Hill of Torture

Director Arthur Caswell Parker of the Rochester (N. Y.) Municipal Museum (he is part Seneca Indian) was invited last week to solve what promised to be an interesting problem. At Auriesville, N. Y., site of the shrine to North America's eight Roman Catholic saints (TIME, April 7; July 7, 1930), excavators had discovered two complete skeletons and the skull of a third. Archeologist Parker was asked to determine their identity. They might be the remains of three of the eight saints--Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil and John Lalande, Jesuit missionaries--who were slain near Auriesville by Iroquois Indians in the middle of the 17th Century.

The shrine already contains bones of John de Brebeuf, Gabriel Lalemant and Charles Gamier, Jesuit colleagues in the task of converting the Hurons, whom the Iroquois had vowed to exterminate. The cruelties and hardships to which they submitted were rewarded by canonization last June, the two requisite miracles for that purpose having been duly accepted by the Congregation of Sacred Rites. One was the perfect and instantaneous cure of Sister Marie-Maxima of the religious House of St. Hyacinth, in Quebec; the other, the equally perfect and instantaneous cure of Sister Savoie of the diocese of Chatham (Canada). Both Sisters were suffering from tubercular peritonitis. The cures were effected by the invocation of the martyrs, thus investing their relics with added sanctity. Thousands of pilgrims travel to the Auriesville shrine every summer. Additional remains could not but increase the veneration in which the shrine is held, attracting more visitors.

The absence of Indian relics near the new skeletons was what suggested they were the remains of white men. But without waiting for the arrival of Expert Parker, the excavators continued digging in the Hill of Torture. They found five more skeletons. Then Rev. Peter F. Cusick, director of the shrine, and Curator John E. Wyman of the Montgomery County Historical Society became suspicious. The hill crest must have been the burial ground not of the martyrs, but of those who had tomahawked them. A leaden trinket, tortoise-shaped, seemed to indicate an Iroquois burial ground.

Next candidates for North American sainthood are Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, foundress of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, and Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton of New York, foundress of the Sisters of Charity in the U. S.

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