USA > Illinois > Chapters from Illinois history > Part 10
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lage, silent and tenantless. Arriving January 25th at Fort Crèvecœur, which was in fair condition, they found the river open, and halted that their Indian allies might make for themselves canoes of elm bark. Then exchang- ing the collar for the paddle, they embarked again, and on the 6th of February saw before them the mighty stream of the Mississippi, to which La Salle gave the name of the great minister Colbert.41
Here a week's delay was caused by the ice, which made the navigation of the great river perilous, and also impeded the Indians, who had fallen behind in the jour- ney from Crèvecœur. When they joined the others, they were obliged to build more canoes, and so failed to obtain sufficient supplies of game. The Frenchmen resorted to fishing, and caught a huge creature, doubtless of the catfish species, of such extraordinary size, says Tonty, that it furnished meat sufficient for soup for twenty-two men. On the 13th they floated out upon the stream of the Mississippi, and turning towards the sea, encoun- tered at a distance of six leagues or more, the furious current of the great river coming from the west, called by them the Emissourita, or Missouri, and also the River of the Osages. They landed near its mouth, and repeated around their campfires tales told by the savages of its great size and length, its sources in the far-off mountains, and the numerous peoples on its banks, some of whom waged war and hunted the buffalo on horseback. The next day, gliding past the high tableland on which the city of St. Louis was to be founded almost a century later, they came to the great village of the Tamaroas on the east bank, probably near the site of the present town of Cahokia. It contained one hundred and twenty cabins, all abandoned like those of the chief settlement of the
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Illinois. Here La Salle left marks to indicate that he was traveling towards the sea on a peaceful errand, and suspended from posts gifts of merchandise for the inhab- itants if they returned. Such was the terror inspired by the Iroquois that the country along the river for a hun- dred leagues below the mouth of the Illinois was entirely deserted. Two leagues beyond the Tamaroas the expe- dition went into camp on the right bank, perhaps where Jefferson Barracks now stand, and remained for two days hunting buffalo, deer, turkeys and swans in a beautiful region of swelling hills and rolling plains, where there was no ice or snow. The third day they made ten leagues, and passed the night on a level opening in the forest, which was subject to overflow at flood time in the river. The following evening they reared their bark shelters on the Illinois side, a fine country but with many rocks, says Nicolas de La Salle, speaking perhaps of the locality now known as Prairie Du Rocher. Here they halted three days to hunt, and resuming their course, found themselves at nightfall between bold shores bor- dered with a low growth of canes, apparently at the pres- ent Grand Tower. Setting forth in the early morning and making good progress, they saw towards sunset on their left the embouchure of the river, which the differ- ent chroniclers of this expedition call by the various names of the River of St. Louis, the Ouabache, the Chi- cagoua, and the Oyo. Nicolas de La Salle, referring per- haps to his leader's early dreams of discovery, mentions that this river coming from the country of the Iroquois had led some to believe that by following it one could find a passage to China -"La Chine." It was the Ohio, the Beautiful River. Such was the meaning of Oyo in the Iroquois tongue, and it thus soon became known among
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the French as La Belle Rivière. A league beyond the first view of its waters they pitched their camp on the western bank, directly opposite to its mouth. 42
Thenceforth their course took them beyond the con- fines of Illinois, as they went on to accomplish the great discovery of the mouth of the Mississippi, for which La Salle had labored with such titanic energy. Many were their adventures on the way, and numerous strange tribes were met, who were usually well disposed. Tonty volun- teered to bear the calumet to one band, whose intentions were uncertain. At his approach they joined their hands in token of friendship, but he says; "I, who had but one hand, could only tell my men do the same in response. " 43 As they neared the sea, some of the party climbing trees to reconnoitre, reported what seemed a great bay in the distance. La Salle went to explore, returning with the news that he had gone to a point where the water had a briny taste and found some crabs like those of the ocean. April 6th they came to the place where the Mississippi divided into three branches. On the 7th, La Salle took the right, Tonty, with whom was Membré, the center and D'Autray the left. Two leagues below, they issued upon the open gulf and explored its shores either way until they were assured that the great project had been accomplished. On April 9, 1682, they ascended to a spot on the right bank where the ground was firm and a few trees grew. Of the squared trunk of one of these they made a rude column, to which were attached the arms of France, wrought from the copper of one of their kettles, with the inscription, "Louis le Grand, Roy de France et de Navarre, règne le ge Avril, 1682." Amid salvos of musketry and cries of; "Vive le Roi," La Salle erected the column, and took formal possession in the name of
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the King, of the Mississippi, its tributaries and the lands watered by them. A cross was also affixed to one of the trees, while the Te Deum was chanted, and all united in the hymn of the Vexilla Regis. Beneath the cross was buried a leaden plate engraved with the arms of France and the King's title and the date in Latin on one side, and on the other a Latin inscription reciting that La Salle, Tonty, Membré and twenty Frenchmen were the first to navigate this river from the land of the Illinois to its mouth. An official statement, or Procès-Verbal, of the expedition was prepared by Jacques de la Méterie, notary of Fort Frontenac, who had been duly authorized to exercise the functions of his office during this voyage, and signed by him and eleven others. By this act France obtained her title to the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, to which our nation has succeeded. The name of the State of Louisiana to-day preserves the des- ignation which La Salle gave to the whole of the grand realm which he brought under the sway of the French crown. 4
The whole party commenced the ascent of the river on the 10th of April, but La Salle pushed forward with three light canoes, manned chiefly by his Mohegans, as far as Fort Prudhomme. This was a stockade on a high stone bluff near the mouth of the Arkansas, built by his men on their way down the river, and named for Pierre Prud- homme, the armorer. Here La Salle feli dangerously ill, and needed the services of the surgeon, who was with the rear guard. His attendant, Cauchois, went some dis- tance down the river to meet them without success, and fearing to leave his master any longer, tied a letter to a tree on a projecting point of sand. Tonty, following slowly, was startled at the sight of this, and made haste,
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as requested by it, to hurry forward Jean Michel to bleed La Salle. Arriving himself at the fort the last of May, he was profoundly distressed to find his commander seemingly at the point of death. The state of his affairs, the danger of robbery of his caches at Fort Miami, and the importance of a speedy report of his success, made it necessary for the faithful lieutenant to go forward at once. With a heavy heart he proceeded up the river on June 4th, accompanied by Antoine Brossard, Jacques Cauchois, Jean Massé, and a Saco Indian. Below the Ohio he met four forlorn Iroquois, the survivors of a band of a hundred recently defeated by the Sioux, and gave them a part of his scanty supplies. Four days later he steered his canoe towards a smoke on the Illinois shore of the river. Thirty Tamaroa warriors issued from the woods and advanced with bended bows and fierce war cries, taking the travelers for Iroquois. Tonty presented his calumet, and an Indian whom he had known among the Illinois, recognizing him, cried out: "It is my com- rade! They are French." He landed and found a war party composed of Missouris, Tamaroas and Kaskaskias. Those of the two former tribes would have put Tonty and his companions to death, but the latter prevented and made them safe for the night. The Tamaroas then escorted them to their village, which they had reoccu- pied, where Tonty was welcomed by the chiefs, who entertained him for two days. On the 20th, after dis- tributing presents, he departed, and on the 27th passed the great Illinois village, still unoccupied. Low water obliged him to abandon his canoe, and the party trav- ersed on foot the forty leagues' distance to Lake Mich- igan. On its shore they fortunately met an Outagami Indian, who sold them a canoe with which they reached
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Fort Miami, and found everything undisturbed and the place deserted. Paddling onward, Tonty landed at Mackinac July 22d, bringing Membré's letter to his Superior, written June 3d at Fort Prudhomme, which is still preserved. La Salle had been too ill to write when the advance party left him, but Tonty forwarded dis- patches in his behalf to Count Frontenac, containing the first news of the great discovery which slowly found its way to Quebec and thence to France.45
La Salle's iron constitution triumphed over disease and blood-letting after a forty days' contest. With Membré to aid him, though still very feeble, he left Fort Prud- homme at the close of July, with the remainder of his men. Proceeding by short stages and with frequent rests to the Tamaroa village he was made there a guest of honor, the calumet dance was performed before him, and he was presented with a set of mats and two Pawnee cap- tives, a woman and a boy. He gave two muskets in return. This Pawnee youth, who soon acquired a knowl- edge of French, told La Salle a strange story which led him to believe it possible that the pilot and crew did in fact escape from the wreck of Le Griffon. Two years before, the young Indian said he had seen two French- men prisoners among one of the Upper Mississippi tribes. They had been taken with four others while ascending the river in two canoes loaded with merchan- dise, and their comrades had been slain and devoured. The one, whose description tallied with that of the pilot, had saved the lives of himself and companion by his ready exhibition of an explosive, seemingly one of the hand grenades of which there had been a supply on the vessel; and assuring the savages that he could destroy with these the villages of their enemies. One of the
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crew, named La Rivière, from Tours, had formerly been in the service of Duluth, who was at the time of the cap- ture among the Sioux, and La Salle thought it probable that this man was seeking to join his former employer, with his fellows and the more valuable merchandise from Le Griffon. The story seems never to have been fully confirmed. 46
From the Tamaroas La Salle's party ascended to the mouth of the Illinois, and turned into that stream. Their hunters along its banks supplied them with an abundance of swans, ducks, turkeys, deer and buffalo, and after fifteen days foraging they halted at Fort Crèvecœur, which they found nearly destroyed. The unfinished vessel, sad me- morial of the failure of the first attempt to explore the Great River, had been fired, and a few blackened timbers alone remained. La Salle left eight Frenchmen here, and passing the Illinois village, where no one was seen, kept on his way to Lake Michigan, and so to Fort Miami again. Here he learned that the diligent Tonty had left D'Autray and Cauchois among the Miamis, and sent others to the Illinois, and that two hundred lodges of other Indians were going to re-enforce the latter nation. La Salle and Membré hastened on to Mackinac, where they landed at the end of September. The former, hear- ing rumors of another Iroquois invasion which 'boded ill to his newly-formed plans, resolved to remain and oppose it, and indeed was hardly equal to his intended journey to France. He wrote Count Frontenac that, having heard that the Iroquois were ready to march, he proposed to return to the Miami country with his twenty-five Frenchmen, and strongly fortify a post there, resolved to defend it against the warriors of the Five Nations. To secure the proper presentation of the official account of
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his great discovery to the King, he appointed Membré to go to Paris in his stead for that purpose. The clerical deputy made all speed down the lakes and rivers to Quebec, where he reported himself two days before the departure on November 17th, of the last vessels of the season, and sailed in that which bore away La Salle's steadfast friend, Count Frontenac, just retiring from the governorship of Canada. So Membré left New France never to return, and sorrowfully wrote of his labors in the Illinois land; "I cannot say that my little efforts pro- duced certain fruits. With regard to these nations per- haps some one by a secret effort of grace has profited; this God only knows. All we have done has been to see the state of these nations, and to open the way to the Gospel, and to missionaries; having baptized only two infants whom I saw at the point of death and who in fact died in our presence. " 47
The threatened inroad of the Iroquois promised disas- ter to the savages on the River St. Joseph, who had so recently formed an alliance with the French and the Illinois. Tonty was dispatched in haste thither to assem- ble the men who had remained in that region at the Kankakee portage, and to erect a fort there for the pro- tection of the Shawanoes, whom La Salle had invited to move their village, and of the Miamis. 48
But on his arrival Tonty found the Shawanoes all absent in hunting parties, and the Miamis beginning to take flight because rumors had reached them that the Iroquois were coming to destroy them. As those French- men whom he had expected to meet were scattered, and he had too few in his company to undertake the appointed task with them alone, he proceeded to Fort Crèvecœur, intending to winter there and to gather his forces in the
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spring.49 La Salle meanwhile assumed that the fort at the Kankakee portage was well under way and on Octo- ber 5th wrote to the Governor at Quebec, that he had caused such a fort to be constructed, which was on the point of being attacked by the Iroquois, and asked to have one hundred muskets, five hundred pounds of powder and one thousand pounds of balls with some grenades and falconets sent to it at the risk of La Salle. And to one of his friends he wrote in the same month that he had built one of the forts which his letters patent author- ized him to construct, at the portage of the River of the Illinois, and stationed thirty men there with the Sieur de Tonty. But by degrees contradictions of the rumors concerning the Iroquois, and information of Tonty's repairing to Crèvecœur reached La Salle at Mackinac, with such assurances of the amenability of the savages as induced him to return to his original plan of a permanent establishment upon the River Illinois. Fort Crèvecœur was too distant from the general abiding place of the natives, and it probably could not be fortified to the extent deemed necessary since the Iroquois campaign. The strong fort which Tonty was ordered to build on the high rock near the old Indian village, if commenced, was never completed. After La Salle's first visit to the mouth of the Illinois, he was inclined when he returned from the sea to make his stronghold on the rock on the south shore of the Illinois River just where it flows into the Mississippi, having then perhaps some idea of bring- ing the far western and northern tribes under his sway. But this plan was never carried out. 50
A new location was advisable, and one which should be most convenient for the tribes of the Illinois. The former inhabitants of the great village had definitely
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abandoned that site of bitter memories, and it was there- fore unwise to resume the project of a fortress on the rock adjoining it. As La Salle revolved these matters in his mind, his thoughts recurred to a still more command- ing position six leagues farther down the river on its southern shore. Here was an eyrie which he resolved to make his own, and he forthwith chose for it the name of Fort St. Louis, in honor of the canonized king, Louis IX. of France. Some of his party he sent to Montreal for provisions and ammunition, and set out with the rest from Mackinac for the Illinois. The 2d of Decem- ber, 1682, he was on the River St. Joseph and there executed to one of his men, Michel Dizy, a concession of two hundred arpents of land in the district dependent upon his new fort, similar to those which he had already made to others in his service. These grants were sub- jected to certain seignorial charges, which were reduced for those making early application.51 He seemed to feel that his wanderings were about to end, and he desired to offer inducements to his followers to make permanent settle- ment in his new seignory. Its hills and valleys, forests and open plains lay before him as he descended the Illinois, and in imagination he saw them occupied by people of two races united in commercial enterprise under his protecting sway. Disembarking at Crèvecœur on the 30th of December, he directed Tonty's com- mand to break camp and to follow him to the chosen place in the heart of the land of the Illinois. 5%
This land, which Jolliet and Marquette had found so beautiful was equally so to La Salle and to his associates who had now summered and wintered there. The glow- ing descriptions given by all whose accounts we have make it a paradise, the attractions of which they are
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never weary of depicting. Tonty, whose brief chronicles waste no words, cannot resist the spell. In his Memoir of 168453 he says it is as charming a country as one can anywhere see, for the most part a great plain adorned with clusters of trees and rich in strange fruits. There the first buffalo are seen, and its prairies abound with every kind of animal, deer in flocks like sheep, turkeys and game. And again in his Memoir of 1693 he says the country of the Illinois contains some of the finest lands ever seen.54 So Father Membré writes that the River Seignelay, as he calls the Illinois, is very beautiful, forming lakes as far as the Mississippi, edged with hills covered with beautiful trees whence one sees vast prai- ries on which herds of wild cattle pasture in profusion. The soil is good and capable of producing all that can be desired for subsistence. The whole country along this river is charming in its aspect.55 The Relation Officielle repeats these praises and adds that the air is very tem- perate and very healthful, the country is watered by numberless lakes, rivers and streams for the most part navigable, one is hardly ever incommoded there by mosquitoes or other harmful creatures, and there are mines of coal, slate and iron.56 La Salle's own letters are full of similar statements. In one of them he speaks of the country nine leagues below the confluence of the Kankakee and the Des Plaines as the most beautiful in the world, and adds that the savages call it Massane because of the great quantity of hemp that grows there, and that there could be no other region so intersected with rivers and diversified with prairies, islands, groves, hills, valleys and plains of the most fertile soil.57 The novelty of such a land to natives of Europe or of the bleak forests of Canada evoked this enthusiasm and deepened
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these impressions. And it was with the feeling that they had come to the garden of the earth that La Salle's retainers began the preparations for a feudal establish- ment within its borders after the pattern of those of the old world.
IV. SETTLEMENT
The lines of La Salle's new citadel were traced just as the year 1683 began, and its construction went steadily forward despite the winter weather. The tall rock on which it stood rose to a height of one hundred and twenty-five feet, so sheer from the river's edge that water could be drawn at its summit from the stream directly below. The circuit of its level top measured six hundred feet, and on three sides it was so steep as to be totally inaccessible. On the fourth the approach was toilsome enough, and here it was fortified by a formida- ble palisade of trunks of white oak trees ten inches in diameter and twenty-two feet high. This was flanked by three redoubts, built of squared beams, so located that each could defend the others. A like palisade but only fifteen feet in height encompassed the remainder of the rock, and along its line four similar redoubts frowned upon the region below. A parapet of large trees laid lengthwise and covered with earth ran along the inner side of the whole fortification, and the palisades were crowned with heavy timbers set with wooden spikes, iron pointed. Within the enclosure were rude dwellings, a store house for supplies and peltries, and a chapel. All was completed in the month of March, 1683, when the royal ensign of France was unfurled above the walls of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois.1 It overlooked the country
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far and wide, for its foundation rock towered above the neighboring bluffs in splendid isolation. From the near- est of these to the eastward it was separated by a ravine two hundred feet across, and on the other side was a wide valley through which a little stream made its way to the Illinois. The farther shore of the river was a broad prairie, and midway lay a beautiful island, both of which had formerly been cultivated by the natives. The island was within musket shot, and could be planted and its harvest gathered under protection of the fort. It seemed that at last La Salle had found an appropriate center for his great design of a commercial colony in the heart of the West, communicating on the one hand with the Gulf of St. Lawrence and on the other with the Gulf of Mexico.
The assurance given to the friendly tribes had been fulfilled, and of this they were speedily advised. No sooner was the fortress completed than the indefatigable Tonty set forth to summon the dusky retainers to the castle of their chief. East, south and west, he journeyed over the prairies for well nigh three hundred miles, pass- ing from one group of lodges to another, and distributing presents in the name of La Salle. He told his eager hear- ers of the mighty stronghold which their white father had built to defend them against the ruthless Iroquois, and urged them to encamp about its walls. The machinations of La Salle's enemies had estranged some of the natives, but by persistent effort Tonty won them back, and one and all agreed to come to the appointed place.º They kept their word, and soon from his watch tower the French leader saw band after band of Illinois, Miamis and Shawanoes approach and establish themselves in the near neighborhood until three hundred cabins were
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reared round about Fort St. Louis. Other Indians fol- lowed and some with strange names whose tribes we cannot now identify, but who probably came from the Mississippi region in which La Salle's recent voyage to the sea had spread his name abroad.3 Ere long he was able to report to the home government that he had assembled at the fort four thousand savage warriors, which number would represent a native population of fully twenty thousand souls.4
To make the settlement all that he wished it remained only to attract there a sufficient number of Frenchmen. He had given liberal grants of land to those of his com- rades who were willing to make their homes in the wilderness, and anxiously awaited the return of the men whom he had sent to Montreal in the fall, and the coming of new colonists with them. But these did not appear and April came without reliable news from the lower St. Lawrence, although disquieting rumors repeated from one tribe to another, or carried by wandering coureurs de bois, were in the air. A disastrous change for La Salle had taken place in the government at Quebec. Count Frontenac had been recalled and Le Fêbvre de La Barre had succeeded him on October 9, 1682. The new Governor sided with the enemies of La Salle, and almost at once showed hostility to him. Writing to the minister Colbert on the 12th of November, La Barre mentioned the receipt of the letter which Tonty had written for La Salle when the latter lay ill at Fort Prud- homme, to announce the finding of the mouth of the Mississippi; and made light of the discovery and ex- pressed doubts of its utility. This opinion he repeated in another letter to Colbert, dated two days later, in which he blamed La Salle for the threatened Iroquois
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