n early ages, they brought Christianity and civilization
to peoples and nations of the lands of the Eastern Hemisphere. After
the discovery of the New World by Columbus, they were with the
explorers of North and South America. From about 1615 we find them
laboring among the Indian tribes from Quebec in Canada to California
in the West. Intrepid apostles like Marquette, Breheuf, Menard,
Millet, Lallemant, Jogues, Le Moyne, Dablon, Garnier, and a host of
others like them blazed the way through the wilderness to labor and
suffer and die for the salvation of the Indians. They made records in
the service of Christ among the Hurons, Algonquins, Iroquois and
Mohawks. To the South, in Florida, Spanish Franciscans fell victims to
the treachery of Creeks and Seminoles. In the middle of the last
century, before the coming of the settlers, Father De Smet spent
nearly forty years among the tribes of the great Western plains and in
the Rocky Mountain region. Other missionaries in Western Canada
penetrated the North as far as the Arctic Circle. In the seventies and
eighties of the nineteenth century, a frail and slender man, in the
person of the learned and saintly Archbishop Charles J. Seghers,
journeyed thousands of miles, to bring the message of the Master to
the red men in the vast territory of distant Alaska. In California,
Arizona and Texas, the traveler meets with many evidences and
monuments of the work of early Spanish Catholic missionaries among the
Indians. The records show that in some instances, the missionaries
were accompanied by Negroes. Probably the first Negro whose name is
recorded in North American history is that of Estevan, or Stephen, who
accompanied Father Marcos de Niza, in 1536, on a missionary
expedition into the territory of the present States of Arizona and New
Mexico.[495]

It is at a later period, however, than that of these early
missionaries, that the coming of the Negro as a notable part of the
population of the American Colonies begins. This growth takes its rise
with the revival of the slave trade in America after the first
importation of slaves brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. There
was long a demand for laborers, and thus an increasing number of
slaves were brought from Africa to the various colonies on the
Atlantic seaboard, from Massachusetts to Louisiana. British ships at
that time supplied not only English colonies with slave labor, but
also those of France and Spain.[496] Catholic co