There were worse ways to die in the frontier beyond New France than to be gobbled up by the land. The Jesuit father Brébeuf had been burned at the stake in 1649. Charles Garnier was shot twice and then clubbed in the head, and Antoine Daniel was “showered…with a volley of arrows” before being shot with a musket. Their deaths were violent and clear cut, the word of what had happened to them flowing quickly back to Montreal. The bent, old man who disappeared in August 1661, Father René Ménard, was a different case altogether.
He was about a hundred miles west of Lake Michigan and traveling upstream with a French fur trader, L’Esperance. They were attempting to reach a Huron village near the headwaters of Wisconsin’s Black River. Ménard, his fellow Jesuits reported, “while following his Companion, went astray, mistaking some woods or rocks for others. At the end of a somewhat arduous portage past a rapid, his companion looked behind to see if he were following.” He was not following. L’Esperance searched for the missing priest, firing his musket and yelling, before he set off alone for the Huron village to get help. Losing his way, L’Esperance spent two days finding the village. He couldn’t speak Huron and somehow gestured a plea for them to join his search. One man joined L’Esperance, but after two hours of working their way back to the river they spotted enemy warriors and returned to the village. No one ever saw Ménard again.
Historians of Wisconsin’s fur trade era had a brief obsession with determining where Ménard disappeared. They attempted to follow Ménard’s route with clues written by his contemporaries in “The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents”, a detailed French account of Jesuit work in North America. Historians felt confident in Ménard’s initial route from Trois-Rivières up the Saint Lawrence into the Ottawa River, from the Ottawa River into Lake Huron, and through Sault Ste Marie into Lake Superior. Ménard and his traveling companions spent the winter on the south shore of Lake Superior.
But his trail in the spring of 1661 is murkier. Ménard heard about a group of starving Huron refugees in the forested interior west of Lake Michigan who were Christian, or at least interested, and he decided to go to them. The portage where he disappeared was somewhere along his route to the band of Huron, and historians have put forth various hypotheses about which river’s rapids and waterfalls forced Ménard out of the canoe and into the woods.
In 1959, a North Dakota priest and amateur fur trade historian did two things historians before him hadn’t done. First, Father Schmirler paddled the rivers he was writing about. Second, Schmirler flipped the problem on its head, starting the search from the Huron village that Ménard was trying to reach. Ménard and L’Esperance were a day away from the Huron village when he disappeared, Schmirler reasoned, since L’Esperance reached the village in two days while getting lost and having to retrace his way south. A day’s travel from Lake Chelsea, where Schmirler argued the village was, would probably be less than twenty-five miles. He realized that if he drew a circle with a twenty-five mile radius around Lake Chelsea, he’d drawn a circle around the rapids where Ménard disappeared.
Schmirler found five sets of rapids to investigate and paddled each of them. He ruled out Spirit Falls on the Spirit River, a tributary of the Wisconsin River, because it was a waterfall and not, as the Jesuits described the location of Ménard’s disappearance, a “somewhat arduous portage past a rapid.” The riffles on Wisconsin’s Yellow River, Schmirler argued, would not have qualified as rapids in the minds of native and fur trade era paddlers. He also ruled out the rapids on Copper Creek, just west of Wausau, Wisconsin. The rapids at the base were three feet deep, and Ménard and L’Esperance could have pushed upstream without leaving the river. Next, Schrmiler ruled out Bill Cross Rapids on the Wisconsin River near Wausau, as he “judged them to be riffles.” Lastly, he ruled out Big Jump Rapid on the Jump River because the swampy surrounding terrain would have stopped L’Esperance from reaching the Huron village in a day. Schmirler determined that the rapids where Ménard disappeared were on the Big Rib River south of Goodrich, Wisconsin.
Wanting to see where Ménard disappeared in August of 1661, I set out in late July to retrace part of Ménard’s journey north on the Big Rib River. Driving northeast from southwestern Wisconsin, through alternating corn fields and dark forests, I thought about Ménard. While I wanted to see the river where he disappeared, I wasn’t as interested as Schmirler or other historians about the location of his disappearance. Schmirler had probably already solved that problem. I was more interested in why Ménard, fifty-five and feeble, born in Paris and educated in France, was in a place to disappear into the woods on the very edge of European knowledge about North America.
Amco County Park, which abuts the river and offers a gentle sand canoe launch, was mostly empty when I arrived just before noon. A motorcycle sat in the gravel parking lot and an older man sat on the grass, watching the river flow south. Upstream from the launch, granite boulders guarded the river’s first bend. The motorcyclist was the only person I saw until I returned five hours later.
In the early 1660s, Wisconsin was far from empty. The beaver trade had transformed the northeast and Great Lakes region. European hatters used the rodents’ dense fur to make felt, and early industrialization in Europe produced cheap trade goods to exchange for the pelts. The French had a small foothold in what is now Quebec, the English held the eastern seaboard and Hudson’s Bay, and squeezed between the two were the Dutch in New York. Native nations, many displaced by the Europeans, vied for greater territory and access to European goods. Metal trade goods, exchanged for pelts, had transformed the dynamics of power between northeastern tribes. The Iroquois confederacy, made up of five nations, pushed west with Dutch muskets in order to secure access to better beaver territory and women and children, who were usually taken captive and then adopted.
The Beaver Wars, as the conflicts were called, pitted the Huron and their French allies against the Iroquois and their on-again off-again Dutch and English allies and brought conflict as far east as Fort Amsterdam on Manhattan Island and as far west as the Mississippi River in Illinois. The Iroquois expanded west from New York state into Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The Huron fled west ahead of the Iroquois, shattered by the war. Some sought refuge west of Lake Michigan, in the homeland of the Menominee, Anishinabe, and Ho-Chunk. Ménard was trying to reach Huron in a village in central Wisconsin when he disappeared.
Ménard found the terrain difficult. The mosquitoes, the Jesuit Relations reported of the area where Ménard went missing, “are formidably numerous in those regions, and SO unbearable…there is no other way to ward them off than to run without stopping.” I left Amco County Park during a historic drought. I pulled a sixteen foot canoe upstream in knee deep water. I was lucky enough not to see any mosquitos. Maybe it was the drought, or the occasional breeze, or, later in the afternoon, a storm forming as columns of cold blue clouds in the northeast, but the mosquitos that prevented the French from pausing even for a moment were entirely absent from my short journey.
I did however find the river’s crayfish “formidably numerous.” In my push upstream I saw thousands of them, nearly one every square foot of rocky river bottom, streaking in all directions as I splashed through the water. Most zipped off in front of me and then pushed themselves under rocks, but some of the bigger crayfish made a single lunge away and then squared off towards me, apparently ready to fight me. I also saw trout and dozens of frogs.
The Jesuits arrived in the northeast in 1609, and although they presented themselves as humble servants of a heavenly power and a simple Catholic order, they served as the advance of French colonialism, meddling in the politics of native nations, carrying disease, and pushing for fundamental changes in native lifeways beyond religion. The Jesuit order, founded by Ignatius Loyola and several friends in Rome in 1540, had quickly sent missionaries around the world.
Before he founded the order in 1540, Loyola “gave himself up to a severe regimen–long hours of prayer, fasting, self-flagellation, and other austerities.” He hit a low point and considered suicide before swinging nearly to the opposite end of a spectrum of religious experience, “greatly temper[ing] his austerities” and advocating for an almost modern practice of reflection and self-care. “He turned away from the model of sanctity that prevailed up to that time, which assumed that the more severely the body was punished, the better the soul would flourish.” By the mid 1600s, at least in North America, the Jesuits had made a hard turn back toward severe, nearly suicidal punishment of the body in the service of god.
On the Big Rib River, I found that making good time was difficult. The drought meant the river was never deeper than my waist and was often much shallower. At some points I floated my canoe over three or four inches of water, with only my paddle and pack inside. Mostly the river was thirty or forty feet wide, but at regular intervals it pinched down into gardens of small boulders where the water moved faster. Where it pinched down, I pushed and pulled the canoe over and between large rocks. I tried to imagine what the river might look like with three or four more feet of water. Most of the boulders that slowed me down would have been underwater, but they would have roiled the water above. More water would have meant a swift current, and I wondered whether Ménard and L’Esperance mostly paddled or pushed and pulled the canoe upstream like I did.
The Jesuit order “was founded for ministry, especially in a missionary mode.” They were reluctant to take no for an answer, and the Mohawk, one of the five nations (in 1661) of the Iroquois, said no again and again. Opportunities for martyrdom ensued. The Jesuit Relations in North America demonstrates an obsession with the idea of being martyred. Ménard is compared and compares himself with Francis Xavier, who died of fever while working as a missionary in China. Ménard told his companions, “Saint Francis Xavier…who seemed so necessary to the world for the conversion of souls, met his death in the act of effecting an entrance into China; and should I, who am good for nothing, refuse, for fear of dying on the way, to obey the voice of my God, who calls me to the relief of poor…?” But Ménard didn’t need to compare himself to Saint Xavier, with eight Jesuits martyrs in North America between 1642 and 1649, all killed by the Iroquois, who were mostly uninterested in the Jesuits’ teachings.
The priests were considered fair targets in a war that often saw the torture of captives by both the Iroquois and the Huron. Both cultures expected men to bear torture with calm indifference. In The Jesuit Relations, a writer tells the story of four Huron prisoners, adopted by the Iroquios and then captured by Algonquins allied to the French. They were tied to stakes and slowly burned alive. A Jesuit father attended to the four Huron men during their ordeal.
“What happened to [them], makes the infinite treasures of God’s mercy toward his predestined ones shine forth to much greater advantage,” although from a modern perspective it’s difficult to see how. One of the four Huron men, in his fifties or sixties, his body pierced “with red hot javelins” was “resolved to continue to suffer with firmness,” despite the Jesuit father attending to him telling him, “Know, my brother, that it is no sin to cry oat; thou canst do so without displeasing God thereby.”
But the Jesuits, whatever they were telling the captives, revered the same endurance for extreme suffering. The Iroquois captured the Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf in 1649 and tortured him to death, with the Jesuit Relations reporting that he “suffered like a rock, insensible to the fires and the flames, without uttering any cry, and keeping a profound silence.” Ignatius Loyola had urged his followers to find god in all things, and apparently they found what they were looking for even in torture. The more they suffered, the French Jesuits seemed to believe, the more their god was showing his love for them.
My suffering on the river was minimal. The main challenge was staying balanced while wading on slick rocks in moving water. I pushed upstream, watching trout flit for cover as I passed. An eagle flew overhead. At times the banks were mixed hardwoods that reminded me of narrow backwaters on the lower Wisconsin River, and at other times the forest was made up of tall, dark pines that hinted at the transition to boreal forests further north. At a few points, head high grass hugged the bank.
Ménard’s decision to go west only makes sense in the context of Jesuit thinking that recast extreme suffering as an expression of the love of god. Ménard was not physically prepared for the journey. He was fifty-six when he died. He is described in The Jesuit Relations as “worn out” and a “poor old man, broken in health, feeble.” Before he left Trois-Rivières, he wrote in a letter, “In three or four months, you may remember me at the memento for the dead, on account of my old age, my weak constitution, and the hardships I lay under amongst these tribes.” Nor was he a particularly effective missionary. He converted just six people during his winter with a band of Ottawa on the south shore of Lake Superior, and two of them were toddlers who died almost immediately.
Ménard is reported to have spoken six or seven native languages, but he comes across in his own letters as having abandoned diplomacy. He complained to his Ottawa hosts about having to paddle on the journey from Trois-Rivières. Apparently he had been told he wouldn’t have to on account of his age. Ménard also complained about having to portage, and about the Ottawa paddlers’ lack of regular meal times. In return, the Ottawa men threw a prayer book of Ménard’s in the water. When they finally arrived at Lake Superior, a tree fell on his group’s canoe. The other men abandoned Ménard and the other men from his canoe. The group found fish bones and entrails left behind by native families that had moved on. They pounded the waste and mixed it with water to make soup. They were eventually saved by another group of paddlers and taken to Keneewa Bay, where they spent the winter near an Ottawa band.
Ménard fared no better at Keneewa Bay, and some of his actions during the winter nearly defy common sense. He was taken in by an Ottawa chief but once again found something he could complain about. Having narrowly avoided starving to death before being taken to Keneewa Bay, he still chose to “reprove… the chief [of the band] for his polygamy,” and his host “turned the missionary out of his wigwam in the midst of a Lake Superior winter.” Ménard survived by building a hut made of pine branches. He begged for fish from the Ottawa band, pounded the bones to make soup, and ate tree bark and acorns.
Meanwhile, I stopped for lunch at an outcrop of rock that reminded me of northern Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. Sitting on a log, I unpacked summer sausage, cheese, and crackers. On either side of the narrow river, shelves of granite squeezed the water through rapids. I tried to imagine what it would look like with higher water. The formation wasn’t Ménard’s rapids, but I wondered how L’Esperance and Ménard would have passed through formations like these. Paddling upstream, even in higher water, would have been difficult. Did they line the canoe along the banks, guiding it by rope? Did L’Esperance, sharing the same culture as the old father and maybe more attuned to Ménard’s expectations, let the old man sit as he pushed and pulled the canoe through obstacles?
L’Esperance, after Ménard’s disappearance, made it to their destination in two days. There are about seventeen miles between Ménard’s rapids on the Big Rib River and Chelsea Lake as the crow flies. L’Esperance overshot the village, meaning he could have easily made it in a day if he hadn’t gotten lost. If L’Esperance could have reached the village so easily overland in a day, why were they pushing upstream slowly on the Big Rib River? I wondered what obligation L’Esperance felt for the worn out old priest in the canoe, who had already been abandoned twice during his journey from Trois-Rivières and probably seemed halfway to death.
Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to Ménard’s rapids farther upriver. Soon after lunch I turned around, trying to keep towering storm clouds, forming on the horizon to the north, at my back. I would have liked to see where Ménard disappeared, but I didn’t have a strong sense that it would add to my understanding of him.
I don’t have the confidence of some historians in puzzling through what might have happened to the missionary nearly four hundred years ago. In the end, the story in the Jesuit Relations is merely the product of rumors passed back to Montreal over years, translated between different cultures and written for an audience with a deeply religious view of the world. His death, they naturally wrote, imitated his hero Saint Xavier. But I think maybe Ménard, feeling himself worn out beyond the point of return, abandoned multiple times by his guides in the last year, and slowing L’Esperance, gave himself up to the woods to suffer one last time. He would have known that in his death, he joined a rich tradition of Jesuit self-sacrifice.
The Jesuit Relations imagined “the poor Father, stretched flat on the ground, or perhaps on some rock, [he] remained exposed to all the stings of those little [mosquitos], and suffered that cruel torture. While he lingered alive, hunger and the other hardships drained his strength, and made that blessed soul leave its body, and go to enjoy the fruits of so many labors undergone by him…”
I had the canoe back on the car before the rain began to fall. Thunder boomed, like some ancient musket. I imagined Ménard looking skyward, rain drops falling as the mosquitos sucked away what little was left of him, ready to join his hero Saint Xavier.
Additional Sources
A Savage Empire: Trappers, Traders, Tribes, and the Wars That Made America Hardcover by Alan Axelrod