1678-1679.
LA SALLE AT NIAGARA.
FATHER LOUIS HENNEPIN.--HIS PAST LIFE; HIS CHARACTER.--EMBARKATION.
--NIAGARA FALLS.--INDIAN JEALOUSY.--LA MOTTE AND THE SENECAS.--A
DISASTER.--LA SALLE AND HIS FOLLOWERS.
Hennepin was all eagerness to join in the adventure, and, to his great
satisfaction, La Salle gave him a letter from his Provincial, Father Le
Fèvre, containing the coveted permission. Whereupon, to prepare himself,
he went into retreat, at the Récollet convent of Quebec, where he remained
for a time in such prayer and meditation as his nature, the reverse of
spiritual, would permit. Frontenac, always partial to his Order, then
invited him to dine at the chateau; and having visited the Bishop and
asked his blessing, he went down to the lower town and embarked. His
vessel was a small birch canoe, paddled by two men. With sandalled feet, a
coarse gray capote, and peaked hood, the cord of St. Francis about his
waist, and a rosary and crucifix hanging at his side, the Father set forth
on his memorable journey. He carried with him the furniture of a portable
altar, which in time of need he could strap on his back, like a knapsack.
He slowly made his way up the St. Lawrence, stopping here and there, where
a clearing and a few log houses marked the feeble beginning of a parish
and a seigniory. The settlers, though good Catholics, were too few and too
poor to support a priest, and hailed the arrival of the friar with
delight. He said mass, exhorted a little, as was his custom, and, on one
occasion, baptized a child. At length, he reached Montreal, where the
enemies of the enterprise enticed away his two canoe-men. He succeeded in
finding two others, with whom he continued his voyage, passed the rapids
of the upper St. Lawrence, and reached Fort Frontenac at eleven o'clock at
night, of the second of November, where his brethren of the mission,
Ribourde and Buisset, received him with open arms. [Footnote: Hennepin,
_Description de la Louisiane_ (1683), 19. Ibid., _Voyage Curieux_ (1704),
66. Ribourde had lately arrived.] La Salle, Tonty, La Motte, and their
party, who had left Quebec a few days after him, soon appeared at the
fort; La Salle much fatigued and worn by the hardships of the way, or more
probably by the labors and anxieties of preparation. He had no sooner
arrived, than he sent fifteen men in canoes to Lake Michigan and the
Illinois, to open a trade with the Indians and collect a store of
provisions. There was a small vessel of ten tons in the harbor; and he
ordered La Motte to sail in her for Niagara, accompanied by Hennepin.
This bold, hardy, and adventurous friar, the historian of the expedition,
and a conspicuous actor in it, has unwittingly painted his own portrait
with tolerable distinctness. "I always," he says, "felt a strong
inclination to fly from the world and live according to the rules of a
pure and severe virtue; and it was with this view that I entered the Order
of St. Francis." [Footnote: Hennepin, _Nouvelle Découverte_ (1697), 8.] He
then speaks of his zeal for the saving of souls, but admits that a passion
for travel and a burning desire to visit strange lands had no small part
in his inclination for the missions. [Footnote: Ibid., _Avant Propos_, 5.]
Being in a convent in Artois, his superior sent him to Calais, at the
season of the herring-fishery, to beg alms, after the practice of the
Franciscans. Here and at Dunkirk, he made friends of the sailors, and was
never tired of their stories. So insatiable, indeed, was his appetite for
them, that "often," he says, "I hid myself behind tavern doors while the
sailors were telling of their voyages. The tobacco smoke made me very sick
at the stomach; but, notwithstanding, I listened attentively to all they
said about their adventures at sea and their travels in distant countries.
I could have passed whole days and nights in this way without eating."
[Footnote: Ibid., _Voyage Curieux_ (1704), 12.]
He presently set out on a roving mission through Holland; and he recounts
various mishaps which befell him, "in consequence of my zeal in laboring
for the saving of souls." "I was at the bloody fight of Seneff," he
pursues, "where so many perished by fire and sword, and where I had
abundance of work, in comforting and consoling the poor wounded soldiers.
After undergoing great fatigues, and running extreme danger in the sieges
of towns, in the trenches, and in battles, where I exposed myself freely
for the salvation of others, while the soldiers were breathing nothing but
blood and carnage, I found myself at last in a way of satisfying my old
inclination for travel." [Footnote: Ibid., 13.]
He got leave from his superiors to go to Canada, the most adventurous of
all the missions; and accordingly sailed in 1675, in the ship which
carried La Salle, who had just obtained the grant of Fort Frontenac. In
the course of the voyage, he took it upon him to reprove a party of girls
who were amusing themselves and a circle of officers and other passengers
by dancing on deck. La Salle, who was among the spectators, was annoyed at
Hennepin's interference, and told him that he was behaving like a
pedagogue. The friar retorted, by alluding--unconsciously, as he says--to
the circumstance that La Salle was once a pedagogue himself, having,
according to Hennepin, been for ten or twelve years teacher of a class in
a Jesuit school. La Salle, he adds, turned pale with rage, and never
forgave him to his dying day, but always maligned and persecuted him.
[Footnote: Ibid., _Avis au Lecteur_. He elsewhere represents himself as on
excellent terms with La Salle; with whom, he says, he used to read
histories of travels at Fort Frontenac, after which they discussed
together their plans of discovery.]
On arriving in Canada, he was sent up to Fort Frontenac, as a missionary.
That wild and remote post was greatly to his liking. He planted a gigantic
cross, superintended the building of a chapel, for himself and his
colleague, Buisset, and instructed the Iroquois colonists of the place. He
visited, too, the neighboring Indian settlements, paddling his canoe in
summer, when the lake was open, and journeying in winter on snow-shoes,
with a blanket slung at his back. His most noteworthy journey was one
which he made in the winter,--apparently of 1677,--with a soldier of the
fort. They crossed the eastern extremity of Lake Ontario on snow-shoes,
and pushed southward through the forests, towards Onondaga; stopping at
evening to dig away the snow, which was several feet deep, and collect
wood for their fire, which they were forced to replenish repeatedly during
the night, to keep themselves from freezing. At length they reached the
great Onondaga town, where the Indians were much amazed at their
hardihood. Thence they proceeded eastward, to the Oneidas, and afterwards
to the Mohawks, who regaled them with small frogs, pounded up with a
porridge of Indian corn. Here Hennepin found the Jesuit, Bruyas, who
permitted him to copy a dictionary of the Mohawk language [Footnote: This
was the _Racines Agnières_ of Bruyas. It was published by Mr. Shea in
1862. Hennepin seems to have studied it carefully; for, on several
occasions, he makes use of words evidently borrowed from it, putting them
into the mouths of Indians speaking a dialect different from that of the
Agniers, or Mohawks.] which he had compiled, and here he presently met
three Dutchmen, who urged him to visit the neighboring settlement of
Orange, or Albany, an invitation which he seems to have declined.
[Footnote: Compare Brodhead in _Hist. Mag._, x. 268.]
They were pleased with him, he says, because he spoke Dutch. Bidding them
farewell, he tied on his snow-shoes again, and returned with his companion
to Fort Frontenac. Thus he inured himself to the hardships of the woods,
and prepared for the execution of the grand plan of discovery which he
calls his own; "an enterprise," to borrow his own words, "capable of
terrifying anybody but me." [Footnote: "Une entreprise capable
d'épouvanter tout autre que moi."--Hennepin, _Voyage Curieux, Avant
Propos_ (1704).] When the later editions of his book appeared, doubts had
been expressed of his veracity. "I here protest to you, before God," he
writes, addressing the reader, "that my narrative is faithful and sincere,
and that you may believe every thing related in it." [Footnote: "Je vous
proteste ici devant Dieu, que ma Relation est fidèle et sincère," etc.--
Ibid., _Avis au Lecteur_.] And yet, as we shall see, this Reverend Father
was the most impudent of liars; and the narrative of which he speaks is a
rare monument of brazen mendacity. Hennepin, however, had seen and dared
much: for among his many failings fear had no part; and where his vanity
or his spite was not involved, he often told the truth. His books have
their value, with all their enormous fabrications. [Footnote: The nature
of these fabrications will be shown hereafter. They occur, not in the
early editions of Hennepin's narrative, which are comparatively truthful,
but in the edition of 1697 and those which followed. La Salle was dead at
the time of their publication.]
La Motte and Hennepin, with sixteen men, went on board the little vessel
of ten tons, which lay at Fort Frontenac. The friar's two brethren,
Buisset and Ribourde, threw their arms about his neck as they bade him
farewell; while his Indian proselytes, learning whither he was bound,
stood with their hands pressed upon their mouths, in amazement at the
perils which awaited their ghostly instructor. La Salle, with the rest of
the party, was to follow as soon as he could finish his preparations. It
was a boisterous and gusty day, the eighteenth of November. The sails were
spread; the shore receded,--the stone walls of the fort, the huge cross
that the friar had reared, the wigwams, the settlers' cabins, the group of
staring Indians on the strand. The lake was rough; and the men, crowded in
so small a craft, grew nervous and uneasy. They hugged the northern shore,
to escape the fury of the wind which blew savagely from the north-east;
while the long, gray sweep of naked forests on their right betokened that
winter was fast closing in. On the twenty-sixth, they reached the
neighborhood of the Indian town of Taiaiagon, [Footnote: This place is
laid down on a manuscript map sent to France by the Intendant Duchesneau,
and now preserved in the Archives de la Marine, and also on several other
contemporary maps.] not far from Toronto; and ran their vessel, for
safety, into the mouth of a river,--probably the Humber,--where the ice
closed about her, and they were forced to cut her out with axes. On the
fifth of December, they attempted to cross to the mouth of the Niagara;
but darkness overtook them, and they spent a comfortless night, tossing on
the troubled lake, five or six miles from shore. In the morning, they
entered the mouth of the Niagara, and landed on the point at its eastern
side, where now stand the historic ramparts of Fort Niagara. Here they
found a small village of Senecas, attracted hither by the fisheries, who
gazed with curious eyes at the vessel, and listened in wonder as the
voyagers sang _Te Deum_, in gratitude for their safe arrival.
Hennepin, with several others, now ascended the river, in a canoe, to the
foot of the mountain ridge of Lewiston, which, stretching on the right
hand and on the left, forms the acclivity of a vast plateau, rent with the
mighty chasm, along which, from this point to the cataract, seven miles
above, rush, with the fury of an Alpine torrent, the gathered waters of
four inland oceans. To urge the canoe farther was impossible. He landed,
with his companions, on the west bank, near the foot of that part of the
ridge now called Queenstown Heights, climbed the steep ascent, and pushed
through the wintry forest on a tour of exploration. On his left sank the
cliffs, the furious river raging below; till at length, in primeval
solitudes, unprofaned as yet by the pettiness of man, the imperial
cataract burst upon his sight. [Footnote: Hennepin's account of the falls
and river of Niagara--especially his second account, on his return from
the West--is very minute, and on the whole very accurate. He indulges in
gross exaggeration as to the height of the cataract, which, in the edition
of 1683, he states at five hundred feet, and raises to six hundred in that
of 1697. He also says that there was room for four carriages to pass
abreast under the American Fall without being wet. This is, of course, an
exaggeration at the best; but it is extremely probable that a great change
has taken place since his time. He speaks of a small lateral fall at the
west side of the Horse Shoe Fall which does not now exist. Table Rock, now
destroyed, is distinctly figured in his picture. He says that he descended
the cliffs on the west side to the foot of the cataract, but that no human
being can get down on the east side.
The name of Niagara, written _Onguiaahra_ by Lalemant in 1641, and
_Ongiara_ by Sanson, on his map of 1657, is used by Hennepin in its
present form. His description of the falls is the earliest known to exist.
They are clearly indicated on the map of Champlain, 1632. For early
references to them, see "The Jesuits in North America," 143. A brief but
curious notice of them is given by Gendron, _Quelques Particularitez du
Pays des Hurons_, 1659. The indefatigable Dr. O'Callaghan has discovered
thirty-nine distinct forms of the name Niagara.--_Index to Colonial
Documents of New York_, 465. It is of Iroquois origin, and in the Mohawk
dialect is pronounced Nyàgarah.]
The explorers passed three miles beyond it, and encamped for the night on
the banks of Chippewa Creek, scraping away the snow, which was a foot
deep, in order to kindle a fire. In the morning they retraced their steps,
startling a number of deer and wild turkeys on their way, and rejoined
their companions at the mouth of the river.
It was La Salle's purpose to build a palisade fort at the mouth of the
Niagara; and the work was now begun, though it was necessary to use hot
water to soften the frozen ground. But frost was not the only obstacle.
The Senecas of the neighboring village betrayed a sullen jealousy at a
design which, indeed, boded them no good. Niagara was the key to the four
great lakes above, and whoever held possession of it could in no small
measure control the fur-trade of the interior. Occupied by the French, it
would, in time of peace, intercept the trade which the Iroquois carried on
between the Western Indians, and the Dutch and English at Albany, and in
time of war threaten them with serious danger. La Motte saw the necessity
of conciliating these formidable neighbors, and, if possible, cajoling
them to give their consent to the plan. La Salle, indeed, had instructed
him to that effect. He resolved on a journey to the great village of the
Senecas, and called on Hennepin, who was busied in building a bark chapel
for himself, to accompany him. They accordingly set out with several men
well armed and equipped, and bearing at their backs presents of very
considerable value. The village was beyond the Genesee, south-east of the
site of Rochester. [Footnote: Near the town of Victor. It is laid down on
the map of Galinée, and other unpublished maps. Compare Marshall,
_Historical Sketches of the Niagara Frontier_, 14.] After a march of five
days, they reached it on the last day of December. They were conducted to
the lodge of the great chief, where they were beset by a staring crowd of
women, and children. Two Jesuits, Raffeix and Julien Garnier, were in the
village; and their presence boded no good for the embassy. La Motte, who
seems to have had little love for priests of any kind, was greatly annoyed
at seeing them; and when the chiefs assembled to hear what he had to say,
he insisted that the two fathers should leave the council-house. At this,
Hennepin, out of respect for his cloth, thought it befitting that he
should retire also. The chiefs, forty-two in number squatted on the
ground, arrayed in ceremonial robes of beaver, wolf, or black squirrel
skin. "The senators of Venice," writes Hennepin, "do not look more grave
or speak more deliberately than the counsellors of the Iroquois." La
Motte's interpreter harangued the attentive conclave, placed gift after
gift at their feet,--coats, scarlet cloth, hatchets, knives, and beads,--
and used all his eloquence to persuade them that the building of a fort at
the mouth of the Niagara, and a vessel on Lake Erie, were measures vital
to their interest. They gladly took the gifts, but answered the
interpreter's speech with evasive generalities; and having been
entertained with the burning of an Indian prisoner, the discomfited
embassy returned, half-famished, to Niagara.
A few days after, Hennepin was near the shore of the lake, when he heard a
well-known voice, and to his surprise saw La Salle approaching. This
resolute child of misfortune had already begun to taste the bitterness of
his destiny. Sailing with Tonty from Fort Frontenac, to bring supplies to
the advanced party at Niagara, he had been detained by contrary winds when
within a few hours of his destination. Anxious to reach it speedily, he
left the vessel in charge of the pilot, who disobeyed his orders, and
ended by wrecking it at a spot nine or ten leagues west of Niagara.
[Footnote: Tonty, _Mémoire envoyé en 1693 sur la Découverte du Mississippi
et des Nations voisines, par le Sieur de la Salle, en 1678, et depuis sa
mort par le Sieur de Tonty_. The published work bearing Tonty's name is a
compilation full of misstatements. He disowned its authorship. Its
authority will not be relied on in this narrative. A copy of the true
document from the original, signed by Tonty, in the Archives de la Marine,
is before me.] The provisions and merchandise were lost, though the crew
saved the anchors and cables destined for the vessel which La Salle
proposed to build for the navigation of the Upper Lakes. He had had a
meeting with the Senecas, before the disaster; and, more fortunate than La
Motte,--for his influence over Indians was great,--had persuaded them to
consent, for a time, to the execution of his plans. They required,
however, that he should so far modify them as to content himself with a
stockaded warehouse, in place of a fort, at the mouth of the Niagara.
The loss of the vessel threw him into extreme perplexity, and, as Hennepin
says, "would have made anybody but him give up the enterprise." [Footnote:
_Description de la Louisiane_ (1683), 41. It is characteristic of
Hennepin, that, in the editions of his book published after La Salle's
death, he substitutes for "anybody but him," "anybody but those who had
formed so generous a design," meaning to include himself, though he lost
nothing by the disaster, and had not formed the design.] The whole party
were now gathered within the half-finished palisades of Niagara; a motley
crew of French, Flemings, and Italians, all mutually jealous. Some of the
men had been tampered with by La Salle's enemies. None of them seem to
have had much heart for the enterprise. La Motte had gone back to Canada.
He had been a soldier, and perhaps a good one; but he had already broken
down under the hardships of these winter journeyings. La Salle, seldom
happy in the choice of subordinates, had, perhaps, in all his company but
one man in whom he could confidently trust; and this was Tonty. He and
Hennepin were on indifferent terms. Men thrown together in a rugged
enterprise like this quickly learn to know each other; and the vain and
assuming friar was not likely to commend himself to La Salle's brave and
loyal lieutenant. Hennepin says that it was La Salle's policy to govern
through the dissensions of his followers; and, from whatever cause, it is
certain that those beneath him were rarely in perfect harmony.