USA > Iowa > Poweshiek County > History of Poweshiek County, Iowa: a record of settlement, organization, progress and achievement, Volume 1 > Part 2
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It is interesting to consider the weight of this ice sheet and to reflect on its grinding power as it moved southwestward, preparing rich farms from crushed rocks. It is interesting, too, to notice its carrying power, when we see the huge boulders in Buchanan county and elsewhere. That huge boulder is said to have been brought into Iowa from British America. Smaller boulders were dropped in this county after being carried hundreds or thousands of miles, probably. One of them, very fortunately, was lying on the prairie a mile or two away to make a permanent foundation for the first college building in Grin- nell, while only a crumbling, yellow sandstone was, aside from this granite rock, within reach at that early day.
WHO WERE THE FIRST INHABITANTS?
Here again we do not know. Perhaps they were mound builders, or dwell- ers in or near the ice age, one hundred thousand years or more ago. We have had no cliff dwellers in Iowa of note and few mound builders, apparently. The indications are that some men have lived in Iowa who were little above the gorilla, low-browed, small-bodied and with little skill or art. The mounds in which they have been found are small and located along the Mississippi river chiefly, with a few elsewhere. There seems to have been no special effort to make them artistic, or to place in them articles that show progress in civiliza- tion. Wisconsin is far in advance of Iowa in the character of its mounds and in the articles preserved. Nevertheless our ancients utilized copper, and left evidence of some skill in weaving and in making signs and marks that may be intended to serve as letters or as representatives of ideas.
How far the predecessors of the Indians whom our fathers first saw on this continent or in Iowa are to be found among the mound builders or the cliff dwellers we do not know. We can only add this question to the others which we cannot answer. We can imagine much, guess at more and be as perfectly deceived as a Yale writer was about our "Cardiff giant," when he said: "We only know that at some distant period, the great statne was brought in a ship of Tarhish across the see of Atl." And yet it was hewed out only a few weeks before and taken by Iowa teams and by railroads from Fort Dodge to Chicago and to New York to have the great discovery of it made in due time as the great Iowa created "Phenician giant."
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIANS.
It is a common theory that man originated in the warmer regions of Asia. Whether we accept the theory of evolution or not, it is not difficult to believe that he came from almost any part of the temperate zone, or the cooler por- tion of the torrid. The Indians are commonly believed to have come directly
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from Asia across Behring strait. Agassiz thought they began life in South America. Professor Winchell and others are more inclined to believe they crossed Behring strait and that some groups went down along the west coast of North America, while others took the east side of the Rocky mountains for their home, and moved farther southward.
The first Europeans found them everywhere on the entire continent. They differed greatly in language, in habits, and in cultivation. Some were so degraded in Darwin's time that he thought nothing could improve them noticeably within a generation, while the agriculture of others, the skill in building bridges, roads and temples and in forming governments, have astonished the most intelligent. The Digger Indians, with their poverty of life, contrasted strangely with the Peruvian, Mexican and Central American culture, as Americans who live in the lowest city slums contrast strangely with the most cultivated today. Neverthe- less the lowest and the highest may belong to the same great family of the human race.
If our historic records were lost and the date of history were reduced to spec- ulation as completely as is the Indian's life story, in another millennium some mousing lover of research might confidently deny that the English of the present had in their veins any blood of savage Saxon, or cruel Angle, or of Northman robber. Through all the obscurity of the past we will not attempt to say to what height of civilization some Indian tribe may have arisen, or in what depth of degradation some may have remained, or to what they may have sunk. The best of the Copts in this century are inferior to the ablest in the time of Rameses II or Thothmes III. It has been a long time since the descendants of Caesar. or Cicero, or Seneca have equalled their ancestors in statesmanship, oratory or moral philosophy. The human race may be moving upward, but only irregularly and with many a slip or slide here and there.
The Indians of Iowa had apparently been approaching it from the east for a considerable time, when the French first saw them, and the westward move- ment continued till they crossed the Mississippi and have left only a few hun- dred in this state.
The Ine ns of Iowa in the nineteenth century were almost wholly Algonquin, and their kindred stretched from the A 'antic to the Mississippi, it is believed, in the days of John Smith and Miles : andish. Men who have risen only to the hunting st. e of civilization, whose ho" can be built in a day, whose farms are the ber y patch and covered wit' -bearing trees, and whose herds are the deer and the antelope of the fore .. the plain, have little to hold them to 1 nen and are surrounded by flocks any narrow locality. When they bec of sheep and droves of cattle, in goo pastia 's or sheltered nooks, they abandon them less readily. They cling to their homes more tenaciously still when they live in houses built by weeks or months of labor, and on lands which have cost years of toil to clear for cultivation and to cover with fields of grain and fruit- ful orchards.
When the Cherokees and the Creeks were driven from their lands in Georgia westward, they were better farmers, some writers have said, than an equal num- ber of whites around them and now we call them civilized tribes. The Algon- quins, however, have little desire to build houses or cultivate the fields like
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white men. The wigwams of King Philip of Pokanoket were about as good as those of Push-e-to-ne-ke-qua, chief of the Musquakies, today.
THE FRENCH ON THE ROAD TO IOWA.
French fishermen learned much of the Gulf of St. Lawrence but nothing of the river by that name before 1534, or forty-two years after Columbus saw the Indians and the island of Guanahani, or Watling island among the Bahamas, a's today we believe it was. In that year James Cartier, a sailor of St. Malo, seek- ing a near route to China, coasted along the gulf, claimed the territory for France by planting its flag and the cross on its coast, and sailed up the St. Law- rence bay and river until he could see both sides of it from his vessel. One year later he sailed up the stream till he touched the chief Algonquin village along the shore. He reached Stadacone, was kindly received by its chief, and trod the promontory on which a few wigwams then stood, and where later Frontenac defied his enemies, and where the English Wolfe, the French Montcalm, and the Irish Montgomery fell in deadly battle. It was to be the Gibraltar of America, the rock of Quebec.
But there was a wonderful town above which Cartier would approach at his peril. Portents on river and shore forbade them to go. Devils appeared to ter- rify, and pious men were horror stricken at the thought of the white man's defiance of the then god whom they called a fool. Nevertheless, Cartier ad- vanced. The heavens were bright, the earth was veiled with autumnal beauty, and the birds caroled all the way. They were near their landing place. Thou- sands of Indians crowd the shore, bringing gifts of corn and fish. Fires illumi- nate the night; rejoicing fills the air. They set out for the town; fires and welcomes mark the way; they reach the city. It is on a slope that rises seven hundred feet into the air. The city is fortified with palisades. They enter. A new outburst of joy. Mats are brought. A poor, emaciated, old man is laid at Cartier's feet. He is their chief. Signs ask Cartier's healing touch ! He complies. Crowds of sick are laid at his feet. "He is a God!" He reads a part of John, offers a prayer, makes the sign of the cross, the Indians are satisfied.
The white men withdraw. Down the river they go. They have been one thousand miles from the coast nearer China,-"far Cathay," they think. They have given the name to Montreal from its seven hundred-foot "Royal Moun- tain."
MONTREAL.
But they have not been on the road to China. It is the direct road to our own Iowa!
A hundred years go by before the French in Canada get much nearer the China of their search. The wood rangers, the fur gatherers who used to plunge into the forests, remain years in the midst of their savagery, marry their women, leave mixed bloods as representatives of their lives there, and then re- turn to be the scourge of civilized society, may have approached the Orient by Vol. 1-2
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going farther west than any others, nevertheless they usually carried little of value among the Indians. It was a hundred years after Cartier that Champlain pushed on beyond Montreal up the Ottawa river to the country of the Hurons in the vicinity of Lake Huron. The spirit of the explorer was his, and when he could no longer traverse the forests or discover new Lake Champlains or Ontarios, he sent out Jean Nicollet, a wood ranger of the better sort, and a de- vout Catholic who came back out of the forests that he might enjoy the sacra- ments. He had been trying to ascertain whether it was true that a hairless and beardless people came from the far west to trade with tribes beyond the Great Lakes. He probably needed the sacraments on his return!
It was in 1638, or a little earlier, that Nicollet set out on his journey from the Nipissings to learn of the strange people who were believed to be Chinese or Japanese. He prepared himself for meeting the people of the far west by providing a robe of Chinese damask embroidered with birds and flowers, and wrapped it carefully in oil cloth or oil skin. He sailed around North Michigan, through the Straits of Mackinac, across the north part of Lake Michgan, into Green Bay. He went ashore, approached the Winnebago town, sent a messen- ger to announce his arrival, and put on his Chinese robe. He advanced, pistol in hand, and when near the waiting crowd fired a salute. The women and chil- dren fled at first because the god had come to them armed with thunder and lightning, yet gave them welcome, but, alas, they were not Chinamen and knew nothing of them. They were plain Winnebago Indians! The French were not on the road to China! They were still approaching Iowa!
They crossed Winnebago lake, ascended Fox river, crossed the snort portage to the Wisconsin, and descended the river until within three days of the "Massa Sepe," the great water of which they had heard so much. So near and yet st far! They turned aside southward and homeward, but little wiser than when they set out with such buoyant expectations.
IOWA IS SEEN.
Jacques Marquette was of an old and honored family of France, a natural linguist, an ardent devotee of the Virgin Mary, and, at thirty-five, eager to be a missionary to the Indians along the marvelous, yet unknown, Mississippi. Just then Louis Joliet, a young man of French descent, was commissioned to represent the governor of Canada in the attempt to discover, and explore, the Mississippi. He was about twenty-eight, well educated, energetic, fond of adventure, and hailed the appointment with delight. Marquette joined him at the Straits of Mackinaw, and together they set out with joy on their famous mission. Marquette says: "I was all the more delighted at this good news, because I saw my plans about to be accomplished, and found myself in the happy necessity of exposing my life for the salvation of all these tribes; and especially of the Illinois, who, when I was at Point St. Esprit, had begged me very earnestly to bring the word of God among them."
They coasted along the northern part of Lake Michigan, called on the Me- nominees who tried to dissuade them from their enterprise. They told them the people along the shore of the great water scalped all strangers, and a demon
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occupied it who would engulf them in its waters. Other monsters were waiting to swallow them, canoe and all, and if they should escape all these, they would certainly die of the fierce heat. The travelers were not alarmed, but entered Green Bay, struggled up Fox river, crossed Lake Winnebago and worked their way through the wild rice to the Mascoutins, Miamis and Kickapoos. They reached the Indian town and called a council. They amazed the Indians by the audacity of their plan, yet they accepted their guidance to the Wisconsin. They had passed the watershed between the streams flowing into the Great Lakes and those that would bear them into the valley of the unknown.
They floated down through forests rich with grape vines, between prairies, enjoying the nightly luxury of a sleep on shore, after a meal of venison, beneath the stars of June. At length broad meadows appear on their right and beyond them rise bold bluffs, while before them flows a wide and rapid stream. It is the "Massa Sepe," long sought, gladly found. The intrepid explorers are now in a new world, a newer world. The wonderful river is like a broad channel of the sea with the full tide in perpetual motion outward. The rugged bluffs that frown upon them from above and the broad savannas that slope gently down to its margin arouse perpetual admiration, and the strange birds that fly above them and the stranger, monster cattle that darken the prairies by their number, or that come down singly to the water's edge to slake their thirst, and to gaze lazily through heavy forelocks at the strange canoes and white men floating in the middle of the stream. They are objects of increasing interest. It may be a question which are most surprised, the men on the water or the animals on the land.
But Marquette's canoe has received a sudden shock. It may go to the bot- tom! What is it? Is it a warning blow from the monster of the deep of which they have been kindly warned? Is he about to open his horrid jaws and take them into his capacious maw, canoe and all? Is it possible? What is not possi- ble in that region of wonders, and on that river of monstrosities?
Wait a little. Their fear is at its height. The awful assailant is only a large catfish, that is, it is large for a catfish. It has been a little too careless with serious Frenchmen on the eager lookout for unknown and unknowable perils. Catfish and Frenchmen share the same terror apparently; they appar- ently soon recover.
But two weeks are gone and they see no dangerous man or beast, no threat- ening biped, quadruped or centipede, which they had been taught to expect. Indeed, they see no man at all, but they do see human footprints now on the western shore. A well worn path leads out upon the prairie. But what savage men are in ambush along the side of it or at its end?
AN IOWA WALK AND FEAST.
Marquette and Joliet are plucky enough not to run from danger till they see it. They leave their Huron attendants to guard their canoes. They move out upon the land cautiously and silently. Some half dozen miles away three vil- lages appear. They approach one of them, and call. Four men come slowly toward them. They wear French cloth-must be friends.
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"Who are you," inquires the many-tongued Marquette in an Indian dialect. "Illini" is their reply and they conduct them to the chief in the village. In the robe which nature gave him as an infant, he awaits them from the entrance of his wigwam.
Shading his eyes with both hands the chief said: "Frenchmen, how bright the sun shines when you come to visit us. All our village awaits you, and you shall enter our wigwams in peace." Another speech of welcome awaited them when they were conducted to their head chief. Marquette told of their purpose in visiting them and of their religion, and urged them to accept it.
The chief's reply was one of compliment, assuring them that their visit made their tobacco sweeter, the river calmer, the sky more serene and the earth more beautiful.
A feast of four courses followed; first a wooden bowl of greasy porridge of Indian meal, which they received from a spoon as infants sometimes do, and from the master of ceremonies. Then came a plate of fish, from which the bones were removed, and the guests of honor received it in their mouths from the fingers (as clean as usual) of their entertainers. The third course was of dog but the Frenchmen were disinclined to enjoy that part of the feast and chose the course of luscious buffalo meat. Thus were they feasted for a few days. When the morning of their departure came, six hundred braves, an es- cort of honor, accompanied them to their canoes, bidding them a cordial good- bye, with all Indian tokens of good will.
Such was the first meeting of white and Indian on Iowa soil, but not always thus did their successors meet or separate in Iowa.
It has been generally believed that they met on the banks of the Des Moines in Lee county. Professor Lenas G. Weld has given good reasons recently for believing that they met, rather, on the banks of the Iowa river, in Louisa county.
Resuming their canoes, they again dropped down the Mississippi. Parkman summarizes a part of their downward trip thus: "They passed the mouth of the Illinois, and glided beneath that line of rocks on the eastern side cut into fan- tastic forms by the elements, and marked as "The Ruined Castles" on some of the early French maps. Presently they beheld a sight which reminded them that the devil was still lord paramount of the wilderness. On the flat face of a high rock were painted, in red, black and green, a pair of monsters each as large as a calf, with horns like a deer, red eyes, a beard like a tiger and a frightful expression of countenance. "The face is something like that of a man, the body covered with scales and tail so long that it passes entirely round the body, over the head and between the legs, ending like that of a fish."
That horrid monster was just above the city of Alton, but when Parkman passed there in 1867 he saw nothing more horried on that rock than the awful words, "Plantation Bitters!" Was the Indian picture the equivalent of the white man's inscription ?
The explorers moved southward among men simply garbed with a string of beads in their noses or about their necks, and among some who fed and flattered them by day and planned to kill them at night.
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Dangers were still thick about them, they were still far from the Gulf of Mexico, and it seemed wise to return. They sailed up the Mississippi, up the Illinois, crossed to the east side of Lake Michigan and on northward. Mar- quette's increasing weakness induced them to land that he might die on shore, where he calmly bade farewell to his companions and the world.
THE WHITES CLAIM. IOWA.
Marquette and Joliet had hoped to discover the mouth of the Mississippi, but they gave up the hope a little below the mouth of the Arkansas river. If they had continued their journey to the Gulf of Mexico they might have claimed for their sovereign the immense territory which La Salle presented to him a few years later, but some of the Indians along the way were becoming hostile to them, along the lower Mississippi they might be attacked by the Spaniards who were far from friendly to the French.
LA SALLE AT THE MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
Rene Robert Cavalier, Sieur de La Salle, a burgher of Ronen, born in 1643, belonged to a family rich enough to belong to the noble rather than the burgher class. He probably became a Jesuit in early life, but was too self directive to re- main long in such a military organization, although he was always a devout Catholic. Eager to find a route to China, some of his followers left him in dis- gust and he returned to his home a few miles from Montreal, and named the place La Chine, that is, China. His life of pushing discovery made him friends and enemies, as is usual with such an able and imperious man, and he was mur- dered at last by some of his own party.
His most memorable exploit was his descent of the Mississippi, and the erec- tion of the column at its month on which he inscribed the words, "Louis le Grand, Roy de France et de Navarre, Regne le Neuvienne Avril, 1682," that is, "Louis the Great, King of France and Navarre, reigns : Ninth of April, 1682."
As the column dropped into its place La Salle's men stood under arms shout- ing, "Vive le Roi," and singing the "Te Deum," the "Exaudiate," and "Dominie salvum fac Regem," closing their part with volleys of musketry. La Salle then proclaimed: "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, fourteenth of that name, I, this ninth day of April, one thousand six hundred and eighty-two, in virtue of the commission of his Majesty, which I hold in my hand, and which may be seen by all whom it may concern, have taken and do now take, in the name of his Majesty and of his successors to the crown, pos- session of this country of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits and all the nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, min- erals, fisheries, streams and rivers, within the extent of the said Louisiana, from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio . . . as also along the river Colbert, or Mississippi, and the rivers which discharge themselves thereinto, from its source beyond the Nadouessiour (or Sioux)
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as far as its mouth at the sea, or Gulf of Mexico." The soldiers responded with renewed shouts and volleys of musketry, when a cross was erected beside the column, and near it a leaden plate, bearing the arms of France and the inscrip- tion, "Ludovicus Magnus regnat," was buried.
Thus did France take possession of the valley of the Mississippi, making a claim recognized by all Christian nations as valid against them, although the Indian occupants were recognized as having some claim, still, to the land they occupied. Thus France completed her claim to all the territory which encircled the English colonies in North America.
THE FRENCH CLAIM IOWA AND MORE.
Before the year 1682 John Locke had wrought out in his study a remarkable constitution for the Carolinas which seemed utterly unfitted for either pioneers, or a well settled and stable community. It was called "a grand model," and it was intended to avoid the erection of a numerous democracy, and to be in har- mony with monarchy.
Virginia had had its tilt between Bacon and Berkeley, and the latter had decided that the colony should have no school or printing press. It was 1682 also when William Penn landed in America to make Pennsylvania his home, the year when La Salle gave France the Mississippi valley. New Netherland had become New York, Connecticut had formed the first American constitution by the people and for the people. Then Massachusetts had founded Harvard, es- tablished a school system, closed her war with King Philip and hung four Quakers.
The English held a narrow, but enlarging fringe of territory along the At- lantic, as we have seen. Now as the French have possession of the lines of the angle formed by the valley of the upper St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes and the valley of the Mississippi, and as the English are moving back from the Atlantic, the two nations are brought into closer contact in America. The Canadian French go to the valley of the Mississippi along several routes. Sometimes they fol- lowed the route of early explorers through Green Bay, up the Fox river and down the Wisconsin, along the track of Marquette, sometimes by the southern part of Lake Michigan and down the Illinois river; thirdly, they left the western end of Lake Erie, ascended the Maumee, crossed over to the Wabash and went down to the Ohio, into the Mississippi, and, finally, they left the east end of Lake Erie, crossed over to the Allegany and went down to the Ohio and the Mississippi. These were their main routes between their northern and their western territories, and, as their claims extended as far east as the Allegany river and south to the Ohio, these lines of travel were within the region which they claimed.
French missionaries, French traders and French soldiers were located in all that region and dotted it with settlements which expanded into towns and cities.
Detroit was an Indian village early in the seventeenth century, and the French located a fort there in 1701 ; the first settlement of the French in Michi- gan, was between Lakes Huron and Erie.
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