TONTY’S HEROIC VENTURE
Couture had added the fatal sequel to the story of the Abbé and Joutel.
Tonty heard it with mingled despair and rage. He thought of La Salle
lying dead and unburied among the weeds beside a river hundreds of
leagues in the wilderness; and he thought of the five men who had come
to his fort and withheld the truth from him, the trusted lieutenant of
their master. So La Salle was in good health when he parted from them on
the other side of the Cenis villages! He remembered now the strange
silence of Father Douay. The friar could not say that La Salle was well
when he left him.
But the anger of Tonty rose most strongly against that priestly
brother—the Abbé who had prevented Joutel from taking vengeance upon the
murderers, who had accepted Tonty’s hospitality all through the winter
while deceiving him, and who had run off with his secret to France after
begging supplies under a letter from his dead brother.
But what of the little garrison on the shore of the Gulf, the forlorn
fragment of the colony under Gabriel Barbier at the other Fort St.
Louis? Tonty thought of Father Membré and of the hardships they had gone
through together. Was it too late to save them? A year had gone by since
the Abbé and his party had reached the fort on the Illinois. It was
almost two years since they had left Barbier; yet the colony might still
be alive. The master was gone and there was no one left to save them but
himself.
Perhaps in making ready to lead a rescue party to the fort on the Gulf,
Tonty forgot some of his anger atthe Abbé. Moreover, the Indian tribes
between the Illinois and the sea had given the Abbé assurances that they
would rally to an attack upon the Spaniards of the Southwest. Possibly
he could do more than save the colony: it might be that he could fulfill
the long cherished hope of La Salle by gathering a force of French and
Indians and invading the territory of the hated Spaniards.
Twice Tonty had gone to the Gulf—once with La Salle and once in search
of him. Now all that remained for him to do was to rescue the survivors
whom La Salle’s death had left almost without hope. He sent Couture back
on the trail by which the Abbé and his party had come, to get what
information he could; but Couture’s canoe was wrecked a hundred leagues
from the fort and he returned without news.
Then Tonty bought an Indian dugout and taking with him four or five
Frenchmen, a Shawnee, and two Indian slaves, was on his way early in
December. On the 17th, a village of Illinois Indians at the mouth of the
river saw him go by; and a month later, near the mouth of the Arkansas,
the Kappa tribe welcomed him with great joy and danced the calumet
before him. He could not stop long at the Arkansas towns, but pushed on
down the river to the country of the Taensas and the Natchez.
With a band of Taensas he left the Mississippi and struck off toward the
west. After traveling some days across country they came upon the
village of the Nachitoches, where they distributed presents and
concluded peace with the Indians. Taking guides at this point they went
up the Red River till they reached the village of the Cadadoquis, which
lay upon the route by which the Abbé and Joutel and their companions had
struggled out of the wilderness. Here the Indians told Tonty that Hiens
and his party were farther on at a village known as Nabedache. These
Nabedaches were the same Indians whom Joutel and the Abbé called the
Cenis. At last Tonty was nearing the object of his expedition; a few
more days and he would join the fragment of the party of La Salle and
push on to the Gulf.
But what was this murmuring? The Frenchmen flatly refused to go farther;
only one of them would stay with their leader. Tonty would push on
nevertheless. With his one white man, the Shawnee, the two slaves, and
five Cadadoquis as guides, he took up his march again early in April.
The Frenchman strayed from the party and it was two long days before he
found them again. Meanwhile, in crossing a river he had lost most of
their powder—a serious misfortune.
Before the end of the month Tonty and his party reached the Nabedache
village where two years before the Abbé and his companions had left
Hiens and his crew among the Indians. The Indians told various stories
of the Frenchmen for whom Tonty was searching. Some said that Hiens and
his party had gone off with their chiefs to fight the Spaniards; while
others told him that three had been killed by another tribe and the rest
had gone away in search of arrowheads. Tonty himself came to the firm
conclusion that the Cenis had killed the survivors.
He was now many leagues beyond the Red River and within a few days’
journey of the scene of La Salle’s murder. Eighty leagues more would
take him to the fort on the Bay of St. Louis. Tonty begged for guides,
but the Cenis would give him none. Hiens and his men were not to be
found. He looked at his remaining supply of gunpowder, so necessary for
providing food as well as defense. It was almost gone. Even Tonty could
go no farther. With heavy heart he gave the Indians some hatchets and
glass beads in exchange for Spanish horses and turned back toward the
Mississippi.
It was the 10th of May when they reached the Cadadoquis village on the
Red River, and here they stopped for a week to rest their horses. Then
with an Indian guide they started once more for the Coroa village. In
all the ten years Tonty had spent in the wilds he never had suffered
such hardships—not even during his bitter experiences in the winter of
1680, when with Father Membré and his young French companions he had
struggled out of the clutches of the Iroquois in the valley of the
Illinois and fought his way against cold and starvation to the friendly
Pottawattomie village on Green Bay.
While leading one of the horses by the bridle across a swamp the guide
imagined himself pursued by an alligator and tried to climb a tree. In
his haste he entangled the bridle of Tonty’s horse, which was drowned.
Fearful of punishment the guide made off to his people, leaving the
party to find their way alone.
With Tonty in the lead they crossed, by one means or another, eight or
ten swollen streams. Everywhere the country seemed drowned, for the
spring freshets were on. They gave up their horses and carried their own
baggage, wading day after day in water often up to their knees. They had
to sleep and light their fires and cook their food on the trunks of
fallen trees placed together. Only once did they find anything like dry
land in the endless leagues of flooded country.
Their food gave out and they ate their dogs. There was nothing left and
no wild animals were to be found in all the wet dreariness. One, two,
three days passed with nothing to eat—only the water everywhere. On the
evening of the third day, the 14th of July, they came at length to the
Coroa village, where the chiefs feasted them for as many days as they
had fasted. Here they found two of the men who had deserted; and toward
the end of the month they all went on together to the towns at the mouth
of the Arkansas River. The months of hardship had sapped even Tonty’s
endurance, and now for nearly two weeks he lay sick with a fever among
these kindly Indians.
It was late in September, 1689, when Tonty finally reached the towering
rock at Fort St. Louis and climbed to its friendly summit to rest. In
the weary ten months’ expedition he had neither found the bones of his
friend, nor reached his fort on the Gulf, nor led an invading force into
the land of the Spaniard. But he had done all that lay in his power to
rescue his leader’s last garrison.
The Abbé had left his own brother unburied in the wilds, had
deliberately for more than a year delayed any effort to rescue the
survivors at the fort, and had gone off to France on funds obtained by
fraud and deceit. But Tonty, almost alone, had braved every peril and
hardship for nearly a year in a last courageous but unsuccessful effort
to save the pitiful remnant of his friend’s ill-fated colony on the Bay
of St. Louis.