Not long after Etienne Brûlé, the protégé of Samuel de Champlain, returned from his second trip of exploration to
Bawating, the French efforts to Christianize the Natives began in earnest, driven by the zeal of Jesuit missionaries. The first missionaries to arrive in the Bawating settlement were Fathers Isaac Jogues and Charles Raymbault in 1642. While the Native Ojibwe did not rush to conversion, since they had practiced their own form of
spirituality at Bawating for thousands of years, they received the Jesuits warmly. Nineteen years after the departure of Jogues and Raymbault, Father Rene Menard arrived and in 1665 Menard was replaced by Father Claude Allouez. Allouez reported to his superiors in New France the particulars of the Ojibwe religion; it's animism, it's mythology and an apparently casual reference to the occurrence of pure copper in Lake Superior. This report was enough to convince the Jesuit authorities that Bawating deserved a mission, which soon became known as the mission at
Sault de Sainte Marie.
