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.Their captors stripped them, tied them to posts, poured boilingwater over them in a mockery of baptism, tied red hot hatchetsaround their necks, and sliced flesh from their legs and loins to roast.While Brbeuf, who uttered not a word except to encourage hisfriends, was still alive they cut his heart out and ate it, while, to some-how imbibe his courage, they gathered around to drink his blood.The death of Brbeuf, in its extreme drama and brutality, castBrbeuf in the mold of the legendary supermartyrs, the heroic modelfor the Catholic grammar school and high school students nurturedon the Francis Talbot, S.J., biographies, Saint among Savages and Saintamong the Hurons, from the 1930s.To a few writers, however, his defi-ant death seems less than human.Francis Parkman, in The Jesuits inNorth America (1867), dwells on Brbeuf s frequent supernatural vi-sions, which spring from the Jesuit s deep nature like a furnace whitehot, which gleamed with the still intensity of his enthusiasm. De-mons appear as men, women, bears, wolves, and wild cats.Angels, St.Joseph, and Mary are there.Death, like a skeleton, threatens him butfalls powerless at the Jesuit s feet.Parkman quotes a letter in whichthe Ursuline nun Marie d Incarnation, herself a visionary, reports that,when God revealed to Brbeuf that he was to die, the Jesuits bled himand dried his blood so they would have relics, lest his body be burnedto ashes.The contemporary novelist and essayist Tobias Wolff discoveredBrbeuf through Parkman, and, though he admires his courage, is re-pelled by his unshakable certainty. Brebeuf, he says, scorned theHuron beliefs, shamans, healers, and their ceremonies to control na-The Pioneers 37ture, but he himself played the wizard with magnifying glasses thattransformed a flea into a frightful monster.The Jesuits pretended thattheir clock was alive, and when it struck four times was telling the In-dian visitors, who otherwise would hang around the Jesuit quartersall day, to Get up and go home. Creatures of their own time, the Jes-uits depended on France for logistical support; and, in Wolff s inter-pretation, the Huron-Jesuit alliance contributed to the tribes eventualdestruction.Finally, Wolff argues, Brbeuf went to his death without asecond thought, while Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane sweatedblood and prayed for his cup to pass.This was the end of the Huron missions and, to a great degree, ofthe Hurons themselves as a people, as they scattered to the West.Ofthe 29 missionaries who had been there over 35 years, seven lost theirlives.The Jesuits in New France would regroup, return, move Westand South; but for the time being they whiffed the smell of defeat.Down the MississippiThe specter of Jogues and his companions hovered over the next gen-eration of French Jesuit missionaries, as had Xavier over the genera-tion before.In 1653 a missionary from the Far East returned to Europeto recruit volunteers for Vietnam, and 20 came forward and sailed forthe Far East.Jacques Marquette, the youngest of six children, born in1636 to a Loan family of warriors that traced it lineage back to the 12thcentury, joined the Society at 17.He wrote to the general early that hehad wanted to be a missionary all his life.When he heard of the Viet-nam expedition, he pleaded, without success, to join.When Joguesdied, Jacques was ten years old.Since, like Jogues, he had no disposi-tion for abstract theological concepts, he argued, he would like to skipthat part of his training and be sent abroad right away.On a visit tothe Jesuit college at LaFleche his hosts showed him the room whereIsaac Jogues had slept years before.In 1666 he found himself sailingdown the St.Lawrence River toward Quebec.As with so many ordinary men of those times who could not af-ford to have their portraits painted, we have very little idea of whatMarquette looked like.When in 1952 his portrait was commissionedfor a banking firm in Peoria, the artist visited the Marquette family sdescendants in Loan for inspiration, and concluded that Jacques was38 The Pioneerstall and lean and blond with thinning hair.Though not by nature atheologian, he was eloquent and quick with languages, and peopleseemed to love him.To visualize this young man s early apostolic work, it helps to seea map of Michigan sticking up like a gloved mitten with Lake Huronon the right and Lake Michigan on the left, and a thin, ragged Michi-gan land mass stretched above, with Lake Superior on the other side.In the upper right corner a strait linking Huron and Superior sepa-rates Canada from the Michigan land on Superior s south bank.Onthe strait is Sault Sainte Marie, where, after two years of learning theHuron language in Three Rivers, Marquette worked for 18 months.Far to the west on Superior s south bank is LaPointe (today s Ash-land), where he toiled for another 18 months.Between the northerntips of Lake Michigan and Lake Huron sits Mackinac Island, nearwhich he cared for the Hurons who had fled from Canada and upstateNew York.To Ashland came Indians from the south, the Illinois, whospoke of a great river that flowed so far south that no one knew whereit emptied out; and they asked him to come and teach them.The discovery of the Mississippi River is due to the initiative ofthree men.Jean Talon, the scion of a French Gallican family, edu-cated by Jesuits, and appointed entendant of New France in 1665,was informed there was copper ore on the shore of Lake Superiorand wanted to establish France s influence beyond the Great Lakes.Twenty-seven-year-old Louis Jolliet, born the year before Jogues sdeath and educated in the Jesuit college in Quebec that replicated theeducation Marquette had received at Reims, had the entrepreneurialskills to win business backing for the trip and the frontier experienceto lead it.He knew a priest always went along on these trips to meetthe explorers religious needs and to pacify the Indians.Who betterthan Jacques?The trip in brief
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