USA > Illinois > Chapters from Illinois history > Part 9
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lage, went northward, and ultimately reached Green Bay. They brought the chalice and sacerdotal vestments from this chapel, with reverent care, to the Mission of St. François Xavier. Here Hennepin obtained them on his return, late in 1680, from his adventurous journey to the country of the Sioux, and thus was enabled to celebrate the mass for his party.26
The cause of this Iroquois raid, which utterly depopu- lated the land of the Illinois, and brought La Salle's plans to naught for a time, was threefold. The'first is found in the character of the famous confederacy of the Five Nations, well described in the contemporary chronicle of the enterprises of La Salle. The five tribes inhabiting central New York, between the Hudson and the Niagara, and collectively named Iroquois by the French, were known among themselves as Hodenosaunee, or People of the Long House, of which the Ganeagaono or Mohawks kept the eastern door, and thence westward in order were the Onayotekaono or Oneidas, the Onundagaono or Onon- dagas, the Gweugwehono or Cayugas, and the Nundawa- ono or Senecas. The French synonyms for their sepa- rate tribal names were Agniers, Onneiouts, Onnontagués, Oiogouins, and Tsonnontouans, the last and westernmost being the most powerful of all. The Iroquois lived in perfect harmony themselves, but were almost always embroiled with other people. They were politic, artful, perfidious, vindictive and indescribably cruel. Though numbering but twenty-five hundred warriors, their supe- rior weapons and experience in warfare had enabled them to defeat and finally to exterminate all their neighbors. They had carried their arms on every side eight hundred leagues around, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the north to Florida on the south, and beyond the Mississippi
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on the west. They had destroyed more than thirty nations, caused the death of more than six hundred thou- sand persons within eighty years, and rendered the country about the Great Lakes a desert. Some twenty years before the period under consideration, they had made an expedition against the Outagamis in Wiscon- sin, and on their way came in contact with the Illinois and killed a number of them. These hostilities were renewed in succeeding years, until the Illinois were forced to abandon their country and retire across the Mis- sissippi. Later the Iroquois had made war upon and entirely destroyed the Andastes, a powerful people dwelling on the lower Susquehanna. The southern tribes had submitted to their despotic rule, and those of the north were under the protection of the French. Hence, when they sought fresh occupation for their blood-stained weapons, these insatiable demons naturally turned their restless eyes westward. The Miamis and the Illinois were their nearest prey. The former were just establish- ing themselves on the banks of the St. Joseph. The lat- ter, while the Iroquois were busied elsewhere, had returned to their own land, and recently had cut off small parties of their dreaded foemen coming thither in scorn- ful confidence to hunt the beaver. Together the two western tribes might have withstood the onslaught, but the crafty sachems of the Five Nations skillfully plotted to array them against each other, and made their own losses at the hands of the Illinois the pretext for the war. 27
Next to the savage desire of the Iroquois to devour new nations, the commercial interests involved tended to set their gory hordes in motion. Situated as they were between the English and the French, and alternately
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conspiring against and dealing with the one and the other, they controlled the exchange of furs for the liquor and ammunition which only the white men could fur- nish. As the supply of beaver and other animals decreased in their neighborhood, they were forced to seek new hunting fields and to wrest them from their native owners. To this also they were urged by the secret advices of the English governor of New York, who saw with concern the increasing trade between the west- ern tribes and the French at Montreal, and trusted through the Iroquois to turn it to his own colony. Fur- thermore, La Salle's plans were opposed to the interests of the middlemen and dealers in peltries among his own nation.28 They feared the monopoly he might establish under his royal patent, and his direct dispatch of furs to the home market either by sea or by his own vessels on the Great Lakes. Then, too, the news of the discoveries made by the early visitors to the country of the Illinois had spread rapidly, and already many coureurs de bois had found their way to this wonderful land.29 These poachers on La Salle's preserves joined with the mer- chants who employed them, to arouse the Iroquois against him and his allies. Evidence of this had come to La Salle's knowledge before leaving Fort Frontenac on his first journey to the Illinois country, and further proofs were afforded during his visit to the Senecas near the Niagara River, when he secured their consent to the building of Le Griffon. He found there an embassy from the Miamis, sent to arrange concert of action with the Iroquois, bearing letters from some Frenchmen who were ill disposed to him. There was good reason to believe that these enemies of his own race were seeking to bring about the direct destruction of La Salle and his
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party, or to accomplish the same end by embroiling them with the Iroquois.30
Lastly, combined with this commercial opposition to La Salle, was the clerical enmity he had provoked, and which sometimes, perhaps unwittingly, supplied fuel to Iroquois wrath. Count Frontenac was a bitter opponent of the Jesuits, and to La Salle, as his protégé, they were hostile. His plans of colonization and trade, moreover, were opposed to theirs, since they desired to be both church and state in the wilderness, and to control it abso- lutely. Father Allouez' withdrawal from the great Illi- nois village at the approach of La Salle certainly indicated opposition if not hostility. That it was the latter feeling was shown by this priest's resorting to the Miamis and furnishing the information with which the chief Monso attempted to array the Illinois against La Salle, and suc- ceeded in leading away the deserters at Pimiteoui. Allouez again visited the Illinois while the bold French leader was absent on his marvelous journey to Fort Fron- tenac, and incited the natives against both La Salle and Tonty, and is directly charged with giving aid and com- fort to the Crèvecœur deserters, blessing their bullets and predicting a broken head for the valiant soldier whom they had left in such extremity.31 In the same line were the protection given by the Jesuits at Sault Ste. Marie to these men and to their ill-gotten gains, and the preven- tion by the missionaries at Mackinac of La Salle's obtain- ing supplies there on his second voyage to the Illinois country.32 To the Jesuits was due the settlement of the Miamis along the River St. Joseph. They were induced to remove from beyond the Mississippi by the gifts and persuasion of the Jesuit Fathers, who had such influence with them as to induce them to agree to remain neutral
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in the impending war between the Iroquois and the Illi- nois. This exactly suited the crafty sachems of the Five Nations, who moreover induced some of the Miamis, as we have seen, to become members of their war party. And so strong was the bias of the Jesuit missionaries in favor of the Iroquois, that several of these savage war- riors, when setting out on their campaign against the Illinois, were furnished by the priests in their villages with certificates intended as safeguards in case they were taken prisoners. Whatever the real animus of the order was, these and other circumstances of like tenor caused the Illinois to firmly believe that the "black robes" were opposed to them and to the Frenchmen in alliance with them. 33
Against such opposing forces it might well have seemed useless to contend. The last and bitterest drop was added to La Salle's cup of sorrow, when a Huron named Scortas arrived at the lonely post at the mouth of the St. Joseph with the intelligence that Tonty had been burned at the stake by the Illinois. This falsehood, deliberately contrived, as it afterwards appeared, by his enemies, con- vinced him for the time that his faithful lieutenant was no more.34 And thus these two brave men, one at Green Bay and one at Fort Miami, were each mourning the other's death in the early days of the year 1681. During La Salle's recent absence from Fort Miami, twenty or thirty savages of different tribes which had been at war with the English colonies on the seaboard, wandering westward, had found their way to this post. They intended to join themselves to the Iroquois, but were per- suaded to delay the execution of their design until La Salle's return, by Nanangoucy, who, like themselves, was a fugitive from the east. This savage, apprised of La
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Salle's approach by one of his dogs, which ran before him to the fort, made haste to meet him, and to inform him of the situation. He told La Salle that these strangers, with about thirty others who were on the way, would join him either at the Illinois or among the Miamis, as he chose, and only asked that he would make his informant chief of the band. La Salle entrusted the matter to his own native attendant, Ouiouilamech, the son of the chief of a village of New England Indians not far from Boston, who had lived at the west for four years, and during the past two had followed the fortunes of the French com- mander with unswerving fidelity. Through him was unfolded to these wanderers a plan for a firm union between them, the Miamis and the Illinois, under La Salle's leadership, which they received with joy. 35
The Miamis were soon disposed to favor the new alli- ance by the insolent conduct of the Iroquois. These haughty warriors, after their slaughter of the Tamaroas and pursuit of the other tribes, returned by the River Ohio, or Baudrane, as La Salle called it, and encamped in the Miami country. Here, in mere wantonness, they slew or took captive twenty of that tribe, and establishing themselves in three strong forts, mocked at the Miamis, who demanded redress, and after accepting gifts of three thousand beaver skins as ransom for their prisoners, refused to release them. A gallant chief of the Kaskas- kia tribe, named Paessa, who had been absent on a war party at the time of inroad of the Iroquois, now came to seek vengeance upon them with a band of a hundred of his tribesmen, and attacked these forts. The battle raged all day, and the Illinois made three desperate charges, but Paessa and fourteen of his bravest comrades were slain, with eight of the Iroquois, and both sides
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retired from the conflict. The rest of the Illinois boldly pursued their way towards Lake Erie to cut off Iroquois hunting parties there. This exhibition of valor also impressed the Miamis with the importance of a reconcili- ation with their ill-treated neighbors, who might visit upon them condign punishment for their furtherance of the Iroquois invasion. About this time a Shawnee chief- tain of a band of one hundred and fifty warriors dwelling on one of the rivers flowing into the Ohio, having heard of La Salle's arrival, sent to request that his people might be placed under the guardianship of the French King. La Salle replied that his country was too distant to receive aid from Canada, but that if the chief chose to join him in the autumn to go to the sea, he would assure him of the royal protection. The Shawnee promised to be at the mouth of the St. Joseph at the time appointed with as many as possible of his band. 36
La Salle could delay no longer his return to the assist- ance of D'Autray and the surgeon Michel, who were keeping their lonely watch over the merchandise left on the banks of the Des Plaines. Furthermore, he desired to obtain the supplies of corn which he had stored, prob- ably at the great Illinois village during his last stay there, for the support of those whom he had resolved to leave at the mouth of the St. Joseph during the summer, that they might rebuild Fort Miami. And he wished also to find the Illinois and secure their adherence to his new scheme. Accordingly he set forth on the Ist of March, 1681, for the village, with all of his men, including Le Blanc and the five other Frenchmen who had remained at the river mouth, the four who had but a month before returned there with La Salle, and La Forest and the three men who came with him, fifteen in all. Two savages,
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Ouiouilamech and another, probably Nanangoucy, accompanied the party. They traveled on snowshoes over the smooth white crust, their dogs captured before their eyes deer and other game sufficient for their wants, and they made rapid progress until the reflection of the sun from the frozen surface made La Salle and some of his men snow-blind. He was compelled to encamp for three days, but sent forward most of his companions, keeping with him only the two savages and You and Hunault. The latter discovered a fresh trail of strange Indians, which he and Ouiouilamech followed for three days and overtook a hunting party of eighty Outagamis or Foxes, whose home was in the Green Bay region. These received them very well, and informed them of the arrival of Tonty at the Pottawattamie encampment, and the return of Hennepin, Ako and Du Gay from the land of the Sioux. This fortunate intelligence borne quickly back to La Salle rejoiced his heart, and he was soon able to resume his journey. The melting ice rendering nav- igation possible, they proceeded in canoes. On March 15th they reached the great village of the Illinois, and met there ten of that tribe mourning over their ruined homes. La Salle consoled them with presents, exhorted them to make peace with the Miamis, and told them of his design to unite the several tribes. He listened with sympathy to their tale of the woes they had suffered at the hands of the Iroquois, and received from them papers showing the complicity of the Jesuits with their enemies. The Illinois with gratitude for his plans in their behalf, heartily approved of them and passed the rest of the day in feasting and dancing. The next day they loaded their canoes with a hundred minots of corn, and ascended the river to the place where D'Autray and his associate
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awaited their welcome arrival. Hence La Salle sent a canoe party by the River Divine, or Des Plaines, and the Chicago portage and along Lake Michigan's western shore to find Tonty among the Pottawattamies, and to bring back La Salle's papers if perchance they had been saved. The others returned to the junction of the Kan- kakee and followed its winding course to the portage, and so along the River of the Miamis to its mouth, where they found everything in good condition, though unguarded since their departure.37
Immediately upon their arrival here La Salle dis- patched La Forest and four men in a canoe to find the blacksmith and his companions, who had wintered at the Detroit, and to request Tonty, in case he found him at Mackinac, to await La Salle there. La Forest met the delayed party at Mackinac, but learned that Tonty was still at Green Bay, and sent Jacques Messier, Pierre You and André Massé to meet him, with a canoe load of mer- chandise to repay the friendly Pottawattamies and their chief Onanghisse for their care of the Frenchmen. Meanwhile the New England Indians, described by La Salle as the savages from Boston, "Les Sauvages de Bas- ton," notified him that they were waiting at the Miami village to conclude the proposed treaty. He left a part of his men to clear the ground for cultivation and to pre- pare materials for the rebuilding of the fort, and with the rest ascended the St. Joseph to the Kankakee portage. He found there three Iroquois emissaries urging the Mia- mis to make war upon the Illinois. These he treated so haughtily that a sudden terror fell upon them and they decamped in the night. Their flight gave the Miamis a new sense of the power of the French leader, of whom the Iroquois, who had not feared their whole nation,
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showed such dread. He first assembled the eastern Indians, among whom seven or eight tribes were repre- sented. Fugitives from King Philip's war and front border conflicts with the white men from Maine to Vir- ginia were here, homeless wanderers in the forests for years, who joyously acceded to the proposition that they should establish themselves permanently at the west. Thirty Mohegans from among them attended La Salle like a bodyguard the next day when he held a solemn parley with the Miamis, observing all the ceremony so dear to their barbaric hearts. Many presents were given each with its symbolic meaning appropriate to the occa- sion, and La Salle made a master stroke when he announced that the spirit of their dead chief, Ouabi- colcata, had entered into his person, and that hereafter he should be called by that name and not Okimao, which had been his title among the Miamis. They made sim- ilar presents in return, and sealed the treaty with dances and feasts. Three days later the Frenchmen returned to the mouth of the river, whence La Salle persuaded his eastern allies to send two of their number, named Oua- bach and Amabauso, with presents of beaver skins to their respective tribes, to invite them to join him. This done he embarked on May 25th for Mackinac, and passed on the way the remainder of the blacksmith's party at last en route for Fort Miami. 38
Tonty coming from Green Bay with his associates and Father Enjalran, of the St. François Mission, reached Mackinac on the eve of Corpus Christi, June 4, 1681, and La Salle came there the next day. The two heroes who had parted more than fourteen months before on the banks of the Illinois, and had each believed the other dead, greeted one another as if returned from the spirit
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land. The good father Membré, in his narration, leaves us to conceive their mutual joy chastened though it was by their accounts of the tragical adventures which had happened to both. La Forest had been charged to pro- ceed to Fort Frontenac as fast as possible, to exchange his peltries for supplies and ammunition, and to return to Mackinac by the last of May. He did not appear, and therefore La Salle, Tonty, Membré and their men set out themselves for Frontenac by the route of Lake Simcoe. At Teioiagon, Tonty, with three of the party, encamped on an island while the others went forward, expecting soon to return. At Fort Frontenac they found the laggard La Forest attending to other matters and not realizing the consequences of his delay. Letters from Count Frontenac awaited La Salle, summoning him to Montreal, whither he went at once, and although he missed the Count, his secretary, Barrois, assisted him to satisfy his creditors, and even to obtain fresh aid from them. His cousin François Plet was also of signal serv- ice in preserving his seignory at Frontenac against the efforts of those who wished to deprive him of it, and in gratitude and recompense he executed at Montreal, Aug- ust 11, 1681, a will bequeathing to Plet this seignory and all of La Salle's rights in the country of the Miamis, the Illinois and the regions of the South, and his other prop- erty. He had intended to make his voyage to the sea the same season, but his Montreal trip delayed him too long. Returning to Frontenac as soon as possible, he sent a brigantine to Teioiagon, conveying Father Membré, bear- ing letters to Tonty directing him to go to the Miami country, and to assemble there as large a party of French and Indians as possible. The untiring soldier and the intrepid priest set forth at once, and were among the
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Miamis by the 10th of November. La Salle followed, leaving La Forest in command at Frontenac, but delayed by a fifteen days' portage of his merchandise to Lake Simcoe, and an epidemic of fever among his men, both red and white alike, he did not reach Fort Miami until December 19th.39
As their commander landed at the appointed meeting place, Tonty and Membré and two of their men came to greet him. Five others, among whom was the interpre- ter, disheartened by malicious tales of the dangers of the Mississippi, had stolen off, and were in hiding along a neighboring river. The remainder of the detachment, by their leader's orders, were hunting fifty leagues away on the Illinois plains, to obtain supplies of food. La Salle brought with him ten Frenchmen as well as four savages hired for the voyage, and employed fourteen others for the same service from among those at Fort Miami, promising each a hundred beaver skins as his wages. These eighteen Indians were all from New England, belonging to the Mohegan, Abenaqui and Saco tribes, and with them were ten squaws and three children. The frozen river barred the usual route by the Kankakee portage, and after waiting till December 21st, in the hope of a timely thaw, Tonty embarked on Lake Michi- gan with most of the party and Membré, "to go," as the latter says, "towards the Divine River, called by the Indians Checagou." Three days' journey brought them to the Chicago portage and after one day's canoeing down the stream called by them the Checagou, now the Des Plaines, the increasing firmness of the ice prevented further navigation. Tonty, ever ready for an emergency, established a winter camp, and set his command at work to build sledges for the transportation of the canoes and
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their lading. These were made of the hardest wood found in the forests along the river, such as the wild cherry, maple or walnut, the side pieces smoothly pol- ished, curved in front and connected by three cross bars on which the load was placed. A man, harnessed to one by a neck collar attached to the runners, could readily draw a hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds weight eight or ten leagues a day. La Salle meanwhile, with a few assistants, was constructing caches in the sand ridges at the mouth of the St. Joseph, placing in deep excava- tions his surplus commodities in boxes, lined and covered with sheets of birch bark, supported on stakes and pro- tected with heavy timbers, above which the sand was heaped high, and every trace of human presence care- fully effaced. These completed, he left Fort Miami on December 28th, by the lake route, following his vanguard to the Chicago portage, where winter storms arrested his progress. New Year's Day, 1682, he passed upon the site of the future metropolis snow-bound, looking out upon a dreary waste of which his little party were the sole inhab- itants. This probably was the first time La Salle trav- ersed the site of Chicago, although he may have touched the lake shore at some point now within the city limits on his journey along the western shore of Lake Michigan in 1679. Delayed here by the drifts for several days, he was able at length to proceed on foot, and reached the place where Tonty awaited him on the 6th of January.40
The sledges completed, these were loaded with the canoes, provisions, ammunition, and one of the French- men disabled by a wound, and the march commenced along the icy surface of the river. On the Ioth of the month they reached the junction of the Kankakee, where the trail of Tonty's hunters was discovered. Search was
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inade, and one of the parties was found. Two others had gone to the river St. Joseph, to obtain news of La Salle. They returned on the 11th, and as the remainder of this detachment were expected soon, the main body moved forward by short journeys, leaving provisions for the others, and directions to follow. In a day or two more the whole company were gathered together, twenty-three Frenchmen and thirty-one savages in all. Tonty appro- priately takes this occasion to record in his narrative the roster of the expedition which had undertaken so great an enterprise. We read there next after La Salle, Mem- bré and Tonty, the names so honorably associated with the early history of Illinois, of Tonty's gallant comrade, the young Sieur François de Boisrondet, and of the ever faithful Jacques Bourdon, Sieur d'Autray. There, too, are three of La Salle's companions on that trying winter journey from Crèvecœur to Frontenac, Hunault, La Vio- lette, and Collin Crèvel; two of the party sent from Niag- ara to Tonty's relief, Pierre You and Jean du Lignon, the repentant deserter Gabriel Barbier or Minime; and others of whom we first hear by this list. Of these was the young Nicolas de La Salle, a son of a French Commis- sary of Marine, not a relative of the discoverer, whose narrative of this expedition we have, and who was, later, to be associated with the early history of Louisiana, and Pierre Prudhomme, the armorer for whom a fort on the Mississippi was to be named. The Indian contingent was commanded by Clance, a Mohegan chief, who had been prominent at the conclave of the New England savages at the Kankakee portage. In single file along the frozen Illinois, which Membré also calls the Seignelay, dragging their weighty burdens, they plodded stoutly on, passing, with no desire to halt, the ruins of the great Illinois vil-
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