Ghost have to the present time kept up a kind of peace with them, but affairs having become embroiled during last winter, and some murders even having been committed on both sides, our savages had reason to apprehend that the storm would soon burst upon them, and judged that it was safer for them to leave the place, which in fact they did in the spring, when they retired to the Lake of the Hurons."[1]
CONVOCATION OF A.D. 1671, AT SAULT STE. MARIE.
To prevent Groseilliers, now in the employ of the English at Hudson's Bay, from drawing the Indians of Lake Superior thither for trade, Talon, the Intendant of Canada,
- ↑ Cadillac corroborates this statement, in a letter, written in 1703, from Detroit. His words are: "It is proper that you should be informed that more than fifty years since [about 1645] the Iroquois by force of arms drove away nearly all of the other Indian nations from this region [Lake Huron] to the extremity of Lake Superior, a country north of this post, and frightfully barren and inhospitable. About thirty-two years ago [1671] these excited tribes collected themselves together at Michillimakinak." Margry, vol. v. p. 317.
mouth College, with his wife, and Frederick Ayer and wife as catechists and teachers. In June, 1832, Mr. Hall was joined by his classmate, the Rev. W. T. Boutwell, and the latter in October, 1833, established a mission at Leech Lake, the first attempted west of Lake Superior among the Ojibways of Minnesota. After this mission was established, Father Baraga, an estimable Roman Catholic missionary, built a chapel on the island.
A guide book published in 1884, with the title "Summer Tours via the Great Lakes," promulgates the following fiction: "The Church still stands, a portion of it being the identical log structure built by Pere Marquette. The visitor is shown an old picture which it is said the Pope of that time gave Marquette for his mission church in the wilderness. . . . . The half-breed Indian who acts as guide will open a closet and show the visitor an ancient vestment which it is said Pere Marquette wore on great occasions."
Myths, like the above, silently creep into history, as moths into cloth, and are difficult to expel.
