The Lake Erie Cross-"There is assuredly, they say, no more beautiful country in all Canada. It is the Earthly Paradise of Canada" (Monsieur Dollier),

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1669-1670


"The Lake Erie Cross 



during the following April. There is some ground for the surmise 
that the missing men deserted to La Salle. 
The priests and the remaining seven men descended the Grand 
River, six in the canoes or dragging them through the shoal water, 
the others following the trail along the bank. Lake Erie seemed to 
them like a great sea. The wind was strong from the south. There 
was perhaps no lake in all the country whose billows rose so high as 
Lake Erie, because, as Galinee naively suggests, of its great depth 
and its great extent. 

WINTERING ON LAKE ERIE 

They wintered just above the forks where Black Creek joins 
the River Lynn, otherwise known as Patterson's Creek, at Port 
Dover. The exact spot was identified in August, 1900, at a meeting 
of the Norfolk Historical Society. Slight elevations indicate the 
outlines of the building. Trenches for drainage are quite distinct. A 
slight depression in an embankment shows where the door stood, 
near the little rivulet where they got their water. 

INDIAN VISITORS 

Iroquois hunters visited them during the winter and admired 
the structure, which was dwelling-house, chapel, granary and forti- 
fication all in one. They stored their granary with some fifty bushels 
of walnuts and chestnuts, besides apples, plums, grapes and hack- 
berries. They made wine of the grapes. It was as good as vin de 
Grave, and was used for mass. The rivers were full of fish and of 
beaver. Deer roamed the meadows in herds of a hundred. Bears 
were abundant, fatter and of better flavor than the most savory pigs 
of France. No wonder that the worthy priests are enthusiastic over 
the country. There is assuredly, they say, no more beautiful 
country in all Canada. It is the Earthly Paradise of Canada. 

Their dwelling-place was a beautiful spot on the bank of a rivulet, 
five-eighths of a mile inland, sheltered from the wind. They set up a 
pretty altar at one end of the cabin. There they heard mass three 
times a week without missing a single time. "You may imagine," 
says Galinee, "the consolation we experienced in seeing ourselves 
with our good God, in the depths of the woods, in a land where no 
European had ever been. Monsieur Dollier often said to us that 
that winter ought to be worth to us, for our eternal welfare, more 
than the best ten years of our life." 

On Passion Sunday, 23rd March, 1670, they all proceeded to 
the lake shore to make and plant a cross. At its foot were placed 
the arms of the King of France, with a formal inscription setting 
forth how the two Seminary missionaries and seven other Frenchmen 
had been the first of all Europeans to winter on the lake, and how 
they had taken possession of it in the name of King Louis XIV, as 
an unoccupied country, by attaching his arms to the foot of the cross."

https://archive.org/details/lakeeriecrossere00canauoft

    To me the cross is the single most powerful symbol in history
with the single most powerful message, That of sacrifice
and unconditional love (Kevin Lajiness)