USA > Mississippi > A history of the Mississippi valley, from its discovery to the end of foreign domination. The narrative of the founding of an empire, shorn of current myth, and enlivened by the thrilling adventures of discoverers, pioneers, frontiersmen, Indian fighters, and homemakers > Part 9
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summer they were all barefooted, except on festive occasions," when they wore "light moccasins, gor- geously ornamented with brilliants of porcupine quills, shells, beads, lace, ingeniously wrought" over the whole above the sole.
The traders kept a heterogenous stock of goods in their largest rooms, where the assortment was fully displayed to the gaze of the purchasers. "The young men who wished to see the world sought occupation as voyageurs and their return was greeted with smiling faces, and signalized by balls and dances at which the whole village assembled."
"The commandants were invested with despotic authority." "Learning and science were terms beyond their comprehension." "The priest was their oracle in matters of learning as well as in the forms and ob- servances of religion." "On politics and the affairs of the nation they never suffered their minds to feel a moment's anxiety." "Day after day passed by in contentment and peaceful indolence." (Italics not in the original. )
And yet, being agriculturists, they did raise food for export. In 1745 the Illinois country sent 400,000 pounds of grain to New Orleans, the French popu- lation being then not far from 900 souls, all told.
Other villages near Chartres were Prairie du Rocher, with twelve dwelling houses in 1770, and St. Phillippe with sixteen dwellings. Cahokia (called Kaoquias by the French), was at this date a long straggling village of forty-five dwellings and a church.
A trading post was established at or near the site of New Madrid as early as 1740 (according to tra-
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dition). The region was notable for its number of bears, and the "principal occupation" of the inhabi- tants "was the chase of that animal, and the prepara- tion and sale of bears' oil." Hence the voyageurs named it "L'Anse de la Graisse"-Grease Bay.
St. Genevieve was not established in Missouri until about 1755.
Following the Illinois settlements came the occu- pation of the Wabash country. The Fox Indians living around the Wisconsin River proved implacable enemies to the French, in the Eighteenth century. Neither blandishments, nor attacks that drove them temporarily from their homes, could bring these In- dians to the French interests, and the portages at the Fox River and the Chicago River, and the St. Joseph- Kankakee portage became, in spite of fortified posts, so dangerous that the voyageurs from the St. Lawrence began, as early as 1705, to use the portage from the Maumee to the Wabash.
This portage had been avoided in the Seventeenth century because of fear of the Iroquois. The route led up the Maumee to the St. Mary's branch, the present site of Ft. Wayne, Indiana. A portage of three leagues brought the coureurs de bois to a branch of the Wa- bash. According to Father Marest, a stockade was built on the upper Wabash previous to 1712, but it appears that the route was not popular previous to 1716. The post on the upper Wabash was called Ouiatanon. Lafayette, Ind., stands on the site of Ouiatanon. It stood at the mouth of Little River. In 1705 some enterprising coureurs de bois collected 15,000 skins on the Wabash and took them to Mobile,
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where they were received joyously, because it was the first arrival from the Wabash.
The fortified trading post of Vincennes was estab- lished where Vincennes, Indiana, now stands, by Mon- sieur Vincennes in 1722. But Vincennes did not be- come a settlement, properly so called, until 1734 or 1735, when a number of families made homes there.
Father du Poisson, describing what he saw in a journey made from New Orleans to the Arkansas, beginning May 25, 1727, says (Jesuit Relations, vol. lxvii) :
"A tract of land granted by the company of the Indies to a private individual, for the purpose of clear- ing that land and making it valuable, is called a con- cession. * * The concessionaries are, therefore, the gentlemen of the country. The greater part of them are not people who would leave France, but they equipped vessels and filled them with superintendents, stewards, storekeepers, clerks, and workmen of various trades, with provisions and all kinds of goods. They [these workmen], had to plunge into the woods to set up cabins, to choose their ground, and burn the cane brakes and trees. This beginning seemed very hard to people not at all accustomed to that kind of labor; the superintendents and their subordinates, for the most part, amused themselves in places where a few Frenchmen had already settled, and there they con- sumed their provisions. The work had hardly begun when the concession was ruined; the workmen, ill-paid or ill-fed, refused to work, or himself took his pay; the warehouses were pillaged. Do you not recognize in this the Frenchman?"
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"There are also people who have no other occu- pation than that of roving about: Ist. The women or girls taken from the hospitals of Paris, or from the Salpetriere, or other places of equally good repute, who find that the laws of marriage are severe, and the management of a house too irksome. A voyage of 400 leagues does not terrify these heroines; I already know of two of them whose adventures would furnish materials for a romance. 2nd. The travellers; these for the most part are young men sent to the Missis- sippi 'for various reasons' by their relatives, or by the law, and who, finding that the land lies too low for digging, prefer to hire themselves to row and ply from once shore to another. 3rd. The hunters," who supplied New Orleans with dried buffalo meat, skins and bears' oil, a class of men not reprobated by the father, though most of the writers speak harshly of these wood rangers.
In the course of forty years after Iberville came to Louisiana, the French, by an unhurried progression over easy water routes, made settlements at Natchez ; at Natchitoches, on the Red River; on the Mississippi, near the Arkansas; on the Yazoo; in the region around Kaskaskia and Fort Chartres (five villages there) ; on the Illinois River above Lake Peoria; at Vincennes, and near the Wabash-Maumee portage.
In all these years they suffered but one serious attack from the Indians, though many small ones were endured. On November 29 (one account says 28), 1729, the Natchez arose and wiped out the French in- habitants and garrison at the village of Rosalie that stood where Natchez now stands. Five men escaped,
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and two, a tailor and a wagon maker, with the attrac- tive women, and the children were kept alive.
Aided by the Choctaws, the French took ample revenge, and Governor Perier wrote on August I, 1730, concerning some of the red prisoners captured : "Laterly I have burned here four men and two women, and sent the rest to St. Domingo."
Charles Gayarre, the New Orleans historian, him- self a Frenchman, says of this burning. "It was not only an act of useless cruelty, but of exceedingly bad policy. * It must have looked, in the estima- tion of the Indians, as an approval of their national custom. But what is remarkable and char- acteristic is the cool, business-like indifference, and the matter of fact tone with which Governor Perier in- forms his government of the auto-da-fe which has taken place by his orders."
These words are worth remembering because they show how all Southern gentlemen regard such atro- cities. There is a very great difference between the Southern gentlemen and the upstarts, (sons of former overseers, in many cases), who describe themselves as "leading citizens," and are found heading the mobs that burn negroes alive.
On November 15, 1731, Law's Mississippi Com- pany took final leave of Louisiana by turning the coun- try over to the King. It is a curious fact in French history that this company continued to exist long after every other scheme planned by Law failed. Being freed from the grasp of private monopoly the young city was now able to open free commerce with the French West Indies and the home country. By the
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labor of slaves the colonists were producing indigo, rice, tobacco and lumber for export. The tobacco is worth special notice because at a point fifty-five miles above New Orleans a kind of tobacco is yet produced, (400 pounds to the acre, at that), which is famous as Louisiana perique.
And yet when Bienville left Louisiana in 1743, the whole province had a population of only 4,000 French and 2,000 negroes, and but for the supplies of food sent down the river from the Illinois, New Orleans would have been starved from the face of the map. In 1730 Bienville reported that for three months the colonists had "subsisted on the seeds of reeds and wild grass." The Marquis de Vaudreuil, who suc- ceeded Bienville, "notified his home government in 1744, that if an importation of flour had not arrived he could not have controlled his famished garrison." (Winsor. )
In a letter by Father Vivier, written from the Illinois country, November 17, 1750, he says, "Wheat, as a rule yields only from five to eight fold; but it must be observed that the lands are tilled in a very careless manner, and that they have never been manured dur- ing the thirty years while they have been cultivated."
Father Gravier describes one method of curing the sick which he practiced, (Jesuit Relations, vol. 1xv, p. 109) :
"A small piece of Father Francois Regis's hat, which one of our servants gave me, is the most in- fallible remedy that I know of for curing all kinds of fever."
Said Bienville in a letter written on April 15, 1735:
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"I neglect nothing to turn the attention of the in- habitants to agricultural pursuits, but in general they are worthless, lazy, dissolute." And of a company of soldiers that had arrived a short time before writing another letter, he said :
"There are but one or two men among them whose size is above five feet ; as to the rest, they are under four feet ten inches. With regard to their moral character it is sufficient to state that out of fifty-two, who have lately been sent here, more than one-half have already been whipped for larceny."
During the summer of 1754, some soldiers of a garrison kept on Cat Island, when exasperated beyond endurance by the cruelty of their commander, killed him, and started through the woods toward South Carolina, but were all captured by Indians sent after them. One killed himself. Two were broken upon the wheel, and one, who was a Swiss from the regiment of Karrer, was placed alive in a wooden coffin, and by two sergeants sawed in two with a whip saw.
Father Etienne de Carheil in a letter regarding the work of missionaries at French forts in the interior, (Jesuit Relations, vol. 1xv) says: "These [missions] are reduced to such an extremity that we can no longer maintain them against an infinite multitude of evil acts-acts of brutality and violence; of injustice and impiety ; of lewd and shameless conduct."
As a final view of those Frenchmen who were osten- sibly striving to make a great colony of the Missis- sippi valley, take this from the "Present State of the Country and Inhabitants, Europeans and Indians, of Louisiana," by "An Officer of New Orleans to his
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Friend at Paris," as translated and printed in London in 1744, (page II et seq).
"Every one studies his own Profit; the Poor labour for a Week and squander in one day all they have earned in six; from thence arises the profit of the Pub- lic Houses, which flourish every day. The Rich spend their time in seeing their slaves work to improve their land and get money which they spend in Plays, Balls and Feasts; but the most common pastime of the highest as well as the lowest, and even of the slaves, is Women; so that if there are 500 women, married or unmarried in New Orleans, including all ranks, I don't believe, without exaggeration, that there are ten of them of a blameless character; as for me I know but two of those, and even they are privately talked of. What I say of New Orleans I say of the whole province without being guilty of Slander or Calumny."
"Laws are observed here much in the same man- ner as in France, or worse. The rich man knows how to procure himself Justice of the Poor, if the affair is to his advantage; but if the poor man is in the right he is obliged to enter into a composition; if the rich is in the wrong the affair is stifled. They deal fairly with such as are very sharp sighted. As the King is at a great distance they make him provide Victuals, Arms and Clothing for troops, which those who keep the offices or magazines sell and put the money in their own pockets; the poor soldier for whom they were designed never so much as seeing them."
With patient persistence and unsurpassed endurance the austere La Salle staked the trail from Montreal to the mouth of the Mississippi. Iberville, a hero of
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the French Navy, came to possess the land. The populations that followed were composed of convicts, male and female; soldiers "under four feet ten inches" in body, mind and morals; colonists whose highest ambition was to find a gold mine, and whose pastime among the "highest as well as the lowest, and even of Slaves, is women."
The Goths and Vandals who swarmed through the gates of degenerate Rome "did not come a day too soon." The swelling tide from the British colonies that was already trickling through the passes, and wash- ing around the ends of the Alleghany range, had some- thing in it as harsh and bitter as the brine of the sea, but it was to descend on the valley of the great river with the cleansing power of the flood of Noah.
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PHILIP, ALIAS METACOMET. From the original engraving by Paul Revere.
VII
THE FRENCH EXPELLED FROM THE VALLEY. PART I.
This is to Tell How the Corruption of the French Court Spread Until it Blighted French Trade Among the American Indians and How the French Resorted to Inhuman Warfare to Retain Their Trade-Celoron's Expedition-The Remarkable Attitude of the British Colonists After Celoron's Warning-Work of the British Traders Brings Another French Irruption- First Gun in the War that Ended on the Plains of Abraham.
The war that destroyed the French power in the Mississippi Valley began, strictly speaking, in an at- tack on Indians, (friendly to the British), who lived on the banks of the Scioto river in the present state of Ohio; it ended, so far as America was concerned,
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when Wolfe scaled the Heights of Abraham at Que- bec. But this war was, after all is said, only an outbreak of a chronic state of conflict that had grown out of the earliest efforts of the British to extend their "peaceful commerce" in beaver skins.
To understand the conditions under which the British colonists drove the French from the Mississippi Valley it is necessary to consider briefly this chronic state of conflict growing out of the competition for furs-especially to consider what the French did in that conflict and their avowed object in fighting.
As has been noted already, the British were in no degree as venturesome as the French in the fur trade, but the British trade, especially at Albany, grew in spite of the greater enterprise of the French traders. In fact a time came when coureurs-de-bois carried packs of furs down the Mohawk instead of down the St. Lawrence.
The reason for this growth of trade is readily found. The British undersold the French merchants. As one French merchant said in a letter yet preserved, the Albany traders gave a silver bracelet for two beaver skins where the French trader would have charged ten.
This difference in price is accounted for by the enormous burden of taxes which the French King laid upon his people, and by the utter dishonesty of the French officials in America. The practices of the French court, so graphically described by Carlyle, nec- essarily spread through all the French domains. "Mon- sieur the Count de Maurepas [the "lightly gyrating" Prime Minister] is right when he says that the officials
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in Canada are looking not for the Western sea but for the sea of beaver," wrote Father Nau, on October 2, 1735.
To preserve their fur trade in spite of prices that amounted in a moral point of view to sheer robbery, the French resorted to inhuman warfare. They set the Indians raiding the New England settlements. Said Charlevoix regarding one of these raids :
"Monsieur de Vaudreuil formed a party of these savages to whom he joined some Frenchmen under the direction of the Sieur de Beaubassin, when they effected some ravages of no great consequence; they killed, however, about 300 men." To this he adds the very significant remark: "The essential point was to commit the Abenakis in such a manner that they could not draw back."
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The Abenakis, and the Iroquois converts known as the Caughnawagas, (in the Eighteenth Century French diplomacy had fully established priests in the Iroquois villages), were sneaking away from the shadow of the altar to buy goods at Albany; and the French persuaded them to raid the British settlements in New England on the theory that no raider would dare to go to a British town to trade. Every New England settlement within reach was raided by order of the French, and French officers went along to see that the raiding was thoroughly done. Women were slaughtered, parents saw the brains of their babes dashed out against rock or tree, prisoners were tor- tured in ways so shocking that a detailed description cannot now be printed; and all this was done "to commit the Indians in such fashion that they would
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continue to buy French goods at prices rendered ex- cessive by the bald stealing of which French officials were guilty."
It was New England alone that suffered from the early raids for the preservation of the French trade. The Caughnawaga Iroquois, (located on the St. Law- rence), could not be trusted to raid toward Albany, because their relatives lived in the Mohawk valley; and the Abenakis could not be sent there alone because that would rouse the resentment of all the Iroquois.
In consequence of this freedom from raids, New York's population spread slowly up the Mohawk. The Lutheran Palatines, fleeing from religious perse- cution in Europe, came nearly 3,000 strong, to New York, and were sent by the wily authorities to settle west of Schenectady, because they would serve as a buf- fer in case of French-Indian invasion over the route lying west of the Adirondacks. Their plantations were extended as far as where Rome now stands. Some of them went also to the frontier of Pennsylvania and Virginia.
In 1727 Governor Burnet, of New York, built at his own expense "a stone house of strength," where Oswego now stands, in order to fend off the French. Here a lively trade was established.
The French fumed over the advancing settlements of Englishmen, but instead of attacking this "house of strength," they built a trading station where Toronto now stands.
Meantime, (1726), Joncaire, a Frenchman living among the Iroquois, had re-established on Niagara River the post La Salle had built, while in 1731 Fort
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Frederick was built at Crown Point, on Lake Cham- plain. Both patriotism and private greed urged the French to establish new posts; for by so doing they hoped to wall in the British, and they knew by expe- rience that every post was a source of wealth to its officers.
During all the early years of the Eighteenth Cen- tury, while British settlers and stations spread west- ward through New York, the British traders of Penn- sylvania, Virginia and the Colonies to the South, had been working across and around the Alleghanies, while their stations were eventually established in the moun- tain passes, and beyond them. Col. Thomas Cresap, whom Winsor calls "a vagrant Yorkshire man, then near forty years old," built, in the winter of 1742-43, a hunting and trading cabin near the upper fork of the Potomac in the extreme west part of what is now Maryland. In 1745 a British trading post was estab- lished on Sandusky Bay, Lake Erie, near the site of the present city of Sandusky, Ohio, and as many as 300 traders are said to have gone to the Ohio country every season thereafter, for several years. If anyone wishes a more detailed story of this growth of colonial trade it can be found in Walton's "Conrad Weiser."
In 1748, the Ohio company was organized in Vir- ginia for trade and colonization in the Ohio Valley. They applied to the King for a grant of 500,000 acres in that valley, (which Virginia claimed), and they received, by the royal order of May 19, 1749, 200,000, on condition that they settle 100 families on the tract, each year, for seven years, and build a fort to protect them. This done they were to receive an additional
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300,000 acres. This company did a little memorable work. They contracted with Col. Thomas Cresap "to lay out and mark a road" from Will's Creek, (now Cumberland, Md.), to the forks of the Ohio. Cresap, with the aid of an Indian named Nemacolin, marked the trees along an old trail that had been occasionally used by the Indians, and created a path fit for sure- footed pack horses. It lay not far from the route of the old National Road, as now found there.
In 1736, Col. William Mayo from a head spring of the Potomac passed over to the head of a tributary of the Monongahela with a party of surveyors. In 1748, Dr. Thomas Walker, "a genuine explorer and surveyor, a man of mark," reached the Cumberland River, and in 1750, passed through and named the Cumberland Gap, after the Duke of Cumberland.
The British population that was crowding west- ward toward the Great Lakes and swelling to the crests of the Alleghanies, occupied a territory of 514,416 square miles, (Census Report of 1850), and numbered 1,160,000. The French who were to try to stop the westward movement of the British, numbered no more than 80,000, and they claimed in addition to all Canada, the entire Mississippi Valley with its area of 1,217,562 square miles. If the French were to hold their claims to the Mississippi Valley, they needed to bestir them- selves-and that they did.
But before telling what they did to rivet their claims to the Great Basin, it seems worth while to con- sider whether the British ought to have respected the claim of the French.
The French claim was based on the work of La
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Salle in discovering the mouth of the Mississippi, and in building forts within the watershed of the Great River. Under the law and practice of nations, this certainly gave them what is now called the right of pre- emption to the whole basin. They had the right to establish a great French colony there. But when that much is conceded, the fact remains that the French nation had failed to do anything in furtherance of this right-they had failed to colonize the region. The widely scattered posts that had been established could no more be called lasting or sufficient "improve- ments on the claim," than the planting of an apple seed would have been, in recent years, sufficient to give an American settler a right to a quarter section of land in Kansas as a timber claim. The Mississippi Valley, with its capacity to support 200,000,000 people, in the middle of the 18th century contained less than 7,000 Frenchmen, including slaves; and more than half of these were concentrated around New Orleans. The whole region was an unscarred wilderness.
Although there were no statutes or treaties that covered the condition of affairs in the Mississippi Val- ley, the French law governing individual settlers at the posts is a strong point to urge against the French claim to the whole valley. To any French settler of good standing in the church the King would concede a reasonable tract of land on condition that he improve it. within seven years. If within seven years he failed to improve the claim to the satisfaction of the com- mandant of the post, the land could be taken by another. The Mississippi Valley, in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, was by the French standard, wild land, be-
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cause they had not made the proper improvements; and it was therefore open to the claims of whomso- ever would improve it.
To look at the matter in another point of view, the French were trying to take the wild region for a vast game preserve, wherein to gather furs, while the Brit- ish were trying to get it for home sites. The quarrel was somwhat like that between actual settlers and cat- tlemen on the wild land west of the Mississippi after our Civil war. Exact justice always gave the actual settler his claim wherever he chose to stake it.
But laying aside all such arguments as these (al- though an international court would consider them), there is one more point to be made for the British, and it is one that is decisive. The argument is as follows :
For more than fifty years the French, in order to preserve their trade with the Indians, had deliberately waged an inhuman warfare on the British settlements that were within convenient reach of the French posts. In due time they determined to monopolize the trade of the Mississippi Valley, as they had tried to monopo- lize that of the St. Lawrence. To do that they began attacking the British traders found west of the Alle- ghanies, and then they established forts in that region. The British colonists were fully justified in believing that raiders would be sent from the French posts west of the Alleghanies as they had been sent from the posts on the St. Lawrence.
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