"A few days later the canoes became separated, and Father Daniel was the last to arrive at a long and difficult portage. Famished, enfeebled by the long illness he had endured at Quebec, and worn out by the arduous journey over rocks and through swamps and woodland undergrowth, he reeled under the pack he was shouldering and fell to the ground in a faint. When he returned to consciousness, he was too weak to rise. A few gooseberries were within his reach, and these became the first food he had had that day. He got up on his feet, and his legs collapsed under him.

"It was the law of the wilderness that to drop from weariness on a journey was to be abandoned by the Indians. All missionaries had been warned years before, and ever since, that if one were accidentally hurt on the way to Huronia, or if one fell sick, no help must be expected from the natives.

" 'I thought of Agar and the prophet Elias in the wilderness,' wrote Daniel, 'and I wondered if God would help me as He did them, but my sins prevented me from hoping for such a favor. However, I was consoled by the thought that if I died, it was through obedience. I remained an hour or two in this state when my men, perceiving my absence, came back to look for me. I asked them for something to eat, but they said they had nothing. They helped me up, took my pack, and encouraged me to walk, and soon we came to a rivulet which refreshed me somewhat and gave me strength to reach Allumeues toward evening. There I found my two seminarists, and also the young Frenchman, who were very much alarmed, for they had been waiting for me for two days. I met Armand's relatives and went to their cabin, but at night the AIgonquins came and asked me to go with them to sing their litanies. I was very tired, but I dragged myself to their wigwam, for it was sweeter for me than for them. We heard that the Fathers were safe, though they had been in considerable danger, and so after remaining a week on the Island to recuperate, we resumed our journey and reached Ihonatiria on July 9, having left Montreal on June 11.'

"It is a rare individual who, in the last stages of physical exhaustion, is ready to surrender the rest that nature demands and stagger to an Indian wigwam and listen to its unsubtle inhabitants sing litanies that were 'sweeter for me than for them.' "

"The missionaries had attended the best colleges and universities in France. They were versed in the sacred sciences and in many branches of secular knowledge. They were able to make astronomical and meteorological observations, to chart maps, and to note what was peculiar in forestry, vegetation, and animal life. They were shrewd observers of racial characteristics, and one of them, Joseph Fran~ois Lafitau, is recognized as the founder of modem technology.

"Many of the missionaries' letters were written in Indian huts and wigwams and at campfires, amid a chaos of distractions: dogs barking, mosquitoes swarming over face and hands, smoke covering the missionaries like a pall, apd dogs and children crawling over them alternately. Frequently the writers were suffering from fatigue and hunger, from sickness, or from wounds inflicted by rude hosts who, at the twinkling ofan eye, could change into jailers and tormentors upon the whisper of a medicine man or sorcerer.

"The style of the letters is nearly always simple and direct, informal and factual. The narrators indulge in no self-glorification or self-pity; they do not dwell needlessly upon the details of their own hardships, but rather set forth the facts with candor and objectivity.

"Considering the difficulties, it is a wonder that anything at all was written and dispatched. Jogues wrote some of his letters with a hand on which there remained but one whole finger; blood from a wound stained the paper. Gunpowder was his ink; the earth, his table. Many of the Indians regarded writing as magic and feared that it might do harm to them. Chaumonot, one of the chroniclers, at times had to write in secluded places and carry his letters in his clothing, because of the su,perstitious fear with which the Indians sometimes regarded them."

– John A. O'Brien

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