LA SALLE AND THE FOUNDING OF LOUISIANA
La Salle leads an Expedition to seize the Mouth of the Mississippi.--A
Series of Mishaps.--Landing at Matagorda Bay.--Fort St. Louis of
Texas.--Seeking the Mississippi, La Salle explores the Interior of
Texas.--Mounted Comanches.--La Salle starts out to go to Canada for
Relief.--Interesting Experiences.--La Salle assassinated.--Tonty's
Heroic Efforts to rescue him and his Party.--Supplement: The Founding
of New Orleans.
On a day in February, 1685, a party landed from one of three vessels
lying off the entrance of Matagorda Bay, on the coast of Texas. They
were under the command of La Salle. What was this extraordinary man
doing there? In accordance with the plan which had long filled his
mind, of planting French forts and colonies in the valley of the Great
River and giving its trade an outlet into the Gulf of Mexico, he had
come to establish a fort on the Mississippi. This, the first part of
his plan, was very rational, if only he had the vast resources needed
for such an undertaking.
{262}
But the second part was so crazy that we must suppose that his mind was
beginning to give way. With a handful of Frenchmen and an army of
fifteen thousand savages, which he professed to be able to muster and
to march down the Mississippi, he had promised the King of France that
he would conquer the northern province of Mexico, called New Biscay,
and get possession of its valuable silver mines.
Louis had cheerfully accepted this insane proposition--insane, if we
consider the pitiful equipment that La Salle said would suffice,
namely, two ships and two hundred men. Louis was indeed furiously
jealous of the Spanish King's success in the New World and irritated by
his arrogant treatment of the Gulf of Mexico as private property of
Spain,--as completely a "closed sea" as if it had been a duck-pond in
his palace yard. Moreover, there was war now between the two
countries, and he would gladly seize an opportunity of striking his
rival a blow in what seemed an exposed part. Besides, the risk would
be small. If La Salle failed, the loss would be chiefly his; if he
succeeded, a province of Mexico would be a shining jewel in the French
crown.
So here was La Salle, with an outfit {263} corresponding with his mad
scheme--but three ships, only one a man-of-war, the "Joly," one a
little frigate, the "Belle," and one a transport, the "Aimable"; for
soldiers, the destined army of invasion, a parcel of rapscallions raked
up from the docks and the prisons; for colonists some mechanics and
laborers, priests and volunteers, with the usual proportion of "broken
gentlemen," some peasant families looking for homes in the New World,
and even some wretched girls who expected to find husbands in the land
of promise. This ill-assorted little mob to seize and colonize the
mouth of the Mississippi and to wrest a province from Spain!
From the first everything had gone wrong. La Salle and the
ship-captains, who could not endure his haughty manners, quarreled
incessantly. A Spanish cruiser captured his fourth vessel, laden with
indispensable supplies for the colony. Then he was seized with a
dangerous fever; and while the vessels waited at San Domingo for him to
be well enough to resume the voyage, his villains roamed the island and
rioted in debauchery.
Its destination being the mouth of the Mississippi, what was the
expedition doing at Matagorda Bay, in Texas? This was the result of
{264} another folly. Not a soul on board knew the navigation of the
Gulf, so carefully had Spain guarded her secret. The pilots had heard
much of the currents in those waters, and they made so excessive
allowance for them that when land was sighted, instead of being, as
they supposed, about Appalachee Bay, they were on the coast of Texas,
probably about Galveston Bay. In the end it proved to be a fatal
mistake, wrecking the enterprise.
On New Year's day La Salle landed and found only a vast marshy plain.
Clearly, this was not the mouth of the Great River. He returned on
board, and the vessel stood westward along the coast, every eye on
board strained to catch some indication of what they sought, whereas
they were all the time sailing further from it. At one point where
they stopped, some Indians, who doubtless were familiar with the sight
of white men, swam out through the surf and came on board without any
sign of fear. But, nobody knowing their language, nothing could be
learned from them.
After hovering for three weeks in sight of land, La Salle, perplexed
beyond measure, but forced to decide because the captain of the
man-of-war was impatient to land the men and to sail for {265} France,
announced that they were at one of the mouths of the Mississippi and
ordered the people and stores put ashore.
Scarcely were they landed, when a band of Indians set upon some men at
work and carried off some of them. La Salle immediately seized his
arms, called to some of his followers, and started off in pursuit.
Just as he was entering the Indian village, the report of a cannon came
from the bay. It frightened the savages so that they fell flat on the
ground and gave up their prisoners without difficulty. But a chill
foreboding seized La Salle. He knew that the gun was a signal of
disaster, and, looking back, he saw the "Aimable" furling her sails.
Her captain, in violation of orders, and disregarding buoys which La
Salle had put down, had undertaken to come in under sail and had ended
by wrecking her. Soon she began to break up, and night fell upon the
wretched colonists bivouacking on the shore, strewn with boxes and
barrels saved from the wreck, while Indians swarmed on the beach,
greedy for plunder, and needed to be kept off by a guard.
What a situation, ludicrous, had it not been tragic! Instead of
holding the key of the {266} Mississippi Valley, the expeditionists did
not even know where they were. Instead of the fifteen thousand
warriors who were expected to march with them to the conquest of New
Biscay, the squalid savages in their neighborhood annoyed them in every
possible way, set fire to the prairie when the wind blew toward them,
stole their goods, ambushed a party that came in quest of the missing
articles, and killed two of them.
Next came sickness, due to using brackish water, carrying off five or
six a day. When the captain of the little "Belle," the last remaining
vessel--for the man-of-war had sailed for France--got drunk and wrecked
her on a sand-bar, the situation was truly desperate. Nobody knew
where they were, and the last means of getting away by water had
perished.
In the meantime La Salle had chosen a place for a temporary fort, on a
river which the French called La Vache (Cow River), on account of the
buffaloes in its vicinity, and which retains the name, in the Spanish
form, Lavaca.
La Salle returned from an exploration unsuccessful. He had found
nothing, learned nothing; only, he knew now that he was not near the
Mississippi. The summer had worn away, {267} steadily filling the
graveyard, and, with the coming of the autumn, he prepared for a more
extensive exploration. On the last day of October he started out with
fifty men on his grand journey of exploration, leaving Joutel, his
faithful lieutenant, in command of the fort, which contained
thirty-four persons, including three Recollet friars and a number of
women and girls.
The winter passed not uncomfortably for the party in the fort. The
surrounding prairie swarmed with game, buffaloes, deer, turkeys, ducks,
geese, and plover. The river furnished an abundance of turtles, and
the bay of oysters. Joutel gives a very entertaining account of his
killing rattlesnakes, which his dog was wont to find, and of shooting
alligators. The first time that he went buffalo-hunting, the animals
were very numerous, but he did not seem to kill any. Every one that he
fired at lumbered away, as if it were unhurt. After some time he found
one dead, then others, and he learned that he had killed several.
After their wont they had kept their feet while life lasted. Even the
friars took a hand in buffalo-hunting.
La Salle and his party, meanwhile, were roaming wearily from tribe to
tribe, usually fighting {268} their way, always seeking the
Mississippi. At last they came to a large river which at first they
mistook for it. Here La Salle built a stockade and left some of his
men, of whose fate nothing was afterward heard. Then he set out to
return to Fort St. Louis, as he called his little fort on Lavaca. One
day in March he reappeared with his tattered and footsore followers,
some of them carrying loads of buffalo-meat.
Surely the condition of affairs was dismal in the extreme. More than a
year gone, and as yet the Frenchmen did not even know where they were.
The fierce heat of another summer was near. Still La Salle, with his
matchless courage, so soon as he recovered from a fit of illness,
formed a desperate resolve. He would start out again, find the
Mississippi, ascend that river and the Illinois to Canada, and bring
relief to the fort. This time the party was composed of twenty men,
some of them clad in deerskin, others in the garments of those who had
died. On April 11 they started out.
Months went by. Then, to the surprise of those in the fort, one
evening La Salle reappeared, followed by eight men of the twenty who
had gone out with him. One had been lost, {269} two had deserted, one
had been seized by an alligator, and six had given out on the march and
probably perished. The survivors had encountered interesting
experiences. They had crossed the Colorado on a raft. Nika, La
Salle's favorite Shawanoe hunter, who had followed him to France and
thence to Texas, had been bitten by a rattlesnake, but had recovered.
Among the Cenis Indians, a branch of the Caddo family, which includes
the famed Pawnees, they met with the friendliest welcome and saw plenty
of horses, silver lamps, swords, muskets, money, and other articles,
all Spanish, which these people had obtained from the fierce Comanches,
who had taken them in raids on the Mexican border. They also met some
of the Comanches themselves and were invited to join them in a foray
into New Mexico. But La Salle had, necessarily, long since given up
his mad scheme of conquest and was thinking only of extricating himself
from his pitiable dilemma.
This seems to have been the first meeting of Frenchmen with mounted
Indians of the plains. The possession of horses, which had strayed or
been stolen from Spanish settlements, had transformed these wild rovers
from foot-travelers, such {270} as Cabeza de Vaca and Coronado found
them, having no other domestic animals than dogs, into matchless
horsemen and the most dangerous brigands on the continent, capable of
covering hundreds of miles in an incredibly short space of time.
Splendid specimens of savage manhood, presenting the best type of the
Shoshonee stock, they amply avenged the terror which the sight of
mounted Spaniards at first struck into the hearts of the aborigines, by
harrying the colonists and laying the border in blood and ashes, as
they sometimes do to this day.[1]
{271}
From the Cenis villages, where they bought five horses, the Frenchmen
went as far, perhaps, as the Sabine River, encamped there for two
months, detained by La Salle's illness with fever, and then, on account
of their weakened condition, returned to Fort St. Louis.
{272}
A deeper pall of gloom settled upon the little band of exiles. They
had now been two years on that forlorn spot, and still they had not
even found their way out. From one hundred and eighty their number had
dwindled to forty-five. Clearly, there was but one thing to be done.
If anybody was to remain alive, the journey to Canada must be
accomplished, at all costs. This time La Salle determined to take
Joutel with him, leaving Barbier in command of the little party in the
fort.
The New Year, 1687, came, and a few days later, with sighs and tears,
the parting took place which many felt was for all time, and the
travelers went away in mournful silence, with their meagre outfit
packed on the horses, leaving Barbier to hold the fort with his little
band of twenty persons, including all the women and children and a few
disabled men.
We shall not attempt to trace closely the movements of the travelers.
For more than two months they journeyed in a northeasterly direction.
At the best, they were in wretched plight, with nothing for shoes but
raw buffalo-hide, which hardened about the foot and held it in the grip
of a vise. After a while they bought dressed {273} deerskin from the
Indians and made themselves moccasins. Rivers and streams they
crossed, two or three at a time, in a boat made of buffalo-hide, while
the horses swam after them. They met Indians almost daily and held
friendly intercourse with them.[2]
Once they saw a band of a hundred and fifty warriors attacking a herd
of buffalo with lances, and a stirring sight it was. These warriors
entertained the Europeans most handsomely. Says La Salle's brother,
the priest Cavelier, "They took us straight to the cabin of their great
chief or captain, where they first washed our hands, our heads, and our
feet with warm water; after which they presented us boiled and roast
meat to eat, and an unknown fish, cooked whole, that was six feet long,
laid in a dish of its length. It was of a wonderful taste, and we
preferred it to meat." Here the way-worn travelers were glad to buy
thirty horses--enough to give every one of them a mount, and to carry
their baggage besides--all for thirty knives, ten hatchets, and six
dozen needles!
{274}
In one of the villages they witnessed the catching of an alligator
twelve feet long on a large hook made of bone and baited with meat.
The Indians amused themselves an entire day with torturing it. They
would have been keenly disappointed, had they known how little this
animal, so low in the scale of life as to be almost insensible to pain,
suffered from their ingenious cruelty.
The Colorado and the Trinity were reached. A deluge of rain kept them
weather-bound for four or five days. It was a gloomy time. What added
fuel to the flame was that La Salle had with him a young nephew, named
Moranget, who presumed on his relation to the leader and behaved most
overbearingly to the men.
One day it chanced that some of the men were separated from the main
body when Nika killed two buffaloes. They sent word to La Salle, in
order that he might have the meat brought in on the horses.
Accordingly, he dispatched his nephew, Moranget, with two other men,
for that purpose. This was just the opportunity the malcontents
desired. Besides, Moranget incensed them by flying into a passion
because they had reserved certain portions of the meat for themselves,
and by seizing the whole of it. They laid their plans {275} and, in
the dead of the night, murdered him, La Salle's servant Saget, and his
faithful Indian, Nika.
Now they had to choose between killing La Salle and being killed by
him, as soon as he should learn the facts. They laid an ambush for
him, and when he came in the morning to look after the missing men,
they shot him dead. Then the murderers stripped his body, dragged it
into the bushes, and left it to be torn by buzzards.
Thus died, in the prime of his manhood, one who had done more than any
other toward the opening of our continent. He had traversed regions
where white men were almost unheard of. He had launched the first
vessel that ever floated on the vast inland seas above Niagara Falls.
He had established the French in the Illinois region, opening the way
for the possession of the Mississippi Valley. He had drawn hostile
Indian tribes together into a league strong enough to resist the Long
House. He had traveled thousands and thousands of miles on foot and by
canoe. He had led the first party of white men from the Lakes to the
Gulf of Mexico. His foresight had grasped the commercial value of the
Mississippi Valley, and, triumphing over enormous difficulties, he had
opened the Great {276} West to our race. And now all his greatness was
come to this, to die in the wilderness by an assassin's hand!
After the death of the leader, a little party, among whom were Joutel
and La Salle's brother, the friar Cavelier, after many strange
experiences, finally made their way down the Arkansas River to the
Mississippi. There, to their inexpressible joy, they found two of
their countrymen who had been left there by Tonty. That brave man and
loyal friend, when he received the news, by the way of France, of his
former leader's disastrous landing, had at once, at his own expense,
fitted out an expedition and led it down the Illinois to the mouth of
the Mississippi. Of course, he did not find La Salle or any trace of
him there. He had then returned to his post, leaving some of his men
at the mouth of the Arkansas. These escorted the survivors of La
Salle's party to Canada, whence they sailed to France, having made one
of the most remarkable journeys on record. They arrived in Europe, the
sole known survivors of the expedition that had left France three years
before.
Louis the Great, when he heard the news of the failure of the
enterprise, took no steps to {277} relieve the forlorn little band of
exiles on the coast of Texas. Not so Tonty. That brave soul
determined to rescue them, if possible. For the third time he voyaged
down the Mississippi, turned up the Red River, and penetrated as far as
the country of the Caddoes.[3] There he lost the most of his
ammunition in crossing a river, his men mutinied and refused to go
further, and he was compelled to turn back. On his way down the Red
River he encountered a flood and traveled more than a hundred miles
through country covered with water. The party slept on logs laid side
by side and were reduced to eating their dogs. Few men who figure in
our country's early story are more deserving of honorable remembrance
than this man with one hand and with the heart of a lion.
The French King neglected the exiles in Texas, but the Spanish King did
not. He ordered a force sent from Mexico, to destroy the nest of
invaders. When the Spanish soldiers arrived on the spot, not a human
being was to be seen. The poor little fort was a ruin, and a few {278}
skeletons were all that remained of its former inmates. The Indians in
the neighborhood told a story of a band of warriors who had entrapped
the garrison into opening the gates, on the plea of trading, and then
had rushed in and massacred them.
[Illustration: The Murder of La Salle]
Thus ended, for the time, La Salle's brilliant scheme of colonizing
Louisiana.
Supplement to Chapter XIV
The Executor of La Salle's Plan of Colonization.--First Experiences of
the Settlers.--Bienville's Shrewdness in getting rid of the
English.--New Orleans Founded.--Character of the Population.--Indian
Wars.
La Salle was dead, but his bright dream of France enthroned on the
Mississippi, holding in her hand the sceptre of the great West, was too
vital to die. It was growing more and more into the consciousness of
sea-going Europe, that the nation holding the mouth of the Great River
would grasp the key to the undeveloped wealth of the Western World. So
it was that when France stretched forth her hand to seize the coveted
prize, she found rivals in the field, Spain and {279} Great Britain
struggling for a foothold, Spain already planted at Pensacola, the
English nosing about the mouth of the Mississippi.
The man who was destined to achieve what La Salle had been hindered
from accomplishing only by the blunder of his pilots and the jealousy
of his associates, was Jean Baptiste LeMoyne de Bienville.
He was of that fine French Canadian stock that had already produced
Joliet, the brave explorer, and he belonged to a family whose seven
sons all won distinction, four of them dying in the service of their
country. When he came on the enterprise in which he was destined to
complete La Salle's unfinished work, he was a midshipman of twenty-two
serving with his older brother, Iberville, who was winning renown as a
brave and skilful naval captain. Though possessing none of La Salle's
brilliancy of genius, and never called on to make those heroic
exertions or to exhibit that amazing fortitude which were so
conspicuous in the case of the great explorer, he still exhibited
qualities which well fitted him for the task that fell to him, and
which earned for him the title of "Father of Louisiana."
To us it may seem strange that the first {280} reaching out of France
toward the incredibly rich Mississippi Valley did not touch the valley
itself, but made its lodgment on a sandy bluff overlooking a bay in the
territory of what is now the State of Mississippi. So it was, however,
and the fact only shows how little was grasped the true meaning of La
Salle's gigantic scheme.
In January, 1699, fifteen years after the great Pathfinder had made his
misguided landing in Texas, a small fleet from Brest was hovering about
the mouth of Mobile River seeking a place for settlement. It was
commanded by Pierre LeMoyne d'Iberville. With him were his two
brothers, Sauvolle and Bienville, and Father Anastase Douay, who had
accompanied La Salle.
One of the first spots which the Frenchmen visited bore evidences of a
ghastly tragedy. So numerous were the human bones bleaching on the
sandy soil that they called it Massacre Island (to-day Dauphin Island).
It was surmised--and with some plausibility--that here had perished
some portion of the ill-fated following of Pamphile de Narvaez. (See
"Pioneer Spaniards in North America," p. 200.)
Another island, farther to the west, chiefly impressed the visitors by
the great number of {281} animals, of a species new to them, which they
found there. Isle des Chats they called it, and as "Cat Island" it is
known to this day. Had the Frenchmen been naturalists, they would have
seen that there was more of the bear than of the cat about this
creature, for it was none other than our sly friend, the raccoon.
Leaving his vessels at anchor near the mouth of Mobile River,
Iberville, with his brother Bienville and Father Douay, went in search
of the mouth of the Mississippi. They found it and ascended the river
a considerable distance. What assured them that they really were on
the Great River was that they received from the Bayagoulas a letter
which Tonty had left with them for La Salle, when he made, in 1686,
that heroic journey all the way from the Illinois country to the Gulf,
in the vain effort to succor his chief.
Another interesting relic which the explorers are said to have seen,
was a coat of mail shown to them by the Indians near the Red River, as
once having belonged to a Spaniard. Though nearly one hundred and
sixty years had gone by since Hernando de Soto's famous expedition, it
is by no means improbable that this was a genuine relic of that
enterprise. Naturally, the {282} Indians would have highly prized and
would have kept, as a precious trophy, such a reminder of their
forefathers' heroic stand against the dastardly invaders.
The appearance on the river of the two English vessels, whose captain
frankly said that he was seeking a place for a settlement, was
conclusive evidence that France was none too early in reaching out for
the prize that others coveted. Bienville has the credit of getting rid
of the Britons by telling the officer that he might easily judge how
numerous and strong were his master's, the French King's, subjects, in
that region, from seeing them on the river in small boats--a piece of
reasoning which was rather ingenious than ingenuous. It had its effect
in sending away the Briton with "a flea in his ear." "English Turn,"
the name given to a great bend in the stream some miles below New
Orleans, keeps alive the memory of that piece of shrewdness. Not far
distant, by the way, is the field where, in 1815, the British regulars,
under Sir Edward Pakenham, received a disastrous defeat at the hands of
Andrew Jackson and his American riflemen.
Iberville planted his first settlement at Biloxi, {283} on Mississippi
Sound. Other French posts were shortly afterward established on Cat
Island, Dauphin Island, which is at the mouth of Mobile Bay, and at
Mobile. A little later Bienville built a fort fifty-four miles above
the mouth of the Great River, and he early began to insist that the
future of the colony lay on its banks, not on the shores and sandy
islands of the Gulf. But the time had not yet come when his ideas
would prevail. The wretched colony must first go through a dismal
experience of languishing, in consequence of which the seat of
government was removed to Mobile, and of actual famine.
At last, in 1718, Bienville, who by the death of his brother had
succeeded to the direction of affairs, with twenty-five convicts from
France and as many carpenters and some voyageurs from the Illinois
River, founded the city of New Orleans.
At the first the outlook was far from hopeful. The site was but a few
feet above the sea-level and was subject to constant inundation. Most
unfavorable reports went back to Mobile, which for five years longer
remained the seat of government. The population, too, was rude and
lawless, being made up of trappers, redemptioners having a period of
years to serve, transported {284} females, inmates of the House of
Correction, Choctaw squaws, and negro slave women--all, as an old
writer says, "without religion, without justice, without discipline,
without order, without police."
Bienville, however, held firmly to his purpose and, in 1723, procured
the royal permission to transfer the seat of government from Mobile to
the new settlement on the banks of the Great River. Thus, at last, was
La Salle's prophetic dream realized. France had become awake to the
importance of concentrating her strength where it could be effective,
rather than frittering it away on the shores of the Gulf.
One of the most striking evidences of the warm interest which the King
felt in the colony was his sending out, in 1728, a number of decent
girls, each with a trunk filled with linen and clothing (from which
they were called _filles à la cassette_, or girls with a chest), who
were to be disposed of under the direction of the Ursuline nuns, in
marriage to the colonists. Other consignments followed; and the homes
thus established soon gave to the population of the city a more quiet
and orderly character.
[Illustration: Le Moyne de Bienville]
Through various experiences, chiefly disastrous wars with the Natchez,
that remarkable people {285} whom La Salle visited on his great
exploration, and whom the French finally broke up and scattered, and
with the Chickasaws in Mississippi, that hardy breed of warriors who
had fought Soto so fiercely, and who now sent the Frenchmen back
discomfited, Bienville in his later years lost much of his earlier
prestige. But the fact remains that it was he who grasped the meaning
of La Salle's plan, he who founded New Orleans, and he who guided the
struggling colony through its perilous infancy. He well earned his
title of "Father of Louisiana."
[1] These matchless horsemen, probably unsurpassed in the world, are
also great jockeys, passionately fond of horse-racing and deeply versed
in all its tricks. The following laughable account of a race that he
witnessed is given by Col. Dodge in his very entertaining book, "Our
Wild Indians": "A band of Comanches once camped near Fort Chadbourne,
in Texas. Some of the officers were decidedly 'horsey,' owning blood
horses whose relative speed was well known. The Comanche chief was
bantered for a race, and, after several days of manoeuvring, a race was
made against the third best horse of the garrison, distance four
hundred yards.
"The Indians wagered robes and plunder of various kinds, to the value
of sixty or seventy dollars, against money, flour, sugar, etc., to a
like amount. At the appointed time the Indians 'showed' a miserable
sheep of a pony, with legs like churns, a three-inch coat of rough hair
stuck out all over the body; and a general expression of neglect,
helplessness, and patient suffering struck pity into the hearts of all
beholders. The rider was a stalwart buck of one hundred and seventy
pounds, looking big and strong enough to carry the poor beast on his
shoulders. He was armed with a huge club, with which, after the word
was given, he belabored the miserable animal from start to finish. To
the astonishment of all the whites, the Indian won by a neck.
"Another race was proposed by the officers, and, after much
'dickering,' accepted by the Indians, against the next best horse of
the garrison. The bets were doubled; and in less than an hour the
second race was run by the same pony, with the same apparent exertion
and with exactly the same result.
"The officers, thoroughly disgusted, proposed a third race and brought
to the ground a magnificent Kentucky mare, of the true Lexington blood.
The Indians accepted the race and not only doubled bets as before, but
piled up everything they could raise, seemingly almost crazed with the
excitement of their previous success. The riders mounted, and the word
was given. Throwing away his club, the Indian rider gave a whoop, at
which the sheep-like pony pricked up his ears and went away like the
wind almost two feet to the mare's one. The last fifty yards of the
course was run by the pony with the rider sitting face to his tail,
making hideous grimaces and beckoning to the rider of the mare to come
on.
"It afterwards transpired that the old sheep was a trick and
straight-race pony, celebrated among all the tribes of the south, and
had lately won for his master six hundred ponies among the Kickapoos of
the Indian Nation."
[2] They learned from these Indians to handle skin-boats, or
"bull-boats," such as we shall see were in constant use among the
Mandans of the upper Missouri.
[3] These people, sometimes called the Pawnee family, were scattered,
in various wandering bands, from eastern Texas as far north as the
Missouri.
{289}