A series of anonymous manuscript dictionaries of French and Indigenous languages, now preserved at the Musée de la civilisation and the John Carter Brown Library, are traditionally attributed to Chaumonot.
He entered St. Andrew’s Jesuit novitiate in Rome on 18 May 1632 at the age of twenty-one, and was ordained in late 1637 or early 1638.
He was immediately involved in the Huron mission being constructed at Sainte-Marie-des-Hurons near Georgian Bay under the leadership of Father Jérôme Lalemant.
Father Chaumonot spent nearly ten years in the Huron missions[6] and worked with many notable priests; Jean de Brébeuf, Simon Le Moyne, Claude Dablon, Antoine Daniel and Leonard Garreau to name a few.
This mission lasted only two years; the priests and the fifty colonists who joined them subsequently being obliged to escape in the night to avoid a general massacre.