The Jesuit Missions: A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness

In the remote forests and waterways of seventeenth-century North America, Jesuit missionaries carried their faith into territories where no European had ventured. This chronicle reconstructs their extraordinary journey: the brutal winters, thelanguage lessons learned in smoke-filled longhouses, the conversions and the refusals, the alliances forged and the trust betrayed. Marquis draws on letters, journals, and mission records to reconstruct not merely what the missionaries did, but how they understood their own purpose amid suffering and failure. The indigenous peoples here are not passive recipients of conversion but shrewd negotiators, hosts, and sometimes adversaries navigating the arrival of strangers with strange gods. The book illuminates the contradictions at the heart of the enterprise: men who brought both salvation and disease, both the cross and the colonizer. For readers drawn to the early Republic or to stories of cultural collision, this offers a granular, often uncomfortable portrait of faith wielded as both weapon and surrender.