In the autumn of 1636, Father Isaac Jogues stepped from a canoe onto the sandy beach below the Huron village of Ihonatiria, in what is now Ontario. He was exhausted after nineteen days of paddling and portaging up the waterways, but his spirit was high. He had been chosen, one of six Jesuits selected for the mission to bring Christianity to the Huron nations and the barbarous tribes beyond. For a few days, he rested and recovered his strength.
Then, within a week of his arrival, a deadening lassitude gripped him. By Wednesday, Father de Brébeuf recognized a burning fever. Jogues was ordered to his mat. He was not alone.
The workman Mathurin had returned from a trading trip to Three Rivers with a debilitating fever, abandoned by his Huron companions along the route and left to find his own way back. The engagé Dominique, who helped tend the sick, soon showed signs of the disease as well. And the young lad Jean, still convalescing from an earlier illness, suffered a relapse. By the following Tuesday, Jogues was in a critical state: drenched in sweat, coughing until he was nearly strangled, and bleeding from the nose for days on end.
The small French community had no medicines beyond purges. Their only remedy for fever was bloodletting, but not one of them had ever performed the operation. That night, Father de Brébeuf brought Holy Communion to Jogues, and the priests knelt around his mat, fearing this was his viaticum. In the morning, Jogues was still burning with fever.
It was decided that bleeding was absolutely necessary, but none of the priests wanted to take the lancet. When asked if he had confidence in anyone, Jogues said he would make the cut himself. He had bled an Indian successfully on the journey up. They propped him up, held candles near his arm, and he made the stroke.
The blood poured out. He was bound up and settled back on his mats, slipping into a coma. By the next day, the fever had abated. But the disease was spreading through the mission house.
Father Chastelain collapsed that same day, and Father Garnier, who had tried to conceal his own illness to continue nursing, finally staggered to his bed after nearly fainting at mass. Six people were now sick. Only de Brébeuf, Le Mercier, and the engagé Petit Pré were still on their feet. The hunters scoured the woods for game but found nothing for days.
The sick were given only broth of parsley weeds stewed in water with a dash of unripe grape juice. One hen provided an egg now and then, and the priests debated who among the invalids should not eat it. De Brébeuf finally bought a bustard from a Huron in exchange for a deerskin, a precious commodity. They had been ready to kill one of their dogs for broth.
The Hurons crowded into the cabin from sunrise to night, chanting and dancing around the sick, which was their way of driving away evil spirits. The French tried to keep them quiet, but the Indians were offended. When Le Mercier asked one man to lower his voice, the man pointed to a rooster on the crossbeams and replied that the bird talked louder than he did. The sick hovered between life and death.
Chastelain was bled twice. Garnier lay in a deathly coma. Dominique, afflicted with a purple fever that discolored his face and body, was bled repeatedly with no good result. De Brébeuf gave him extreme unction.
It seemed only a matter of hours. Then, on October 1st, Le Mercier himself collapsed into a violent fever, and Pierre and de Brébeuf took over the nursing. By the end of the first week of October, all seven invalids remained in danger, but none were beyond hope. In the second week, they all began to recover.
None of the sick died, and none of the three who stayed well fell ill. The missionaries interpreted their survival as a sign of divine providence. They had learned how to treat the sickness through their own suffering, and they believed that if they had not been sick unto death, they would certainly have been massacred. The influenza, meanwhile, was ravaging the Huron lands far beyond the mission house.
The first victims had fallen in early September, after traders returned from infected Algonquin territory. By late September, the disease was spreading from village to village. Ossossané, the largest and most important town in the district, reported the most alarming losses. The Hurons turned to their sorcerers, and across the country, medicine men rose up, boasting of limitless powers.
One of them, Taronhiawagon, a misshapen hunchback, offered to cure the black robes for ten glass beads and declared, “I am not like other men. I am a demon. ” He announced that the cure for the plague was a game of lacrosse, which all the men of the villages must play. They played until their arms ached, and the disease increased.
He boasted that he would forbid the disease to enter his village, and the fathers vowed thirty masses to Saint Joseph to confound the devil and his agents. Other sorcerers prescribed ritual dances, blowing violently on the sick, and feasts where the diners had to disgorge at intervals without ceasing to empty their plates. They interpreted the dreams and deliriums of the sick, and whatever the patient dreamt had to be done, no matter how impossible or tragic. They wore masks, beat about the cabins with rods, howled and danced until exhausted, then hung the masks on the door posts to keep the evil spirits away.
They held ritual sweats in little tents piled with roasting stones, threw tobacco on the embers, and claimed to learn the cure from the devil in the smoke. Le Mercier described one witches’ vigil in the cabin of a dying girl, where men took burning embers in their bare hands and passed them over the patient’s stomach, while the women sang and danced and the drums pounded. The sick died, and the well became insane. The black robes argued and pleaded with the Hurons, pointing out that the sorcerers’ remedies did nothing to stop the disease.
They cooked broths and carried them to the sick, but the Indians complained that the priests kept the best part, the grease, for themselves. They distributed prunes and raisins, counted out two or three per patient, and their practices produced effects that dazzled the country. Most effective was bloodletting, which the Hurons could understand and eagerly sought. Father Jogues, the first of the French to recover, was able to administer to the sick of Ihonatiria by early October.
He and de Brébeuf made rounds of the cabins morning and evening, tending to the natives’ physical needs and seeking consent to baptize the dying. Most adults refused. One said he had no desire to go to heaven because he had no acquaintances there. Another would not go because his relatives would not be there.
Another refused because there was no corn, no trade, no hunting, and no marriage. As the weather turned colder, the plague increased in violence. On November 17th, de Brébeuf, Jogues, and Petit Pré made their first excursion to Ossossané, a twelve-mile walk through the bare woods in the teeth of an icy wind. They visited the cabins, distributed their stores of dried fruit, and baptized six dying adults and three children.
But they also heard disquieting rumors. Some Hurons claimed the black robes were responsible for the plague and should be killed. Others said they were powerful magicians who could drive the disease away and should be cultivated. A sorcerer claimed he saw the disease sweeping down the lake from the direction whence the black robes arrived, and that the sickness was a huge poisoned cloak.
Another recalled that Champlain had died vowing to return and kill all the native peoples. The broth of the black robes, they warned, was poisoned. And the water poured on heads during baptism caused death. Practically everyone they baptized died soon after.
The fathers countered with a feast of deer meat on November 27th, offering four hundred wampum beads, many hatchets, and a moose skin, and exhorting the Hurons to believe in the true God. After holding a council, the people of Ihonatiria promised to believe in the God of the black robes, and if the influenza disappeared, to build a chapel in his honor the following spring. But the next day, they donned their masks and chanted their ritual dance. When the village of Wenrio heard of the vow, they wanted to make it too.
On December 5th, de Brébeuf visited them, but this time he demanded more: that they give up their belief in dreams, that marriages be binding and for life, that they observe conjugal chastity, and that they renounce vomiting feasts, shameless assemblies, the eating of human flesh, and the feasts called Ihou Tarohi. The Hurons were troubled. One chief said the proposals would only prove a stumbling block. But an old chief persuaded the council to accept, saying it was better to endure a little trouble and live rather than die miserably.
Ossossané also accepted, and a medicine man was deputed to cry through the streets that the people took God as their lord and master and bound themselves to build a cabin in his honor, on condition that he stop the disease. For a few weeks, the black robes were treated affably. Jogues found an Indian named Sononresk gasping his last breath, repeating, “I believe. ” Jogues baptized him, and the man suddenly recovered, announcing that the water had flowed down his throat and cured him.
He died the next day. In January, the mood shifted again. The chiefs of Ihonatiria publicly denounced the black robes as the authors of the plague. One leader, Taratande, hurled burning sticks at them and threatened to split the head of the first Frenchman he met if anyone in his family died.
He plotted with neighboring chiefs to massacre all the French. The fathers knew of it, and even the children spoke of them as persons soon to have their heads split. Then, rapidly, one by one, Taratande’s family fell sick, and he himself died within days. The other chiefs feared and repented.
They entreated the fathers not to reveal the evil designs to the French at Three Rivers. De Brébeuf accepted the apology and berated them for their superstitions. One chief answered, “What can you expect? Our brains are muddled.
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The missionaries continued their journeys. In mid-January, they visited Wenrio, where not one Indian would tolerate their words, and Anguiens, where they baptized two dying children. At Ossossané, they found the devil let loose. A new sorcerer, Tearen Hignouan, had fasted ten days in a divining cabin and learned the cure from demons.
He deputed his disciple Saou Serinnon, who came to the village and ordered a great feast and dance. The men assembled at nightfall, chanting and swaying, and the chief cried an invocation to the demon, telling him they were making a feast in his honor and begging him to take the sickness to the country of their enemies. They danced all night. At dawn, Saou Serinnon returned, waving a bow as a symbol of power and carrying a kettle of mystic water, and gave each man a few drops to drink.
The ritual was repeated on two successive nights. The sick remained as numerous as those who professed themselves cured. Saou Serinnon returned and ordered the sick carried to his presence; a few died in the process, and not one was bettered. Opinion veered, and he left hurriedly, while his two disciples threw away their turkey wings and renounced their sorcery, since the penalty for failure was a split skull.
De Brébeuf and Jogues waited for the hysteria to pass. They had the consolation of baptizing a few souls before they died. The epidemic eventually ran its course. The Hurons, also known as the Wyandots, would survive this outbreak, but the disease and the counterproductive rituals that accompanied it took a heavy toll.
The missionaries practiced bloodletting, which would later be discredited, while the Indians called on sorcerers whose dances, feasts, and sweats usually made their patients worse. Disease would remain the greatest killer of American Indians after the arrival of Europeans, and the failure of the traditional remedies often opened the door for those who promised a different kind of salvation. Within a little more than a decade, the Huron confederation itself would be conquered and dispersed by the Iroquois.
