USA > Illinois > Chapters from Illinois history > Part 7
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with foam. Mocking at their fears and asserting that no wind could stay his course, he set sail in the face of the increasing storm. Hardly had the little vessel gone a quarter of a league from its anchorage when the natives saw it rolling wildly amid the huge waves, and then with its canvas furled driven irresistibly before the blast. In the gathering gloom and floods of rain it disappeared from view, and they never saw it more. The following spring they found some clothing along the shore, and in the summer a hatchway, a bit of cordage and a few pack- ages of beaver skins were discovered in the sand. These, with the head of a flag staff, were the sole relics of the unfortunate craft, which undoubtedly foundered not many hours after it was last seen from the Pottawattamie village.95 And those midnight guns heard by the won- dering savages on the other shore above the roar of the tempest were her last appeals for help as she went to her doom in the depths of the Lake of the Illinois. Romance has been busy with her fate, and has even fancied that Le Griffon, shaped as we see her in the picture in Hen- nepin's New Discovery, after the fashion of ancient men of war, her bow and stern built high and her beak head displaying a flying griffin and an eagle, with her five small cannon, three of brass and two of arquebus pattern, and all the rest of her antique equipment is pre- served to this day beneath one of the sand dunes on the eastern coast of Lake Michigan. 96
The long suspense was over, and the hope which had cheered the dreary journey from Crèvecœur and prom- ised tidings at every station in the wilderness was sor- rowfully abandoned. But La Salle was not discouraged. He had sent six of his men, a blacksmith, two sailors, a rope maker and two soldiers to take powder, lead, sails,
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tools and other supplies from the Niagara storehouse by Lake Erie to Mackinac. He, with the rest of his party, descended the Severn River to Lake Huron, and coast- ing its lonely shores and islands reached Sault Ste. Marie on September 16th. He presented here Frontenac's order for the delivery to him of the peltries left at the mission by the deserters, but the priests had mningled them with those belonging to the church, and to avoid a charge of sacrilege La Salle departed empty handed. He pursued his way the next day to Mackinac, where he was delayed three weeks by the hostility of the Jesuits, who prevented his obtaining supplies, and sought to entrap him into trading in that region contrary to the royal commission. At this place he seems to have been joined by D'Autray and La Forest, who in turn had met some of the deserters from Crèvecœur, by whose false tales of Tonty's death and other disasters the men of the relief parties had been so discouraged that their leaders were compelled to retrace their steps. The Lake Erie detachment did not make its appearance, and La Salle was compelled to send two canoes by different routes in search of it. He could not wait longer, and exchanging his stock of spirits with the natives for Indian corn, and leaving La Forest with three soldiers to follow with the rear guard, he left Mackinac on the 4th of October, 1680.97
The advance party now consisted of La Salle, D'Au- tray, whom his commander calls "the ever faithful," a proud title to win in those days of treachery, the ship carpenter, Noël Blanc, whose desertion had been for- given, a surgeon, three soldiers, two sawyers, two masons, two laborers and an Indian. Frequent storms delayed their arrival at the river of the Miamis until No-
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vember 4th. Here they expected to meet La Forest, who had been ordered to leave Mackinac not later than Octo- ber 20th, and being less encumbered with heavy lading should have made the trip by this time. He did not appear, and most of their equipment being useless with- out the blacksmith, who was with the Lake Erie detach- ment, it was left in charge of Le Blanc and five French- men, and an Indian hunter named Nanangoucy, of a New England tribe, was employed to supply them with pro- visions. They were directed to prepare timbers for the building of the ruined fort and construction of a vessel, while waiting for La Forest, for whom orders were left to join the vanguard if he arrived before winter. La Salle, with D'Autray, whom he again compliments as a "very brave young man," the surgeon, and the man named You, also called "a very brave fellow," Tamisier. Baron, and Hunault, who had made the terrible winter journey from Crèvecœur, together with La Salle's faith- ful Indian, Le Loup, set out on November 8th. They ascended the river, and on the 15th were at the Miami village near the portage, which they were surprised to find totally deserted. Crossing the two leagues of marshy land which in times of low water were all that inter- vened between the two rivers, on the 17th they were afloat on the Kankakee, and pursued their course as swiftly as its tortuous windings would allow.98 By the 23d they were once more in the land of the Illinois, and at the mouth of the River Iroquois, passed the recent camping place of a war party of Kickapoos, two hundred or more in number, of whose deeds they were soon to hear. An abundance of game rejoiced the hearts of the men, but La Salle was filled with a vague inquietude as he noted the unusual Indian signs and the failure of the Ill-
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inois to burn the prairies according to their custom in the buffalo season. The 27th they arrived at the place where, as La Salle says, the River Divine falls into the Teaki, being the junction of the Des Plaines and the Kan- kakee. Here careful search was made for signs of Ton- ty's passing. As none were found, and he must have followed one or the other of these rivers had he left the country, it seemed that he was still at the Illinois village. Encouraged by this belief La Salle halted for three days to indulge his men in a grand hunting expedition. The neighborhood, then as in later times the paradise of the sportsman, soon yielded to their pursuit a dozen fat buf- falo, seven or eight deer, and swans and other birds in profusion. They prepared and stored a supply for the winter, loaded one canoe with the choicest viands to regale Tonty and his comrades, and cheerily embarked on the Illinois River for the great Indian village only fif- teen leagues away." Here they arrived the evening of December Ist only to find it a place of indescribable hor- ror. The long rows of lodges had been burned, and their site was marked by blackened poles on which were fixed ghastly human heads. The plain was strewn with man- gled bodies and with bones from the violated burial places of the village. The underground storehouses had been broken open, and the supplies of corn burned or trampled under foot, the village utensils shattered and every spe- cies of diabolical mischief wrought. And this place of carnage was inhabited only by wolves and birds of prey, whose howls and cries filled the air while they seemed ready to oppose the landing of the horror-stricken trav- elers. The terrible scourge of an Iroquois invasion had fallen upon the land of the Illinois, and there seemed no one left to tell the tale. An eager search revealed no
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indications of the slaying of Tonty's party, except that by a planted space, a league from the village and near the river, which apparently had been their garden, La Salle found six pointed stakes set in the earth, painted red, with the figure of a man in black upon each with his eyes bandaged. He knew it was the custom of the sav- ages to erect such trophies where they had slain people, and feared that such had been the fate of his men. But it was possible that they had only been made prisoners and forced to descend the river with some of the Illinois fleeing from the Iroquois. After a night of sleepless anxiety La Salle resolved to follow. Storing his goods in an opening in the steep side of a cliff, he detailed three of his men to occupy a neighboring island between two rapids to gather corn for winter supplies for his party and that which he expected to follow, warning them to remain in concealment as much as possible. These three were the surgeon, Tamisier and Baron. 100
The next day, December 2d, La Salle himself, at three in the afternoon, embarked with D'Autray, You, Hun- ault, and Le Loup, in a canoe. They made six leagues before night, and came to the place of refuge which the Illinois had established for their women and children, on a point of land between the river and the marsh. It was crowded with lodges defended by a kind of parapet built of their pirogues. On the opposite shore the insatiable Iroquois, prevented from crossing by their lack of canoes, had erected their one hundred and thirteen lodges, and on the bark of trees near by were rudely drawn the tokens of their chiefs and the tallies which showed that five hundred and eighty-two braves had fol- lowed them to the war. In neither camp was there any trace of the missing Frenchmen. At daybreak, La Salle
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was again afloat, and steadily paddling until nightfall, his party arrived at what remained of Fort Crèvecœur, which the deserters had left in ruins. On the way they passed six encampments of the Illinois, and as many of the Iro- quois, face to face with these, on the opposite shore. Relentlessly these human tigers had tracked their vic- tims, halting when they halted, marching when they marched, and waiting only for the decisive moment to glut their thirst for blood. With mournful thoughts La Salle stood again by the side of the unfinished vessel which he had expected to bear him proudly to the mouth of the Mississippi. The Iroquois had drawn a few nails from its moldings, but it was otherwise uninjured, and could have been completed in a month, had the tools been at hand which were taken to the Indian village by Tonty and ruined in its destruction. On a broken plank were written the words; "Nous sommes tous sauvages ce 15 A 1680," and the latter part of the sentence was missing. La Salle recognized the handwriting of Le Parisien, and at first thought that Tonty had caused this to be done in August, when retreating with the Illinois. It was afterwards learned that it was part of an inscrip- tion traced in April before Tonty went to the great Illi- nois village. La Salle set out on December 4th to follow the river to its mouth, believing that his lieutenant and companions had descended it with the savages. Passing four of their camps and as many of their ruthless foes directly opposite these, and traveling all night, the next day they came upon another dreadful scene of slaughter.101 Only twelve days before, as the hapless survivors later told the tale, the Illinois tribes, trusting to a treaty of peace with the Iroquois, separated for their more con- venient support. The Kaskaskias, the bravest of all,
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with the Cahokias and others, ascended the Mississippi. The Peorias, the most numerous and apparently the wis- est, crossed it, and the Omouhoa and others went down the stream. Only the Tamaroas with two other tribes or sub-tribes remained, and upon them the relentless war- riors of the Five Nations wreaked their vengeance, leav- ing behind them horrible proofs of their demoniac cruelty. Afterwards it was said that the warriors who went northward and there battled with the Sioux, returned and had several engagements with the Iroquois with equal loss on both sides, but finally the greater part of the Illinois retired beyond the Mississippi among the Osages, two hundred leagues from their own country, but even to this distant refuge some of the Iroquois pur- sued them.102 No trace of the French being found, La Salle pushed forward to the Mississippi, whose swollen stream he now saw probably for the first time. On a rock to the left of the mouth of the Iliinois he trimmed a young tree, and nailed to its trunk a board on which he painted a canoe and a calumet as a sign of peace, and attached a letter to Tonty, telling him of his own return to the village, and that he had hidden near by a supply of hatchets, knives and other supplies of use to him if he were with the savages. D'Autray and the other men now proposed to descend the great river and to risk their lives to achieve the great discovery which they knew their leader had so much at heart. He praised their fearless courage and the spirit so akin to his own, but he could not thus abandon the men left at the Illinois village, or those who were to follow, or give up the search for Tonty, nor had they the equipment or the force for such an undertak- ing. He assured them that he would accomplish it in safety and honor the following spring when all his men
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would be re-united and proper preparation made, but now he must retrace his steps. The thin ice was forming on the surface of the river on December 7th, when the prow of their canoe was turned northward. They urged it for- ward with such remarkable speed that they reached the Illinois village within four days, and were greeted there by their three comrades the night of the 11th. During the two weeks following, they collected and stored the Indian corn which had been scattered about the plain, and built sledges to carry their canoes and supplies over the ice. As they rested from their work in the evening of the 19th, they beheld the great comet of 1680 appear- ing above the horizon. Night after night they watched its fiery splendors increase until it culminated in the fol- lowing month and slowly faded away. During that win- ter also they repeatedly saw parhelions or mock suns, and on one notable occasion, of which La Salle carefully noted the particulars, eight of these were seen besides the true sun, and remained visible for hours. 103
The day after Christmas, they fired the rude fort and the cabins which the Iroquois had built at the ruined village, that the smoke might attract some of the Illinois with news of Tonty, and to advise them of the presence of the relief party. It was in vain. The country was deserted, and perhaps at that time La Salle and his four men were the only human beings in all the region which is now comprised in the State of Illinois. They departed on December 28th, with three heavily loaded canoes which they drew on the sledges over the ice. Six leagues below the junction of the Kankakee with the Des Plaines, which La Salle says Jolliet named the Divine, they came upon a hut missed in their downward voyage, which seemed to be one of Tonty's. Believing then that he had
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not accompanied the savages, and knowing that there was no trace of him on the Kankakee, La Salle felt sure that he had taken the route of the Des Plaines to Lake Michigan; and resolved to follow him. A league above the junction, which he reached January 6, 1681, he left all his equipage in charge of D'Autray and the surgeon, probably Jean Michel, who volunteered to remain and guard it, and proceeded on foot with his five other men. The first day's weary tramp through heavy snow brought them to another hut on the bank of the stream, where La Salle's quick eye fell upon a piece of wood cut with a saw, which told him that Tonty must have passed that way. From other signs he judged that this was at least two months before, and hence it was impossible to over- take him. 10%
Turning, therefore, in the direction of the St. Joseph, he crossed the open country during nineteen days of contin- uous snowfall, finding no bark to make a hut and hardly wood enough for the evening fires, pressing forward ever in advance of his men, and breaking for them a passage through the drifts. His chronicler informs us that La Salle, who seemed always insensible to every kind of fatigue, assured him that he never endured so much cold or such suffering as on this memorable journey. At the end of January he was again at the mouth of the St. Joseph, but did not find there Tonty, who he hoped had traversed the Chicago portage to Lake Michigan and coasted its southern shore to this meeting place. La Forest had arrived with three soldiers and reported that the party for whom he had waited had wintered at the strait flowing into the west end of Lake Erie, and that he had seen from Mackinac a canoe passing by which did not stop there but held on its way down Lake Huron. La
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Salle thought this might be Tonty's craft, and eager to communicate with him as well as to prevent the news of the Iroquois invasion from discouraging his men who were in winter quarters, asked for volunteers to carry messages to their camp. Two of his comrades, realizing that it was only a third of the journey which their com- mander had made the preceding spring, willingly under- took this task, and set forth on February 2, 1681. 105
In the midst of these anxieties it was a comfort to La Salle to find that the men left at the St. Joseph had faith- fully executed his orders. The carpenter had laid the keel and shaped the knees of a bark, and squared the wood for her sheathing, while his companions had cleared a large space of ground for cultivation, and prepared the materials for the construction of a barn. The vessel might have been completed, had the blacksmith only arrived with the saws and the rigging and other supplies, which his party were to bring from the storehouse at Tiotontaracton, at the foot of Lake Erie, to the River of the Miamis. The work done here was the more impor- tant as La Salle had concluded to make an establishment at this place, and give up that among the Illinois, as he feared that the formidable enemies of that tribe would never permit their return to their own country.106 For the time it seemed as if they must be left out of his plans, and all hope abandoned of maintaining a settlement in the land of the Illinois.
III. OCCUPATION
Tonty meanwhile was undergoing experiences rivaling those of La Salle in interest and in danger. Some six weeks after he was left in command of Fort Crèvecœur,
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La Chapelle and Le Blanc arrived from Fort Miami, bringing the order for the construction of a stronghold near the great Indian village.1 Membré had already gone there with his adopted father, Oumahouha, who was returning with other savages from their winter quarters. Tonty at once ascended the river with a few men to commence the new fort and obtain further sup- plies. The messengers remained with the rest of the party, and the tale of misfortune which they had brought from Mackinac was repeated again and again. Le Blanc did not hesitate to assure his comrades that La Salle was a lost man and would never return to the Illinois country, and advised them to shift for themselves, taking pay for their arrears of service from the goods at hand. Under his lead, about the middle of April,2 Moyse Hillaret and François Sauvin, called La Roze, ship carpenters like him- self, and Jean Le Meilleur, nicknamed La Forge, the black- smith, forced the magazine at Crèvecœur, and carried away all the ammunition, provisions and peltries there in store. Two other faithless ones, named Petit Bled and Boisardenne, on their way to the great village with Father Gabriel de La Ribourde, deserted him in the woods at night, taking the canoe and spiking the guns of Bois- rondet and L'Esperance, who were with them, but not in the plot. The six disaffected men seem also to have done as much damage as they could at the fort, and then departed for Canada. Étienne Renault, known as the Parisian, first writing on one of the planks of the bark the despairing sentence which La Salle later found partly effaced, made haste, with the others, to join Tonty. That steadfast man was thus at a blow deprived of everything and made utterly dependent upon the savages. But, regardless of himself, he thought only of La Salle, and
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forthwith dispatched four of his men, two to take the Lake Erie route and two to go by Lake Simcoe, to carry the sorrowful tidings to his commander.3 Of these La Chapelle and Messier, as we have seen, were faithful to their trust. The others, Jacques Richon and Jean Lemire, overtook and made common cause with the deserters. These went by the Illinois, the Kankakee and the St. Joseph to Fort Miami, which La Salle had left in good order but a little time before, and deliberately destroyed it. Thence they coasted Lake Michigan to Mackinac, where they were joined by some of those who had deserted there, and seized La Salle's furs stored at that place. These they deposited at Sault Ste. Marie for their own account. Somewhere on their route they met the parties of D'Autray and La Forest, and persuaded them to abandon the journey to the Illinois, telling them that Tonty was dead and Fort Crèvecœur deserted. At Niagara they robbed the storehouse and induced the guards to go with them. Then they divided into two companies, as heretofore related, one making for Albany and the other falling into the hands of La Salle, by whom Boisardenne and one named Paulmier were shot, and the rest of their band imprisoned.4
By these desertions and the detachments sent to carry the news, Tonty's command was reduced to the two friars, Ribourde and Membré, and three young men who had come from France only the year before, Le Sieur Boisrondet, L'Esperance, and Renault. The two latter were at first La Salle's personal servants, but the rough training of the wilderness soon transformed them into hardy voyageurs. Crèvecœur was no longer tenable, and the forge and tools which the deserters had not time to destroy were removed to the great Indian village.5 The
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friars labored among the natives who assembled there, Membré says, to the number of seven or eight thousand souls. An Illinois chieftain named Asapista, with whom La Salle had formed a friendship, adopted Ribourde as his son and gave him a home and subsistence in the Indian fashion in his cabin. His aged comrade thus cared for, the more active Membré was free to visit other tribes in the pursuit of his calling. He made a journey to the villages of the Miamis along the River St. Joseph to learn something of their dispositions, and also went to other encampments of the Illinois. He mentions a vil- lage of the Kaskaskias situated a little southwest of the foot of Lake Michigan, which he called Lake Dauphin, at about latitude 41 degrees,6 perhaps on the Kankakee River. He heard of, and possibly visited, the nation of the Mascoutens and the Outagamis, who were dwelling on the banks of the river called Melleoki, and who had their village very near its entrance into Lake Dauphin or on the site of the city of Milwaukee. West ofthese again were the Kickapoos and the Ainoves or Iowas, the way to whose two villages was up the River Checagoume- mant, a name here apparently applied to the Des Plaines. Of the Sioux and other distant nations some information reached him through the intercourse of the Illinois with them. He had little success with any of the savages whom he met, finding only cause for chagrin at their deplorable state. He could not rely upon any conver- sions, and felt great scruples as to the efficacy of native baptism after he learned that an Indian whom he calls Chassagouache, once duly baptized, had died in the hands of the medicine men, abandoned to their superstitions and consequently doubly a child of hell -"duplo filium gehennæ." This backslider was undoubtedly the head-
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chief of the Illinois, already spoken of as Chassagoac, who must have died shortly after his memorable inter- view with La Salle.7
Tonty had expected his commander to return by the end of May, and encouraged the Illinois to believe this, while he instructed them in the use of firearms and other European arts. They were disquieted by a rumor that the Miamis were forming a league with the Iroquois against them, and he taught them how to defend them- selves by palisades and even made them erect a kind of little fort with entrenchments. But the summer wore on without a word from the absent leader. An Indian of the Kiskakon tribe named Winipeg, appeared at the vil- lage with a tale of La Salle's death, supported by proofs so carefully prepared by his enemies, clerical or commer- cial, that Tonty was forced to believe it. His own posi- tion was becoming critical, for a story ran among the Illinois that La Salle was coming to deliver them to the Iroquois to be destroyed, and that Tonty was not a Frenchman, but of a nation hostile to the great King. The worthy priests meanwhile following their Indians in their camps and to the chase, had no greater grievance than the lack of wine for the celebration of the mass. 8 They were rejoiced to supply this want towards the end of August from the juice of wild grapes, which began to ripen then in clusters of prodigious size, of very agree- able taste, and with seeds larger than those of Europe. They made a kind of retreat, a league's distance from the village near the river, in a cabin in the midst of a plain which the savages had sown with grain. Here they set up their portable chapel service and performed the offices of their faith, with a dusky neophyte in the person of the Indian with whom they lodged. This peaceful
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