USA > Illinois > Peoria County > Peoria > Peoria city and county, Illinois; a record of settlement, organization, progress and achievement, Vol. I > Part 6
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In 1734 Pierre d'Artaguiette was appointed commander of the Illinois dis- trict and his administration was popular and successful. In 1736, however, he conducted a disastrous expedition against the Chickasaws who had long op- posed the advancement of the French settlers on the Mississippi. His force was composed of a part of the garrison of Fort Chartres, a company of vol- unteers from the French villages, and a large portion of the warriors of the Kas- kaskias, making an army of two hundred French and four hundred Indians. The Illinois and Miami Indians were under the command of chief Chicagou. Major d'Artaguiette had been promised re-inforcements from New Orleans but they failed to arrive and there was nothing left to the brave young com- mander but to fight. He was severely wounded in the engagement as were 'nany of his officers. His Indian armies fled and the Chickasaws soon remained masters of the bloody field. D'Artaguiette and some other Frenchmen were taken prisoners and burned at the stake.
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We have reached the point where the names of Washington and Virginia come into our story.
In 1611, March 12th, the English king had granted to the Virginia company all the land between parallels thirty and forty-one running from the Atlantic to the western sea. The northern line of Virginia under that charter ran about three miles north of Peoria county, so that the whole of Peoria county was in Virginia.
As the French and English colonies increased in population and extended their settlements, the question of the boundary between them became one of in- creasing importance and brought the two rival nations into collision with each other. The first strong competition took place on the head waters of the Ohio river. The first exciting cause of this was the formation of the Ohio Com- pany under a grant from the English crown. Not an Englishman had at that time settled northwest of the Ohio river. The Indians held the whole country with a tenacious grip and had not even a distant fear that the English would ever be able to dispossess them.
The grant to the Ohio company was obtained for a tract situated within the present limits of the state of Ohio. The company was composed of eight asso- ciates, of whom Lawrence Washington, Augustine, and George Washington were three. Measures for the occupancy of these. lands were taken by com- mencing to build a fort near where Pittsburg now stands but the men there employed were driven away by a large force of French and Indians. This was the beginning of the French and Indian war, which lasted from 1754 to 1759. It involved nearly the whole of Europe in the struggle, for its issue was en- tangled with the old question as to the balance of power on the continent.
The Canadian tribes of Indians sided with the French; the Iroquois and others sided with the English, and all of the Indians were on the warpath on one side or on the other to help settle this question, one of the momentous ques- tions of the world's history, as events have proven.
Washington had investigated the situation on the head waters of the Ohio to learn what was the strength of the enemies and of their forts and what they were probably planning to do. The information brought by Washington con- vinced the governor of Virginia that the French were preparing to take posses- sion of the Ohio valley, and Major Washington, as he then was, was ordered to the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers to superintend the completion of a fort there. When he arrived at the place, he found that it had already been taken possession of by the French with a force of a thousand men. He thereupon determined to proceed to the mouth of Red Stone Creek where the warehouses of the Ohio company were situated. He encountered Sieur de Jumonville de Villiers, who had been despatched with a military force and a summons to Washington to require him to withdraw from French territory. On May 28th, Washington successfully attacked him, killed ten of the French in- cluding DeVilliers, and captured twenty-one prisoners, while his own loss was one killed and three wounded. This was Washington's first battle, in which he was twenty-two years old.
Coulan, a brother of the deceased French general, was sent from Montreal with twelve hundred French and Indians. As Washington only had three hun- dred all told, he retreated to Fort Necessity. Here he was attacked on July 3rd and compelled to surrender.
Fort Chartres, Illinois, at this time was garrisoned by a regiment of grena- diers and the fort had just been rebuilt of stone, for it had been of wood, at a cost of a million dollars.
Upon learning of the defeat of Jumonville de Villiers. Captain Neyon de Villiers of Fort Chartres was despatched with a company to join the force of his brother Coulan from Fort Duquesne to aid in overcoming "Monsieur de Wachenston." The result of this campaign brought to the gallant Captain Villiers and his post on the Mississippi a well earned distinction, for the Illinois
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country was largely depended upon for supplies, which were transported in boats down the Mississippi and up the Ohio to Fort Duquesne, in which ser- vice Neyon de Villiers rendered valuable aid. His honors in this war were dearly bought for he was the only one of several brothers, who was not slain in the defense of Canada.
Five years before this time, that is, in 1749, the British white population of the thirteen colonies was estimated at one million, fifty-one thousand. That of the French in all of New France, exclusive of their Indian allies, was about fifty-two thousand.
The desire of the English colonists to speculate in the lands northwest of the Ohio was very strong and many prominent men were connected with all such schemes, including besides the Washingtons already mentioned, John Murray. Earl Dunmore, Governor of Virginia, and the Franklins, father and son.
The French and Indian war which was begun as we have seen, at what is now Pittsburg, was practically ended five years later, Sept. 13, 1759, on the plains of Abraham at Quebec where the gallant and able commanders on each side lost their lives. From this time forth France lost all power and control in Canada and the whole north west.
As soon thereafter as the dilatory movements of the governments could bring it about, France surrendered all her claims to her remaining possessions in North America to Great Britain by the treaty of Paris, which was signed in 1763. She had ceded her territory west of the Mississippi to Spain the year before.
Thus ended the magnificent scheme planned by La Salle for making in the Mississippi valley a new France, even greater than the old. It failed because it was not based upon proper fundamental principles of government. Abso- lutism and despotism cannot succeed in a new country such as this was.
At the end of almost ninety years of French control, it will be interesting to consider what Illinois gained by it. In the year 1763 when France ceded this country to Great Britain, what did she transfer within that part now included in Illinois? A population consisting of about two thousand whites and five or six hundred negro slaves-and a system of legalized slavery. The soil and forests as nature had made them. Here and there a little wooden town; a magnificent stone fortress, the grandest that up to that time had been built within the present borders of the United States, standing on a sandy foundation too close to the channel of the erratic Mississippi; a rude wooden village insecurely founded on the same treacherous stream; three or four other villages scarcely worth naming and a few inefficient water mills located on unreliable streams. And what else besides? No agriculture beyond the supply of immediate wants, and possibly for export, as much flour, bacon, pork, hides, tallow and leather as would be produced on one good prairie farm of six hundred acres ; no build- ings but the rudest and they of wood-there were no brick; no commerce ex- cept trade and barter with the natives of the forest; no mines developed; no looms or churns in use and no factories built, no schools established, no print- ing press set up, no roads except the trail of the Indian and the buffalo, no bridge other than an occasional tree felled across a narrow stream and no trans- portation facilities superior to those of the red men ; no civil officers, no popular election ever held. few people outside of the priests who were able to read, and there were not many of them-the Jesuits having just been expelled in a sum- mary manner-no civil courts and no legislatures. There were only a few homesteads so owned by the occupants, that they could develop and improve them, leave them to their heirs with a good title. There was nothing to broaden and strengthen the intellectual life of the people or their political life. There was nothing to produce the strong, active, self-reliant, progressive, and courage- ous characters that are necessarily found in the successful frontiersman or pioneer. There was little or no inducement to the citizen to do anything for the progress of the country, and little ability on the part of the people to ac-
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complish it if they had so desired. All of this was the fault of their institut- tions. The government was centralized and autocratic both of church and state. The initiative was not accepted or desired on the part of the private citizen, or indeed permitted to them. Without these no new country can prosper. French institutions themselves on both sides of the sea were tottering. The Grand Monarque had died many years before. The financial interests of the country had been committed to John Law, the author of the Mississippi bubble, and the bubble had burst and John Law had died in poverty. Even the kingdom of France was approaching its downfall. The whole institutions of government in every branch were resting on foundations as insecure as the foundation of their magnificent fort. It remains to be seen when Clarke and his Virginians come what can be done with the same natural advantages by free men under free institutions which allow the citizens a large degree of personal, religions, and civil freedom and cultivate in him self-reliance and energy, train him to do his own thinking, and offer him an opportunity to labor for his own benefit and the benefit of his children and heirs, guaranteeing to him the reward of his labor. The government heretofore has existed for the benefit of the governing class and the result shows beyond a doubt that such a government will ulti- mately be a failure everywhere. The French made no effort to establish colonies of self-supporting, self-governing people.
CHAPTER VII
BRITISH RULE IN ILLINOIS-1763-1778
We have already seen that the government of the French over this region for eighty years or more had been of little or no benefit to the people of Illinois. We will now see that the government exercised by the English was worse, for it was as damaging as they could make it.
The English government desired colonies solely for the benefit they could derive from them in the way of trade and they used every means to keep them in such a state of subjection that England could monopolize that trade, a policy which they had already so successfully and so cruelly carried out in the case of Ireland. This they hoped to be able to do in the colonies along the sea-coast, for by their navy they controlled the ocean; but they felt sure they would not be able to secure any considerable amount of benefit to themselves from the inland settlements, for the transportation from there to Great Britain for pro- duce and from Great Britain to them for manufactured articles would be so great that such commerce could not be made profitable. For this reason they discouraged settlement in the northwest.
Another strong reason they had for not wishing to encourage such settlement was that they hoped by use of the Indian tribes on the frontiers to be able to keep the eastern colonies in a more servile state of subjection. In furtherance of this policy, they continually made large presents to the Indians and endeav- ored in every possible way to prejudice them against the colonists, and prom- ised them that the vast territory of the Ohio and Illinois valleys and western lakes should be kept as one vast hunting ground for the red men.
Notwithstanding this, after England had driven the French from Canada and the Northwest, the Indians fearing they could no longer rely upon the protection of the French, and that they would be entirely within the despotic power of the English when the colonies and the king should be united, shrewdly concluded they must at once make a strong and desperate defense of the country west of the Alleghanies or be driven from the lands of their fathers.
They had been taught by the French to hate the English and many of the tribes near the colonies who had been friendly to them up to this time, began to think that they must unite with their red brethren of the west or be rendered entirely helpless.
Pontiac, who has been called the Colossal Chief of the Northwest, the King and Lord of all that country, Chief of the Ottowas, respected and adored in a manner by all of the Indians, a man of "integrity and humanity" according to the morals of the wilderness, of a comprehensive mind, fertile in resources and of an undaunted nature, conceived the idea of uniting all of the Indian tribes and entirely driving out the whites from the whole of the northwest and the Mississippi valley. He proceeded with consummate ability to execute his plan. He secured the co-operation of nearly all of the Indian tribes and planned that on one and the same fateful day, May 1, 1763, they should surprise, attack, and destroy all of the forts of the white men west of the Alleghanies. This they carried out within sixty days in a way that would seem incredible. The forts were all surprised and destroyed except two.
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It would be an interesting story to tell how each of these forts was captured without any intimation of the coming calamity, and men, women, and children massacred. The only two forts in all the country that were not surprised and captured were those at Detroit and Pittsburg. They managed to withstand a siege until they were relieved. Except them, the entire northwest was in the power of Pontiac. Under his able leadership this unexampled and magnificent confederation of Indians had intended to make this a war of extermination of the whites west of the Alleghanies. They hoped to get rid of the white men at once and forever in all this country and so terrify the English that none of them would ever attempt to enter their hunting grounds again. "They roamed the wilderness, massacring all whom they met. They struck down more than a hundred traders in the woods, scalping every one of them; quaffing their gushing life-blood, horribly mutilating their bodies. They prowled round the cabins of the husbandmen of the frontiers; and their tomahawks struck alike the laborer in the field or the child in the cradle. They menaced Fort Ligonier, at the western foot of the Alleghanies, the outpost of Fort Pitt. They passed the mountains and spread death even to Bedford. The unhappy emigrant knew not whether to brave danger, or to leave his home and his planted fields, for wretchedness and poverty." Of course we know that Pontiac and his allies were fighting against the inevitable. His people with their methods of life, with their civilization and their government such as it was, were. unable to develop the strength of the wonderful regions they possessed and must submit to the power of Great Britain, which sent in regiments of regular soldiers and called out the volunteers and militia and soon put an end to Pontiac's reign. It had not been possible for him to know the tremendous forces of the colonies and the king beyond the Alleghanies and the ocean, whom he had set himself up to oppose, or he would never have tried it.
Amherst, the British commander, then stationed at New York and represen- tative of the British government in North America, treated the Indians with con- tempt. He issued an order, August 10, 1763, offering one hundred pounds to anyone who would assassinate Pontiac and ordered his soldiers to take no pris- oners but to put to death all that fell into their hands. He deemed the Indians as unfit to be accepted as allies and unworthy to be respected as encmics, and he ordered his soldiers to take no prisoners but to put to death all that fell into their hands of the "nations who had so unjustly and cruelly committed depredation."
Pontiac appealed to the French for further assistance but was told that the French had ceded this country to the English and could no longer assist them. Despondent, yet revengeful, he returned to the Illinois country. Here is where he had first received the encouragement which determined him to make the attempt to drive out the English, and here at least he thought he would find a friend in Neyon de Villiers, the only survivor of six brothers who lost their lives in fighting the English ; but receiving answer that he had already been sent word that France and Great Britain were at peace and that his scheme was imprac- ticable, and when he was still further assured by Crogan that the French would adhere to their treaty with the English and could no longer offer the Indians any support, his feelings can be more easily imagined than described; seeing that his cause was lost, he surrendered and made peace, a treaty which he there- after respected.
As compared with the officers of the English government who attempted to secure the assassination of the peaceful farmers and traders of their own blood and religion, by offering gold and trinkets to bloody savages for the scalps of citizens murdered by stealth in their quiet homes, and who finally offered five hundred dollars for the assassination of Pontiac himself, Pontiac-considering that he was raised a barbarian-was a man of integrity and honor worthy of our esteem. He had led out his Ottowa warriors to assist in Braddock's defeat. He organized his brother red men in order to drive the invader from the land
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of his fathers, led them and planned for them with consummate ability until overwhelmed by superior force.
It is said that Pontiac while visiting his old friends, St. Ange and Chouteau at St. Louis, then a Spanish colony, learned that the Indians were carousing at Cahokia and concluded to join the party. While he was there and they were all drinking heavily, a hired assassin, for the promise of a barrel of whiskey, stole up behind him and buried his tomahawk in his brains, and left him lying where he fell until St. Ange claimed his body and buried it in St. Louis, early in April, 1769.
Pontiac's red friends of the Northwest most wrongfully blamed the Illinois Indians with the murdering of Pontiac and resolved to exterminate them. They attacked them at their chief village, La Vantum, in sight of Starved Rock, where the most of them were at that time assembled, and after terrific and bloody fighting for a whole day, in which a large proportion of the Illinois warriors were slain, compelled them to retire during the night to the summit of Starved Rock. There they were starved to death and perished, all but one young warrior who during a severe rain-storm and darkness of the night took a buckskin cord, which had been used for drawing water, and fastening it to the trunk of a cedar tree let himself down into the river and thus made his escape, the only survivor of this fearful tragedy. This young warrior was partly white, being a descend- ant, on his father's side, from the French who lived at Fort St. Louis many years before. Being alone in the world, without friends or kindred, he went to Peoria, joined the colony, and there ended his days. He embraced Christianity, became an officer in the church, assuming the name of Antonia La Bell, and his descendants were living in 1882 near Prairie du Rocher, one of them, Charles La Bell, being a party to a suit in the United States court to recover a part of the land where Peoria now stands.
ENGLISH TAKE POSSESSION
Going back to four years before the death and burial of Pontiac, we find that the first step of the English toward taking actual possession of the north- west was to send George Croghan on an expedition down the Ohio on his way to Illinois. On reaching the soil of Illinois, just below the mouth of the Wabash, he was attacked, on the 6th of June, 1765, by eight Kickapoo warriors and com- pelled to surrender. When he had been taken as far as Vincennes, the Indians found they had a man not to be trifled with, since he was the representative and agent of the great and powerful nations which had just put a successful end to Pontiac's War. They released him on the 18th of July and he started for the Illinois villages. On the way he met Pontiac at the head of a detachment of Indians. Now for the first time, Pontiac's stubborn resolution gave way and he consented to confer with Croghan as to peaceful relations, which resulted in his renouncing his hostile policy and promising to use his influence in favor of peace. This made it unnecessary for Croghan to go further and he started for Detroit, where he had a council with other Indians.
A detachment of the 42d regiment of the Highlanders under Captain Stirling was sent to Fort Chartres, where they arrived on the Ioth of October, 1765, by the way of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and on that day the last flag bearing the lilies of France within the state of Illinois fell from the flag staff and the cross of St. George rose in its stead.
The first English court ever convened in Illinois held its first session at Fort Chartres, December 9, 1768, under orders from General Gage. By proclama- tions from George III, dated 1765 and 1772, private ownership in the soil was forbidden. The inference was plain that he intended to divide the whole country up into baronial estates, still following the policy that the country was to be governed for the benefit of the rulers rather than of the people, a policy which could not succeed in a new country to be settled by independent Americans.
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The thirteen colonies were already beginning to be insubordinate and were still further provoked by the act of June 2, 1774, called the Quebec Bill, by which parliament extended the limits of Canada to include all of the territory north of the Ohio, in seeming utter disregard of the jurisdictional rights of Virginia and some other colonies under their charter from the king. The people com- posing the French province were of a character much more easily to be ruled by the autocratic decrees of their superiors than were the people of the thir- teen colonies.
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
This policy of suppression led to the Declaration of Independence on the 4th day of July, 1776. Although this northwestern territory was not repre- sented in the convention that adopted that declaration, wrongs to the northwest- ern territory were given as some of the reasons for the dissolution of the political bands. The charges against the king were that "He had endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for natural- ization of foreigners; refusing to pass others, to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands." His consent to laws "for cutting off our trade with all parts of the world;" "For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province (Canada), establish- ing therein an arbitrary government, enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies ;" and, "he has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all the ages, sexes and conditions."
VIRGINIA'S CONQUEST OF TIIE NORTIIWEST
The attack of the Indians on the American frontier had become so numerous, so treacherous, and so bloody. and were so evidently excited by the British, that George Rogers Clark, one of the great men of the frontier, who had been appointed by Virginia to organize the militia in what was afterward the county of Kentucky, concluded that the proper way to prevent those attacks was to drive the British out of the Northwest. For this purpose he called on Patrick Henry. the governor, and received a commission to raise volunteers for the defense of Kentucky. The success of the expedition depended so largely on the celerity and the secrecy with which it should be carried out, that it was not thought practicable to take anyone into confidence except the governor, Patrick Henry, and George Wythe, George Mason, and Thomas Jefferson. They gave Clark twelve hundred pounds in money and promised to use their influence to secure three hundred acres of land for every man who should engage in the expedition.
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