USA > Mississippi > The pioneers, preachers and people of the Mississippi Valley > Part 8
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almost say of decency-which it would be hard to match, I faney, in the ball-room of our own more in- telligently Christian and more elaborately civilized society.
Other balls they had, with somewhat more of cere- monious observance. On New Year's Eve, the young men of the village patrolled the town in the costume of beggars, and entering the cottages in which dwelt the fairest maidens, petitioned for bread. Being well feasted and entertained, they then extended an invi- tation to each hospitable damsel for the dance to-mor- row evening. This was the inauguration of the festi- val of the coming year. About the Sth of that month, great cakes were baked, and in these were carefully deposited four beans. The cakes were cut, and the gentlemen to whose share fell the pieces with beans in them, were called kings. These four bean- kings selected four queens, and the queens then se- lected the kings of the next ball that was to be given. At its close, the lady queens of the occasion selected four other gentlemen, whom they elected to the honor of this shadowy kingship, inaugurating them with all due solemnity, by the granting of a kiss. These gen- tlemen inaugurated other ladies by the same interest- ing process, and they became the regulators and go- vernors of the following ball. And this, the " King- Ball," as it has been called, has been kept up, and still is, through all these years; and if you ever trave.
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in the State of Indiana, and stop at the ancient town of Vincennes, and there have a friend or acquaint- ance who can introduce you to the French society of the place, you may, on a given evening of almost any week in the calendar year, have an opportunity of attending the king ball ; for it has never been allowed to pass out of fashion from the early settlement of Illinois down to the present writing.
These people, with their kind and simple habits, easily fraternized with the Indians, and although there was great difference between them and those original owners of the soil, by reason of physical, mental, and moral condition, their differences seemed to relate and ally them more intimately to each other than white and red men were ever allied on this con- tinent before. To the honor of both parties let it be said, there was scarce ever a fraud, a quarrel, or a murder between the French and Indians upon the soil of Illinois ; and it constitutes, in this particular, the one only grand exception, saving the enterprise of Friend William Penn in the establishment of his City of Brotherly Love. And there, even, as soon as the good Penn himself had passed away, and the equally good, if not better, James Logan, who after him came into the dignity of Secretary of the Colony of Pennsylvania-so soon as their official sway and authoritative influence was gone, the Quakers were found to the full as overbearing, unjust, avaricious,
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careless, and regardless of the good of the natives, as the Puritan Fathers of New England. But these Frenchmen of Illinois, singularly enough it seems to the student of American history, in all their inter- course with the Indians treated them like human beings and equals in every respect, and received the kind and faithful treatment which was the natural result, in turn. The friendly and trustful reciprocity of benefits, the intimate neighborly communion, be- tween these forest Frenchmen and forest Indians, constitutes one of the few beautiful pages in the record of American colonization, usually so dry and barren, or so blood-stained and full of miseries.
And thus, in that pleasant untroubled far-off land, and except for their happy family relation and the wise separate ownership of their lands, holding their property in common, sheltered almost like children under the mild influence of the good priests to whom, as to a father, they told all their sweet confi- dences of love, or their little sorrows and troubles, resting in sunshine, and far from wars and disturb ance, beneath the broad banner with the lilies that streamed from the battlements of the old fort : thus was enacted this brief poem of the ages, this Idyl of America. This atmosphere of rural freshness, of de- lightful confidence, of unrestrained liberty, free from the sordid, troubled, eager haste of trade, the harden- ing touch of avarice, the gnawing tooth of care-
7
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passed so far backward toward that lovely dream, the Golden Age, that in truth and reality it began to reproduce the lengthening of days, always a feature in the limning of that ancient legend. These people, it seemed, would have come to live forever, if forever were a possible term on earth.
And why should they grow old ? It is care that wears us all out. We struggle beneath burdens in- expressible. Anxiety, with terrific plough, scars dreadful furrows over brow and cheek ; worn out and weary, the springs of life exhausted, and desire even all but dead, we tremble on the verge of the grave at the age of fifty or sixty. Yet the French in Illi- nois retained good spirits, physical elasticity, and exceeding animation, to the age of ninety, one hun- dred, one hundred and ten, and one hundred and twenty ; and such cases you may find even now in Attakapas, Opelousas, or Bayou Lafourche, the French Creole regions of Louisiana.
Thus went their lives kindly and cheerily by, though with no impulse, little enterprise, no inspira- tions ; and though it was perhaps but a droning life-no contribution to the accumulated treasures of the ages, no exemplification of a stern struggle for principle, nor of a mighty aspiration and effort for the ideals of the race-yet it was such a sunny, peace- ful life, so quietly, brightly joyous with the genial play of benign feelings, of the kindly social faculties
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of our nature, as gladdens us to look upon. We must long, sometimes, to escape out of the mighty rushing current of our civilized life, and to rest awhile upon some green island like this, where God's heaven hath not a cloud, where storm and tempest are unknown, where the still waters around us have not a ripple on their surface.
Thus were they living, missionaries, fur traders, voyageurs, farmers, simply and innocently, in honest labor and harmless enjoyments, in the year 1719 or 1720. A sort of border war was then carried on between the French in Louisiana under their great leader, Bienville, and the Spanish viceroyalty of Mexico. Offended at the rapid daring with which the French were pushing their explorations and planting their outposts west of the Mississippi, and toward the great Santa Fe trail, which had even then been opened by traders, they secretly organ- ized a great expedition at Santa Fe, for the pur- pose of exterminating such of the French settlements on the upper Mississippi as they could reach, and substituting Spanish colonies instead ; to which end were sent priests, artifieers and women, property and domestic animals, all the materials for a new establishment. Their plan of operations was to join forces with the Osage Indians, and in concert with them, first to exterminate their enemies the Mis- souries, the allies of the French, and then to queneh
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the light of the flourishing settlements in a storm of blood and fire, and plant instead the standard of Spain.
After a long desert march of nine hundred miles across the plains which have of late years become so familiar to us, they reached that recent battle- ground of politics, the upland prairie country of Kansas, the supposed abode of their expected allies, the Osages. By a strange fortune, they fell in with their intended victims, the Missouries, instead, who spoke the same language with the Osages ; and confident of their men, at once revealed to them the plan for the total destruction of their tribe. The imperturbable savages received the startling news with no sign of surprise, signified their appro- bation of the scheme, requested two days to assemble their warriors, and took their measures in savage secrecy. They drew from the Spaniards full details of the plan, and in character of the Osages received the ample supplies of ammunition and more than a hundred guns, destined for their own slaughter.
And now the next morning was to witness the setting forth of the joint expedition. But to the treacherous and self-deluded Spaniards that morning never came. In the night the Missouries rose up and smote their invaders and slew them, until but one living soul was left-a Jesuit priest, whom they sent back to Santa Fe with the doleful tidings.
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Though thus providentially preserved, this nine hundred miles' march awakened the apprehensions of the French for their distant settlements in Illinois and on the upper Mississippi ; and they promptly erected Fort Orleans, on an island in the Missouri above the mouth of the Osage River; and for the immediate defence of the Illinois settlements, that dignified and famous stronghold already mentioned, Fort Chartres. This fortress was completed during the year 1720. It was placed about a mile and a half from the Mississippi River, within the great American Bottom which we have already described, near the five chief villages of the Illinois country- Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Prairie de Rocher, St. Philip, and St. Geneviève, which last alone was west of the Great River. To these was soon added the vil- lage of Fort Chartres, which grew up under the walls of the fort.
This redoubted fortress, long the strongest garrison on the North American continent, occupied an irre- gular square of about three hundred and fifty feet to the side. Its walls were of solid masonry, three feet thick and fifteen feet high. Its ramparts were de- fended by twenty great guns; and such was its strength and armament, that it was impregnable to any force then available against it. Here, for forty years, was the centre of the French power in Illinois, the key of all the land, an important link of the great
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chain of fortresses between Quebec and New Orleans; the residence of the French commandant ; the metro- polis of the gaiety and fashion of all the country round : as an old Illinois chronicler, with pardonable local enthusiasm, calls it, "the Paris of America." But, alas for the brief duration of human prosperity ! In 1765, the last French commandant of the Illinois, M. St. Ange de Bellerive, formally gave up the fort and his authority into the hands of the British captain, Sterling. And all this time, the capricious, mighty flood of the Mississippi was silently marching across from the westward, arraying against its strong walls powers not to be opposed by great guns nor by regi- ments of armed men. Steadily the eating flood swept nearer and nearer, and presently -- in 1772 -- two bastions were undermined. The English disman- tled and deserted the old fort. Fifty years ago, part of its site had been swept away by the devouring river, and it was a venerable ruin, solitary and over- grown with wild vines and with trees, some a foot in diameter.
The Spanish invasion had long passed by ; and under the kindly despotie patriarchate of the commandant in Fort Chartres, and of the little village senates of old men, in the beauteous prairie land-where the land lies rolling like the billows of the sea, heaved in gen- tle undulations beneath the summer sun, studded with groves like islands far out on the deep, carpeted
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with flowers that lend their rich fragrance to the air until for sweetness you seem to be walking in Para- dise, where all that is around gladdens the senses and rejoices the heart-the French colonists lie down and rise up without fear or guile, thinking no evil against any, and themselves without apprehension of incur- sion of savage, attack from hostile army, or any rob- bery or theft or fraud. Here life is serene as if man were never driven out of Eden, and the flaming che- rubin stationed at the gate with his terrific sword.
But far away beyond the mountains is gathering the storm of war, which is to transfer all this vast val- ley from French to English hands, and to substitute for the bright, peaceful happiness which I have striven to depict, the rough and passionate cupidity of the Anglo-American backwoodsman-the violent sway of arms. The English settlers, eager after the magnifi- cent lands beyond the Alleghanies, are slowly steal- ing over the ridge; and military detachments, and families, and single hunters, push westward into the great valley. The French have long been steadfastly advancing the design conceived by La Salle almost a hundred years before ; and from Quebec to New Or- leans the vast girdle of fortresses and confederate na- tions, at once held together and made accessible by the wondrous highway of the Great Lakes and the Great River, is almost complete, keyed by the great metropolitan stronghold of Fort Chartres, and lack-
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ing but one or two more fortresses between that and New Orleans.
That mighty and terrible confederation, the Six Nations, has long resisted the furious attacks of Onondio, the great French captain, and governor of Canada; has kept the valley of the Ohio unknown and inaccessible to their missionaries, their traders, and their settlers ; and has, for the most part, nega- tively or positively, been ranged on the side of the English. Some of their young men, on distant scout- ing parties, have seen large bodies of French troops moving up the rapids of the St. Lawrence. They bring the news home; and in the great confederate senate-house at Onondaga a council of the Six Na- tions is held, to consider the important information. It is resolved to send the tidings to the Governors of Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia, and it is done. But these great men are little inclined to be- stir themselves; they are busied in squabbling with the provincial assemblies, or they are at ease, and would fain be left "in their lazy dignities "-all but Governor Dinwiddie, of Virginia, an able, shrewd, stirring Scotchman, who sees at once the importance of the juncture. The troops now pushing up the St. Lawrence, are destined to occupy and hold for the French king the valley of the Ohio-for notwithi- standing the Mississippi had been explored a hundred years before, and routes had long been open between
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Quebec and New Orleans, by way of the Illinois and Wabash, it was not until about 1740 that the Ohio, above the Wabash, had been even explored by the French. The present scheme is to move by way of Niagara across to the headwaters of the Alleghany, to occupy thence downward all the valley of the Ohio, and in course of time to secure the whole land close west of the Alleghanies, and confine the grow- ing English settlements to the narrow belt between the Alleghanies and the sea.
The Six Nations send the French commander a message of entreaty, remonstrance, and threats. But these are treated with contempt, and the standard of France moves forward. Governor Dinwiddie sends a messenger to ask the French what is their design in thus entering the valley of the Ohio-of the Beauti- ful River, as the French boatmen call it. "For," say the English, " all the land is ours, from the stormy Atlantic across to the peaceful sea on the west ; be- cause"-admirable logic !- " our countrymen first settled the eastern shore. We deny the claim of the French to the Mississippi valley, founded on the de- scent of its chief water-course, the river," by "one La Salle," as Washington called him.
Yet the title by which the English held the Atlan- tic slope was no better, if even as good, as that of the French to the great inland valley. The only Eng- lishman who had entered that valley before 1740 was
7*
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Captain Barré, the agent of Dr. Daniel Coxe, proprie- tor of New Jersey, who entered the Mississippi River from its mouth in a corvette of twelve guns. Stem- ming the deep and muddy current, all at once the English captain is hailed from a small boat that meets him in one of the reaches of the river. A lad of twenty-one, in command of the skiff-it is Bienville, then and long after the Governor of Louisiana for the French king-stands up and addresses Captain Barré. The truth is, that his army is with him in that little boat, and he has scarce a better weapon than his naked hand, for he is on an exploring expedition, not a conquering one. Yet he hails as sternly as if the commander of regiments and embattled forts. "Turn about," he orders, " and go down the river ! I am loth to harm you, but if you go beyond the next bend, I have guns enough in position there to blow you out of the water, and I will do it !" The daunted Englishman, believing every word, obeys, and es- capes with his sloop-of-war, as fast as he can, from the boy and his boat's crew ; and to this day the point in the river where he retreated is called the Englishı Turn. This was the only entrance of the English into the Mississippi Valley until Dr. Walker's first exploring expedition over the Cumberland Mountains, about 1748.
What right had either nation to these lands ? Said an old Delaware to an English partisan, "The king
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of France claims all the lands one side of the Ohio, and the king of England all on the other side. Now, where are the Indian's lands ?" And the confounded backwoodsman was speechless. The red men owned the lands. Neither Onondio nor Corlear-neither Englishman nor Frenchman, had the shadow of any claim to a foot of land in the valley of the Missis- sippi.
But of all this the shrewd Scotch governor of Vir- ginia neither thinks nor cares. He rests satisfied upon the usual claim by discovery, and is the more certain of the justice of his country's pretensions because his own estates in forest lands depend thereon. So he inquires by the mouth of his messenger, one Major Washington of the Virginia provincial forces, what does the king of France mean, and what do his servants of Canada mean, by thus presuming to in- trude upon undoubted English territory in the Ohio valley ? The young major of course receives a curt though courteous reply, and carries it back to those who sent him.
Not, however, to let the affair rest ; for their glow- ing zeal for the pretensions of his Britannie majesty is intensified and made practical by their own. For the Ohio Company of Virginia has received a gift- no matter though the king who gave it did not own it-of six hundred thousand acres of the best land west of the mountains; and in this company, two
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elder brothers of our youthful provincial major, and Governor Dinwiddie, are principal shareholders. If the French hold the Ohio valley, these present broad domains on earth, and still fairer future castles in the air, will alike disappear, and great prospective gains will be lost. This, I hasten to add, is said without meaning to impute any sinister motives to George Washington. He sincerely believed in the English claim, and in his own and his friends' property ; and he would have been more than human if these pecu- niary interests had not reinforced the alacrity which he would, no doubt, have shown in the cause if he had never owned a foot of Ohio land, nor expected to.
He returns, at any rate, in 1754, now promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and in command of a small body of troops, to arrest the progress of the French, who have commenced actual hostilities by taking from the English (in April, 1754) a small stockade fort in the forks of the Alleghany and Mo- nongahela Rivers, and by beginning a stronger and more serviceable fortress in its place, which they call Fort Duquesne, in honor of the governor-general of Canada. Washington crosses Laurel Ridge, and gains the Great Meadows, a pleasant open spot some fifty miles southeast of the new French stronghold. Here he learns from an old friend and companion in forest journeys, one Christopher Gist, settled near by, and from the half-king of the Delawares, Tanachari-
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son, that a party of French are in his neighborhood, with warlike intentions. His Indian allies search them out, and about sunrise he discovers them en- camped in a retired and secret place among thie rocks. Discerning the tall form of the Virginian advancing from among the trees, and the troops behind him, they spring to arms, and at once commence a vigorous fire upon the English. But being surrounded and outnumbered, ten of them, including their commander, M. de Jumonville, are killed, and the remainder made prisoners.
That brief command, " Fire !" echoed all over the earth. That scattering blaze of musketry among an obscure pile of wild rocks beneath the western Alle- ghanies, kindled a conflagration that spread through- out the continent of Europe, as fire runs through the dry prairie-grass in autumn time ; and burned even on the far shores of Asia. It was the beginning of the Seven Years' War, a struggle which called forth the genius of Pitt as a minister and parliamentarian, and of Frederic the Great as a warrior ; which crushed the doctrine of legitimacy in France ; and which, under the over-ruling of Him who sees the end from the beginning, not as man ordereth, but who maketh the wrath of man to praise Him, did more to elevate the masses of the population of Europe, and to pre- pare the way for the freedom and independence of our own country, than all other causes together.
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The war thus fairly commenced, Jumonville's brother, De Villiers, commandant at Fort Chartres, hastens eastward to revenge his brother's death, and finds Lieutenant-Colonel Washington still in the neighborhood, opening a military road for troops ex- pected from Virginia. The Frenchman came upon him with double his forces, but declining the battle which the bold young commander offered in the open ground before the fort which he had constructed, he laid siege to the small and ill-provisioned stockade, which, with a judgment giving little promise of his after wisdom, Washington had planted in low ground, where it was commanded and almost thoroughly raked from the secure covert of the wooded ridges on either side. An attack was soon commenced, and after nine hours of sharp firing, during which thirty of the garrison were killed and three wounded, the French commander, afraid that his ammunition would fail, allowed Washington to capitulate and retire east of the mountains with all the honors of war; the articles of capitulation, which were in French, by means of the ignorance or treachery of the inter- preter, admitting the death of Jumonville to be an " assassination," and promising that no further estab- lishments should be attempted west of the mountains for the term of one year. This obligation was not taken to be binding.
Then comes the expedition of General Edward
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Braddock, whose hot-headed valor, absurd routinism, and arrogant conceit, we all know ; as well as the in- conceivable obstinate folly with which he persisted in trying to dress ranks, and form by platoons, there among the forests, " as if manœuvring his troops upon the plains of Flanders;" and the genuine English pride and stubbornness with which he refused to take advice from the provincials, experienced in bush- ranging and Indian fighting; and how the hard- headed fool thus threw away his own life, and the lives of three hundred better men, great treasures wasted to no purpose, with the certain prospect of taking Fort Duquesne ; for nothing was further from the minds of the French and Indians than a victory, and they were on the point of evacuating the fort.
And now, in good season, the Great Commoner, William Pitt, takes the helm of English affairs. " What are we to do ?" cries Chesterfield ; " abroad reverses and disgrace ; at home, poverty and bank- ruptcy-what are we to do ?" In America, the French line of midland forts was steadily and rapidly closing in behind the belt of English settlements along the sea. In India, the other side of the world, Dupleix had laid at Pondicherry the foundations of a power which promised quicky to exterminate the timid traders of the East India Company, and to bring the oriental wealth and the swarming millions of Hindos- tan beneath the power of France. In the Mediterra-
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nean, Minorca was taken by the French forces under the Duke de Richelieu. On the continent of Europe, the single ally of England, of any power, Frederic of Prussia, was attacked at once by the three vast em- pires of Austria, France, and Russia, and that in a quarrel where he was flagrantly in the wrong ; and the English king's own hereditary dominions of Ha- nover were overrun by French troops. The tremen- dous energy, the pride, the rapid decision and daring of the great minister, inspired fleets, armies, the whole nation. From being sullen, gloomy, discouraged, fearful, they became, in a year or two, daring, high- spirited, fearless, and enterprising, almost beyond the bounds of human belief or human capacity. Under his strong, haughty, and energetic direction, the stout Prussian king is brought safely through his terrific war ; Hanover is cleared of the French ; the coalition between Russia, Austria, and France is shattered ; the victories of Clive and Lawrence eradicate the very foundations of the French empire in Hindostan, and lay the corner stone of the vast dominion of British India. In America, the brave New England hosts take the stronghold of Louisbourg, and the gal- lant Wolfe, scaling the heights of Abraham, as it were buys with his heart's blood the victory over Mont- calm and the surrender of the great French citadel of Quebec. An irresistible flood of British conquest sweeps round and round the world ; and the humbled
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