ECAI French and Spanish Missions in North America

Saints and Pilgrims on Land and Water:
Topology and Hydrology in French and Spanish Missionizing Strategies in Colonial North America

Any glance at a map of the French mission enterprise in North America immediately impresses that missions in New France were located on waterways. The St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and their many tributaries were the roads traveled by Jesuits, Seminarians, Sulpicians and others who undertook the Christianization of Indians in New France. The Franciscan initiatives in La Florida and the borderlands of the Southwest included missions located on rivers, and especially on the seacoast, but Spanish conversion of Native Americans also took place in missions located away from waterways. Franciscans established strings of missions - most noticeably across the Florida panhandle - that were joined one to the other by overland trails. Even the California missions, which were near the coast, were connected by El Camino Real, which stretched from San Diego to Sonoma. Other branches of the "King's Highway," El Camino Real de Tientra Adentro and El Camino Real de los Tejas, likewise linked the outposts in New Mexico, Texas, and greater Louisiana to the historic center of New Spain, Mexico City. In short, the French navigated water, the Spanish land, and the missionizing strategies of the French Jesuits and the Spanish Franciscans developed distinctive emphases in those respective contexts. Topology and hydrology were crucial factors in the construction and administration of French and Spanish plans for remaking the cultures of North American indigenes. ¹

Spanish and French Missions in North America

Red = Spanish
Yellow = French

The Franciscan Order technically dates from 1209, when Francis obtained from Pope Innocent III approval for his rule of community. Stressing poverty, obedience, and penance, the order grew, divided itself into various species or sub-orders, and made its initial reputation on its successes in preaching conversions, and in the moral reform of Europe. By 1300, it had spread to points eastward as far as the court of the Great Khan in China. The culture of missionizing - the coalesced superstructure of ideas and practices that shaped the mission activities of the friars -emerged out of a worldview that was profoundly flavored by apocalyptic.

The author of the medieval Franciscan Catalogus sanctorum explained that "Now in these last days when the end of the world approaches, Christ the sun, has made Francis shine as a symbol of himself."² The medieval preacher of Crusades and Franciscan-watcher Cardinal Jacques de Vitry likewise commented in 1216 that in "the twilight of the world which is sinking towards the west," God had commissioned the friars minor to preach a renewal of primitive Christianity as a line of defense against the imminent appearance of the antichrist.³ This outlook was common in the thirteenth century, when church authorities - even those who inhabited the splendid rooms of ecclesiastical headquarters in Rome, Paris, or other cities - viewed the world as corruption, as a dung heap, and looked forward morosely, through a lens ground by Augustinian eschatology, to the horrors of the end times. Francis was received as an agent of change, raised up from the putridity of the world, to deliver the faithful and the striving into the purity of evangelical life. As the last judgment approached, Christians, through repentance and devotion to the gospel, would prepare themselves to meet the telos of history, clean and worthy. Much of this thinking came to the nascent Franciscan movement by way of the 12th-century Cistercian abbot Joachim of Fiore, whose influence was still felt in New Spain 500 years later, in the friars' explicit references to his works - and above all in their embrace of Joachim's claim that mendicant clergy would lead the church to an age of renewal. ⁴

The means by which persons were to prepare for their resuscitation was through penance. The call to penance meant, first of all, the imitatio Christi, the modeling of one's life on that of Jesus of Nazareth. What this meant, in practice, was in fact the imitatio cruci, the imitation of the suffering of Jesus, through poverty, physical ordeal, and steadfastness. Franciscan preaching was not doctrinal preaching, and in as much as there was a distinctively theological content of Franciscan preaching, it tended toward a generalized ethics, eschewing the lexicon of medieval Christian systematics, the hair-splitting enterprise criticized by contemporaries as an exercise in determining "how many angels could dance on the heads of a pin." Books were not numbered among the most essential items in the field pack of missionary Franciscans. What some later religious writers called "plain language" was the meat-and-potatoes of the Franciscan approach, together with the premium that was placed upon the penitential character of the preacher's life, for how could a man convert others whose life was not itself a living example of penitence? As St. Francis stated it in his rule: "All brothers, nevertheless, preach by their works." ⁵

The Franciscan mission, shaped as it was during the period of the Crusades, developed some of its key features as a mission to the Saracens, and to Muslims generally. It accordingly was imbued from the thirteenth-century on with the flavor of profound risk. Friars were to live among the infidel as shining examples of devotion, righteousness, patience, and perseverance, enduring suffering, living as paupers, embracing the shame and tribulation heaped upon them by their prospective flocks. Martyrdom was, in this context, a possibility, and a welcome one for some. Martyrdom was, after all, a way out of the world, this place of corruption and decay. The imitation of Christ might lead Franciscans to die for their faith, but such an outcome meant heaven for them. The upshot of this was that the Franciscan approach to missionizing rested on the notion of example rather than doctrinal argumentation. Franciscans, to put it simply, sought to convert the "outer person" into a habit of virtue, believing that the reformation of the "inner person" would follow. In the short time before the end of the world, this meant taking chances to reach the heathen. The reward for such speculation on one's life might be martyrdom.

The twist in the Francisican approach, its ambiguity, was the same mixture of perspectives that were found in many groups that prospected the imminent end to the world in medieval and early modern Europe - and still in some cases today. Namely, the Franciscans looked forward to, that is, anticipated, the end of a compromised world at the same time that they invested themselves in a hopefulness about reforming that world. Indeed, the collective effort of the Franciscans is, in the long view, testimony to their trust in the reformability of the world, a lived statement of belief in the possibility of bringing in a millennium characterized not by the bloody housecleaning of a vengeful God, but by a cosmic act of approval that would crown the project of evangelization in wondrous fashion. Martyrdom remained a possibility in this scheme of things, but less so, as the fervency for escape from the world was replaced by exultation in the astonishing effects of the hand of God waved over the earthly landscape of sin. This sense of history lay side by side with the apocalyptic (more specifically, millenarian) orientation of the order. Depending on the circumstances, one or the other might become prominent.
If the Franciscan approach pulled together, albeit tensively, competing notions of history in its ongoing definition of its mission, the Jesuits, the other order well-represented in North American colonial missions, had its own complicated matrix of ideas and practices. Crucial to understanding the Jesuit mission enterprise is the earliest history of the order, which arose from the spiritual meditations of a Spanish soldier, Ignatius Loyola, who, while recuperating from a wound suffered in battle, experienced a period of intense religiosity. His reflections on that, which he put down on paper as the Spiritual Exercises, were largely focused on the conversion of the heart to God. They took the thinking and feeling self, which we might again in keeping with the Exercises refer to as the "inner person," as the proper site for religious renewal or conversion. With the Exercises as the blueprint for a heightened spirituality, groups of men in the 1530s began to pursue their renewal through prayer and meditation. Tellingly, this nascent program of devotion unfolded in the context of a retreat. Men removed themselves from the affairs of everyday life in the world to a territory characterized by psychological work, by inward-looking mental exercise. The regimen as set forth in the Exercises stressed examination of conscience, and meditation on one's sins, on humility, on prayer, on love, on a wide-ranging catalog of the "mysteries of our Lord," and so forth. Centuries later, the Jesuits are still known by many for their "retreat houses," hundreds of which around the world are available to persons interested in engaging in spiritual exercise. ⁶

The Jesuits, like the Franciscans, grew rapidly after the mid-sixteenth century and took a particular interest in missionary work, which, together with their focus on education, came to define them as an order. It is no accident that those two enterprises - missionizing and education - are the most visible components of Jesuit missions. The two have been linked in Jesuit self-understanding almost from the beginning. Doctrine was of fundamental importance to the Jesuits, and education was the means by which doctrine was taught; or, put another way, with respect to the linkage of education to missionizing, education was the means by which men were taught to preach doctrine. The goal of conversion of persons to Christianity accordingly emerged in Jesuit practice largely as a matter of reaching the "minds and hearts"⁷ of prospective converts. Jesuits set out to instruct persons in the foundations of Christian theology, to teach reflexivity and meditation (on the general model of the Spiritual Exercises), and to draw converts into a mood of patient trust in the formal means of the church to foster spiritual development. In a nutshell, Jesuits sought to persuade their subjects to think and feel as Christians - as Jesuit Christians, that is - and by degrees to engage the full apparatus of ritual deployed by the church for the salvation of sinners. That meant, of course, that language mattered enormously. So Jesuits immersed themselves with an extraordinary energy into the construction of grammars, dictionaries, and teaching texts of languages throughout the world. If one's purpose was to convert by teaching theology, one would need the language to do so. It should not surprise then that the first dictionaries and grammars (for Europeans) of languages spoken by peoples in India, China and the Americas were of Jesuit provenance.

The Jesuit focus on the "hearts and minds" of potential converts was reinforced by a pattern of diminished disinterest - vis a vis the Franciscans - in modeling behavior as a strategy for the conversion of those who observed it. In its earliest days, the order had rejected the usual monastic pattern of penance and fasts, so that such practice, which was fundamental to the species of imitatio Christi practiced by the Franciscans, consequently was less important in Jesuit missionizing. As a result, in the mission field, there was not an emphasis on drawing subjects into mimicry of the virtues modeled by missionaries specifically as a way of opening them up to a broader world of spiritual renewal.
Jesuit interest in the soul did not lead the order to discount the importance of community, however. The Society of Jesus, founded by a military man, was deeply tinctured by the military sensibility. Jesuits imagined themselves engaged in battle to uphold the church (a devotion so unyielding that it led, by way of the usual labyrinth of European aristocratic politics, to the suppression of the Jesuits as a religious order in the late 18th and early 19th centuries). That military sensibility was visible especially in the Jesuit conceptualization of community. Military communities, as Ignatius knew, are among the most closely-knit and clearly ordered kinds of social organization. The type of communities Jesuits built in mission fields, and especially in North America, were rather different from those favored by Franciscans, to whom we will return in a moment. But is important for us to keep in mind that Jesuits had their feet on the ground, as it were, that they understood the importance of forming religious communities both among themselves and among those they converted. But circumstances in the mission field always dictate the terms of engagement.

Spain sent a force of 500 soldiers to Mexico in 1518, reduced the Aztec empire by 1521, and by the 1560s had begun planting missions along what is today the Atlantic coast of Georgia and Florida. Franciscans began arriving in New Spain in the early 1520s, and from the beginning they did the heavy lifting in terms of the construction of the mission system, although Jesuits who accompanied the Spanish later in the sixteenth century made some contributions as well (notably in Baja California). The Laws of the Indies, particularly in the form given them by the Spanish monarchy in 1542, set forth the plans for these mission settlements in as much as they made clear the priority of establishing labor forces of Indian citizens in places where that labor (as a form of the tribute that was required by the Laws) could be expected to support the colony and enrich the state.⁸ Church and state were to rule together - the church sharing the plaza with the offices of the civil authority in the larger missions - and trade with more distant tribes was to be encouraged with a view to expansion of the mission settlements in the direction of exploitable native populations. In all of this, the Native Americans were to be converted to Christianity as well.

In La Florida, the initial settlements naturally were on the coast. St. Augustine (f.1565), which was a large settlement and included an impressive fort and port, served as a model for later coastal missions. But relatively early in the Spanish exploration of Florida the soldiers and friars began to move inland. Less than fifty years after the founding of St. Augustine, they had established a string of missions across the north of Florida, in a more or less east-west line stretching eventually all the way to present-day Alabama. Archaeological evidence indicates that the Spanish favored bluffs - areas with elevation 100-200 feet above sea level - as sites for missions. It appears also that they had relatively little interest in linking their missions by waterway, one to the other. In fact, what is striking about the north Florida missions - and there over sixty of them established after all was said and done - is that for the most part they were not connected to each other, or to the sea, by water.⁹ They were truly inland settlements, built to sustain themselves - on the backs of Indian laborers, to be sure - but built to sustain themselves as largely independent settlements. They were of course dependent on the supply caravans that came every two or three years, bringing them ritual artifacts, art, metal goods, ammunition, replacement soldiers and clergy, and other such things as were necessary for the defense of the missions and the administration of the sacraments. (Resistance to English encroachment was more important than response to Indian uprisings, and, in fact, the north Florida missions came to an end in the early 1700s as a result of armed incursions by the English from Georgia.) Clergy and colonists kept in touch with nearby missions, but missions were designed largely to stand on their own feet and advance their projects under their own power.

In these missions, set deep into the mainland of Florida, the friars set about their work of converting the Indians. The missions mimicked, as much as possible, the way of life of Spaniards in Iberia. The Franciscans learned native tongues, but they did so with the expectation that it would hasten their teaching of Spanish to the Indians. The Spanish ruler Philip II had forbidden the translation of sacred texts into native languages, and the implied lesson - that theology did not translate so well - was not lost on the friars. But none of this crossed the purposes of the friars. The observation of Francis that "all brothers preach by their works" translated easily enough into missionizing native Floridians. Through example, through their tribulation and perseverance, their visible willingness to imitate the sufferings of Jesus, friars believed that they would reach a population with whom they shared few words, and certainly no order of linguistic understanding capable of bridging complex theological ideas from one party to another.¹⁰

Crucial to this enterprise was the creation, in the mission, of a semblance of Spanish Catholic culture. Franciscans to a certain extent accepted Indian ways of life, but the mission ideally was to mirror as much as possible the order and habits and rhythms of life of a small Spanish town. People were to dress modestly. Inferiors and superiors were to engage in a dance of, respectively, deference and patronal sympathy for each other. Food was to be prepared along the lines of Spanish cuisine. Marriages and funerals and other ritual markings of the life cycle were to be decorated in Spanish custom. The settled life of agriculture was to be the backbone of the community. The Spanish language was privileged. A mission was a "little Spain," and the mission compound itself was built with an eye to the future. That is, it was built large and strong, and with some foresight as far as population increase and the enlargement of the industries carried on there. It was, in short, a rich material culture of residences, a house of worship, government buildings, artisans' workshops, recreational areas, kitchens, a plaza, fortified walls and gates, educational resources, gardens, rooms for the sick. The friars set up facilities for tailoring, shoemaking, carpentry, smithery, and the rest. It may have been an outpost of Spanish culture, a distant mirror of Iberian life, but the mission was at the same time thought to be a plantation that one day would represent in full color the efflorescence of a triumphant global Christian culture of Spanish inflection.
The mission, then, was a place where friars expected, first of all, to draw the natives into the practice of Spanish-ness, to "civilize" them, to reform the "outer person" by acculturating that person to the Spanish way of life, religious culture and all. The Crown's plan for the mission system - as a place to gather labor for focused, wealth-producing projects - set the friars up in an environment that elicited from Franciscan ideology a strong pronouncement of the strand that stressed activity in the world as the core of the religious life, and that made example (the example of the friar) the central component in the friars' strategy of missionizing.¹¹

As Franciscan activity in New Spain coalesced in this way, the eschatological perspective that framed it lost much of its apocalyptic flavor. The friars in New Spain reflected less on the imminent end of the world than on the future of a Christian North America. They remained strongly millennial, but the form of millennialism that they embraced was not born of despair for the world as a corrupted site for human life, but rather sprang from their sense of the possibilities for bringing about in the New World the glorious culmination to Christian history. There was of course a background of fabulist historicizing of the Americas: Christopher Columbus's belief, sailing off the coast of South America, that he had discovered the edge of the Garden of Eden; rumors of the Fountain of Youth in Florida and elsewhere; El Dorado, the city of gold, which enticed a number of explorers into the wildernesses of the Americas; the Seven Cities of Cibola, and other wonders, reports of which were recounted by the shipwrecked and miraculously rescued Spanish hero Cabeza de Vaca. These stories must have nurtured, in some measure, the hopes of friars that the New World was indeed to be a place of miracles.

And, as the friars looked over their successes in New Spain, they could not help but declare themselves hopeful that they were a sign of the coming millennial Christian era. There was a tone of hopeful expectancy in the writing of Fray Alonso de Benavides when he commented on the piety of the mission Indians ("How Well They Take to Christian Practices") in 1630:

If only the friars in Iberia could have said as much about their congregations, the worry about an awful coming judgment would have been much less. The friars' investment in the mission system, the pattern of conversion that required behavioral modification within the framework of a "little Spain," and the successes of that approach - especially, later, in California - were strands of the Franciscan experience that were interwoven in a worldview that shifted the apocalyptic eschatology of the order into a millennial vision of triumphant Christianity. The inland mission, built with an eye to a long future, and decorated with as much material culture of Spanish life as the backs of mules could bear and the minds of the friars could imagine, materially grounded a hopeful view of the evangelical project - at least for as long as the English and French would allow it.

The Jesuit undertakings in New France differed significantly from the pattern established by the Franciscans in New Spain. Jesuit missions, situated largely on waterways, likewise materially framed the practice of missionaries in ways that affected their style of missionizing. The French never had an equivalent of the tripartite Spanish goal of "God, Glory, and Gold" in their colonization of North America. New France evolved as a fur-trading enterprise, the French aristocracy of the time having developed a seemingly boundless affection for felt (especially in wide-brimmed hats), which could be made from the underbelly fur of the beaver, and, less surprisingly, for the beaver castoreum that served the perfuming industry in France so well as a bearer of musk scent. From a base point - such places were established on rivers and lake shores throughout New France - individual traders would set out to visit the villages of Indians who wished to trade beaver pelts. They conducted business, in a particular region, until they had loaded their boats - for some, just large canoes - with the cargo that they would then bring in with other traders to a place of brokerage, where the goods would be bartered or sold for shipment to France. A celebration would ensue, and last by some accounts throughout the winter, until the rivers unfroze and water traffic was once again possible. There was little interest in rounding up Indians to serve as a labor force for the production of other commodities. There was little interest, that is, compared to the priorities of the Spanish colonial order, where missions built with a view to permanency were founded in the image of Spanish towns. In most of New France, what infrastructure there was - and there was not much - was in the form of waterway depots and simple shelters, where the population fluctuated widely depending on the season, where the military might garrison troops in between responding to Indian uprisings, and where the patterns of everyday life bore little resemblance to the way persons lived in France. Eventually, French traditions took root in Quebec and Montreal, but in most ways, these settlements were exceptions to the pattern of French colonial life in the upper St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes and Mississippi, and the enormous territory of Louisiana.¹³

Missionaries came on the heels of the fur traders. From the start, they labored diligently to keep French traders at a distance from the Indians they sought to convert, for it was generally agreed that the traders would bring sinful habits to the natives, and make their conversion more difficult or even impossible. This meant not only that the missionaries discouraged contact with traders who visited Indian villages, but, even more vigorously, they sought to keep Indians from visiting the trading camps. This proved particularly hard in view of the fact that missionaries often found themselves posted at trading camps, and these camps became de facto missions. And when missions were built they had more the appearance of a temporary station than a permanent investment in the region. Of course, as the history of Quebec and Montreal shows, it was impossible to separate the traders from the missionaries and their catachumens, so that when the flimsy upriver missions were built, those missions naturally attracted traders as mostly unwanted guests. In short, missions on waterways posed certain challenges to Jesuit missionizing, and so Jesuits with responded with a strategy that moved the pursuit of converts in another direction.

The problems posed by the siting and uses of missions brought to the forefront of Jesuit thinking about their mission in the New World an emphasis on the "inner person." Jesuits in Europe formed strong, close-knit communities - particularly in academic settings but not exclusively so - that were grounded in communal ideals embedded in the "military" side of Ignatius Loyola's vision of the religious life. The several dozen successful reducciones in Brazil and Paraguay, and the Baja California missions, are examples of Jesuit pursuit of communities of the converted created out of scratch in the New World. Some of the South American reductions in fact were miniature industrial states (with populations as high as 20,000 persons) where the inhabitants produced not only handicrafts for local use but sophisticated commodities such as watches and musical instruments. The Baja missions themselves likewise did not differ in significant ways from the Franciscan Alta California missions established in the second half of the 18th century. But in New France, the case was different. Jesuits responded to the colonial circumstances and settings there by deëmphasizing ideas about the need for behavioral modification as a part of the conversion process, instead stressing inner renewal through an appeal to the "hearts and minds" of the natives. The missions themselves, interestingly, came to function as "retreats" for the Jesuit missionaries - places where they could go to recuperate from their experiences in the field. Sainte-Marie, in fact, founded by French Jesuits in 1639 in Huron country, was planned as a retreat for itinerant missionaries.¹⁴

Unlike the Franciscans in New Spain, the Jesuits did not hope to convert Indians by acculturating them to a European way of life. Instead, they chose to learn the Indian way of life, from the language all the way down to dietary customs and habits of work. Jean de Brébeuf, author of a set of guidelines for the work of the Jesuits in New France, urged missionaries to come to terms with the native cultures, to mimic Indian lives, at least in certain ways. He wrote: "If you go naked and carry the load of a horse upon your back, as they do, then you would be wise according to their doctrine, and would be recognized as a great man, otherwise not."¹⁵ The Jesuit plan also had the advantage of hindsight, in this case, a view of the failures of the Recollet missionaries who preceded them, briefly, in the St. Lawrence. The French Recollets, or Recollect Franciscans, who arrived in Quebec in 1615, believed that it was only after Native Americans had settled among the French and learned their language, manners, and way of life that they would be in a position to grasp the religious message of Christian salvation. Jesuit efforts were in the end shaped by the same forces that urged the French generally towards cultural hybridization in New France. As historian Tanis C. Thorne has observed, "the administrators of New France bent to Indian protocol in order to win Indian trade and military alliances. Meanwhile the citizens of New France learned skills as hunters and trappers and learned Indian languages as well. Some men lived in Indian villages for part of the trading season and took native women as wives. As a result, these Frenchmen became quite Indianized in their habits and their dress." New France was, after all, profoundly "bicultural.".¹⁶

The enormous energy of the Jesuits in learning native languages and producing the books that would teach other missionaries those languages signals especially well the emphasis on teaching doctrine that would lead to "inner renewal." The translation of concepts such as the Christian Trinity, and grace, into the Illinois or Huron tongue was of course a project fraught with difficulties, but the Jesuits remained steadfast in their trust that through their efforts at translation, they could deliver to potential converts an understandable message - one that, with divine help, would lead to the Christianization of the Indians.¹⁷ The Jesuit missionary Paul le Jeune wrote that language was the key to "interior consciousness" and that any missionary "who knew the language perfectly, so that he could crush their reasons and promptly refute their absurdities, would be very powerful among them." Father le Mercier, taking a little different of a tack, stated the project in these words: "We gather up all the words from the mouths of the savages as so many precious stones, that we may use them afterwards to display before their eyes the beauty of our holy mysteries."¹⁸ It is a sad fact that Jesuits seemed to reach natives most effectively immediately following a war or an outbreak of disease, when the social and political order of the tribes was fractured. In any event, the missionaries believed that once the soul had been turned to God, the behavior of the convert would represent that change, like fruit maturing on a healthy tree, and lead to a Christian society of a higher order than the way of life that the aboriginal peoples had invented.

The ways in which certain elements in Franciscan and Jesuit ideology came to the forefront of their respective strategies of missionizing, and the role of mission location and other material factors in eliciting that development, is a historical issue that deserves more analysis, as I have painted it only in very broad strokes here. But as long as I am painting in broad strokes, I remark by way of conclusion on the ways in which thinking about sainthood and pilgrimage developed in New Spain and New France within the context that I have already sketched.

Jesuits, from the beginning, counted pilgrimage as a fundamental part of their religious life. Ignatius Loyola included "pilgrimage to Jerusalem" as one of the crucial elements of the religious life, and his followers made that pilgrimage during times when the Holy Land was in Christian hands. In fact, in many of his writings, Ignatius referred to himself as "the pilgrim.".¹⁹ It should not surprise, then, that the Jesuit missionaries in New France typically thought of themselves as pilgrims. But their sense of what kind of pilgrimage that was - why they were there, what was supposed to happen, and how it would end up - was different from what much of the rest of the order, stationed in Europe, imagined a pilgrimage to be. Typically, the reports of pilgrims to Jerusalem described it as a "coming home" to the center of Christianity. For the North American missionaries, a visit to New France was a pilgrimage, but to a strange land, to a place that was as far from the center of Christianity as one could imagine, to a place of heathen savages and barely a sign of French culture, especially on the upcountry rivers and lakes, where there was nothing to remind missionaries of their French Christian culture except for their breviaries and bibles, and the few ritual artifacts - chalice, cross, relic - that they carried in their pack. For this reason, the pilgrimage to America - so different from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land - was an ordeal of such magnitude that it carried with it a premium of spiritual advantage. That advantage was compounded by the suffering that missionaries endured at the hands of Indians - the tortures and killings of missionaries recounted so dramatically in the Jesuit Relations, the chronicles of the Jesuit exploits in New France. Against this background, many missionaries achieved noteworthy status, and none more so than a cohort of clergy known as the North American Martyrs, eight men who suffered torture and death among the Indians in New France between 1642 and 1649. The hagiographies of these eight persons - among whom are figures such as Isaac Jogues and Jean de Brébeuf - stress their bravery in entering, and in some cases reentering, a strange world, a world as different from their own as could be imagined, a world without Christianity and without European culture. Jerome Nadal, a Jesuit contemporary of Loyola, had made the connection explicit in arguing that pilgrimage was synonymous with "journeying for ministry."²⁰ In 16th and 17th-century Jesuit self-understanding, pilgrimage increasingly became constructed as a test, as the story of Father Masse, in the Relations, makes clear: "As it is one of the tests which our Society makes of those who wish to be enrolled in it, to send them on certain pilgrimages, asking alms, the good Enemond Massé, as well as the others, was sent out thus, with desires for the contempt and the hardships which accompany that probation."²¹ The stranger the land, the harder the mission. The harder the mission, the better the pilgrimage. The better the pilgrimage, the more likely was sainthood. By remaining strangers in a strange land, Jesuits set the stage for their mission in a way to ensure that the "test" would be hard, and the rewards, in spiritual terms, great. The missions upriver from Quebec and Montreal remained waterway missions, in the sense that the colonists never built them into "little Frances."

There are no Franciscan missionary saints from North America. There is one from South America, St. Francis Solano. Franciscans to a certain extent embraced the idea of pilgrimage, but never to the extent that the Jesuits did. The Franciscan idea of mission, moreover, was not cast as a species of test (although it is fair to say that in early Franciscanism, the desire for martyrdom played a limited role in the coalescence of the order's mission - until the fourteenth century, when some instances of overeagerness led Franciscan theologians to skeptically view cooperation in one's own martyrdom). And Franciscans tended not to assess the value of their missionary fieldwork in terms of degree of difficulty: obstacles overcome, suffering endured, and so forth. Their primary assessment was made on the evidence of the founding of Christian congregations, and their successes in planting seedlings of European civilization deep into the North American soil. The better rooted that civilization, the greater the likelihood of the survival of native communities as Christian communities. Franciscans, certainly, thought themselves in a strange land, and occasionally that realization led to uncertainties about their role as Christian clergy. But more often they imagined the strange land as ripe with possibilities for establishing Spanish Catholic culture, in all of its rich tradition. Although there were some exceptions, they experienced the strangeness of North America as an invitation to permanently settle the native inhabitants into a Spanish way of life and its familiar Catholicism. Franciscanism in the New World accordingly tended toward more than the notion of mission as an outward focused "example" to others than as a "test" or "probation" of the individual missionary. Such was in keeping with the observation of the early Franciscan mystic David of Augsburg who had advised that only mature friars who had already proven their virtue be licensed as missionaries.²² In the "little Spains" of the Spanish dominions in North America, Franciscans thus labored under a rather different set of expectations for their work, and felt less need to seek out the dramas that Jesuits did as a course to sainthood.

The story of missions in New France and New Spain, then, is one which is rich in potential for our understanding how material conditions and religious ideologies cooperated in setting the strategies of the Franciscans and Jesuits. This approach also is a way into understanding how in-group notions of sainthood and pilgrimage were contextualized by those factors. The land and water of the New World were no less influences on the missionizing strategies of Jesuits and Franciscans than were the founding visions of Francis and Ignatius.

2. Quoted in E. Randolph Daniel, The Franciscan Concept of Mission in the High Middle Ages (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), 28.

4. Stephen E. Wessley, Joachim of Fiore and Monastic Reform (New York; Peter Lang, 1990); Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future: A Medieval Study in Historical Thinking (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1999).

5. Francis of Assisi, Regula Prima, Chapter 17. See the Rule and Life of the Brothers and Sisters of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis, commentary by Margaret Carney and Thaddeus Horgan (Washington: Franciscan Federation, 1982); Ignatius Brady, The Marrow of the Gospel: A Study of the Rule of Saint Francis by the Franciscans of Germany (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1958), 212-15, 268-72. For Jacques de Vitry's similar emphasis on example see The Exempla or illustrative stories from the Sermones vulgares of Jacques de Vitry, ed. Thomas Frederick Crane (London: for the Folk-Lore Society, by D. Nutt, 1890).

6. Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss (New York,: Paulist Press, 1991), 113-214. An overview of the Ignatian focus on "interiority" is in W. W. Meissner, The Psychology of a Saint: Ignatius of Loyola (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 279-346

7. Paul Le Jeune, The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610-1791, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, vol. 28 (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers Company, 1898), 65. The Jesuit emphasis on "intellectual" conversion is discussed in Daniel, 37-75.

8. Labor was a form of "tribute" required by the laws. See The New Laws for the Government of the Indies and for the Preservation of the Indians, 1542-1543 (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1968).

9. Amy Turner Bushnell, Situado and Saban: Spain's Support System for the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); John E. Worth, The Struggle for the Georgia Coast: An Eighteenth-century Retrospective on Guale and Mocama, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Wendy M. Nettles, "A New Mission Model? A Study of Long Term Research At Six Franciscan Missions in La Florida," M.A. thesis, Florida State University, 1996; Jerald T. Milanich, Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995); Christopher B. Ruff and Clark Spencer Larsen, "Reconstructing Behavior in Spanish Florida: The Biomechanical Evidence" in Bioarchaelogy of Spanish Florida: The Impact of Colonialism, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen (Gainesville: University press of Florida, 2001), 113-145; Mark F. Boyd, Here They Once Stood: The Tragic End of the Apalachee Missions (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999).

10. A discussion of Franciscan failure to adequately learn the native languages in New Spain is in Jim Norris, After "the year eighty": the demise of Franciscan power in Spanish New Mexico (Albuquerque [N.M.]: University of New Mexico Press in cooperation with the Academy of American Franciscan History, 2000).

11. Robert H. Jackson, Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish colonization : the impact of the mission system on California Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

12.Fray Alonso de Benavides, A Harvest of Reluctant Souls: The memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides, 1630, translated and edited by Baker H. Morrow (Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1996), 42-3.

13. On the fur trade see Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian women and French men: rethinking cultural encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

14. John F. Hayes, Wilderness mission; the story of Sainte-Marie-Among-the-Hurons (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1969).

15. Quoted in Angelyn Dries, The Missionary Movement in American Catholic History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 14. Ignatius Loyola recommended adaptation to local cultures as part of the strategy of missionizing (John W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 255).

16. Tanis C. Thorne, The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 64-5. See also W. J. Eccles, Canadian Society During the French Regime ( Montreal: harvest House, 1968), 75.

17. Tracy Neal Leavelle, "Religion, encounter, and community in French and Indian North America", PhD dissertation, Arizona State University, 2001.

18. Quoted in Carole Blackburn, Harvest of souls: the Jesuit missions and colonialism in North America, 1632-1650 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000), 100-104. See also John Webster Grant, Moon of wintertime: missionaries and the Indians of Canada in encounter since 1534 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 26-39.

20. On Nadal's conceptualization of ministry see William V. Bangert, Jerome Nadal, S.J. 1507-1580: Tracking the First Generation of Jesuits, edited Thomas M. McCoog (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1992).

21. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610-1791, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, vol. 29 (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers Company, 1898), 38-9. A view of Jesuit notions of suffering and martyrdom in Baja California is in Andrés Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of Our Holy Faith amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, translated by Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern and Richard K. Danford (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999).