dispensation. In the spring of
1643 he returned to the St. Lawrence country to found a new mission, to
be called the Mission of Martyrs. His Superior at Montreal ordered him
to proceed to the country of the Mohawks, and in company with Sieur
Bourdon, a government engineer, and six Indians, he followed the
Richelieu and Champlain, which the savages called "the doorway of the
country," until the little party stood on the northern end of Lake
George, on the evening of Corpus Christi; and with the catholic spirit
of the Jesuit missionary he christened it Lac St. Sacrement, and this
name it bore for a whole century. On the 18th of October, 1646, the
tomahawk of the savage ended the life of Father Jogues, who, after
suffering many tortures and indignities from his Iroquois captors, died
in their midst while working for their salvation in his field of
Christian labor.

The right of a discoverer to name new lakes and rivers is old and
unquestioned. A missionary of the cross penetrated an unexplored
wilderness and found this noblest gem of the lower Adirondacks, unknown
to civilized man. Impressed with this sublime work of his Creator, the
martyred priest christened it St. Sacrement. One hundred years later
came troops of soldiers with mouths filled with strange oaths, cursing
their enemies. What respect had _they_ for the rights of discoverers or
martyred missionaries? So General Johnson, "an ambitious Irishman,"
discarded the Christian name of the lake and replaced it with the
English one of George. He did not name it after St. George, the patron
saint of England, of whom history asserts that he "was identical with a
native of either Cappadocia or Cilicia, who raised himself by flattery
of the great from the meanest circumstances to be purveyor of bacon for
the army, and who was put to death with two of his ministers by a mob,
for peculations, A. D. 361;" but he took that of a sensual king, George
of England, in order to advance his own interests with that monarch.

For more than a century Lake George was the highway between Canada and
the Hudson River. Its pure waters were so much esteemed as to be taken
regularly to Canada to be consecrated and used in the Roman Catholic
churches in baptismal and other sacred rites. The lake was frequently
occupied by armies, and the forts George and William Henry, at the
southern end, possess most interesting historical associations. The
novelist Cooper made Lake George a region of romanc