The grim story of the labors of the followers of Loyola among the Indians
has its beatific culmination in the life of this zealot and explorer.
Pestilence and the Iroquois had ruined all the hopes of the Jesuits in the
east. Their savage flocks were scattered, annihilated, driven farther in
the fastnesses, or exiled upon islands. The shepherds who vainly followed
their vanishing numbers found themselves out upon the edge of a new field.
If the Iroquois east and west could have been curbed, the Jesuits would
have become masters of that field and all the north. We shall, thinking of
that contingency, take varying views, beyond reconciliation, as to the
place of the Iroquois in American history; but we shall all agree,
whatever our religious and political predilection, men of Old France and
men of New France alike, in applauding the sublime disinterestedness,
fearless zeal, and unquestioned devotion to something beyond the self,
which have consecrated all that valley of the Lakes and have, in the
person of Marquette, the son of Laon, made first claim upon the life of
the valley, whose great water he helped to discover.
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