FROM THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF
Père Marquette was still in a convent in Rheims when a French wood-ranger
and fur trader was out in those western forests making friends for the
French, one Sieur Nicolas Perrot, who would doubtless have been forgotten
with many another of his craft if he had not been able-as few of them
were-to read and write. And Marquette was but on his way from France to
Canada when Sieur Perrot was ministering with beads and knives and
hatchets and weapons of iron to these stone-age men on the southern shore
of Superior, where the priest was later to minister with baptismal water
and mysterious emblems. It was Perrot, whom they would often have
worshipped as a god, who prepared the way for the altars of the priests
and the forts of the captains; for back of the priests there were coming
the brilliantly clad figures of the king's representatives. Once when
Perrot was receiving such adoration, he told the simple-minded worshippers
that he was "only a Frenchman, that the real Spirit who had made all, had
given the French the knowledge of iron and the ability to handle it as if
it were paste"; that out of "pity for His creatures He had permitted the
French nation to settle in their country." [Footnote: Emma H. Blair,
"Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley," 1:310.] At another time
he said: "I am the dawn of that light, which is beginning to appear in
your lands," and having learned by experience the true Indian eloquence,
he proceeded in his oration with most impressive pauses: "It is for these
young men I leave my gun, which they must regard as the pledge of my
esteem for their valor. They must use it if they are attacked. It will
also be more satisfactory in hunting cattle and other animals than are all
the arrows that you use. To you who are old men I leave my kettle (pause);
I carry it everywhere without fear of breaking it" (being of copper or
iron instead of clay). "You will cook in it meat that your young men bring
from the chase, and the food which you offer to the Frenchmen who come to
visit you." [Footnote: Blair, "Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi
Valley," 1:330, 331.] And so he went on, throwing iron awls to the women
to be used instead of their bone bodkins, iron knives to take the place of
pieces of stone in killing beavers and cutting their meat, till he reached
his peroration, which was punctuated with handfuls of round beads for the
adornment of their children and girls.
Do not think this a petty relation. It is a detail in the story of an age
of iron succeeding, in a single generation, an age of stone. The splendor
of the court and age of Louis XIV was beginning to brighten the sombreness
of the northern primeval forests.
It is this ambassador Perrot, learned in the craft of the woods rather
than in that of the courts, more effective in his forest diplomacy than an
army with banners, who soon after (1671) appears again on those shores,
summoning the nations to a convocation by the side of that northern
tumultuous strait, known everywhere now as the "Soo," then as the Sault
Ste. Marie, there to meet the representatives of the king who lived across
the water and of the Onontio who governed on the St. Lawrence.
This convocation, of which Perrot was the successful herald, was held in
the beginning of summer in the year 1671 (the good fishing doubtless
assisting the persuasiveness of Perrot's eloquence in procuring the great
savage audience). When the fleets of canoes arrived from the west and the
south and east, Daumont de St. Lusson and his French companions, sent out
the previous autumn from Quebec, having wintered in the Mantoulin Island,
were there to meet them. It is a picture for the Iliad. Coureur de bois
and priest had penetrated these regions, as we have seen; but now was to
take place the formal possession by the crown of a territory that was
coming to be recognized as valuable in itself, even if no stream ran
though it to the coasts that looked on Asia.
The scene is kept for us with much detail and color. On a beautiful June
morning the procession was formed, the rapids probably furnishing the only
music for the stately march of soldier and priest. After St. Lusson, four
Jesuits led the processional: Dablon, Allouez, whom we have already seen
on the shores of Superior, André from the Mantoulin Island, and
Druilletes; the last, familiar from his long visit at Plymouth and Boston
with the character of the Puritan colonies and doubtless understanding as
no one else in that company, the menace to the French of English
sturdiness and industry and self-reliant freedom. He must have wondered in
the midst of all that formal vaunt of possession, how long the mountains
would hold back those who were building permanent bridges over streams,
instead of traversing them in ephemeral interest, or as paths to waters
beyond; who were working the iron of the bogs near by, instead of hunting
for the more precious ores or metals on remote shores; who were sawing the
trees into lumber for permanent homes and shops, instead of adapting
themselves to the more primitive life and barter in the woods; who were
getting riches from the cleared fields, instead of from the backs of
beavers in the sunless forests; who were raising sheep and multiplying
cattle, instead of hunting deer and buffaloes; who were beginning to trade
with European ports not as mere voyageurs but as thrifty merchants; who
were vitally concerned about their own salvation first, and then
interested in the fate of the savage; and who, above all, were learning in
town meetings to govern themselves, instead of having all their daily
living regulated from Versailles or the Louvre. Druilletes, remembering
New England that day, must have wondered as to the future of this
unpeopled, uncultivated empire of New France, without ploughs, without
tame animals, without people, even, which St. Lusson was proclaiming.
[Footnote: See Justin Winsor "Pageant of St. Lusson," 1892.] Was its name
indeed to be written only in the water which their canoes traversed?
There were fifteen Frenchmen with St. Lusson, among them the quiet,
practical, unboastful Joliet, trained for the priesthood, but turned
trader and explorer, who had already been two years previous out on the
shores of Superior looking for copper. Marquette was not with the priests
but was urging on the reluctant Hurons and Ottawas who did not arrive
until after the ceremony.
The French were grouped about a cross on the top of a knoll near the
rapids, and the great throng of savages, "many-tinted" and adorned in the
mode of the forest, sat or stood in wider circle. Father Dablon sanctified
a great wooden cross. It was raised to its place while the inner circle
sang _Vexilla Regis_. Close to the cross a post bearing a plate inscribed
with the royal arms, sent out by Colbert, was erected, and the woods heard
the _Exaudiat_ chanted while a priest said a prayer for the king. Then St.
Lusson (a sword in one hand and "crumbling turf in the other") cried to
his French followers who applauded his sentences, to the savages who could
not understand, to the rapids which would not heed, and to the forests
which have long forgotten the vibrations of his voice, the words in French
to which these words in English correspond:
"'In the name of the most high, most mighty and most redoubtable monarch
Louis, the XIVth of the name, most Christian King of France and Navarre,
we take possession of the said place of Ste Mary of the Falls as well as
of Lakes Huron and Supérieur, the Island of Caientoton and of all other
Countries, rivers, lakes and tributaries, contiguous and adjacent
thereunto, as well discovered as to be discovered, which are bounded on
the one side by the Northern and Western Seas and on the other side by the
South Sea, including all its length or breadth;' Raising at each of the
said three times a sod of earth whilst crying Vive le Roy, and making the
whole of the assembly as well French as Indians repeat the same; declaring
to the aforesaid Nations that henceforward as from this moment they were
dependent on his Majesty, subject to be controlled by his laws and to
follow his customs, promising them all protection and succor on his part
against the incursion or invasion of their enemies, declaring unto all
other Potentates, Princes and Sovereigns, States and Republics, to them
and their subjects, that they cannot or ought not seize on, or settle in,
any places in said Country, except with the good pleasure of his said most
Christian Majesty and of him who will govern the Country in his behalf, on
pain of incurring his hatred and the effects of his arms; and in order
that no one plead cause of ignorance, we have attached to the back the
Arms of France thus much of the present our Minute of the taking
possession." [Footnote: "Wisconsin Historical Collections," 11:28.]
Then the priest Allouez (as reported by his brother priest Dablon), after
speaking of the significance of the cross they had just raised, told them
of the great temporal king of France, of him whom men came from every
quarter of the earth to admire, and by whom all that was done to the world
was decided.
"But look likewise at that other post, to which are affixed the armorial
bearings of the great Captain of France whom we call King. He lives beyond
the sea; he is the Captain of the greatest Captains, and has not his equal
in the world. All the Captains you have ever seen, or of whom you have
ever heard, are mere children compared with him. He is like a great tree,
and they, only like little plants that we tread under foot in walking. You
know about Onnontio, that famous Captain of Quebec. You know and feel that
he is the terror of the Iroquois, and that his very name makes them
tremble, now that he has laid waste their country and set fire to their
Villages. Beyond the sea there are ten thousand Onnontios like him, who
are only the Soldiers of that great Captain, our Great King, of whom I am
speaking. When he says, 'I am going to war,' all obey him; and those ten
thousand Captains raise Companies of a hundred soldiers each, both on sea
and on land. Some embark in ships, one or two hundred in number, like
those that you have seen at Quebec. Your Canoes hold only four or five
men--or, at the very most, ten or twelve. Our ships in France hold four or
five hundred, and even as many as a thousand. Other men make war by land,
but in such vast numbers that, if drawn up in a double file, they would
extend farther than from here to Mississaquenk, although the distance
exceeds twenty leagues. When he attacks, he is more terrible than the
thunder: the earth trembles, the air and the sea are set on fire by the
discharge of his Cannon; while he has been seen amid his squadrons, all
covered with the blood of his foes, of whom he has slain so many with his
sword that he does not count their scalps, but the rivers of blood which
he sets flowing. So many prisoners of war does he lead away that he makes
no account of them, letting them go about whither they will, to show that
he does not fear them. No one now dares make war upon him, all nations
beyond the sea having most submissively sued for peace. From all parts of
the world people go to listen to his words and to admire him, and he alone
decides all the affairs of the world. What shall I say of his wealth? You
count yourselves rich when you have ten or twelve sacks of corn, some
hatchets, glass beads, kettles, or other things of that sort. He has towns
of his own, more in number than you have people in all these countries
five hundred leagues around; while in each town there are warehouses
containing enough hatchets to cut down all your forests, kettles to cook
all your moose, and glass beads to fill all your cabins. His house is
longer than from here to the head of the Sault"--that is, more than half a
league--"and higher than the tallest of your trees; and it contains more
families than the largest of your Villages can hold." [Footnote: "Jesuit
Relations" (Thwaites), 55:111-113.]
This remarkable proclamation and this extraordinary speech are to be found
in the records. And the historian would end the incident here. But one may
at least wonder what impressions of Louis the Great and Paris and France
these savages carried back to their lodges to ponder over and talk about
in the winter nights; and one must wonder, too, what impression the
proclamation and pantomime of possession made upon their primitive minds.
Perrot translated the proclamation for them, and asked them to repeat
"Long live the king!" but it must have been a free translation that he
made into their idioms; he must have softened "vassals" to "children," and
"king" to "father," and made them understand that the laws and customs of
Versailles would not curb their freedom of coiffure or attire, of chase or
of leisure, on the shores of Superior.
The speech of Allouez may seem full of hyperbole to those who know, in
history, the king, and, by sight, the palace employed in the priest's
similes; but if we think of Louis XIV not in his person but as a
representative of the civilization of Europe that was asserting its first
claim there in the wilderness, and give to the word of the priest
something of the import of prophecy, the address becomes mild, indeed.
Through those very rapids a single fleet of boats carries every year
enough iron ore to supply every man, woman, and child in the United States
(97,000,000) with a new iron kettle every year; another fleet bears enough
to meet the continent's, if not the world's, need of hatchets. Trains
laden with golden grain, more precious than beads, trains that would
encircle the palace at Versailles or the Louvre now cross that narrow
strait every day. A track of iron, bearing the abbreviated name of the
rapids and the mission, penetrates the forests and swamps from which that
savage congregation was gathered in the first great non-religious
convocation on the shores of the western lakes where men with the
scholarship of the Sorbonne now march every year with emblems of learning
on their shoulders.
As to the proclamation, Parkman asks, what now remains of the sovereignty
it so pompously announced? "Now and then," he answers, "the accents of
France on the lips of some straggling boatman, or vagabond half-breed--
this and nothing more."
But again I would ask you to think of St. Lusson not as proclaiming merely
the sovereignty of Louis XIV or of France, but as heralding the new
civilization, for if we are to appreciate the real significance of that
pageant and of France's mission, we must associate with that day's
ceremony, not merely the subsequent wanderings of a few men of French
birth or ancestry in all those "countries, rivers, lakes and streams,"
"bounded on the one side by the seas of the north and west and on the
other by the South Sea," but all that life to which they led the
adventurous, perilous way.
The Iroquois and disease had thinned the Indian populations of the
northeast, but here was a new and a friendly menace to that stone-age
barbarism whose dusky subjects found their way back to their haunts by the
stars, lighted their fires by their flint, and gluttonously feasted in
plenty, or stoically fasted in famine.
For the French it was a challenge to "those countries, lakes and islands
bounded by the seas." They must now "make good the grandeur of their
hopes." And a brave beginning is soon to be made. This highly colored
scene becomes frontispiece of another glorious chapter, in the midst of
whose hardship one will turn many a time to look with a sneer or smile, or
with pity, at the figures in court garments, burnished armor, and
"cleansed vestments," standing where the east and the west and the far
north and the south meet.
From the shores of a seigniory on the St. Lawrence, eight or nine miles
from Montreal, just above those hoarse-voiced, mocking rapids which had
lured and disappointed Cartier and Champlain and Maisonneuve, and which
were to get their lasting name of derision from the disappointment of the
man who now (1668) stands there, Robert René Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle,
looks across the waters of Lake St. Louis (into which the St. Lawrence for
a little way widens) to the "dim forests of Chateauguay and Beauharnois."
His thoughts look still farther, for they are out in that valley of his
imagination through which a river "must needs flow," as he thinks, "into
the 'Vermilion Sea'"--the Gulf of California. The old possessing dream!
This young man (but twenty-five years of age) was a scion of an old and
rich family of Rouen. As a youth he showed unusual traits of intellect and
character and (it is generally agreed) doubtless because of his promise,
he was led to the benches of the Jesuits. Whether this be true or not, he
was an earnest Catholic. But his temperament would not let him yield
unquestioned submission to any will save his own. For it was will and not
mere passion that mastered his course. "In his faults," says a sympathetic
historian, "the love of pleasure had no part." At twenty-three he had left
Rouen, and securing a seigniory, where we have just seen him, in the "most
dangerous place in Canada," he made clearing for the settlement which he
named the Seigniory of St. Sulpice (having received it from the seminary
of St. Sulpice), but which his enemies named, as they named the rapids,
"La Chine."
There tutored in the Indian languages and inflamed of imagination as he
looked day after day off to the west, his thoughts "made alliance with the
sun," as Lescarbot would have said, and dwelt on' exploration and empire.
It was ten years later that those who were keeping the mission and the
trading-post on Point St. Ignace, where to-day candles burn before the
portrait of Père Marquette, saw a vessel equipped with sails, as large as
the ships with which Jacques Cartier first crossed the Atlantic, come
ploughing its way through waters that had never before borne such burdens
without the beating of oars or paddles. Its commander is Sieur de la
Salle, now a noble and possessed of a seigniory two hundred miles west of
that on which we left him--two hundred miles nearer his goal. This
galleon, called the _Griffin_ because it carried on its prow the carving
of a griffin, "in honor of the armorial bearings of Count Frontenac," was
the precursor of those mighty fleets that now stir those waters with their
commerce.
These ten years of disaster and disappointment, but also of inflexible
purpose and indomitable persistence, must not be left to lie unremembered,
though the recital must be the briefest. In 1669, in company with some
Sulpitian priests and others, twenty-four in all, he sets forth from his
seigniory. Along the south shore of Ontario they coast, stopping on the
way to visit the Senecas, La Salle, at least, hoping to find there a guide
to the headwaters of what is now known as the Ohio River. Disappointed, he
with them journeyed on westward past the mouth of the Niagara River,
hearing but the sound of the mighty cataract. At the head of Lake Ontario
they have the astounding fortune to meet Louis Joliet, who with a
companion was returning from Superior (two years before the pageant of St.
Lusson) and who had just discovered that great inland lake between the two
lakes, Ontario and Huron (which had been shown on French maps as connected
by a river only). This lake, Erie, now the busiest perhaps of all that
great chain, had been avoided because of the hostility of the Iroquois,
and so it was that it was last to rise out of the geographic darkness of
that region. Even Joliet's Iroquois guide, although well acquainted with
the easier route, had not dared to go to the Niagara outlet but had
followed the Grand River from its northern shores and then portaged to
Lake Ontario.
The Sulpitian priests and their companions followed to the west the newly
found course, but La Salle, the goal of whose thought was still the Ohio,
feigning illness (as it is believed), received the sacrament from the
priests (an altar being improvised of some paddles), parted from them,
and, as they at the time supposed, went back to Montreal. But it was not
of such fibre that his purposes were knit. Just where he went it is not
with certainty known, but it is generally conceded that he reached and
followed the Ohio as far at least as the site of Louisville, Ky. It is
claimed by some that he coasted the unknown western shores of Lake Huron;
that he reached the site of Chicago; and that he even saw the Mississippi
two years at least before Marquette and Joliet. What Parkman says in his
later edition, after full and critical acquaintance with the Margry papers
in Paris, is this: "La Salle discovered the Ohio, and in all probability
the Illinois also; but that he discovered the Mississippi has not been
proved, nor, in the light of the evidence we have, is it likely." Winsor
argues that in the minds of those who knew him in Montreal, La Salle's
projects had failed, since it was then that the mocking name was given to
his estate--a name which, by the way, has been made good, as some one
remarks, "by the passage across La Salle's old possessions of the Canadian
Pacific Railway," a new way to China.
I think we must admit, with his enemies of that day and hostile
authorities of this, despite Margry's documents, that except for his
increased knowledge of the approaches and his acquaintance with Indians
and the conditions of nature in that valley, La Salle's expedition was a
failure. It was his first defiance of the wilderness before him and the
first victory of his enemies behind him.
While Marquette is spending the winter, sick of a mortal illness, in the
hut on the Chicago portage, La Salle is in Paris, bearing a letter from
Frontenac, in which he is recommended to Minister Colbert as "the most
capable man I know to carry on every kind of enterprise and discovery" and
as having "the most perfect knowledge of the state of the country,"
[Footnote: Margry, "Découvertes et établissements des Français," 1:227.]
that is, of the west. A letter I find was sent to Colbert under the same
or proximate date [Footnote: Winsor dates letter November 14, 1674.
Margry, November 11.] acquainting Colbert with the discovery made by
Joliet. La Salle must therefore have known of the Mississippi and its
course, even if he himself had not beheld it with his own eyes or felt the
impulse of its current.
He goes back to Canada possessed of a new and valuable seigniory (having
spent the proceeds of the first in his unsuccessful venture) under charge
to garrison Fort Frontenac (on the north shore of Ontario) and to gather
about it a French colony. For two years he labors there, bringing a
hundred acres of sunlight into the forests, building ships for the
navigation of the lake, and establishing a school under the direction of
the friars. He might have stayed there and become rich "if he had
preferred gain to glory"--there where he had both solitude and power.
"Feudal lord of the forest around him, commander of a garrison raised and
paid by himself, founder of the mission and patron of the church, he
reigned the autocrat of his lonely little empire." But this does not
satisfy him. It is but a step toward the greater empire still farther to
the west.
In 1677 he comes back again to Paris with a desire not for land, but for
authority to explore and open up the western country, which he describes
in a letter to Colbert. It is nearly all "so beautiful and fertile; so
free from forests and so full of meadows, brooks and rivers; so abounding
in fish, game, and venison that one can find there in plenty, and with
little trouble, all that is needful for the support of powerful colonies.
The soil will produce anything that is raised in France." [Footnote:
Parkman, "La Salle," p. 122. Margry, 1:331.] He says that cattle may be
left out all winter, calls attention to some hides he has brought with him
of cattle whose wool is also valuable, and again expresses confidence that
colonies would become prosperous, especially as they would be increased by
the tractable Indians, who will readily adapt themselves to the French way
of life, as soon as they taste the advantages of French friendship. He
does not fail to mention the hostility of the Iroquois and the threatened
rivalry of the English, who are beginning to covet that country--all of
which only animates him the more to action. Lodged in Paris in an obscure
street, Rue de la Truanderie, and attacked as a visionary or worse, he is
yet petitioning Louis XIV for the government of a realm larger than the
king's own, and holding conference with Colbert.
In the early summer, after his winter of waiting somewhere in the vicinity
in which I have written this chapter, a patent comes to him from the
summer palace at St.-Germain-en-Laye, which must have been to him far more
than his patent of nobility or title to any estate in France:
"Louis, by the grace of God King of France and Navarre, to our dear and
well-beloved Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, greeting. We have
received with favor the very humble petition made us in your name to
permit you to undertake the discovery of the western parts of New France;
and we have the more willingly consented to this proposal, since we have
nothing more at heart than the exploration of this country, through which,
to all appearances, a way may be found to Mexico." [Footnote: Various
translations. Original in Margry, 1:337.] La Salle, accordingly, was
permitted to build forts at his own expense, to carry on certain trade in
buffalo-hides, and explore to his heart's content.
This lodger in Rue de la Truanderie now sets about raising funds for his
enterprise and, having succeeded chiefly among his brothers and relations,
he gathers materials for two vessels, hires shipwrights, and starts from
Rochelle for his empire, his commission doubtless bound to his body,
taking with him as his lieutenant Henri de Tonty--son of the inventor of
the Tontine form of life insurance who had come to France from Naples--a
most valuable and faithful associate and possessed of an intrepid soul to
match his own.
From Fort Frontenac, an outpost, La Salle's company pushes out to build a
fort below Niagara Falls near the mouth of the Niagara River, the key to
the four great lakes above, and to construct a vessel of fifty tons above
the Falls for the navigation of these upper lakes. It is on this journey
that the world makes first acquaintance of that mendacious historian Friar
Hennepin, who, equipped with a portable altar, ministered to his
companions and the savages along the way and wrote the chronicles of the
expedition. It is he who has left us the first picture of Niagara Falls
unprofaned by tourists; of the buffalo, now extinct except for a few
scrawny specimens in parks, and of St. Anthony Falls. After loss by wreck
of a part of the material intended for the vessel and repeated delays, due
to La Salle's creditors at Frontenac and the Indians on his way, the
vessel was at last completed, launched with proper ceremonies, and started
on her maiden trip up those lakes where sail was never seen before.
It is this ship that found temporary haven in the cove back of Point St.
Ignace in 1679 while La Salle, "very finely dressed in his scarlet cloak
trimmed with gold lace," knelt, his companions about him, and again heard
mass where the bones of Marquette were doubtless even then gathered before
the Jesuit altar. Thence they pushed on to Green Bay, where some of his
advance agents had gathered peltries for his coming. The _Griffin_, loaded
with these, her first and precious cargo, was sent back to satisfy his
creditors, and La Salle with fourteen men put forth in their canoes for
the land of his commission, of "buffalo-hides," and of "the way toward
Mexico."
I will "make the _Griffin_ fly above the crows," La Salle is recorded to
have said more than once in his threat toward those of the Black Gowns who
were opposing his imperious plans, because they aimed at the occupation,
fortification, and settlement of what the order still hoped to keep for
itself. But the flight of this aquatic griffin gave to La Salle no good
omen of triumph. The vessel never reached safe port, so far as is known.
Tonty searched all the east coast of Lake Michigan for sight of her sail,
but in vain. And those whom in America we call "researchers"--those who
hunt through manuscripts in libraries--have not as yet had word of her.
Many have doubtless walked, as I, the shores of that lake with thoughts of
her, but no one has found so much as a feather of her pinions. Whether she
foundered in a storm or was treacherously sunk and her cargo stolen, no
one will probably ever know.
La Salle and his men in their heavily laden canoes had a tempestuous
voyage up the west shore of Lake Michigan. [Footnote: It will illustrate
what a change has come over a bit of that shore along which he passed if I
tell you that when I landed there one day from a later lake _Griffin_, at
a place called Milwaukee--in La Salle's day but another "nameless
barbarism"--the first person whom I encountered chanced to be reading a
copy of _the London Spectator_--the ultimate symbol of civilization some
would think it.] They passed the site of Chicago, deciding upon another
course (which persuades me that La Salle must have been in that region
before) and on till they reached the mouth of the St. Joseph River, where
precious time was lost in waiting for Tonty and his party coming up the
other shore. I take space to speak in such detail of this voyage because
it traces another important route into the valley.
About seventy miles up the stream there stands an old cedar-tree bearing,
as it is believed by antiquarians, the blaze marks of the old French
broadaxes and marking the beginning of another of those historic portage
paths over the valley's low rim. I have visited this portage more than
once, and when last there I dug away the sand and soil about the trunk of
the tree till I could trace the scar left by the axe of the French. It is
only about two miles from this tree at the bend of the St. Joseph to where
a mere ditch in the midst of the prairie, a tributary of the Illinois,
soon gathers enough eager water to carry a canoe toward the Gulf of
Mexico.
I have read in the chronicles, with a regret as great as that of the
hungry Hennepin, that the Illinois, from whom La Salle expected
hospitality at their village farther down the Illinois River, which had
been visited by Marquette twice, were off on their hunting expeditions.
But I have satisfaction in knowing that he took needful food from their
caches in my own county, now named La Salle.
Early in January they passed on to a village four days beyond--the site of
the second largest city in the State of Illinois. There La Salle, detained
by Indian suspicions of his alliance with the Iroquois, discouraged by the
desertion of some of his own men and by the certainty that the _Griffin_
was lost beyond all question not only with its skins but with the
materials for a vessel, which he purposed building for the Mississippi
waters, stayed for the rest of the winter, building for shelter and
protection a fort which he named Fort Crèvecoeur, not to memorialize his
own disheartenments as some hint, but, as we are assured by other
historians, to celebrate the demolition of Fort Crèvecoeur in the
Netherlands by Louis XIV, in which Tonty had participated. The vessel for
the Mississippi he bravely decides to build despite the desertion of his
sawyers, who had fled to the embrace of barbarism and who, fortunately,
did not return to prevent the employment of the unskilled hands of La
Salle himself and some others of his men. And so the first settlement in
Illinois begins.
On the last day of February Father Hennepin and two associates were sent
down the Illinois River on a voyage of exploration, carrying abundant
gifts with which to make addresses to the Indians along the way. We may
not follow their tribulations and experiences, but we have reason to
believe that they reached the upper waters of the Mississippi. There,
taken by the Sioux, they were in humiliating and even perilous captivity
till rescued by the aid of Du Lhut. We almost wish that the rumor that
Hennepin had been hung by his own waist-cord had been true, if only we
could have had his first book without the second.
On the next day La Salle, leaving Tonty in command, set out amid the
drifting ice of the river with four or perhaps six [Footnote: Margry,
1:488.] men and a guide for Fort Frontenac, to replace at once the
articles lost in the _Griffin_, else another year would be spent in vain.
Having walked many, many miles along that particular river on those
prairies, I can appreciate, as perhaps some readers cannot, what it means
to enter upon a journey of a thousand miles when the "ground is oozy" and
patches of snow lie about, and the ice is not strong enough to bear one's
weight but thick enough to hinder one's progress. La Salle, moreover, was
in constant danger of Indians of various tribes. In a letter to a friend
he said that though he knew that they must suffer all the time from
hunger, sleep on the open ground, and often without food, watch by night
and march by day, loaded with baggage, sometimes pushing through thickets,
sometimes wading whole days through marshes where the water was waist-
deep; still he was resolved to go. Two of the men fell ill. A canoe was
made for them and the journey continued. Two men were sent to Point St.
Ignace to learn if any news had come of the _Griffin_. At Niagara, where
he learned of further misfortune, he left the other two Frenchmen and the
faithful Mohigan Indian as unfit for further travel and pushed on with
three fresh men to Fort Frontenac, which he reached in sixty-five days
from the day of his starting from Fort Crèvecoeur. This gives intimation
and illustration of the will which possessed the body of this "man of
thought, trained amid arts and letters." "In him," said the Puritan
Parkman, "an unconquerable mind held at its service a frame of iron." And
Fiske adds: "We may see here how the sustaining power of wide-ranging
thoughts and a lofty purpose enabled the scholar, reared in luxury, to
surpass in endurance the Indian guide and the hunter inured to the
hardships of the forest." I have wondered how his petition to the king, if
written after this journey, would have described this valley. But its
attraction seems not to be less despite this experience, for he was
setting forth again, when word came to him that his Fort Crèvecoeur had
been destroyed, most of his men deserting and throwing into the river the
stores and goods they could not carry away!
All has to be begun again. Less than nothing is left to him of all his
capital. Nothing is left except his own inflexible spirit and the loyalty
of his Tonty in the heart of the wilderness. Still undismayed, he turns
his hand to the giant task again, only to find when he reaches the
Illinois a dread foreboding of the crowning disaster. The Iroquois, the
scourge of the east, had swept down the valley of the Illinois like hyenas
of the prairies, leaving total desolation in their path. After a vain,
anxious search for Tonty among the ruins and the dead, he makes his way
back, finding at last at the junction of the two rivers that make the
Illinois a bit of wood cut by a saw.
I fear to tire the reader with the monotony of the mere rehearsal of
difficulty and discouragement and despairful circumstance which I feel it
needful to present in order to give faithful background to the story of
the valley. I have by no means told all: of continued malevolence where
there should have been help; of the conspiracy of every possible untoward
circumstance to block his way. But the telling of so much will be
tolerated in the knowledge that, after all, his master spirit did triumph
over every ill and obstacle. With Tonty, who, as he writes, is full of
zeal, he confounded his enemies at home, gathered the tribes of the west
into a confederacy against the Iroquois, as Champlain had done in the
east, gave up for the present the building of the vessel, and in 1681, the
river being frozen, set out on sledges at Chicago portage and made a
prosperous journey down the Illinois to Fort Crèvecoeur. Re-embarking in
his canoes, they paddled noiselessly past tenantless villages into the
Mississippi. He went beyond the mouth of the Arkansas, reached by Joliet
and Marquette; he was entertained by the Indians of whom Châteaubriand has
written with such charm in his "Atala"; and at last, in April, 1682,
fifteen years from the days that he looked longingly from his seigniory
above the Lachine Rapids, he found the "brackish water changed to brine,"
the salt breath of the sea touched his face, and the "broad bosom of the
great gulf opened on his sight--limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born
of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life."
His French companions and his great company of Indians about him, he
repeated there, in the subtropical spring, the ceremony which ten years
before had been performed two thousand miles and more by the water to the
north, but in phrases which his inflexible purpose, valorously pursued,
had given him a greater right to pronounce. "In the name of the most high,
mighty, invincible and victorious prince, Louis the Great--I,--in virtue
of the commission of his majesty which I hold in my hand, and which may be
seen by all whom it may concern, have taken and do now take, in the name
of his Majesty--possession of this country of Louisiana, the seas,
harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all nations, peoples,
provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams,
and rivers,--from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called
the Ohio,--as also along the river Colbert, or Mississippi, and the rivers
which discharge themselves thereinto, from its source beyond the
Nadouessioux--as far as its mouth at the sea, or Gulf of Mexico, and also
to the mouth of the River of Palms, upon the assurance we have had from
the natives of these countries, that we are the first Europeans who have
descended or ascended the river Colbert." [Footnote: Margry, 2:191.]
None could have remembered the emaciated followers of De Soto, who cared
not for the land since they had found no gold there and asked only to be
carried back to the sea, whence they had so foolishly wandered. There were
probably not even traditions of the white god who had a century and a half
before been buried in the river that his mortality might be concealed. It
was, indeed, a French river, from where Hennepin had been captured by the
Sioux through the stretches covered by Marquette and Joliet to the very
sea which La Salle had at last touched. The water path from Belle Isle,
Labrador, to the Gulf of Mexico was open, with only short portages at
Lachine and Niagara and of a few paces where the Fox all but touches the
Wisconsin, the Chicago the Des Plaines, or the St. Joseph the Kankakee. It
took almost a century and a half to open that way, but every league of it
was pioneered by the French, and if not for the French forever, is the
credit the less theirs?
When the "weathered voyagers" that day on the edge of the gulf planted the
cross, inscribed the arms of France upon a tree, buried a leaden plate of
possession in the earth and sang to the skies "The banners of heaven's
king advance," La Salle in a loud voice read the proclamation which I have
in part repeated. Thus "a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile,"
[Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 308.] in fact gave to France a river
and a stupendous territory, of which Parkman has made this description for
the title-deed: "The fertile plains of Texas, the vast basin of the
Mississippi, from its frozen springs to the sultry borders of the gulf;
from the wooded ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky
Mountains--a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts, and
grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand
warlike tribes." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 308.] They gave it to
France. That, perhaps, the people of France almost wish to forget. But it
is better and more accurately written: "On that day France, pioneer among
nations, gave this rich, wide region to the world."