The Ryerson Canadian History Readers
LORNE PIERCE, Editor
Endorsed by
IMPERIAL ORDER DAUGHTERS OF THE EMPIRE
RECOMMENDED BY THE PROVINCIAL DEPARTMENTS OF EDUCATION
FATHER MORICE
By
THOMAS O'HAGAN, Ph.D., Litt.D.
Author of "Collected Poems," "With Staff and Scrip,"
"Intimacies in Canadian Life and Letters," etc.
PRICE 10 CENTS
THE RYERSON PRESS
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THE RYERSON CANADIAN HISTORY READERS
Are designed to meet a real need of the school-room. Every wide-awake teacher has long recognized the value of supplementary readers, simple and interesting enough to be placed in the hands of the pupils.
Up to the present most of the available books of this kind have been foreign in sentiment and manufacture. The present series has been prepared by Canadians of outstanding ability, on Canadian themes, for Canadian boys and girls.
Each reader contains a wealth of historical information, and completely covers the history of our country through its great characters and events. These books are written in a charming and vivid manner, and will be valued, not only as history readers, but also as lessons in literary appreciation, for the teaching of history and literature ought to go hand in hand.
"This little paper-covered book is designed to supplement the history in the lower forms and grades, and is to be used as a reader. Biography, simple and lively, is for the young pupil, the easy and natural approach to history. The life of a great man, presented with even small degree of narrative facility, will be read eagerly by a pupil who will find the account of the same period of years dull and difficult. Wide margins, clear, handsome print and two sketches by C. W. Jeffreys make this unpretentious book very attractive. Teachers who have seen or used any one of the four will look forward to the others."—Teachers' Magazine.
"Children will really know and learn to love Canadian History when it is introduced by such charming booklets. They meet the real need of the school-room."—The Canadian Teacher.
Copyright, Canada, 1928, by
The Ryerson Press, Toronto.
FATHER MORICE
When the boy, Adrien Gabriel Morice, then fifteen years of age, a young student in the ecclesiastical seminary of the city of Mayenne, in France, heard the burning and apostolic words of Mgr. Grandin, O.M.I., one of the great missionary bishops of the Canadian Northwest, who had been visiting France in the spring of 1874, the fixed resolution was formed in young Morice to devote his life to the great and arduous labor of bearing the Gospel of Christ to the pagan Indians of Canada, then immersed in the darkness of spiritual misery and sin.
This was a number of years before our Dominion was spanned, from Atlantic to Pacific, by a transcontinental railroad; so that when the young seminarian, Adrien Gabriel Morice, now twenty-one years of age and a member of that missionary order known as Oblates of Mary Immaculate, having almost completed his theological studies, started for his appointed field of labor in British Columbia, he was obliged to go by way of New York and San Francisco, thence by a sea voyage of five days to Victoria, B.C. This vast territory, with its sea of mountains, its rushing rivers with their cascades sparkling and alluring, its sparse settlements of village and mining camp, known to-day as British Columbia, was to be the scene of this young priest's future missionary labors. The finger of God pointed him thitherwards to toil spiritually among the benighted children of the forest wilds.
Perhaps in no other part of Canada was mission work among the Indians attended by greater danger, greater perils than in British Columbia. In the first place this country was inhabited by tribes of Indians treacherous even for savages; Indians whose moral code was low and degrading, and whose character had been so warped by debasing practices that in preparation for receiving Christian truth and Christian baptism, they had to be well-nigh made over again.
The missionaries of the Northwest Plains who undertook the Christianization of the Crees, Blood and Blackfeet Indians, found themselves among tribes that, at least, possessed a modicum of morals as well as a certain sense of Indian chivalry; but there was little of this among the nomads that slew and pillaged each other, and pursued a code of vengeance and violence, beyond the Rockies; both the scale of intelligence and the scale of morals reaching a lower and lower level as the Pacific Coast was being approached. A fundamental essential for mission work among the Indians is a knowledge of their character supplemented by a knowledge of their language. Without the latter, it is needless to say, little progress can be made.
All the Indian tribes of the Middle West agreed more or less in their sociology and religion, dwelling in skin tepees, which were conical lodges, mounted on poles. They lived on the meat of the buffalo, fish and a species of wild rice and berries, according to the season. In British Columbia the Indians lived on fish and game, and in searching for the sustenance of life moved their habitat more frequently than did the Indians of the Plains. This made the work of the missionary more arduous and more subject to vicissitudes. Among none of the Indian tribes, either of the Rockies or the Plains, did purity of morals or honesty prevail; while polygamy was common to all. The average of intelligence and morals among the aborigines of the Pacific Coast, or let us say of the Rockies, was, however, of a lower order than among the tribes of the Plains. Among all there obtained the idea of a Great Spirit or Master of Life—Kichi-Manitou, together with the idea, of course, of an opposite spirit or Bad Spirit, Machi-Manitou. Yet their religious system, which was the shamanism common to nearly all the natives of America, was mostly concerned with a multitude of lesser spirits which were believed to people the material world, to inhabit rocks and trees, lakes and mountains—some good, which were supposed to adopt people and act as their protectors, others bad, which caused storms and head winds in nature, sickness and bad luck in individuals. So that, in the eyes of those Indians, a sick person is little short of one possessed of an evil spirit, which has to be exorcised out of the patient by the incantations of the shaman or medicine-man, who is thought to be under the influence of a stronger spirit.
In estimating the work of the missionary—his difficulties and hardships in British Columbia—we must not forget the physical nature of the country, its valleys hemmed in by mountains, its impassable rivers and streams, swollen by mountain torrents, with their treacherous rapids, and the blinding snow-storm which descending wipes out in a moment every vestige of path or trail.
Stationed first at St. Mary's Mission on the Lower Fraser, B.C., a mission then in charge of the Oblates, young Morice, not yet ordained, had an opportunity to become acquainted with what was to be his future life-work—the teaching and conversion of pagan Indians. Here at St. Mary's Mission, in the Industrial School for boys, our young subject found ample scope for his versatile mind and tastes; for we find him organizing among the Indian boys a brass band, and deep in the work of photography and printing. The latter, no doubt, stirred in him a desire to make himself master of the numerous Indian dialects, which, in time, came to be such a passion that to-day Father Morice is recognized as among the great authorities on the Indian dialects of Canada.
Being ordained to the priesthood on July 2, 1882, Father Morice was assigned to Williams Lake Mission in the northern interior of British Columbia. While there he was appointed missionary to the Chilcotin Indians, one of the most savage of all the tribes of the Far West, who, in April, 1864, had massacred seventeen white men whom they accused of having taken undue liberties with their wives. Here truly began Father Morice's real missionary work, a work calling for self-sacrifice, tact, zeal, spiritual intuition, and a passionate love of souls. Here, too, Father Morice began in earnest, and with a genuine passion, the study of the Chilcotin language. It was a prodigious undertaking, for the Chilcotin dialect is an exceedingly difficult Indian tongue to acquire, with its delicate sounds and intricate word-formation. Our young missionary was accustomed to live several months at a time with those Indians.
The Chilcotins belong to the same ethnic group of aborigines known as the Déné (men), who in British Columbia are divided into five tribes, the other four being the Nahanais, the Babines, the Sekanais, and the Carriers. The latter are so called because at one time the widows used to carry in small satchels the remnants of the bones of their dead husband which had escaped the action of the flames during their cremation.
While living with the Chilcotins Father Morice not only taught the Indians religion but also cleanliness, which is next to godliness, and infused into them a love of work. When our missionary first visited them some of the tribe were still clad in the skins of wild beasts and were abhorrently filthy. Determined that he should lead those Indians to a realization of their dirty habits, Father Morice declared to them that he would not in the future shake a dirty hand. This led to the Indians posting a sentinel on some elevated point of vantage and, as Father Morice approached their village, at a signal from the sentinel, the whole band would rush to the creek near by and proceed to wash their hands. So that under the benign work of Father Morice these Indians were receiving together the blessings of Christianity and civilization.
One of the greatest foibles of the American aborigine is his inveterate passion for gambling. As long as he has anything to stake, he will spend not only his days but his very nights in this unholy recreation. The following little incident will tell to what extremes even the best Chilcotins could go on that score when the subject of this sketch first undertook their conversion.
It was a fixed custom of his to have one or two inhabitants of the village he was going to, in the course of his missionary journeys, come to accompany him and take thither the objects necessary for the celebration of divine worship. On the point of leaving one day a certain place for another, the priest noticed that the Indian who had come to fetch him over to his people had no horse to carry those impedimenta.
"Where is your horse?" he then asked him.
"I have none, and I need none," answered the Indian.
"But I saw you yesterday with one," insisted the missionary. "Did you sell it?"
Made uneasy by the inquisitiveness of his interlocutor, Ezoosee, the Magpie (that was the Indian's name), hung down his head, but contented himself with remarking that he was blessed with broad, stout shoulders, and that he would himself act as a beast of burden. Had he been a Christian, he would have confessed that he had passed the night in gambling and had lost the horse he had brought for the priest!
This foible, this passion was to entail long, steady and unfailing efforts, without counting not a few inconveniences for the latter, before it could be conquered and eradicated from that tribe.
Ingrained in the Indian heart is the principle of their native code that blood calls for blood; and that anyone who kills, even though innocently or accidentally, must be killed. After many years of missionary labor Father Morice was brought face to face with this fact one day when Taya, the head chief of all the Carrier Indians, an old man of rather an irascible temper, came to tell him of a murder he had committed—innocently and unwittingly, indeed—a brief time before.
It would seem that the aged chief, tired of eating salmon for some time, went out to hunt for the bears which at that season used to come and eat the carcasses of the fish that died on the way and got stranded along the shore of the river. The chief, it appears, while floating down the river in a canoe, in the midst of a heavy fog, thinking that he heard a noise as of a bear eating salmon, fired in that direction, and immediately realized that he had killed a man. So surprised had been the chief that he did not have the courage to go and see who his victim was, but immediately hurried back to tell Father Morice of the fact.
Being old and having passed a great part of his life before the advent of a missionary to teach him the moral code of a Christian, the old chief felt quite sure that, though he had been the actor in a pure accident, the Indians would come and kill him in accordance with the Indian law or code of blood for blood. So he wanted to run into the woods and there build himself a log fort, as in the olden days, and defend himself. Father Morice at once dissuaded him from running away, pointing out that the times had changed since he was a young man using his musket and axe and knife too freely, and that now, people being Christians—the disciples of Him who pardoned His executioners on the Cross—they would pardon him for this unfortunate accident.
Meantime Father Morice sent for the body of the victim, which proved to be that of an Indian who had the largest number of grown-up boys able to avenge his death. On the day of the funeral a spectacle absolutely unheard of in the annals of the Carrier tribe, was witnessed: despite the great grief which prevailed, the old chief and the widow of the victim of the accident and other members of her family were seen kneeling together in the church receiving Holy Communion. Furthermore, not a word of reproach was uttered at the grave or later on. It was a marvellous example of the power of Christian faith and teaching in curbing—nay, completely changing—the nature and spirit of the savage and unbridled Indian. In truth to him who knows the Indians it was little short of heroic.
This had happened in Father Morice's new mission field, the capital of which was Fort Saint James, on Stuart Lake, one of the most beautiful sheets of water in British Columbia, whence he periodically emerged, visiting in succession every one of the fourteen missionary stations, or native villages or bands, he had under him.
Another instance or occurrence will show how these Indians profited by the teaching of their missionary. In this Father Morice himself was a chief actor and, had the Indian law or code prevailed, would have been meted out death by the Indians. Once in the month of June, when the spring freshets render the Fraser river, because of the swollen tides, very dangerous for navigation, Father Morice left Fort George by canoe with two Indians desirous of visiting the "land of the horizon" and the "sky water" as the Indians call the sea, meaning, thereby, that in the open you can see nothing but sky and water. Arrived at Fort George Cañon, which is made up of rocky islands, leaving but one very narrow place for the canoe to follow, the two Indians, Louis and his companion, the married son of the village chief, after having carried most of the goods or baggage to the lower end of the portage, undertook to shoot the rapids. Father Morice was sitting just below the rapids when suddenly he heard a shrill cry which seemed to emerge from the water, and rushing to the shore saw nothing but the maddened waves springing up in endless spray. A second cry and then, to his dismay, he saw Louis, alone, just below the rapids, sitting apparently on the water but in reality astride the upturned boat. The good missionary immediately guessed the nature of the disaster. A quarter of a mile farther down were other rapids which surely would engulf Louis in their furious elements. Fortunately, before he reached the second rapids Louis let go the canoe and swam ashore. At the instructions of Father Morice, Louis returned through the pathless forest to Fort George, thirteen miles distant, and asked for another canoe and three men to man it. This untoward drowning accident of the son of the chief placed Father Morice in a very delicate position, for, according to the law of the Indians, the missionary who employed Louis and the chief's son was responsible for the death of the latter. In fact, in remote parts of the district it was believed that the enraged chief had killed Father Morice.
When the new canoe came down, accompanied by one which was manned by the father, the mother and the wife of the drowned man, it was pitiful to hear the lamentations; but not only was there no violence offered the good missionary, nor a word of reproach uttered, but the chief, being now a good Christian, lost all memory of the Indian spirit of revenge—"an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," and even offered consolation to Father Morice in his sorrow and affliction; thanking God that his son was a practical Catholic and was, therefore, prepared to meet his Eternal Judge.
One of the most difficult tasks of a missionary among the pagan Indians is the breaking up of polygamous relations. Sometimes both polygamy and polyandry prevailed among certain tribes of the Pacific Coast Indians. In truth, among the Chilcotins and Babines, with whom Father Morice labored for several years, the marriage tie was very lightly treated. After the death of their husbands, widows, according to the ancestral custom, were reduced to slavery, a degrading state of bondage. Father Morice thundered against both polygamy and the slavery of widows and succeeded in destroying them.
On one occasion, however, his zeal to safeguard the marriage tie and break up the immoral relations that existed between the Indian men and women almost cost him his life. He had separated a lawfully married and baptized man from his paramour. The rejected unbaptized woman, learning of this, took a rope and went out into the woods that night and hanged herself. Whereupon her relations and co-tribesmen and women uprose, the former armed with their rifles and the latter uttering the most excited and shrill outcries, rushed to kill Father Morice, holding him as the party responsible for the death of the rejected woman. They were met, however, by parties of Christian Babines who, by dint of reasoning and even force, prevented them from accomplishing their purpose. All this took place, too, after midnight, when Indians are bravest.
It may be noted here that it was during Father Morice's stay at Stuart Lake that he began his profound study of Indian dialects. Stuart Lake, which is situated some seven hundred miles north of Vancouver, was an ideal Indian post. There was not a white man settled in the whole district, which extended from Fort George (to-day Prince George), in the south, to Bear Lake, two hundred and twenty-five miles from the centre in the north, including Babine Lake, Hazelton, etc., as well as Fraser Lake and the mountainous territory of the Sekanais, which signifies a people living on the rocks; a tribe whose habitat was originally on both sides of the Rocky Mountains but who now roamed only west. These Sekanais are a perfectly nomadic tribe, without a single house or village, because they live on venison and have to follow the herds of caribou or other game, which are always on the move.
When Father Morice arrived at Stuart Lake in August, 1885, he had to commence again his linguistic studies, as the language of the Indians there was quite different from that of the Chilcotins, though possessing the same sounds and roots. It was here at Stuart Lake that our missionary invented the Déné syllabary in order to teach reading and writing to his new Indian charges.
He started his pedagogic efforts by gathering together all the children of one place and teaching them the new signs. A very few weeks would generally suffice for this, when the operation would be repeated in another locality. Then, with the aid of a little machine, he printed several books as well as a monthly periodical, using the newly invented signs. By this means he was able to furnish the Indians with plenty of useful information. Ever since, these Carrier Indians have been corresponding with each other and have even written their one-time missionary. This invented system is very methodical and very easy and does not entail any spelling process. One Indian is said to have acquired it in two winter evenings. In truth, knowing this syllabary invented by this learned and zealous missionary is knowing how to read.
In the fourteen or fifteen works which Father Morice has written he brings us into the most intimate relation with his life as a missionary as well as setting forth the character of the Indians among whom he labored for many years, in his book: Au Pays de l'Ours Noir: Chez les Sauvages de la Colombie Britannique (In the Land of the Black Bear: Among the Savages of British Columbia). This is, too, a valuable anthropological, sociological, ethnical and linguistic work. Nothing has escaped the observation of the good missionary as he passed from village to village, from camp to camp of his red-skin converts. He has discussed with these children of the forest the ethics of life and has drawn from them a philosophy sometimes as consistent and full of common sense as may be found in the great schools. For instance, Father Morice tells us that Indians, who have become Christians, cannot understand how white men, who have been baptized can, without remorse of conscience, resign themselves to the killing of their fellowmen; and when they are told that priests accompany soldiers as chaplains in the service of their country their astonishment is exceedingly great. For them war and murder are synonymous terms.
On other points their ethics were not so sure. Thus among them the lot of woman was very far from enviable. All the drudgery of daily Indian routine was hers; on the move, or even when at home, she would have to carry heavy burdens and be subjected to all sorts of indignities which could not but render her life miserable. By dint of patience and insistence he succeeded in bettering her position in the family and society, but not before he had had to encounter the opposition of interested men and refute the sophisms of native philosophers.
"You are not consistent with yourself, he would be told. You admit that in a family it is the man who is the master, who must command, and yet you would have him work as if he were an inferior. Furthermore, you are not without knowing that woman has been made expressly for work, especially to carry heavy loads. That is the reason why she is so broad between the hips."
Father Morice's chapter in the aforesaid work dealing with the chase of the caribou, the marriage customs of the Sekanais and Porteurs, the courtship that precedes the marriage and the divorce which frequently follows, throws much light on Indian character and Indian social and primitive life. In this same chapter Father Morice deals with the superstition and honesty that prevail among these naïf children of the forest. At times, he tells us, a fur trader may visit his traps, leaving his store wide open, without any fear for his merchandise. At another time, perhaps, a native hunter will supply himself with all that is necessary in the absence of the trader, but he will not fail to leave there the equivalent of what he has taken. This was among the Sekanais; the Carriers were not so honest, neither were the Babines, as will appear later on.
As to superstition, its manifestations among each of these tribes were formerly numberless. Most of these were connected with girls and married women who, at certain periods of their life, had to practise many tedious and painful observances. But hunters and others were also beset by quite a few customs based on superstitious beliefs. The head of a bear, for instance, had to be placed out of reach of the dogs, for fear contact between this unclean, yet very serviceable, animal and bones of the king of the Western forests would anger the latter and cause his kin thenceforth to shun the snares of the guilty canine's master. The same fate was believed to attend beaver traps touched by a dog. No woman would eat of the flesh of a lynx, because of a legend telling of the supposed misdeeds of such a wild beast in prehistoric times. On nearing a mountain for the first time, you had to paint your face black lest that mountain might see you and send a downpour of rain on you, etc.
Worst of all, because of the disastrous effects of that belief, those Indians were convinced of the existence in the woods of a fabulous bear-like monster, seeing which was portentous of a fast approaching death. And such was the influence of imagination on those poor benighted people that Father Morice knew of two Sekanais who withered away and did really die because they were persuaded they had met one of those dreadful beings. The demise of two others during his pastorate at Stuart Lake is more easy to account for: having wounded a grizzly, the enraged brute turned upon them and devoured them.
It was while at Stuart Lake that Father Morice also began the study of anthropology—that is, in 1886, and his first contribution to that science was written in 1888 and published in Toronto the year after. Soon our missionary was recognized as occupying a first place among the missionaries of the Pacific Coast. Bishop Durieu regarded Father Morice as the missionary who best understood the native character, and his successor, now our hero's Superior General in Rome, would propose him to the imitation of his fellow workers in the vineyard of the Lord. By his intuitive gifts he could accurately determine in advance the probable effect of this or that measure when applied to the native. Above all he realized the fact that with such grown-up children as were the Indians, one must always aim higher, being sure to hit lower at the intended mark. But perhaps chiefest of all the causes which led to our missionary's success was the fact that he loved his Indian people; and even the least civilized of savages are amenable to kindness when this kindness emanates from the warmth of a loving heart ready to make every sacrifice for the good, spiritual and temporal, of another. Then, too, the Indians quickly discerned in their spiritual guide, who was both their moral instructor and law-giver, that he was impartial and meted out absolute justice to all, irrespective of any friendship.
Again, Father Morice knew the language of the Indians so nothing could be concealed from him; and, besides, he was always ready to share in their every trouble. He adopted, too, a manner of preaching in accordance with the Indian mode of thinking and expression, using comparisons and illustrative stories. He was, likewise, a man of duty, as attested by the fact that during his nineteen years on the fourteen missions attended to from Stuart Lake he never missed a single visit to a village when the time for the visit arrived. He had, according to the season, to travel by canoe, portage, and horseback, and on snowshoes and by dog-train. At times his path was so beset with fallen timber that he could not make more than five miles a day, frequently travelling all night that he might keep his appointment and tend spiritually to his benighted and beloved children of the wilds.
One of these night voyages took place before he was inured to the hard task of snowshoeing. After having travelled since the preceding Monday morning on the frozen expanses of Babine Lake and part of the adjoining forest, he had reached on a Friday night a point on the northern end of Lake Stuart when his native companions declared they could not go one step farther. One of them had his feet frozen, they said, and the dogs could no longer be depended on to pull the party's baggage.
The missionary was in a quandary, for unless he reached that night a certain hut far enough from there he could not think of getting to his central mission for the forthcoming Sunday. Moved by the fear to miss the usual religious services on the Lord's Day, he borrowed a pair of snowshoes from his Indians, and, in spite of their loud protests that he was sure to get frozen, that a blizzard was approaching and that the snow was too deep and the tracks too obliterated even for them to proceed, he started alone and supperless in the darkness of a winter night.
But unused as he then was to that so fatiguing mode of travelling, he soon realized that he should have listened to the pleadings of his companions and made camp, instead of doing what was little short of tempting Providence. Each step he would take would fill his footgear with snow, which would make it a task for him to stride on. Then a hurricane, a terrible blizzard, arose which would have caused him to lose his bearings had he not been careful to follow closely the shore line. The wind would howl piteously through the pines, the rocks split with loud reports through the intensity of the cold, and the squalls whipped the poor wayfarer's face with fine falling snow until he was forced to avow himself vanquished by the elements. He was now reduced to such a state of helplessness that he had to use his hands to lift up his feet and trudge on.
Though in great danger of freezing if he stopped one moment in the midst of the storm, he had to take off his snowshoes and lie thereon, expecting death (which would have infallibly come to him if he had then fallen asleep) or the help of the Almighty. This came to him in the shape of a path under the recent snow which he was lucky enough to find. After having rested a while, he followed it very cautiously until he reached the hut for which he was making. The inmates were reciting their morning prayers when he arrived.
His chin and some of his fingers were frost-bitten; but he did reach his headquarters at the other end of the lake that Saturday evening; and he felt happy, though the terrible exertion he had gone through in the course of that fateful night confined him to his room for quite a few weeks thereafter.
This was but one of his many more or less similar experiences. As he was an explorer no less than a missionary, he travelled thousands of miles in search of geographical data as well as of souls—though these were, of course, the main object of his quest—being on the wing sometimes many days, nay weeks, at a stretch. He was once nine days in succession on horseback; another time he painfully trudged on foot along the rocks and perpetual snows of a chain of high mountains for eleven days without stopping, except a few hours on Sunday. Nor was this apparent disregard for the sanctity of the Lord's day imputable to him: hunger and unexpected delays in reaching half-starving Indians assembled to receive him in the wilderness left no other course open to him.
He was once three full days without eating, while another time he was delivered from impending starvation by clouds of mosquitoes which drove a bear into the waters of the stream he was ascending, after having been several days on short commons. This goes to show that there is no insect, no matter how tantalizing, which may not at times be of use to man.
Father Morice usually remained eight days in a village, the morning being devoted to divine service and a sermon, and the afternoon to teaching the catechism, followed by a sermon and benediction. The last few days were given to "fixing up" troubles between man and wife, correcting and punishing delinquents, etc.; for he had to act as chief of police as well as judge.
It is needless to say that Father Morice's influence among the Indians, in the way of curbing murder and violence and inculcating honesty and obedience to law and order, was very great. More than once he was thanked for this by the government of British Columbia. No wonder the Hudson's Bay Company designated him the "King of the Country;" and Somerset, in his Land of the Muskeg, regards Father Morice as a "prince of missionaries."
One among many of the proofs of his extraordinary power for good and wonderful influence among the Indians will bear relating in this connection.
He had already, by his intervention with the government, saved from the gallows an innocent but misunderstood lad of Fraser Lake, when his services were required two hundred miles from there among the turbulent Babines, natives whom it took a longer time to bring to fully accept the yoke of Christ. For some time the Hudson's Bay Company were complaining of the gradual but steady disappearance of a vast amount of merchandise from its store at the northern end of the lake called after them, and, after long and careful watching, its local authorities had come to fasten the guilt therefor on no less a personage than the chief of the village himself.
Goods to the amount of $4,000 being involved in the dishonest transaction, it was resolved to have him arrested and tried. But when six constables came up from Hazelton with this end in view, they were fired upon by the Indians, who felt sure that no chief could stoop to such degrading conduct, with the result that they had to turn back without accomplishing their mission. The traders insisted upon government intervention, with the result that the Indian Agent of Hazelton, sixty miles away, asked them to forego any action in the matter until he had begged Father Morice, who was expected among the Babines some time in February, to use his influence in the interests of honesty and justice.
By that time the natives were thoroughly aroused by what they considered the unwarranted interference of the whites. Yet the missionary had no sooner read the Indian Agent's letter explaining the whole case than he called in the accused, that is, the head chief, together with all the petty chiefs of the Babine tribe then assembled to follow the retreat, or revival, he had come to preach. Violent and indignant indeed were the speeches and bitter the denunciations of the whites which followed the priest's advice to the accused that he go and deliver himself up to the Indian Agent, who would give him a fair trial, he declared. If, as Father Morice himself believed, he was innocent this was bound to be found out, in which case he would come out of the ordeal proud and triumphant.
"There is not in the world a man capable of making me do that," declared the head chief after the others had talked themselves hoarse. "But you are not a common man; you are the representative of Him-that-sits-on-the-Sky (God), and since you insist that I must go and deliver myself up to the white chief, I will do so."
He went; his case was thoroughly sifted, and he was found guilty and duly sentenced. Father Morice had once more been instrumental in seeing justice come to its own.
This zealous and learned missionary, now passing the evening of his life in Winnipeg, Man., whither labors too strenuous for his strength, travelling over mount and vale, preaching and teaching, no less than doing unaided all the work incident on book printing, forced him to repair, belongs to thirteen or fourteen of the most learned scientific societies of Canada, United States, England, France and Switzerland. He has compiled original maps of the regions he explored, and published numerous books, scientific and otherwise; but his most enduring honor is to be found in the spiritual harvest that followed the toil of his goodly sowing, amid the great valleys and lakes of the Canadian Rockies.
THE RYERSON CANADIAN HISTORY READERS
1. HEROES 1A. *Sieur de Maisonneuve--Lorne Pierce 1B. *Count de Frontenac--Helen B. Williams 1C. *Pierre le Moyne d'Iberville--Norman McLeod Rogers 1D. *Marquis de Montcalm--J. C. Sutherland 1E. *General James Wolfe--J. C. Sutherland 1F. Sir Guy Carleton--A. L. Burt 1G. *Tecumseh--Lloyd Roberts 1H. *Sir Isaac Brock--T. G. Marquis 1I. The North-West Mounted Police--C. F. Hamilton 2. HEROINES 2A. *Madame La Tour--Mabel Burkholder 2B. *Madeleine de Verchères--E. T. Raymond 2C. Laura Secord 2D. Marguerite Bourgeois--P. O. Call 2E. Sisters of St. Boniface--Emily P. Weaver 2F. *The Strickland Sisters--Blanche Hume 3. EXPLORERS AND COLONISTS 3A. *Pathfinders to America--S. P. Chester 3B. *Jacques Cartier--J. C. Sutherland 3C. *Samuel de Champlain--Adrian Macdonald 3D. *Hébert: The First Canadian Farmer--Julia Jarvis 3E. Robert Cavelier de la Salle--Margaret Lawrence 3F. Henry Hudson--Lawrence J. Burpee 3G. *Alexander Henry and Peter Bond--Lawrence J. Burpee 3H. *Anthony Hendry and Cocking--Lawrence J. Burpee 3I. Pierre Radisson--Lawrence J. Burpee 3J. *Sir Alexander Mackenzie--Adrian Macdonald 3K. Samuel Hearne--Lloyd Roberts 3L. *Simon Fraser--V. L. Denton 3M. *Lord Selkirk--William Martin 3N. Sir John Franklin--M. H. Long 3O. *Captain Cook--Mabel Burkholder 3P. David Thompson--M. H. Long 3Q. *La Vérendrye--G. J. Reeve 3R. Capt. George Vancouver--H. Charlesworth 4. GREAT BATTLES AND SIEGES 4A. *Siege of Quebec: French Régime 4B. *Sieges of Quebec: British Régime 4C. *Louisburg--Grace McLeod Rogers 4D. +Pontiac and the Siege of Detroit--T. G. Marquis 4E. *Naval Warfare on the Great Lakes--T. G. Marquis 4F. *Battlefields of 1813--T. G. Marquis 4G. Battlefields of 1814--T. G. Marquis 4H. *The North-West Rebellion--H. A. Kennedy 5. MASTER BUILDERS 5A. *Thomas Chandler Haliburton--Lorne Pierce 5B. *John Graves Simcoe--C. A. Girdler 5C. Joseph Howe--D. C. Harvey 5D. Sir John A. Macdonald--George H. Locke 5E. Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt--John I. Hutchinson 5F. *Lord Strathcona--H. A. Kennedy 5G. Sir Wilfrid Laurier--T. G. Marquis 5H. Sir Sandford Fleming--Lawrence J. Burpee 5I. *The Hudson's Bay Company--Robert Watson 5J. The North-West Company--M. H. Long 5K. *The Building of the C.P.R.--H. A. Kennedy 5L. James Douglas--W. N. Sage 5M. Robinson and Begbie--Judge F. W. Howay 5N. Thomas D'Arcy McGee--Isabel Skelton 5O. George Brown--Chester Martin 5P. Sir George E. Cartier 5Q. Sir Charles Tupper--D. C. Harvey 6. MISSIONARIES 6A. *Père Jogues--Isabel Skelton 6B. *Jean de Brébeuf--Isabel Skelton 6C. *Father Lacombe--H. A. Kennedy 6D. *Rev. John Black--Lorne Pierce 6E. *Rev. James Evans--Lorne Pierce 6F. *Rev. John McDougall--Lorne Pierce 6G. *Father Morice--Thomas O'Hagan 6H. Bishop Bompas--"Janey Canuck"
Those marked with an asterisk are already published and available. Those marked with a dagger will shortly be ready. Price, 10c. each, postage 2c. extra.
THE RYERSON PRESS :: TORONTO 2