built in the curving roof of all French houses. Henry found a place
where he could look out. He saw his countrymen slaughtered without being
able to help them, and it was like a frightful nightmare from which
there was to be no awakening. Presently the cry rose:--
"All is finished!"
Then the Indians crowded into Langlade's house and inquired whether any
Englishmen were hid there. So thin was the attic floor of planks laid
across joists, that Henry could hear every word.
"I cannot say," answered the Frenchman. "You may examine for
yourselves."
Henry looked around the attic for some place to hide in. Moccasined feet
were already coming upstairs. Savage hands shook the attic door, and
impatient guttural voices demanded the key. While some one went for the
key, Henry crept into a kind of tunnel made by a heap of birch-bark
vessels, used in the maple-sugar season. The door was opening before he
could draw himself quite out of sight, and though the pile was in a dark
corner, he dreaded displacing some of the birch troughs and making a
noise.
The Indians trod so close to him he thought they must hear him breathe.
Their bodies were smeared with blood, which could be seen through the
dusk; and while searching they told Monsieur Langlade how many
Englishmen they had killed and the number of scalps they had taken.
Not finding any one, they went away and the door was again locked.
Henry crept out of hiding. There was a feather bed on the floor and he
stretched himself on it, so worn out by what he had seen and endured
that he fell asleep.
He was roused by the door opening again. Madame Langlade came in, and
she was surprised and frightened at finding him. It was nearly night and
a fierce summer rain beat upon the roof, dripping through cracks of the
heat-dried bark. Madame Langlade had come to stop a leak. She told Henry
that all the English except himself were killed, but she hoped he would
escape. She brought him some water to drink.
As darkness came on, he lay thinking of his desperate state. He was four
hundred miles from Detroit, which he did not then know was besieged,
and with all his stores captured or destroyed by the Indians, he had no
provisions. He could not stay where he was, and if he ventured out, the
first red man who met him would kill him.
By morning the Indians came to the house inquiring for Henry, whom they
had missed. Madame Langlade was in such fear that they might kill her
children if they found Henry sheltered in the house, that she told her
husband where he was and begged to have him given up. This the Frenchman
at first refused to do; but he finally led the Indians again to the
attic.
Henry stood up, expecting to die.
The Indians were all partially drunk and had satisfied themselves with
slaughter. One of them seized Henry by the collar and lifted a knife to
plunge into his breast. White man and red man looked intently at each
other, and the savage, perhaps moved by the fearless despair in the
young Englishman's eyes, concluded to take him prisoner. Henry began
to think he could not be killed.
He found that the captain and lieutenant of Michilimackinac were also
alive and prisoners like himself. The missionary priest was doing all
he could to restrain his maddened flock. At a council held between
Chippewas and Ottawas, Henry was bought with presents by a Chippewa
chief named Wawatam, who loved him, and who had been absent the day of
the attack Wawatam put Henry in his canoe, carried him across the strait
to Michilimackinac Island, and hid him in a cave, which is now called
Skull Rock by the islanders, because Henry found ancient skulls and bones
in the bottom of it. As the island was held sacred by the Indians, this
was probably one of their old sepulchres. Its dome top is smothered in a
tangle of evergreens and brush. There is a low, triangular entrance, and
the hollow inside is shaped like an elbow. More than one island boy has
since crept back to the dark bend where Henry lay hidden on the skulls,
but only a drift of damp leaves can be found there now.
The whole story of Alexander Henry's adventures, before he escaped and
returned safely to Canada, is a wonderful chapter in western history.
The Indians were not guilty of all the cruelties practiced in this war.
Bounties were offered for savage scalps. One renegade Englishman, named
David Owen, came back from adoption and marriage into a tribe, bringing
the scalps of his squaw wife and her friends.
Through the entire summer Pontiac was successful in everything except
the taking of Detroit. He besieged it from May until October. With
autumn his hopes began to dwindle. He had asked the French to help him,
and refused to believe that their king had made a treaty at Paris,
giving up to the English all French claims in the New World east of
the Mississippi. His cause was lost. He could band unstable warriors
together for a common good, but he could not control politics in Europe,
nor defend a people given up by their sovereign, against the solidly
advancing English race.
[Illustration: North America at Close of French Wars, 1763.]
But he was unwilling to own himself defeated while the French flag waved
over a foot of American ground. This clever Indian, needing supplies to
carry on his war, used civilized methods to get them on credit. He gave
promissory notes written on birch bark, signed with his own totem, or
tribe-mark--a picture of the otter. These notes were faithfully paid.
When he saw his struggle becoming hopeless eastward, he drew off to the
Illinois settlements to fight back the English from taking possession of
Fort Chartres, the last French post. They might come up the Mississippi
from New Orleans, or they might come down the Ohio. The Iroquois had
always called the Mississippi the Ohio, considering that river which
rose near their own country the great river, and the northern branch
merely a tributary.
Pontiac ordered the Illinois Indians to take up arms and stand by him.
"Hesitate not," he said, "or I will destroy you as fire does the prairie
grass! These are the words of Pontiac."
They obeyed him. He sent more messengers down as far as New Orleans,
keeping the tribes stirred against the English. He camped with his
forces around Fort Chartres, cherishing it and urging the last French
commandant, St. Ange de Bellerive, to take up arms with him, until that
poor captain, tormented by the savage mob, and only holding the place
until its English owners received it, was ready to march out with his
few soldiers and abandon it.
It is told that while Pontiac was leading his forlorn hope, he made his
conquerors ridiculous. Major Loftus with a detachment of troops came up
the Mississippi to take possession according to treaty. Pontiac turned
him back. Captain Pittman came up the river. Pontiac turned him back.
Captain Morris started from Detroit, and Pontiac squatted defiantly in
his way. Lieutenant Frazer descended the Ohio. Pontiac caught him and
shipped him to New Orleans by canoe. Captain Croghan was also stopped
near Detroit. Both French and Spanish people roared with laughter at
the many failures of the coming race to seize what had so easily been
obtained by treaty.
Two years and a half passed between Pontiac's attack on Detroit and
the formal surrender of Fort Chartres. The great war chief's heart, with
a gradual breaking, finally yielded before the steadily advancing and
all-conquering people that were to dominate this continent.
The second day of winter, late in the afternoon, Pontiac went into
the fort unattended by any warrior, and without a word sat down near
St. Ange de Bellerive in the officers' quarters. Both veteran soldier
and old chief knew that Major Farmar, with a large body of troops,
was almost in sight of Fort Chartres, coming from New Orleans. Perhaps
before the low winter sun was out of sight, cannon mounted on one of
the bastions would have to salute the new commandant. Sentinels on
the mound of Fort Chartres could see a frosty valley, reaching to the
Mississippi, glinting in the distance. That alluvial stretch was, in
the course of years, to be eaten away by the river even to the bastions.
The fort itself, built at such expense, would soon be abandoned by
its conquerors, to sink, piecemeal, a noble and massive ruin. The
dome-shaped powder house and stone quarters would be put to ignoble
uses, and forest trees, spreading the spice of walnut fragrance, or the
dense shadow of oaks, would grow through the very room where St. Ange
and Pontiac sat. Indians, passing by, would camp in the old place,
forgetting how the last hope of their race had clung to it.
The Frenchman partly foresaw these changes, and it was a bitter hour to
him. He wanted to have it over and to cross the Mississippi, to a town
recently founded northward on the west shore, where many French settlers
had collected, called St. Louis. This was then considered Spanish
ground. But if the French king deserted his American colonies, why
should not his American colonists desert him?
"Father," spoke out Pontiac, with the usual Indian term of respect,
"I have always loved the French. We have often smoked the calumet
together, and we have fought battles together against misguided Indians
and the English dogs."
St. Ange de Bellerive looked at the dejected chief and thought of Le
Moyne de Bienville, now an old man living in France, who was said to
have wept and implored King Louis on his knees not to give up to the
English that rich western domain which Marquette and Jolliet and La
Salle and Tonty and many another Frenchman had suffered to gain, and
to secure which he himself had given his best years.
"The chief must now bury the hatchet," he answered quietly.
"I have buried it," said Pontiac. "I shall lift it no more."
"The English are willing to make peace with him, if he recalls all his
wampum belts of war."
Pontiac grinned. "The belts are more than one man can carry."
"Where does the chief intend to go when he leaves this post?"
Pontiac lifted his hand and pointed east, west, north, south.
He would have no settled abode. It was a sign that he relinquished the
inheritance of his fathers to an invader he hated. His race could not
live under the civilization of the Anglo-Saxon. He would have struck
out to the remotest wilderness, had he foreseen to what a burial place
his continual clinging to the French would bring him. For Pontiac was
assassinated by an Illinois Indian, whom an English trader had bribed,
and his body lies somewhere to-day under the pavements of St. Louis,
English-speaking men treading constantly over him. But if the dead
chief's ears could hear, he would catch also the sound of the beloved
French tongue lingering there.
A cannon thundered from one of the bastions. St. Ange stood up, and
Pontiac stood up with him.
"The English are in sight," said St. Ange de Bellerive. "That salute is
the signal for the flag of France to be lowered on Fort Chartres."
* * * * *
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INTRODUCTION TO AMERICAN HISTORY
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