Maids of the Natchez Send Tomahawks to Surprise Fort Rosalie—Fashions in Scalps
SAILORS clinging to the rigging with toes and fingers sang an echoing chantey as one by one they furled the canvas wings of the frigate coming through Lake Pontchartrain to anchor before New Orleans.
The frigate, a splendid ship of fifty guns, had belonged to one of the Le Moyne brothers, de Iberville; another, de Châteauguay, was her captain; and a third, de Bienville, was the governor of these colonies she had come from France to supply. There was a large family of the patriotic Canadian Le Moynes in active service throughout the New World. Like all the lesser French nobles, each was called by the title of the estate he owned instead of his parent's name.
News that the ship had been sighted spread so quickly that by the time she had arrived notonly the people of the town, but all the blacks from the outlying plantations and many red natives of forest camps, were on the dock to meet her.
The Sieur de Bienville kept a thousand details in his mind. "Run, Tony," he commanded the Picard du Gay, "and offer your services as interpreter to the Natchez chief of the White-Apple region. Be sure that some of the uniformed officers do him homage; see that the daughter and her attendant maids receive a present. Watch you, too, and give the blacks the signal to bob and duck at the proper places."
At the same moment the White-Apple chief was saying to the Apple-Blossom at his side: "Allow our white brothers to make friends. Much is to be gained from a boat like this."
The coming of an overseas ship is a time of tense feeling in any port at any age of the world. Fortunes stay or go, hearts rejoice or break, with the destiny of an argosy. The New Orleans people and the immigrants alike laughed and cried with the pleasure and excitement of meeting. Whether they were kinsfolk or strangers, they chattered together.
Many of these new settlers were farmers and artisans. They brought implements for tilling the land and special tools for mechanical trades. The Mississippi French had learned that if their towns were to grow, somebody had to go to work.
A whole regiment of troops had come to supply the garrisons. Quantities of munitions and stores to maintain them were in the hold. Several priests and nuns were among the passengers. All were welcomed by cheer after cheer.
On deck and on shore interest centered in an item of the cargo, a bevy of girls, shipped from the mother country by the king as a gift to the colony. Chaperoned by nuns, they came to the dock half-shyly, half-boldly.
Anthony Auguelle, stationed with the Indians, was embarrassed. He twisted his best cap round and round and dangled its plume. Four girls were looking at him and he didn't know what to do. The every-day smile which he used for officers, priests, red men, and negroes with such good effect faded away. He was grave and awkward. The girls passed him with indifferent tosses of their dainty heads.
His Majesty had sent them to persuade the too lively young bachelors of the colony to settle down in sedate home life. They were penniless orphans of Paris. Nothing could be lost by venturing into another country; fortune and happiness might be gained thereby. Romance and adventure called to them as it had to their brothers, and they had answered blithely.
With no dowry except the tiny hand-trunks ofpersonal needs with which the crown had furnished them, they would have gone unclaimed in the matrimonial markets of the capital. On the brink of the Great River their ruffles and ribbons, coquettish headgear of lace, small, neat shoes, their whole feminine charm, sent the pulses of backwoodsmen to fluttering. Straightway each maid had her choice of a dozen suitors.
French overlords, even on the remotest borders, kept up the dignity of the Empire by holding court in as formal an imitation of the royal audience at Versailles as they could.
The hall at New Orleans, built of bark-covered logs, was large and high. A mammoth fireplace at one end and a canopied dais with a throne-like chair gave it an air of state. In its impressive atmosphere the Sieur de Bienville received all the colonists as graciously as any king could have done.
Immigrants from the poverty-stricken lower middle class of workaday France were enchanted with the semi-tropical luxuriance of this new land of parti-colored races. The elegance of the reception-chamber appealed to their love of change. Where else in the wide world could common people be associated so cordially with uniformed soldiers and their gorgeous officers, be waited upon by fantastic blackamoors, be introduced to a dusky princess more beautifulthan any one they had ever seen? She spoke to them in the French phrases Anthony had taught her. Her maids danced with the officers the steps that his fiddle had measured for them in his visits to the White-Apple plantation.
The governor patronized all the marriage ceremonies which the priests performed for the king's maids. He presided over the fête which followed.
The first days of the new colonists were happy ones. A fraternal policy demanded that they be made to feel at ease and that the intelligent, semi-barbarous Natchez be assured of the new-comers' kindness.
Anthony sulked. "I did not want one of the maids," he explained, pettishly, "but I hate to be sniffed at."
"Neither was I chosen," replied the tactful Sieur de Bienville. "Let us console each other by thinking how the hands of women will improve our town of clumsy men. Then will be scrubbing and good cooking and clean curtains and flower-gardens—"
Anthony interrupted: "And no dogs and no cock-fights and no fun of any sort! I am going back to the wilderness!"
The Sieur de Bienville's laughing face went grave. "You are needed in the Natchez forest, Tony. So much is at stake that I shall go with you. The friendliness which you have begunwith the restless White-Apple must continue until we are sure of the tribe's allegiance. We will go with the returning Indians to their village. It does not matter if we French quarrel among ourselves; we can forget and make up again. But when our traders offend the Indians, as has lately been done, the natives remember and resent it, planning secret revenge."
"The Natchez welcome a dog as they do his master; game-chickens abound," cried Anthony. "Let us go!" and away they both paddled with the chief.
It seemed more like play than politics to be rowing up-stream in the Natchez delegation through country where so many notable events were to happen. They specially observed a bluff something over a hundred miles above New Orleans where great red cypresses stood. Each was like a painted post, or abâton rouge, as they pronounced it. They planned to build a fortress there, little dreaming that a capital city by the name they gave would one day flourish on the spot. From Baton Rouge for many miles north the banks they passed were within the century to become the refuge of the three thousand French Acadians driven out of Nova Scotia into such pathetic exile that the story of their "Evangeline," as told by the poet Longfellow, will never be forgotten as long as this bit of "Acadian coast" retains its name.
While Anthony played his fiddle to cement the peace between the White-Apple people and the French, the Sieur de Bienville as a military precaution put into perfect working order a tiny near-by outpost of three stockaded log cabins which he had built some years before. His brother Iberville had chosen the site. It was the first permanent settlement on the Mississippi and was called Fort Rosalie. On its foundation was afterward laid the American city of Natchez.
Since the Great River came out of the void and wet the feet of the first dinosaur there has never been a dull minute upon it. Anthony's gray eyes were always hunting for unusual sights.
"What is that?" he whispered to the Sieur de Bienville on the homeward way as some heavy creature like a huge water-rat stirred among the roots of a tree hidden under the bank.
"Paddle nearer, Tony. Faster! It may be a wounded man."
It was acoureur de bois, not hurt in body, but so frightened that his state was pitiful.
"The Natchez murdered my two companions days and days ago," he screamed, in hysterical relief, when he found that he was rescued from his slimy cave by men of his own nation. "What will the post do about such an outrage?" he demanded, wildly. "Are traders to be sacrificedwithout revenge?" He pounded distracted hands upon his chest.
As he fed the poor thing, who had been living upon raw fish and roots for a long time, the officer asked, "What did your companions do first to the Natchez?"
"We walked around in their funny church a little; that's all," faltered thecoureur de bois. "The White-Apple's daughter saw us and threw a tomahawk at us. She hit first one and then another." He turned very pale as he recalled the sight. "I escaped by falling in the river."
"Not the pretty Apple-Blossom?" gasped Anthony, "Not our gentle pupil in French and music who came to the wedding?"
The Sieur de Bienville inclined his head. "She has charge of the maids who help tend the temple's sacred fire which came from the sun and which never goes out. These men profaned a sanctuary."
"She should have tomahawked you, too!" cried Anthony to thecoureur de bois. "You foolish fellows came near being the death of us all. We have spent a week soothing the Natchez. We could not find out why they were angry."
"They will never forgive nor forget. It is only one of the many indignities done them by your careless acts. If you promise never to mention the murder or to stir up trouble about it I'll carry you with us," said the stern youngofficer. "Otherwise back you go into the river."
Thecoureur de boisagreed to silence. They took him to New Orleans, an abject prisoner.
Yet many days later, when there came messengers, one tumbling over the other in their frantic haste to tell of a massacre of settlers at several small posts, he began to babble his story, and the cry went round: "The Natchez! The Natchez did it. We must subdue the Natchez!"
The young wives from France were panic-stricken at this frightful menace of armed savages. Husbands who for themselves would not have minded a few Indians on the war-path were now excited by the uncontrollable terror of the women. They demanded of Bienville the extinction of the Natchez. A mob spirit grew.
"Do you see the gray moss hanging from the live-oaks?" these citizens cried. "The Spanish and the Indians call its clusters 'French wigs.' If we do not kill these Natchez, then shall our hair dangle in like festoons from every branch."
"Give us action!" howled the soldiers. "We came to protect the colony. Now is the time to strike!"
The distressed governor sighed heavily. He could not afford mutiny of his troops nor the desertion of his citizens. Neither could he trust the Natchez, who no longer trusted him.
"It is the beginning of the end," he told Anthony, sadly. "The condition of peace between two nations for which our priests hoped is too ideal. None of us on either side are self-controlled enough to maintain it."
He hastily filled his bateaux with several hundred men, hurried under sail and oar up the Mississippi to Fort Rosalie, marched out from there, took the Natchez by surprise, and fell upon them with gun and bayonet.
Now Anthony loved a fight. For his vivacious nature it was the best way to clear the air. Pummeling some rude fellow who needed it was a satisfaction. But this battle was not a fight. It was war; cruel, bloody war. His whole soul sickened at cutting down these Indians whose artistic, half-civilized towns had so often been his shelter. He had a childish fancy that if he had been given time to go about among them with the fiddle they loved, he could have brought peace again.
It was too late. They were beaten by the sword. Conquered and subdued, the Natchez agreed to whatever the French dictated. Fort Rosalie became the headquarters of the Sieur de Bienville. Under his direction the sullen Indians labored at enlarging the fort which had taken their freedom from them. Many of the king's maids and their husbands came to its shelter to found homes.
Then the Sieur de Bienville was called to France and Anthony wandered disconsolate from the fort, now under a commander as heartless as Bienville had been kind.
Although the plantations were destroyed, the Natchez temple to the sun, their deity, stood inviolate. The village looked the same as ever. Anthony often went there unafraid. Some of his old welcome still remained when they accepted his gifts. For in Indian-land one speaks by a present. If he gives nothing it is the same as though he were silent.
"Make me a pipe," the pretty princess coaxed him one day, "a flute of several reeds." She selected some from a handful she held. She counted the others carefully and tied them in bundles, the same number in each. "Play me a tune upon it; not a sad song because the new governor demands that we give up our town to him, but a joyous air which tells that the sun still shines."
Anthony made the pipe and taught her maids a triumphant tune. The princess gave him a bundle of reeds. "Destroy a reed each day. When there is only one left come again and we will give you a present of tender chickens and fresh eggs—all that our chiefs can carry, to take to the fort. The delicacies will speak for us and show our feeling of submission to the conquerors." Her smile was not a pleasant thing to see; it worried him.
With an anxious mind the Picard du Gay took his bundle of reeds. He made the rounds of the small settlements dependent on Fort Rosalie and warned them that the Natchez meant mischief. He pleaded with the officers of the fort to reinforce themselves. He could not explain what the reeds meant nor tell the settlers what to fear from the Indians whose arms had been confiscated.
The Sieur de Bienville, in France, was pleading with the court for more men for colonial defense. The local governor sent requests, by every ship, for arms—more arms.Coureurs de boispredicted uprisings. Who listens to any Cassandra?
On the day that he drew the last reed Anthony went early to see the princess. The maidens, gentle and domestic, were loading the braves with dressed fowls and baskets of eggs. A more peaceable-looking procession never took the trail to any fort.
"Stay you here before our temple with me," commanded the princess, whose vivid pose and brilliant eyes suggested a crisis of some sort. "A white man shall witness our submission and play our song upon his pipes."
He felt helpless, worn, and old, a victim in her power.
She abandoned French and took up Natchez words. "The war between us has only begun.No one but the sun above can see how it will end."
Confused by her distraught manner, Anthony looked helplessly at the one reed in his hand.
"Every Natchez tribe had such a bundle," she went on. "This morning, when there was one reed left, each warrior ran to the nearest white man's post around Fort Rosalie with his newly made stone tomahawk hidden under a present. Every Frenchman is massacred. Every lodge-pole is hung with scalps—your hair, not ours. So do the fashions change."
Anthony could not believe her. She pointed in the direction of Fort Rosalie. Smoke, heavy and ominous, was rising above the trees. The stockade, the settlers' houses, were on fire! To be able to kindle the buildings the Indians must have destroyed first the defenders and then have dragged out the women and children.
With one blow they had killed or captured five hundred French and avenged themselves upon the white race.
The many battles of the Natchez war which followed ended, after several years, in the destruction of that tribe. But Anthony, almost the sole survivor of Fort Rosalie, felt that the French had lost, in breaking with the semi-barbarous and skilled Natchez, more than any ultimate victory could have given them.
The princess took the pipe from his nervelessfingers and played some wild pagan strain. All aglow with triumph, she put her hands beneath the hereditary fire on the altar, gathered it up as though it had been a flower, drove her vestals before her, and went down a forest path out of sight forever, clasping to her breast the undying flame.