CCHA, Historical Studies,
69 (2003), 52-63
The
Death of Père Aulneau, 1736:
The
Development of Myth
in
the Northwest
Bill Moreau
On 6 June 1736, a party of
twenty-one Frenchmen was killed by Native warriors on an island in Lake of the
Woods. The attackers were a mixed group of Teton-Lakota, Dakota, and Ojibwa,
and the French victims included the Jesuit missionary Jean-Pierre Aulneau and
Jean-Baptiste de la Vérendrye, son of the explorer and trader Pierre Gaultier
de la Vérendrye. There were no survivors among the French party, and thus no
eyewitnesses aside from the perpetrators. Despite this, the incident became the
subject of several written and oral accounts, and the death of the Jesuit
Aulneau the focal point of the discourse. The narratives include the testimony
of those who found the bodies of the victims, accounts written by the Jesuits
of New France during the years following the incident, and oral traditions
passed on in the Lake of the Woods region through subsequent decades. In this
paper I propose to examine the evolution of the narrative traditions
surrounding the events of 6 June 1736, and in so doing seek a lesson and a
caution for narrators of history.
By
the 1730s the French, having already established several posts in the
Mississippi Valley and the Petit Nord, began to extend their explorations and
their network of trade westward to the Great Plains. At the forward edge of
this movement was Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Vérendrye, who in
1732 established a post on Lake of the Woods, which he named Fort
Saint-Charles, in honour of Charles de la Boische, the Marquis de Beauharnois
and Governor of New France. The Jesuits of New France moved in concert with
this westward expansion. News had arrived at Quebec of an intriguing Native
group known as the Mandans, who lived in villages on the Missouri River and
were said to be bearded and fair-skinned, and so in 1734 it was decided to send
a missionary to these people. The Society could spare only one man, and the
task was assigned to Jean-Pierre Aulneau, a newly-ordained and newly-arrived
confrère from the Vendée. Aulneau went west with La Vérendrye in June 1735.
In
the 1730s Lake of the Woods lay on the northern edge of a zone of conflict between
several Native groups. Before 1737 enmity ran deepest between the Cree, who
occupied a vast woodland region stretching north and north-west from the lake,
and the Teton-Lakota branch of the Sioux nation, who had recently moved
westward onto the Plains, but who retained a presence in the upper Mississippi
region. The Cree allied themselves with the Assiniboine, a Siouan group living
to the south of Lake Winnipeg, while the Teton-Lakota were often joined by the
Dakota, the eastern branch of the Sioux nation, who occupied the upper
Mississippi valley, and the Ojibwa, who inhabited the lands around Lake
Superior but who were beginning to move south and westward.1
The
relationship between the French and the Dakota is the key to understanding the
prelude to the killing of La Vérendrye’s party. In order to trade with the
French, the Dakota had carried out ceremonies by which they and their partners
in commerce had formed kinship ties.2 This trading alliance was mutually satisfactory, and by
1731 a large Dakota settlement had grown up around Fort Beauharnois, the French
trading post at Lake Pepin on the Upper Mississippi. But with French expansion
north and northwest, and the development of relations between La Vérendrye and
the Cree, the Dakota-French alliance became strained. In early July 1733 a
skirmish between a Cree war expedition and a group of Dakota was fought in a
dense forest on Dakota lands; when the Dakota demanded to know who was
attacking them, their Cree adversaries replied “C’est le françois.” Then, in
May 1734, in order to cement a trading alliance with the Cree, La Vérendrye
allowed his eldest son Jean-Baptiste to accompany a new war party against the
Dakota. The kinship ties had been broken, and the stage was set for the drama
that would come to be known as the “Lake of the Woods Tragedy.”
Pierre
de la Vérendrye and Aulneau arrived at Fort Saint-Charles on 2 October 1735
and passed the winter there. In a letter written from the post in April 1736
Aulneau had anticipated passing that summer and fall with the Assiniboine as a
prelude to his mission to the Mandan. But when La Vérendrye decided at the
beginning of June to send a brigade east to Michilimackinac for supplies,
Aulneau asked to join the party. It is unclear why Aulneau made this request,
but it has been suggested that he wanted to go to confession. A small advance
party set out from Fort Saint-Charles on 2 June, and, unbeknownst to La
Vérendrye, was detained and pillaged by a group of 130 Teton-Lakota, Dakota,
and Ojibwa warriors, who had recently arrived on the lake. On 3 June the main
French party was constituted. Aulneau made his request to be included, and
asked La Vérendrye to send his eldest son Jean-Baptiste along with the brigade
to ensure its speedy progress. The men embarked in three canoes on 5 June 1736.
They numbered twenty-one; none would survive the next twenty-four hours. The
killing of the party was a cataclysmic event for the French, Cree,
Teton-Lakota, Dakota, and Ojibwa, disrupting patterns of travel, exchange and
relationship in the Lake of the Woods region and beyond, and forestalling for a
time French expansion westward.
While oral traditions
regarding the engagement continued to be transmitted in the Lake of the Woods
region itself, the incident was soon lost to European and Canadian historical
discourse, and this historical fog only grew thicker with the end of the French
regime in 1760. The story reemerged over a century later, with the retrieval
and publication of several oral and manuscript sources, which appeared in a
span of twenty-eight years between 1888 and 1916.3 The recovery of the documentary
heritage prompted a search for the sites associated with the events of 1736,
and led to the identification of Massacre Island, and, in 1908, to the
discovery of the site of Fort Saint-Charles and of the remains of the victims
themselves.
The recovered narratives tell a compelling
tale. There are three kinds of sources: the first are the accounts written by
La Vérendyre and his associates in the weeks and months immediately following
the incident, the second is comprised of letters written by Jesuits of New
France between 1736 and 1739, and the third consists of local oral accounts,
transcribed during the nineteenth century.
Pierre de la Vérendrye’s own account is
contained in his annual report for 1736-1737, sent to the Marquis de
Beauharnois, and then on to the Comte de Maurepas, the French Secretary of
State.4 La Vérendrye’s recital of
events is spare yet evocative, and conveys the growing sense of dread that the
explorer felt after the departure of the brigade on 5 June. He reports that on
the 8th a party of canoes arrived at Fort Saint-Charles from Kaministiquia on
Lake Superior; forebodingly, it had not encountered the eastbound travellers.
On the 12th a Native party arrived with word that the small advance
party had been detained and robbed, and on the 17th another party
arrived from Kaministiquia; neither had they encountered the canoes. La
Vérendrye records that he sent out a search party under the command of his
sergeant, Sieur le Gras. The next entry
in his account is as follows:
On
... the twenty-second, the sergeant and his men arrived bringing the sad news
of the massacre of the twenty-one men seven leagues from the fort on a little
island. Most of the bodies were found, all decapitated, and lying in a circle
against one another, which made me to conclude that they were killed while
holding counsel; the heads were wrapped in beaver skins.5
We
have here the barest of details: all the men decapitated, the bodies in a
circle, the heads in beaver skins (perhaps in mockery of the French love for
furs). La Vérendrye makes no particular reference to either his son
Jean-Baptiste or to Père Aulneau.
A second
account was written by a member of the party which found the bodies, and was
included in La Vérendrye’s correspondence to Beauharnois.6
The anonymous author writes:
The heads
were placed on beaver robes, most of them scalped; the missionary had one knee
on the ground, an arrow in his side, his breast split open, his left hand
against the ground, his right hand raised. The Sieur de la Vérendrye was lying
on his face, his back all scored with knife cuts, a stake thrust into his side,
headless, his body ornamented with leggings and armpieces of porcupine.7
The beaver robes reappear, but
everything else in this report is new. Three scenes are presented, in ever
greater detail: the group (13 words in the original French), the corpse of
Aulneau (24 words) and the corpse of Jean-Baptiste de la Vérendrye (34 words).
While the narrative builds up to the description of the explorer’s son, let us
keep in mind the carefully-sketched picture of Aulneau: knee on the ground, an
arrow in the side, breast split open, left hand on the ground, right hand
raised.
The
author of this report anticipated that more details of the episode would
emerge, and as 1736 progressed bits of information began to leak out at three
French posts: Kaministiquia at the west end of Lake Superior, Chequamegon on
the south shore of the same lake, which were both frequented by Ojibwa, and
Fort Beauharnois at Lake Pepin, in Dakota lands. It was confirmed that the
majority of the attackers were Teton-Lakota, but that they had been joined by
Dakota and Ojibwa. On 18 August two of the French canoes, along with twenty of
the warriors’ canoes, were found in the south end of Lake of the Woods. All
were bloodied, and limbs were found buried in the sand. On 17 September the
French trader at Lake Pepin, Sieur de Saint-Pierre, reported that he received a
Dakota chief at his post. Spying an ornament in the chief’s ear, Saint-Pierre
recognized the seal of Père Aulneau, tore off both seal and ear, and turned the
chief out. On the same day the bodies of Jean-Baptiste and Aulneau, and the
heads of the others, were retrieved and brought to Fort Saint-Charles to be
interred.
The
second body of texts consists of accounts written by Aulneau’s Jesuit
confreres in the three years following the events. Père Nicolas de Gonnor,
posted at the Huron mission of Lorette near Québec, wrote to an unidentified
recipient in 1736 asking that the news of Aulneau’s death be conveyed to the
late priest’s mother.8
De Gonnor writes:
[Aulneau]
was surprised with twenty other Frenchmen; it is not known how they were put to
death. No sign of distrust was perceived, nor had the Natives tortured them as
they usually do those they take in war. It is conjectured that they were
surprised while asleep, and attacked suddenly, after which the heads of all
were severed from the bodies. It is said, however, that from the position in
which the father’s body was found, that he was on his knees when he was
decapitated; this is why one of those who found him took his calotte
[skull cap], saying that, as poor as he was, he would not give it up for a
thousand ecus.9
Some details here are consistent
with the accounts from Fort Saint-Charles: the decapitation of all the victims
and the posture of Aulneau. The conjecture that the Frenchmen were “surprised
while asleep” is new, and introduces the first real inconsistency in the
accounts (unless Aulneau had the habit of sleeping in a kneeling position;
perhaps this was an ascetic discipline of the time).
The
second Jesuit account is that of Père Joseph François Lafitau, contained in a
letter written at Paris on 4 April 1738 and addressed to the Jesuit Father
General Francis Retz at Rome.10
Lafitau states simply:
As to
what relates to Father Pierre Aulneau, nothing new has been learnt beyond what
was first written ... The savage band came upon them unawares and slaughtered
them all. Father Aulneau was stabbed twice and was decapitated.11
Despite the fact that Lafitau
states that there is “nothing new,” the detail of Aulneau’s being stabbed twice
makes its first surviving appearance here.
The
third, fullest, and most intriguing Jesuit account is that written by Père
Pierre de Jaunay, of the mission at Michilimackinac. The letter is written to
Madame Aulneau herself, and is dated 28 September 1739 – over three years after
the killings took place.12 De
Jaunay cautiously endorses the reliability of his account, asserting “here is
what I have learned from hearsay, and some of my sources of information seem
trustworthy” and stating that many of these details are derived from “various
accounts of the Indians.” What he writes attests to a significant evolution in
the story of the death of Aulneau:
In the
first place, the majority of the Indians implicated were averse to putting him
to death. In the second place, it was through sheer bravado that a
crazy-brained Indian set at naught the consequences which held the others in
awe. A third particular I have gathered is that scarcely had the deed been
perpetrated than a deafening peal of thunder struck terror into the whole
band. They fled the spot, believing that Heaven was incensed at what they had
done. Finally, that the portable chapel, and, specifically, the chalice which
was plundered, had fallen into the hands of a widowed squaw who had several
grown up sons, the pride and wealth of the tribe. In a remarkably short lapse
of time, all or nearly all of them perished in her sight. This she ascribed to
the chalice which her sons had given her, so she rid herself of it by throwing
it into a river.13
There is virtually nothing here
that is not new: the debate among the attackers, the figure of the
single bold Native who assaults Aulneau, the sudden peal of thunder and the
episode of the stolen chalice, which seems to wreak its own crude vengeance.
We
move forward some sixty years for our next account. In August 1797, while en
route from Grand Portage at the head of Lake Superior to Lake Winnipeg, the
North West Company fur trader David Thompson passed through Lake of the Woods
and heard a fantastic tale associated with a place called the Isles aux Morts.
Thompson set down the account in his narrative:
It seems
that when the French from Canada first entered these fur countries, every
summer a Priest came to instruct the Traders and their men in their religious
duties, and preach to them and the Natives in Latin it being the only language
the Devil does not understand and cannot learn; He had collected about twenty
Men with a few of the Natives upon a small Island, of rock; and while
instructing them a large war party of Sieux Indians came on them and began the
work of death; not one escaped; whilst this was going on the Priest kept
walking backwards and forwards on a level rock of about fifty yards in length,
with his eyes fixed on his book, without seeming to notice them; at length as
he turned about, one of them sent an arrow through him, and he fell dead. At
this deed the rocky isle trembled and shook; the Sieux Indians became afraid,
and they retired without stripping the dead, or taking their scalps. These
Isles, of which there are three, are to this day called “The isles of the dead
(Les isles aux Morts).14
The incident cannot be other than
the 1736 engagement. While some historical details are clearly incorrect (for
example, that the men were gathered on the island for religious instruction),
others are accurate (the size of the party assembled and the identity of the
attackers). The uncanny aspect of this account is its affinity with that of De
Jaunay; the trembling and shaking of the island is close to the Jesuit’s “peal
of thunder,” and the hasty flight of the attackers is identical in both
narratives. New details include the aloofness of the priest from the work of
death, and the assertion that the bodies were neither stripped nor scalped.
Our
final account dates from 1843. In that year Père G.-A. Belcourt visited the
supposed site of the killings, where his Ojibwa guide gave him an account of the
events:
The Sioux
... stealthily landed on the island without attracting notice, and rushed upon
the explorers who were off their guard. Many were pierced with arrows or were
felled with the tomahawk. Some sought safety in flight only to perish in the
waves. Father Aulneau, wounded by an arrow, fell upon his knees, when an Indian
coming up behind him dealt him the death blow with his tomahawk. All the
baggage was pillaged, but the Indians dared not touch the body of the
missionary. Three weeks after the occurrence, a party of Indians of the Sault,
passing by the spot, found his body unmutilated.15
This version seems almost a
hybrid of the others. It shares with the 1736 accounts Aulneau’s kneeling
posture and his arrow wound, with the letter of De Gonnor the suddenness of the
attack, with the letter of De Jaunay the lone murderer, and with the narrative
of Thompson the inviolability of Aulneau’s body.
To
round out these accounts, we might add that in 1908 nineteen skulls and five
skeletons were unearthed at the site of Fort Saint-Charles. Two of the
skeletons had been placed in a box, side by side. Both were headless, and at
the feet of one were placed the beads of a rosary and a set of keys.
There
is little work for the historian in a search of “what really happened” on 6
June 1736. Some conjectures are certainly more probable than others, and we
must respect the objective evidence of skeletal remains. But it is far less
interesting to ponder what might have happened than it is to probe the narration
of what happened.
The
two Fort Saint-Charles accounts of 1736 place Aulneau in a subordinate role;
one account speaks only of the group, while the other gives priority to Jean-Baptiste
de la Vérendrye. The narratives assert that the attack on the French party was
primarily a political act. As we have seen, the Dakota felt betrayed by La
Vérendrye, who had broken his kinship alliance with them, first by trading arms
to the Cree and then by sending his eldest son to accompany a Cree war
expedition. When the opportunity arose to attack the French, and Jean-Baptiste
himself, it was seized.
There
is no suggestion in the 1736 accounts that Aulneau was killed in odium fidei,
and the heads wrapped in beaver pelts speak the symbolic language of commerce
rather than Christianity. Indeed, elsewhere in his writings the elder La
Vérendrye betrays some peevishness with the missionary, stating on three
occasions that it was at Aulneau’s insistence that Jean-Baptiste was sent along
with the brigade, stopping just short of accusing the Jesuit of responsibility
for the death of his son. By contrast, the Jesuit letters show complete
ignorance of the political and commercial realities behind the Lake of the
Woods incident; instead, they suggest that Aulneau may be both a saint and a
martyr. The Jesuits place particular stress on the priest’s kneeling posture.
Recall Père de Gonnor’s comment that, upon discovering Aulneau’s corpse in
this position, “one of those who found him took his calotte, saying
that, as poor as he was, he would not give it up for a thousand ecus.” The
collection of relics had begun.
Passages
in other Jesuit letters attest to this belief in Aulneau’s saintly status. In
October 1738 Père Pierre de Lauzon sent the priest’s calotte to Madame
Aulneau (it is unclear how he obtained it from the voyageur who first took
possession of it, but one presumes that he did not pay a thousand écus).
De Lauzon writes “The French and Canadians wished to keep for themselves all
else that belonged to him,” and admits that he had clipped a small piece from
the calotte for use in his own devotions.16
In the same year, 1738, Père Luc François Nau informed Madame Aulneau that her
son was “invoked here as a powerful intercessor with God, and [that] a great
many persons affirm that they have received signal graces through his
intercession.”17 When La Vérendrye was at
last able to reach the Mandans in the winter of 1738-1739, de Gonnor wrote a
letter in which he cited the patristic maxim “the blood of the martyrs is the
seed of Christians.”18
The
status accorded to Aulneau – that of saint and martyr – determined the way in
which the story of his death would be narrated, and many of the features of
traditional hagiography enter the tale with the Jesuits. For one, the priest
becomes the central, and almost sole figure in the narrative – he approaches
heroic status even before his death, and de Jaunay asserts that he even held
such a fearsome group as a band of Native warriors in awe. The most remarkable
element, though, must be the peal of thunder, as the natural order expresses
its sympathy with human events. Both the awe of the spectators and the natural
cataclysm echo details of the death of Jesus in the Gospels of Mark and
Matthew. In Matthew the earth shakes and rocks are split; in their terror the
centurion and those keeping watch are prompted to exclaim “Truly this man was
God’s Son” (Mt 27:51-54).
We
should not be surprised that the story of the death of Aulneau is made to
conform to such patterns in the writings of the Jesuits, who were so attuned to
this kind of discourse that the scriptural echoes in their writings seem almost
unconscious. But when we consider again the accounts of Thompson and Belcourt
we find that the same process had been at work in the transmission of the oral
tradition in the Lake of the Woods region. Thompson records that he heard the
story from an “old Canadian” (that is, a French Canadian) who had himself
learned it from French regime fur traders. Belcourt credits local Ojibwa. If
anything, the elements of traditional hagiography are accentuated in these two
relations.
The
theme of disturbance in the natural order is the most striking aspect of Thompson’s
account: “The rocky isle trembled and shook,” he records, and as we have seen
this is not so far from de Jaunay’s “clap of thunder.” Both oral accounts
insist on the awe felt by the warriors, and in both accounts this awe is linked
to the inviolability of Aulneau’s body. Thompson writes that the warriors
“retired without stripping the dead or taking their scalps,” and Belcourt
asserts that the attackers “dared not touch the body of the missionary.”
Recall that in the Gospel of John the soldiers do not break Jesus’ legs, so
fulfilling the scripture “None of his bones shall be broken” (Jn 19:33, 36). Of
course, the testimony of the documents of 1736, which state that the victims
had all been decapitated, and the evidence of their skeletal remains, directly
contradict this version of events.
Where
does this leave us? Is there a moral to this story? There are some lessons. The
Aulneau narratives illustrate again how hermeneutics determine the way in which
historical events are related. The Jesuit accounts of this incident, and the
folk tradition with which they share so many features, are patterned along
Scriptural and hagiographic lines, attesting to the power of this kind of
discourse for the people of New France, whether they be those living in the
bush of the interior or the educated clergy of the St. Lawrence Valley.
There
are some unanswered questions. There is the uncertain relationship between the
Jesuit accounts and the oral tradition, for the distinction between the two is
perhaps less clear than I have suggested. De Jaunay states that he drew on
oral accounts; at the same time, Jesuits continued to travel west as
missionaries after 1736, and so could have informed the oral tradition in their
turn. We may also consider the relationship between Native and non-Native
discourses, for both de Jaunay and Belcourt credit Natives, most likely
non-Christians, as their first-stage informants. Is there an affinity between
the world views of the Ojibwa, Cree, Teton-Lakota, and Dakota on the one hand,
and the Jesuits and fur traders on the other, that would lend rhetorical power
to the Aulneau narrative in both cultures?
Finally,
there is a caution for historians, to be attentive to our own modes of
narration. The same rhetoric that marks the Jesuit letters and the oral
tradition would later be picked up by romanticist and nationalist historians,
who must have found it irresistible. In his fanciful recreation of the attack
for his 1921 Pathfinders of the Great Plains, Burpee writes “The Jesuit
priest walked up and down, deep in his breviary.”19
Irene Moore, in her 1927 biography Valiant La Vérendrye, writes “The
missionary’s body was [found] in such a position that it was thought he was
beheaded while on his knees,” and adds “perhaps pronouncing absolution for his
confreres in dying.”20 In her
1956 biography of La Vérendrye, Nellis Crouse writes that Aulneau “remained a
horrified spectator of the scene, doubtless on his knees imploring the mercy of
Heaven for his fellow countrymen.”21
These were all serious historians, and while we may have entered a new moment
in historiography, we do well to remain self-aware about the way that we tell
stories, and to acknowledge that our modes of understanding continue to
determine the shape of our narratives, including that which now comes to a
close.
1 The French sources often fail to
distinguish between the various branches of the Sioux family. When they do,
the Teton-Lakota are usually referred to as the “Sioux des plains” and the
Dakota as the “Sioux du lac.”
2 For the background to these
kinship trading alliances, see Gary Clayton Anderson, Kinsmen of Another Kind:
Dakota-White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650-1862 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 30.
3 Documents relating to La
Vérendrye’s activities are housed at Aix-en-Provence at the Centre des archives
d’outre-mer, Fonds des colonies, series C11E, volume 16. These documents were
published in French in 1888 in volume 6 of Pierre Margry, ed., Mémoires
et documents pour servir à l’histoire des origines françaises des pays
d’outre-mer: découvertes et établissements des Français dans l’ouest et dans le
sud de l’Amérique septentrionale (Paris: Maisonneuve et Leclerc,
1888). A bilingual edition of the La Vérendrye documents was published in 1927
as Lawrence J. Burpee, ed., Journals and Letters of Pierre Gaultier de
Varennes de la Vérendrye and His Sons (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1927).
Papers belonging to the Aulneau family
were recovered in 1889. In that year three Jesuits gave an Advent mission in
the Vendée, at the conclusion of which a man approached the fathers to ask if
they would be interested in seeing some old papers relating to a family member
who had belonged to the Society. These were translated and published in 1893 as
Arthur E. Jones, ed., The Aulneau Collection: 1734-1745 (Montreal: St
Mary’s College, 1893).
Between 1896 and 1901 the Jesuit
Relations of Reuben Gold Thwaites appeared; this monumental work contains,
in addition to the published Relations, hundreds of personal letters,
journals, and other documents, including several which refer to the death of
Aulneau. See: Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied
Documents (Cleveland: Burrows, 1896-1901), 73 vols.
The oral account collected by Père G.-A.
Belcourt in 1843 was published in Camille de Rochemonteix, Les
Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris:
Alphonse Picard et fils, 1906), 2 vols.
The manuscript of David Thompson’s
narrative of his western experiences, containing his account of the Lake of the
Woods affair, was written in 1846-1850 and first published in 1916 as J.B.
Tyrrell, ed., David Thompson’s Narrative of His Explorations in North
America 1784-1812 (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1916).
Except in the case of Thompson, whose
manuscript narrative is housed at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the
University of Toronto, in this paper I employ the published transcriptions and
translations.
4
Report of Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Vérendrye to Charles de
la Boische, Marquis de Beauharnois, June 2, 1736-August 3, 1737. Journals
and Letters, 213-62.
5
Ibid., 219.
6
Anonymous Report to Charles de la Boische, Marquis de Beauharnois, 1736. Ibid, 262-6.
7
Ibid., 264.
8
Nicolas de Gonnor to unidentified recipient, 1736. Jesuit Relations, 68:
312-19
9 Ibid., 316-17.
10 Joseph François Lafitau to Francis Retz, 4
April 1738. Aulneau Collection, 91-2.
11
Ibid.
12
Pierre de Jaunay to Madame Aulneau, 28 September 1739. Ibid,
110-12. Madame Aulneau, in addition to
being the mother of two Jesuits, was an affiliate of the community. She
corresponded with many Jesuits in New France, and sent the missionaries
religious articles such as scapulars and crucifixes, and on at least one
occasion leek seeds from her garden.
13
Ibid., 111.
14
David Thompson Papers, MS 21, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, Univer-sity of
Toronto, iv. 122.
15
de Rochemonteix, Les Jésuites et la Nouvelle-France au XVIIIe siècle,
1:223.
16
Pierre de Lauzon to Madame Aulneau, October 26, 1738. Aulneau Collection,
107-08.
17
Luc François Nau to Madame Aulneau, October 10, 1738. Ibid.,
106.
18
Nicolas de Gonnor to Madame Aulneau, [1739]. Ibid., 117. One may note that the
items taken by the warriors – Aulneau’s seal and the portable chapel – were
termed plunder, and resulted in mutilation and death; those taken by the French
and Canadians were regarded as relics, which could be used in the invocation of
divine aid.
19
Lawrence J. Burpee, Pathfinders of the Great Plains : A Chronicle of La
Vérendrye and His Sons (Toronto: Glasgow, Brook, 1921), 40.
20
Irene Moore, Valiant La Vérendrye. (Quebec: L.S.-A, Proulx, 1927),
227.
21
Nellis M. Crouse, La Vérendrye: Fur Trader and Explorer. (Toronto:
Ryerson, 1956), 107-108.