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[Illustration: Front Cover.]
[Illustration: COUNT FRONTENAC.
From a Statue at Quebec.]
HEROES OF THE MIDDLE WEST
The French
BY
MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD
GINN AND COMPANY
BOSTON . NEW YORK . CHICAGO . LONDON
ATLANTA . DALLAS . COLUMBUS . SAN FRANCISCO
Copyright, 1898
By MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
317.8
The Athenaeum Press
GINN AND COMPANY . PROPRIETORS . BOSTON . U. S. A.
PREFACE.
Let any one who thinks it an easy task attempt to cover the French
discovery and occupation of the middle west, from Marquette and Jolliet
to the pulling down of the French flag on Fort Chartres, vivifying men,
and while condensing events, putting a moving picture before the eye.
Let him prepare this picture for young minds accustomed only to the
modern aspect of things and demanding a light, sure touch. Let him
gather his material--as I have done--from Parkman, Shea, Joutel,
Hennepin, St. Cosme, Monette, Winsor, Roosevelt--from state records,
and local traditions richer and oftener more reliable than history;
and let him hang over his theme with brooding affection, moulding and
remoulding its forms. He will find the task he so lightly set himself
a terribly hard and exhausting one, and will appreciate as he never
before appreciated the labors of those who work in historic fields.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. The Discoverers of the Upper Mississippi 1
II. Bearers of the Calumet 19
III. The Man with the Copper Hand 44
IV. The Undespairing Norman 71
V. French Settlements 102
VI. The Last Great Indian 117
HEROES OF THE MIDDLE WEST.
I.
THE DISCOVERERS OF THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI.
The 17th of May, 1673, Father Jacques Marquette, the missionary priest
of St. Ignace, on what is now called the north shore of Michigan, and
Louis Jolliet, a trader from Montreal, set out on a journey together.
Huron and Ottawa Indians, with the priest left in charge of them, stood
on the beach to see Marquette embark,--the water running up to their
feet and receding with the everlasting wash of the straits. Behind them
the shore line of St. Ignace was bent like a long bow. Northward, beyond
the end of the bow, a rock rose in the air as tall as a castle. But very
humble was the small mission station which Father Marquette had founded
when driven with his flock from his post on the Upper Lakes by the
Iroquois. A chapel of strong cedar posts covered with bark, his own
hut, and the lodges of his people were all surrounded by pointed
palisades. Opposite St. Ignace, across a league or so of water, rose
the turtle-shaped back of Michilimackinac Island, venerated by the
tribes, in spite of their religious teaching, as a home of mysterious
giant fairies who made gurgling noises in the rocks along the beach or
floated vast and cloud-like through high pine forests. The evergreens
on Michilimackinac showed as if newborn through the haze of undefined
deciduous trees, for it was May weather, which means that the northern
world had not yet leaped into sudden and glorious summer. Though the
straits glittered under a cloudless sky, a chill lingered in the wind,
and only the basking stone ledges reflected warmth. The clear elastic
air was such a perfect medium of sight that it allowed the eye to
distinguish open beach rims from massed forests two or three leagues
away on the south shore, and seemed to bring within stone's throw those
nearer islands now called Round and Bois Blanc.
It must have wrung Marquette's heart to leave this region, which has
an irresistible charm for all who come within its horizon. But he had
long desired to undertake this journey for a double purpose. He wanted
to carry his religion as far as possible among strange tribes, and he
wanted to find and explore that great river of the west, about which
adventurers in the New World heard so much, but which none had seen.
[Illustration: Totem of the Illinois.]
A century earlier, its channel southward had really been taken
possession of by the Spaniards, its first discoverers. But they made no
use of their discovery, and on their maps traced it as an insignificant
stream. The French did not know whether this river flowed into the Gulf
of California--which was called the Red Sea--or to the western ocean,
or through Virginia eastward. Illinois Indians, visiting Marquette's
mission after the manner of roving tribes, described the father of
waters and its tributaries. Count Frontenac, the governor of Canada,
thought the matter of sufficient importance to send Louis Jolliet with
an outfit to join the missionary in searching for the stream.
The explorers took with them a party of five men. Their canoes, we are
told, were of birch bark and cedar splints, the ribs being shaped from
spruce roots. Covered with the pitch of yellow pine, and light enough
to be carried on the shoulders of four men across portages, these canoes
yet had toughness equal to any river voyage. They were provisioned with
smoked meat and Indian corn. Shoved clear of the beach, they shot out
on the blue water to the dip of paddles. Marquette waved his adieu.
His Indians, remembering the dangers of that southern country, scarcely
hoped to see him again. Marquette, though a young man, was of no such
sturdy build as Jolliet. Among descendants of the Ottawas you may still
hear the tradition that he had a "white face, and long hair the color
of the sun" flowing to the shoulders of his black robe.
The watching figures dwindled, as did the palisaded settlement. Hugging
the shore, the canoes entered Lake Michigan, or, as it was then called,
the Lake of the Illinois. All the islands behind seemed to meet and
intermingle and to cover themselves with blue haze as they went down
on the water. Priest and trader, their skins moist with the breath
of the lake, each in his own canoe, faced silently the unknown world
toward which they were venturing. The shaggy coast line bristled with
evergreens, and though rocky, it was low, unlike the white cliffs of
Michilimackinac.
Marquette had made a map from the descriptions of the Illinois Indians.
The canoes were moving westward on the course indicated by his map.
He was peculiarly gifted as a missionary, for already he spoke six
Indian languages, and readily adapted himself to any dialect. Marquette,
the records tell us, came of "an old and honorable family of Laon," in
northern France. Century after century the Marquettes bore high honors
in Laon, and their armorial bearings commemorated devotion to the
king in distress. In our own Revolutionary War it is said that three
Marquettes fought for us with La Fayette. No young man of his time had
a pleasanter or easier life offered him at home than Jacques Marquette.
But he chose to devote himself to missionary labor in the New World,
and had already helped to found three missions, enduring much hardship.
Indian half-breeds, at what is now called the "Soo," on St. Mary's
River, betwixt Lake Huron and Lake Superior, have a tradition that
Father Marquette and Father Dablon built their missionary station on
a tiny island of rocks, not more than two canoe lengths from shore, on
the American side. But men who have written books declare it was on the
bank below the rapids.
[Illustration: Autograph of Jolliet.]
Jolliet had come of different though not less worthy stock. He was
Canadian born, the son of a wagon-maker in Quebec; and he had been well
educated, and possessed an active, adventurous mind. He was dressed for
this expedition in the tough buckskin hunting suit which frontiersmen
then wore. But Marquette retained the long black cassock of the priest.
Their five voyageurs--or trained woodsmen--in more or less stained
buckskin and caps of fur, sent the canoes shooting over the water with
scarcely a sound, dipping a paddle now on this side and now on that,
Indian fashion; Marquette and Jolliet taking turns with them as the
day progressed. For any man, whether voyageur, priest, or seignior,
who did not know how to paddle a canoe, if occasion demanded, was at
sore disadvantage in the New World.
The first day of any journey, before one meets weariness or anxiety and
disappointment, remains always the freshest in memory. When the sun went
down, leaving violet shadows on the chill lake, they drew their boats
on shore; and Pierre Porteret and another Frenchman, named Jacques,
gathered driftwood to make a fire, while the rest of the crew unpacked
the cargo. They turned each canoe on its side, propping the ends with
sticks driven into the ground, thus making canopies like half-roofs to
shelter them for the night.
"The Sieur Jolliet says it is not always that we may light a camp-fire,"
said Pierre Porteret to Jacques, as he struck a spark into his tinder
with the flint and steel which a woodsman carried everywhere.
"He is not likely to have one to-night, even in this safe cove,"
responded Jacques, kneeling to help, and anxious for supper. "Look now
at me; I know the Indian way to start a blaze by taking two pieces of
wood and boring one into the other, rubbing it thus between my palms.
It is a gift. Not many voyageurs can accomplish that."
"Rub thy two stupid heads together and make a blaze," said another
hungry man, coming with a kettle of lake water. But the fire soon
climbed pinkly through surrounding darkness. They drove down two forked
supports to hold a crosspiece, and hung the kettle to boil their hulled
corn. Then the fish which had been taken by trolling during the day were
dressed and broiled on hot coals.
The May starlight was very keen over their heads in a dark blue sky
which seemed to rise to infinite heights, for the cold northern night
air swept it of every film. Their first delicious meal was blessed and
eaten; and stretched in blankets, with their feet to the camp fire, the
tired explorers rested. They were still on the north shore of what we
now call the state of Michigan, and their course had been due westward
by the compass. A cloud of Indian tobacco smoke rose from the lowly roof
of each canoe, and its odor mingled with the sweet acrid breath of
burning wood. Jolliet and the voyageurs had learned to use this dried
brown weed, which all tribes held in great esteem and carried about with
them in their rovings.
"If true tales be told of the water around the Bay of the Puans," one of
the voyageurs was heard to say as he stretched himself under the canoe
allotted to the men, "we may save our salt when we pass that country."
"Have you ever heard, Father," Jolliet inquired of the missionary, "that
the word Puan meant foul or ill-smelling instead of salty?"
"I know," Marquette answered, "that salt has a vile odor to the Indians.
They do not use it with their food, preferring to season that instead
with the sugar they make from the maple tree. Therefore, the bay into
which we are soon to venture they call the Bay of the Fetid, or
ill-smelling salty country, on account of saline water thereabout."
"Then why do the Winnebago tribe on this bay allow themselves to be
called Puans?"
"That has never been explained by the missionaries sent to that post,
though the name seems to carry no reproach. They are well made and tall
of stature. I find Wild Oats a stranger name--the Menomonies are Wild
Oats Indians. Since the gospel has been preached to all these tribes for
some years past, I trust we may find good Christians among them."
"What else have you learned about the country?"
"Father Dablon told me that the way to the head of that river called
Fox, up which we must paddle, is as hard as the way to heaven, specially
the rapids. But when you arrive there it is a natural paradise."
"We have tremendous labor before us," mused Jolliet. "Father, did you
ever have speech with that Jean Nicollet, who, first of any Frenchman,
got intimations of the great river?"
"I never saw him."
"There was a man I would have traveled far to see, though he was long a
renegade among savages, and returned to the settlements only to die."
"Heaven save this expedition from becoming renegade among savages by
forgetting its highest object!" breathed Marquette.
His companion smiled toward the pleasant fire-light. Jolliet had once
thought of becoming a priest himself. He venerated this young apostle,
only half a dozen years his senior. But he was glad to be a free
adventurer, seeking wealth and honor; not foreseeing that though the
great island of Anticosti in the Gulf of St. Lawrence would be given
him for his services, he would die a poor and neglected man.
When, after days of steady progress, the expedition entered the Bay
of Puans, now called Green Bay, and found the nation of Menomonies or
Wild Oats Indians, Marquette was as much interested as Jolliet in the
grain which gave these people their bread. It grew like rice, in marshy
places, on knotted stalks which appeared above the water in June and
rose several feet higher. The grain seed was long and slender and
made plentiful meal. The Indians gathered this volunteer harvest in
September, when the kernels were so ripe that they dropped readily into
canoes pushed among the stalks. They were then spread out on lattice
work and smoked to dry the chaff, which could be trodden loose when the
whole bulk, tied in a skin bag, was put into a hollow in the ground made
for that purpose. The Indians pounded their grain to meal and cooked it
with fat.
The Menomonies tried to prevent Marquette and Jolliet from going
farther. They said the great river was dangerous, full of frightful
monsters that swallowed both men and canoes; that there was a roaring
demon in it who could be heard for leagues; and the heat was so intense
in those southern countries through which it flowed, that if the
Frenchmen escaped all other dangers, they must die of that. Marquette
told them his own life was nothing compared to the good word he wanted
to carry to those southern tribes, and he laughed at the demon and
instructed them in his own religion.
The aboriginal tribes, by common instinct, tried from the first to keep
the white man out of countries which he was determined to overrun and
possess, regardless of danger.
At the end of a voyage of thirty leagues, or about ninety miles, the
explorers reached the head of the Bay of Puans, and a region thickly
settled with Winnebagoes and Pottawotomies between the bay and Winnebago
Lake, Sacs on Fox River, and Mascoutins, Kickapoos, and Miamis. Fox
River, which they followed from the head of the bay, and of which the
lake seemed only an expansion, was a rocky stream. A later traveler has
told us that Fox River in its further extent is very crooked, and while
seeming wide, with a boundary of hills on each hand, it affords but a
slender channel in a marsh full of rushes and wild oats.
The Kickapoos and Mascoutins were rude, coarse-featured Indians. Though
the missionary exhorted them as seriously as he did their gentler
neighbors, he could not help remarking to Jolliet that "the Miamis were
better made, and the two long earlocks which they wore gave them a good
appearance."
It was the seventh day of June when the explorers arrived in this
country of cabins woven of rushes; and they did not linger here.
Frenchmen had never gone farther. They were to enter new lands untrodden
by the white race. They were in what is now called the state of
Wisconsin, where "the soil was good," they noted, "producing much corn;
and the Indians gathered also quantities of plums and grapes." In these
warmer lands the season progressed rapidly.
Marquette and Jolliet called the chiefs together and told them that
Jolliet was sent by the governor to find new countries, and Marquette
had been commissioned of Heaven to preach. Making the chiefs a present,
without which they would not have received the talk seriously, the
explorers asked for guides to that tributary which was said to run into
the great river.
The chiefs responded with the gift of a rush mat for Marquette and
Jolliet to rest on during their journey, and sent two young Miamis with
them. If these kindly Indians disliked to set the expedition further on
its way, they said nothing but very polite things about the hardihood
of Frenchmen, who could venture with only two canoes, and seven in their
party, on unknown worlds.
The young Miamis, in a boat of their own, led out the procession the
tenth morning of June. Taking up paddles, the voyageurs looked back
at an assembled multitude--perhaps the last kindly natives on their
perilous way--and at the knoll in the midst of prairies where hospitable
rush houses stood and would stand until the inmates took them down and
rolled them up to carry to hunting grounds, and at groves dotting those
pleasant prairies where guests were abundantly fed.
Three leagues up the marshy and oats-choked Fox River, constantly
widening to little lakes and receding to a throat of a channel, brought
the explorers to the portage, or carrying place. The canoes then had
to be unloaded, and both cargo and boats carried overland to a bend of
the Miscousing, which was the Indian name for Wisconsin River. "This
portage," says a traveler who afterwards followed that way, "is half a
league in length, and half of that is a kind of marsh full of mud." In
wet seasons the head of Fox River at that time seemed not unlikely to
find the Wisconsin, for Marquette has set it down in his recital that
the portage was only twenty-seven hundred paces.
When the two Miamis had helped to carry the goods and had set the French
on the tributary of the great river, they turned back to their own
country. Before the men entered the boats Marquette knelt down with
them on the bank and prayed for the success of the undertaking. It was
a lovely broad river on which they now embarked, with shining sands
showing through the clear water, making shallows like tumbling discs
of brilliant metal,--a river in which the canoes might sometimes run
aground, but one that deceived the eye pleasantly, with islands all vine
covered, so when a boat clove a way between two it was a guess how far
the Wisconsin spread away on each side to shores of a fertile land.
Oaks, walnuts, whitewood, and thorn trees crowded the banks or fell
apart, showing prairies rolling to wooded hills. Deer were surprised,
stretching their delicate necks down to drink at the margin. They looked
up with shy large eyes at such strange objects moving on their stream,
and shot off through the brush like red-brown arrows tipped with white.
The moose planted its forefeet and stared stolidly, its broad horns set
in defense.
"Sieur Jolliet," said the missionary, once when the canoes drew
together, "we have now left the waters which flow into the great lakes
and are discharged through the St. Lawrence past Quebec to the sea.
We follow those that lead us into strange lands."
"This river Miscousing on which we now are," returned Jolliet, "flows,
as we see by our compass, to the southwestward. We know it is a branch
of the great river. I am becoming convinced, Father, that the great
river cannot discharge itself toward the east, as some have supposed."
The explorers estimated the distance from the country of the Mascoutins
to the portage to be three leagues, and from the portage to the mouth
of the Miscousing forty leagues. This distance they covered in a week.
Drawing their canoes to the shore at night, they pitched camp, varying
the monotony of their stores with fish and game. Perhaps they had
learned that wild grapes then budding were not really fit to eat until
touched by frost. Pierre Porteret said in Marquette's hearing, "the
Indians could make good wine of grapes and plums if they desired."
The 17th of June, exactly one month from the day on which they had left
St. Ignace mission, the explorers paddled into a gentle clear river,
larger than the Miscousing but not yet monstrous in width, which ran
southward. High hills guarded the right-hand shore, and the left spread
away in fair meadows. Its current was broken with many little islands,
like the Miscousing, though on sounding, Jolliet found the water to
be ten fathoms, or sixty feet, deep. The shores receding, and then
drawing in, gave unequal and irregular width to the stream. But it was
unmistakably the great river they had sought, named then as now by the
Indians, Mississippi, though Marquette at once christened it Conception,
and another Frenchman who came after him gave it the name of Colbert.
It was the river of which Nicollet had brought hints from his wanderings
among northwestern tribes: the great artery of the middle continent, or,
as that party of explorers believed, of the entire west. Receiving into
itself tributaries, it rolled, draining a mighty basin, to unknown seas.
The first white men ventured forth upon its upper channel in two birch
canoes. Five hardy voices raised a shout which was thrown back in an
echo from the hills; five caps were whirled as high as paddles could
raise them. But Marquette said, "This is such joy as we cannot express!"
The men in both canoes silenced themselves while he gave thanks for the
discovery.
[Illustration: FATHER JACQUES MARQUETTE.
From a Statue in the Capitol at Washington.]
II.
BEARERS OF THE CALUMET.
Moving down the Mississippi, league after league, the explorers noted
first of all its solitude. Wigwam smoke could not be seen on either
shore. Silence, save the breathing of the river as it rolled on its
course, seemed to surround and threaten them with ambush. Still, day
after day, the sweet and awful presence of the wilderness was their only
company. Once Pierre Porteret dropped his paddle with a yell which was
tossed about by echoing islands. A thing with a tiger's forehead and a
wildcat's whiskered snout, holding ears and entire gray and black head
above the water, swam for the boat. But it dived and disappeared; and
the other voyageurs felt safe in laughing at him. Not long after,
Jacques bellowed aloud as he saw a living tree glide under the canoe,
jarring it from end to end. The voyageurs soon learned to know the huge
sluggish catfish. They also caught plenty of sturgeon or shovel fish
when they cast in their nets.
The river descended from its hilly cradle to a country of level
distances. The explorers, seeing nothing of men, gave more attention to
birds and animals. Wild turkeys with burnished necks and breasts tempted
the hunters. The stag uttered far off his whistling call of defiance to
other stags. And they began to see a shaggy ox, humped, with an enormous
head and short black horns, and a mane hanging over low-set wicked eyes.
Its body was covered with curly rough hair. They learned afterwards from
Indians to call these savage cattle pisikious, or buffaloes. Herds of
many hundreds grazed together, or, startled, galloped away, like thunder
rolling along the ground.
The explorers kindled very little fire on shore to cook their meals,
and they no longer made a camp, but after eating, pushed out and
anchored, sleeping in their canoes. Every night a sentinel was set to
guard against surprise. By the 25th of June they had passed through
sixty leagues of solitude. The whole American continent was thinly
settled by native tribes, many in name indeed, but of scant numbers.
The most dreaded savages in the New World were the Iroquois or Five
Nations, living south of Lake Ontario. Yet they were never able to
muster more than about twenty-two hundred fighting men.
The canoes were skirting the western bank, driven by the current, when
one voyageur called to another:
"My scalp for the sight of an Indian!"
"Halt!" the forward paddler answered. "Look to thy scalp, lad, for here
is the Indian!"
There was no feathered head in ambush, but they saw moccasin prints in
the low moist margin and a path leading up to the prairie.
Marquette and Jolliet held the boats together while they consulted.
"Do you think it wise to pass by without searching what this may mean,
Father?"
"No, I do not. We might thus leave enemies behind our backs to cut off
our return. Some Indian village is near. It would be my counsel to
approach and offer friendship."
"Shall we take the men?" debated Jolliet. "Two of them at least should
stay to guard the canoes."
"Let them all stay to guard the canoes. If we go unarmed and unattended,
we shall not raise suspicion in the savages' minds."
"But we may raise suspicion in our own minds."
Marquette laughed.
"The barbarous people on this unexplored river have us at their mercy,"
he declared, "We can at best do little to defend ourselves."
"Let us reconnoitre," said Jolliet.
Taking some of the goods which they had brought along for presents,
Jolliet bade the men wait their return and climbed the bank with the
missionary. The path led through prairie grass, gay at that season
with flowers. The delicate buttercup-like sensitive plant shrank from
their feet in wet places. Neither Frenchman had yet seen the deadly
rattlesnake of these southern countries, singing as a great fly might
sing in a web, dart out of its spotted spiral to fasten a death bite
upon a victim. They walked in silence, dreading only the human beings
they were going to meet. When they had gone about two leagues, the
path drew near the wooded bank of a little stream draining into the
Mississippi which they had scarcely noticed from the canoes. There
they saw an Indian village, and farther off, up a hill, more groups of
wigwams. They heard the voices of children, and nobody suspected their
approach.
Jolliet and Marquette halted. Not knowing how else to announce their
presence, they shouted together as loud as they could shout. The savages
ran out of their wigwams and darted about in confusion until they saw
the two motionless white men. The long black cassock of Marquette had
instant effect upon them. For their trinkets and a few garments on their
bodies showed that they had trafficked with Europeans.
Four old Indians, slowly and with ceremony, came out to meet the
explorers, holding up curious pipes trimmed with many kinds of feathers.
As soon as they drew near, Marquette called out to them in Algonquin:
"What tribe is this?"
"The Illinois," answered the old man. Being a branch of the great
Algonquin family, which embraced nearly all northern aboriginal nations,
with the notable exception of the Iroquois, these people had a dialect
which the missionary could understand. The name Illinois meant "The
Men."
Marquette and Jolliet were led to the principal lodge. Outside the door,
waiting for them, stood another old Indian like a statue of wrinkled
bronze. For he had stripped himself to do honor to the occasion, and
held up his hands to screen his face from the sun, making graceful and
dignified gestures as he greeted the strangers.
"How bright is the sun when you come to see us, O Frenchmen! Our lodges
are all open to you."
The visitors were then seated in the wigwam, and the pipe, or calumet,
offered them to smoke, all the Indians crowding around and saying:
[Illustration: Calumet.]
"You do well to visit us, brothers."
Obliged to observe this peace ceremony, Marquette put the pipe to his
lips, but Jolliet, used to the tobacco weed, puffed with a good will.
The entire village then formed a straggling procession, gazing at the
Frenchmen, whom they guided farther to the chief's town. He also met
them standing with a naked retinue at his door, and the calumet was
again smoked.
The Illinois lodges were shaped like the rounded cover of an emigrant
wagon, high, and very long, having an opening left along the top for
the escape of smoke. They were made of rush mats, which the women wove,
overlapped as shingles on a framework of poles. Rush mats also carpeted
the ground, except where fires burned in a row along the middle. Each
fire was used by two families who lived opposite, in stalls made of
blankets. The ends of the lodge had flaps to shut out the weather, but
these were left wide open to the summer sun. During visits of ceremony a
guest stood where he could be seen and heard by all who could crowd into
the wigwam. But when the Illinois held important councils they made a
circular inclosure, and built a camp-fire in the center. Many families
and many fires filled a long wigwam, though Jolliet and Marquette were
lodged with the chief, who had one for himself and his household.
Whitening embers were sending threads of smoke towards a strip of blue
sky overhead when the missionary stood up to explain his errand in the
crowded inclosure, dividing his talk into four parts with presents.
By the first gift of cloth and beads he told his listeners that the
Frenchmen were voyaging in peace to visit nations on the river. By the
second he said:
"I declare to you that God, your Creator, has pity on you, since, when
you have been so long ignorant of him, he wishes to become known to you.
I am sent on his behalf with this design. It is for you to acknowledge
and obey him."
By the third gift they were informed that the chief of the French had
spread peace and overcome the Iroquois. And the last begged for all the
information they could give about the sea and intervening nations.
When Marquette sat down, the chief stood up and laid his hand on the
head of a little slave, prisoner from another tribe.
"I thank you, Blackgown," he said, "and you, Frenchman, for taking so
much pains to come and visit us. The earth has never been so beautiful,
nor the sun so bright, as to-day; never has the river been so calm and
free from rocks, which your canoes removed as they passed! Never has our
tobacco had so fine a flavor, nor our corn appeared so beautiful as we
find it to-day. Here is my son. I give him to you that you may know my
heart. Take pity on us and all our nation. You know the Great Spirit who
made all: you speak to him and hear him; ask him to give us life and
health and come and dwell with us."
When the chief had presented his guests with the Indian boy, and again
offered the calumet, he urged them, with belts and garters of buffalo
wool, brilliantly dyed, to go no farther down the great river, on
account of dangers. These compliments being ended, a feast was brought
in four courses. First came a wooden dish of sagamity or corn-meal
boiled in water and grease. The chief took a buffalo-horn spoon and fed
his guests as if they had been little children; three or four spoonfuls
he put in Marquette's mouth and three or four spoonfuls in Jolliet's.
Three fish were brought next, and he picked out the bones with his own
fingers, blew on the food to cool it, and stuffed the explorers with
all he could make them accept. It was their part to open their mouths
as young birds do. The third course was that most delicate of Indian
dishes, a fine dog; but seeing that his guests shrank from this, the
chief ended the meal with buffalo meat, giving them the fattest parts.
The Illinois were at that time on the west side of the Mississippi,
because they had been driven from their own country on the Illinois
River by the Iroquois. The Illinois nation was made up of several united
tribes: Kaskaskias, Peorias, Kahokias, Tamaroas, and Moingona. Flight
scattered them, and these were only a few of their villages. They
afterwards returned to their own land. Their chief wore a scarf or belt
of fur crossing his left shoulder, encircling his waist and hanging in
fringe. Arm and leg bands ornamented him, and he also had knee rattles
of deer hoofs. Paint made of colored clays streaked his face. This
attractive creature sent the Indian crier around, beating a drum of deer
hide stretched over a pot, to proclaim the calumet dance in honor of the
explorers.
Marquette and Jolliet were led out in the prairie to a small grove
which sheltered the assembly from the afternoon sun. Even the women
left their maize fields and the beans, melons, and squashes that they
were cultivating, and old squaws dropped rush braiding, and with
papooses swarming about their knees, followed. The Illinois were nimble,
well-formed people, skillful with bow and arrow. They had, moreover,
some guns among them, obtained from allies who had roved and traded with
the French. Young braves imitated the gravity of their elders at this
important ceremony. The Illinois never ate new fruits or bathed at the
beginning of summer, without first dancing the calumet.
A large gay mat of rushes was spread in the center of the grove, and
the warrior selected to dance put his god, or manitou--some tiny carven
image which he carried around his person and to which he prayed--on
the mat beside a beautiful calumet. Around them he spread his bow and
arrows, his war club, and stone hatchet. The pipe was made of red rock
like brilliantly polished marble, hollowed to hold tobacco. A stick
two feet long, as thick as a cane, formed the stem. For the dance these
pipes were often decked with gorgeous scarlet, green, and iridescent
feathers, though white plumes alone made them the symbol of peace, and
red quills bristled over them for war.
[Illustration: War Club.]
Young squaws and braves who were to sing, sat down on the ground in a
group near the mat; but the multitude spread in a great circle around
it. Men of importance before taking their seats on the short grass, each
in turn lifted the calumet, which was filled, and blew a little smoke
on the manitou. Then the dancer sprang out, and, with graceful curvings
in time to the music, seized the pipe and offered it now to the sun and
now to the earth, made it dance from mouth to mouth along the lines of
spectators, with all its fluttering plumes spread. The hazy sun shone
slanting among branches, tracing a network of flickering leaf shadows
on short grass; and liquid young voices rising and falling chanted,
"Nanahani, nanahani, nanahani, Naniango!"
[Illustration: Stone Hatchet.]
The singers were joined by the Indian drum; and at that another dancer
sprang into the circle and took the weapons from the mat to fight with
the principal dancer, who had no defense but the calumet. With measured
steps and a floating motion of the body the two advanced and attacked,
parried and retreated, until the man with the pipe drove his enemy from
the ring. Papooses of a dark brick-red color watched with glistening
black eyes the last part of the dance, which celebrated victory. The
names of nations fought, the prisoners taken, and all the trophies
brought home were paraded by means of the calumet.
The chief presented the dancer with a fine fur robe when he ended; and,
taking the calumet from his hand, gave it to an old man in the circle.
This one passed it to the next, and so it went around the huge ring
until all had held it. Then the chief approached the white men.
"Blackgown," he said, "and you, Frenchman, I give you this peace-pipe
to be your safeguard wherever you go among the tribes. It shall be
feathered with white plumes, and displaying it you may march fearlessly
among enemies. It has power of life and death, and honor is paid to it
as to a manitou. Blackgown, I give you this calumet in token of peace
between your governor and the Illinois, and to remind you of your
promise to come again and instruct us in your religion."
The explorers slept soundly all night in the chief's lodge, feeling as
safe as among Christian Indians of the north, who stuck thorns in a
calendar to mark Sundays and holy days. Next morning the chief went with
several hundred of his people to escort them to their canoes; but it
was three o'clock in the afternoon before the voyageurs, dropping down
stream, saw the last of the friendly tribe.
Day after day the boats moved on without meeting other inhabitants.
Mulberries, persimmons, and hazelnuts were found on the shores. They
passed the mouth of the Illinois River without knowing its name, or
that it flowed through lands owned by the tribe that had given them
the peace-pipe. Farther on, the Mississippi made one of its many bends,
carrying them awhile directly eastward, and below great rocks like
castles. As the canoes ran along the foot of this east shore, some of
the voyageurs cried out. For on the face of the cliff far up were two
painted monsters in glaring red, green, and black; each as large as a
calf, with deer horns, blood-colored eyes, tiger beard, a human face,
and a body covered with scales. Coiled twice around the middle, over the
head, and passing between the hind legs of each, extended a tail that
ended like a fish. So startling was this sight, which seemed a banner
held aloft heralding unseen dangers, that the men felt threatened by a
demon. But Marquette laughed at them and beckoned for the canoes to be
brought together.
"What manner of thing is this, Sieur Jolliet?"
"A pair of manitous, evidently. If we had Indians with us, we should see
them toss a little tobacco out as an offering in passing by."
"I cannot think," said Marquette, "that any Indian has been the
designer. Good painters in France would find it hard to do as well.
Besides this, the creatures are so high upon the rock that it was hard
to get conveniently at them to paint them. And how could such colors be
mixed in this wilderness?"
"We have seen what pigments and clays the Illinois used in daubing
themselves. These wild tribes may have among them men with natural skill
in delineating," said Jolliet.
"I will draw them off," Marquette determined, bringing out the papers on
which he set down his notes; and while the men stuck their paddles in
the water to hold the canoes against the current, he made his drawing.
One of the monsters seen by the explorers remained on those rocks until
the middle of our own century. It was called by the Indians the Piasa.
More than two centuries of beating winter storms had not effaced the
brilliant picture when it was quarried away by a stupidly barbarous
civilization. The town of Alton, in the state of Illinois, is a little
south of that rock where the Piasa dragons were seen.
As the explorers moved ahead on glassy waters, they looked back, and the
line of vision changing, they saw that the figures were cut into the
cliff and painted in hollow relief.
They were still talking about the monsters when they heard the roar of a
rapid ahead, and the limpid Mississippi turned southward on its course.
It was as if they had never seen the great river until this instant.
For a mighty flood, rushing through banks from the west, yellow with
mud, noisy as a storm, eddying islands of branches, stumps, whole trees,
took possession of the fair stream they had followed so long. It shot
across the current of the Mississippi in entering so that the canoes
danced like eggshells and were dangerously forced to the eastern bank.
Afterwards they learned that this was the Pekitanoui, or, as we now call
it, the Missouri River, which flows into the Mississippi not far above
the present city of St. Louis; and that by following it to its head
waters and making a short portage across a prairie, a man might in time
enter the Red or Vermilion Sea of California.
Having slipped out of the Missouri's reach, the explorers were next
threatened by a whirlpool among rocks before they reached the mouth of
Ouaboukigou, the Ohio River. They saw purple, red, and violet earths,
which ran down in streams of color when wet, and a sand which stained
their paddles like blood. Tall canes began to feather the shore, and
mosquitoes tormented them as they pressed on through languors of heat.
Jolliet and Marquette made awnings of sails which they had brought as a
help to the paddles. They were floating down the current of the muddy,
swollen river when they saw Indians with guns on the east shore. The
voyageurs dropped their paddles and seized their own weapons. Marquette
stood up and spoke to the Indians in Huron. They made no answer. He held
up the white calumet. Then they began to beckon, and when the party drew
to land, they made it clear that they had themselves been frightened
until they saw the Blackrobe holding the calumet. A long-haired tribe,
somewhat resembling the Iroquois, but calling themselves Tuscaroras;
they were rovers, and had axes, hoes, knives, beads, and double glass
bottles holding gunpowder, for which they had traded with white people
eastward.
They fed the French with buffalo meat and white plums, and declared it
was but a ten days' journey to the sea. In this they were mistaken, for
it was more than a thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico.
[Illustration: Wampum Girdle.]
To each tribe as he passed, Marquette preached his faith by the belt of
the prayer. For each he had a wampum girdle to hold while he talked, and
to leave for a remembrance. His words without a witness would be
forgotten.
Three hundred miles farther the explorers ventured, and had nearly
reached the mouth of the Arkansas River, floating on a wide expanse of
water between lofty woods, when they heard wild yelling on the west
shore, and saw a crowd of savages pushing out huge wooden canoes to
surround them. Some swam to seize the Frenchmen, and a war club was
thrown over their heads. Marquette held up the peace-pipe, but the wild
young braves in the water paid no attention to it. Arrows were ready
to fly from all sides, and Marquette held the peace-pipe on high and
continually prayed. At once old Indians restrained the young ones. In
their turmoil they had not at first seen the calumet; but two chiefs
came directly out to bring the strangers ashore.
Not one of the missionary's six languages was understood by these
Indians. He at last found a man who spoke a little Illinois, and Jolliet
and he were able to explain their errand. He preached by presents, and
obtained a guide to the next nation.
On that part of the river where the French came to a halt, the Spanish
explorer De Soto was said to have died two hundred years before. In this
region the Indians had never seen snow, and their land yielded three
crops a year. Their pots and plates were of baked earth, and they kept
corn in huge gourds, or in baskets woven of cane fibers. They knew
nothing of beaver skins; their furs were the hides of buffaloes.
Watermelons grew abundantly in their fields. Though they had large
wigwams of bark, they wore no clothing, and hung beads from their
pierced noses and ears.
These Akamsea, or Arkansas Indians showed traits of the Aztecs under
Spanish dominion; for what is now the state of Texas was then claimed
by Spain. Marquette and Jolliet held a council. They were certain that
the great river discharged itself into the Gulf of Mexico. If they
ventured farther, they might fall into the hands of Spaniards, who would
imprison them; or they might be killed by fiercer tribes than any yet
encountered, and in either case their discoveries would be lost. So they
decided to turn back.
All day the Arkansas feasted them with merciless savage hospitality, and
it was not polite to refuse food or the attention of rocking. Two stout
Indians would seize a voyageur between them and rock him back and forth
for hours. If the motion nauseated him, that was his misfortune.
Pierre Porteret crept out behind one of the bark lodges looking very
miserable in the fog of early morning. His companion on many a long
journey, never far out of his shadow, sat down to compare experiences.
"Did they rock thee all night, Pierre?"
"They rocked me all night, Jacques. I can well endure what most men can,
but this is carrying politeness too far."
"I was not so favored. They would have saved you if they had killed the
rest of us. And they would have saved the good father, no doubt, since
the chief came and danced the calumet before him."
"Were these red cradle-rockers intending to make an end of us in the
night?"
"So the chief says; but he broke up the council, and will set us safely
on our journey up river to-day."
"I am glad of that," said Pierre. "Father Marquette hath not the
strength of the Sieur Jolliet for such rude wanderings. These southern
mists, and torturing insects, and clammy heats, and the bad food have
worked a great change in him."
"We have been gone but two months from the Mission of St. Ignace," said
Jacques. "They have the bigness of years."
"And many more months that have the bigness of years will pass before we
see it again."
They grew more certain of this, when, after toiling up the current
through malarial nights and sweltering days, the explorers left the
Mississippi and entered the river Illinois. There, above Peoria Lake,
another Illinois town of seventy-four lodges was found, and these
Kaskaskias so clung to the Blackrobe that he promised to come back
and teach them. From the head waters of the Illinois a portage was
made to Lake Michigan, and the French returned to the Bay of the Puans
alongshore. They had traveled over twenty-five hundred miles, and
accomplished the object of their journey.
Jolliet, with his canoe of voyageurs, his maps and papers, and the young
Indian boy given him by the Illinois chief, went on to Montreal. His
canoe was upset in the rapids of Lachine just above Montreal, and he
lost two men, the Indian boy, his papers, and nearly everything except
his life. But he was able to report to the governor all that he had seen
and done.
Marquette lay ill, at the Bay of the Puans, of dysentery, brought on by
hardship; and he was never well again. Being determined, however, to go
back and preach to the tribe on the Illinois River, he waited all winter
and all the next summer to regain his strength. He carefully wrote out
and sent to Canada the story of his discoveries and labors. In autumn,
with Pierre Porteret and the voyageur Jacques, he ventured again to the
Illinois. Once he became so ill they were obliged to stop and build him
a cabin in the wilderness, at the risk of being snowed in all winter.
It was not until April that he reached what he called his Mission of the
Immaculate Conception, on the Illinois River, through snow, and water
and mud, hunger and misery. He preached until after Easter, when, his
strength being exhausted, Pierre and Jacques undertook to carry him home
to the Mission of St. Ignace. Marquette had been two years away from his
palisaded station on the north shore, and nine years in the New World.
It was the 19th of May, and Pierre and Jacques were paddling their canoe
along the east side of that great lake known now as Michigan. A creek
parted the rugged coast, and dipping near its shallow mouth they looked
anxiously at each other.
"What shall we do?" whispered Jacques.
"We must get on as fast as we can," answered Pierre.
They were gaunt and weather-beaten themselves from two years' tramping
the wilderness. But their eyes dwelt most piteously on the dying man
stretched in the bottom of the canoe. His thin fingers held a cross.
His white face and bright hair rested on a pile of blankets. Pierre and
Jacques felt that no lovelier, kinder being than this scarcely breathing
missionary would ever float on the blue water under that blue sky.
He opened his eyes and saw the creek they were slipping past, and a
pleasant knoll beside it, and whispered:--
"There is the place of my burial."
"But, Father," pleaded Pierre, "it is yet early in the day. We can take
you farther."
"Carry me ashore here," he whispered again.
So they entered the creek and took him ashore, building a fire and
sheltering him as well as they could. There a few hours afterward he
died, the weeping men holding up his cross before him, while he thanked
the Divine Majesty for letting him die a poor missionary. When he could
no longer speak, they repeated aloud the prayers he had taught them.
They left him buried on that shore with a large cross standing over his
grave. Later his Indians removed his bones to the Mission of St. Ignace,
with a procession of canoes and a priest intoning. They were placed
under the altar of his own chapel. If you go to St. Ignace, you may see
a monument now on that spot, and people have believed they traced the
foundation of the old bark chapel. But the spot where he first lay was
long venerated.
A great fur trader and pioneer named Gurdon Hubbard made this record
about the place, which he visited in 1818:--