Radio Script #412

Little Talks on Common Things

March 15, 1959

Many times on this program mention has been made of Father Druillettes, the first French Jesuit missionary on the Kennebec. I want tonight to tell you a bit more about those early French missions. You already know that before 1628 a mission station had been established about two miles above the Pilgrim trading post at Augusta, and that the Catholic mission was given friendly treatment.by the Pilgrim fur traders. But during the brief period of British domination of Canada around 1630 the missions were suspended. When the Treaty of 1632 again gave France dominion over what are now the provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the suspended missions were revived, and before 1650 the wide ranging Jesuits had carried the Christian message to the natives of every part of New France.

The City of Quebec was the center of this activity. Up the St. Lawrence about four miles from Quebec, on the northern shore, nearly opposite the mouth of the Chaudiere, was an ancient Indian village. There the missionaries built a church, much as Father Rasle did many years later at Norridgewock on the Kennebec.

In 1639 a converted French courtier, the Duc de Sillery, endowed that mission and it was named in his honor the Residence of St. Joseph of Sillery. It became a sort of seminary for giving the Jesuit missionaries some knowledge of the various Indian languages before they went out to their wilderness fields of labor.

It was to the Sillery Residence that in 1643 came Father Gabriel Druillettes, the first of a long chain of missionaries on the Kennebec. The old mission records state that it was in the same year, 1643, that a Christianized St. Lawrence Indian spent the winter with the Abnaki settlement at Norridge-wock. The record further states: “The Fathers selected Father Gabriel Druillettes to establish a mission on the river Kennebec.”

On August 26, 1646 Father Druillettes, with a few Abnaki guides, ascended the Chaudiere about 90 miles to Lake Megantic, then followed an old trail over the divide and through the swamp to the Kennebec. Descending the main river, they reached the Abnaki village at Old Point (Norridgewock) by the middle of September. Druillettes continued down the river to the Pilgrim trading post at Augusta, which was then enjoying the height of its prosperity and would be kept open sixteen years longer until 1662. On a previous occasion I have told you how Father Druillettes was kindly received by the factor in charge of the trading post, the staunch Pilgrim, John Winslow.

Father Druillettes chose for his mission site a place on the east bank of the river about two miles above the trading post. There, near what was long afterward named Gilley’s Point in Augusta, Druillettes built a little chapel of hand-split planks, and named the place “The Mission of the Assumption in the Country of the Abnakis”.

The First Indian War of 1675-78 resulted in many of the Kennebec Indians fleeing to Canada. Those refugees so overcrowded the Sillery mission that, in 1685, it was removed to the south side of the St. Lawrence and actually a few miles up the Chaudiere. That new village was named the “Mission of St. Francis de Sales”.

At first the predominant group of Indians at St. Francis de Sales were from the Kennebec. But the cruel punishment they had taken in the war persuaded the Sacos to emigrate en masse to a place near the mouth of the St. Francis River. The two groups, those on the St. Francis and those on the Chaudiere, established ready communications with each other, and both became thorough converts of the Jesuit missions. Later, in 1700, the two missions were consolidated into one large village on the St. Francis. It was the Indian warriors of the St. Francis and the Chaudiere, most of them either refugees or the descendants of refugees from the Maine tribes, who were the persistent recruits of the French to fight both the troublesome Iroquois from the west and the hated English of Massachusetts and Nova Scotia.

Father Sebastian Rasle came from France to Quebec in 1689. He spent two years among the Abnakis of Canada and Nova Scotia, and was ,then sent to a mission on the Illinois River. In preparation for his missions in the west, Rasle learned the language of the Algonquins of that region. In 1694 he was ordered back east to take charge of the well established mission at Norridgewock.

John Francis Sprague, who for a number of years published a magazine of his own called the “Journal of Maine History”, said of Father Ras1e: “Among the many devoted followers of Ignatius of Loyola in America, none achieved greater fame than the priest of the Abnakis at Norridgewock.”

Father Ras1e was a serious student of the Abnaki dialect, and he completed a dictionary of the Indian words. In order to catch the peculiarities of Indian speech and become really adept at continued conversation with the natives, Ras1e lived a part of each year in Indian wigwams. He came to understand not only the Abnaki speech, but also the customs, moods and traditions of the people. He had to a remarkable degree that trait so notable among the Jesuits, as distinct from all other Catholic orders — the ability to adapt to any situation. Except that he never forgot that he was first of all a Christian missionary, it is probably true, as Mr. Sprague said of him, “Father Ras1e acted and thought like an Indian. He made himself truly one of them.”

By 1700 the bitter feelings between English and French in America had become even more intense than were the feelings between the two nations in Europe. More and more the enmity of the Massachusetts province was directed against the Jesuit priests in Maine, because those priests were uniformly of French birth and native French speech. In June, 1700 the Massachusetts General Court passed an act, the preamble of which read as follows: “Whereas diverse Jesuit priests and missionaries by their subtle insinuations industriously labor to debauch, seduce and withdraw the Indians from their obedience to His Majesty and to excite and stir them up to rebellion, said priests are ordered to depart from this province on or before the tenth day of September, 1700.”

The act laid down a penalty of life imprisonment on any French Jesuit priest -found within the province after that date.

Time passed, and it became evident that several of the missions were still operating. For some time the authorities in Boston had been especially suspicious of Father Rasle, regarding him as a leader among those who plotted to gain possession of most of Maine for France. It must be remembered that the boundary between Maine and French Canada was in dispute for many years later, and that, in those early years of the 18th century, the French persisted in their claim to all lands east of the Kennebec.

The Massachusetts authorities decided the only way to get rid of the Jesuit agitators was to wipe out the mission stations. So in the winter of 1705 Col. Hilton set out from Boston with 270 men, determined to wipe out the Indian village at Norridgewock and either kill or make captive its inhabitants. News of their coming had evidently preceded them. for when Hilton’s party arrived at Norridgewock they found the village deserted. They set fire to everything, burning all the Indian homes and the chapel.

With the aid of the French governor of Quebec, Father Rasle rebuilt his chapel and helped his Indians put up even better homes — no longer the rough wigwams of the roving tribes. Thus Rasle and his Indians defied Col. Hilton and the Massachusetts officials. Burning their village couldn’t stop their return.

In fact the new village was greatly improved over the one Hilton burned. This is the way ,John Francis Sprague described it: “Within the limits of the present town of Norridgewock the Kennebec curved around a piece of meadow land surrounded by forested hills. On this meadow, on ground a few feet above the common level, stood the Indian village. fenced with a stockade of logs 9 feet high. The enclosure was square, each of its four sides 160 feet long, and each with a gate. From the four gates two streets crossed each other in the middle of the village. Inside the stockade were 26 Indian houses, constructed of logs, both round and hewn. The chapel was outside the enclosure about twenty yards from the east gate. Preserved to this day in the Maine Historical Society at Portland is the bell which rang each morning for mass in Father Rasle’s chapel.”

The situation dragged along until 1721 when Massachusetts offered a reward of a thousand pounds for the capture of Father Rasle. Three hundred men were sent to Norridgewock with a demand that the Indians give up their priest. If the Indians refused. the men were instructed to seize Rasle and bring him to Boston. Again news of the raid preceded the party, and Father Ras1e escaped to the woods.

Finally in 1724 Governor Dummer decided the time had come to stop these unsuccessful moves and continued skirmishing, and once and for all to get rid of Father Rasle. At that time thirty years before the building of Fort Western at Augusta and Fort Halifax at Winslow, the fortification farthest up the Kennebec was Fort Richmond which stood on the west bank of the river a short distance above Swan Island. near what is now the northern limits of the village of Richmond.

From Fort Richmond in August, 1724 Col. Moulton and about a hundred men set out in boats up the river. They left the boats in charge of a small squad at a point on the west side of the river just below Ticonic Falls – probably about where the Hathaway Shirt Factory now stands. From that point Moulton’s party, guided by three Mohawk Indians, made their way on foot through the woods to Norridgewock.

This time the Indians were taken completely by surprise. Only fifty warriors were there at the time, the others being away on a hunt. Those fifty rushed out to protect the flight of their women and children. The English met them with volleys of musket shot, killing many at once. Father Rasle was shot down at the door of his house, although Moulton’s instructions had explicitly been to bring the priest to Boston alive. It was all a cold-blooded massacre — the sort of thing of which Maine history was all too full for a hundred years. Both the English and the French used Indian allies. Both paid for scalps. Both frequently showed little mercy for the foe, and none at all for the poor Indians caught as pawns in the conflict between two European nations.

That fatal day of August 23, 1724 was the end of the Norridgewock mission. Not only the Indian braves, but many women and children were ruthlessly killed as they tried to gain safety on the other side of the river. Neither village nor mission chapel was ever built there again, but 125 years ago last August, on the 109th anniversary of the massacre, there was erected the granite monument which stands there today, that very few modern persons can read with its old Latin inscription. Even in 1833 it was appreciated that Latin, though commonly taught to all students in the grammar schools and the academies, was to most people still an unknown tongue. So in the back of the monument, the modern visitor to Old Point may read in English the translation of the Latin words on the front. The essential fact is in the simple Latin statement: “Sebastianus Rasle natione Gallice Societate Jesu Missionarus hoc in inso loco cecedit die trevigenti anno domini mille sexcentia quadoriginti Augusti, A.D. 1724”, which means “Sebastian Rasle, a missionary of the Society of Jesus and of the French nation, died in this place on the 23rd of August, 1724.”

Year: 1959