Letters, 1661 on impoverished Huron refugees on Lake Superior

When Iroquois attacks drove his small flock of converts 1,000 miles west, Fr. Rene Menard followed after them and became the first Jesuit priest to reach Wisconsin. After wintering on Keweenaw Bay, where he wrote these letters about conditions among the refugees, he set out for a village of exiled Hurons near the headwaters of the Black River northwest of modern Wausau. Modern scholars believe that he hiked overland across the Upper Penninsula of Michigan, entered the Wisconsin River near Lac Vieux Desert, and met his death while portaging a rapids on the Rib River in Taylor County. These two letters, first printed in Paris four years after his death, portray the hardships encountered by the fleeing eastern tribes when they arrived in the Wisconsin wilderness. Pages from the 1665 French edition are given here to show what original volumes of Jesuit Relations looked like, and so language students can try their hands at the original. They are accompanied by a modern English translation: