THE FRENCH OF THE OHIO VALLEY, 1763-1775.
The result of England's last great colonial struggle with France was to
sever from the latter all her American dependencies, her colonists
becoming the subjects of alien and rival powers. England won Canada and
the Ohio valley; while France ceded to her Spanish allies Louisiana,
including therein all the territory vaguely bounded by the Mississippi
and the Pacific. As an offset to this gain Spain had herself lost to
England both Floridas, as the coast regions between Georgia and
Louisiana were then called.
Thus the thirteen colonies, at the outset of their struggle for
independence, saw themselves surrounded north, south, and west, by lands
where the rulers and the ruled were of different races, but where rulers
and ruled alike were hostile to the new people that was destined in the
end to master them all.
The present province of Quebec, then called Canada, was already, what
she has to this day remained, a French state acknowledging the English
king as her over-lord. Her interests did not conflict with those of our
people, nor touch them in any way, and she has had little to do with our
national history, and nothing whatever to do with the history of the
west.
In the peninsula of East Florida, in the land of the cypress, palmetto,
and live oak, of open savannas, of sandy pine forests, and impenetrable,
interminable morasses, a European civilization more ancient than any in
the English colonies was mouldering in slow decay. Its capital city was
quaint St. Augustine, the old walled town that was founded by the
Spaniards long years before the keel of the _Half-Moon_ furrowed
the broad Hudson, or the ships of the Puritans sighted the New England
coast. In times past St. Augustine had once and again seen her harbor
filled with the huge, cumbrous hulls, and whitened by the bellying
sails, of the Spanish war vessels, when the fleets of the Catholic king
gathered there, before setting out against the seaboard towns of Georgia
and the Carolinas; and she had to suffer from and repulse the
retaliatory inroads of the English colonists. Once her priests and
soldiers had brought the Indian tribes, far and near, under subjection,
and had dotted the wilderness with fort and church and plantation, the
outposts of her dominion; but that was long ago, and the tide of Spanish
success had turned and begun to ebb many years before the English took
possession of Florida. The Seminoles, fierce and warlike, whose warriors
fought on foot and on horseback, had avenged in countless bloody forays
their fellow-Indian tribes, whose very names had perished under Spanish
rule. The churches and forts had crumbled into nothing; only the cannon
and the brazen bells, half buried in the rotting mould, remained to mark
the place where once stood spire and citadel. The deserted plantations,
the untravelled causeways, no longer marred the face of the tree-clad
land, for even their sites had ceased to be distinguishable; the great
high-road that led to Pensacola had faded away, overgrown by the rank
luxuriance of the semi-tropical forest. Throughout the interior the
painted savages roved at will, uncontrolled by Spaniard or Englishman,
owing allegiance only to the White Chief of Tallasotchee. St. Augustine,
with its British garrison and its Spanish and Minorcan townsfolk,[2] was
still a gathering place for a few Indian traders, and for the scattered
fishermen of the coast; elsewhere there were in all not more than a
hundred families.[3]
Beyond the Chattahooche and the Appalachicola, stretching thence to the
Mississippi and its delta, lay the more prosperous region of West
Florida.[4] Although taken by the English from Spain, there were few
Spaniards among the people, who were controlled by the scanty British
garrisons at Pensacola, Mobile, and Natchez. On the Gulf coast the
inhabitants were mainly French creoles. They were an indolent,
pleasure-loving race, fond of dancing and merriment, living at ease in
their low, square, roomy houses on the straggling, rudely farmed
plantations that lay along the river banks. Their black slaves worked
for them; they, themselves spent much of their time in fishing and
fowling. Their favorite arm was the light fowling-piece, for they were
expert wing shots;[5] unlike the American backwoodsmen, who knew nothing
of shooting on the wing, and looked down on smooth-bores, caring only
for the rifle, the true weapon of the freeman. In winter the creoles
took their negroes to the hills, where they made tar from the pitch
pine, and this they exported, as well as indigo, rice, tobacco, bear's
oil, peltry, oranges, and squared timber. Cotton was grown, but only for
home use. The British soldiers dwelt in stockaded forts, mounting light
cannon; the governor lived in the high stone castle built of old by the
Spaniards at Pensacola.[6]
In the part of west Florida lying along the east bank of the
Mississippi, there were also some French creoles and a few Spaniards,
with of course negroes and Indians to boot. But the population consisted
mainly of Americans from the old colonies, who had come thither by sea
in small sailing-vessels, or had descended the Ohio and the Tennessee in
flat-boats, or, perchance, had crossed the Creek country with pack
ponies, following the narrow trails of the Indian traders. With them
were some English and Scotch, and the Americans themselves had little
sympathy with the colonies, feeling instead a certain dread and dislike
of the rough Carolinian mountaineers, who were their nearest white
neighbors on the east.[7] They therefore, for the most part, remained
loyal to the crown in the Revolutionary struggle, and suffered
accordingly.
When Louisiana was ceded to Spain, most of the French creoles who formed
her population were clustered together in the delta of the Mississippi;
the rest were scattered out here and there, in a thin, dotted line, up
the left bank of the river to the Missouri, near the mouth of which
there were several small villages,--St. Louis, St. Genevieve, St.
Charles.[8] A strong Spanish garrison held New Orleans, where the
creoles, discontented with their new masters, had once risen in a revolt
that was speedily quelled and severely punished. Small garrisons were
also placed in the different villages.
Our people had little to do with either Florida or Louisiana until after
the close of the Revolutionary war; but very early in that struggle, and
soon after the movement west of the mountains began, we were thrown into
contact with the French of the Northwestern Territory, and the result
was of the utmost importance to the future welfare of the whole nation.
This northwestern land lay between the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the
Great Lakes. It now constitutes five of our large States and part of a
sixth. But when independence was declared it was quite as much a foreign
territory, considered from the standpoint of the old thirteen colonies,
as Florida or Canada; the difference was that, whereas during the war we
failed in our attempts to conquer Florida and Canada, we succeeded in
conquering the Northwest. The Northwest formed no part of our country as
it originally stood; it had no portion in the declaration of
independence. It did not revolt; it was conquered. Its inhabitants, at
the outset of the Revolution, no more sympathized with us, and felt no
greater inclination to share our fate, than did their kinsmen in Quebec
or the Spaniards in St. Augustine. We made our first important conquest
during the Revolution itself,--beginning thus early what was to be our
distinguishing work for the next seventy years.
These French settlements, which had been founded about the beginning of
the century, when the English still clung to the estuaries of the
seaboard, were grouped in three clusters, separated by hundreds of miles
of wilderness. One of these clusters, containing something like a third
of the total population, was at the straits, around Detroit.[9] It was
the seat of the British power in that section, and remained in British
hands for twenty years after we had become a nation.
The other two were linked together by their subsequent history, and it
is only with them that we have to deal. The village of Vincennes lay on
the eastern bank of the Wabash, with two or three smaller villages
tributary to it in the country round about; and to the west, beside the
Mississippi, far above where it is joined by the Ohio, lay the so-called
Illinois towns, the villages of Kaskaskia and Cahokia, with between them
the little settlements of Prairie du Rocher and St. Philip.[10]
Both these groups of old French hamlets were in the fertile prairie
region of what is now southern Indiana and Illinois. We have taken into
our language the word prairie, because when our backwoodsmen first
reached the land and saw the great natural meadows of long grass--sights
unknown to the gloomy forests wherein they had always dwelt--they knew
not what to call them, and borrowed the term already in use among the
French inhabitants.
The great prairies, level or rolling, stretched from north to south,
separated by broad belts of high timber. Here and there copses of
woodland lay like islands in the sunny seas of tall, waving grass. Where
the rivers ran, their alluvial bottoms were densely covered with trees
and underbrush, and were often overflowed in the spring freshets.
Sometimes the prairies were long, narrow strips of meadow land; again
they were so broad as to be a day's journey across, and to the American,
bred in a wooded country where the largest openings were the beaver
meadows and the clearings of the frontier settlers, the stretches of
grass land seemed limitless. They abounded in game. The buffalo crossed
and recrossed them, wandering to and fro in long files, beating narrow
trails that they followed year in and year out; while bear, elk, and
deer dwelt in the groves around the borders.[11]
There were perhaps some four thousand inhabitants in these French
villages, divided almost equally between those in the Illinois and those
along the Wabash.[12]
The country came into the possession of the British--not of the colonial
English or Americans--at the close of Pontiac's war, the aftermath of
the struggle which decided against the French the ownership of America.
It was held as a new British province, not as an extension of any of the
old colonies; and finally in 1774, by the famous Quebec Act, it was
rendered an appanage of Canada, governed from the latter. It is a
curious fact that England immediately adopted towards her own colonists
the policy of the very nationality she had ousted. From the date of the
triumphant peace won by Wolfe's victory, the British government became
the most active foe of the spread of the English race in America. This
position Britain maintained for many years after the failure of her
attempt to bar her colonists out of the Ohio valley. It was the position
she occupied when at Ghent in 1814 her commissioners tried to hem in the
natural progress of her colonists' children by the erection of a great
"neutral belt" of Indian territory, guaranteed by the British king. It
was the role which her statesmen endeavored to make her play when at a
later date they strove to keep Oregon a waste rather than see it peopled
by Americans.
In the northwest she succeeded to the French policy as well as the
French position. She wished the land to remain a wilderness, the home of
the trapper and the fur trader, of the Indian hunter and the French
voyageur. She desired it to be kept as a barrier against the growth of
the seaboard colonies towards the interior. She regarded the new lands
across the Atlantic as being won and settled, not for the benefit of the
men who won and settled them, but for the benefit of the merchants and
traders who stayed at home. It was this that rendered the Revolution
inevitable; the struggle was a revolt against the whole mental attitude
of Britain in regard to America, rather than against any one special act
or set of acts. The sins and shortcomings of the colonists had been
many, and it would be easy to make out a formidable catalogue of
grievances against them, on behalf of the mother country; but on the
great underlying question they were wholly in the right, and their
success was of vital consequence to the well-being of the race on this
continent.
Several of the old colonies urged vague claims to parts of the
Northwestern Territory, basing them on ancient charters and Indian
treaties; but the British heeded them no more than the French had, and
they were very little nearer fulfilment after the defeat of Montcalm and
Pontiac than before. The French had held adverse possession in spite of
them for sixty years; the British held similar possession for fifteen
more. The mere statement of the facts is enough to show the intrinsic
worthlessness of the titles. The Northwest was acquired from France by
Great Britain through conquest and treaty; in a precisely similar
way--Clark taking the place of Wolfe--it was afterwards won from Britain
by the United States. We gained it exactly as we afterwards gained
Louisiana, Florida, Oregon, California, New Mexico, and Texas: partly by
arms, partly by diplomacy, partly by the sheer growth and pressure of
our spreading population. The fact that the conquest took place just
after we had declared ourselves a free nation, and while we were still
battling to maintain our independence, does not alter its character in
the least; but it has sufficed to render the whole transaction very hazy
in the minds of most subsequent historians, who generally speak as if
the Northwest Territory had been part of our original possessions.
The French who dwelt in the land were at the time little affected by the
change which transferred their allegiance from one European king to
another. They were accustomed to obey, without question, the orders of
their superiors. They accepted the results of the war submissively, and
yielded a passive obedience to their new rulers.[13] Some became rather
attached to the officers who came among them; others grew rather to
dislike them: most felt merely a vague sentiment of distrust and
repulsion, alike for the haughty British officer in his scarlet uniform,
and for the reckless backwoodsman clad in tattered homespun or buckskin.
They remained the owners of the villages, the tillers of the soil. At
first few English or American immigrants, save an occasional fur trader,
came to live among them. But their doom was assured; their rule was at
an end forever. For a while they were still to compose the bulk of the
scanty population; but nowhere were they again to sway their own
destinies. In after years they fought for and against both whites and
Indians; they faced each other, ranged beneath the rival banners of
Spain, England, and the insurgent colonists; but they never again fought
for their old flag or for their own sovereignty.
From the overthrow of Pontiac to the outbreak of the Revolution the
settlers in the Illinois and round Vincennes lived in peace under their
old laws and customs, which were continued by the British
commandants.[14] They had been originally governed, in the same way that
Canada was, by the laws of France, adapted, however, to the
circumstances of the new country. Moreover, they had local customs which
were as binding as the laws. After the conquest the British commandants
who came in acted as civil judges also. All public transactions were
recorded in French by notaries public. Orders issued in English were
translated into French so that they might be understood. Criminal cases
were referred to England. Before the conquest the procureur du roi gave
sentence by his own personal decision in civil cases; if the matters
were important it was the custom for each party to name two arbitrators,
and the procureur du roi a fifth; while an appeal might be made to the
council superieur at New Orleans. The British commandant assumed the
place of the procureur du roi, although there were one or two
half-hearted efforts made to introduce the Common Law.
The original French commandants had exercised the power of granting to
every person who petitioned as much land as the petitioner chose to ask
for, subject to the condition that part of it should be cultivated
within a year, under penalty of its reversion to "the king's
demesnes."[15] The English followed the same custom. A large quantity of
land was reserved in the neighborhood of each village for the common
use, and a very small quantity for religious purposes. The common was
generally a large patch of enclosed prairie, part of it being
cultivated, and the remainder serving as a pasture for the cattle of the
inhabitants.[16] The portion of the common set aside for agriculture was
divided into strips of one arpent in front by forty in depth, and one or
more allotted to each inhabitant according to his skill and industry as
a cultivator.[17] The arpent, as used by the western French, was a
rather rough measure of surface, less in size than an acre.[18] The
farms held by private ownership likewise ran back in long strips from a
narrow front that usually lay along some stream.[19] Several of them
generally lay parallel to one another, each including something like a
hundred acres, but occasionally much exceeding this amount.
The French inhabitants were in very many cases not of pure blood. The
early settlements had been made by men only, by soldiers, traders, and
trappers, who took Indian wives. They were not trammelled by the queer
pride which makes a man of English stock unwilling to make a red-skinned
woman his wife, though anxious enough to make her his concubine. Their
children were baptized in the little parish churches by the black-robed
priests, and grew up holding the same position in the community as was
held by their fellows both of whose parents were white. But, in addition
to these free citizens, the richer inhabitants owned both red and black
slaves; negroes imported from Africa, or Indians overcome and taken in
battle.[20] There were many freedmen and freedwomen of both colors, and
in consequence much mixture of blood.
They were tillers of the soil, and some followed, in addition, the
trades of blacksmith and carpenter. Very many of them were trappers or
fur traders. Their money was composed of furs and peltries, rated at a
fixed price per pound;[21] none other was used unless expressly so
stated in the contract. Like the French of Europe, their unit of value
was the livre, nearly equivalent to the modern franc. They were not very
industrious, nor very thrifty husbandmen. Their farming implements were
rude, their methods of cultivation simple and primitive, and they
themselves were often lazy and improvident. Near their town they had
great orchards of gnarled apple-trees, planted by their forefathers when
they came from France, and old pear-trees, of a kind unknown to the
Americans; but their fields often lay untilled, while the owners lolled
in the sunshine smoking their pipes. In consequence they were sometimes
brought to sore distress for food, being obliged to pluck their corn
while it was still green.[22]
The pursuits of the fur trader and fur trapper were far more congenial
to them, and it was upon these that they chiefly depended. The
half-savage life of toil, hardship, excitement, and long intervals of
idleness attracted them strongly. This was perhaps one among the reasons
why they got on so much better with the Indians than did the Americans,
who, wherever they went, made clearings and settlements, cut down the
trees, and drove off the game.
But even these pursuits were followed under the ancient customs and
usages of the country, leave to travel and trade being first obtained
from the commandant[23] for the rule of the commandant was almost
patriarchal. The inhabitants were utterly unacquainted with what the
Americans called liberty. When they passed under our rule, it was soon
found that it was impossible to make them understand such an institution
as trial by jury; they throve best under the form of government to which
they had been immemorially accustomed--a commandant to give them orders,
with a few troops to back him up.[24] They often sought to escape from
these orders, but rarely to defy them; their lawlessness was like the
lawlessness of children and savages; any disobedience was always to a
particular ordinance, not to the system.
The trader having obtained his permit, built his boats,--whether light,
roomy bateaux made of boards, or birch-bark canoes, or pirogues, which
were simply hollowed out logs. He loaded them with paint, powder,
bullets, blankets, beads, and rum, manned them with hardy voyageurs,
trained all their lives in the use of pole and paddle, and started off
up or down the Mississippi,[25] the Ohio, or the Wabash, perhaps making
a long carry or portage over into the Great Lakes. It took him weeks,
often months, to get to the first trading-point, usually some large
winter encampment of Indians. He might visit several of these, or stay
the whole winter through at one, buying the furs.[26] Many of the French
coureurs des bois, whose duty it was to traverse the wilderness, and who
were expert trappers, took up their abode with the Indians, taught them
how to catch the sable, fisher, otter, and beaver, and lived among them
as members of the tribe, marrying copper-colored squaws, and rearing
dusky children. When the trader had exchanged his goods for the peltries
of these red and white skin-hunters, he returned to his home, having
been absent perhaps a year or eighteen months. It was a hard life; many
a trader perished in the wilderness by cold or starvation, by an upset
where the icy current ran down the rapids like a mill-race, by the
attack of a hostile tribe, or even in a drunken brawl with the friendly
Indians, when voyageur, half-breed, and Indian alike had been frenzied
by draughts of fiery liquor.[27]
Next to the commandant in power came the priest. He bore unquestioned
rule over his congregation, but only within certain limits; for the
French of the backwoods, leavened by the presence among them of so many
wild and bold spirits, could not be treated quite in the same way as the
more peaceful _habitants_ of Lower Canada. The duty of the priest
was to look after the souls of his sovereign's subjects, to baptize,
marry, and bury them, to confess and absolve them, and keep them from
backsliding, to say mass, and to receive the salary due him for
celebrating divine service; but, though his personal influence was of
course very great, he had no temporal authority, and could not order his
people either to fight or to work. Still less could he dispose of their
laud, a privilege inhering only in the commandant and in the
commissaries of the villages, where they were expressly authorized so to
do by the sovereign.[28]
The average inhabitant, though often loose in his morals, was very
religious. He was superstitious also, for he firmly believed in omens,
charms, and witchcraft, and when worked upon by his dread of the unseen
and the unknown he sometimes did terrible deeds, as will be related
farther on.
Under ordinary circumstances he was a good-humored, kindly man, always
polite--his manners offering an agreeable contrast to those of some of
our own frontiersmen,--with a ready smile and laugh, and ever eager to
join in any merrymaking. On Sundays and fast-days he was summoned to the
little parish church by the tolling of the old bell in the small wooden
belfry. The church was a rude oblong building, the walls made out of
peeled logs, thrust upright in the ground, chinked with moss and coated
with clay or cement. Thither every man went, clad in a capote or blanket
coat, a bright silk handkerchief knotted round his head, and his feet
shod with moccasins or strong rawhide sandals. If young, he walked or
rode a shaggy pony; if older, he drove his creaking, springless wooden
cart, untired and unironed, in which his family sat on stools.[29]
The grades of society were much more clearly marked than in similar
communities of our own people. The gentry, although not numerous,
possessed unquestioned social and political headship and were the
military leaders; although of course they did not have any thing like
such marked preeminence of position as in Quebec or New Orleans, where
the conditions were more like those obtaining in the old world. There
was very little education. The common people were rarely versed in the
mysteries of reading and writing, and even the wives of the gentry were
often only able to make their marks instead of signing their names.[30]
The little villages in which they dwelt were pretty places,[31] with
wide, shaded streets. The houses lay far apart, often a couple of
hundred feet from one another. They were built of heavy hewn timbers;
those of the better sort were furnished with broad verandas, and
contained large, low-ceilinged rooms, the high mantle-pieces and the
mouldings of the doors and windows being made of curiously carved wood.
Each village was defended by a palisaded fort and block-houses, and was
occasionally itself surrounded by a high wooden stockade. The
inhabitants were extravagantly fond of music and dancing;[32] marriages
and christenings were seasons of merriment, when the fiddles were
scraped all night long, while the moccasined feet danced deftly in time
to the music.
Three generations of isolated life in the wilderness had greatly changed
the characters of these groups of traders, trappers, bateau-men, and
adventurous warriors. It was inevitable that they should borrow many
traits from their savage friends and neighbors. Hospitable, but bigoted
to their old customs, ignorant, indolent, and given to drunkenness, they
spoke a corrupt jargon of the French tongue; the common people were even
beginning to give up reckoning time by months and years, and dated
events, as the Indians did, with reference to the phenomena of nature,
such as the time of the floods, the maturing of the green corn, or the
ripening of the strawberries.[33] All their attributes seemed alien to
the polished army-officers of old France;[34] they had but little more
in common with the latter than with the American backwoodsmen. But they
had kept many valuable qualities, and, in especial, they were brave and
hardy, and, after their own fashion, good soldiers. They had fought
valiantly beside King Louis' musketeers, and in alliance with the
painted warriors of the forest; later on they served, though perhaps
with less heart, under the gloomy ensign of Spain, shared the fate of
the red-coated grenadiers of King George, or followed the lead of the
tall Kentucky riflemen.
1. "Travels by William Bartram," Philadelphia, 1791, pp. 184, 231, 232,
etc. The various Indian names are spelt in a dozen different ways.
2. Reise, etc. (in 1783 and 84), by Johann David Schopf, 1788, II. 362.
The Minorcans were the most numerous and prosperous; then came the
Spaniards, with a few creoles, English, and Germans.
3. J. D. F. Smyth, "Tour in the United States" (1775), London, 1784,
II., 35.
4. _Do_.
5. "Mémoire ou Coup-d'Oeil Rapide sur mes différentes voyages et mon
séjour dans la nation Creck, par Le Gal. Milfort, Tastanegy ou grand
chef de guerre de la nation Creck et General de Brigade au service de la
République Française." Paris, 1802. Writing in 1781, he said Mobile
contained about forty proprietary families, and was "un petit paradis
terrestre."
6. Bartram, 407.
7. _Magazine of American History_, IV., 388. Letter of a New
England settler in 1773.
8. "Annals of St. Louis." Frederic L. Billon. St. Louis, 1886. A
valuable book.
9. In the Haldimand MSS., Series B, vol. 122, p. 2, is a census of
Detroit itself, taken in 1773 by Philip Dejean, justice of the peace.
According to this there were 1,367 souls, of whom 85 were slaves; they
dwelt in 280 houses, with 157 barns, and owned 1,494 horned cattle, 628
sheep, and 1,067 hogs. Acre is used as a measure of length; their united
farms had a frontage of 512, and went back from 40 to 80. Some of the
people, it is specified, were not enumerated because they were out
hunting or trading at the Indian villages. Besides the slaves, there
were 93 servants.
This only refers to the settlers of Detroit proper, and the farms
adjoining. Of the numerous other farms, and the small villages on both
sides of the straits, and of the many families and individuals living as
traders or trappers with the Indians, I can get no good record. Perhaps
the total population, tributary to Detroit was 2,000. It may have been
over this. Any attempt to estimate this creole population perforce
contains much guess-work.
10. State Department MSS., No. 150, Vol. III., p. 89.
11. _Do_ Harmar's letter.
12. State Department MSS, No 30, p 453. Memorial of François
Carbonneaux, agent for the inhabitants of the Illinois country. Dec 8,
1784. "Four hundred families [in the Illinois] exclusive of a like
number at Post Vincent" [Vincennes]. Americans had then just begun to
come in, but this enumeration did not refer to them. The population had
decreased during the Revolutionary war, so that at its outbreak there
were probably altogether a thousand families. They were very prolific,
and four to a family is probably not too great an allowance, even when
we consider that in such a community on the frontier there are always
plenty of solitary adventurers. Moreover, there were a number of negro
slaves. Harmar's letter of Nov. 24, 1787, states the adult males of
Kaskaskia and Cahokia at four hundred and forty, not counting those at
St. Philip or Prairie du Rocher. This tallies very well with the
preceding. But of course the number given can only be considered
approximately accurate, and a passage in a letter of Lt-Gov Hamilton
would indicate that it was considerably smaller.
This letter is to be found in the Haldimand MSS, Series B, Vol. 123, p.
53, it is the 'brief account' of his ill-starred expedition against
Vincennes. He says "On taking an account of the Inhabitants at this
place [Vincennes], of all ages and sexes we found their number to amount
to 621, of this 217 fit to bear arms on the spot, several being absent
hunting Buffaloe for their winter provision." But elsewhere in the same
letter he alludes to the adult arms-bearing men as being three hundred
in number, and of course the outlying farms and small tributary villages
are not counted in. This was in December, 1778. Possibly some families
had left for the Spanish possessions after the war broke out, and
returned after it was ended. But as all observers seem to unite in
stating that the settlements either stood still or went backwards during
the Revolutionary struggle, it is somewhat difficult to reconcile the
figures of Hamilton and Carbonneaux.
13. In the Haldimand MSS., Series B, Vol. 122, p. 3, the letter of M.
Ste. Marie from Vincennes, May 3, 1774, gives utterance to the general
feeling of the creoles, when he announces, in promising in their behalf
to carry out the orders of the British commandant, that he is "remplie
de respect pour tout ce qui porte l'emprinte de l'otorité." [sic.]
14. State Department MSS., No. 48, p. 51. Statement of M. Cerre (or
Carre), July, 1786, translated by John Pintard.
15. _Do_.
16. State Department MSS., No. 48, p. 41. Petition of J. B. La Croix, A.
Girardin, etc., dated "at Cohoe in the Illinois 15th July, 1786."
17. Billon, 91.
18. An arpent of land was 180 French feet square. MS. copy of Journal of
Matthew Clarkson in 1766. In Durrett collection.
19. American State Papers, Public Lands, I., II.
20. Fergus Historical Series, No. 12, "Illinois in the 18th Century."
Edward G. Mason, Chicago, 1881. A most excellent number of an excellent
series. The old parish registers of Kaskaskia, going back to 1695,
contain some remarkable names of the Indian mothers--such as Maria
Aramipinchicoue and Domitilla Tehuigouanakigaboucoue. Sometimes the man
is only distinguished by some such title as "The Parisian," or "The
Bohemian."
21. Billon, 90.
22. Letter of P. A. Lafarge, Dec. 31, 1786. Billon, 268.
23. State Department MSS., No. 150, Vol. III., p. 519. Letter of Joseph
St. Mann, Aug 23, 1788.
24. _Do_., p 89, Harmar's letter.
25. _Do_., p 519, Letter of Joseph St. Marin.
26. _Do_., p. 89.
27. Journal of Jean Baptiste Perrault, in 1783; in "Indian Tribes," by
Henry R. Schoolcraft, Part III., Philadelphia, 1855. See also Billon,
484, for an interesting account of the adventures of Gratiot, who
afterwards, under American rule, built up a great fur business, and
drove a flourishing trade with Europe, as well as the towns of the
American seaboard.
28. State Department MSS., No. 48, p. 25. A petition concerning a case
in point, affecting the Priest Gibault.
29. "History of Vincennes," by Judge John Law, Vincennes, 1858. pp. 18
and 140. They are just such carts as I have seen myself in the valley of
the Red River, and in the big bend of the Missouri, carrying all the
worldly goods of their owners, the French Metis. These Metis,--ex-trappers,
ex-buffalo runners, and small farmers,--are the best representatives of
the old French of the west; they are a little less civilized, they have
somewhat more Indian blood in their veins, but they are substantially the
same people. It may be noted that the herds of buffaloes that during the
last century thronged the plains of what are now the States of Illinois
and Indiana furnished to the French of Kaskaskia and Vincennes their
winter meat; exactly as during the present century the Saskatchewan Metis
lived on the wild herds until they were exterminated.
30. See the lists of signatures in the State Department MSS., also
Mason's Kaskaskia Parish Records and Law's Vincennes. As an example; the
wife of the Chevalier Vinsenne (who gave his name to Vincennes, and
afterwards fell in the battle where the Chickasaws routed the Northern
French and their Indian allies), was only able to make her mark.
Clark in his letters several times mentions the "gentry," in terms
that imply their standing above the rest of the people.
31. State Department MSS., No. 150, Vol. III., p. 89.
32. "Journal of Jean Baptiste Perrault," 1783.
33. "Voyage en Amérique" (1796), General Victor Collot, Paris, 1804, p.
318.
34. _Do_. Collot calls them "un composé de traiteurs, d'aventuriers, de
coureurs de bois, rameurs, et de guerriers; ignorans, superstitieux et
entêtés, qu'aucunes fatigues, aucunes privations, aucunes dangers ne
peuvent arreter dans leurs enterprises, qu'ils mettent toujours fin; ils
n'ont conservé des vertus françaises que le courage."