Soto and the Mississippi—The Gate to the Wilderness—The
_Voyageur_—Champlain to Mackinaw—Pandemonium of Wars—Down
the Mississippi to Soto's Grave—Louisiana—La Salle and His
Death—_Coureurs de Bois_—First Sight of the Northern Rockies—Where
Rolls the Oregon—The American Revolution.
While Coronado was striving from the direction of Mexico to reach
the mirage-like cities of Quivira, which the deceitful Turk asserted
were somewhere eastward of the Rio Grande, and in search of which he
arrived in some locality not many miles from the present site of Kansas
City,[49] another Spaniard, whose name is better known, not for greater
deeds, but because the country he traversed is more familiar, and
because of his romantic burial at night beneath the turbid flood he had
been second to discover, was marching and fighting towards the great
river so permanently linked with his name. This was Hernando de Soto,
who, in 1539, had landed with a large force at Tampa Bay for the purpose
of conquering and appropriating to his heart's desire all of Florida,
a realm comprising then the whole continent east of the River of Palms,
now the Rio Grande. His cruelties to the natives were frightful, and as
he wandered he left a trail of mingled Spanish and native blood, which
at length led him, in 1541, to the Mississippi, where he crossed some
distance above the mouth of the Arkansas. Near Tampa he had captured a
white man, a survivor of the Narvaez party, who had been preserved among
the natives by the intercession of a chief's daughter, and this Juan
Ortiz should have been a reminder of the fate of Narvaez, a fate largely
due to imprudence, bad management, and a disregard for the rights of
natives; but it seems to have conveyed no warning.
Continuing his harsh career into the Wilderness as far as what is now
central Arkansas, he turned south and passed the winter of 1541-42 in
north-western Louisiana, or south-western Arkansas. Coronado spent this
same winter at Tiguex, on the Rio Grande, where the inhabitants declared
the Spaniards had no regard for friendship or their pledged word. In
the spring Soto went down to the mouth of Red River. There his health
failed. He died, and his followers, to prevent the natives from finding
his grave, buried him in the deep water of the river. The command fell
to Moscoso de Alvarado, who now led the company again westward, hoping
to come to Spanish settlements, but when he arrived in Texas at the
upper part of Trinity River he abandoned the attempt and returned to
the Mississippi.
He had probably been within less than two hundred miles of the place
where Coronado, about the same time, sent his army back. They had
rumours of the presence of Coronado, but the nature of the country was
so forbidding they feared to proceed. Moscoso was even more brutal than
Soto. He punished natives by cutting off their noses and their right
hands; or, by another method not unusual with the early Spaniards,
setting hungry dogs on a victim to tear him to pieces before their
eyes. At last this remnant of the expedition, that had started with
high hopes, succeeded in building boats with which they descended the
Mississippi and coasted westward, reaching the province of Panuco, in
north-eastern Mexico. A great deal of misery and death had been brought
to the people of the new land, but, aside from ground for an additional
Spanish claim, little more had been accomplished by this than by the
Narvaez expedition.
[Illustration: Barriers of Adamant—Mission Range.
Photograph by R. H. Chapman, U. S. Geol. Survey.]
Although the Spaniards opposed vigorously the coming to the New World of
any other people, New Spain soon found a rival in New France, and then
in New England. Cortez had barely finished the overthrow of the Aztecs
before Verrazano, for the French King, cruised along the Atlantic coast
from Hatteras northward to where French fishermen already had been, and
where Cartier in 1534, ten years later, discovered the great island we
call Newfoundland and his Gulf of St. Lawrence. The next year he sailed
up the great river, to which he gave the same name, and thereby opened
the real gate to our Wilderness; for it was by this route, and not by
the south, that the best early entrance was offered, on account of the
numerous closely connected lakes and waterways of various kinds. Travel
in a new country is always easier by boat than by any other method, for,
if there are plenty of waterways, a canoe and its cargo can be carried
from the head of one stream, or lake, to the next nearest one, and so
a practically continuous passage effected with quantities of goods,
which otherwise could not be transported without a large number of
pack-animals or waggons, and pack-animals frequently need a way cleared
for them, while a waggon in a new land is often impossible. So by these
waterways, numerously ramifying from the mouth of the St. Lawrence into
the vast western Unknown, the Frenchmen, with the beautiful birch-bark
canoe of the Amerind, whose skill they also speedily acquired, entered
the Wilderness with a sailor's light-heartedness, singing their gay
chansons as they paddled along; songs with little sense but much rhythm,
like all the ditties sailors use for expediting their labours, which,
like rowing or paddling, require to be accomplished in unison. As
New France developed into Canada the _Voyageur_ became a familiar and
distinct character; a creation of the New World. He was as competent
with a canoe as was his Spanish brother, the _vaquero_, with the horse.
We meet him constantly in the Wilderness, and all the waterways leading
to it, his airy verses echoing through the forest till the sombre pine
trees seemed more lightly to wave their drooping branches; or dying
across limitless stretches of prairie, in conflict, perhaps, with the
stranger notes of some Amerindian chant.
By these songs the _voyageurs_ united the strokes of their oars
or paddles, and they were often responsive, like the sailor-songs
on shipboard, between one party and the other; the steersman and
the rowers, or the forward and the stern oarsmen. One stanza of a
_voyageur's_ song will serve to give their character:
"Derrière chéz nous, il y a un etang,[50]
Ye, ye, ment.
Trois canards s'en vont baignans,
Tous du lóng de la rivière,
Legèrement ma bergère,
Legerment ye ment."
TRANSLATION
"Behind our house there is a pond,
Fal lal de ra.
There came three ducks to swim thereon;
All along the river clear,
Lightly my shepherdess dear,
Lightly, fal de ra."
Cartier opened the way as far as Hochelaga, now the site of Montreal,
which was soon to become the very centre of all commerce with the
Wilderness. Attempts were made by the French to found settlements down
the coast, and one, on St. John's River, in Florida, seemed to have some
life in it till the Spaniards entrenched themselves at St. Augustine,
and from there crushed the French fort and the French power in that
quarter for all time. This St. Augustine of the Spaniards was the first
permanent settlement of Europeans within the limits of the United States
(1565), antedating by forty years Oñate's founding of his first village
at San Juan, New Mexico, now marked, as previously mentioned, by the
little town of Chamita.
About the time that Oñate was organising New Mexico there came over to
the north-east coast one Sieur de Monts, who established Port Royal for
France in a region named Acadia, lying between the Lower St. Lawrence
and the Atlantic, a title later restricted to the portion now called
Nova Scotia, and immortalised in Longfellow's poem, _Evangeline_. But
it was not till the illustrious Champlain, afterwards so justly famous,
founded Quebec, in 1608, that France really closed her grip on the
north-eastern part of the continent; a grip that was later to be broken
for ever by the British. Having permanently settled Quebec, Champlain,
with his _voyageurs_, extended his travels westward by watercourses and
lakes as far as the Straits of Mackinaw, founding many trading-posts and
missions, and marking the first practicable highway to the Wilderness.
He was efficiently supported in his efforts by monks of the Jesuit and
Franciscan orders, brethren of those who were labouring diligently in
the south-west, and who, though their energetic and sincere labours to
Christianise the natives amounted to no more than a puff-ball tossed
against the side of a battleship, performed a great and indispensable
work in this breaking of the Wilderness.
[Illustration: A Reception Committee.
Photograph by J. K. Hillers, U. S. Geol. Survey.]
The British also began to turn their attention to the New World,
and after several explorations along the coast—Raleigh's attempt at
settlement in what is now North Carolina; Davis's exploration in the
Far North, where his name still remains to designate the strait he
discovered—they finally founded on James River their first permanent
settlement in 1607, two years after the establishment of Santa Fé, New
Mexico. To this they gave the name Jamestown, and from it as a centre
they expanded their power. The French were pushing out at the North;
the Spaniards controlled the South and West. Then a fourth nation
appeared—the Dutch—who settled at what is now New York in 1614, five
years after Hudson discovered the river now bearing his name to mark
the event. Not long after this Hudson found for England the immense bay
to which his name was given, and where his mutinous crew turned him,
with some of his adherents, adrift on the icy sea. Never was he heard
from again. Then the _Mayflower_ came, freighted heavily with new and
forceful ideas and a hardy company, who entered by Plymouth Rock; so
that by 1625 all the forces that were to battle for the mastery of North
America had established their footings, and with the various native
tribes, who opposed their encroachment and their cruelty, they soon
turned the land into a pandemonium. Almost daily the natives were given
exhibitions of treachery, brutality, butchery, on the part of these
newcomers among themselves, even while the good priests held aloft the
crucifix and repeated, "Thou shalt not!" Is it a wonder the Amerind
refused to believe? He was quick to perceive that, except the priests,
the one sole object of all these warring people was pecuniary advantage.
This, indeed, was rendered imperative by the European system of life.
As a rule the French were the most humane, the most just; they treated
the natives more as if they might be human beings with sensitiveness
and intelligence. William Penn, and his followers among the English, and
the Hudson Bay Company, also dealt justly with them, but in the eyes of
the others the Amerind was a beast of the forest to be exterminated.
The French sent their missionaries and traders far to the West and
before long had acquired a hold on the continent equal to that of
the Spaniards; a hold which it then seemed impossible should ever be
lessened. Raddison, the French trader, is said to have been on the head
of the Mississippi as early as 1660.
Marquette and Joliet, the former a priest, the latter a trader, were
sent by Frontenac, in 1673, to search for a route across the Wilderness
to the Pacific by way of a great river, of which much was told by the
natives. The river indicated was doubtless the Columbia. Proceeding from
Michigan they finally came at the mouth of the Wisconsin to the river
forming the eastern boundary of the vaster Wilderness, the Mississippi,
called by Marquette Conception, and down it they went, instead of up,
as they should have gone to get on the track to the Pacific, their
birch-bark canoes gliding swiftly along, while the unfathomed waters
for the first time heard the song of the _Voyageur_. Down they went
to Soto's burial-place. They were encroaching on the claims of the
Spaniards, but boundaries then were as nebulous as the Milky Way, and
the sword was the instrument of survey by which all lines were drawn.
Their flag was finally carried through to the mouth of the Mississippi
by that splendid character Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle,[51] a
Frenchman whose qualities shine ever undimmed by the roll of fading
centuries. With Tonty and Hennepin he came through the Great Lakes, and,
leaving these two men behind, reached with his party the Mississippi
at the mouth of the Illinois, and proceeding down it finally, in
1682, standing at the delta beside a great claim-post, he proclaimed
the jurisdiction of Louis the Great (XIV.) over all this country of
"Louisiana,"
"the seas, harbours, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all
nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines,
minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers, within the extent of
said Louisiana, from the mouth of the great river St. Louis,
otherwise called the Ohio, ... as also along the river Colbert or
Mississippi, and the rivers which discharge themselves thereinto,
from its source beyond the country of the Nadouessioux ... as
far as the mouth of the sea, or Gulf of Mexico, and also to the
mouth of the river of Palms, upon the assurance we have from the
natives of these countries, that we are the first Europeans who
have descended or ascended the said river Colbert."
They had forgotten Pineda and the unfortunate Soto and Moscoso, to say
nothing of the still more unfortunate Narvaez, who was wrecked at the
river's entrance. This claim certainly was broad; it covered almost
everything.
La Salle had a magnificent dream of developing this enormous region for
his King, and proceeding to France he came back with vessels laden with
supplies and colonists. But they missed the mouth of the river. Then a
series of disasters left the leader stranded, as the Narvaez survivors
had been, on the coast of Texas. La Salle, of all men, surely deserved
more generous treatment from Fortune. But worse was to follow. They
struck out for the north-east to reach the French settlements. La Salle
was ambushed and shot March 18, 1687, by a villainous member of the
company, leagued with other assassins, and his body stripped and thrown
to the wolves. But La Salle needed no gorgeous funeral train, no costly
sepulchre to carry through the ages to come his illustrious name.
One of the assassin band, he who served as a decoy, was a youth of
sixteen named l'Archeveque, who later arrived in New Mexico, lived a
highly respected life there, and was eventually killed at the Pawnee
village with Villazur.[52] L'Archeveque, with four others from the
dismembered La Salle expedition, three young men and a girl, were
found among the Tejas, two years after La Salle's murder, by Alonzo
de Leon, a Spaniard who came up into Texas from Coahuila, one of the
northern provinces of Mexico. He ransomed all and sent them to Mexico.
Three years later, 1692, the Spaniards organised a settlement at San
Antonio, and henceforth the French and Spaniards began in a hostile way
to encounter each other on these wide frontiers. Iberville, in 1699,
started near the mouth of the Mississippi the first permanent French
settlement, and the French then rapidly spread along that river and its
branches, and when the eighteenth century was fairly under way they had
explored the country immediately along the Mississippi and the regions
between it and Montreal; they had pushed far out into the North-west,
even to the banks of the Saskatchewan. Indeed, a Frenchman is said to
have reached Hudson Bay in 1656. All through these regions were beaver,
bison, deer, panthers, and numerous other fur-bearing animals. The
trapping of these and trading for them with the natives formed the chief
incentive of the Frenchmen, just as the search for imaginary mines and
fabulous cities actuated the Spaniards. The pursuit of the fur business
offered a life of wild freedom, particularly fascinating to many
Frenchmen, who fraternised with the natives and were able peacefully
to travel from tribe to tribe, exchanging European wares for furs and
other property the Amerinds had. The Amerinds welcomed these pedlars,
for they wanted the goods they brought; and numbers of them ranged the
forests, finally being collectively called _Coureurs de Bois_. They have
been described as a kind of outlaw, but they were not exactly that.
Their lives, knowing no restriction but their own consciences, highly
elastic like almost all the consciences of that time, and perhaps this,
were not always models of propriety, but they were in general probably
little worse than the throat-cutting gentlemen who composed a large
part of the several samples of the European nations which were striving
to murder each other, and incidentally the natives, for the purpose of
acquiring sole possession of everything in sight. In the perusal of the
history of the development of this continent it seems almost ludicrous
to describe the natives particularly as the savages. One could fill
a library with volumes detailing the murderous brutality of the white
race, not only in dealing with the natives, but with each other. The
native was hardly more than a good second in rapine and butchery, even
when he was employed by one side or the other to raise slaughter to a
fine art.
[Illustration: In the Heart of the Wilderness—Southern Utah.
Photograph by F. S. Dellenbaugh.]
In 1669 the British formed a settlement in the shape of a fur-trading
post on the coast of Hudson Bay. This was the first of a series of
establishments founded by "The Governor and Company of Adventurers of
England Trading into Hudson's Bay," a company which, because of its
masterly control, wise management, general fairness to the natives,
and complete efficiency, was highly successful and of wide and
long-continued influence.
[Illustration: Great Falls of the Missouri.
From _The Trail of Lewis and Clark_. O. D. Wheeler.]
As the eighteenth century opened, the French seemed to be in the
lead. They claimed and controlled Canada and the greater part of the
Mississippi valley, and by 1710 there were many French colonies and
posts on the banks of the Mississippi. Eight years later Bienville
founded New Orleans, and two after that Antoine Crozat received from
the King a grant of the privilege of exclusive trade in Louisiana,
a privilege which he relinquished in 1717, when it was taken by the
Compagnie d'Orient, or, as it also was called, Law's Mississippi
Company. It was so held for fifteen years, when it was governed as
a French province. By 1722 the French had established a fort on the
Missouri called Orleans, about two hundred and fifty miles above the
mouth, by some authorities said to have been the result of the Spanish
expedition under Villazur, which was destroyed, according to some
reports, in an attempt to annihilate the Missouris, who were friendly
to the French. But the Spaniards claimed that the French instigated
the attack upon their 1720 expedition to the Platte; and the French,
it appears, claimed that the Spanish were striving to wipe out their
allies.
There were now open into the interior two great water highways, one by
the St. Lawrence, the other by the Mississippi-Missouri. Transportation
was almost exclusively by boat, hence the waterways were seldom departed
from for any great distance, and the immense tract lying west of the
Missouri and upper Mississippi was still an unknown country. From time
to time rumours were repeated of a huge river which flowed towards the
Sea of the West, but the traders did not always heed the tales of the
natives. As early as 1716 there was a definite statement that "towards
the source (of the Mississippi) there is in the highlands a river that
leads to the western ocean." Whether some Frenchman had made the journey
or not is unknown, but it is not improbable that a daring _coureur de
bois_ had slipped along from tribe to tribe and finally arrived at the
Pacific.
In 1728 there was a trader at Lake Nipigon—Sieur de la Verendrye, a
Frenchman, to whom the natives told such positive tales about this great
river flowing to the Sea of the West, that he determined to explore
it.[53] He laid his plans before Beauharnois, then Governor of Canada,
who was favourably impressed by the story, and also by a map which
Verendrye's Amerind guide had drawn for him. An expedition of fifty
men was fitted out, which left Montreal in 1731 under the command of
Verendrye's sons and nephew. The party seem not to have moved directly
for the river they intended to examine, but spent a number of years
exploring, trading, and trapping in the North-west country. Finally, in
1738, they built an advance post, Fort La Reine, on the Assiniboine,
whence they continued explorations north and south. In the latter
direction they ascended the Souris, or Mouse, River, and at length
arrived in the country of the Mandans, on the Missouri, at the great
bend to the south, in what is now North Dakota, antedating in the region
Lewis and Clark by over threescore years. This was in 1738. Again in
1742 the company arrived at the Missouri under the command of the eldest
son and his brother, passed the Yellowstone River, and on January 1,
1743, came in sight of the Rocky Mountains, perhaps the Big Horn range,
probably the first white men to see them from this direction; that is,
north of about the 38th parallel, where the Spaniards had been. They
climbed these mountains, and appear to have proceeded westward, perhaps
as far as Wind River, where they remained some time in the country of
the Snakes, hearing of another river farther south called Karoskiou,
probably the head of the Colorado, now named Green River. They were then
within about two hundred miles of the point reached, twenty-three years
later, by Escalante, and not much farther from the locality on Grand
River arrived at in 1765 by Don Juan Maria de Ribera.
Owing to a war between the Snakes and a tribe to the southward named
Arcs, they were unable to go on and returned to the upper Missouri in
May, 1743, somewhere erecting a stone monument to commemorate their
entrance into the region. Having done this they went to the Saskatchewan
valley by way of their Fort La Reine. Jealousy of their success and
changes in the governorship of Canada resulted in the overthrow of the
Verendryes, but Jonquire later, coming to the head of the government,
determined to profit by their investigations and planned two expeditions
to the Pacific, one over the course Verendrye had pursued, and the other
by the waters of the Saskatchewan. These appear to have had little
success, yet some of the men reached the Rocky Mountains, and were
there in 1753. The war with England then prevented further organised
explorations by the French. Several accounts of the existence of a
large river beginning at the head of the Missouri and flowing west to
the Pacific had been given by the Amerinds, as already noted, Dupratz
having heard one from a native of the Yazoo country.[54] This man said
he had himself ascended the Missouri to its source and there found
this other river, which he followed for some distance, wars preventing
him from going through to the ocean into which he was told it entered.
Several maps of about 1750 gave a supposed course of this river, which
was called the Great River of the West. Jonathan Carver[55] also told
of this stream, called the Oregon, in his book describing the travels
he made in 1766-68 into the region of the upper Mississippi; but he
did not go there.[56] The Dane, Bering, under Russian patronage, in
1741, had marked out a path to the New World from a totally different
direction from any taken by the other nations; he came from the West,
from Kamtchatka, by the far northern route. The Russians followed and
began to explore down the North-west coast.
[Illustration: Great Fountain Geyser—Yellowstone Park.
From _Wonderland, 1901_—Northern Pacific Railway.]
Having triumphed over France, Great Britain in 1763 acquired the
whole of Canada, all of Louisiana east of the Mississippi except New
Orleans, and the Spanish claims in Florida. They now controlled the
entire continent east of the Mississippi, the Dutch having long before
surrendered. France published the next year a secret cession two years
before of all Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain, and Spain
obtaining New Orleans also in 1769, France was thrown completely off
the continent. In 1764, at the time France announced the cession to
Spain, La Clede founded St. Louis on the site where it now stands, a
settlement that henceforth became the departing point for the great
Wilderness. Great Britain renounced all claim to lands south-west of
the Mississippi, and the vast territory of North America was now divided
between Great Britain, Spain, and Russia, the latter on the north-west,
Spain on the south-west, and Great Britain on the east. Spain was
endeavouring to clinch its hold on the Californian coast and the regions
to northward, and several vessels were sent out in that direction. One
of these, commanded by Bruno Heceta, returning from more northern shores
on the evening of August 17, 1775, came to a great bay where a current
was discovered setting out from the land with such power that Heceta
thought he had found either some great river or some connection with
another sea. The Strait of Fuca was then supposed to join the Atlantic,
under the old title of the fabled Strait of Anian, and he also thought
he might be at the mouth of this, although his reckoning did not agree
with that of Fuca. In reality he had discovered thus vaguely the mouth
of the River of the West, now the Columbia. He called the place the
Bahia de la Asuncion, but later charts mark it the Inlet of Heceta,
while the supposed river is put down as Rio de San Roque. Aguilar, who
commanded one of Vizcaino's ships in 1603, went north of Cape Mendocino
to the mouth of a great river, which he could not enter on account of
the current. This was probably the Columbia. Thus from sea and land
the existence of a large river in this quarter began to be understood.
Owing to the line of fierce white-caps formed by the tides breaking on
the great bar, extending across the mouth of this river, even now, as
one views the entrance from the deck of his approaching ship, after
government execution of a large amount of admirable engineering, it
presents a most impracticable looking channel, the white foam appearing
to form a continuous line. At low water, with a sea running, the place
is still one of difficult passage, and reminds of Gray, the bold sailor
who first steered through it. Heceta, however, did not hesitate from
timidity, he was a Spaniard, but his officers dissuaded him from making
an attempt to enter on account of their unfit condition.
Once across the bar, the broad bay and river-mouth offer easy
navigation, and it is a beautiful voyage, though a short one, up to
the site of the fine, prosperous American city which now stands at this
gateway, where the Far West opens into the Far East.
As the last quarter of the eighteenth century fairly developed, an event
took place which perhaps, influenced the destinies of man more than
any other of modern times. Garces and Escalante had barely completed
their entradas before the guns of the American Revolution had for ever
shattered the fetters of a new people on the Atlantic seaboard, where a
youthful giant sprang into being, a portent for Spain of great danger.
The Spaniards posted their sentinels facing that way.
[Illustration]
FOOTNOTES:
[49] Some years ago, Col. John Reid found on his farm, six
miles west of Lexington, Mo., and two miles from the river, a
silver-plated halberd, together with some old French and Spanish
coins. The articles were six feet below the surface, and were
exposed by the cutting of a creek. Later owned by Mr. Jo. A. Wilson
of Lexington. This halberd does not indicate Coronado's presence,
but it is interesting in this connection. The French coins would
suggest a later time—dates not known.
[50] _Travels in the Interior of America_, John Bradbury, edition
of 1817, p. 12.
[51] See _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_, by Francis
Parkman.
[52] See _The Expedition of Pedro de Villazur_, by A. F. Bandelier,
_Papers of the Archæological Institute of America, American Series
V._
[53] _Sieur de la Verendrye and His Sons_, etc., by Rev. E. D.
Neill, in _Contributions, Montana Historical Society_, vol. i., p.
267. See also _Report on Canadian Archives_, Douglas Brymner, and
Thwaite's _Rocky Mountain Exploration_, p. 27 _et seq._
[54] Among the papers of James Stuart, who was long resident in
that region, was found a memorandum referring to some monument
"twenty feet in diameter—on river bluffs—round and run to
point—spaces between boulders filled with green grass and weeds."
_Contributions, Historical Society of Montana_, vol. i., p. 272.
[55] See Greenhow's _History of Oregon and California_, p. 140,
_et seq._, second ed.
[56] _Travels throughout the Interior Parts of North America in
1766-8_, by Jonathan Carver. The descriptions of native tribes
contained in this book are, according to Greenhow, not original,
but mainly translations from Lahontan. _Greenhow_, p. 144. second
ed.
[Illustration]