What happened to Father Rene Menard?

(Note: I wrote this column back in 2003 for the Wausau Daily Herald. I liked it, so I'm posting it here.)

What happened to Father Rene Menard?

Only God knows for sure.

Menard was a French priest, one of the first Europeans to walk and explore the wild land that would become Wisconsin. He spent his days in the middle 1600s doggedly spreading the word of his God to the native people of North America. But the end of his story is shrouded in fog.

Some historians from Lincoln County think the pioneering priest may have gone missing somewhere north of Merrill in July 1661. In 1923, the Merrill Council of the Knights of Columbus erected a monument to Menard at the top of Nine Mile Hill on Highway 107 between Merrill and Tomahawk, using a granite obelisk to forever claim the explorer as their own.

The memorial's brief and tantalizing inscription, carved in simple block letters, reads: "In honor of Pere Rene Menard. Born at Paris Sept. 7th, 1605. Entered the Jesuit order Nov. 7th, 1624. Sailed for Quebec in March 1640. Lost hereabouts in July 1661, while en route to Huron village to baptize Indian refugees."

Not to be critical of the good folks of the 1923 Merrill Council of the Knights of Columbus, but this inscription raises more questions than it answers.

Lost? How? Why? Did he forget his compass? And "hereabouts" simply isn't specific enough for me. I've stopped at the monument numerous times, and on each visit, I am tempted to take a hike in the woods to look for a skeleton or an ancient cross.

It just so happened that the last time I stopped at the monument (along with my wife on the way back from a sojourn in Minocqua, because she goes nuts over roadside monuments), I happened to have a book in my truck entitled "Wisconsin River of History," by William F. Stark.

This is a 354-page tome, but it devoted just three midsize paragraphs to the beloved Father Menard. Unfortunately, those three paragraphs just deepened the mystery.

Stark writes that Menard was "not in the best of health," and traveled to Wisconsin to "minister to some of his former converts who had been residing in the eastern part of Canada but had been forced west by the fierce Iroquois and were now located on the south shore of Lake Superior."

Menard was near some rapids at the headwaters of the Black River when he stepped ashore to lighten the canoe, Stark maintains. He never returned to the river, and several years later Menard's cassock was discovered in the possession of some Sioux Indians.

That just begs the question: The Black River? That's really not anywhere "hereabouts" of the monument, unless you draw a wide circle on the map.

Because of the incongruity of the monument and Stark's account, I turned to another resource, a book simply and elegantly entitled "Wisconsin," which I found in the back corner of the Wausau Daily Herald library. This five-volume resource, edited by Fred L. Holmes, and published by The Lewis Publishing Co. of Chicago in 1946, dedicated nearly a page to Menard.

"Though broken and infirm from twenty years of labor in the Canadian wilderness, he welcomed the opportunity to go as a missionary to the distant tribesmen," the book said.

Menard traveled from Quebec, said Holmes, with seven French fur traders. They weren't kind men.
"Menard, according to the Jesuit chronicle, suffered neglect and abuse from his traveling companions," Holmes mentions.

He made it to what is now Ashland, Holmes said, where he devoted himself to preaching to Indians.
During the summer of 1661, he set out inland with one French guide to find a band of Hurons who were starving. On his return, the guide said he became separated from the wilderness priest. Holmes conjectures that Menard disappeared on the Jump or Yellow River in what is now Taylor County.
Did Menard simply keel over while relieving himself in the woods? Or was he set upon and murdered? Was he on the Wisconsin, Jump, Yellow or Black River?

We'll probably never know, said Alice F. Krueger, 74, a vice president of the Merrill Historical Society. But Krueger said there are many who are convinced that Menard walked on Lincoln County soil. A rock with a cross carved in it was found in northeast Lincoln County, and that sent intrepid historians out with metal detectors to find some Menard artifact. Nothing was ever found.

OK, so maybe Menard didn't disappear near the monument on Highway 107. But standing there, on top of the hill, looking at the green forests to the north, it's easy to imagine a man of God walking along, listening to the wind in the trees, preparing to meet his maker.