RASLE, rel (RASLES, RALE, RALLE), SÉBASTIEN: French Jesuit missionary to the North American Indians; b. at Dôle (180 m. s.e. of Paris) in 1658; d. at Norridgewock, Me., Aug. 12 (23, new style), 1724. He arrived in Quebec Oct. 13, 1689, and after laboring in the Abenaki mission of St. Francis, near the Falls of the Chaudière, seven miles above Quebec, and in the Illinois country, among the Algonquins (1691 or 1692), he returned to the Abenakis (1693 or 1694), and finally settled at Norridgewock on the Kennebec. There he built a chapel (1698), and acquired so much influence among the Abenakis, that he was popularly believed to have incited them to attack the Protestant settlers on the coast. A price was set upon his head. In 1705, 1722, and 1724 Norridgewock was attacked by the settlers, with the result that the first time the chapel was burnt; the second time the rebuilt chapel and Rasle's house were pillaged, and his papers carried off, among them a manuscript dictionary of Abenaki, now in Harvard College library, printed in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, ed. with introduction and notes, John Pickering (Cambridge, 1833); and, the third time, he and seven Indians who had undertaken to defend him were killed.