USA > Indiana > Knox County > History of Knox and Daviess Counties, Indiana : from the earliest time to the present; with biographical sketches, reminiscences, notes, etc. ; together with an extended history of the colonial days of Vincennes, and its progress down to the formation of the state government > Part 2
USA > Indiana > Daviess County > History of Knox and Daviess Counties, Indiana : from the earliest time to the present; with biographical sketches, reminiscences, notes, etc. ; together with an extended history of the colonial days of Vincennes, and its progress down to the formation of the state government > Part 2
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
ranked equal, in Indian caste, with the larger capital Ke-ki-on-ga; possessing the right, in the Miami confederacy, to be consulted before engagements in war, and with the prized though ignomini- ous right to share in the cannibal feasts of the tribe.
FIRST CANADIAN RESIDENTS.
Although, in the journeys often made before the close of the sixteenth century, by explorers, missionaries and traders from Que- bec, Montreal and Three Rivers to Kaskaskia upon the Missis- sippi, the Wabash was used as a highway, and, as this Indian village was the most important for so many leagues of the route, it was, doubtless, well known to such travelers, yet no trace of the presence of the French earlier than the beginning of the seven- teenth century can be found. It was in the early autumn of 1702 when four Canadian boats, containing eight white men, con- voyed by a flotilla of Indian laden canoes, gathered from the various villages along the route, having accomplished their long journey by water and portage from the castle of St. Louis at Quebec, were stranded in front of the council-house upon the site of the present city of Vincennes. The names of. but four of these voyagers have been preserved. They were Juchereau, the commander; Leonardy, his lieutenant; Goddare and Turpin, couriers des bois-travelers of the woods-the surf of the flowing tide of population, ever preceding the wave, slowly intruding up- on the realm of solitude and the savage. Impulses having their origin across the ocean, events transpiring in colonies upon the St. Lawrence, had molded their characters, and at last or- dained them to become truly light-bearers in a heathen wilder- ness. France planted a colony at Quebec in 1608. "For the glory of the crown, for the dominion of Christ's holy church," this colony soon came under the patronage of the State and the especial solicitude of the pope. Before Talon, before Guise or Lorain, this union of interest, and yet separation of duties, had been well expressed at the conclusion of a quarrel in the Canadian woods: "You show me my way to heaven," said the governor- general to the vicar, "and I will show you your path on earth."
RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASTS.
The religious sentiment of France felt the quickening spirit
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
which had produced the reformation in the neighboring king- doms of Germany and England; and enthusiasts offering them- selves for martyrdom, devotees, counting sufferings experienced in propagating the true faith as earnests of jewels to be worn in their crowns in heaven, offered themselves in flocks to carry out schemes of the utmost madness. In the province of Anjou, at the town La Fleche, lived Jerome de la Danversiere, an officer of the Income, an enthusiastic devotee, of mystical tendencies, who whipped himself with scourges of chains to mortify the flesh, and wore a belt with more than 1,200 sharp points, that he might be reminded how much better it is to suffer finitely in this world than infinitely in the world to come; truly, a type of many such filling all France with pious sighs and groans, and aspiring to martyrs' crowns under the impatient belief that the world would soon become too pious to offer them. One day, while at his de- votions, he heard an inward voice, commanding him to become the founder of a new order of nuns, and establish under its con- duct a hospital upon an island called Montreal, in Canada. In the old church of St. Germain des Pres, a priest, Jean Jacques Olier, founder of the famous seminary of St. Sulspice, kneeling while the choir was chanting the words Lumen ad revelationem Gentium, heard a voice from heaven commission him to be a light to the Gentiles. An inward voice at the same hour told Olier that he was to form a society of priests, and establish them upon the island of Montreal in a Canadian river. Danversiere proceeded to Paris immediately after his experience at La Fléche, and there in the church of Notre Dame, in the ecstacy of a trance, was led by the hand of the blessed Virgin to the presence of her glorious Son, who accepted the devotee as a servant. Thus confirmed in his miraculous call, he visited the old castle at Mue- don, where in its galleries he met Olier, and, although until then unknown to each other, they immediately embraced and sa- luted each other by name. "Monsieur," exclaimed the priest, "I know your design, and I go to commend it to God at the altar."
Mademoiselle Jeanne Mance, while not of the cloister, had lived from a tender age the life of a nun, and under a vow of per- petual chastity. Inflamed with the Canadian enthusiasm so prev-
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
alent, and desiring to emulate the fame of Madame de la Peltrie, of whom she had read so much, she determined to offer herself to the work in Canada. Setting out upon her journey, she proceeded to Rochelle to take ship. On the day of her arrival at this port she repaired to the Church of the Jesuits, and as she entered its doors she met Danversiére. "Then," says Faillon, her biogra- pher, "these two persons, who had never seen nor heard of each other, were enlightened supernaturally, whereby their most hid- den thoughts were mutually made known." She had found her destiny. The ocean, the wilderness, the solitude, the Iroquois- nothing daunted her .* Out of these visions, in 1643, there arose upon the island of Montreal a seminary consecrated to Christ, a Hotel Dieu to St. Joseph and a college to the Virgin. This col- ony, fed with illusions, founded in dreams, the subject of prayers in unbroken vigils (a nun remained at the altar day and night praying for its preservation), under deceptive lights and false shadows, in the very realm of miracles, beset, in the diseased im- agination of its members, with devils and guarded by angels, with less blood, with less waste of human life, carried the light of the gospel of Christ farther into the desert, to more souls than any of all who came to civilize the human tiger in his Amer- ican home.
THE FUR TRADE.
With all the religious fervor, so strangely impelling men and womeu to leave refinement and luxury, and enter upon lives of deprivation and solitude, there went out to Canada the worldly motive of gain. The fur trade at Montreal, as well as at Que- bec, was accepted as the chief end and aim of colonial enterprise. Every one, from the governor down, was suspected, and probably justly, with having a part in it; and the struggle between the monopolies and the irregular traders provided voluminous charges and counter charges, freighting every ship returning to France. The church revenues were increased by it, its privileges were be- stowed as charities to widows and orphans, and sold profitably for their benefit. The result was that the country swarmed with couriers des bois, who were the indispensable agents of all who engaged in the traffic. But Louis XIV awoke to a new ambi-
*Francis Parkman.
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
tion. He had expanded into a great king, and, determined that Canada should not be abandoned to a company of merchants, an- nounced to his ministry that a new France should be added to the old. Under this new policy, in 1665, the royal patron sent out soldiers, settlers, horses, sheep and cattle, and young women for wives.
THE FIRST FRENCH SOLDIERS.
The old regiment of Carignan-Salieres was the first regiment of regular troops ever sent to America by the French govern- ment. As out of its roll of officers there came Francis Morgan de Vinsenné, from whom the city of Vincennes derived its name, the history of this corps will not be without interest. It was raised in Savoy by the Prince of Carignan, in 1644, and was soon employed in the service of France on the side of the king, at the battle of Porte St. Antoine, in the wars of the Fronde. After the peace of the Pyrenees, the Prince, unable longer to support the regiment, gave it to the king, whereupon it was incorporated into the French armies. In 1664 it distinguished itself as part of the allied force of France in the Austrian war against the Turks. The next year, incorporated, it was consolidated with the fragment of a regiment formed of Germans, the whole placed under the command of Col. de Salieres and ordered to America. Fifteen heretics were discovered in its ranks and quickly con- verted. Mother Mary, of the Incarnation, an Ursuline super- ioress, undertook to enlist them as new crusaders, and soon "made fully five hundred take the scapulary of the Holy Vir- gin."# Thus equipped and instructed, each soldier became more than an arm of the king-he was an apostle.
GOVERNMENT OF THE COLONY.
The fatherly care of the king sought to do still more for his colony. He wished to form a Canadian noblesse, and to this end stimulated marriages among officers and others of the better sort by royal bounties. This care went farther. Bounties were offered on children. By decree of council it was ordered "that all inhabitants of the said country of Canada who shall have liv- ing children, to the number of ten, born in lawful wedlock, not
*Relations of Jesuits, 1665.
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
being priests, monks or nuns, shall each be paid out of the mon- eys sent by his majesty to the said country a pension of 300 livres a year, and those who shall have twelve children a pension of 400 livres."* Still another Canadian policy is worthy of review. The better protection of Montreal from the incursions of the sav- age Iroquois, led to a division of the lands along the Richelieu from its mouth to a point above Chambly into large seigniorial grants, which were apportioned among several officers of the reg- iment of Carignan, who, in their turn, granted out the land to the soldiers. The officer thus became a kind of feudal chief, and the whole settlement a permanent military cantonment. The seignior, in a few cases, made grants of the soil which he had re- ceived gratuitously from the crown to other seigniors inferior in the feudal scale, and they granted in turn to their vassals, the habitants or cultivators of the soil.+ The seignior held by the tenure of faith and homage, the habitant by the inferior tenure en censive. The office of commander carried with it, at all such cantonments, more than seigniorial powers over the ungranted adjacent territory; it conferred upon the officer the right to grant in the name of the crown in perpetuam the fee, to those desiring to become settlers, to small places for homesteads, and to allot to all such in common sufficient fields for tillage, and others likewise in common for pasturage: These grants once made, and settle- ments so established, over all, regulating contracts, tenures, inher- itances, heirships and successions, was a vague civil code called the Contume de Paris. As seignior of the lands acquired, often from evacuation by the Indians, more frequently by grants for favor, the military officer in command exercised judicial powers, from whose decrees, in grave matters, there was, however, an appeal to the commune, the whole of the adult male population of the district as a jury. And even still beyond, to the governor of the Province, the litigant might carry his grievance. ;
In strict feudalism, land ownership conferred nobility; but this was changed in Canada. The king and not the soil was the parent of honor. So to provide a nobility, a gentry, for his
*Elits et Ordonnances 1, 67.
+ Projet de Reglement fait par MM. de Tracy et Talon, January 24, 1667.
il have the record of such an appeal from this Post to Bienville, governor of Louisiana, April, 1742 .- Author.
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
beloved colony, Louis honored the officers of the regiment Carig- nan, many of whom were of the gentilhomme of old France, and others selected from time to time, with titles. Wherever the col- onist settled beyond the borders, whatever had lured him to the interior, business of the crown, hope of gain in the fur trade, zeal for the propagation of the faith, it was as impossible for him to divest himself of any one of these impulses, and to rid himself of the influence of these laws and customs, as to suddenly forget his beloved language.
The Sieure Juchereau was from the Cote La Salle on the St. Lawrence; a regular trader bearing a permit to establish a trade upon the river St. Jerome. Not even the faintest trace of his com- panions beyond naming three of them, except that Leonardy was in command at the Poste de Oubache, preceding Vinsenné, can now be found.
THE "NEW VILLAGE."
The Indians, soon after the arrival of the whites, conceded ground for the "new village upon the bank of the stream from the lower line of their village (Broadway Street) to the low lands."* "The fort," probably a palisade, formed of stakes planted in the earth leaning outward, enclosing a log magazine buried in the sand; a storehouse constructed potteau en terre (posts in the ground) with the interstices filled with mortar toughened by the long prairie grass, and a few rude sheds, or huts of bark, soon arose into the nucleus, around which has gathered all of our modern city, and at whose gates armed con- tests between nations have adjusted boundaries, created States, and determined the political institutions of mighty races and popula- tions.
*Bonneau, quoted by Bishop Bruté, first Bishop of Vincennes.
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
CHAPTER II.
THE FORT AND THE MISSION AT VINCENNES FROM 1702 TO 1767- THE INDIAN'S MANITOU AND RELIGIOUS OBSERVANCES-THE FIRST CHURCH AT VINCENNES-REGAL POLICIES-THE WESTERN COMPANY AND THIE INDIAN TRADE-FRANCOIS MORGAN DE VINSENNE-THE CHICKASAW CAMPAIGN-THE TORTURE OF VINSENNE-ST. ANGE BELLE RIVE-VINCENNES IN 1767-BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT-ENGLISH GOVERNMENT IN THE WEST-DEMANDS OF GEN. GAGE.
T THE Wabash, long only a pathway for the explorer, by the year 1710 had become a highway, over which were transported the commodities of exchange between Europe and the forests. Annual journeys to dispose of peltries collected and to secure the simple goods demanded in Indian barter, called into existence an employment in harmony with the roving disposition of the Canadian, and led to rapid increase in the population nominally inhabiting the post of Juchereau. The life of license, the free- dom from the conventional restraints of more refined society and the quick approximation of one race to the manners of the other, led to marriages with Indian girls, at which there was neither priest or civil magistrate. In his contemplative hours the devout son of the church longed to have his children, born of such unions, baptized and made Christians. Neither had he entirely lost his zeal to be counted an instrument in the conversion of the heathen. Under these emotions he invoked the company of the priest at every place where he even temporarily tarried. November 9, 1712, Father Marest, a Jesuit at the mission of the Immaculate Conception, called Kaskaskia, wrote to Father Germon, of the same company: "The French having lately established a fort on the river Wabash, demanded a missionary, and Father Mermet was sent to them."*
The conversion of the Indians was the prime motive of the zealous Jesuit, and while at the post he labored unceasingly to
* Les Francois itvint itabli un fort sur le fleure Oubache its demanderent un missionaire ; et le Pere Mermet leur fait enoye. Le Pere Orut devoir travailler a la cenversier des Mascoutins qui avoient fait'un village sur les bordes dumeme fleure c'est une nation Indian qui eztende la langue Illinois." Lettres Edifanis st Currinese, Paris 1761, page 333.
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
that end. Thoroughly familiar with Indian character, he sought . a discussion with their chief medicine man in the presence of the whole tribe, that he might confound him in the meshes of logic and win his dupes from idolatry to the true faith.
THE INDIAN'S MANITOU.
The Indian priest or medicine man worshiped the Manitou of the buffalo, which he asserted was the master of health, and the great healer of disease. After leading him on insensibly to the avowal that it was not the buffalo, but the Manitou or spirit of the buffalo (which was under the earth, and animated all the buffaloes ) he worshiped, the Father asked, if other beasts, the bear for instance, worshiped by some of his nation, were not equally inhabited by a Manitou, which was under the earth ? "Without doubt," said the Indian. "If this is so," the missionary rejoined, "men ought to have a Manitou within them." "Nothing more certain," said the grand medecine. "Ought not that to convince you," replied the priest, "that you are not very reasonable? For if man upon the earth is master of all animals, if he kills them, and eats them, does it not follow that the Manitou which inhabits him must necessarily have a mastery over all the other Manitous ? Why then do you not invoke him instead of the Manitou of the bear and buffalo?" "This reasoning," says the Father " dis- concerted the charlatan, but," he adds, "this was all the effect it had."
A severe malady broke out in the Indian village during the Father's sojourn, and the followers of the great medicine sought by costly sacrifices and din of prayers to drive away the plague. Assembling in front of the fort they sacrificed thirty dogs, one for each day the pest bad lasted, and with the bodies of their slain pets hoisted upon poles, paraded the boundaries of the afflicted village, dismally lamenting their misery. As the malady continued they at last appealed to the Frenchman to implore his God to interpose. Mermet prayed and ceased not his interces- sions, and entered their stricken homes and nursed their sick for many weeks; but in that epidemic, more than half of the good Father's flock of rescued heathens died. The baptized victims of that terrible visitation, laid away by the hands of this loving priest, are sleeping in the old cemetery of St. Francis Xavier.
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
THE FIRST CHURCH AT VINCENNES.
Upon the square of ground to the southeast and separated from the fort by a narrow street, afterward designated as Rue Cal- vary, Father Mermet erected a church. In this rude building, without other floor than the earth, lighted by an opening in the roof, warmed by fires built after the manner of the camp in the central aisle, adorned with a rude print of St. Francis, the mys- tery of the Incarnation was taught, and the comforting sacraments of the church administered first in the present great State of Indiana. How long Father Mermet remained in charge of the church he had here dedicated to St. Francis Xavier cannot be determined, but that he and Marest continued to visit this post as late as 1730, is probable, from the statements in the church records at Kaskaskia. It is probable however, that Mermet returned to Canada with Juchereau, as he officiated at the mission at the Sault Ste. Marie, whither Juchereau repaired in 1719.
THE FRENCH KING'S POLICY.
The regiment Carignan-Salieres distributed throughout the interior of the colonies trained officers, educated to command and accustomed to administering the affairs of isolated posts. And now when the policy of the king aimed at the union of the posses- sions on the gulf coast with those upon the St. Lawrence, by a cordon of military establishments, along the waters constituting the route between these two borders, this regiment was called upon to furnish the commandants for these stations. Under this ambitious project, the commerce of all New France (Canada) and New Mexico (Louisiana), was granted to Anthony Crozat, " counseller, secretary of household, crown and revenue " by letters of Sep- tember 14, 1712. In a few years thereafter Juchereau retired from the Wabash to the lakes, and Pierre Leonardy, as the agent of Crozat, had charge of the fur trade upon the lower Wabash. Upon the death of Louis XIV, in the year 1717, Crozat surren- dered his grant to the crown of France.
THE WESTERN COMPANY.
In August of that year, the province of Louisiana was ceded to the Western Company, an organization created by the famous
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
banker, John Law. A new government was formed; an edict issued to collect and transport settlers into the valley of the Mis- sissippi; the site for a central town was selected; M. de Broisbrant was sent to the Illinois, and the settlement at New Orleans began. Over 800 French immigrants were brought into the colonies in the two succeeding years. Reports of the finding of rich mines of silver and gold, and even pearl fisheries, near Kaskaskia were spread abroad, and this tide of immigration from the Old World was largely poured into the interior. In 1719 the Western Company obtained from the crown of France the exclusive right to trade with the East Indies, China, and the South Seas, and assumed, in consequence, the name of la Com- pagnie des Indies; and having by stories of fabulous riches in mines and fisheries lured large numbers of laborers, peasants and artisans from France, the directors endeavored to create a trade in Louisiana by stimulating agriculture. The agents of the company at each station were supplied with seed, and instructed to offer bounties for the production of rice, tobacco and indigo; and to relieve the settler of the severer toil, negroes were im- ported and sold on a long credit for sums payable in rice, tobacco and indigo grown in the province. Good, merchantable tobacco, in leaves or rolls, by decree of council September 2, 1721, were to be purchased by the company at the rate of 25 livres (about $5) per 100 pounds. In the same decree the inhabitants are urged not to neglect the manufacture of silk, and to set out mul- berry trees upon their plantations that they may increase until the population will justify the manufacture of silk. Merchandise imported from France, it was provided, should be sold "at Illi- nois at 100 per cent advance on the French invoice price. Wine shall be sold at 125 livres per hogshead; brandy at 120 livres per barrel; and the half casks and quarter casks in proportion." In March, 1724, Louis XV published an exhaustive ordinance for the better government of Louisiana. The Jews were banished; slaves were educated in the apostolic Catholic religion and bap- tized. All other religious rites than those of the Catholic Church were prohibited. Sundays and holidays were scrupulous- ly observed; the marriage of blacks with whites was forbidden; children springing from marriages between slaves were the slaves
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
of the owner of the mother, and the status of the mother and not of the father determined whether the children were free or slave; markets were regulated, and a comprehensive slave code was established. On the 10th of April, 1732, the Company of the Indies surrendered their charter, France resumed the govern- ment of Louisiana, and its charge was entrusted to the Depart- ment of Marine.
ATTEMPT TO DESTROY THE FRENCH FORT.
In May, 1712, at the instigation of the English interests in New York, a desperate attempt was made to destroy the fort near Detroit. Two villages of the Mascoutins and Outaganires had been established and fortified within pistol shot of the French gar- rison. The people determined to annihilate the post, and called to aid two large bands to help them. On the 13th of May François Morgan De Vinsenné arrived with seven or eight French. That night a Huron came into the fort, and announced that the Potta- wattomie war chief desired to counsel with the French, and would meet them in the old Huron fort. Vincenné went over and was told that 600 men from the villages upon the St. Jerome would soon arrive to help the garrison. Upon Vinsenné's return Dubuis- son, the commander, at once closed the fort, the chaplain per- formed divine service, and all was put in readiness for a siege. The next day Dubuisson ascended a bastion and casting his eyes toward the woods saw the army of the nations of the South issu- ing from it. They were the Illinois, the Missouries, the Osages and other nations yet more remote .* The battle began at once be- tween these allies of the French and their Mascoutin enemies. After four days the Mascoutins surrendered, and all but their women and children were slain. The loss of the allies was sixty Indians killed and wounded and seven French wounded. The enemy lost 1,000.
PROMOTION OF VINSENNÉ FOR GALLANTRY.
For gallant conduct at this siege de Vinsenné was restored to a rank forfeited by a previous disobedience of orders, and pro- moted to a general command for the king in the Illinois, and sent by M. de Vandriel, the governor of Canada, to Sault Ste. Marie, at
*Dubuisson's Narrative, page 9.
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HISTORY OF KNOX COUNTY.
which place and Michillimacinac, he remained until 1732, when, under the order of Longueville, "for the king," he repaired to the command of the "Poste des Oubache de Leonardy." Vinsenné at once began the enlargement of the fortifications and the repair of the old palisade defenses, extending the line north to about Main Street of the present city, and along Rue St. Louis (First Street, and Rue Calvary (Bienville) to Rue de Perdupleur (of the Yost) now Barnet Street, and to the river bank, and mounting small cannon transported from Quebec. The settlement at Oui- tenon (Lafayette), made in 1720, was now broken up and the in- habitants removed to the post.
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