USA > Illinois > Vermilion County > History of Vermilion County, together with historic notes on the Northwest, gleaned from early authors, old maps and manuscripts, private and official correspondence, and other authentic, though, for the most part, out-of-the-way sources > Part 15
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Yet their decline, from causes assigned, was so rapid. that when
* Official letter of General Harrison to the Secretary of War, of date March 24, 1814. + P. 39 of General Harrison's address, original pamphlet edition.
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CESSION OF THEIR LANDS.
the Baptist missionary, Isaac McCoy, was among them from 1817 until 1822, and drawing conclusions from personal contact. declared that the Miamis were not a warlike people. There is, perhaps, in the history of the North American Indians, no instance parallel to the utter demoralization of the Miamis, nor an example of a tribe which stood so high and had fallen so low through the practice of all the vices which degrade human beings. Mr. McCoy, within the period named, traveled up and down the Wabash, from Terre Haute to Fort Wayne : and at the villages near Montezuma, on Eel River, at the Mississinewa and Fort Wayne, there were continuous rounds of drunken debauchery whenever whisky could be obtained, of which men, women and children all partook, and life was often sacrificed in personal broils or by exposure of the debauchees to the inclemency of the weather."
By treaties, entered into at various times, from 1795 to 1845, in- chisive, the Miamis ceded their lands in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, and removed west of the Mississippi, going in villages or by detach- ments, from time to time. At a single cession in 1838 they sold the government 177,000 acres of land in Indiana, which was only a fragment of their former possessions, still retaining a large tract. Thus they alienated their heritage, and gradually disappeared from the valleys of the Maumee and Wabash. A few remained on their reservations and adapted themselves to the ways of the white peo- ple, and their descendants may be occasionally met with about Peru, Wabash and Fort Wayne. The money received from sales of their lands proved to them a calamity, rather than a blessing, as it intro- duced the most demoralizing habits. It is estimated that within a period of eighteen years subsequent to the close of the war of 1812 more than five hundred of them perished in drunken broils and fights. +
The last of the Miamis to go westward were the Mississinewa band. This remnant, comprising in all three hundred and fifty per- sons, under charge of Christmas Dagney, # left their old home in the
* Mr. McCoy has contributed a valuable fund of original information in his History of Baptist Indian Missions. published in 1840. The volume contains six hundred and eleven pages. He mentions many instances of drunken orgies which he witnessed in the several Miami towns. We quote one of them: "An intoxicated Indian at Fort Wayne dismounted from his horse and ran up to a young Indian woman who was his sister-in-law, with a knife in his hand. She first ran around one of the company pres- ent, and then another. to avoid the murderer, but in vain. He stabbed her with his knife. She then fled from the company. He stood looking after her, and seeing she did not fall, pursued her, threw her to the earth and drove his knife into her heart, in the presence of the whole company, none of whom ventured to save the girl's life." P. 85.
+ Vide American Cyclopædia, vol. 11. p. 490.
# His name was, also, spelled Dazney and Dagnett. He was born on the 25th of December, 1799, at the Wea village of Old Orchard Town, or We-au-ta-no, "The Risen Sun," situated two miles below Fort Harrison. His father, Ambroise Dagney,
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HISTORIC NOTES ON THE NORTHWEST.
fall of 1846, and reached Cincinnati on canal-boats in October of that year. Here they were placed upon a steamboat and taken down the Ohio, up the Mississippi and Missouri, and landed late in the season at Westport, near Kansas City. Ragged men and nearly naked women and children, forming a motley group, were huddled upon the shore, alone, with no friends to relieve their wants, and exposed to the bitter December winds that blew from the chilly plains of Kansas. In 1670 the Jesuit Father Dablon introduces the Miamis to our notice at the village of Maskontench, where we see the chief surrounded by his officers of state in all the routine of bar- baric display, and the natives of other tribes paying his subjects the greatest deference. The Miamis, advancing eastward. in the rear of the line of their valorous warriors, pushed their villages into Michi- gan, Indiana, and as far as the river still bearing their name in Ohio. Coming in collision with the French, English and Americans, re- duced by constant wars, and decimated, more than all, with vices contracted by intercourse with the whites, whose virtues they failed to emulate, they make a westward turn, and having, in the progress of time, described the round of a most singular journey, we at last behold the miserable and friendless remnant on the same side of the
was a Frenchman, a native of Kaskaskia, and served during Harrison's campaign against the Indians, in 1811, in Captain Scott's company, raised at Vincennes. He took part in the battle of Tippecanoe. His mother, Me-chin-quam-e-sha, the Beauti- ful Shade Tree, was the sister of Jocco, or Tack-ke-ke-kah, "The Tall Oak." who was chief of the Wea band living at the village named, and whose people claimed the country east of the Wabash. from the mouth of Sugar Creek to a point some dis- tance below Terre Haute. "Me-chin-quam-e-sha" died in 1822, and was buried at Fort Harrison. Christmas Dagney received a good education under the instruction of the Catholics. He spoke French and English with great fluency, and was master of the dialects of the several Wabash tribes. For many years he was government inter- preter at Fort Harrison, and subsequently Indian agent, having the superintendency of the Wabash Miamis, whom he conducted westward. On the 16th of February, 1819, he was married to " Mary Ann Isaacs," of the Brothertown Indians, who had been spending a few weeks at the mission house of Isaac McCoy, situated on Raccoon Creek, -or Pisherra, as it was called by the Indians, - a few miles above Armysburg. The marriage was performed by Mr. McCoy " in the presence of our Indian neighbors, who were invited to attend the ceremony. And we had the happiness to have twenty- three of the natives partake of a meal prepared on the occasion." Vide page 64 in his book, before quoted. This was, doubtless, the first marriage that was celebrated after the formality of our laws within the present limits of Parke country. By the terms of the treaty at St. Mary's, concluded on the 2d of October. 1818, one section of land was reserved for the exclusive use of Mr. Dagney, and he went to Washington and selected a section that included the village of Armysburg. which at that time was the county seat, and consisted of a row of log houses formed out of sugar-tree logs and built continuously together, from which circumstance it derived the name of "String- town." As a speculation the venture was not successful, for the seat of justice was removed to Rockville, and town lots at Stringtown ceased to have even a prospective value. Mr. Dagney's family occupied the reservation as a farm until about 1846. Mr. Dagney died in 1848, at Coldwater Grove, Kansas. Her second husband was Babtise Peoria. Mrs. Babtise Peoria had superior opportunities to acquire an extensive knowl- edge of the Wabash tribes between Vincennes and Fort Wayne, as she lived on the Wabash from 1817 nntil 1846. She is now living at Paola, Kansas, where the author met her in November, 1878.
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REMOVAL WESTWARD.
Mississippi from whence their warlike progenitors had come nearly two centuries before.
From Westport the Mississinewas were conducted to a place near the present village of Lowisburg, Kansas, in the county named (Miami) after the tribe. Here they suffered greatly. Nearly one third of their number died the first year. They were homesick and disconsolate to the last degree. "Strong men would actually weep, as their thoughts recurred to their dear old homes in Indiana, whither many of them would make journeys, barefooted, begging their way, and submitting to the imprecations hurled from the door of the white man upon them as they asked for a crust of bread. They wanted to die to forget their miseries." ". I have seen, " says Mrs. Mary Baptiste to the author, " mothers and fathers give their little children away to others of the tribe for adoption, and after singing their funeral songs, and joining in the solemn dance of death, go calmly away from the assemblage, to be seen no more alive. The Miamis could not be reconciled to the prairie winds of Kansas ; they longed for the woods and groves that gave a partial . shade to the flashing waters of the Wah-pe-sha."*
The Wea and Piankeshaw bands preceded the Mississinewas to the westward. They had become reduced to a wretched community of about two hundred and fifty souls, and they suffered severely during the civil war, in Kansas. The Miamis, Weas, Piankeshaws, and the remaining fragments of the Kaskaskias, containing under that name what yet remained of the several subdivisions of the old Illini confederacy, were gathered together by Baptiste Peoria, and consolidated under the title of The Confederated Tribes.+ This
* The peculiar sound with which Mrs. Baptiste gave the Miami pronunciation of Wabash is difficult to express in mere letters. The principal accent is on the first syl- lable, the minor accent on the last, while the second syllable is but slightly sounded. The word means "white" in both the Miami and Peoria dialects. In treating upon the derivation of the word Wabash (p. 100), the manuscript containing the statements of Mrs. Baptiste was overlooked.
+ This remarkable man was the son of a daughter of a sub-chief of the Peoria tribe. He was born, according to the best information, in 1793, near the confluence of the Kankakee and Maple, as the Des Plaines River was called by the Illinois Indians and the French respectively. His reputed father was a French Canadian trader liv- ing with this tribe, and whose name was Baptiste. Young Peoria was called Batticy by his mother. Later in life he was known as Baptiste the Peoria, and finally as Bap- tiste Peoria. The people of his tribe gave the name a liquid sound, and pronounced it as if it were spelled Paola. The county seat of Miami county, Kansas, is named after him. He was a man of large frame, active, and possessed of great strength and courage. Like Keokuk, the great chief of the Sacs and Fox Indians, Paola was fond of athletic sports, and was an expert horseman. He had a ready command both of the French Canadian and the English languages. He was familiar with the dialects of the Pottawatomies, Shawnees, Delawares, Miamis and Kickapoos. These qualifications as a linguist soon brought him into prominence among the Indians, while his known integrity commended his services to the United States government. From the year 1821 to the year 1838 he assisted in the removal of the above-named tribes from Indi-
136
HISTORIC NOTES ON THE NORTHWEST.
little confederation disposed of their reservation in Miami county, Kansas, and adjacent vicinity, and retired to a tract of reduced dimensions within the Indian Territory. Since their last change of location in 1867 they have made but little progress in their efforts toward a higher civilization. The numbers of what remains of the once numerous Illinois and Miami confederacies are reduced to less than two hundred persons. The Miamis. like the unfortunate man who has carried his dissipations beyond the limit from which there can be no healthy reaction, seem not to have recovered from the vices contracted before leaving the states, and with some notable exceptions, they are a listless. idle people, little worthy of the spirit that inspired the breasts of their ancestors.
ana and Illinois to their reservations beyond the Mississippi. His duties as Indian agent brought him in contact with many of the early settlers on the Illinois and the Wabash, from Vincennes to Fort Wayne. In 1818, when about twenty-five years of age. Batticy represented his tribe at the treaty at Edwardsville. By this treaty, which is signed by representatives from all the five tribes comprising the Illinois or Illini nation of Indians, viz, the Peorias, Kaskaskias, Mitchigamias, Cahokias and Tamaoris, it appears that for a period of years anterior to that time the Peorias had lived, and were then living, separate and apart from the other tribes named. Treaties with the Indian Tribes, etc .. p. 247, government edition. 1837. By this treaty the several tribes named ceded to the United States the residue of their lands in Illinois. For nearly thirty years was Baptiste Peoria in the service of the United States. In 1867 Peoria became the chief of the consolidated tribes of the Miamis and Illinois, and went with them to their new reservation in the northeast corner of the Indian Territory, where he died on the 13th of September, 1873, aged eighty years. Some years before his death he married Mary Baptiste. the widow of Christmas Dagney, who, as before stated, still survives. 1 am indebted to this lady for copies of the " Western Spirit," a newspaper published at Paola, and the "Fort Scott Monitor," containing obituary notices and biographical sketches of her late husband, from which this notice of Baptiste Peoria has been summarized. Baptiste may be said to be "the last of the Peorias." He made a manly and persistent effort to save the fragment of the Illinois and Miamis, and by precepts and example tried to encourage them to adopt the ways of civilized life.
CHAPTER XV.
THE POTTAWATOMIES.
WHEN the Jesuits were extending their missions westward of Quebec they found a tribe of Indians, called Ottawas, living upon a river of Canada, to which the name of Ottawa was given. After the dispersion of the Hurons by the Iroquois, in 1649, the Ottawas, to the number of one thousand, joined five hundred of the discom- fited Hurons, and with them retired to the southwestern shore of Lake Superior .* The fugitives were followed by the missionaries, who established among them the Mission of the Holy Ghost, at La Pointe, already mentioned. Shortly after the establishment of the mission the Jesuits made an enumeration of the western Algonquin tribes, in which all are mentioned except the Ojibbeways and Pian- keshaws. The nation which dwelt south of the mission, classified as speaking the pure Algonquin, is uniformly called Ottawas, and the Ojibbeways, by whom they were surrounded, were never once noticed by that name. Hence it is certain that at that early day the Jesuits considered the Ottawas and Ojibbeways as one people. +
In close consanguinity with the Ottawas and Ojibbeways were the Pottawatomies, between whom there was only a slight dialectical difference in language, while the manners and customs prevailing in the three tribes were almost identical.# This view was again re- asserted by Mr. Gallatin : "Although it must be admitted that the Algonquins, the Ojibbeways, the Ottawas and the Pottawatomies speak different dialects, these are so nearly allied that they may be considered rather as dialects of the same, than as distinct languages.">
This conclusion of Mr. Gallatin was arrived at after a scientific and analytical comparison of the languages of the tribes mentioned.
In confirmation of the above statement we have the speeches of three Indian chiefs at Chicago in the month of August, 1821. Dur- ing the progress of the treaty. Keewaygooshkum, a chief of the first authority among the Ottawas, stated that " the Chippewas. the Pot- .
* Jesuit Relations for 1666.
t Albert Gallatin's Synopsis of the Indian Tribes, p. 27.
Jesuit Relations.
§ Synopsis of the Indian Tribes, p. 29.
137
138
HISTORIC NOTES ON THE NORTHWEST.
tawatomies and the Ottawas were originally one nation. We sepa- rated from each other near Michilimackinac. We were related by the ties of blood, language and interest, but in the course of a long time these things have been forgotten," etc.
At the conclusion of this speech, Mich-el, an aged chief of the Chippewas. said : " My Brethren. - I am about to speak a few words. I know you expect it. Be silent, therefore. that the words of an old man may be heard.
" My Brethren, -You have heard the man who has just spoken. We are all descended from the same stock. - the Pottawatomies. the Chippeways and the Ottawas. We consider ourselves as one. Why should we not always act in concert ?"
Metea. the most powerful of the Pottawatomie chieftains, in his speech made this statement :
·· Brothers, Chippeways and Ottawas, -we consider ourselves as one people, which you know, as also our father* here, who has trav- eled over our country.'
Mr. Schoolcraft. in commenting on the above statements. re- marks: "This testimony of a common origin derives additional weight from the general resemblance of these tribes in person. man- ners. customs and dress, but above all by their having one council- fire and speaking one language. Still there are obvious characteris- ties which will induce an observer, after a general acquaintance, to pronounce the Pottawatomies tall. fierce, haughty; the Ottawas short, thick-set, good-natured. industrions ; the Chippeways warlike, daring. etc. But the general lineaments, or. to borrow a phrase from natural history. the suite features, are identical.+
The first mention that we have of the Pottawatomies is in the Jesuit Relations for the years 1639-40. They are then mentioned as dwelling beyond the River St. Lawrence, and to the north of the great lake of the Hurons. At this period it is very likely that the Pottawatomies had their homes both north of Lake Huron and south of it. in the northern part of the present State of Michigan. Twenty-six or seven years after this date the country of the Potta- watomies is described as being "about the Lake of the Ilimouek."+ They were mentioned as being " a warlike people, hunters and fish- ers. Their country is very good for Indian corn. of which they plant fields, and to which they willingly retire to avoid the famine that is too common in these quarters. They are in the highest de- gree idolaters, attached to ridiculous fables and devoted to polygamy.
* Lewis Cass. + Schoolcraft's Central Mississippi Valley. pp. 357, 360, 368. # Lake Michigan.
139
THE POTTAWATOMIES.
We have seen them here* to the number of three hundred men, all capable of bearing arms. Of all the people that I have associated with in these countries, they are the most docile and the most affectionate toward the French. Their wives and danghters are more reserved than those of other nations. They have a species of civility among them, and make it apparent to strangers, which is very rare among our barbarians. "+
In 1670 the Pottawatomies had collected at the islands at the month of Green Bay which have taken their name from this tribe. Father Claude Dablon, in a letter concerning the mission of St. Francis Xavier, which was located on Green Bay, in speaking of this tribe, remarks that " the Ponteonatami, the Onsaki, and those of the Forks, also dwell here, but as strangers, the fear of the Iro- qnois having driven them from their lands, which are between the Lake of the Hurons and that of the Illinois. "+
In 1721, says Charlevoix, "the Pontewatamies possessed only one of the small islands at the month of Green Bay. but had two other villages, one on the St. Joseph and the other at the Nar- rows. ">
Driven out of the peninsula between lakes Huron and Michigan, the Pottawatomies took up their abode on the Bay de Noqnet, and other islands near the entrance of Green Bay. From these islands they advanced southward along the west shore of Lake Michigan. Extracts taken from Hennepin's Narrative of La Salle's Voyage mention the fact that the year previons to La Salle's coming west- ward (1678), he had sent ont a party of traders in advance, who had bartered successfully with the Pottawatomies upon the islands named, and who were anxiously waiting for La Salle at the time of his arrival in the Griffin. Hennepin further states that La Salle's party bartered with the Pottawatomies at the villages they passed on the voyage sonthward.
From this time forward the Pottawatomies steadily moved sonth- ward. When La Salle reached the St. Joseph of Lake Michigan there were no Pottawatomies in that vicinity. Shortly after this date, however, they had a village on the south bank of this stream. near the present city of Niles. Michigan. On the northern bank was a village of Miamis. The Mission of St. Joseph was here established and in successful operation prior to 1711, from which fact, with other incidental circumstances, it has been inferred that
* La Pointe.
# Jesuit Relations, 1670-71.
t Jesuit Relations, 1666-7. $ Detroit.
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HISTORIC NOTES ON THE NORTHWEST.
the Pottawatomies, as well as the mission, were on the St. Joseph as early as the year 1700 .*
Father Charlevoix fixes the location of both the mission and the military post as being at the same place beyond a doubt. " It was eight days yesterday since I arrived at this post, where we have a mission, and where there is a commandant with a small garrison. The commandant's house, which is a very sorry one, is called the fort, from its being surrounded by an indifferent palisado, which is pretty near the case in all the rest, except Forts Chambly and Cata- rocony, which are real fortresses. We have here two villages of Indians. one of Miamis and the other of Pottawatomies, both of them mostly Christians ; but as they have been for a long time with- out any pastors, the missionary who has lately been sent them will have no small difficulty in bringing them back to the exercise of their religion." +
The authorities for locating the old mission and fort of St. Joseph near Niles are Charlevoix, Prof. Keating and the Rev. Isaac Mc- Coy. Commenting on the remains of the old villages upon the St. Joseph River at the time Long's expedition passed that way, in 1823, the compiler states that " the prairies, woodland and river were rendered more picturesque by the ruins of Strawberry, Rum and St. Joseph's villages, formerly the residence of the Indians or of the first French settlers. It was curious to trace the difference in the remains of the habitations of the red and white man in the midst of this distant solitude. While the untenanted cabin of the
* Some confusion has arisen from a confounding of the Mission of St. Joseph and Fort St. Joseph with the Fort Miamis. The two were distinct, some miles apart, and erected at different dates. It is plain, from the accounts given by Hennepin, Membre and La Hontan, that Fort Miamis was located on Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the St. Joseph. It is equally clear that the Mission of St. Joseph and Fort St. Joseph were some miles up the St. Joseph River, and a few miles below the " portage of the Kankakee " at South Bend. Father Charlevoix, in his letter of the 16th of August, 1721,- after having in a previous letter referred to his reaching the St. Joseph and going up it toward the fort,-says: "We afterward sailed up twenty leagues before we reached the fort." Vol. 2, p. 94. Again, in a subsequent letter (p. 184): " I de- parted yesterday from the Fort of the River St. Joseph and sailed up that river about six leagues. I went ashore on the right and walked a league and a quarter, first along the water side and afterward across a field in an immense meadow, entirely covered with copses of wood." And in the next paragraph, on the same page, follows his description of the sources of the Kankakee, quoted in this work on page 77. Here, then, we have the position of Fort St. Joseph and the mission of that name and the two villages of the Pottawatomies and the Miamis. on the St. Joseph River, six leagues below South Bend. In Dr. Shea's Catholic Missions, page 423, it is stated that " La Salle, on his way to the Mississippi, had built a temporary fort on the St. Joseph, not far from the portage leading to the The-a-ki-ke"; and Mr. Charles R. Brown, in his Missions, Forts and Trading Posts of the Northwest, p. 14, says that "Fort Miamis, built at the mouth of the St. Joseph's River by La Salle, was afterward called St. Joseph, to distinguish it from (Fort) Miamis, on the Maumee." In this instance neither of these writers follow the text of established authorities.
t Charlevoix' Narrative Journal, pp. 93, 94.
141
ST. JOSEPH.
Indian presented in its neighborhood but the remains of an old cornfield overgrown with weeds, the rude hut of the Frenchman was surrounded with vines, and with the remains of his former garden- ing exertions. The asparagus, the pea vine and the woodbine still grow about it, as though in defiance of the revolutions which have dispersed those who planted them here. The very names of the villages mark the difference between their former tenants. Those of the Indians were designated by the name of the fruit which grew abundantly on the spot or of the object which they coveted most, while the French missionary has placed his village under the patron- age of the tutelar saint in whom he reposed his utmost confidence. "*
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