XXXVIIA. D. 1682THE VOYAGEURS
Thischapter must begin with a very queer tale of rivers as adventurers exploring for new channels.
Millions of years ago the inland seas—Superior, Michigan and Huron—had their overflow down the Ottawa Valley, reaching the Saint Lawrence at the Island of Montreal.
But, when the glaciers of the great ice age blocked the Ottawa Valley, the three seas had to find another outlet, so they made a channel through the Chicago River, down the Des Plaines, and the Illinois, into the Mississippi.
And when the glaciers made, across that channel, an embankment which is now the town site of Chicago, the three seas had to explore for a new outlet. So they filled the basin of Lake Erie, and poured over the edge of Queenstown Heights into Lake Ontario. The Iroquois called that fall the “Thunder of Waters,” which in their language is Niagara.
All the vast region which was flooded by the ice-field of the great ice age became a forest, and every river turned by the ice out of its ancient channel became a string of lakes and waterfalls. This beautiful wildernesswas the scene of tremendous adventures, where the red Indians fought the white men, and the English fought the French, and the Americans fought the Canadians, until the continent was cut into equal halves, and there was peace.
Now let us see what manner of men were the Indians. At the summit of that age of glory—the sixteenth century—the world was ruled by the despot Akbar the Magnificent at Delhi, the despot Ivan the Terrible at Moscow, the despot Phillip II at Madrid, and a little lady despot, Elizabeth of the sea.
Yet at that time the people in the Saint Lawrence Valley, the Mohawks, Oneidas, Senecas, Cayugas and, in the middle, the Onondagas, were free republics with female suffrage and women as members of parliament. Moreover the president of the Onondagas, Hiawatha, formed these five nations into the federal republic of the Iroquois, and they admitted the Tuscaroras into that United States which was created to put an end to war. In the art of government we have not yet caught up with the Iroquois.
They were farmers, with rich fisheries, had comfortable houses, and fortified towns. In color they were like outdoor Spaniards, a tall, very handsome race, and every bit as able as the whites. Given horses, hard metals for their tools, and some channel or mountain range to keep off savage raiders, and they might well have become more civilized than the French, with fleets to attack old Europe, and missionaries to teach us their religion.
Their first visitor from Europe was Jacques Cartier and they gave him a hearty welcome at Quebec. When his men were dying of scurvy an Indian doctorcured them. But to show his gratitude Cartier kidnaped the five principal chiefs, and ever after that, with very brief intervals, the French had reason to fear the Iroquois. Like many another Indian nation, driven away from its farms and fisheries, the six nation republic lapsed to savagery, lived by hunting and robbery, ravaged the white men’s settlements and the neighbor tribes for food, outraged and scalped the dead, burned or even ate their prisoners.
The French colonies were rather over-governed. There was too much parson and a great deal too much squire to suit the average peasant, so all the best of the men took to the fur trade. They wore the Indian dress of long fringed deerskin, coon cap, embroidered moccasins, and a French sash like a rainbow. They lived like Indians, married among the tribes, fought in their wars; lawless, gay, gallant, fierce adventurers, the voyageurs of the rivers, the runners of the woods.
With them went monks into the wilderness, heroic, saintly Jesuits and Franciscans, and some of the quaintest rogues in holy orders. And there were gentlemen, reckless explorers, seeking a way to China. Of this breed came La Salle, whose folk were merchant-princes at Rouen, and himself pupil and enemy of the Jesuits. At the time of the plague and burning of London he founded a little settlement on the island of Mount Royal, just by the head of the Rapids. His dream was the opening of trade with China by way of the western rivers, so the colonists, chaffing him, gave the name La Chine to his settlement and the rapids. To-day the railway trains come swirling by, with loads of tea from China to ship from Montreal, but not to France.
During La Salle’s first five years in the wilderness he discovered the Ohio and the Illinois, two of the head waters of the Mississippi. The Indians told him of that big river, supposed to be the way to the Pacific. A year later the trader Joliet, and the Jesuit Saint Marquette descended the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas. So La Salle dreamed of a French empire in the west, shutting the English between the Appalachians and the Atlantic, with a base at the mouth of the Mississippi for raiding the Spanish Indies, and a trade route across the western sea to China. All this he told to Count Frontenac, the new governor general, a man of business who saw the worth of the adventure. Frontenac sent La Salle to talk peace with the Iroquois, while he himself founded Fort Frontenac at the outlet of Lake Ontario. From here he cut the trade routes of the west, so that no furs would ever reach the French traders of Montreal or the English of New York. The governor had not come to Canada for his health.
La Salle was penniless, but his mind went far beyond this petty trading; he charmed away the dangers from hostile tribes; his heroic record won him help from France. Within a year he began his adventure of the Mississippi by buying out Fort Frontenac as his base camp. Here he built a ship, and though she was wrecked he saved stores enough to cross the Niagara heights, and build a second vessel on Lake Erie. With theGriffinhe came to the meeting place of the three upper seas—Machilli-Mackinac—the Jesuit headquarters. Being a good-natured man bearing no malice, it was with a certain pomp of drums, flags and guns that he saluted the fort, quite forgetting that hecame as a trespasser into the Jesuit mission. A Jesuit in those days was a person with a halo at one end and a tail at the other, a saint with modest black draperies to hide cloven hoofs, who would fast all the week, and poison a guest on Saturday, who sought the glory of martyrdom not always for the faith, but sometimes to serve a devilish wicked political secret society. Leaving the Jesuit mission an enemy in his rear, La Salle built a fort at the southern end of Lake Michigan, sent off his ship for supplies, and entered the unknown wilderness. As winter closed down he came with thirty-three men in eight birchbark canoes to the Illinois nation on the river Illinois.
Meanwhile the Jesuits sent Indian messengers to raise the Illinois tribes for war against La Salle, to kill him by poison, and to persuade his men to desert. La Salle put a rising of the Illinois to shame, ate three dishes of poison without impairing his very sound digestion, and made his men too busy for revolt; building Fort Brokenheart, and a third ship for the voyage down the Mississippi to the Spanish Indies.
Then came the second storm of trouble, news that his relief ship from France was cast away, his fort at Frontenac was seized for debt, and his supply vessel on the upper lakes was lost. He must go to Canada.
The third storm was still to come, the revenge of the English for the cutting of their fur trade at Fort Frontenac. They armed five hundred Iroquois to massacre the Illinois who had befriended him in the wilderness.
Robert Cavalier de la Salle
Robert Cavalier de la Salle
At Fort Brokenheart La Salle had a valiant priest named Hennepin, a disloyal rogue and a quite notable liar. With two voyageurs Pere Hennepin was sent toexplore the river down to the Mississippi, and there the three Frenchmen were captured by the Sioux. Their captors took them by canoe up the Mississippi to the Falls of Saint Anthony, so named by Hennepin. Thence they were driven afoot to the winter villages of the tribe. The poor unholy father being slow afoot, they mended his pace by setting the prairie afire behind him. Likewise they anointed him with wildcat fat to give him the agility of that animal. Still he was never popular, and in the end the three wanderers were turned loose. Many were their vagabond adventures before they met the explorer Greysolon Du Luth, who took them back with him to Canada. They left La Salle to his fate.
Meanwhile La Salle set out from Fort Brokenheart in March, attended by a Mohegan hunter who loved him, and by four gallant Frenchmen. Their journey was a miracle of courage across the unexplored woods to Lake Erie, and on to Frontenac. There La Salle heard that the moment his back was turned his garrison had looted and burned Fort Brokenheart; but he caught these deserters as they attempted to pass Fort Frontenac, and left them there in irons.
Every man has power to make of his mind an empire or a desert. At this time Louis the Great was master of Europe, La Salle a broken adventurer, but it was the king’s mind which was a desert, compared with the imperial brain of this haughty, silent, manful pioneer. The creditors forgot that he owed them money, the governor caught fire from his enthusiasm, and La Salle went back equipped for his gigantic venture in the west.
The officer he had left in charge at Fort Brokenheartwas an Italian gentleman by the name of Tonty, son of the man who invented the tontine life insurance. He was a veteran soldier whose left hand, blown off, had been replaced with an iron fist, which the Indians found to be strong medicine. One clout on the head sufficed for the fiercest warrior. When his garrison sacked the fort and bolted, he had two fighting men left, and a brace of priests. They all sought refuge in the camp of the Illinois.
Presently this pack of curs had news that La Salle was leading an army of Iroquois to their destruction, so instead of preparing for defense they proposed to murder Tonty and his Frenchmen, until the magic of his iron fist quite altered their point of view. Sure enough the Iroquois arrived in force, and the cur pack, three times as strong, went out to fight. Then through the midst of the battle Tonty walked into the enemy’s lines. He ordered the Iroquois to go home and behave themselves, and told such fairy tales about the strength of his curs that these ferocious warriors were frightened. Back walked Tonty to find his cur pack on their knees in tears of gratitude. Again he went to the Iroquois, this time with stiff terms if they wanted peace, but an Illinois envoy gave his game away, with such extravagant bribes and pleas for mercy that the Iroquois laughed at Tonty. They burned the Illinois town, dug up their graveyard, chased the flying nation, butchered the abandoned women and children, and hunted the cur pack across the Mississippi. Tonty and his Frenchmen made their way to their nearest friends, the Pottawattomies, to await La Salle’s return.
And La Salle returned. He found the Illinois town in ashes, littered with human bones. He found anisland of the river where women and children by hundreds had been outraged, tortured and burned. His fort was a weed-grown ruin. In all the length of the valley there was no vestige of human life, or any clue as to the fate of Tonty and his men. For the third time La Salle made that immense journey to the settlements, wrung blood from stones to equip an expedition, and coming to Lake Michigan rallied the whole of the native tribes in one strong league, a red Indian colony with himself as chief, for defense from the Iroquois. The scattered Illinois returned to their abandoned homes, tribes came from far and wide to join the colony and in the midst, upon Starved Rock, La Salle built Fort Saint Louis as their stronghold. When Tonty joined him, for once this iron man showed he had a heart.
So, after all, La Salle led an expedition down the whole length of the Mississippi. He won the friendship of every tribe he met, bound them to French allegiance, and at the end erected the standard of France on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. “In the name of the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by the Grace of God, King of France and of Navarre,” on the nineteenth of April, 1682. La Salle annexed the valley of the Mississippi from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, from the lakes to the gulf, and named that empire Louisiana.
As to the fate of this great explorer, murdered in the wilderness by followers he disdained to treat as comrades, “his enemies were more in earnest than his friends.”