THE ARMS OF THE KING OF FRANCE
In the year fifteen hundred and forty, Jacques Cartier raised a white
cross crowned with the _fleur-de-lis_ of France upon an improvised altar
of crossed canoe paddles at Quebec, bearing the inscription "_Franciscus
Primus, Dei gratia, Francorum Rex Regnat_," and formally took possession
of a new continent. Two centuries later, in the dawn of early morning,
British soldiers wrested from the betrayed Montcalm the mist-enshrouded
height where that emblazoned cross had stood, and New France fell--"amid
the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its
origin."
All the American Indians soon found, as the Iroquois had, that nothing
would do but these newly come Frenchmen must run about over all the
country. Each river must be ascended, the portages traversed, and lakes
crossed. Every hint of further rivers and lakes resulted forthwith in a
thousand questions, if not in the immediate formation of an exploring
expedition.
And yet there was method in the madness of this running about. In the
first place log forts were founded at various points, and when the world
came to know even a fraction as much as the French did about the West,
it found that these forts were situated at the most strategic points on
the continent. For instance, there was Fort Frontenac near the narrowing
of Lake Ontario into the St. Lawrence. This fort commanded that river.
Then there was Fort Niagara, which commanded the route to Lake Erie.
There was Fort Detroit which commanded all access from Lake Erie to
lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior. There were forts La Boeuf,
Venango, and Duquesne to hold the Ohio, Fort Sandusky to hold the
Sandusky river, Fort Miami at the head of the rapids on the
Miami-of-the-Lakes, to hold that river, and the portage to the Wabash,
and Vincennes and Kaskaskia and other posts in the Illinois country.
The Indians did not object to these forts because they found that they
were really no forts at all, but rather depots and warehouses for the
great fur trade, where their heavy stacks of otter and sable and beaver
skins could be exchanged for such splendid colored ribbons and tinkling
bells, and powder, lead, and whiskey. Each fort became a trading post
where the Indians gathered frequently for entertainments--of various
character.
Fancy if you can the emparadizing dreams which must have filled the head
of many a governor of New France, as he surveyed with heaving breast the
vast domains of the Mississippi valley, comprising four million square
miles of delectable land, and pictured the mighty empire it would some
day sustain--outrivaling the dreams of a Grand Monarque. Fancy, if you
can, the great hopes of the builder of Quebec who could see the infant
city holding in fee all the great system of lakes beside whose
sea-outlet it stood--the Gibraltar of the new continent. Fancy the
assemblies of notables which met when a returned Jesuit or forgotten
coureur-de-bois came hurrying down the Ottawa in his canoe and reported
the finding of a mighty river, yet unchronicled, filled with beaver and
otter; a new, bright gem for the Bourbon crown!
And so, we may suppose, such assemblies referred mockingly to the stolid
Englishmen living along the Atlantic seaboard to the south. How the
French must have scorned England's conception of America. Long after the
French had passed from Quebec to the Lakes and down the Mississippi to
the Gulf of Mexico, the English had a boat built at home which could be
taken apart on the upper waters of the James river, carried across the
mountains on wagons, to be put together on the shores of the Pacific
Sea. How the French must have laughed when they heard of this; can you
not see them drinking hilariously to the portable boat stranded in the
Alleghany forests three thousand miles from its destination?
And so it was that the wily emissaries of the Bourbon throne
incorporated the fast filling hunting-ground of the Iroquois, with New
France. It was an easily acquired country since they brought nothing
into it that was not wanted, and took nothing away--but furs! Though of
these they were particular respecting the number and the quality, and
especially that traders from the English settlements over the mountains
should not come and get them.
But it turned out that the English not only came, but even claimed for
themselves the Ohio country which lay beyond the Alleghany mountains! If
Cabot and Drake discovered the continent, did they not discover its
interior as truly as its seaboard? Moreover, the English had by treaty
acquired certain rights from the Iroquois which held good, they
maintained, wherever the Iroquois had carried their irresistible
conquests from Labrador to the everglades of Florida. And who could then
say that this did not hold good beyond the Alleghanies, where the
Iroquois for so long had been the acknowledged masters?
Thus it was, slowly, naturally, and with the certainty of doom itself,
there drew on the terrible war which decided whether the destiny of the
new continent should be placed in the hands of a Teutonic or a Gaelic
civilization--whether Providence should hold the descendants of the
founders of Jamestown or of Quebec responsible for its mighty part in
the history of human affairs. This war has received the vague name of
the "French and Indian" war. By this is meant the war England and her
colonists in America fought against the French and Indians.
It is remarkable enough that this war, which was to settle so much,
began from a spark struck in the West. The explanation of this is found
in the fact that a great expanse of forest separated the English
settlements on the Atlantic seaboard and the great line of French
settlements, three thousand leagues in length, which stretched from the
mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. The nearest points of
contact were in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for here the rivalry of
French and English traders had been most intense.
Virginians found it a very acceptable part to play--this trying the test
case with France to decide who was the real master of the land over the
mountains. In 1749, a company of Virginian gentlemen received from the
King of England a royal charter granting them possession of two hundred
thousand acres of the Black Forest between the Monongahela and Kanawha
rivers.
The astonishment and anger of the French on the St. Lawrence knew no
bounds. Immediately the French governor Galissonière set on foot plans
which would result in the withdrawal of the English colonists.
Looking back through the years, it may seem very strange that the
governors of New France never anticipated a clash with England on the
Ohio and prepared for it, but it appears, that, of all the West, _Lake
Erie and the Ohio river were the least known to the French_. This can be
understood by following the romantic story of French exploration:
On a wild October day, Cartier, who raised the altar at Quebec and
claimed the new continent, stood on Mt. Royal, looking wistfully
westward. Behind him lay the old world throbbing with an intuition of a
northwest passage to China and India. Before him shimmered in the sun
two water-ways. As we know them now, the southern was the St. Lawrence,
the western the Ottawa.
It was a strange providence which compelled Cartier to set the tide of
French trade and exploration over the Ottawa rather than up the St.
Lawrence. By this France lost, we are told, the Hudson valley--the key
to the eastern half of the continent--but gained the Great Lakes. This
tide of trappers, merchants, Jesuits, and adventurers went up the
western river, across into Georgian Bay, through the lakes, down the
Allegheny, Wabash, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Mississippi. Some few braved
the dangers of traveling in the domains of the Iroquois and went up the
St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, then across to Lake Simcoe and Georgian
Bay. The important result was that Lake Erie was the last of all the
Great Lakes to be discovered and the country south of it was the last to
be explored and claimed by the French. Lakes Ontario and Huron were
discovered in 1615, Lake Superior in 1629, Lake Michigan in 1634. Lake
Erie was not discovered until 1669--half a century after the two lakes
which it joins; and then for a hundred years it was a mystery. Champlain
drew it on his map as a widened river; other maps of the day make it a
brook, river, strait, or lake, as their authors fancied. One drew it as
a river, and, in perplexity over its outlet, ran it into the Susquehanna
and down into Chesapeake Bay. And as late as 1750, in the map of
Céloron, is written along the southern shore of Lake Erie, "This shore
is almost unknown."
It is a custom peculiar to the French to declare possession of a land by
burying leaden plates, upon which their professions of sovereignty are
incised, at the mouths of its rivers. This has been an immemorial
custom, and has been done in recent times in the Pacific sea. La Salle
buried a leaden plate at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682, claiming
possession of that river and all streams emptying into it and all lands
drained by them. But, now, more plates were needed. And so Céloron de
Bienville, a gallant Chevalier of St. Louis, departed from Quebec in the
fall of the same year with a detachment of eight subaltern officers, six
cadets, an armorer, twenty soldiers, one hundred and eighty Canadians,
thirty friendly Iroquois, and twenty-five Abnakis, with a load of
leaden plates to be buried at the mouths of all the rivers in the
Central West. Two plates were buried in what we now call the Allegheny
river and one at the mouths of Wheeling creek, the Muskingum, Great
Kanawha, and Miami rivers. At the burial of each plate a given formality
was observed. The detachment was drawn up in battle array. The leader
cried in a loud voice "_Vive le Roi_," and proclaimed that possession
was taken in the name of the king. In each instance, the _Arms of the
King_, stamped upon a sheet of tin, were affixed to the nearest tree,
and a _Procès Verbal_ was drawn up and signed by the officers. Each
plate bore the following inscription:
"In the year 1749, of the reign of Louis XV., King of France, We,
Céloron, commander of a detachment sent by Monsieur the Marquis de la
Galissonière, Governor General of New France, to reëstablish
tranquillity in some Indian villages of these cantons, have buried
[_here a space was left for the date and place of burial_] this plate of
lead near the river Ohio otherwise _Belle Rivière_, as a monument of the
renewal of possession we have taken of the said river Ohio, and of all
those which empty into it, and of all lands on both sides as far as the
sources of said rivers, as enjoyed by the Kings of France preceding, and
as they have there maintained themselves by arms and treaties,
especially those of Ryswick, Utrecht, and Aix-la-Chapelle."
Ah! but leaden bullets were more needed in the West than leaden plates!
This Céloron found out before he had gone a dozen leagues. Suspicious
savages dug up his first plate and hurried with it to the English at
Albany. Is it strange that the Indians soon came to the conclusion that
there was ever some fatal connection between the art of writing and
their home-lands? At Logstown, near the present city of Pittsburg, he
found some detested English traders, and a strong anti-French influence.
He drove off the intruders with a sharp letter to their governor, but
here his Iroquois and Abenaki Indians deserted him, and, on their way
north, tore from the trees those sheets which contained yet more of that
horrid writing. Céloron hurried homeward by the shortest route--up the
Miami river and down the Maumee and through the lakes--and rendered his
alarming report. It was decided immediately to fortify Céloron's route.
The enterprising successor of Galissonière--Governor Duquesne--sent a
detachment from Quebec with orders to proceed to Lake Erie and begin the
building of a line of forts down the Ohio frontier, from Lake Erie to
the Ohio river. This party, under the command of M. Marin, landed near
the present site of Erie, Pennsylvania, and raised a fort.
The ruins of this fort in the West are still perceptible within the
limits of the city of Erie. It was a strong work built of chestnut logs,
fifteen feet high and one hundred and twenty feet square, with a
blockhouse on each side. It had a gate to the south and one to the
north, but no portholes. It was first called Fort Duquesne, but later
was named Fort Presque Isle from the promontory which juts out into the
lake. From Fort Presque Isle M. Marin hewed a road southward, a distance
of thirteen miles, twenty-one feet in width, to the Rivière aux
Boeufs--river of Buffaloes--later named French creek by Washington.
This was the first white man's road--military or otherwise--ever made in
the Central West. It was built in 1753, and though it has not been used
over its entire length since that day, it marks, in a general way, the
important route from the lakes to the Allegheny and Ohio, which became
early in the century the great thoroughfare for freight to and from the
Ohio valley and the east. For a distance of seven miles out of the city
of Erie the old French road of a century and a half ago is the main road
south. At that distance from the city the new highway leaves it, but the
old route can be followed without difficulty until it meets the
Erie-Watertown plank road, the new Shun pike. This plank road follows
the road cut by the French general one hundred and forty-nine years ago.
Those that traveled over the same road in 1795, speak of the trees which
were growing up and blocking the thoroughfare. It seems to have been the
first intention of the French to make this road a military road in the
European sense, leveling hills and filling the valleys. And for half
the distance between Erie and French creek the road had been grubbed by
hauling out the stumps of the trees. Travelers refer to the great
cavities which were left open, for the road was never completed on the
lines originally laid out. It was built with some care and served for
the hauling of cannon to the forts along the Allegheny and Ohio. Cannon
balls, accoutrements, and pieces of harness were found along the route
as late as 1825. In the day of the pioneer, the route was lessened from
Erie to French creek to thirteen miles. This Watertown turnpike was a
principal thoroughfare for the great salt trade between the east and
Pittsburg and Louisville. In return, iron, glass, and flour were
freighted over it eastward from the Monongahela, and bacon from
Kentucky. The tradition prevails in Erie that, when the French abandoned
Fort Presque Isle, at the close of the French and Indian war, treasures
were buried either on the site of the fort or on the old road. Spanish
silver coins to the value of sixty dollars were found while plowing the
site of the old fort within twenty-five years, but these may not have
been left by the French. Old walls have been excavated again and again
but without extraordinary results. Pottery of singular kinds, knives,
bullets, and human bones have been found. Thus, something of the air of
romance of the old French days still lingers over this first pathway of
the French in the Central West.
At the end of this road was erected Fort La Boeuf on the north bank of
the west fork of Rivière aux Boeufs, at the intersection of High and
Water streets in what is now the city of Watertown, Pennsylvania. Being
an inland fort, it was not ranked or fortified as a first-class one;
yet, as a trading fort, it was of much importance in the chain from
Quebec to the Ohio. Of it Washington said, "The bastions were made of
piles driven into the ground, standing more than twelve feet above it,
and sharp at the top, with portholes cut for the cannon, and loopholes
for the small arms to fire through. There are eight six-pound pieces
mounted in each bastion, and one piece of four pounds before the gate.
In the bastions are a guardhouse, chapel, doctor's lodging, and the
commander's private stores, round which are laid platforms for the
cannon and the men to stand on. There are several barracks without the
fort, for the soldiers' dwellings, covered, some with bark, and some
with boards, made chiefly of logs. There are also several other houses,
such as stables, smith's shop, etc."
Late in the summer of 1753, M. Marin sent fifty men to erect a third
fort in the chain from Lake Erie, at Venango, just below the junction of
French creek and the Allegheny river, on the present site of Franklin,
Pennsylvania. Possession was taken of the site by Captain Chabert de
Joncaire, who spent the winter in the trader Frazier's hut, having been
opposed by the Delaware chieftain Half King who said "that the land was
theirs, and that they would not have them build upon it." In the spring,
however, machinery for a sawmill was brought from Canada, and oak and
chestnut trees were cut down and sawn into timbers for a new fort which
was completed in April. It was not an elaborate work but answered its
purpose as an entrepôt for goods going down to Fort Duquesne. It was
named Fort Machault, from Jean Baptiste Machault, a celebrated French
financier and politician and favorite of La Pompadour. The fort was a
parallelogram about seventy-five by one hundred and five feet with
bastions in the form of polygons at the four angles. The gate fronted
the river. It contained a magazine protected by three feet of earth, and
five barracks two stories high furnished with stone chimneys. The
soldiers' barracks consisted of forty-four buildings erected around the
fort on the north and east sides.
Thus, strong in her resources of military and civil centralization,
France at last moved swiftly into the West. In this, her superiority
over the English colonies was as marked as her success in winning her
way into the good graces of the Indians. French and English character
nowhere show more plainly than in the nature of their contact with the
Indians as each met them along the St. Lawrence, Allegheny, and the
Great Lakes. The French came to conciliate the Indians, with no scruples
as to how they might accomplish their task. The coureur-de-bois threw
himself into the spirit of Indian life and very nearly adopted the
Indian's ideals. The stolid English trader, keen for a bargain, justly
suspicious of his white rival, invariably distant, seldom tried to
ingratiate himself into the friendship of the red man. The voyageur
flattered, cajoled, entertained in his wild way, regaled at tables,
mingled without stint in Indian customs. Sir Guy Carleton wrote, "France
did not depend on the number of her troops, but on the discretion of her
officers who learned the language of the natives ... distributed the
king's presents, excited no jealousy and gained the affections of an
ignorant, credulous but brave people, whose ruling passions are
independence, gratitude, and revenge." The Englishman little affected
the conceits of the red man, seldom opened his heart and was less
commonly familiar. He ignored as much as possible Indian habits; the
Frenchman feigned all reverence for them, with a care never to rupture
their stolid complacency. The English trader clad like a ranger or
trapper, made no more use of Indian dress than was necessary. The
voyageur adopted Indian dress commonly, ornamented himself with
vermilion and ochre, and danced with the aborigines before the fires; he
wore his hair long, crowned with a coronet of feathers; his hunting
frock was trimmed with horse-hair fringe and he carried a charmed
rattlesnake's tail. "They were the most romantic and poetic characters
ever known in American frontier life. Their every movement attracts the
rosiest coloring of imagination. We see them gliding along the streams
in their long canoes, shapely and serviceable as any water craft that
man has ever designed, yet buoyant and fragile as the wind-whirled
autumn leaf. We catch afar off the thrilling cadences of their choruses
floating over the prairie and marsh, echoing from forest and hill,
startling the buffalo from his haunt in the reeds, telling the drowsy
denizens of the posts of the approach of revelry and whispering to the
Indian village of gaudy fabrics, of trinkets and of fire water." This
was not alone true of the French voyageur, it was more or less true of
French soldier and officer. Such deportment was not unknown among
English traders but it must have been comparatively rare. Few men of
his race had such a lasting and honorable hold upon the Indian as Sir
William Johnson and we cannot be wrong in attributing much of his power
(of such momentous value to England through so many years) to the spirit
of comradeship and familiarity which underlay his studied deportment.
"Are you ignorant," said the French governor Duquesne to a deputation of
Indians, "of the difference between the king of France and the English?
Look at the forts which the king had built: you will find that under
their very walls, the beasts of the forests are hunted and slain; that
they are, in fact, fixed in places most frequented by you merely to
gratify more conveniently your necessities. The English, on the
contrary, no sooner occupy a post, than the woods fall before their
hand--the earth is subjected to cultivation--the game disappears--and
your people are speedily reduced to combat with starvation." M. Garneau,
the French historian, frankly acknowledges that the marquis here
accurately described the chief difference between the two
civilizations. In 1757, M. Chauvignevie, Jr., a seventeen-year-old
French prisoner among the English, said that at Fort La Boeuf the
French plant corn around the fort for the Indians, "whose wives and
children come to the fort for it, and get furnished also with clothes at
the king's expense."
Horace Walpole, speaking of the French and English ways of seating
themselves in America, said: "They enslaved, or assisted the wretched
nations to butcher one another, instructed them in the use of firearms,
brandy, and the New Testament, and at last, by scattered extension of
forts and colonies, they have met to quarrel for the boundaries of
empires, of which they can neither use nor occupy a twentieth part of
the included territory." "But," he sneers elsewhere, "_we_ do not
massacre; we are such good Christians as only to cheat."
But, while the French moved down the lakes and the Allegheny, and the
English came across the mountains, what of the _poor_ Indian for whose
_rich_ lands both were so anxious?
An old Delaware sachem did not miss the mark widely when he asked the
question: "The French claim all the lands on one side of the Ohio, and
the English on the other: now, where does the Indian's land lie?" Truly,
"between their father the French and their brothers the English, they
were in a fair way of being lovingly shared out of the whole country."
In 1744, the English paid four hundred pounds to the representatives of
the Six Nations for assuming to cede to them the land between the
Alleghany Mountains. But, as we have seen, the Six Nations had
practically given up their Alleghany hunting-grounds to the other
nations who had swarmed in, the Delawares (known to the French as the
_Loups_, "wolves"), and the Shawanese. So, in a loose way, the
confederacy of the Six Nations was friendly to the English, while the
actual inhabitants of the land which the Six Nations had "sold" were
hostile to the English and usually friendly to the French. Besides these
(the Delaware and Shawanese nations), many fugitives from the Six
Nations, especially Senecas, were found aiding the French as the
momentous struggle drew on.