his life with the Abenakis at the mission station of Norridgewock
on the Kennebec River. He knew the language and the customs of
the Indians, attended their councils, and dominated them by his
influence. He was a model missionary, earnest and scholarly. But
the Jesuit of that age was prone to be half spiritual zealot,
half political intriguer. There is no doubt that the Indians had
a genuine fear that the English, with danger from France
apparently removed by the Treaty of Utrecht, would press claims
to lands about the Kennebec River in what is now the State of
Maine, and that they would ignore the claims of the Indians and
drive them out. The Governor at Quebec helped to arouse the
savages against the arrogant intruders. English border ruffians
stirred the Indians by their drunken outrages and gave them real
cause for anger. The savages knew only one way of expressing
political unrest. They began murdering women and children in
raids on lonely log cabins on the frontier. The inevitable result
was that in 1721 Massachusetts began a war on them which dragged
on for years. Rale, inspired from Quebec, was believed to control
the Indians and, indeed, boasted that he did so. At last the
English struck at the heart of the trouble. In 1724 some two
hundred determined men made a silent advance through the forest
to the mission village of Norridgewock where Rale lived, and Rale
died fighting the assailants. In Europe a French Jesuit such as
he would have worked among diplomats and at the luxurious courts
of kings. In America he worked among savages under the hard
conditions of frontier life. The methods and the aims in both
cases were the same--by subtle and secret influence so to mold
the actions of men that France should be exalted in power. In
their high politics the French sometimes overreached themselves.
To seize points of vantage, to intrigue for influence, are not in