Saints of the American Wilderness: The Brave Lives and Holy Deaths of the Eight North American Martyrs - John O'brien

True tales of horror and holiness

French priests enter a war zone where captured Westerners are paraded before their captors, tortured, and then beheaded. Their desecrated bodies get dumped by the roadside.

Iraq in 2007? The Gaza Strip? Western Afghanistan?

No. A place more dangerous: Canada in the 1600s. On rivers and in forests, Iroquois slaughter Huron and Europeans kill for land and power. It's a landscape of blood and horror whose viciousness eclipses the terrorism that shocks us today. Into this iniquitous land go dozens of stouthearted Jesuits, the purest examples of Roman Catholic virtue our Western continent has ever seen.

Their purpose? To baptize souls and preach the gospel to savages whose degraded, vicious lives cry out for the light of Christ.

Many of these Jesuits were murdered, and today eight of them are saints. Six were priests: Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf, Gabriel Lalemant, Antoine Daniel, Charles Garnier, an