878 



MISSIONS 



[b. a. e. 



tied on the n. shore in the neighborhood 

 of Quinte bay. A t their request Sulpician 

 priests were sent to minister to them, but 

 within a few years the immigrant Indians 

 had either returned to their original 

 country or scattered among the other 

 Canadian missions. In 1676 the Catholic 

 Iroquois mission town of The Mountain 

 was founded by the Sulpician fathers 

 on the island of Montreal, with a well- 

 organized industrial school in charge 

 of the Congregation sisters. In conse- 

 quence of these removals from the Iro- 

 quois country and the breaking out of a 

 new war with the Five Tribes in 1687, 

 the Jesuit missions in New York were 

 brought to a close. In the seven years' 

 war that followed. Christian Iroquois of 

 the missions and heathen Iroquois of the 

 Five Nations fought against each other as 

 allies of French or English, respectively. 

 The Mountain was abandoned in 1704, 

 and the mission transferred to a new site 

 at the Sault au Recollet, n. of JMontreal. 

 In 1720 this was again removed to the 

 Lake of Two Mountains (Oka, or Canasa- 

 daga) on the same island of Montreal, 

 where the Iroquois were joined by the 

 Nipissing and Algonkin, of the former Sul- 

 pician mission town of Isle aux Tourtes. 

 Among the noted workers identified with 

 it, air of the scholarly Sulpician order, 

 mav be named Kevs. Deperet, Giien, 

 Mathevet, 1746-81; De Terlaye, 1754-77; 

 Guichart, Dufresne, and Jean Andre Cuoq, 

 1843-90. Several of these gave attention 

 also to the Algonkin connected with the 

 same mission, and to the Iroquois of St 

 Regis and other stations. All of them 

 were fluent masters of the Iroquois lan- 

 guage, and have left important contribu- 

 tions to , philology, particularly Cuoq, 

 whose "Etudes philologiques" and Iro- 

 quois dictionary remain our standard au- 

 thorities. 



All effort among the villages of the 

 confederacy was finally abandoned, in 

 consequence of the mutual hostility of 

 France and England. In 1748 the Sul- 

 pician Father Fran(;ois Picquet founded 

 the new mission settlement of Presenta- 

 tion on the St Lawrence at Oswegatchie, 

 the present Ogdensburg, N. Y., which 

 within three years had a prosperous pop- 

 ulation of nearly 400 families, drawn 

 chiefly from the "Onondaga and Cayuga 

 trilies. About 1756 the still existing mis- 

 sion town of St Francis Regis (St Regis), 

 on the s. side of the St Lawrence where 

 the Canada-New York boundary inter- 

 sects it, was founded under Jesuit aus- 

 pices by Iroquois emigrants from Caugh- 

 nawaga mission. The Oswegatchie set- 

 tlement declined after the Revolution un- 

 til its abandonment in 1807. Caughna- 

 waga, St Regis, and Lake of Two Moun- 

 tains still exist as Catholic Iroquois mis- 



sion towns, the two first named being the 

 largest Indian settlements n. of Mexico. 



About the year 1755 the first mission in 

 w. Pennsylvania was established among 

 the Delawares at Sawcunk, on Beaver 

 r., by the Jemit Virot, but was soon 

 discontinued, probably on account of the 

 breaking out of the French and Indian 

 war. 



Philology owes much to the labor of 

 these missionaries, particularly to the 

 earlier Jesuit, Jacques Bruyas, and the 

 later secular priest. Father Joseph Mar- 

 coux (St Regis and Caughnawaga, 1813, 

 until his death in 1855), whose monu- 

 mental Irocjuois grammar and dictionary 

 is the fruit of forty years' residence with 

 the tril)e. Of Father Bruyas, connected 

 with the Sault Ste Louis (Caughnawaga) 

 and other Iroquois missions from l(i67 un- 

 til his death in 171 2, during a part of which 

 period he was superior of all the Canadian 

 missions, it was said that he was a master 

 of the Mohawk language, speaking it as 

 fluently as his native French, his diction- 

 ary of Mohawk root words being still a 

 standard. Father Antoine Rinfret, 1796- 

 1814, has left a body of more than 2,000 

 quarto pages of manuscript sermons in the 

 Mohawk language; while Rev. Nicolas 

 Burtin, of Caughnawaga (1855- ), is an 

 even more voluminous author. 



The Liiilwran minister, John Campa- 

 nius Holm (commonly known as Campa- 

 nius), chaplain of the Swedish colony in 

 Delaware in 1643-48, gave much attention 

 to missionary work among the neighbor- 

 ing Indians and translated a catechism 

 into the Delaware language. This seems 

 to have been the only missionary work 

 in the Atlantic states by that denomina- 

 tion. 



Under the encouragement of the Eng- 

 lish colonial government the Episcopa- 

 lians, constituting the established Church 

 of England, undertook work among the 

 Iroquois tribesof New York as early as the 

 beginning of the 18th century. In 1700 a 

 Dutch Calvinist minister at Schenectady, 

 Rev. Bernardus Freeman, who hadalready 

 given sufficient attention to the Mohawk 

 to acquire the language, was employed to 

 prepare some Gospel and ritual transla- 

 tions, which formed the basis of the first 

 booklet in the language, published in Bos- 

 ton in 1707. In 1712 the English Society 

 for the Pi'opagation of the Gospel sent out 

 Rev. William Andrews, who, with the as- 

 sistance of a Dutch interpreter, Lawrence 

 Claesse, and of Rev. Bernardus Freeman, 

 translated and published a great part of 

 the liturgy and some parts of the Bi1:)le 

 3 years later. The work grew and ex- 

 tended to other tribes of the Iroquois con- 

 federacy, being es]iecially fostered at a 

 later period by Sir William Johnson, su- 

 perintendent for Indian affairs, who had 



