Jean-Pierre Choné

Jean-Pierre Choné
Father Choné
Occupation	Jesuit missionary

Jean-Pierre Choné, also known as Father Choné, was a Jesuit missionary who laboured among the Ojibwe of the Lake Superior and Lake Huron regions in the mid-nineteenth century.

Mission work

• Choné joined Father Frémiot at the Fort William Mission after Frémiot's arrival in 1848, the two enduring great hardship paddling the shores of Lake Superior to reach it.
• Before coming to Fort William he had laboured among the Ojibwe at Manitoulin Island and other posts on Lake Huron.
• He met with greater missionary success than Frémiot: his converts included an old chief, a wandering Indian family, and a widow and her three daughters who settled near the mission chapel, and he was received with joy by several Ojibwe groups who asked him to return.
• He was present when Father du Ranquet returned to the mission one winter evening, his beard covered with frost and so weakened that Choné was briefly uncertain whether to administer extreme unction.

In the Papers of the Thunder Bay Historical Society (1921–1928)

The 1923 volume of the Papers of the Thunder Bay Historical Society reprints Henry Youle Hind's account of a visit to the Mission of the Immaculate Conception on the Kaministiquia River, then in Choné's charge.

• At the time of Hind's visit Choné had resided at the Mission for nine years; thirty to thirty-five substantially built wooden houses had been established there, generally superior to the log houses of Canadian pioneers, many with cultivated gardens and post-and-rail-fenced fields.
• Choné's room held a small library, a turning lathe, articles of his own manufacture, and a buffalo-robe-covered bed; Hind took it as indicative of the Mission's prosperity and cleanliness, and Choné supplied him with information on the valley's suitability for settlement and on the local Indigenous peoples and their treaty relations with the government of Canada.