The White Man Comes Exploring
ONE DAY a strange piece of news came to an Indian prairie camp. The men
and women, squatting on the grass, and smoking their willow-bark,
discussed the great news, and even the children stopped their play to
listen and wonder.
A new kind of man had been seen, far away in the south,—a light-skinned
man.
How did the news come? The scattered Indian tribes had little to do with
each other, except when they fought, and in a fight they generally
killed all the men they conquered who did not escape. But they often
kept the women and made wives of them.
It may have been one of these women, captured by some raiding party in
the south, who told the prairie Indians the story her tribe had heard in
the same way from some tribe still farther south. The story was that a
lot of these “white” men had come sailing across the big water in
monstrous canoes with wings; once ashore, they had come riding over the
country on great four-legged animals, as swift and terrible as buffalo,
though not so shaggy. Nearly all the tribes had an old story about an
agreeable fair-skinned god who had once lived among them and had
promised to come back, so the newcomers were at first believed to be
that god and his brothers. But they were not at all agreeable, for they
took possession of the land and killed the Indians resisting them. They
had terrible weapons,—tubes that breathed fire, and shining swords that
cut off a head at a blow.
Fortunately for our Indians, these mysterious conquering white-skins
never came up to the north. But some of their animals did. Running wild,
little herds of horses found their way up at last to the prairie. They
were hard to catch; but if buffalo could be driven into a corral, so
could they. It was not very long before the Indians were breaking and
riding them; and from that time the tribesmen chased the buffalo on
horseback instead of on foot.
[Illustration]
_Early Buffalo Hunting_
Presently news came that more white men or gods had appeared,—this time
in the east.
* * * * *
Here is what had happened.
While the early forefathers of our “Indians” were spreading north
through Asia and wandering over into America, our own forefathers came
wandering and hunting west through Europe. Some of them came to the very
edge of the sea before they finally settled down, and learned to plow,
and gradually joined together to form nations. Five hundred years ago,
three of the strongest nations had grown up on the shores of the
Atlantic, in Spain, France, and England. They, like other nations in
Europe, used to get spices and incense, pearls and precious stones,
ivory and silk, from India and the farther East. But the way to India
was now barred by the Mahommedans. The goods that they allowed to pass
were heavily taxed on the way, and became very dear.
Most people up to then believed that the earth was flat; but some knew
it must be round, and one of these was the Italian named Christopher
Columbus. He persuaded the King and Queen of Spain in 1492 to lend him
three little ships, and with these he sailed away westward to find a
shorter and cheaper trade route to India. He discovered a number of
islands, and thinking they were close to India he called them the West
Indies and their people Indians,—a mistaken name which has stuck to the
native tribes of America ever since. More Spaniards followed; some of
them landed on the American mainland, in Mexico; and it was their
runaway horses which found their way up to our Western plains.
The English, years before Columbus, had sent ships exploring far out
into the Atlantic, in search of a new land; but they did not find it.
Five years after Columbus had found the West Indies, however, the King
of England sent out ships under another Italian, Cabot, who took a more
northerly route. That expedition came in 1497 to Labrador, Newfoundland
and Nova Scotia; so the English were the first white men to discover the
mainland of America in modern times. We know now that five hundred years
earlier the Norsemen, after settling in Iceland and Greenland, visited
Nova Scotia or New England; but they probably sailed away again very
soon. Some of them may have been captured and “adopted” into Indian
tribes. At any rate they vanished, and their adventure was forgotten.
European fishermen, too, had been gathering harvests of cod from the
Newfoundland banks long before Columbus was born, and they probably
landed; but they wrote no accounts of what they had seen, and their
stories attracted little notice.
The French explorers came soon after the English; one of them, Jacques
Cartier, of St. Malo, in Brittany, sailed up the Gulf of St. Lawrence in
1534, and got as far as Montreal on his next voyage in 1535. Another
great Frenchman, Champlain, founded at Quebec, in 1608, the first
Canadian settlement which has had an unbroken history to our own time.
For a long while, however, the towns of “New France” on the St. Lawrence
were little more than fur-trading posts, as fur was the only Canadian
product that any one in Europe thought of much value.
The real object of the first French explorers was the same as that of
Columbus, to find a short cut to Asia. Even the fur trade, rich as it
might be, was nothing compared to the trade they hoped to carry on with
India and China. Jacques Cartier, when he first sailed into the mouth of
the St. Lawrence, hoped he had discovered the “North-west Passage”
through America, never dreaming that the western ocean was three
thousand miles away across a whole wide continent.
To explore the West, then, was the ambition of more than one brave
Frenchman who left the new settlements behind and paddled up the St.
Lawrence,—not to find homes for their people in this new world, but to
find a waterway through to the Pacific. In 1666 one of these explorers,
La Salle, set out from Montreal for the Great Lakes. Missionaries and
fur traders had already reached Lake Huron, and Indians had told them of
a great river, the Mississippi, which La Salle thought might flow into
the Pacific. He reached first the Ohio and then the Illinois, but did
not follow them to their junction with the great river; for he learned,
to his great disappointment, that the fur traders had already discovered
it to flow south instead of west.
La Salle gave up the idea of reaching China, and, on another adventurous
journey, went down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. He proclaimed
the sovereignty of France over all the country through which the great
river and its tributaries might flow. Long afterwards, accordingly, when
traders from the growing English colonies along the Atlantic made their
way farther and farther inland, they found the way barred by French
forts. Mother England sent troops to their aid, and the united British
force, in which George Washington himself was a colonel, broke down
French opposition and enabled the colonists to spread westward into the
valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. The war was carried on until even
Canada in the north was brought under the British flag, by Wolfe’s
crowning victory at Quebec. It was, in fact, Britain’s action in freeing
her colonists from French opposition that enabled the colonists to turn
on Britain herself a few years later, and, this time with the help of
French soldiers, to separate themselves from the rest of the
English-speaking brotherhood.
* * * * *
Let us turn back now to the earlier days.
The English, like the Spanish and French, were bent on finding a western
route to Asia. Nearly eighty years after Cabot’s voyage to Labrador,
another little English ship, of only twenty tons, sailed from London on
this adventure. Martin Frobisher was her captain’s name. Passing
Newfoundland and Labrador, he entered a channel, where he verily
believed the land on his right was the coast of Asia. As a matter of
fact the channel led nowhere, being only the mouth of a bay—Frobisher
Bay, in Baffin Land, as we call it now.
A lump of mineral picked up on shore excited a belief that the barren
country was a land of gold. Accordingly, the London merchants sent out a
second expedition, and even a third. No gold was found; but Frobisher
discovered a new inlet, which became a highway of commerce under the
name of Hudson Strait.
The great explorer Hudson, however, did not appear on the scene till
1610, and his first appearance was his last. Passing through the strait,
he rounded the north point of Labrador, and, turning southward, sailed
out upon a body of water so vast that three months’ exploration left the
work unfinished; but it was pretty clear that no way through to the
Pacific existed in that direction.
Caught by winter at the south end of the Bay, Hudson and his crew landed
and put up wooden shelters, where they spent an unhappy eight months.
They failed to lay in a stock of game, and when the breaking ice set the
ship free, in the middle of June, food was running terribly short. The
homeward voyage had barely started when mutineers laid hold of their
captain, his young son and half a dozen others, and set them adrift in a
boat. The few who survived, when the ship reached England at last,
professed to believe that Hudson meant to leave them behind in the Bay
if they had not played the trick first, as there was not food enough to
keep all alive. Nothing was heard again of the great explorer, though
ships were sent in search; but the sea that he won for a grave still
bears the modest name of Hudson Bay.
[Illustration]
_Towing through the Ice—1600_
Many a brave man after that met his death in the icy chaos, trying to
find the North-west Passage to Asia. There were some, however, who had
another aim—they saw in Hudson Strait and Bay a new way to the heart of
North America, a way by which the wealth of the great North-west might
be drained off to England, in spite of the French who barred the St.
Lawrence route.
Curiously enough, it was a couple of Frenchmen, named Radisson and
Groseillers, who led the English in through this unguarded door.
The first French settlers on the St. Lawrence made friends of the
Indians living there, the Hurons and Algonquins, and helped them to
fight their enemies, the Iroquois. For many years, therefore, the
Iroquois were constantly attacking the French, who could not even
cultivate their little fields around the river-side towns without
muskets slung over their shoulders. Even so, many of them were killed,
and most of those taken alive were cruelly tortured.
At the village of Three Rivers, between Quebec and Montreal, lived
Pierre Radisson. One spring morning in 1652, when he was about
seventeen, he went out hunting, and was captured by a party of redskins
in ambush. His life was spared, for an Indian and his wife took a fancy
to him, adopted him as their son, and took him with them on their
wanderings. He escaped, along with an Algonquin fellow-prisoner; but
only by killing three Iroquois. He was captured again, and tortured; his
feet were so badly burnt that he was lame for a month; but his Indian
“father and mother” ransomed him with gifts to the head men of the
tribe, and as he was a brave young fellow and a “good mixer” he became
quite popular with his redskinned companions.
In the fall of the following year, these Indians went off raiding into
the south, where the Dutch had settled in the present State of New York.
At Fort Orange, or Albany, Radisson escaped again. From the Dutch town
of New Amsterdam, now New York, he took ship for Europe; but after a few
months in his native land of France he got back to his family in Canada,
where he had long been given up for dead. He had another narrow escape
from Indians when they attacked the fort of Onondaga; but nothing could
satisfy his appetite for adventure. Two of his fellow-countrymen had
travelled up the lakes as far as Green Bay in Wisconsin, where Indians
had told them of other tribes who hunted great beasts on a treeless
plain still farther west, and wandered in summer to a northern sea—no
doubt our Hudson Bay. A big lake named Winnipeg also, they said, lay up
there in the north.
Eager to explore, young Radisson and his sister’s husband, Médard
Chouart des Groseillers, set off with a party of Algonquins in 1658,
paddled up the Ottawa, through Lake Nipissing, across Lake Huron, and
down Lake Michigan to Green Bay, where they spent the winter. Early in
the following year they crossed Wisconsin, and came to a great brown
river, worthy to rank with the green St. Lawrence. They had discovered
the Mississippi. They crossed the river; and for the first time the red
man of the West looked on a white man’s face.
The meeting was quite friendly. The Sioux were a warlike tribe, always
breathing slaughter against their northern neighbors, the Crees; but as
yet they had no quarrel with the whites. It mattered nothing to them if
bearded white men were fighting Indians down in the south, as they had
heard. The white men were evidently ready to trade as well as fight, for
these Sioux were already wearing European beads which must have been
brought oversea by the Spaniards and passed up north from tribe to
tribe.
The two young Frenchmen travelled for months over the plains. They saw
the buffalo and hunted them; the swift and graceful antelope as well.
How far west they got we do not know. They heard from the Indians of a
range of mountains beyond the sunset; but then, circling south and east
again, they set out for home. There they arrived, after two years’
absence, and had a tremendous welcome, not only from their families, but
from the Governor of the Colony at Quebec. That was because they had
brought home with them a wealth of furs; and skins were very scarce, for
the Iroquois so infested the country around that friendly tribes dared
not venture down to the settlement with their catch. The Iroquois
themselves had no trouble in selling all they caught to the English, who
had been settling in New England for thirty years and more.
In New France, the fur trade was a strict monopoly. The Government had
given the privilege of dealing in furs to a company, and any one else
daring to buy skins without a license was severely punished. When
Radisson and Groseillers asked leave to start on another journey to the
north and west, the officer in command at Three Rivers refused to let
them go, because they would not promise him half their catch. They
started in spite of him. This time they kept farther to the north, and
reached the country beyond Lake Superior, where they built the pioneer
fort of the West. They spent the winter travelling among the Crees, the
Sioux in the south, and the Assiniboines up in Manitoba. All the tribes
were eager to exchange their furs for guns, knives, beads, and other
European wares; and when the travellers got back east they brought an
enormous quantity of precious fur along with them.
The Governor of the Colony seized nearly the whole of it!
Disgusted with this treatment, Groseillers went over to France and tried
to get help in fitting out an expedition to the forbidden West through
Hudson Bay; but all his persuasions failed. He and his brother-in-law
then went to England, where they were warmly welcomed. By this time
several English ships had explored Hudson Bay, and many people were
ready to put their money into a venture which promised to capture the
fur trade of the West without interference from the French of “Canada.”
King Charles himself was much interested in the two young Frenchmen’s
scheme, and so was his cousin, Prince Rupert. A royal charter was given
in 1670 to the Prince and a few other noblemen and commoners, who thus
formed the “Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay.” Radisson
and Groseillers were sent out in English ships, and helped to establish
forts at the southern end of the Bay.
Thus the Hudson’s Bay Company started on its great trading enterprise,
which continues to this day.
Unfortunately, when rival French traders came overland from Quebec and
drew away much of the Indian trade, the English Company’s chief officer
suspected his two French comrades of playing into the hands of their
fellow-countrymen. Radisson went back to England to defend himself. The
Company’s chiefs were convinced that the charge against him was false;
but as they would only pay him $500 a year for his services he was
tempted back to France, where he became a naval officer. Groseillers
also was forgiven by the French, and returned to his people at Three
Rivers.
Presently both the brothers-in-law went off again to Hudson Bay, this
time in French vessels, but in competition with a powerful and jealous
French company; and on the return of the expedition to Quebec their furs
were confiscated. They appealed to the French Government against this,
but could not get justice. Radisson went back to England, made several
more voyages to the Bay, and the last we know of him is that in his old
age he had a pension of $250 a year from the Hudson’s Bay Company.
He “died poor,” as we say, after making other men’s fortunes. Poor in
money, yes; but the men who took the money he made are forgotten, and he
will always be remembered as one of our greatest explorers. He had two
ambitions, to discover new lands, and to make money by trade. He failed
in one, but succeeded brilliantly in the other. A man with two such
different aims can hardly ever succeed in both; and Radisson won the aim
he most desired. His life was hard, but not poor—far richer than a soft
life could have been.