Revenge Against the Idol: Competing Magical Systems on the Detroit River, 1670

Abstract

The Michigan Historical Review 43:2 (Fall 2017): 55-63©2017 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved Revenge Against the Idol: Competing Magical Systems on the Detroit River, 1670 By Martin W. Walsh Thirty years before the 1701 founding of Detroit, and nearly a decade before La Salle sailed his Griffin through the strait in 1679, the Detroit River was the scene of a major clash of cultures and a conspicuous act of iconoclasm. The first explorers to record passage through le Détroit were two Sulpician Fathers, and their adversary on this occasion was a stone idol situated on the river somewhere in the vicinity of Belle Isle. Until the end of the seventeenth century, the French route to the Great Lakes was by way of the Ottawa River to Lake Nipissing, then to Georgian Bay in Lake Huron. Lakes Ontario and Erie remained relatively unknown due to the hostile presence of the Iroquois Confederacy, particularly the Seneca Nation. When the French forged a treaty with the Confederacy in 1667, initiating a peace that lasted nearly twenty years, it opened a route to explore, map, and evangelize the Lower Great Lakes for the first time. Governor General Daniel de Rémy de Courcelle dispatched a combined missionary/exploratory expedition to the area headed by two Breton Sulpician priests, François Dollier de Casson, an ex-soldier, and René de Brehant de Galinée, together with the explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. The Sulpician Fathers (Compagnie des Prétres de Saint-Sulpice), founded only two decades before in 1647, were missionary rivals to the better-known Jesuits. The total expedition consisted of twenty-one men in seven canoes, along with two additional canoes of Seneca guides. They set off from Montreal on 6 July 1669. Galinée, a latecomer to the mission, was tasked with chronicling the voyage in a written report (procès-verbal) and mapping the newly explored areas, as he had some training as a surveyor. In the ensuing months, the joint expedition explored the southern shore of Lake Ontario and crossed the Niagara Peninsula at lake’s end, following the Grand River into Lake Erie. The first impression of the lake was under October gale winds, prompting Galinée to exaggerate that “there is perhaps no lake in the whole country in which the waves rise so 56 The Michigan Historical Review high because of its great depth and its great extent.”1 Erie’s weather would indeed prove their nemesis. Before forced into winter quarters near present-day Port Dover, Ontario, La Salle split from the Sulpicians, pursuing his own quest for the fabled river “Ohio.” The missionary party, now reduced to nine men in three canoes, spent a relatively comfortable winter on the north shore in what Galinée called le Paradis terrestre du Canada.2 It is not clear whether they had any Native guides at this point; an Amikwa (Nez Percé) captive obtained from the Seneca is the last mentioned by Galinée. After celebrating Easter on 6 April 1670, and with the lake still full of ice, they continued their traverse of Lake Erie. In the second week of April, after a long day’s paddling of some twenty leagues (40 miles), they reached the eastern shore of Point Pelee, a “beautiful sand beach” which today presents much the same look as it did then.3 The party was thoroughly exhausted from the day’s exertions, which caused them to leave their heavy packs on the beach and drag their canoes up to the tree line. During the night, a fierce northeaster racked the lake and a storm surge hit the beach, sweeping away much of the expedition’s equipment. Guns, ammunition, and provisions were sucked under the waves but most disastrously, their complete altar service was also lost. This altar service most likely consisted of a specially-constructed wooden case that would have opened out to present a consecrated altar stone with imbedded relics. The required Mass vessels—chalice and paten, with their vestments: the veil, pall, corporal, and purificator— would have been included, along with a crucifix, candles, and a missal, with possibly...