114 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts^ and Letters. 



their next order for paintings, " one view of celestial rapture is 

 enough, but you cannot send too many scenes of infernal torments." 



Again, " if three four or five devils were painted torturing a 

 soul with different punishrnents, one applying fire, another ser- 

 pents, another tearing him with pincers, another holding him fast 

 with a chain, this wonld have a good effect, especially if every- 

 thing were made distinct, and misery, rage and desperation ap- 

 peared plainly in the victim's face." 



Within fifteen years after Jesuits began work in earnest among 

 Hurons, that tribe was either annihilated or expelled by the Iro- 

 quois. But for that catastrophe the faith of the Jesuit might 

 have been to this day more dominant in Upper Canada than it is 

 in Lower. 



Some tincture of it has survived everything in all Indian dis- 

 persions. One of the first English adventurers to Miine was 

 greeted by the natives with a pantomime of bows and flourishes 

 which in his judgment could have been learned of nobody but a 

 Frenchman. The aborigines in general were inoculated with 

 French faith and French fashions so that they took about as much 

 of one as of the other, — and not much of either. Disciples who 

 ran wild in the woods retained some prayers and chants learned 

 by rote. The divine vision which roused Pontiac and his com- 

 patriots to war, was a woman arrayed in white. Had they not 

 been taught concerning the Virgin Mary, it could hardly have 

 taken this form. In 1877, a white man who had been caught by 

 a Rocky Mountain tribe chained to his wagon- wheel and half 

 burnt, when he made the sign of the cross was snatched out of 

 the fire. The hunting camps of tribes in Manitoba are to-day 

 called Missions. 



Missionaries, then, burning to propagate their faith, more than 

 two centuries 'ago penetrated into our Northwest, some of them 

 into Wisconsin. They there discovered tribes having fixed abodes, 

 over whom their knowledge and tact gave them power, so that 

 they molded them as clay in the hand of a potter, where their 

 influence was unchecked by white mtruders, and where they could 

 so trade as to make their enterprise self-supporting. 



The third stepping-stone of the French into the northwest, and 

 thus into Wisconsin, was fur. 



