some frozen squashes in a deserted Indian town. When we reached the bay
we found an old canoe and mended it; but as soon as we were on the water
there rose a northwest wind with driving snow, which lasted nearly five
days. We ate all our food, and, not knowing what to do, turned back to
the deserted town to die by a warm fire in one of the wigwams. On the
way the bay froze. We camped to make moccasins out of Father Membre's
cloak. I was angry at Etienne Renault for not finishing his; but he
excused himself on account of illness, having a great oppression of the
stomach, caused by eating a piece of an Indian rawhide shield which he
could not digest. His delay proved our salvation, for the next day, as I
was urging him to finish the moccasins, a party of Ottawas saw the smoke
of our fire and came to us. We gave them such a welcome as never was
seen before. They took us into their canoes and carried us to an Indian
village only two leagues off. All the Indians took pleasure in sending
us food; so, after thirty-four days of starvation, we found our famine
turned to abundance."
Tonty and La Salle, with their followers, paddled the thousand miles to
Fort Frontenac, to make another start into the wilderness.
La Salle was now determined to keep his men together. He set down many
of his experiences and thoughts in letters which have been kept; so we
know at this day what was in the great explorer's mind, and how dear he
held "Monsieur de Tonty, who is full of zeal."
On his return to the wilderness with another equipment, he went around
the head of Lake Michigan and made the short Chicago portage to the
Desplaines River. Entering by this branch the frozen Illinois, they
dragged their canoes on sledges past the site of the town and reached
open water below Peoria Lake. La Salle gave up the plan of building a
ship, and determined to go on in his canoes to the mouth of the
Mississippi.
So, pausing to hunt when game was needed, his company of fifty-four
persons entered the great river, saw the Missouri rushing into it--muddy
current and clear northern stream flowing alongside until the waters
mingled. They met and overawed the Indians on both shores, building
several stockades. The broad river seemed to fill a valley, doubling and
winding upon itself with innumerable curves, in its solemn and lonely
stretches. Huge pieces of low-lying bank crumbled and fell in with
splashes, for the Mississippi ceaselessly eats away its own shore.
A hundred leagues below the mouth of the Arkansas they came to a swamp
on the west side. Behind this swamp, they had been told, might be found
the Arkansas tribe's great town. La Salle sent Tonty and Father Membre,
with some voyageurs, to make friends with the Indians and bring him word
about the town.
Tonty had seen nothing like it in the New World. The houses were large
and square, of sun-baked brick, with a dome of canes overhead. The two
largest were the chief's house and the temple. Doors were the only
openings. Tonty and the friar were taken in where the chief sat on a
bedstead with his squaws, and sixty old men, in white mulberry bark
cloaks, squatted by with the dignity of a council. The wives, in order
to honor the sovereign, yelled.
The temple was a place where dead chiefs' bones were kept. A mud wall
built around it was ornamented with skulls. The inside was very rough.
Something like an altar stood in the center of the floor; and a fire of
logs was kept burning before it, and never allowed to go out, filling
the place with smoke, and irritating the eyes of two old Indians who
tended it in half darkness. The Frenchmen were not allowed to look into
a secret place where the temple treasure was kept. But, hearing it
consisted of pearls and trinkets, Tonty conjectured the Indians had got
it from the Spanish. This tribe was not unlike the Aztecs of Mexico.
The chief came in barbaric grandeur to visit La Salle, dressed in white,
having fans carried before him, and a plate of burnished copper to
represent the sun, for these lower Mississippians were sun-worshipers.
With gifts and the grave consideration which instantly won Indians, La
Salle moved from tribe to tribe towards the Gulf. Red River pulsed upon
the course like a discharging artery. The sluggish alligator woke from
the ooze and poked up his snout at the canoes. "He is," says a quaint
old writer who made that journey afterwards, "the most frightful
master-fish that can be seen. I saw one that was as large as half a
hogshead. There are some, they say, as large as a hogshead and twelve
to fifteen feet long. I have no doubt they would swallow up a man if
they caught him."
[Illustration: La Salle at the Mouth of the Mississippi.]
In April La Salle reached his goal. He found that the Mississippi
divided its current into three strands and entered the Gulf through
three mouths. He separated his party; La Salle took the west passage,
and Tonty and another lieutenant the middle and the east. At the Gulf of
Mexico they came together again, and with solemn ceremonies claimed for
France all the country along the great river's entire length, and far
eastward and westward, calling it Louisiana, in honor of King Louis XIV.
A metal plate, bearing the arms of France, the king's name, and the date
of the discovery, was fixed on a pillar in the shifting soil.
Hardy as he was, La Salle sometimes fell ill from the great exposures
he endured. And more than once he was poisoned by some revengeful
voyageur. It was not until the December following his discovery of the
Mississippi's mouth that he realized his plan of fortifying the rock
on the Illinois River. He and Tonty delighted in it, calling it Fort
St. Louis of the Illinois. Storehouses and quarters for a garrison rose
around its edges, protected by a palisade. A windlass was rigged to draw
water from the river below. On the northeast corner of the rock a low
earthwork remains to this day.
Around this natural castle the Indian tribes gathered to La Salle, as to
a sovereign,--Miamis, Abenakis, and Shawanoes, from countries eastward,
and the Illinois returned to spread over their beloved meadow. Instead
of one town, many towns of log, or rush, or bark lodges could be seen
from the summit of the Rock. Years afterwards the French still spoke of
this fortress as Le Rocher. A little principality of twenty thousand
inhabitants, strong enough to repel any attack of the Iroquois, thus
helped to guard it. La Salle meant to supply his people with goods and
give them a market for their furs. At this time he could almost see the
success of his mighty enterprise assured; he could reasonably count on
strengthening his stockades along the Mississippi, and on building near
its mouth a city which would protect the entire west and give an outlet
to the undeveloped wealth of the continent.
[Illustration: Louis XIV., King of France.]
In the flush of his discovery and success La Salle went back to France,
leaving Tonty in charge of the Rock and the gathering Indian nations,
and laid his actual achievements before the king, asking for help. This
was made necessary by the change in the colonial government, which had
removed his friend Count Frontenac and left him at the mercy of enemies.
The king was not slow to see the capacity of this wonderful man, so shy
of civilization that he lodged in a poor street, carrying with him the
very breath of the wilderness. La Salle asked for two ships; the king
gave him four; and many people and supplies were gathered to colonize
and stock the west.
It was La Salle's intention to sail by way of the West Indies, cross the
Gulf of Mexico, and enter the mouth of the Mississippi. But the Gulf of
Mexico is rimmed with low marshy land, and he had never seen the mouth
of the Mississippi from seaward. His unfamiliarity with the coast, or
night, or fog cheated him of his destination, and the colony was landed
four hundred miles west of it, in a place called Matagorda Bay, in
Texas, which then belonged to the Spaniards. Although at the time of
discovery he had taken the latitude of that exact spot where he set the
post, he had been unable to determine the longitude; any lagoon might be
an opening of the triple mouth he sought.
La Salle's brother, a priest, who sailed with him on this voyage,
testified afterwards that the explorer died believing he was near the
mouth of the Mississippi. Whatever may have been his thoughts, the
undespairing Norman grappled with his troubles in the usual way.
One of his vessels had been captured by the Spanish. Another had been
wrecked in the bay by seamen who were willing to injure him. These
contained supplies most needed for the colony. The third sailed away and
left him; and his own little ship, a gift of the king for his use along
the coast, was sunk by careless men while he was absent searching
northward for the Mississippi.
Many of the colonists fell sick and died. Men turned sullen and tried to
desert. Some went hunting and were never seen again. Indians, who dare
not openly attack, skulked near and set the prairie on fire; and that
was a sight of magnificence, the earth seeming to burn like a furnace,
or, far as the eye could follow them, billows of flame rushing as across
a fire sea. But La Salle was wise, and cut the grass close around his
powder and camp.
[Illustration: La Salle's Map of Texas.]
Water, plains, trees combined endlessly, like the pieces of a
kaleidoscope, to confuse him in his search. Tonty was not at hand to
take care of the colony while he groped for the lost river. He moved his
wretched people from their camp, with all goods saved off the wreck in
the bay, to a better site for a temporary fort, on rising ground. The
carpenters proved good for nothing. La Salle himself planned buildings
and marked out mortises on the logs. First a large house roofed with
hides, and divided into apartments, was finished to shelter all.
Separate houses were afterwards built for the women and girls, and
barracks or rougher cells for the men. A little chapel was finally
added. And when high-pointed palisades surrounded the whole, La Salle,
perhaps thinking of his invincible rock on the Illinois and the
faithfulness of his copper-handed lieutenant guarding it, called this
outpost also Fort St. Louis. Cannon were mounted at the four corners of
the large house. As the balls were lost, they were loaded with bullets
in bags.
Behind, the prairies stretched away to forests. In front rolled the bay,
with the restless ever-heaving motion of the Mexican Gulf. A delicious
salty air, like the breath of perpetual spring, blew in, tingling the
skin of the sulkiest adventurer with delight in this virgin world.
Fierce northers must beat upon the colonists, and the languors of summer
must in time follow; and they were homesick, always watching for sails.
Yet they had no lack of food. Oysters were so plentiful in the bay that
they could not wade without cutting their feet with the shells. Though
the alligator pushed his ugly snout and ridgy back out of lagoons, and
horned frogs frightened the children, and the rattlesnake was to be
avoided where it lay coiled in the grass, game of all kinds abounded.
Every man was obliged to hunt, and every woman and child to help smoke
the meat. Even the priests took guns in their hands. Father Membre
had brought some buffalo traditions from the Illinois country. He was
of Father Hennepin's opinion that this wild creature might be trained
to draw the plow, and he had faith that benevolence was concealed
behind its wicked eyes.
As Father Membre stalked along the prairie with the hunters, his capote
tucked up out of his way on its cord, one of the men shot a buffalo and
it dropped. The buffaloes rarely fell at once, even when wounded to
death, unless hit in the spine. Father Membre approached it curiously.
"Come back, Father!" shouted the hunters.
Father Membre touched it gently with his gun.
"Run, Father, run!" cried the hunters.
"It is dead," asserted Father Membre. "I will rest my gun across its
carcass to steady my aim at the other buffaloes."
He knelt to rest his gun across its back.
The great beast heaved convulsively to its feet and made a dash at the
Recollet. It sent him revolving heels over head. But Father Membre got
up, and, spreading his capote in both hands, danced in front of the
buffalo to head it off from escaping. At that, with a bellow, the shaggy
creature charged over him across the prairie, dropping to its knees and
dying before the frightened hunters could lift the friar from the ground.
"Are you hurt, Father?" they all asked, supporting him, and finding it
impossible to keep from laughing as he sat up, with his reverend face
skinned and his capote nearly torn off.
"Not unto death," responded Father Membre, brushing grass and dirty hoof
prints from his garment. "But it hath been greatly impressed on my mind
that this ox-savage is no fit beast for the plow. Nor will I longer
counsel our women to coax the wild cows to a milking. It is well to
adapt to our needs the beasts of a country," said Father Membre, wiping
blood from his face. "But this buffalo creature hath disappointed me!"
La Salle was prostrated through the month of November. But by Christmas
he was able to set out on a final search from which he did not intend
to return until he found the Mississippi. All hands in the fort were
busied on the outfit necessary for the party. Clothes were made of sails
recovered from one of the wrecked vessels. Eighteen men were to follow
La Salle, among them his elder brother, the Abbe Cavelier. Some had on
the remains of garments they had worn in France, and others were dressed
in deer or buffalo skins. He had bought five horses of the Indians to
carry the baggage.
At midnight on Christmas Eve everybody crowded into the small fortress
chapel. The priests, celebrating mass, moved before the altar in such
gold-embroidered vestments as they had, and the light of torches
illuminated the rough log walls. Those who were to stay and keep the
outpost, literally lost in the wilderness, were on their knees weeping.
Those who were to go knelt also, with the dread of an awful uncertainty
in their minds. The faithful ones foresaw worse than peril from forests
and waters and savages, for La Salle could not leave behind all the
villains with whom he was obliged to serve himself. He alone showed the
composure of a man who never despairs. If he had positively known that
he was setting out upon a fatal journey,--that he was undertaking his
last march through the wilderness,--the mass lights would still have
shown the firm face of a man who did not turn back from any enterprise.
The very existence of these people who had come out to the New World
with him depended on his success. Whatever lay in the road he had to
encounter it. The most splendid lives may progress and end through what
we call tragedy; but it is better to die in the very stress of achievement
than to stretch a poor existence through a century. The contagion of his
hardihood stole out like the Christmas incense and spread through the
chapel.
V.
FRENCH SETTLEMENTS.
"It was the establishment of military posts throughout this vast valley
that eventually brought on a life struggle between the English and the
French," says a historian.
At first the only spot of civilization in boundless wilderness was
Tonty's little fort on the Illinois. Protected by it, the Indians went
hunting and brought in buffalo skins and meat; their women planted
and reaped maize; children were born; days came and went; autumn haze
made the distances pearly; winter snow lay on the wigwams; men ran on
snowshoes; and papooses shouted on the frozen river. Still no news came
from La Salle.
[Illustration: MAP OF THE FRENCH SETTLEMENTS.]
Tonty had made a journey to the mouth of the Mississippi to meet him,
after he landed with his colony, searching thirty leagues in each
direction along the coast. La Salle was at that time groping through a
maze of lagoons in Texas. Tonty, with his men, waded swamps to their
necks, enduring more suffering than he had ever endured in his life
before. This was in February of the year 1686. Finding it impossible to
reach La Salle, who must be wandering somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico,
Tonty wrote a letter to him, intrusting it to the hands of an Indian
chief, with directions that it be delivered when the explorer appeared.
He also left a couple of men who were willing to wait in the Arkansas
villages to meet La Salle.
Two years passed before those men brought positive proof of the
undespairing Norman's fate. The remnant of the party that started with
La Salle from Fort St. Louis of Texas spent one winter at Fort St. Louis
of the Illinois, bringing word that they had left their leader in good
health on the coast. The Abbe Cavelier even collected furs in his
brother's name, and went on to France, carrying his secret with him.
La Salle had been assassinated on the Trinity River, soon after setting
out on his last determined search for the Mississippi. The eighteenth
day of March, 1687, some of his brutal voyageurs hid themselves in
bushes and shot him.
So slowly did events move then, and so powerless was man, an atom in the
wilderness, that the great-hearted Italian, weeping aloud in rage and
grief, realized that La Salle's bones had been bleaching a year and a
half before the news of his death reached his lieutenant. It was not
known that La Salle received burial. The wretches who assassinated him
threw him into some brush. It was a satisfaction to Tonty that they all
perished miserably afterwards; those who survived quarrels among
themselves being killed by the Indians.
The undespairing Norman died instantly, without feeling or admitting
defeat. And he was not defeated. Though his colony--including Father
Membre, who had been so long with him--perished by the hands of the
Indians in Texas, in spite of Tonty's second journey to relieve them,
his plan of settlements from the great lakes to the mouth of the
Mississippi became a reality.
Down from Canada came two of the eleven Le Moyne brothers, D'Iberville
and Bienville, fine fighting sons of a powerful colonial family, with
royal permission to found near the great river's mouth that city which
had been La Salle's dream. Fourteen years after La Salle's death, while
D'Iberville was exploring for a site, the old chief, to whom Tonty had
given a letter for La Salle, brought it carefully wrapped and delivered
it into the hands of La Salle's more fortunate successor.
Tonty was associated with Le Moyne D'Iberville in these labors around
the Gulf.
[Illustration: Autograph of Le Moyne D'Iberville.]
A long peninsula betwixt the Mississippi and Kaskaskia Rivers, known
since as the American Bottom, lured away Indians from the great town on
the Illinois. The new settlement founded on this peninsula was called
Kaskaskia, for one of the tribes. As other posts sprung into existence,
Fort St. Louis was less needed. "As early as 1712," we are told, "land
titles were issued for a common field in Kaskaskia. Traders had already
opened a commerce in skins and furs with the remote post of Isle
Dauphine in Mobile Bay." Settlements were firmly established. By 1720
the luxuries of Europe came into the great tract taken by La Salle in
the name of King Louis and called Louisiana.
Twelve years after La Salle's death a missionary named St. Cosme (Sant'
Come) journeyed from Canada in a party guided by Tonty. St. Cosme has
left this record of the man with the copper hand:--
"He guided us as far as the Arkansas and gave us much pleasure on the
way, winning friendship of some savages and intimidating others who from
jealousy or desire to plunder opposed the voyage; not only doing the
duty of a brave man but that of a missionary. He quieted the voyageurs,
by whom he was generally loved, and supported us by his example in
devotion."
On the Chicago portage a little boy, given to the missionary perhaps
because he was an orphan and the western country offered him the best
chances in life, started eagerly ahead, though he was told to wait. The
rest of the party, having goods and canoes to carry from the Chicago
River to the Desplaines, lost sight of him, and he was never seen again.
Autumn grass grew tall over the marshy portage, but they dared not set
it afire, though his fate was doubtless hidden in that grass. The party
divided and searched for him, calling and firing guns. Three days they
searched, and daring to wait no longer, for it was November and the
river ready to glaze with ice, they left him to some French people at
the post of Chicago. But the child was not found. He disappeared and no
one ever knew what became of him.
Like this is Henri de Tonty's disappearance from history. The records
show him working with Le Moyne D'Iberville and Le Moyne de Bienville to
found New Orleans and Mobile, pushing the enterprises which La Salle had
begun. He has been blamed with the misbehavior of a relative of his,
Alphonse de Tonty, who got into disgrace at the post of Detroit. Little
justice has been done to the memory of this man, who should not be
forgotten in the west. So quietly did he slip out of life that his
burial place is unknown. Some people believe that he came back to the
Rock long after its buildings were dismantled and it had ceased to be
Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. Others say he died in Mobile. But it is
probable that both La Salle and Tonty left their bodies to the
wilderness which their invincible spirits had conquered.
After the settlement of Kaskaskia a strong fortress was built sixteen
miles above, on the same side of the Mississippi. The king of France
spent a million crowns strengthening this place, which was called Fort
Chartres. Its massive walls, inclosing four acres, and its buildings and
arched gateway were like some medieval stronghold strangely transplanted
from the Old World. White uniformed troops paraded. A village sprang up
around it. Fort Chartres was the center of government until Kaskaskia
became the first capital of the Illinois territory. Applications for
land had to be made at this post. Indians on the Mississippi, for it was
a little distance from the shore, heard drumbeat and sunset gun, and
were proud of going in and out of its mighty gateway under the white
flag of France.
Other villages began on the eastern bank of the river--Cahokia, opposite
the present city of St. Louis, and Prairie du Rocher, nearer Kaskaskia.
Ste. Genevieve also was built in what is now the state of Missouri, on
land which then was claimed by the Spaniards. There was a Post of
Natchitoches on the Red River, as well as a Post of Washita on the
Washita River. Settlements were also founded upon La Fourche and Fausse
Riviere above New Orleans.
"The finest country we have seen," wrote one of the adventurers in those
days, "is all from Chicago to the Tamaroas. It is nothing but prairie
and clumps of wood as far as you can see. The Tamaroas are eight leagues
from the Illinois." Chicago was a landing place and portage from the
great lakes long before a stockade with a blockhouse was built called
Fort Dearborn.
"Monjolly," wrote the same adventurer, "or Mount Jolliet, is a mound of
earth on the prairie on the right side of the Illinois River as you go
down, elevated about thirty feet. The Indians say at the time of the
great deluge one of their ancestors escaped, and this little mountain is
his canoe which he turned over there."
La Salle had learned from the Iroquois about the Ohio River. But the
region through which it flowed to the Mississippi remained for a long
while an unbroken wilderness. The English settlements on their strip of
Atlantic coast, however, and the French settlements in the west, reached
gradually out over this territory and met and grappled. Whichever power
got and kept the mastery of the west would get the mastery of the
continent.
The territory of Kentucky, like that of Michigan, was owned by no tribe
of Indians. "It was the common hunting and fighting ground of Ohio
tribes on the north and Cherokees and Chickasaws on the south."
There was indeed one exception to the uninhabited state of all that land
stretching betwixt the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. Vincennes, now
a town of Indiana, was, after Kaskaskia, the oldest place in the west.
This isolated post is said to have been founded by French soldiers and
emigrants. Five thousand acres were devoted to the common field. De
Vincennes, for whom it was named, was a nephew of Louis Jolliet. And
while it is not at all certain that he founded the post, he doubtless
sojourned there in the Indiana country during his roving life. A small
stockade on the site of the town of Fort Wayne is said to have been
built by him.
French settlements began to extend southward from Lake Erie to the head
waters of the Ohio, like a chain to check the English. Presqu' Isle, now
Erie, Pennsylvania, was founded about the same time as Vincennes.