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Chapters from Illinois History
Edward G. Mason
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http://www.archive.org/details/historyofparisma00laphuoft
Chapters from Illinois History
Edward & Uabon,
Chapters
FROM
Illinois History
BY
32056 7901
EDWARD G. MASON
FAIRE ANG TAIRE
1
H. S. S. & Co
0
HERBERT S. STONE AND COMPANY ELDRIDGE COURT, CHICAGO MDCCCCI
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY HERBERT S. STONE & CO.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE LAND OF THE ILLINOIS.
I. Discovery I
II Exploration 40
III. Occupation . 94
IV. Settlement 138 Notes . 192
ILLINOIS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
I. Old Fort Chartres 212
II. Col. John Todd's Record Book
250
ILLINOIS IN THE REVOLUTION
280
THE MARCH OF THE SPANIARDS ACROSS ILLINOIS
293
Notes
312
THE CHICAGO MASSACRE
313
PREFACE
The papers composing this volume are published prac- tically just as they were left by the author. "The Land of the Illinois" was written in 1896, and has never been printed before. "Illinois in the Eighteenth Century" is composed of two papers read before the Chicago His- torical Society in 1880 and 1881, and published by the Fergus Printing Company in 1881; "Illinois in the Revo- lution" was written probably in 1896; "The March of the Spaniards across Illinois" was published in substance in the Magazine of American History for May, 1886; "The Chicago Massacre" was delivered in substance as an address at the unveiling of a bronze memorial group in Chicago on June 22, 1893.
The author had planned to write a complete history of Illinois, and had it been possible for him to carry out his intention the contents of this volume would have formed a considerable part of the history.
Chapters from Illinois History
Chapters from Illinois History
THE LAND OF THE ILLINOIS
I. DISCOVERY
Upon the curious map of New France published by Samuel de Champlain in 1632 is shown, beyond Lac Mer Douce, which we call Lake Huron, the home of a people whom he describes as "a nation where there is a quan- tity of buffalo."1 Champlain, the "Father of Canada," and the first to carry the flag of France into the heart of North America, reached Lake Huron in 1615. This was the western limit of his explorations, but he gathered from the natives in that region information concerning what lay beyond, which he included in this map, the earliest known delineation of the country of the Great Lakes.2 It takes strange liberties with their topography, even to ignoring Lake Erie, confining Lake Michigan to Green Bay, and transferring it and the Fox and Wisconsin waterway to the north of Lake Superior. But there appear upon it indications which justify the belief that the far away people of whom Champlain heard as he coasted the shore of the Georgian Bay, were the tribe later known as the Illinois, and that the country in which they dwelt where the buffalo abounded was the prairie land upon which their name is fixed forevermore.3
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CHAPTERS FROM ILLINOIS HISTORY
Such being the case, this brief mention is the earliest notice in history of the Illinois Indians, and Champlain, though he never visited their domain, brought them to the knowledge of Europe and became in some sense their discoverer. Five years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, this splendid sailor, soldier and explorer reached a point in the interior of the North American continent a thousand miles from the Gulf of St. Law- rence; and ever desiring, as he said, "to see the Lily flourish and also the only religion, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman,"+ longed to press onward to win new conquests for France and the Church. He lamented that the natives by the great lake, Mer Douce, were at war with the more distant nations, fuller knowledge of whom he was thus prevented from obtaining.5 Reluctantly he left this field to men of sufficient means, leisure and energy to undertake the enterprise.6 Heroic energy he did not lack, but time and opportunity were not granted to him. Yet he pointed out the way which those followed who reached the goal of which he dreamed. He was the force- runner of the discovery of the land of the Illinois, and at the very beginning of its history we see Champlain in his canoe on the Georgian Bay, gazing westward.
To Champlain is doubtless directly due the first visit of one of his race to the region west of Lake Michigan. As Governor of New France, he appears to have sent his interpreter, Jean Nicolet, in 1634, to make peace between the Winnebagoes of Green Bay and the Hurons of the lake now known by their name.7 In the year of his appointment, or possibly not until 1638,8 Nicolet arrived in the region comprised in the present State of Wiscon- sin, and so was the foremost of white men to set foot upon its soil. From this adventurous journey he seems
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THE LAND OF THE ILLINOIS
to have brought some tidings of the Illinois Indians, since the Reverend Father Vimont, writing from Canada to France in 1640, speaks of the nations whose names were given him by the Sieur Nicolet who had visited most of them in their own country, and among those in the neighborhood of the Winnebagoes he mentions the Erin- iouaj,9 who seemingly were the Illinois. It has been ingeniously argued that Nicolet visited the Illinois in their villages on the prairies,10 but there is no evidence sufficient to establish this proposition. And we can only be certain that he, who in his time worthily bore the reputation of having penetrated farthest into those remote countries, was the next after Champlain to give to the expectant priests and traders in the little settlement on the rock of Quebec news of the distant people who lived in the land of the buffalo.
Of this people and their land we next hear in the rela- tion of that which took place in the mission of the Fa- thers of the Company of Jesus in the country of New France, in the years 1655 and 1656, sent to the Reverend Father Louis Ceilot, the Provincial Superior of the Jes- uits at Paris. The writer, enlivening his pages with an occasional classic allusion, tells of two young Frenchmen who in company with some savages set forth from Que- bec August 6, 1654, and made a voyage of more than five hundred leagues, borne, as he picturesquely says, not in great galleons or splendid galleys, but in little gondolas of bark. They returned to civilization in August, 1656, with a fleet of fifty canoes laden with Indian merchan- dise, and were received with a grand salute of cannon from Fort St. Louis.11 By these pilgrims and their dusky hosts, the Jesuits were told of the different nations in the neighborhood of the Nation of the Sea, meaning
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CHAPTERS FROM ILLINOIS HISTORY
the Winnebagoes of Green Bay, and among them of the Linouck, a people comprising about sixty villages.12 These undoubtedly were the Illinois, and this has been called the first mention of the tribe in history,13 but, as we have seen, it is later in point of time than the references made by Champlain and Nicolet. It is, however, the earliest men- tion of their numbers, and these exceeded those assigned to any of the neighboring nations. It is not probable that either of these young Frenchmen in fact reached the land of the Illinois, as their report was apparently based on hearsay rather than on personal observation. And we may be sure that an actual visit to that region would have been fully chronicled by the Jesuits. In their Relation of 1658, perhaps referring to the news brought by this expedition or possibly to still later information, it is stated that among the nations recently discovered is the Aliniouck (another version of the name Illinois), which is very numerous, including quite twenty thousand war- riors, and sixty villages comprising about one hundred thousand souls. And this nation is said to be located seven days' journey from St. Michel, a village of the Pottawattamies of Green Bay, and to the westward.14
Again, in the 1660 Relation, we are told of two French- men who had arrived at Quebec with three hundred Algonquins in sixty canoes loaded with peltry. They had wintered on the borders of Lake Superior, and sixty days' journey to the southwest of it, had reached a band of Hurons who had been driven from their own country by the Iroquois. These fugitives had penetrated the unknown forests and happily came upon a beautiful river, grand, large, deep and comparable to the great river St. Lawrence, and upon its banks they had found the great Aliniouck nation, once more described as composed of
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THE LAND OF THE ILLINOIS
sixty villages, which received them very kindly. 15 The names of these Frenchmen do not appear in the record, and this, which is in reality the earliest published mention of a visit to the upper Mississippi, passed almost unno- ticed until very recent times.16 But we know now that this pair of explorers were the dauntless voyageurs Pierre Esprit Radisson and his brother-in-law, Medard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers, whose travels and experiences among the North American Indians between the years 1652 and 1684 were of surpassing interest. Radisson's own account of these remarkable journeys, after remain- ing in manuscript more than two hundred years, has but recently been published.17 From this it is plain that he was the first of white men to reach the northern portion of the great river of the West, which he saw in the sum- iner of 1659; 18 and the first to announce that among the dwellers by its waters was the tribe of the Illinois.
Such tidings, and perhaps those brought by other explorers and traders whose names and adventures have not been chronicled, turned the thoughts of the authori- ties of Canada more and more towards the Mississippi and the land of the Illinois as associated with it. And the movements of this tribe soon began to be of such a nature as to bring them more prominently to the attention of the French. The wars in which the Illinois became engaged with the Sioux on the one hand and the Iroquois on the other reduced their numbers and scattered them widely. They began to appear in roving bands at the Mission of the Holy Ghost established in 1665 on Lake Superior and at that of Saint François Xavier at Green Bay, founded four years later.19 Among those who came to the former place was organized the Mission of the Aliniouek or Illi- nouek. The priest in charge of it writes a most interest-
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CHAPTERS FROM ILLINOIS HISTORY
ing description of the Illinois Indians of that day. He praises them as affable and humane, and says, that when they meet a stranger they utter a cry of joy, caress him and give him every proof of friendship. He describes their country, from information given by them, as genial in climate, producing two crops of Indian corn a year, with no forests there at all, but a wealth of grand prairies where the buffalo, deer, bear and other animals pass to and fro in great numbers.20 The readiness of the Illinois to receive instruction and their desire that missionaries should visit them in their own attractive land, interested the Church in the plan which the State was forming for an expedition to the West.21
Jean Talon, Intendant of Canada from 1665 to 1668, and again from 1670 to 1672, was the master spirit of its government during his brief five years of service. He saw again the vision of Champlain of the occupation of the great West by France, and bent all his energies to its realization. In 1670 he sent a party to proclaim the royal authority throughout the whole region of the interior, under the leadership of Simon François Daumont, Sieur de St. Lusson. Messages to as many of the natives as possible appointed a meeting at the Sault Ste. Marie, and when representatives of fourteen tribes had assem- bled there, St. Lusson carried out his instructions. On the 14th of June, 1671, in the presence of the throng of savages, and of four Reverend Fathers of the Company of Jesus, and of his little band of fifteen Frenchmen, he caused his commission to be read aloud, and to be trans- lated into the Indian tongue by his interpreter Nicolas Perrot. A cross of wood was reared, and near it was placed a cedar post bearing the arms of France. St. Lusson three times in a loud voice made proclamation in
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THE LAND OF THE ILLINOIS
the name of the Most High, Most Powerful and Most Redoubted Monarch, Louis, fourteenth of that name, Most Christian King of France and Navarre, that he took possession of Ste. Marie du Sault, as well as of Lakes Huron and Superior, the Island of Manatoulin, and all the other lands, streams, lakes and rivers contiguous and adjacent, both those discovered and those to be discov- ered, bounded on the one side by the Seas of the North and the West, and on the other by the South Sea, as to all their length and breadth. At each proclamation he raised a sod of earth in his hand and cried, "Vive le Roi," and made the whole assembly, French and savage alike, join in the cry.22
The Procès Verbal of this ceremony recites St. Lus- son's orders to journey to the country of the savages, Outaouacs, Nez-Percés, Illinois, and other nations dis- covered and to be discovered in North America in the region of Lake Superior or Mer Douce (Huron). In enumerating the tribes which responded to his summons he mentions the Poulteattemies (Pottawattamies) and others dwelling upon what was called the Bay of the Puants, which we know as Green Bay. And it expressly states that these Indians took it upon themselves to make the matter known to their neighbors, the Illinois, and other nations.28 It is apparent, therefore, that the Illinois were at this period included, as to their place of abode, among the undiscovered people, or those to whom the news of this important event was to be communicated by the neighboring tribes, and that their country, so far as known to any in that assemblage, comprising officers of the crown, priests, traders and representatives of many Indian tribes, was still unvisited by the French.
The time, however, was approaching when the secret
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CHAPTERS FROM ILLINOIS HISTORY
of the prairies was to be revealed; and their discoverer was one of those who gathered around St. Lusson's banner at the Sault Ste. Marie.24 St. Lusson returned to Quebec late in the following year to report the success- ful accomplishment of his undertaking to Talon. The Intendant's busy brain was already planning a more important step, and he next resolved to find the great river Mississippi, and to explore the regions adjacent thereto. In 1672 he selected for the leader in this enter- prise the young Canadian, Louis Jolliet,25 who was one of the witnesses of St. Lusson's imposing ceremony at the Sault.
Louis Jolliet was the second son of Jean Jolliet, a native of the town of Sezanne in France, 26 who emigrated to Canada before the middle of the seventeenth century, and was the first of the name in that country. He was a wagon-maker by occupation, and was employed by the Company of the Hundred Associates, for many years the proprietors of Canada.27 On October 9, 1639, Jean Jolliet and Marie d'Abancour were married in the parish of Notre Dame de Quebec, and among those present at the wedding was the famous Jean Nicolet, not long returned from his exploration of the Wisconsin region.
Louis Jolliet was born at Quebec in 1645, and baptized September 2 Ist of that year, as appears from the records of the parish of Notre Dame de Quebec for the period, which are still preserved. When very young he resolved to be a priest, and was educated for that office at the Jes- uit College of Quebec, where he was a classmate of the first native Canadian advanced to the priesthood. Jolliet received the tonsure and the minor orders at the age of seventeen, and became an assistant in the college. At the age of twenty-one he bore a prominent part in a pub-
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THE LAND OF THE ILLINOIS
lic discussion in philosophy, which was attended by all the dignitaries of the colony. The Intendant Talon him- self joined in the argument on this occasion, and may there first have seen the youthful Jolliet whom six years later he was to designate for an undertaking which brought renown to both their names. In 1667 Jolliet is spoken of as clerk of the church at Quebec, but soon after his arrival at manhood he left the ecclesiastical serv- ice and became a fur trader and explorer.28 His elder brother Adrien was engaged in the same pursuits, as appears from an interesting document, which lately came to light, executed by him and eight associates at his place of residence, Cap de la Magdeleine, on the St. Maurice River. It is a joint agreement for a trading voyage to the Ottawas, the term then applied to the western Indians in general, dated April 20, 1666, and contemplat- ing an immediate departure for the wilderness.29 Louis Jolliet followed his brother's example, and soon obtained a reputation for courage and skill in exploration. It is said that he made a visit to France in 1667, returning the following year.
. Talon, before leaving for Paris, in 1668, employed Jolliet and a comrade named Péré, at a handsome remunera- tion, to discover a copper mine believed to be on Lake Superior, and to find a better route than those then in use, for the transportation of the mineral to the settlements. They set forth from Montreal early in 1669, with four canoes laden with merchandise to trade with the natives by the way, and arrived at the home of one of the west- ern tribes, but lack of time prevented their reaching the mine from which the natives brought specimens of very rich ore. In his other purpose Jolliet was more success- ful, and on his return journey added to geography
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another of the Great Lakes, and a new waterway to the West. He found some Iroquois captives among these savages, whom he commanded, upon the authority of the Governor of Canada, to make peace with the Five Nations, and persuaded them to release a captive that he inight carry the news of their pacific purpose to his peo- ple. The grateful messenger rendered a most important service in return, and showed Jolliet the route, till then unknown to the French, by Lakes Ste. Claire 30 and Erie. He was the first of white men to navigate these waters and stands in history as their discoverer. Passing through the Strait of Detroit he coasted the northern shore of the lonely Lake Erie, until his guide, fearing they might be waylaid by a war party of the Andastes if they attempted the Niagara portage, diverged by way of Grand River towards the head of Lake Ontario.31 But Jolliet learned that it was easy to go directly to that lake by water with the exception of a portage of half a league around the great cataract.
Between Grand River and the Burlington Bay of to-day, at the Iroquois village of Otinawatawa, a few miles north of the site of the present city of Hamilton, in September, 1669, Jolliet encountered, to their mutual surprise, La Salle on his first journey westward, accompanied by two priests of the Sulpitian order, François Dollier and L'Abbé de Galinée. Jolliet gave the party much valua- ble information, and outlined for them his own route from the Ottawas, which led the priests to separate from La Salle, and to pursue their journey along Lake Erie. 32 They wintered on its shores and took formal possession of all the lands adjacent to it in the name of Louis XIV, whose arms with a proper inscription they affixed to a cross which they erected.33 The public record of this act
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THE LAND OF THE ILLINOIS
has caused the two Sulpitians to be considered the dis- coverers of this lake, but this honor, as we have seen, really belongs to Jolliet. He went on his way to Quebec where he was welcomed as one who had opened a new and easy navigation between Lakes Ontario and Huron. Another and more important link in the great chain of water communication between the Gulf of St. Law- rence and the Gulf of Mexico he was soon to add.
We know that Jolliet made still other excursions through the West, and he was probably on his way home- ward from one of these when he met St. Lusson's party at Sault Ste. Marie.34 Before the time of his appoint- ment he had penetrated almost to the Mississippi. He had become familiar with the languages of the tribes among whom he had traveled,35 and there was no man in Canada better qualified than he to undertake a great dis- covery.36 No wonder, therefore, that the sagacious Talon chose him of all others for this service. The Intendant's action was highly commended by those best able to judge of it. Count Frontenac wrote the great French Minister Colbert that Jolliet was a man renowned for this kind of discovery, who had already been nearly to the great river of which he now promised to discover the mouth. 37 Father Dablon, Superior General of the Missions of the Society of Jesus, in his official reports to the headquarters of his order, stated that Jolliet was a young man born in Canada, and endowed with every quality that could be desired in such an enterprise. He possessed experience and a knowledge of the languages of the Ottawa country where he had spent several years; he had the tact and prudence so necessary for the success of a voyage equally dangerous and difficult, and lastly he had courage to fear nothing where all is to be feared. These high encomi-
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ums from both civil and ecclesiastical authorities were fully justified by the result.38
Talon returned to France in November, 1672, after his Mississippi expedition and its leader had been fully approved by Count Frontenac, the new Governor of Can- ada.39 The Intendant had the pleasure before his depar- ture of seeing Jolliet set forth on his adventurous journey." He was requested to take with him as the mis- sionary chaplain of his party the Jesuit Father Jacques Marquette, who was then at the mission of St. Ignace on the mainland opposite the island of Mackinac.41 This was not an official appointment," but was doubtless the suggestion of the Jesuit authorities at Quebec, who desired to plant their missions in the land of the Illinois and recognized Marquette's special fitness for such work. The selection was agreeable to Jolliet, who had indeed expressed a wish that Marquette should be the priest assigned to the expedition, as they were already acquainted, and had often talked of such an enterprise as that which awaited them.43 Through this association and its consequences the story of Marquette's life, like that of Jolliet, has become a part of the history of Illinois, and it is fitting to narrate it.
Jacques Marquette was a native of Laon, in northeast- ern France, situated near a branch of the River Oise in the department of Aisne, a once famous place, whose mountain site and ancient walls and lordly cathedral make it still an ideal mediæval town. His family was the oldest and one of the most honorable there, and a long line of heroic and distinguished ancestors gave lus- ter to his name. They traced their origin to Vermand Marquette, a favorite counselor of Louis the Young, and one of those who held for that king the city of Arras.
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Vermand's son Jacques, intendant for Ferrand, Count of Flanders, sought to share his lord's captivity after the battle of Bouvines, and as a perpetual souvenir of his devotion, the Countess of Flanders gave the name of Marquette to an abbey founded by her near Lille. The next in succession was Jacques the Second, who as one of the Aldermen of Laon zealously aided its Provost in obtaining from the burghers a portion of the ransom of the hapless King John taken prisoner at Poitiers. In recognition of this service, the Alderman and the Provost were authorized to add to their coats of arms the three martlets which the city bore on its own shield." Others of the family in the sixteenth century possessed the estate of Touly, took the title of esquire, and were prominent in the magistracy of Laon. Nicolas Mar- quette, a counselor of the city in the days of Henry of Navarre, adhered to that sovereign and refused to join the League, suffering exile and the loss of his goods because of his fidelity to the king. In later times the honor of the name was nobly maintained by Jean Charles Marquette, King's Advocate at Laon during Louis Fif- teenth's reign, whose reputation for justice, wisdom and virtue filled the whole province, and by his son Antoine François who was counselor of the Grand Chamber of the Parliament of Paris at the outbreak of the French Revo- lution,45 and by the three young Marquettes who served with the troops of France in our War of Independence, and gave their lives for our country.46
But no one of these has conferred such renown upon his lineage, or is so proudly commemorated in the annals of Laon47 as the humble priest born there in the year 1637. His mother, Rose de La Salle, of the royal city of Rheims, by a singular coincidence bore a name which, like his
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own, was to be indissolubly connected with the history of the Northwest. She was a relative of the venerable Jean Baptiste de La Salle, the founder of the society known as the Brothers of the Christian Schools. Her religious zeal and fervor, combined perhaps with her kinsman's example, inspired her daughter Françoise to establish the association for the instruction of young girls named from her the Sisters Marquette,48 and her son to enroll himself as a member of the Society of Jesus. He joined this order at the early age of seventeen, and after twelve years of teaching and study, sought an assignment to the Canadian missions, and arrived at Quebec September 20, 1666.49 He applied himself to the Indian tongues and served as parish priest at Boucherville, where his signature may still be seen in the church records, and studied at Three Rivers until April, 1668, when he was ordered to prepare for the Ottawa mission. During that year he began his missionary career on the American shore of the Sault Ste. Marie, at the foot of the rapids, and here, with the aid of Father Claude Dablon, who joined him the following season, a church was built. The next autumn he was transferred to the mission at La Pointe on Lake Superior, to succeed Father Allouez, and reached his new station September 13, 1669.50 In his account of his work there, written the year ensuing, he mentions a sick man whom he was the means of restoring to health, and who in gratitude gave him a little slave brought from the Illinois two or three months before. This seems to be Marquette's first public men- tion of the name of this tribe, and this epistle may be called the opening chapter of his account of the Illinois.
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