The unvarying model was one story high, with porches or galleries
surrounding it. Wooden walls were filled and daubed with a solid mass of
what was called cat-and-clay, a mixture of mortar and chopped straw or
Spanish moss. The chimney was of the same materials, shaped by four long
corner posts, wide apart below, and nearer together at the top.
As fast as children grew up and married they built their cottages
in their father's yard; and so it went on, until with children and
grandchildren and great-grandchildren, a small village accumulated
around one old couple.
The French were not anxious to obtain grants of the rich wild land.
Every settlement had its common field, large or small, as was desired.
A portion of this field was given to each person in the village for his
own, and he was obliged to cultivate it and raise food for his family.
If a man neglected his ground, it was taken from him. A large tract of
land called the common pasture was also inclosed for everybody's cattle
to graze in.
Sometimes houses were set facing one court, or center, like a camp, for
defense. But generally the French had little trouble with their savage
neighbors, who took very kindly to them. The story of western settlement
is not that dreadful story of continual wars with Indians which reddens
the pages of eastern colonies. The French were gay people. They loved to
dance and hunt and spend their time in amusements. While the serious,
stubborn English were grubbing out the foundations of great states on
the Atlantic coast, it must be confessed these happy folks cared little
about developing the rich Mississippi valley.
During all its early occupation this hospitable land abounded with game.
Though in November the buffaloes became so lean that only their tongues
were eaten, swans, geese, and ducks were always plentiful, and the fish
could not be exhausted.
On a day in February, people from Kaskaskia hurried over the road which
then stretched a league to the Mississippi, for the town was on the
Kaskaskia River bank. There were settlers in blanket capotes, shaped
like friars' frocks, with hoods to draw over their heads. If it had
been June instead of February, a blue or red kerchief would have covered
the men's heads. The dress of an ordinary frontiersman in those days
consisted of shirt, breech-cloth, and buckskin leggins, with moccasins,
and neips, or strips of blanket wrapped around the feet for stockings.
The voyageur so equipped could undertake any hardship. But in the
settlements wooden shoes were worn instead of moccasins, and garments of
texture lighter than buckskin. The women wore short gowns, or long, full
jackets, and petticoats; and their moccasins were like those of squaws,
ornamented with beautiful quill-work. Their outer wraps were not unlike
the men's; so a multitude of blanket capotes flocked toward the
Mississippi bank, which at that time had not been washed away, and rose
steeply above the water. They had all run to see a procession of boats
pass by from Fort Chartres.
A little negro had brought the news that the boats were in sight. Black
slaves were owned by some of the French; and Indian slaves, sold by
their captors to the settlers, had long been members of these
patriarchal households. Many of them had left their work to follow their
masters to the river; the negroes pointing and shouting, the Indians
standing motionless and silent.
The sun flecked a broad expanse of water, and down this shining track
rushed a fleet of canoes; white uniforms leading, and brick-colored
heads above dusky-fringed buckskins following close after. This little
army waved their hands and fired guns to salute the crowd on shore. The
crowd all jangled voices in excited talk, no man listening to what
another said.
"See you--there are Monsieur Pierre D'Artaguette and the Chevalier De
Vincennes and excellent Father Senat in the first boat."
"The young St. Ange and Sieur Lalande follow them."
"How many of our good Indians have thrown themselves into this
expedition! The Chickasaw nation may howl when they see this array!
They will be taught to leave the boats from New Orleans alone!"
"But suppose Sieur De Bienville and his army do not meet the Commandant
D'Artaguette when he reaches the Chickasaw country?"
"During his two years at Fort Chartres has Sieur D'Artaguette made
mistakes? The expedition will succeed."
"The saints keep that beautiful boy!--for to look at him, though he is
so hardy, Monsieur Pierre D'Artaguette is as handsome as a woman. I have
heard the southern tribes sacrifice their own children to the sun. This
is a fair company of Christians to venture against such devils."
The Chickasaws, occupying a tract of country now stretching across
northern Mississippi and western Tennessee, were friendly to the English
and willing to encroach on the French. They interrupted river traffic
and practiced every cruelty on their prisoners. D'Artaguette knew
as well as the early explorers that in dealing with savages it is a
fatal policy to overlook or excuse their ill-behavior. They themselves
believed in exact revenge, and despised a foe who did not strike back,
their insolence becoming boundless if not curbed. So he had planned with
Le Moyne de Bienville a concerted attack on these allies of the English.
Bienville, bringing troops up river from New Orleans, was to meet him in
the Chickasaw country on a day and spot carefully specified.
[Illustration: Autograph of Bienville.]
The brilliant pageant of canoes went on down the river, seeming to grow
smaller, until it dwindled to nothingness in the distance.
But in the course of weeks only a few men came back, sent by the
Chickasaws, to tell about the fate of their leaders. The troops from
New Orleans did not keep the appointment, arriving too late and then
retreating. D'Artaguette, urged by his Indians, made the attack with
such force as he had, and his brave array was destroyed. He and the
Chevalier Vincennes, with Laland, Father Senat, and many others, a circle
of noble human torches, perished at the stake. People lamented aloud in
Kaskaskia and Cahokia streets, and the white flag of France slipped down
to half-mast on Fort Chartres.
This victory made the Chickasaw Indians so bold that scarcely a French
convoy on the river escaped them. There is a story that a young girl
reached the gate of Fort Chartres, starving and in rags, from wandering
through swamps and woods. She was the last of a family arrived from
France, and sought her sister, an officer's wife, in the fort. The
Chickasaws had killed every other relative; she, escaping alone, was
ready to die of exposure when she saw the flag through the trees.
But another captain of Fort Chartres, no bolder than young Pierre
D'Artaguette, but more fortunate, named Neyon de Villiers, twenty years
afterwards led troops as far east as the present state of Pennsylvania,
and helped his brother, Coulon de Villiers, continue the struggle
betwixt French and English by defeating, at Fort Necessity, the English
commanded by a young Virginia officer named George Washington.
[Illustration: INDIAN GAME OF BALL.
After Catlin.]
VI.
THE LAST GREAT INDIAN.
The sound of the Indian drum was heard on Detroit River, and humid May
night air carried it a league or more to the fort. All the Pottawatomies
and Wyandots were gathered from their own villages on opposite shores
to the Ottawas on the south bank, facing Isle Cochon. Their women and
children squatted about huge fires to see the war dance. The river
strait, so limpidly and transparently blue in daytime, that dipping a
pailful of it was like dipping a pailful of the sky, scarcely glinted
betwixt darkened woods.
In the center of an open space, which the camp-fires were built to
illuminate, a painted post was driven into the ground, and the warriors
formed a large ring around it. Their moccasined feet kept time to the
booming of the drums. With a flourish of his hatchet around his head, a
chief leaped into the ring and began to chase an imaginary foe, chanting
his own deeds and those of his forefathers. He was a muscular rather
than a tall Indian, with high, striking features. His dark skin was
colored by war paint, and he had stripped himself of everything but
ornaments. Ottawa Indians usually wore brilliant blankets, while
Wyandots of Sandusky and Detroit paraded in painted shirts, their heads
crowned with feathers, and their leggins tinkling with little bells.
The Ojibwas, or Chippewas, of the north carried quivers slung on their
backs, holding their arrows.
The dancer in the ring was the Ottawa chief, Pontiac, a man at that
time fifty years old, who had brought eighteen savage nations under his
dominion, so that they obeyed his slightest word. With majestic sweep of
the limbs he whirled through the pantomime of capturing and scalping an
enemy, struck the painted post with his tomahawk, and raised the awful
war whoop. His young braves stamped and yelled with him. Another leaped
into the ring, sung his deeds, and struck the painted post, warrior
after warrior following, until a wild maze of sinewy figures swam and
shrieked around it. Blazing pine knots stuck in the ground helped to
show this maddened whirl, the very opposite of the peaceful, floating
calumet dance. Boy papooses, watching it, yelled also, their black eyes
kindling with full desire to shed blood.
Perhaps no Indian there, except Pontiac, understood what was beginning
with the war dance on that May night of the year 1763. He had been
laying his plans all winter, and sending huge black and purple wampum
belts of war, and hatchets dipped in red, to rouse every native tribe.
All the Algonquin stock and the Senecas of the Iroquois were united with
him. From the small oven-shaped hut on Isle Cochon, where he lived with
his squaws and children, to Michilimackinac, from Michilimackinac to the
lower Mississippi, and from the eastern end of Lake Erie down to the
Ohio, the messengers of this self-made emperor had secretly carried and
unfolded his plan, which was to rise and attack all the English forts on
the same day, and then to destroy all the English settlers, sparing no
white people but the French.
Two years before, an English army had come over to Canada and conquered
it. That was a deathblow to French settlements in the middle west.
They dared no longer resist English colonists pushing on them from
the east. All that chain of forts stretching from Lake Erie down to the
Ohio--Presqu' Isle, Le Boeuf, Venango, Ligonier--had been given up to
the English, as well as western posts--Detroit, Fort Miami, Ouatanon on
the Wabash, and Michilimackinac. The settlements on the Mississippi,
however, still displayed the white flag of France. So large was the
dominion in the New World which England now had the right to claim,
that she was unable to grasp it all at once.
[Illustration: The White Flag of France.]
The Indians did not like the English, who treated them with contempt,
would not offer them presents, and put them in danger of starvation
by holding back the guns and ammunition, on which they had learned to
depend, instead of their bows and arrows. For two years they had borne
the rapid spread of English settlements on land which they still
regarded as their own. These intruders were not like the French, who
cared nothing about claiming land, and were always ready to hunt or
dance with their red brethren.
All the tribes were, therefore, eager to rise against the English, whom
they wanted to drive back into the sea. Pontiac himself knew this could
not be done; but he thought it possible, by striking the English forts
all at once, to restore the French power and so get the French to help
him in fighting back their common foe from spreading into the west.
Pontiac was the only Indian who ever seemed to realize all the dangers
which threatened his race, or to have military skill for organizing
against them. His work had been secret, and he had taken pains to appear
very friendly to the garrison of Detroit, who were used to the noise of
Indian yelling and dancing. This fort was the central point of his
operations, and he intended to take it next morning by surprise.
Though La Motte Cadillac was the founder of a permanent settlement on
the west shore of Detroit River, it is said that Greysolon du Lhut set
up the first palisades there. About a hundred houses stood crowded
together within the wooden wall of these tall log pickets, which were
twenty-five feet high. The houses were roofed with bark or thatched with
straw. The streets were mere paths, but a wide road went all around the
town next to the palisades. Detroit was almost square in shape, with
a bastion, or fortified projection, at each corner, and a blockhouse
built over each gate. The river almost washed the front palisades, and
two schooners usually anchored near to protect the fort and give it
communication with other points. Besides the homes of settlers, it
contained barracks for soldiers, a council-house, and a little church.
About a hundred and twenty English soldiers, besides fur traders and
Canadian settlers, were in this inclosure, which was called the fort, to
distinguish it from the village of French houses up and down the shore.
Dwellers outside had their own gardens and orchards, also surrounded by
pickets. These French people, who tried to live comfortably among the
English, whom they liked no better than the Indians did, raised fine
pears and apples and made wine of the wild grapes.
The river, emptying the water of the upper lakes into Lake Erie, was
about half a mile wide. Sunlight next morning showed this blue strait
sparkling from the palisades to the other shore, and trees and gardens
moist with that dewy breath which seems to exhale from fresh-water seas.
Indians swarmed early around the fort, pretending that the young men
were that day going to play a game of ball in the fields, while Pontiac
and sixty old chiefs came to hold a council with the English. More than
a thousand of them lounged about, ready for action. The braves were
blanketed, each carrying a gun with its barrel filed off short enough
to be concealed under his blanket.
About ten o'clock Pontiac and his chiefs crossed the river in birch
canoes and stalked in Indian file, every man stepping in the tracks
of the man before him, to the fort gates. The gates on the water side
usually stood open until evening, for the English, contemptuously
careless of savages, let squaws and warriors come and go at pleasure.
They did not that morning open until Pontiac entered. He found himself
and his chiefs walking betwixt files of armed soldiers. The gates were
shut behind him.
Pontiac was startled as if by a sting. He saw that some one had betrayed
his plan to the officers. Even fur traders were standing under arms.
To this day it is not known who secretly warned the fort of Pontiac's
conspiracy; but the most reliable tradition declares it to have been a
young squaw named Catherine, who could not endure to see friends whom
she loved put to death.
It flashed through Pontiac's mind that he and his followers were now
really prisoners. The captain of Detroit was afterwards blamed for not
holding the chief when he had him. The tribes could not rush through
the closed gates at Pontiac's signal, which was to be the lifting of a
wampum belt upside down, with all its figures reversed. But the cunning
savage put on a look of innocence and inquired:--
"My father," using the Indian term of respect, "why are so many of your
young men standing in the street with their guns?"
"They have been ordered out for exercise and discipline," answered the
officer.
A slight clash of arms and the rolling of drums were heard by the
surprised tribes waiting in suspense around the palisades. They did not
know whether they would ever see their leader appear again. But he came
out, after going through the form of a council, mortified by his failure
to seize the fort, and sulkily crossed the river to his lodge. All his
plans to bring warriors inside the palisades were treated with contempt
by the captain of Detroit. Pontiac wanted his braves to smoke the
calumet with his English father.
"You may come in yourself," said the officer, "but the crowd you have
with you must remain outside."
"I want all my young men," urged Pontiac, "to enjoy the fragrance of the
friendly calumet."
"I will have none of your rabble in the fort," said the officer.
Raging like a wild beast, Pontiac then led his people in assault.
He threw off every pretense of friendliness, and from all directions
the tribes closed around Detroit in a general attack. Though it had
wooden walls, it was well defended. The Indians, after their first
fierce onset, fighting in their own way, behind trees and sheltered by
buildings outside the fort, were able to besiege the place indefinitely
with comparatively small loss to themselves; while the garrison, shut
in almost without warning, looked forward to scarcity of provisions.
All English people caught beyond the walls were instantly murdered. But
the French settlers were allowed to go about their usual affairs unhurt.
Queer traditions have come down from them of the pious burial they gave
to English victims of the Indians. One old man stuck his hands out of
his grave. The French covered them with earth. But next time they passed
that way they saw the stiff, entreating hands, like pale fungi, again
thrust into view. At this the horrified French settlers hurried to their
priest, who said the neglected burial service over the grave, and so put
the poor Englishman to rest, for his hands protruded no more.
One of the absent schooners kept for the use of the fort had gone down
river with letters and dispatches. Her crew knew nothing of the siege,
and she narrowly escaped capture. A convoy of boats, bringing the usual
spring supplies, was taken, leaving Detroit to face famine. Yet it
refused to surrender, and, in spite of Pontiac's rage and his continual
investment of the place, the red flag of England floated over that
fortress all summer.
Other posts were not so fortunate in resisting Pontiac's conspiracy.
Fort Sandusky, at the west end of Lake Erie; Fort Ouatanon, on the
Wabash, a little south of where Lafayette, in the state of Indiana, now
stands; Fort Miami, Presqu' Isle, Le Boeuf, Venango, on the eastern
border, and Michilimackinac, on the straits, were all taken by the
Indians.
At Presqu' Isle the twenty-seven soldiers went into the blockhouse of
the fort and prepared to hold it, lining and making it bullet-proof.
A blockhouse was built of logs, or very thick timber, and had no
windows, and but one door in the lower story. The upper story projected
several feet all around, and had loopholes in the overhanging, floor,
through which the men could shoot down. Loopholes were also fixed in the
upper walls, wide within, but closing to narrow slits on the outside.
A sentry box or lookout was sometimes put at the top of the roof. With
the door barred by iron or great beams of wood, and food and ammunition
stored in the lower room, men could ascend a ladder to the second story
of a blockhouse and hold it against great odds, if the besiegers did not
succeed in burning them out.
Presqu' Isle was at the edge of Lake Erie, and the soldiers brought
in all the water they could store. But the attacking Indians made
breastworks of logs, and shot burning arrows on the shingle roof.
All the water barrels were emptied putting out fires. While some men
defended the loopholes, others dug under the floor of the blockhouse and
mined a way below ground to the well in the fort where Indians swarmed.
Buildings in the inclosure were set on fire, but the defenders of the
blockhouse kept it from catching the flames by tearing off shingles
from the roof when they began to burn. The mining party reached the well,
and buckets of water were drawn up and passed through the tunnel to the
blockhouse. Greatly exhausted, the soldiers held out until next day,
when, having surrendered honorably, they were all taken prisoners as
they left the scorched and battered log tower. For savages were such
capricious and cruel victors that they could rarely be depended upon to
keep faith. Pontiac himself was superior to his people in such matters.
If he had been at Presqu' Isle, the garrison would not have been seized
after surrendering on honorable terms. However, these soldiers were not
instantly massacred, as other prisoners had been in war betwixt French
and English, when savage allies could not be restrained.
Next to Detroit the most important post was Michilimackinac.
This was not the island in the straits bearing that name, but a
stockaded fort on the south shore of Michigan, directly across the
strait from St. Ignace. To this day, searching along a beach of deep,
yielding sand, so different from the rocky strands of the islands,
you may find at the forest edge a cellar where the powder house stood,
and fruit trees and gooseberry bushes from gardens planted there more
than two hundred years ago.
Michilimackinac, succeeding St. Ignace, had grown in importance, and was
now a stockaded fort, having French houses both within and outside it,
like Detroit. After Father Marquette's old mission had been abandoned
and the buildings burned, another small mission was begun at L'Arbre
Croche, not far west of Fort Michilimackinac, such of his Ottawas as
were not scattered being gathered here. The region around also was full
of Chippewas or Ojibwas.
All these Indians hated the English. Some came to the fort and said to a
young English trader named Alexander Henry, who arrived after the white
flag was hauled down and the red one about to be hoisted:--
"Englishman, although you have conquered the French, you have not
conquered us. We are not your slaves. These lakes, these woods and
mountains were left to us by our ancestors. They are our inheritance,
and we will part with them to none!"
Though these Ottawas and Chippewas were independent of those about
Detroit, they had eagerly taken hold of Pontiac's war belt. The
missionary priest was able for a while to restrain the Ottawas. The
Chippewas, gathered in from their winter's hunting, determined to strike
the first blow.
On the fourth day of June, which was the English king's birthday, they
came and invited the garrison to look at a game of ball, or baggattaway,
which they were going to play on the long sandy beach, against some
Sac Indians. The fortress gates stood open. The day was very warm and
discipline was relaxed. Nobody noticed that squaws, flocking inside the
fort, had tomahawks and scalping knives hidden under their blankets,
though a few Englishmen afterward remembered that the squaws were
strangely huddled in wrappings on a day hot for that climate.
The young English trader, Alexander Henry, has left a careful account of
the massacre at Fort Michilimackinac. He did not go out to see the ball
game, because he had important letters to write and send by a canoe just
starting to Canada. Officers and men, believing the red tribes friendly,
lounged about unarmed. Whitewashed French houses shone in the sun, and
the surge of the straits sounded peacefully on the beach. Nobody could
dream that when the shouting Indians drove the ball back from the
farthest stake, their cries would suddenly change to war whoops.
At that horrid yell Henry sprang up and ran to a window of his house.
He saw Chippewas filling the fort, and with weapons snatched from the
squaws, cutting down and scalping Englishmen. He caught his own gun from
its rack, expecting to hear the drum beat to arms. But the surprised
garrison were unable even to sound an alarm.
Seeing that not a Frenchman was touched, Henry slipped into the house of
his next neighbor, a Canadian named Langlade. The whole family were at
the front windows, looking at the horrible sights in the fort; but an
Indian slave, a Pani, or Pawnee woman, beckoned to him and hid him in
the attic, locking the door and carrying away the key.