There is a memorial to Father Ménard along the Michigamme River in the Upper Peninsula near Mansfield. There is another along the Wisconsin River near Merrill, about one hundred miles to the south. They both memorialize a "lost," "died" or "murdered" seventeenth century Jesuit who did not return from a mission to either the Menominee or Huron people. The former spoke an Algonquin language and had been living in Wisconsin for 10,000 years, since the Copper Culture. The later spoke an Iroquoian language and had been moving west since French contact.

Jesuit priests and fur trapping voyageurs were among the first wave of French colonizers in the New World. These French trade routes and indigenous contacts south of the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River were later controlled by British colonial, American territorial rule and finally the American state.

Ménard is historically elusive because his story is hundreds of years old. It has also been translated through French-Catholic, British and American colonial traditions. Indigenous traditions from the Algonquin, Iroquois and Dakota-Sioux languages are also responsible for key parts of Ménard's memory. The Indigenous and European traditions were quickly changing after contact. The Europeans expanded into the wilderness. The Indigenous either adapted to the colonial period with trade and treaties or they moved west away from the Europeans and into conflict with other Native peoples. This was the stressful period of political and economic realignment in which the sixty year old Ménard was ministering.

The Monet biography of Ménard is evidence of the diverse traditions that he encountered during his twenty-one years on the continent. In France, he received religious education but it is unlikely his birth in Paris or seminary in La Flèche, Bourges prepared him for the frontier experience. He lived the first half of his life in highly developed and ancient French cities. The second half of his life was spent in North American cities, like Quebec City and Trois-Riviéres, that were founded after Ménard he was born. The peoples he contacted were the Hurons, Nipissings and Algonkins--people who used to live where the new French cities were being founded. From 1651-56 he lived in residence at Trois-Riviéres and became superior in 1658.

There seems to be a shift in M&eactute;nard's methods after he became superior where he spends more time away from his residence. He lived the next two years with Iroquois people. In 1660 he ministered to Ottawa. He then spent the next year with the Hurons "who were encamped near the mouth of the Black River." With more age and experience, Ménard traveled deeper into the Northwoods and spent more time with his native targets. As French civilization took hold in Canada Ménard spent less time in residence in the new settlements and more time in the frontier. He kept on the front lines of the colonial process until he was died, lost or murdered in August 1661. The Monet's narrative continues after Ménard is lost. "Several years later his breviary and his cassock were discovered in the possession of the Sioux, who had found them and placed them among their manitous on an altar upon which they offered up prayers to the Great Spirit." The Dakota-Sioux live to the west of the Ojibwe and Iroquois people that Ménard targeted. Dakota is also a different language group than the Anishinabee (Ojibwe) and Iroquois that Ménard learned in New France.

Marshall's 1954 history of Brule Country describes Ménard's New France. This narrative relies on some misunderstandings that Chung deconstructed in 2019. What they can agree on is that after contact with France, Jesuit missionaries were sent out from Quebec, Montreal and Three Rivers to convert native people regardless of their tribe. This included the Ojibwe, Iroquois and Dakota. According to Marshall, the "result [was] many devoted Jesuit missionary, preaching peace and good will to the savages, perished at the hands of these vengeful warriors." But there is no evidence of this in Ménard's case.

Stewart's 1934 biography of Menard has been maintained online by John Allen since 1997. Stewart was interested in Ménard's canoe trips, his Jesuit education and the native people he met. The fifth chapter starts in the 1658 with Ménard returning to his "official Residence" in Trois-Riviéres where he was appointed Superior. There was a developing fur trade route which included Trois-Riviéres that French and Indigenous people participated in. Ménard followed one of these trips, a group of French and Ottawa traders "up the Ottawa River, through the little lakes beyond Mattawa...[to] Lake Nipissing." They continued to the north end of Lake Huron through the "long cascade at Sault Ste. Marie" and up into Lake Superior.

Ménard's story is punctuated by trials. One of these comes in Sault Ste. Marie. According to McGinn, the Ottawa who were on Ménard's canoe tried to lighten their load as they crossed into Lake Superior. To achieve this, Ménard followed the canoe on foot from the shoreline. Stewart's account reads as if the Ottawa traders resented the dead weight of the Jesuit. The natives were "hurrying" and the Father was "compelled" to do the same to keep up. There are sensibilities that would describe this hazing of a old guy as mean and sacrilegious. Others might see wonder why a this man and his religious paraphernalia are more valuable than the beaver pelts he displaced.

The Ottawa were "suspicious" and afraid. One stole Ménard's prayer book and "threw it away." The breviary disappears from the Stewart narrative only to be rediscovered with the Dakota in the Monet narrative. Ménard continued to minister. He "converted 50 adult Indians" when he arrived in Keweenaw Bay from Trois-Riviéres. He could have done this without liturgy. But when his artifacts were discovered with the Sioux--the breviary was alongside his cassock. Metaphor is a powerful part of story telling. It is possible that the loss of his breviary is more allegorical than literal.

As Ménard and his Ottawa companions were outside of the canoe it was destroyed. Stewart proposes two causes of this catastrophe. First, a tree fell on it while Ménard and his fellow-travelers were skirting the shallow water. McGinn prefers a second explanation, that a tree fell on the canoe as the men slept underneath "as a roof at night." If the canoe was sabotaged it was probably not done by Ménard's co-passengers because they were all stranded on the shoreline for six days without any supplies.

They survived on "the offal of an abandoned Indian hunting camp" eating bones, skin and "clotted dried blood." To make it worse--members of their trade flotilla from Trois-Rivéres passed the stranded men and were unwilling to dump the goods and livre that weighted down their canoes. Ménard and his companions were rescued after six days. The voyage continued to "the winter rendezvous" near Keweenaw bay. Where his trial continued.

After wintering in Keweenaw Bay, Ménard and a companion voyaged to the Chequamegon Bay looking for a way to get to the Black River from the Chippewa River. The route he was looking for would have taken him from the Chippewa (Flambeau, Jump or Yellow Rivers) toward Eau Claire. Then he could have followed Eau Claire river, against the current to get close to the Wolf and Black Rivers where he would have had to Portage. Another route would take him via the Chippewa to Lake Pepin on the Mississippi River, then fifty miles more to La Crosse. He could have then followed the Black River, against the current, into the Northwoods.

This is where the Stewart narrative ends in suppositions. Maybe it was a "deadly...sorcerer of the Indians...jealous of Fr. Ménard" that killed him after separating from his companion at a portage. There is no evidence of this provided. What is known is Ménard disappeared somewhere in between Chequamegon Bay and the Flambeau River. The confusion about his final route was addressed the state historical society and Jesuit organizations. Assistant Superintendent Nunns of the the WI-SHS described the academic consensus to Stewart in the 1930s. A copy of this letter was found in the author's copy of the book and included by Allen.

The full text: "Dear Sir: Miss Kellogg of our research department who has made a study of Father Méenard's life and work, makes the following report to reply to your query concerning his route: The earlier studies of Father Méenard's route were based on the assumption that he started from Keweenaw Bay; after more careful reading of the sources it is now admitted by most historians that the start was from Chequamegon Bay. That much alters the conclusions about the route, making it down the Chippewa, not the Wisconsin, and up a tributary of that river towards the headwaters of the Black River." The State historical society journal published on this in June 1921.

Shifting Ménard's starting point more than one hundred miles west from Keweenaw to Chequamegon Bay was a twentieth century correction of a seventeenth century event. In the twenty-first century the incorrect narrative is still accepted. In fact, neither the monument in Mansfield (Menominee river basin) nor the one north of Merrill (Wisconsin river basin) is on the route where Ménard was lost--on the Turtle-Flambeau-Chippewa River system looking for Black River. Yet somehow, the Knights of Columbus erected a memorial obelisk on the Wisconsin River in 1923. The Mansfield memorial is further misplaced on the Upper Peninsula's Menominee River.

Nunns is referencing "The First Missionary in Wisconsin" by Kellog. Kellog's Ménard narrative is congruent with Stewart's that came a decade later. Ménard wasn't alone in the woods. Kellog emphasized Me´nard's company of guides, traders and sometimes personal attendant's. Kellog describes the upheaval caused in the Great Lakes Indian nations by French settlement and the resulting Indigenous diaspora. The Dakota relics of Ménard might have been "found in a cabin of western Indians" who were accused of killing the missionary.

According to Kellog, "the savages denied it; had they been guilty they would probably have boasted of the deed." The more likely explanation is Ménard got lost in the woods and died from wilderness exposure. Even without a body, he became a martyr in France.

Martyrdom was probably Ménard's mission. Kellog's description of Ménard's last few voyages in the Northwoods start with the, apocryphal trope: Nicolet's landing in Green Bay which "marked the close of a great era of exploration." This was in 1634. There were only a "few wandering Winnebago Indians" in Wisconsin's forests. Population pressures changed this landscape. By 1652, Wisconsin it was "a refuge for a horde of Indian fugitives--tribes of the Algonquian and Iroquoian families who were fleeing" from Europeans and Indigenous people armed with European weapons and disease.

According to Stewart, this western pressure made western transportation routes more valuable. Ménard's final mission to the Flambeau and Black rivers was inspired by a settlement in the Wisconsin river valley. To Stewart, "[Ménard's] route was down the Chippewa and up a tributary to the headwaters of the Black River. The. Refugees from the old Huron country had found in this new land among the Ottawas, in a white birch and beaver country, a maze of lakes and rivers, which as yet the Iroquois had not explored and which formed, for these Hurons, a safe dodging place from the guns and tomahawks of their old relentless enemies." These Huron were the vanguard of invaders to Dakota territory.

Kellog describes the Huron and Ottawa as Great Lakes "refugee" nations. These two tribes had been fleeing west since 1650--from upstate New York, the Great Lakes to Green Bay. By Ménard's time Huron had settled in Black River and Ottawa in Lac Court Oreilles. This was the last piece of the Northwoods before the great plains of Minnesota and greater Sioux country. Ménard was headed for the Huron's new home when he disappeared. As a new-immigrant to this land he was ignorant of the rippling conflict that European contacts had caused among the various Indigenous people.

This wasn't Ottawa or Huron's traditional home either. Pre-history is tricky. This is compounded by transient populations. Any Wisconsin regional history should start with three of the eight Anishinaabe people [Potawatomi, Chippewa-Ojibwa, Odawa-Ottawa] and the Mississippi Sioux [Dakota and Ho-Chunk-Winnebago speakers] Later, the Iroquois confederacy [Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca] acquired European guns. The smallpox epidemic destroyed most of the native population and the Iroquois moved west to exploit the depopulated land. Then the French fur trapping regime started to send voyageurs and priests into the frontier. The land that Ménard encountered seemed like a static wilderness but it had already been changed by decades of European influence. The people who Ménard was coming to convert had felt his arrival--in the form of flintlocks or smallpox--knew he was coming while he was still training in France. His arrival was the reason they left the Great Lakes to begin with.

They were invaders and they were treated as such. The first French trade routes used canoes around Montreal. The Jesuits followed the traders. In 1656 "two missionaries embarked in the returning trade flotilla of the Indians from northern Wisconsin." They were ambushed by Iroquois. One missionary was killed and the other was "abandoned by the Indians." These were Ménard's immediate predecessors. He ventured back with the Ottawa in 1660. He was "fifty-five years of age" when they left. He had a "delicate constitution, worn by long years of service in the western wilderness." He had been evangelizing to Huron and Ottawa for twenty years and could speak "six Indian dialects." In this quote about "wilderness" Kellog doesn't distinguish between the French settlements of Montreal, Trois-Rivéres and Quebec City and the Indigenous settlements.

Kellog's Ménard was "eager" for the assignment and knew it was "in effect a death sentence." This framing makes a strong case for martyrdom. In a letter to France, Ménard described his reasoning, "I could not doubt if I failed to respond to this opportunity that I should experience an endless remorse." He also had a psychological wanderlust which he described as a divine inspiration pushing him "yonder." The journey gets predictably bad as soon as Ménard and his companions leave New France as the "Indian traders who had promised the French of Canada to care for Father Ménard quickly broke their word." At first it seems like Kellogg's language is a little harsh. The Father was told to pull his own weight. The Indians were mean to him when he couldn't. He didn't have the right shoes and cut his feet which became swollen. He didn't get the best food. Ménard didn't carry himself like a self-reliant wilderness veteran like Kellog suggests. Istead, he seems like an unprepared burden.

The story compounds as Ménard is "separated from the French traders who might have aided him." This language is interesting. It assigns the terrifying burden of looking after an naive and injured man in the wilderness to French Voyageurs and not the natives. This is interesting because the Indians and the Voyagers were engaged in one pursuit, trapping and trade, while the Jesuit was engaged in a totally different one. Assuming Ménards compatriots would take care of the French priest at the expense of their Indigenous co-trappers is an argument for national-religious chauvinism that doesn't make economic sense.

Ménard "his own donnée who had volunteered to accompany him." Essentially he was the fourth in a canoe with three natives. The canoe "was broken by a falling tree." Nobody in the flotilla stopped to help them and for "six days they existed by pounding bones and eating offal." After the six days they got a ride to an Ottawa winter camp "at the foot of Keweenaw Bay" and arrived October 15. This might be the current town of L'Anse. Ménard decided to spend the winter there with the people there.

The "chief" was a "surly brute." Ménard started scolding the man's polygamy. The chief kicked him out of his wigwam into the winter. Ménard made a "poor hut" from tree branches and presumably lived off of fish from the bay and "wine for the mass [which] did not congeal" for the whole winter. In the spring some French traders came from Chequamegon to Keweenaw bay and carried Ménard back to Chequamegon. When they arrived Ménard found a "great concourse of Indians, refugees from several tribes" and he started to preach to them. This move from the Ottawa winter camp at L'Anse to Chequamegon Bay is what confuses the roadside memorials in Mansfield and Merrill.

Word came from Black River that the Huron were starving. This is why Ménard was compelled to find a route from the Chippewa River, just south of Chequamegon Bay, to the Black River. His goal was to "baptize all the heathens he could before their death." He sent a message to the Huron via some traders. When the traders arrived they "found the Huron in a famishing condition, so weak they could scarcely stand or lift their hands." The traders decided that the Huron were to weak to be saved and Ménard was to old to journey. They refused to deliver the message and returned to Chequamegon. The traders' failure to deliver his message is evidence that Ménard had do himself what could have been delegated. This can help explain Ménard's hands-on approach to proselytization.

Ménard decided to visit the starving Huron. To Kellog "Ménard was determined to visit his Huron neophytes" in Black River. Divine inspiration pushed him yonder. He set out from Chequamegon on July 13, 1661 with "some smoked meat and a bag of dried sturgeon." He was accompanied by a trader and some Huron guides. The guides became "weak for lack of food and dissatisfied with the slow progress of the old man..." They abandoned the trader and the priest and said they would send a rescue. After waiting two weeks with no support, the Frenchmen continued alone in unfamiliar territory.

The French twosome usufructed a canoe that they found. They went downstream in the Chippewa River looking for the Black. The river they were in had a strong current. The canoe became caught in some rocks in a rapid. Ménard "to lighten his companion's labors, considerately stepped ashore" and the trader freed the canoe. The trader waited "[s]afely up in quiet water" for Ménard. The missionary didn't appear. The trader shot five times and yelled a bunch before he "became frightened at the menace of the forest" and he started toward the Huron encampment leaving Ménard alone. It took the trader two days to get to the Hurons where he didn't speak their language. The starving Hurons and the frightened trader were unable to find anything during an initial rescue attempt.

After that "the Huron were obdurate in their refusal to search for the missing missionary." It is understandable. They were scared. After a few days the trader returned to Chequamegon and "reported the loss...the exact site of his martyrdom will probably never be known." Kellog uses some hagiographic superlatives "heroism...devotion to duty" to describe this Quixotic Jesuit missionary. Ménard might have come to Wisconsin looking for the vanity of martyrdom or he might have been a tool of colonization. What is obvious is that he annoyed the people he lived with. More than once did his companions pull the vehicle over and ask him to get out. He was an elder deserving of respect but he didn't accept his physical limitations. This made him dangerous to those around him who were expected to care for the man. The time and energy it took to care for Ménard on his religious mission took away from the broader colonial economic mission. In this context, the French and Indigenous people he encountered were saintly for keeping him around for as long as they did.

Mashall's Brule Country includes a paragraph about Ménard. The period was after the "Iroquois war saw considerable expansion in French America..." New France received troops, colonists, farm labor and missionaries from Europe. Ménard was part of this. In 1660 he "accompanied a returning party of Chippewas as the first apostle to the Lake Superior district." Marshall doesn't mention the first two missionaries from Kellogg, one killed and the other abandoned. This was also the fate of Ménard. The mortality of this position is evidence of a broader disconnect. French and Indigenous have a shared language based in tangible things like silver, rifles, pelts. There is nothing equivalent to that physical trade of ds in Ménard's ethereal salvation of the soul. The abstraction that it would take for a European priest to explain sixteen hundred years of theology in a non Christian language might render the message incoherent. The language of salvation is not tangible when compared to the language of exchange. It is surprising that the French and Indigenous traders let Ménard participate in their flotillas at all.

Ménard was "fifty-six years old and far from robust." He had a "kind and gentle ways" that were ridiculed by the native people. The canoe trip from Montreal was "long" his winter in L'Anse was "harrowing." The mission to the starving Hurons is described as "an errand of mercy" on which "he perished." This final mission is most interesting because he disappeared. It is also interesting because of the it's hubris. Only a man educated in seminaries and not in the wild would bring salvation to a starving settlement of people. This is compounded by the David Stannard territory of Indigenous genocide or Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel. In Wisconsin's Northwoods around 1660, forgiving sins and transubstantiation of the Eucharist are not marketable skills. People who are starving do death in the middle of a diaspora need food and territory. They do not need a breviary and cassock.

Ménard wasn't a missionary that was going to help the Hurons with food, water or housing. He was going to their village to observe a people displaced by colonial diaspora and give them eternal salvation. This doesn't serve anybody but the Church. Previous emphasis on hardships make Ménard seem like a martyr in training. He has value post mortem in France. His inability to feed the starving limits his value in America. Multiple accounts describe his hardships even as his companions are unscathed. The trials are of his own making--Kafkaesque in that sense. He must carry things on a trade mission. He didn't bring the right shoes so his feet hurt. He has to ride in the canoe without his friends. Even when he has good luck--such as being rescued and housed in L'Anse--he messes it up by acting righteous.

Ménard's mysterious fate is curious as a whodunit. It is also interesting as a psychological supposition about the link between French colonialism and Jesuit martyrdom. Ménard's years of suffering are of his own creation. A surface question from Ménard might ask how and why he died. The secular-humanist question would have to include why Jesuit missionaries thought food was less important than salvation and how they expected to be received by Indigenous people in the middle of this diaspora.