Iroquois guns seemed to flash in his face. It was like throwing himself
among furious wolves. Snarling lips and snaky eyes and twisting sinuous
bodies made nightmares around him. He felt himself seized; a young
warrior stabbed him in the side. The knife glanced on a rib, but blood
ran down his buckskins and filled his throat.
"Stop!" shouted an Iroquois chief. "This is a Frenchman; his ears are
not pierced."
Tonty's swarthy skin was blanching with the anguish of his wound, which
turned him faint. His black hair clung in rings to a forehead wet with
cold perspiration. But he held the wampum belt aloft and spat the blood
out of his mouth.
"Iroquois! The Illinois nation are under the protection of the French
king and Governor Frontenac! I demand that you leave them in peace!"
A young brave snatched his hat and lifted it on the end of a gun.
At that the Illinois began a frenzied attack, thinking he was killed.
Tonty was spun around as in a whirlpool. He felt a hand in his hair and
a knife at his scalp.
"I never," he thought to himself, "was in such perplexity in my life!"
"Burn him!" shouted some.
"But he is French!" others cried. "Let him go!"
Through all the uproar he urged the peace belt and threatened them with
France. The wholesome dread which Governor Frontenac had given to that
name had effect on them. Besides, they had not surprised the Illinois,
and if they declared a truce, time would be gained to consider their
future movements.
The younger braves were quieted, and old warriors gave Tonty a belt
to carry back to the Illinois. He staggered across the prairie. Father
Ribourde and Father Membre, who had just reached the spot, ran to meet
him, and supported him as he half fainted from loss of blood.
Tonty and his allies withdrew across the river. But the Iroquois,
instead of retreating, followed. Seeing what must happen, Tonty thought
it best for the Illinois to give up their town and go to protect their
women and children, while he attempted as long as possible to keep the
invaders at bay. Lodges were set on fire, and the Illinois withdrew
quietly down river, leaving some of their men in the bluffs less than a
league from the town, to bring them word of the result. The Frenchmen,
partially rebuilding their own lodge, which had been wrecked when their
goods were thrown in the river, stood their ground in the midst of
insulting savages.
For the Iroquois, still determined on war and despoiling, opened maize
pits, scattering and burning the grain; trampled corn in the fields; and
even pulled the dead off their scaffolds. They were angry at the French
for threatening them with that invisible power of France, and bent on
chasing the Illinois. Yet Tonty was able to force a kind of treaty
between them and the retreating nation, through the men left in the
bluffs. As soon as they had made it, however, they began canoes of elm
bark, to follow the Illinois down river.
Two or three days passed, while the Frenchmen sat covering the invaded
tribe's retreat. They scarcely slept at night. Their enemies prowled
around their lodge or celebrated dances on the ruins of the town.
The river flowed placidly, and the sun shone on desolation and on
the unaltered ferny buttresses of the great rock and its castellated
neighbors. Tonty heard with half delirious ears the little creatures
which sing in the grass and fly before man, but return to their singing
as soon as he passes by. The friars dressed and tended his fevered
wound, and when the Iroquois sent for him to come to a council, Father
Membre went with him.
Within the rude fort of posts and poles saved from ruined lodges, which
the Iroquois had built for themselves, adding a ruff of freshly chopped
trees, the two white men sat down in a ring of glowering savages. Six
packs of beaver skins were piled ready for the oration; and the orator
rose and addressed Tonty.
With the first two the Indian spokesman promised that his nation would
not eat Count Frontenac's children, those cowardly Illinois.
The next was a plaster to heal Tonty's wound.
The next was oil to anoint him and the Recollets, so their joints would
move easily in traveling.
The next said that the sun was bright.
And the sixth and last pack ordered the French to get up and leave
the country.
When the speaker sat down, Tonty came to his feet and looked at the
beaver skins piled before them. Then he looked around the circle of hard
weather-beaten faces and restless eyes, and thanked the Iroquois for
their gift.
"But I would know," said Tonty, "how soon you yourselves intend to
leave the country and let the Illinois be in peace?"
There was a growl, and a number of the braves burst out with the
declaration that they intended to eat Illinois flesh first.
Tonty raised his foot and kicked the beaver skins from him. In that very
way they would have rejected a one-sided treaty themselves. Up they
sprang with drawn knives and drove him and Father Membre from the fort.
All night the French stood guard for fear of being surprised and
massacred in their lodge. At daybreak the chiefs ordered them to go
without waiting another hour, and gave them a leaky boat.
Tonty had protected the retreat of the Illinois as long as he could.
With the two Recollets, Boisrondet, young Renault, and L'Esperance, and
with little else, he set out up the river.
[Illustration: SITE OF FORT ST. LOUIS OF THE ILLINOIS.
From a Recent Photograph.]
IV.
THE UNDESPAIRING NORMAN.
"The northward current of the eastern shore of Lake Michigan and
the southward current of the western shore," says a writer exact in
knowledge, "naturally made the St. Joseph portage a return route to
Canada, and the Chicago portage an outbound one." But though La Salle
was a careful observer and must have known that what was then called the
Chekago River afforded a very short carrying to the Desplaines or upper
Illinois, he saw fit to use the St. Joseph both coming and going.
His march to Fort Frontenac he afterwards described in a letter to one
of the creditors interested in his discoveries.
"Though the thaws of approaching spring greatly increased the difficulty
of the way, interrupted as it was everywhere by marshes and rivers, to
say nothing of the length of the journey, which is about five hundred
leagues in a direct line, and the danger of meeting Indians of four or
five different nations, through whose country we were to pass, as well
as an Iroquois army which we knew was coming that way; though we must
suffer all the time from hunger; sleep on the open ground, and often
without food; watch by night and march by day, loaded with baggage, such
as blanket, clothing, kettle, hatchet, gun, powder, lead, and skins to
make moccasins; sometimes pushing through thickets, sometimes climbing
rocks covered with ice and snow; sometimes wading whole days through
marshes where the water was waist deep or even more,--all this did not
prevent me from going to Fort Frontenac to bring back the things we
needed and to learn myself what had become of my vessel."
Carrying their canoes where the river was frozen, and finally leaving
them hidden near where the town of Joliet now stands, La Salle and his
men pushed on until they reached the fort built at the mouth of the St.
Joseph. Here he found the two voyageurs he had sent to search for the
Griffin. They said they had been around the lake and could learn nothing
of her. He then directed them to Tonty, while he marched up the eastern
shore. This Michigan region was debatable ground among the Indians,
where they met to fight; and he left significant marks on the trees, to
make prowlers think he had a large war party. A dozen or twenty roving
savages, ready to pounce like ferocious wildcats on a camp, always
peeled white places on the trees, and cut pictures there of their totem,
or tribe mark, and the scalps and prisoners they had taken. They
respected a company more numerous than themselves, and avoided it.
Stopping to nurse the sick when some fell ill of exposure, or to build
canoes when canoes were needed, La Salle did not reach Fort Niagara
until Easter, and it was May when Fort Frontenac came into view.
No man ever suffered more from treachery. Before he could get
together the supplies he needed, trouble after trouble fell upon him.
The men that Tonty had sent to tell him about the destruction of Fort
Crevecoeur were followed by others who brought word that the deserters
had destroyed his forts at the St. Joseph River and Niagara, and carried
off all the goods. The Griffin was certainly lost. And before going back
to the Illinois country he was obliged to chase these fellows and take
from them what could be recovered. But when everybody else seemed
to be against him, it was much comfort to remember he had a faithful
lieutenant while the copper-handed Italian lived.
La Salle gathered twenty-five men of trades useful to him, and another
outfit with all that he needed for a ship, having made new arrangements
with his creditors; and going by way of Michilimackinac, he reached the
St. Joseph early in November.
Whenever, in our own day, we see the Kankakee still gliding along its
rocky bed, or the solemn Illinois spreading betwixt wooded banks, it is
easy to imagine a birch canoe just appearing around a bend, carrying La
Salle or Tonty, and rowed by buckskin-clad voyageurs. On the Kankakee
thousands of buffaloes filled the plains, and La Salle's party killed
many, preparing the flesh in dried flakes by smoking it.
The buffaloes were left behind when they approached the great town on
the Illinois. La Salle glanced up at the rock he wanted fortified, but
no palisade or Frenchman was to be seen.
"It seems very quiet," he said to the men in his canoe, "and we have not
passed a hunter. There--there is the meadow where the town stood; but
where is the town?"
Heaps of ashes, charred poles, broken scaffolds, wolves prowling where
papooses had played, crows whirling in black clouds or sitting in rows
on naked branches, bones,--a horrible waste plain had taken the place of
the town.
The Frenchmen scattered over it, eagerly seeking some trace of Tonty and
his companions. They labored all day, until the sun set, among dreadful
sights which they could never forget, without finding any clue to his
fate.
They piled charred wood together and made a fire and camped among ruins.
But La Salle lay awake all night, watching the sharp-pointed autumn
stars march overhead, and suffering what must have seemed the most
unendurable of all his losses.
Determined not to give up his friend, he rose next morning and helped
the men hide their heavy freight in the rocks, leaving two of them to
hide with and guard it, and went on down the Illinois River. On one bank
the retreat of the invaded tribe could be traced, and on the other the
dead camp-fires of the Iroquois who had followed them. But of Tonty and
his Frenchmen there was still no sign.
La Salle saw the ruins of Fort Crevecoeur and his deserted vessel. And
so searching he came to the mouth of the Illinois and saw for the first
time that river of his ambitions, the Mississippi. There he turned back,
leaving a letter tied to a tree, on the chance of its sometime falling
into the hands of Tonty. There was nothing to do but to take his men and
goods from among the rocks near the destroyed town and return to Fort
Miamis, on the St. Joseph, which some of his followers had rebuilt. The
winter was upon them.
La Salle never sat and brooded over trouble. He was a man of action.
Shut in with his men and goods, and obliged to wait until spring
permitted him to take the next step, he began at once to work on Indian
hunters, and to draw their tribes towards forming a settlement around
the rock he meant to fortify on the Illinois. Had he been able to attach
turbulent voyageurs to him as he attached native tribes, his heroic life
would have ended in success even beyond his dreams. Tonty could better
deal with ignorant men, his military training standing him in good
stead; yet Tonty dared scarcely trust a voyageur out of his sight.
While Tonty and La Salle were passing through these adventures, the
Recollet father, Louis Hennepin, and his two companions, sent by La
Salle, explored the upper Mississippi. One of these was named Michael
Ako; the other, Du Gay, a man from Picardy in France.
They left Fort Crevecoeur on the last day of February, twenty-four
hours before La Salle started northward, and entered the Mississippi on
the 12th of March. The great food-stocked stream afforded them plenty of
game, wild turkeys, buffaloes, deer, and fish. The adventurers excused
themselves from observing the Lenten season set apart by the Church for
fasting; but Father Hennepin said prayers several times a day. He was
a great robust Fleming, with almost as much endurance as that hardy
Norman, La Salle.
They had paddled about a month up river through the region where
Marquette and Jolliet had descended, when one afternoon they stopped to
repair their canoe and cook a wild turkey. Hennepin, with his sleeves
rolled back, was daubing the canoe with pitch, and the others were busy
at the fire, when a war whoop, followed by continuous yelling, echoed
from forest to forest, and a hundred and twenty naked Sioux or Dacotah
Indians sprang out of boats to seize them. It was no use for Father
Hennepin to show a peace-pipe or offer fine tobacco. The Frenchmen were
prisoners. And when these savages learned by questioning with signs, and
by drawing on the sand with a stick, that the Miamis, whom they were
pursuing to fight, were far eastward out of their reach, three or four
old warriors laid their hands on Hennepin's shaven crown and began to
cry and howl like little boys.
[Illustration: Totem of the Sioux.]
The friar in his long gray capote or hooded garment, which fell to his
feet, girt about the waist by a rope called the cord of St. Francis,
stood, with bare toes showing on his sandals, inclining his fat head
with sympathy. He took out his handkerchief and wiped the old men's
faces. Du Gay and Ako, in spite of the peril, laughed to see him daub
the war paint.
"The good father hath no suspicion that these old wretches are dooming
him to death," said Ako to Du Gay.
It appeared afterwards that this was what the ceremony meant. For
several days the Frenchmen, carried northward in their captors' boats,
expected to die. No calumet was smoked with them; and every night one
of the old chiefs, named Aquipaguetin, who had lost a son in war and
formed a particular intention of taking somebody's scalp for solace,
sat by the prisoners stroking them and howling by the hour. One night
when the Frenchmen were forced to make their fire at the end of the
camp, Aquipaguetin sent word that he meant to finish them without more
delay. But they gave him some goods out of the store La Salle had sent
with them, and he changed his mind and concluded to wait awhile. He
carried the bones of one of his dead relations, dried and wrapped in
skins gaily ornamented with porcupine-quill work; and it was his custom
to lay these bones before the tribe and request that everybody blow
smoke on them. Of the Frenchmen, however, he demanded hatchets, beads,
and cloth. This cunning old Sioux wanted to get all he could before the
party reached their villages, where the spoil would be divided.
Nineteen days after their capture the prisoners were brought to a place
which is now the site of St. Paul in the state of Minnesota, where the
Sioux disbanded, scattering to their separate towns. They had finally
smoked the peace-pipe with the Frenchmen; and now, fortunately without
disagreement, portioned their white captives and distributed the goods.
Father Hennepin was given to Aquipaguetin, who promptly adopted him
as a son. The Flemish friar saw with disgust his gold-embroidered
vestments, which a missionary always carried with him for the impressive
celebration of mass, displayed on savage backs and greatly admired.
The explorers were really in the way of seeing as much of the
upper Mississippi as they could desire. They were far north of the
Wisconsin's mouth, where white men first entered the great river.
The young Mississippi, clear as a mountain stream, gathered many small
tributaries. St. Peter's joined it from a blue-earth channel. This
rugged northern world was wonderfully beautiful, with valleys and
heights and rocks and waterfalls.
The Sioux were tall, well-made Indians, and so active that the smaller
Frenchmen could hardly keep up with them on the march. They sometimes
carried Du Gay and Ako over streams, but the robust friar they forced to
wade or swim; and when he lagged lame-footed with exhaustion across the
prairies, they set fire to grass behind him, obliging him to take to his
heels with them or burn. By adoption into the family of Aquipaguetin
he had a large relationship thrust upon him, for the old weeper had
many wives and children and other kindred. Hennepin indeed felt that
he was not needed and might at any time be disposed of. He never had
that confidence in his father Aquipaguetin which a son should repose
in a parent.
He was separated from Ako and Du Gay, who were taken to other villages.
By the time he reached father Aquepaguetin's house he was so exhausted,
and his legs, cut by ice in the streams, were so swollen that he fell
down on a bear robe. The village was on an island in a sheet of water
afterwards called Lake Buade. Hennepin was kindly received by his new
family, who fed him as well as they were able, for the Sioux had little
food when they were not hunting. Seeing him so feeble, they gave him an
Indian sweating bath, which he found good for his health. They made a
lodge of skins so tight that it would hold heat, and put into it stones
baked to a white heat. On these they poured water and shut Hennepin in
the steam until he sweated freely.
The Sioux had two kinds of lodges--one somewhat resembling those of the
Illinois, the other a cone of poles with skins stretched around, called
a tepee.
Father Hennepin did little missionary work among these Indians. He
suffered much from hunger, being a man who loved good cheer. But the
tribes went on a buffalo hunt in July and killed plenty of meat. All
that northern world was then clothed in vivid verdure. Honeysuckles and
wild grapevines made the woods fragrant. The gentian, which jealously
closes its blue-fringed cup from the human eye, grew close to the lakes.
Captive though the Frenchmen were, they could not help enjoying the
evening camp-fire with its weird flickerings against the dark of savage
forests, the heat-lightning which heralded or followed storms, the
waters, clear, as if filtered through icebergs, dashing in foam over
mossy rocks.
They met during the buffalo hunt, and it was about this time that some
"spirits," or white men, were heard of, coming from Lake Superior. These
proved to be the great ranger Greysolon du Lhut and four other
Frenchmen.
This man, cousin to Tonty, passed nearly his whole life in the woods,
going from Indian town to Indian town, or planting outposts of his
own in the wilderness. Occasionally he went to France, and the king's
magnificence at Versailles was endured by him until he could gain some
desired point from the colonial minister and hurry back. The government
relied on him to keep lawless coureurs de bois within bounds, and he
traded with nearly all the western tribes. When Greysolon du Lhut
appeared, the Sioux treated their prisoners with deference; and from
that time Hennepin, Du Gay, and Ako went where they pleased.
They seemed to have had no thought of returning to Fort Crevecoeur.
In those days when each man took his individual life in his hands and
guarded it in ways which seemed best to him, it was often expedient to
change one's plan of action. About the time that Tonty was obliged to
abandon Fort Crevecoeur, Hennepin and his companions set off eastward
with Greysolon du Lhut's party. Hennepin sailed for France as soon as he
could and wrote a book about his adventures. It was one of La Salle's
misfortunes that this friar should finally even lay claim to discovering
the mouth of the Mississippi, adding the glory of that to these real
adventures on its upper waters.
The first of March, La Salle, with a number of the men he had gathered,
started from Fort Miamis to the Illinois country. The prairies were one
dazzling expanse of snow, and as the party slid along on the broad,
flat snowshoes to which their feet were strapped, some of them were
so blinded that the pain in their eyes became unendurable. These were
obliged to camp in the edge of some woods, while the rest went on.
La Salle himself was sitting in darkness while the spring sun struck a
million sparkles from a world yet locked in winter. The wind chilled
his back, and he spread his hands to the camp blaze. In the torment
of snow-blindness he wondered whether Tonty was treading these white
wastes, seeking him, or lying dead of Indian wounds under the snow
crust. The talk of the other snow-blinded men, sitting about or
stretched with their feet to the fire, was lost on his ear. Yet his one
faithful servant, who went with him on all his journeys, could not see
anything but calm fortitude on his face as he lifted it at the approach
of snowshoes.
"I cannot see you, Hunaut," said La Salle. "Did you find some pine
leaves?"
"I found some, monsieur."
"Steep them as soon as you can for the men's eyes."
"I wish to tell you, monsieur," the man said as he went about his task
with a snow-filled kettle, "that I found also a party of Fox Indians
from Green Bay, and they gave me news of Monsieur de Tonty."
Hunaut looked at the long, pale face of his master and saw the under lip
tremble and twitch.
"You know I am much bound to Monsieur de Tonty. Is he alive?"
"He is alive, monsieur. He has been obliged to pass the winter at Green
Bay. Father Hennepin has also passed through that country on his way to
Montreal."
La Salle felt his troubles melt with the unlocking of winter. The brief
but agonizing snow-blindness passed away with a thaw; and, overtaking
his other men, he soon met the returning Illinois tribe and began the
Indian settlement around the rock he intended to fortify.
Already the Miami tribe was following him, and he drew them into an
alliance with the Illinois, impressively founding the principality soon
to grow there. This eloquent Norman Frenchman had gifts in height and
the large bone and sinew of Normandy, which his Indian allies always
admired. And he well knew where to impress his talk with coats, shirts,
guns, and hunting-knives. As his holdings of land in Canada were made
his stepping-stones toward the west, so the footing he gained at Fort
Miamis and in the Illinois country was to be used in discovering the
real course of the Mississippi and taking possession of its vast basin.
It was the end of May before he met Tonty at St. Ignace; Italian and
Frenchman coming together with outstretched arms and embracing. Tonty's
black eyes were full of tears, but La Salle told his reverses as calmly
as if they were another man's.
"Any one else," said Father Membre, who stood by, "would abandon the
enterprise, but Monsieur de la Salle has no equal for constancy of
purpose."
"But where is Father Ribourde?" La Salle inquired, missing the other
Recollet.
Tonty told him sorrowfully how Father Ribourde had gone into the woods
when his party camped, after being driven up river in a leaky boat by
the Iroquois; how they had waited and searched for him, and were finally
made aware that a band of prowling Kickapoos had murdered him.
Tonty had aimed at Green Bay by the Chicago portage, and tramped along
the west shore of Lake Michigan, having found it impossible to patch the
boat.