Aulneau insisted on traveling to Fort Michilimackinac, located at what is now Mackinaw City in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, with a pre-winter resupply mission led by the commander's son, Jean Baptiste de La Vérendrye.
Aulneau had hopes of a last visit to the Sacrament of Confession at Fort Michilimackinac, before accompanying a years-long westward expedition in search of both the Mandan people and an overland route to the Pacific Ocean.
His remains were recovered during an excavation of the ruins of Fort St Charles in 1908 and, in 1961, Father Aulneau was dubbed "Minnesota's Forgotten Martyr" by Fr.
[1] Jean-Pierre Aulneau was born into the French nobility at the ancestral chateau belonging to his family near Moutiers-sur-le-Lay, La Vendée, Kingdom of France.
"[2] After recovering his health, he lodged at the Jesuit College in Quebec, preparing for his final examination, which he passed during Lent, and was ordained to the priesthood in April 1735.
[5] He sailed through the Great Lakes to Fort St. Charles along with Pierre Gaultier de La Vérendrye, commander of the western district.
His letters to his family showed a young man filled with excitement about his mission to the Mandans, to whom he was eager to preach the Roman Catholic faith.
"[8] Within several kilometres of the fort, however, all members of the resupply expedition were killed by "Prairie Sioux" war party consisting of an estimated 90 canoes, which had travelled down the Warroad River, at Massacre Island in Lake of the Woods.
[9] The Lake of the Woods Massacre is believed to have been masterminded by Chief Sacred Born and a disaffected minority of the Minnesota Dakota people in retaliation for the Sieur de La Vérendrye's practice, like many other Frenchmen during the same era, of supplying guns to Sioux enemies, especially the Assiniboine and the Cree peoples, as part of the North American fur trade.
At the Palace of Versailles, King Louis XV and the Comte de Maurepas, the Minister of Marine, were increasingly impatient and rapidly escalating their demands for the Northwest Passage to be located without any further delays, but they invariably refused to cover any of the costs.
Furthermore, according to visiting naturalist Pehr Kalm of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, La Vérendrye, similarly to the Lewis and Clark Expedition of a later century, was under strict orders from the Governor of New France, the Marquis de Beauharnois, to continue exploring to the westward until reaching the Pacific Ocean.
[10] In addition to his trading relationship and occasional military alliance with some Sioux enemies, La Vérendrye is also strongly suspected by some historians of having covertly encouraged the Assiniboine and Cree Iron Confederacy into the poaching of North American beaver skins from much further south in Minnesota, especially during the seasonal western migration of the local Dakota people to hunt the American bison in the Great Plains.
La Vérendrye, who had then shipped the valuable beaver skins east in order to cover his debts and expenses, later wrote, however, that the loss of his son, his chaplain, and the 19 Voyageurs in what is now called the Lake of the Woods massacre was the greatest grief of his entire life and one from which he never completely healed.
When the Cree people reported the massacre to La Verendrye, he wrote in a 17 September 1736 diary entry, "I dispatched the Sergeant with six men to raise the bodies of Reverend Father Aulneau and my son and on the eighteenth I had them buried in the chapel together with the heads of all the Frenchmen killed, they also brought in accordance with my orders.
Aulneau and young La Verendrye were encased in a rough hewn coffin and buried beneath the altar of the fortress chapel.
The French commander also considered it suicidal to lead a war party so late in the year, as a bountiful wild rice harvest would be desperately needed to survive the coming winter without supplies from Fort Michilimackinac.
After several years of receiving supplies only from coureurs des bois, who continued trading with the Dakota in defiance of the French Crown, Chief Sacred Born sued for peace.
His decision was made following a massive retaliatory raid by the Iron Confederacy against the Prairie Dakota during their annual bison hunting migration.
Emmett Shanahan, "an island at which no pagan Indian will as much as look and who, should he have to pass it, will without fail cast upon the waters a handful of tobacco to appease the anger of the Manitou.
The property was then deeded over to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Crookston, Minnesota, and remained, as of 1961, the site of an annual Christian pilgrimage and of a mid-July outdoor Mass in honor of Father Aulneau.