[or Rasles]. French missionary, born in Franche-Comté in 1657. He became a Jesuit and professor of Greek at Nîmes; went to Canada, arriving at Quebec, October 13, 1689, and was stationed among the Abenaki and the Algonquin Indians, near the Falls of the Chaudière, learning their languages and customs; in 1692, went to Illinois; in 1694, took charge of the Abenaki mission at Norridgewock, on the Kennebec, and built a church. The Indians, incited by Frontenac and the French Jesuits, broke their treaty engagements with the British colonists. The English settlers laid the blame of their troubles with the Indians to Rale, and set a price on his head. They burned his church in 1705, and again in 1722 pillaged his house and carried away his dictionary of the Abenaki language, which they presented to Harvard College, and finally, in a third expedition in 1724, succeeded in killing him. In 1833 a monument was erected to his memory at Norridgewock. His Abenaki dictionary was published in 1833, and a memoir of him appeared in Sparks’s American Biography.
