First French Foot-Prints Beyond the Lakes. Ill 



pany near Chicago, cried out : " We love those gray robes. They 

 go barefoot as we do ; they care nothing for beaver ; they have no 

 arms to kill us; they fondle our infants ; they have given up every- 

 thing to abide with us. So we learn from our people who have 

 been to carry fur to French villages." 



Stations far inland and dissevered from their base on the sea- 

 board, were also preferred as being undisturbed by the influx and 

 influence of non-missionary and anti-missionary whites, — godless 

 sailors who swarmed on the rock of Quebec, — and above all from 

 the heretical psalmody of Huguenots which could not there be 

 silenced. 



Aside from the moral advantages of a mission in the heart of 

 the land, the fathers and their employes, whether paid or volun- 

 teering without pay, were most numerous and useful when remote 

 from other whites, because they were able to push trade in fur, 

 free from competitors. The lay brothers together with brandy 

 sold scapularies or belts of the Virgin which were of such sovereign 

 virtue that nobody who wore one at his death could possibly sink 

 to perdition. The missionaries, according to Grovernor Frontenac, 

 wished to keep out of sight the trade which they always carried on 

 in the woods. They also claimed that their profits never exceeded 

 five hundred per cent. Parkman wrote his Jesuits more than a 

 decade ago. He was then doubtful whether those missionaries 

 engaged iu fur trading. But the letters of Frontenac, often writ- 

 ten in cipher for secrecy (lately discovered by P. Margry and pub- 

 lished by our congress), leave us no doubt on this point. In 1674 

 he wrote Colbert that when he urged the Black Eobes to labor near 

 white settlements, they answered that their coming into America 

 was to indoctrinate savages — or rather to draw in beaver. He 

 accuses them of dealing in peltries. In 1682 La Salle wrote that 

 the Green Bay Jesuits held the real key of the castor country, 

 while their blacksmith brother and his two helpers converted 

 more iron into fur than all the fathers could turn j)agans into 

 proselytes. 



A further narrative by La Salle regarding Jesuit tactics, reads 

 as follows : "A savage named Kiskirinaro, that is to say, "Wild Ox, 

 of the Mascoutin tribe, a considerable war chief among his people, 



