Holding the Only Fortress of the Valley against the Iroquois for Henry Tonty—An Owl Saves a Nation
ANTHONY frowned at the capable back of Henry Tonty as it mounted the steep trail in front of him. He wished that he dared to sigh aloud to call this energetic man's attention to the fact that helpers sometimes wearied and that this was one of the times.
For Anthony hated work. Common useful labor tired him. "Let the Indians do it," he thought. The Indians passed the idea on, "Let the squaws do it."
But the squaws were already over-busy curing furs and getting ready to put in the spring crops. So Tonty had decreed that Frenchmen and Indians alike should lend a hand at strengthening the fort on top of the Rock of the Illinois. It had been hastily built in the autumn and now needed the finishing touches.
Every Frenchman wanted to be a militaryofficer or a wanderingcoureur de bois. Each Indian preferred the life of a hunter or a warrior. Yet here they were all working busily under a commander who said that they must dig ditches or fell trees for the mammoth stockade.
Now Tonty had an artificial iron hand to take the place of one he had lost in battle. He was clever, almost uncanny, in the use of it. The bad Indians whom he slapped with it and the good Indians whom he directed by its metal point regarded it equally with fearsome rolling eyes as very big medicine.
Tonty had also an iron will. Every Frenchman felt it. Few could go against it. His mandates were obeyed; the fort improved.
The Rock was a fine spot for such a defense. It rose out of a plain high above all other landmarks. Over a hundred feet up in the air its almost flat top spread out in an acre of ground with a running spring hidden in its shrubbery. On the north the Illinois River flowed past its base. Three sides dropped sheer to the plain. The fourth had a difficult almost perpendicular path.
A few men could hold it against many.
Ever since the destruction of Crevecœur the Sieur La Salle had wanted to set a fort upon the Mississippi midway between north and south to be the center of the fur trade. He had found here on the tributary Illinois a natural fortresseasily defended and already surrounded by loyal Indian towns. Upon his return from the mouth of the Mississippi he had built the stockade. For the present he would make it answer for his central headquarters. It was christened Fort Saint Louis.
The crisp spring air was ideal for industry and Tonty was determined to get the buildings in perfect order. To do this it was necessary to bring various materials from the plain. The end in view was good. Anthony knew that; but he decided as his gang of workmen reached the heights, threw down their loads and panted for breath, that they had done enough for the present.
He winked at a really handsome young Indian standing near him and knew by a single exchange of glances that this fellow was of the same opinion. He had loved the savage and had coaxed him into fagging for his white brother ever since the day of their first meeting in the fall. For Anthony was apt to give his light-hearted affections to any chum who promised to be full of fun.
As Tonty stood ready with his next order he faced Anthony's way. That naughty Frenchman with his team-mate beside him paused abruptly in the act of mopping his brow and fixed his eyes, popping with amazement, on a tree near him where hopped two robins. All the Indiansround about followed his stare and watched the robins. Even busy Tonty looked. One bird chirped at the workers; the other bird turned his head on one side and said to the first bird in perfectly good Illinois dialect, with a thin little trilling robin voice, "Squaws work."
The Indians stood petrified. Tonty, ill-pleased at the interruption, waved his hand impatiently and the robin said again, "Squaws work." That magic hand! Every Indian saw it make the bird talk. What would it do next? With an impulse for safety they turned as one man and went scrambling, sliding and falling to the bottom of the hill.
Tonty was provoked. "Oh, Tony, that was such an untimely thing for you to do when I need the workers. Such an old, old trick, too—so childish!"
"It is all the better for being ancient and simple if it succeeds," grinned the unrepentant Anthony; "and besides,Idid not do it. I couldn't. It is much harder than singing a tune."
"Didn't the sounds come through those crooked teeth of yours?"
Anthony shook his head and crossed his heart. His chum stood innocently aloof. "Give us an hour, dear Tonty, to rest our muscles in a ball game. At your signal I will bring them all here again to work at double speed," and away he ran to play.
Tonty, heavy with care, went to the Sieur La Salle with the list of his needs. The fort was nearly repaired. Quantities of stores, enough for a siege, were arriving on the backs of squaws every hour in the day. Bales and bales of furs by the same pack beasts were also coming up.
As the two leaders stood side by side and gazed down on the lovely fertile plain, the happy towns and the rollicking ball game, they talked of how best to hold the Great River valley from this vantage point. A town of some six thousand Illinois lay just across the river. In another direction, also within reach of the refuge of the fort, was a village of Miamis almost as large. Of Shawnees, Weas, and half a dozen others in much smaller tribes there were enough to make perhaps some twenty thousand souls.
These were allies. Also they were dependents. They expected the Sieur La Salle to give them French goods in exchange for furs and to help provide them with food if their crops failed. First of all, his soldiers and his steel weapons must protect them from their ferocious enemies, the Iroquois.
He had claimed all this land with their consent. In return he must save their constantly threatened lives. Until he could get a line of ships coming through the Gulf to his new-found port, Fort Saint Louis must be supplied from Canada by that route through the Great Lakeswhich he had struggled over back and forth in so many heartbreaking journeys of winter hardships.
On the Atlantic seaboard English towns were rooting themselves through settlers who owned and cultivated their homesteads and meant to keep them forever. Along the Pacific coast Spanish priests drilling the heathen into civilized farmers owned the gardens where the adobe missions were building, and stood ready to defend them. In the Mississippi Valley between the two the little Rock of the Illinois, a pinpoint on the map, a speck on the horizon, by the right of its twenty armed Frenchmen held the whole vast region of the Great River for France.
And the twenty Frenchmen, every one as careless, gay, and irresponsible as Anthony, were playing ball while Fort Saint Louis stood empty and neglected.
Tonty was justified in his anxiety as he listened to the Sieur La Salle say: "The present governor of Canada is not like our former friend, Frontenac. This commandant is an old man and a greedy politician from Paris. He knows nothing of Indian warfare and does not see the importance of this post. He will not send the men we need to defend these towns nor will he give us the munitions and goods that we have paid for in the furs already forwarded to him."
"There are less than a hundred pounds of powder—" interrupted Tonty, "and the Iroquois are threatening even now—"
"Look!" cried La Salle, "look! Something has happened among the ball players."
The dots of Indians, far below, had massed in a crowd at the center of their field and as suddenly separated again with shrill wails, each player going at swiftest pace in a different direction.
"Bad news! Prepare yourself for a deluge. As fast as the warning spreads they will come here by villages. Put a good face on it," and the nobleman made ready to receive his tenants. He was their overlord; and he was at his best when dangers assailed him. His whole life was spent in defying one tragedy after another. "There are stores enough to feed them for several days—"
"When the powder gives out we can use bows and arrows, stones and logs—"
The bearer of evil tidings had fallen exhausted at the base of the Rock. Anthony was the first to come over the rim with the one word message, "Iroquois."
Within the memory of these Illinois their valley had been conquered by the unspeakable Iroquois, the Huns of this continent. Towns had been destroyed, men killed, women tortured, children scalped, prisoners burned. Then theyhad had no refuge. Now they flew to Sieur La Salle and the Fort Saint Louis.
To the Rock they came pouring in such a horde as only fear can drive, red bodies striving—contorted—palpitating—feathers awry—clothes discarded—paint running in sweating streams. Hundreds of galloping moccasined feet pounded out such a series of steps up that steep trail as shovels could not have done in a whole season.
Sieur La Salle met them. His proud, domineering face showed that he had no fear of anything. Tonty's sensitive Italian lips, quivering with responsive excitement, answered their wild demands for the protective medicine of his magic hand with all sorts of impossible promises.
As one means of restoring quiet, the missionary Father prayed as loud as his big outdoor voice could shout. And Anthony attended by his faithful shadow went about among them with that quirk of a smile they all liked. His words were happily calm. He was a much better worker in a panic than he was in a ditching gang. Together they reminded the quaking ones that any man who could make a bird speak could surely save them from the Iroquois. And who had not already heard of that talking bird of a few hours ago?
A red sunset, a yellow rising moon has seldom looked upon a spot more filled with human stress.The very air above the plateau quivered with hurried breath as though a furnace stirred it. Every hour of that awful night added to the number climbing the stair. At dawn they were still coming. Peeping over the stockade and from perilous overhanging lookouts they watched the plain. Without rest, without sleep, they surged back and forth, quelled to a semblance of sanity by the white men.
Peep o' dawn, a rising sun, a day of light showed a deserted vale. No Iroquois! Their enemies had passed on some other trail. This was the power of the iron hand. Let all evildoers beware!
The Illinois pledged fealty afresh to the commander who had for his servant such a captain as Tonty. They scurried back to their homes.
This event had made the Illinois as stable as an Indian settlement can ever be. It was not a town such as La Salle wanted, but it answered his purpose. In his enthusiasm for the extension of France he saw so far into the future that some of the things he planned could not be carried out for a long, long time.
It was not until the year 1764 that his central city for the Mississippi was founded and given the name of his choice, Saint Louis.Coureurs de boisbegan it. Indians were treated justly there. Noble Pontiac, pathetic in his defeated old age, was given a home within its stockadegates. A tablet to his memory hangs now in one of its finest buildings.
La Fayette was one of the city's guests. Thomas Benton, a statesman, lived there. From its trade depots the canvas-topped argosies were fitted out for the gold-fields of the forties. It fought buccaneers, land-grabbers, cholera, cyclones, floods, and renegades, and in each trial came out victorious.
Spain at one time, England at another, tried to hold it without success. But when it became American, it remained American. The French choice of location gave it commercial success. Father Membre's shaven crown would go high in pride could he see the churches, schools, and hospitals it has to-day. Its parks, boulevards, and buildings would delight Tonty's Parisian taste.
It was this vision of their Saint Louis to come that held these men to the dangerous Rock.
Sieur La Salle knew that the peace of the valley might be broken at any time. Men and munitions he must have. He left Tonty in command and started again over the trail to Montreal to get by personal demands the supplies that otherwise would not be given him.
In the false security which so often deceives the unprepared, the villages went through the summer and into the fall under the fort in which they had such superstitious faith.
Then again came the cry of, "Wolf, wolf!" Again the panic; again the crowded Rock; again the night of horror. No magic availed. The day revealed the Iroquois pack surrounding the hill. They sat on their haunches and yelped as though they had come to stay. All day, all night, the next day, the next night, three, four, five days and nights they besieged the Illinois.
They did not attack. The one narrow cannon-swept path would rake off their warriors as they climbed in single file. They meant to let the Illinois make the next move in this dreadful game.
"If they find out how low our powder is—" began Tonty. He would not mention even to himself the possibility of such a thing as actually happened many years afterward on this very Rock when a warrior tribe of Illinois was besieged by Pottawottomies and perished so miserably that the place has ever since been called Starvation Rock.
The Father confessor of the flock was thinking of another danger. "If the smallpox should break out here—"
Anthony laid a friendly hand on Tonty's arm. "Once you saved the Illinois because you were brave enough to go into their camp alone."
Tonty shook his head. "No, it was because I didnotwear ear-rings!"
"It is my turn now to do what I can," and Anthony took his chum by the hand. "Open the gates for us," he demanded.
When the guarded gates swung apart the two crept through and disappeared down the incline toward the twinkling Iroquois camp.
Little owls—the forest was always full of them—hooted now here and now there, calling back and forth in wavering minor notes. Tonty's ear could not tell the difference between an owl's voice and a white man's imitation of it, but any Indian could easily do so. The Illinois whom Tonty asked to listen to the sounds was sure that part were made by Anthony, but neither he nor any one else could say whether birds or Anthony's companion made the rest.
These two mimics, half in joy over the adventure and half in fear of its outcome, slipped nearer and nearer to the hostile camp. They peeped at one place and then another to find the best spot in which to let the Iroquois capture them.
At last they saw a tiny fire where sentinels were putting their weapons in order. And in the shadow, quite like a page of a child's picture-book, sat four little owls all a-row on a limb. It was the stage setting that they wanted for their vaudeville act. Whether it should turn out a comedy or a tragedy the endangered Illinois nation would soon be able to tell.
A delicate, indefinite "oo-oo-oo-" did not attract special notice from the sentinels. But when Anthony's heavier voice and very human "hoo-oot" sounded close to them they jumped to attention, pounced upon the pair and jerked them into the firelight for inspection as though they had been a couple of rag dolls. In any surprising event there is always a half-minute when even the most active will pause to decide upon the next movement. A few seconds' inspection of their captives were necessary before the sentinels would raise the alarm, "White man!"
On some such brief interval Anthony had built his plans. He pointed at the owls and gazed open-mouthed and intent. It is a trick that never fails. All the sentinels followed his glance. Not one of them looked at the lips of the Illinois Indian standing beside Anthony. One of the little owls blinking in the firelight shifted his feet, opened his beak and whined in Iroquois, "Answer me—answer me."
Anthony reproachfully declared in the same language, "Ididanswer you; Idid." Indeed every Iroquois had heard the boyish hoot.
One of the sentinels threw himself on the ground and rolled out of sight into the dark. His personal safety was his one instinct. Another ran to the chief speechless with alarm. But a third, who was not possessed of an excitable temperament, clutched his prisoners with fingers like steel and bade a paralyzed Iroquois bind their wrists.
Thus they were escorted toward a whooping band who were already running to meet them. They were roughly handled, their clothes torn, their faces scratched.
Yet the story of the owl as it traveled had its effect in putting the two prisoners in a different class from the handful of Illinois captives who were already bound both hands and feet. Anthony in particular they examined with a dreadfully intimate curiosity, sticking their fingers in his mouth to try the edges of his four unusual teeth and picking at his ears. If he had had a beard—but no, his chin and lips were smooth! Had there been rings in his ears—not even holes were drilled in them! That is, had he been a whiskered, ear-ringed Spaniard they would have killed him then and there. But since he was so plainly French they hesitated as they had once done with Tonty, of whose magic fingers they were much afraid.
They had various treaties with the French which they sometimes kept and oftener broke. They never quite dared to murder a Frenchman offhand. They generally tortured him and let him go.
So Anthony as he was dumped into a brush heap by the chief's fire tried to tell his Illinoischum that they were safe enough and their business in the enemies' camp successfully begun. If, as the night grew cold and his bonds cut painfully and his captors looked more and more like the red demons they were, his courage thinned and he shed a few tears of weariness and self-pity, no one knew it.
It was easy enough to be brave at midnight when all the warriors were still awake and baiting him, but his spirits were at low ebb in the hour before dawn.
"Perhaps the chief, after a week's unsuccessful siege, may also feel discouraged. This is the time to try him," thought Anthony as he gazed in every direction, but saw no owl to help him. The brighter eyes of his Illinois at his side showed him where to look and indicated that he was ready to help.
The long, shivering cry of the owl woke the jaded chieftain, and Anthony's echoing answer brought half a dozen chilled warriors to their feet.
Anthony was sitting up and shaking his head at the owl. The Illinois seemed to be asleep.
The owl said, "Answer me, answer me."
"Wait until the iron hand comes," replied Anthony with apparent secrecy in a very audible whisper, "thenhewill give bad medicine."
The owl laughed—yes—laughed!
Anthony hastily set his finger on his lips as a signal to the owl to be silent. The owl obeyed. Anthonypretendedtopretendto go to sleep!
The dismayed chiefs laid their ruffled feathers together. They did not like the prospect of a visit from Tonty, who had more than once puzzled and defeated them. His bad medicine was bitter to their taste.
Without stopping to call a powwow they summoned all hands to arms. They released the Illinois prisoners and drove them out of camp. They roused Anthony and his chum and bade them leave.
"But we don't want to go," protested Anthony. "We like to wait with you."
The listening chiefs were overwrought. They dared not kill him, nor keep him, nor send him back. They set some sentries over him, not to prevent his escape, but to hold him so that he could not follow them! For they were now bent on running away before Tonty's hand should strike at them. Of armed force they were not afraid, but before black magic they fled in panic.
Break o' day saw them going over the horizon.
Night in a far-away camp found the Iroquois breathing more easily. The chief was still so nervous that a little owl above him disturbed him. To his horror Anthony's voice in a poor imitation of the bird's call came through the woods.
"Hoo-oo-oot!"
He clutched at his braves. They huddled round him. What an unwelcome sight was Anthony as he came toward their hiding-place!
"How has the magician escaped his guards? Why does he follow me?" The great dignitary gave way to his real feelings and with a howl of fear ran still farther through the forest. All his braves trailed hot-foot after him. Anthony trotted along in not too close pursuit.
On the morning of the seventh day Tonty looked down upon the deserted plain. The enemy had left in the night. He wrote in his journal, "The Iroquois retired discomfited."
Toward night the Illinois prisoners who had been released began to straggle into the fort. Some were badly singed; others full of nasty cuts; all were scared. They could not tell why the Iroquois had freed them.
It was not until evening of the tenth day that Anthony and the Illinois came back. They were ragged and tired. The Illinois was as solemn as any screech-owl could be, but Anthony was full of laughter.
When all the tribes crowded round the two to thank them for driving the besiegers away and rejoicing in their escape, he said in great glee: "We did notescape. They ran fromus!"