USA > Mississippi > The pioneers, preachers and people of the Mississippi Valley > Part 5
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lain through all these years of self renouncing toils, and hold it up before him. His face glows with a holy transport, as if it were an angel's ; one word, "Jesus," is on his lips, and then-he is dead.
'Tis well. Nine years of untiring labor for the sal- vation of the heathen, a life of perfect self-abnega- tion, a discovery rivalling in magnificence any ever made, are thus terminated by a lonely death on a desolate shore. Thus died Xavier, his elected model, after living as he had lived. Two years after, in 1677, a flotilla of canoes from Mackinaw came to that dark wood at the mouth of the little river; the Indians among whom he had long and faithfully labored exhumed his remains and bore them to Mac- kinaw. A fleet advancing from the shore met them, with tearful eyes, and amid the slow solemn strains of " De Profundis," chanted by priests and Indians, the remains were borne to the shore and finally depo- sited beneath the church, on whose site he had so often led their worship.
For many a long year after, when the forest rangers abroad upon the stormy lake were endan- gered by sudden tempest or wild billows, their piteous cries were heard, and Marquette was the name they cried, asking his intercession, as of an all- powerful and undoubted saint.
Important as his discovery was, it is certain that it would have been of slight advantage to France, but
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for the exertions of a young adventurer, whose story we have next to trace.
When Joliet was on his way to Quebec, after quit- ting Marquette, he stopped at Fort Frontenac, on Lake Ontario, where the town of Kingston now stands. The commandant of this post drank in with greedy ears the trader's recital of his voyage. IIe was one of the few that ever saw the Journal and map of Joliet. The trader went his way and the young soldier of fortune remained to dream in the wilderness and work his way to renown.
Robert Cavelier de la Salle was born of an ancient and honorable family in Rouen. Renouncing his patrimony, or in some way deprived of it by unjust laws, he became a Jesuit, and received in a college of that order a thorough education. But finding the life of a priest incompatible with his tastes, he quitted the fraternity, receiving high testimonials of capacity and fidelity, and embarked as an adventurer for Canada, where he arrived between 1665 and 1670. Here the force of his character soon displayed itself by his successful prosecution of various difficult enterprises. In 1674 we find him commanding at the fort named in honor of Frontenac, governor of the province. The confidence of this functionary he seems to have completely gained. The next year he visited France with strong recommendations from the governor to the ministry. Colbert was then at
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the head of the cabinet of Louis XIV. This great statesman listened attentively to the plans of the young soldier, and induced his royal master to grant his request. To La Salle was accordingly given a title of nobility, a monopoly in the fur-trade around Lake Ontario, the command and ownership of Fort Frontenac, and the lands in its neighborhood, on condition of his erecting a stone fortress, and estab- lishing a mission-for to overawe and convert the Iroquois, was the double object of the establishment. While engaged in this undertaking, he showed him- self an able politician, by his skillful management of the tribes around him. On the completion of his task, he found himself ruined. To while away the long winter evenings in his frontier post, and to ban- ish the demon of anxiety, he betook himself to the study of the Spanish accounts of America and its con- quest. His mind . now reverted to the narrative of Joliet, little heeded at the time, and he seems to have been the first to identify the river which De Soto had discovered, with that explored by Mar- quette. To the Mississippi and its valley, the heart of our adventurer now turned in his extremity. There his failure might be retrieved, and fortune be secured. If he can obtain a monopoly of the fur- trade in that vast region, extend a line of posts from Canada to the Gulf, found a colony at the month of the great river, and ship his peltries thence to
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France, what easier ? Gigantic enterprise, you will say. But what can not one strong will do?
IIastening again to France in 1677, he readily obtained, through the friendship of the great Colbert, and of his son, the Duke de Seignelai, minister of the marine, the sanction and authority he needed from the crown. His patent confirmed the previous one, empowered him to construct forts wherever necessary in the western part of New France, and gave him a vast monopoly of the fur-trade, including, with some exceptions, the whole Mississippi valley. Recruiting a company of mechanics and mariners, he starts a a third time for Canada, and September of the next year, 1678, found him once more at his seigniory of Fort Frontenac, on Lake Ontario, with sixty men, prepared and resolved to carry out his great scheme of discovery, trade and settlement. He brought with him one IIenry de Tonty as his lieutenant. This Tonty, said to have been the son of the inventor of those life insurance schemes called Tontines, was an Italian, who had been highly recommended to La Salle by a great noble of the French court; and he thenceforth ever proved himself an unswerving ally, a faithful and able officer, and a trusty friend. Hle had been a soldier seven years in the French wars, and having lost a hand by a grenade in Sicily, had supplied its place with a rude claw of iron.
With his vast plans revolving in his mind, shaping
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out the conception of that belt of forts and missions and settlements twelve hundred miles long, which was at once to secure the great continent for the Grand Monarch, to gird in and overawe the English and Spanish seaboards, to gather the Indians into the Catholic church, and to give himself unbounded riches and a mighty lordship-with all these magni- ficent dreams in his soul, La Salle nevertheless applied himself diligently to the details and drudgery of their small mercantile beginnings, sending forward traders to gather furs, and organizing matters at and about the Fort.
Ilis design was to build a vessel above Niagara, to sail in it as far on his way as the upper lakes would admit, and then to cross by land to the Mississippi, and proceed down the great river in another vessel. He therefore sent Tonty in a small craft of ten tons which had been built at Fort Frontenac the year before, with workmen, tools, materials, and provisions, to select a proper spot for building his brigantine, and also for erecting a fort.
They arrived at the mouth of the Niagara River in the beginning of January, 1679, and leaving their vessel and going round the falls, chose their dock- yard ; but finding the Indians dissatisfied with the plan of erecting a fort, they pacified them, not with- out difficulty, and confined themselves to palisading the cabins in which they passed the winter.
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La Salle embarked from Fort Frontenac, a short time after their departure, in another small vessel with merchandise, provisions, and rigging for the new ship, delaying, as he came, to conciliate the Senecas. IIe reached Niagara on the 20th of January ; and already there began to lower over him the dark clouds of that long series of misfortunes against which he bore up for so many years, with such heroic but unsuccessful strength and resolution. All at once he was assaulted with all the evils which afterward pursued him; timi- dity or dislike or senseless obstinacy in his men, bitter and unscrupulous enmity from the traders with whom his monopoly interfered, and rapacious severity from his creditors. The two pilots of his vessel quarrelled about the route, and wrecked her on the south shore of Lake Ontario. The anchors and the rigging were secured with great difficulty; but the goods and pro- visions were lost. The Indian traders too, with whom his monopoly interfered, and those connected with them in business, had begun to poison the minds of the Indians, by representing that his forts and ships were intended, not for trade, but to subdue the tribes.
But La Salle, with the able diplomacy of the French, conciliated the Senecas in his one short visit. Deferring his fort at Niagara to please them, and urging on his main expedition to the West, he at once chose, from among the sites which had been explored for a dock-yard, a locality about six miles above the
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falls, on the English side, at the month of a creek, and himself drove the first bolt in the frame of his in- tended vessel, a week after his arrival. Then, leav- ing Tonty in charge of the ship-building, he hastened back again to Fort Frontenac by land, almost three hundred miles through snowy forests, with a bag of parched corn to eat, and with two men and a boy as guides and baggage-train. His errand now was to complete his arrangements for raising money, and for the management of his property during his absence. For nearly six months he was thus industriously at work in preparation, and struggling against the busy and unscrupulous intrigues of his enemies. Ilis creditors too, in Montreal and Quebec, frightened at the stories which they heard of his wild schemes and monstrous expenses, seized and sold at ruinous saeri- fice whatever of his property they could lay hands on.
But he could not stop to set these things right- that would have been precisely what his enemies designed ; so letting his peltries and merchandise go, and making a farewell grant out of his estate at Fort Frontenac to the Franciscans, of a hundred and cigh- teen acres of land-he had already erected for them dwellings and a chapel-he set off again for Niagara, hearing that his new ship was launched and ready. Coasting the southern shore of the lake in a canoe, he renewed his friendship with the Indians by the way. He found his vessel already launched, and towed up
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the river to within a mile or two of Lake Erie. She was named the Griffin, was of sixty tons burden, armed with two brass guns and three arquebuses, and adorned with a wooden griffin for a figure-head.
After some delay the expedition, of thirty-four souls, including three Franciscan missionaries, em- barked on the 7th of August, 1679, amid shouts and salvoes of artillery, upon the untried waters of Lake Erie, westward bound. They steered boldly into the unknown depths of the lake, confident in their com- passes and in the skill of their pilot; crossed the lake in less than three days ; threaded the shallows of the straits of Detroit and St. Clair, and the lake between them, to which they gave its present name in honor of the day ; then entered the broad expanse of Lake Huron. In crossing this, they encountered a tempest so terrible that they gave themselves up for lost, La Salle himself even crying out that they were undone, and offering fervent vows to the great St. Anthony of Padua, in case they should eseape alive. Only the tough old sea-dog of a pilot would neither fear nor pray, but, Hennepin says, "did nothing all that while but curse and swear against M. de la Salle, who had brought him thither to make him perish in a nasty lake, and lose the glory he had acquired by his long and happy navigation on the ocean." They escaped, however, and arrived safe at Mackinaw.
Here La Salle found that the influence of his ene.
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mies, the traders, had gone before him. They had made the Indians believe that he intended both to restriet to himself all trade in skins, and also to subject them to the crown of France; and they received him coldly and suspiciously, though with ceremonious politeness. They had also tampered with his advanced guard, most of whom had been indolent and unfaithful in their task of gathering furs and provisions. Still, the energetic leader was not to be diverted from his purpose. He left his faithful lieutenant, Tonty, to collect some of the deserters, and himself pushed on again in the Griffin for Green Bay. At the entrance of this arm of Lake Michigan, on a small island occupied by Pottawatomie Indians, he found some of his missing fur-traders, with great store of peltries, the proceeds of their barter with the Indians.
La Salle here takes a sudden and singular resolu- tion ; and one not pleasing to his men. But he is not wont to ask counsel at their hands, or indeed at the hands of any. Of few words, and of reserved and even harsh manners, he evolves his plans in silence and alone within his own soul, and sets himself to accomplish them with a will seemingly incapable of diversion or discouragement ; but he asks no man's advice, "talks things over" with no one; only resolves, and then orders. Strange character for a Frenchman-and not only strange, but unfortunate,
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at least so far as popularity was important to him. For a chief impediment to his plans, and the cause of his own untimely end, was the insubordination and enmity of his own men. In truth, there seems to have been not one faithful and thoroughgoing helper among them all, except Henry de Tonty the iron-handed Italian, and one poor Indian of some distant eastern tribe, called Nika, a hunter of exqui- site skill, who followed his fortune hither and thither as closely and steadily as a dog, often the sole sup- port of La Salle himself and all his party for days and days together, and finally murdered with his mas- ter, for his faithfulness to him. Peace to the poor forgotten shade of that brave and faithful red man !
This strange resolution was, to send the Griffin, laden with the furs at Green Bay and what others could be gathered on the road, back again to Niagara, that her cargo might pay his debts. All the rest would much prefer the stanch and hitherto fortunate brigantine, for the remainder of the peril- ous navigation through Lake Michigan, to the frail slender canoes, exposed to furious tempests and thievish or hostile savages. But none thinks it best to remonstrate ; and with a prosperous westerly wind, the Griffin sets sail on the 18th of July, manned with five men and the swearing unterrified pilot, firing a farewell gun as she departs.
She was never heard of more. Somewhere in the
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depths of the north end of Lake Michigan, between Green Bay and Mackinaw, her decayed timbers, and the rusty relies of the "two brass guns and three arquebuses," her vaunted armament, yet repose. All else must long since have disappeared. Father Hennepin, with unclerical, careless disregard for the six unfortunate souls, her ship's company, dismisses the subject by saying, " This was a great loss for M. de la Salle and other adventurers, for that ship with its cargo cost above sixty thousand livres,"-twelve thousand dollars.
But La Salle, hopeful and cheery, as trusting in speedy freedom from debts behind, and speedy glory of great discoveries before, now pushes on southward in four canoes, burdened disproportionately with weighty property, even including a blacksmith's forge, and with a party now reduced by detachment and desertion, to fourteen. After a most toilsome and dangerous journey along the western side of the lake, sometimes entertained generously by friendly Indians, once embroiled with a roving squad of Outagamies or Foxes on a thieving expedition, on the first of November they safely entered the Miami River, now called the St. Josephs, the appointed rendezvous for Tonty and for the Griffin.
All that winter was spent in waiting for the expected comers. The men, weary of living by the uncertain fruits of the chase, dreading the winter
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and its famine, dreading the dangers of this vast unknown region into which they were to be led, murmured and complained, and desired to proceed into the Illinois country, where there was corn. But La Salle refused, gave them good reasons, and kept them busy in building Fort Miamis on a hill at the mouth of the river, while he sounded and staked out the channel, and sent two men to Mackinaw to hasten the coming of his ship.
After long delay, Tonty appeared, gladdening the hearts of the party by the reinforcement and the two canoe-loads of venison he brought, but also bringing to his commander the heavy tidings that the Griffin had not been heard from. La Salle had already become apprehensive respecting her, since nearly twice the time had elapsed which should have brought her to the Miamis. And thus disappeared a large part of his means, and his hopes of promptly paying his debts. But the strong-hearted man wasted no useless grief over misfortunes now past. Delaying yet a little longer, until it became neces- sary to depart to escape from the winter, the expedi- tion left Fort Miamis on the 3d of December, in eight canoes, leaving instructions for the captain of the Griffin, in letters conspicuously fixed on branches of trees. Ascending the Miami about seventy miles. they make a portage across to the head of the Kan- kakee, follow that slow and crooked stream through a
5
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hundred miles of desolate frozen marsh, then emerge into a prairie country, and after two hundred miles more of voyaging, enter the river Illinois.
Thus they navigate southward, descending the two rivers, during the whole of December, supplying themselves with corn from the caches of a large Indian town whose inhabitants had departed to the hunt, leaving their cabins empty. Floating onward through Lake Peoria, they come suddenly, at its southern end, into the midst of a great camp of the Illinois tribe, occupying both sides of the river. But, putting on a bold face, and forming in order of battle, the brave commander of the little band meets the Indians as their superior in force, and only holds out the calumet of peace in answer to their signals ; satis- fies them for the abstraction of their supplies of corn, explains his designs, and concludes a solemn alliance.
That same night came an emissary of his busy foes the private traders, a Mascouten chief named Monso, and poisoned the minds of all the Illinois-a fickle, cowardly, suspicious, thievish and lascivious race- with the same old story that his plan was to exter- minate their nation, and that an army of the terrible Iroquois would soon be upon them. This he indus- triously told to one and another all night long, con- firmed the tale by valuable presents of knives and hatchets and such coveted goods, and fled away before morning, that the unsuspecting Frenchman
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might be ruined without knowing whence caine the blow. La Salle saw at once, when next day he went among his savage hosts, that their yesterday's jovial friendship was quite changed into suspicion and fears. But discovering the trick by means of an Illinois chief who had imbibed a strong liking for him, his frank and judicious explanations soon dispersed this threatening cloud, in appearance at least. Yet the minds of the Illinois were not entirely at rest, and an eminent chief, one Nikanape, took occasion, at a great feast which he gave the French, in a long speech filled with flaming descriptions of terrible savages on the land, and vast monsters and hideous whirlpools in the great river, to dissuade them from going further. It may easily be supposed that the steadfast leader of the French was not moved by this savage rhetoric, whose plain meaning he saw clearly to be, " We do not want you travelling about our country at all ; so please go straight back by the way you came." He calmly rebuked the oratorical Indian for the veiled unfriendliness of his purpose, and the feast proceeded. Yet the infection worked among his men, as usual, and six of them, including two sawyers upon whom he depended to build the vessel in which to descend the Mississippi, ran away, like faint hearts as they were. It is even said that they basely planned a cruel death for their bold commander, and that he only escaped the effect of the poison they gave him,
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by a strong dose of treacle, a sovereign antidote in that day, and which, as well as orvietan, another ancient antidote, La Salle seems always to have had in his medicine chest.
To prevent the rest from further dwelling upon future dangers, he explained to them the peril of leaving him in the winter, promised that those who desired it should be permitted and aided to depart in the spring, showed them how unsafe was their unde- fended condition, and proposed to build another fort. To this they agreed, and he at once laid out the ground, and employed part of them in erecting a stout stockade, and the rest in building the vessel in which he proposed to descend the Great River. When the fort was completed, and it only remained to give it a name, La Salle for once took counsel of his sorrows. He remembered the virulent pursuit of the revenge'al traders; the disappearance of the Griffin, with its rich freight of furs, and its richer freight of human souls ; the wasteful seizure of his goods by the creditors at Montreal and Quebec ; the long, weary journeys to and fro across stormy lakes and wintry forests; the base desertions, and vile, murderous schemes of coward followers ; and named his little stockade Crèvecoeur, "The Fort of the Broken Heart."
But this first and last access of discouragement was soon repelled, and the clear, strong mind of the great
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discoverer regained its steady balance. Having completed the bark on the stocks so far as was pos- sible without the rigging and other materials in the Griffin, and having given up hopes of seeing her, he recognizes the fact that his means for proceeding are exhausted, and quickly and quietly prepares for an- other winter's trip to Fort Frontenac, to refit, recruit, and return. He sends Father Hennepin, one of his Franciscans, with two stout French canoe-men, to explore the upper Mississippi during his own absence; takes with him three Frenchmen and his faithful In- dian hunter, and departing, passes over the twelve hundred miles between Forts Crèvecœur and Fronte- nae, taking the route along the south shore of lakes Ontario and Erie, either near their coasts or upon the highlands dividing their affluents from those of the Ohio, deterred now no more than before, by the deep melting snow of the forests, or the floods and floating ice of so many rivers. Sending word baek to Tonty to build another fort on the strong site afterward occupied by the French, Fort St. Louis, and even now called Rock Fort, on a bluff two hundred feet above the Illinois River, he disappeared in the path- less woods ; and neither of his adventures nor of his solitary thoughts during the weeks of that long, toil- some way. have we any record. But experienced wooderaft, a hardy frame, and a strong will, brought him safely through.
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Of course, misfortune and his enemies have played into each other's hands and against him all the time of his absence. Besides the loss of the Griffin, he has been heavily swindled by his agents in trade on Ontario ; has lost a whole cargo of merchandise in the lower St. Lawrence ; several valuable canoe-loads in the rapids above Montreal ; a quantity more by other employees, who stole them and ran away to the Dutch at " Nouvelle Jorck ;" and still another large quan- tity by forced sales at the instance of creditors, who had heard (or wished they had) that he and all his party were drowned.
Penniless, deeply in debt, all Canada full of his enemies, all his plans crushed, is he helpless, too, and will he succumb and disappear from Canada and from history ? Never ! He has still one powerful and trusty friend-Count de Frontenac, the governor ; and one more, yet more powerful and more trusty- himself. With the aid of these two he bestirs him with such energy and success, that he again secures men and means, and only varying his scheme by giving up the idea of navigating the Mississippi in a large boat or brigantine, and trusting to canoes in- stead, he departs again, July 23d, 1680. After a long journey, delayed by contrary winds on the lakes, he arrives, by way of Fort Miamis, at the chief village of the Illinois. It is burned and empty. In surprise, he proceeds to the site where he had directed Tonty
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to build his second fort. There is not a vestige left of human labor or human presence. He turns about, without going further down the river, and returns to the Miamis, where he remains during that winter, occupied in negotiating peace among the Indians. In the course of this season he learns, from some wandering Illinois, a sad story of the disasters of their nation, but gains no news of Tonty or his men.
But without them, his party is not large enough to proceed down the Great River. In the end of May, 1681, therefore, he returns again toward Canada for further reinforcements, and at Mackinaw, to their mutual surprise and joy, finds Tonty and his men. They exchange the stories of their separate experi- ence. Tonty related how mutiny had obliged him to give up both Fort St. Louis and Fort Crèvecoeur, and had driven him to take shelter with the Illinois ; how an Iroquois army had invaded and scattered that tribe, and destroyed the villages ; and how, after long endeavors to avert the destructive purposes of the savage Iroquois, he and his few men had been forced to flee for their lives to Green Bay, some scouting Kickapoos murdering Father Gabriel de la Ribourde on the road. If he had taken the south road at Lake Dauphin, instead of that to the north, Tonty would have met his commander, on his last outward expe- dition, with a well furnished little fleet of canoes.
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