Century History of Steubenville and Jefferson County, Ohio and Representative Citizens, 20th, Part 7

Author: Doyle, Joseph Beatty, 1849-1927
Publication date: 1973
Publisher: Chicago : Richmond-Arnold Pub. Co.
Number of Pages: 584

USA > Ohio > Jefferson County > Steubenville > Century History of Steubenville and Jefferson County, Ohio and Representative Citizens, 20th > Part 7

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The Iroquois also had a Mars or god of war. The flesh of animals and of captive enemies was burned in his honor. Like Jonskeha, he was identified with the sun, and maybe regarded as the same being under different attributes. There was an- other superhuman personage, a deified hero. He was Taounyawatha, or Hiawa- tha, said to be a divinely appointed mes- senger, who made his abode on earth for the instructions of the race, and whose counterpart was found in the traditions of several primitive races.

Parkman thinks that the primitive In- dian's idea of a Supreme Being was no higher than could have been expected. The moment he began to clothe it with attri- butes, it became finite, and commonly ridic- ulous. In the primitive Indian's concep-

tion of a God the moral had no part. The good spirit is the spirit that gives good luck, and ministers to the necessities and desires of mankind; the evil spirit is sim- ply a malicious agent of disease, death and mischances.

In no Indian language could the early missionaries find a word to express the idea of God. Manitou and Oki meant any- thing endowed with supernatural powers, from a snake skin, or a greasy Indian con- jurer, up to Manabozho and Jouskeha. The priests were forced to use a circumlocution, "The Great Chief of Men," or "He who lives in the Sky." Yet the idea that each race of animals had its archetype or chief would easily suggest the existence of a su- preme chief of the spirits or of the human race. The Jesnit missionaries seized this advantage. "If each sort of animal has its king," they urged, "so, too, have men; and as man is above all the animals, so is the spirit that rules over men the master of all the other spirits." The Indian mind readily accepted the idea, and tribes in no sense Christian, quickly rose to the belief in one controlling spirit. The Great Spirit became a distinct existence, a pervading power in the universe, and a dispenser of justice. Many tribes began to pray to him, though still clinging obstinately to their ancient superstitions; and with some, as the heathen portion of the Iroquois, he was clothed with the attributes of moral good.

The primitive Indian believed in the fu- ture state, if not the immortality of the soul, but he did not always believe in a state of future reward and punishment. Nor, when such a belief existed, was the good to be rewarded a moral good, or the evil to be punished, a moral evil. Skilful hunters, brave warriors, etc., went after death to the happy hunting grounds, while the slothful, the cowardly and the weak were doomed to eat serpents and ashes in the dreary regions of mist and darkness. In the general belief, however, there was but one land of shades for all alike. The spirits, in form and feature as they had been in life, weuded their way through dark

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forests to the villages of the dead, subsist- ing on bark and rotten wood. On arriving they sat all day in the crouching posture of the sick, and, when night came, hunted the shades of animals, with the shades of bows and arrows, among the shades of trees and rocks; for all things, animate and inanimate, were alike immortal, and all passed together to the gloomy country of the dead.

Among the Hurons there were those who held that departed spirits pursued their journey through the sky, along the Milky Way, while the souls of dogs were con- signed to another route, known as the "Way of the Dogs."

At intervals of ten years the Hurons and some other tribes collected the bones of their dead and deposited them with great ceremony in a common place of burial. The whole nation was sometimes assembled on such occasions, and hundreds of corpses were buried in one pit. From this time the innnortality of the soul began. They took wing, as some affirmed, in the shape of pigeons, while others declared that they journeyed on foot and in their own like- ness, to the land of shades, bearing with them ghosts of the wampum belts, beaver skins, bows, arrows, pipes, kettles, beads and rings, buried with them in the common grave. But the spirits of the old and of the children, too feeble for the march, were forced to stay behind, lingering near their earthly villages, where the living often heard the shutting of their invisible cabin doors, and the weak voices of disembodied children driving birds from their corn fields.

The Indian land of souls was not always a region of shadows and gloom. The Hurons sometimes represented the souls of their dead-those of their dogs included- as dancing joyously in the presence of Ataentsic and Jouskeha. According to some Algonquin traditions, heaven was a scene of endless festivity, the ghosts danc- ing to the sound of the rattle and the drum, and greeting with hospitable welcome the occasional visitor from the living world;

for the spirit land was not far off, and rov- ing hunters (alias Æneas) sometimes passed its confines unawares.

Generally, however, the spirits on their journey heavenward were beset with diffi- culties and perils. There was a swift river which must be crossed on a log that shook beneath their feet, while a ferocious dog opposed their passage, and drove many into the abyss. The river was full of stur- geon and other fish, which the ghosts speared for their subsistence. Beyond, was a narrow path, with moving rocks, which, like those which threatened the Argonauts, each instant crashed together, grinding to atoms the less nimble of the pilgrims who tried the passage. A person named Osco- tarach, or Head Piercer, dwelt in a bark house beside the path, and it was his office to remove the brains from the heads of all who went by, as a necessary preparation for immortality. According to some, the brain was afterwards restored to its owner.

Dreams were a universal oracle. They revealed to the sleeper his guardian spirit, taught him the cure of his disease, warned him against sorcerers, guided him to his enemy or haunts of game, and unfolded the book of the future. Their behests must be obeyed to the letter-a source of endless misery and abomination. There were pro- fessional dreamers and professional inter- preters of dreams. The Hurons and Iro- quois had a dream feast, which was a scene of frenzy, where the actors counterfeited madness and the town became worse than a lunatic asylum. Each person pretended to have dreamed of something necessary to his welfare, and rushed from place to place demanding of all he met to guess his secret requirement and satisfy it.

Surrounded by such a cloud of demons and spirits, the Indian lived in perpetual fear. The turning of a leaf, the crawling of an insect, the cry of a bird, the creaking of a bough, was to him a signal of weal or woe. Every community swarmed with sorcerers, medicine men and diviners, whose functions were often united in the same person. The sorcerer, .by charms,

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HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY

magic songs, feasts, beating of drums, etc., of an upright pole, as a sacrifice to some had power over the spirits and could call superior spirit, or to the Sun, with which the superior spirits were constantly con- founded by the primitive Indian. Since Christianity has modified his religious ideas, it has been, and still is, the practice to sacrifice dogs to the Great Spirit. to him the souls of his enemies. They came in the fomin of stones, and he chopped and bruised them with his hatchet; blood and flesh issued forth, and the intended victim, however distant, languished and died. Like his old world counterpart; he made images of those he wished to destroy, and, mutter- ing incantations, punctured them with an awl, whereupon the persons represented sickened and pined away.

The Indian doctor in place of natural remedies relied on dreams, beating of drums, songs, magic fensts and danees and howling to drive the female demon from his patient. The prophet or divines through the flights of birds and movements of fire and water read the secrets of the future. Among the Algonquins, a small conical lodge was made by planting poles in a circle, lashing the tops together seven feet from the ground, and closely covering thein with hides. The prophet crawled in and elosed the aperture after him. He then beat his drums and sang magie songs to summon the spirits, whose weak, shrill voices were heard mingled with his sonor- ous chanting, while at intervals the juggler paused to interpret their communications to the crowd. During the affair, the lodge swayed to and fro with a violence, to aston- ish the beholder, and the whole transaction was such as to give valuable pointers to modern spiritualistic demonstrators.

The sorcerers, medicine men and divi- ners did not usually exercise the functions of priest, in fact the Indians, strictly speak- ing, had no priesthood. Each man saeri- ficed for himself to the powers he wished to propitiate. The most common offering wns tobacco thrown into fire or water. Seraps of meat were sometimes burned to the manitous, and, on a few rare occasions of publie solemnity, a white dog, the mystic animal of many tribes, was tied to the end

Space prevents even a reference to the numerous mystie ceremonies, extravagant, disgusting, designed for the eure of the sick and the general weal. The details can be found in any Indian work. If children were seen in their play imitating any of these mysteries, they were rebuked and punished. Secret magical societies existed, and still exist in the West, which were greatly feared and respected. Indian tales must not be told in summer because the spirits are awake and, hearing what is said of them, inny be offended; but in winter they are fust sealed up in snow and ice.

The Indian, although a child of nature, knew nothing of her laws. If the wind blew, it was beenuse the water lizard, which makes the wind, had crawled out of his pond. If the lightning was sharp and fre- quent, it was because the young of the thunder bird were restless in their nests. If the corn failed, the corn spirit was angry, and if the heavers were shy, it was because they had taken offense nt seeing the bones of one of their number thrown to a dog.

As Parkman says, in summing up, the Indian's gods were no whit better than himself. Even when he borrows from Christianity the idea of a Supreme and Universal Spirit, his tendency is to reduce Him to a local habitation and bodily shape, and this tendency disappears only in tribes that have been long in contact with civilized white men. The primitive Indian, yielding his untutored homage to One All-pervading and Omnipotent Spirit, is a dream of poets, rhetoricians and sentimentalists.

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CHAPTER IV

COMING OF THE WHITE MAN

Early Settlers, English and French-Different Methods-Story of De-he-wamis-Wars With the Whites.

There is a tradition that a party of Eu- or charters from the government, but ropeans were wrecked near the mouths of the Mississippi as early as 1586 and made their way northeastwardly to the Atlantic Coast up the Ohio Valley. If so, they left no record of their wanderings hereabouts, so they may be dismissed from further consideration. When the first English set- tlers arrived at Jamestown, in 1607, they carried a charter which granted a very in- definite area of lands extending to the South Sea, or the Pacific Ocean, which they supposed lay a short distance west of the Alleghenies, but the struggle for existence kept them too busy, und their numbers were too small to allow any serious atten- tion to their great western territory, of which they knew little and cared less. It was more than a hundred years before they began to wake up to the possibilities of this region, and in the meantime another enter- prising nation had gotten ahead of them.

In the year 1535, Cartier, a French ex- plorer, ascended the St. Lawrence River, but it was not until 1608, one year after Jamestown, that Sir Samnel Champlain founded the city of Quebec. But the new- comers speedily made up for lost time. There was an essential difference between the English and French methods of settle- ment. The former were parties of citizens who, for various causes, came to cast their lot in the new world by virtue of grants

largely independent, self-governing, seek- ing little assistance from home, and grow- ing up into a collection of separate com- munities scattered along the coast, having two rather slender bonds of interest, name- ly, allegiance to the king, and the necessity of common defense. The French, on the contrary, derived everything and every authority from the king. The French sol- dier and the French priest accompanied the French commandant, who was the Gover- nor, and the colonists, like the French peas- ants, were simply the base which supported the superstructure. There was one central government which spoke with authority, and the will of the commandant at Quebec was law. This was not the way in which a wilderness could be settled to advantage, and hence it is not surprising that the Eng- lish settlements grew more rapidly than the French. On the other hand, the concen- tration of authority, such as had the French, was of inestimable advantage, either in acquiring territory, contending with the savages, or struggling with their white neighbors. These advantages the French were not slow to improve. Scarcely had the palisades been erected at Quebec, when Champlain began his explorations and discovered the lake which bears his name. Whether they would have reached the Atlantic via the Hudson and made New

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HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY

York City a second Paris, had not the un- friendly and powerful Iroquois blocked the way, is a matter of speculation, but as they could not advance in this direction they turned their attention westward. By 1660 they had become familiar with all the great lakes, and their priests, their trappers and their voyageurs, were a familiar sight as far as the west end of Lake Superior, and along the rivers which feed these sheets of water. There is a story that two fur trad- ers in 1654 accompanied a band of Ottawas 500 leagues to the west, returning after two years bringing wonderful stories of that region. It would be foreign to our pur- pose to tell the travels and discoveries of these and following years, as detailed by Parkman and others they are more roman- tic and thrilling than the pages of a modern novel, and, it may be added, the accounts are somewhat more instructive. In 1668 numerous missions were established in what are now the states of Michigan and Wisconsin, and the exploration of the Mis- sissippi was broached. There has been some controversy as to who was the real discoverer of the Mississippi. The first record of the river having been seen by a European, was that of a Spanish navigator named Menandez, who entered the mouths but made no exploration of the river. Then came De Soto, who advanced up the river in 1541 and died on its banks, but the stream as a whole was yet unknown save as tales were gathered from the In- dians. One idea was that the river flowed southeast into the Atlantic, another that it ran into the Gulf of Mexico, and a third, that it emptied into the Gulf of California.

In 1671, a great congress of Indians was held at Sault Ste. Marie, at which an alliance was completed between the French and Northwestern tribes, which opened the way for further explorations. So, on May 13, 1673, Father Marquette, Joliet, and five voyageurs, embarked in two canoes at Mackinac, and crossing Lake Michigan to Green Bay went up Fox River, made a portage to the Wisconsin, and descended to the Mississippi, which they entered on

June 17th with a joy, as Marquette says, "which he could not express." They sailed down the great river, stopping at Indian villages, passing the mouths of the Des Moines, Illinois, Missouri, "muddy, rush- ing and noisy," Ohio, and other streams, until they reached the mouth of the Arkan- sas. They began their return journey on July 17, and reached Green Bay in Sep- tember.

The course of the river was pretty well determined, but nobody had yet traveled its full length. This was reserved for La Salle, a native of Rouen, in Normandy, where he was born about the year 1635. He came to Canada in 1667, and was there when accounts of Marquette's and Joliet's explorations were received. He had the idea, which had been in men's minds ever since the voyage of Columbus, of finding a way to China via Canada and the South Sea, and, returning to France in 1675, he was warmly received and given the title of Chevalier. In September, 1678, he proceeded to Fort Frontenac, on Lake Ontario, and on November 18th left there in a little brigantine of ten tons, the first vessel of European make in those waters. Nearly a month was con- sumed in beating up the lake to Niagara River, where the Iroquois had a village, and where La Salle built a fort which be- came Fort Niagara. On January 26, 1679, at Cayuga Creek, six miles above Niagara Falls, he laid the keel of the first ship to navigate Lake Erie. La Salle returned to Frontenac for supplies, but the Ontario barque was wrecked and most of the sup- plies lost. However, on August 7th, the new vessel was launched and named the Griffin. It had a stormy voyage across Lake Huron, but reached Mackinac on Au- gust 27th. Here La Salle built a fort and trading-house, and then went to Green Bay, where the ship was loaded with furs and sent back. She was never heard of again, having doubtless foundered during a storm on Lake Huron. La Salle descended the Illinois River to Lake Peoria, where he built a fort called Crève Coeur, or Broken

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Heart, having probably heard of the loss of the Griffin and being greatly depressed. His supplies gave out, and the following spring he sent his companion, Father Hennepin, on an exploring tour up the Mis- sissippi, while he should return east for men and supplies. Tonti, his lieutenant, was to remain with a small force and hold the fort. La Salle started back across the country in March, 1680, with a few atten- dants, and reached Frontenac, where he found his ereditors had seized all his prop- erty. But he succeeded in getting both men and supplies, and started back by the middle of the summer. He found the fort deserted, T'onti having become alarmed by the Indians and returned to the lakes. La Salle went back to Mackinac, where he met Tonti. Hennepin had in the meantime gone up the Mississippi to the falls which he named St. Anthony, where is now the thriving city of Minneapolis. He returned in November, 1680, having made an inter- esting visit to the Sioux, with whom the whites were destined to become too well acquainted in after years. In August, 1681, La Salle started on his third journey to the Mississippi via Lake Michigan and the Chicago River. His party consisted of twenty-three Frenchmen and thirty-one In- dians, men, women and children. They left the present site of Chicago about January 5, 1682, and reached the Mississippi on the 6th of February. They resumed their jour- ney on the 13th, and reached the mouth of the great river on April 6th. Thus the whole river had now been traversed from end to end of its navigable waters, although its exact sources were not fully traced until a comparatively recent day. The explorers traversed the three great channels into the Gulf and, erecting a column surmounted by a cross, affixed the arms of France, with the following inscription :

LOUIS THE GREAT, KING OF FRANCE AND NAVARRE, REIGNING APRIL 9, 1682.

Thus was this great Mississippi Valley,

which stretched from the Alleghenies to the Rockies and from the Lakes to the Gulf, formally claimed by the King of France. Having already possessed the country north of the lakes and about the mouths of the St. Lawrence, he practically controlled the continent, save the fringe of English settlements along the Atlantic Coast and the Spanish possessions in Mexico and on the Pacific Coast. In 1688 there were in all this vast region less than 12,000 Euro- peans, but this did not prevent the French from making good their claims by the con- struction of a chain of forts from Quebec to the mouths of the Mississippi. It will be noted that up to this time communica- tion between the extremities of this mag- nificent territorial empire had been mainly via the Great Lakes, which furnished a natural water communication westward at all seasons of the year and were compara- tively safe from the dreaded Iroquois. From the lakes south they had three routes, from Mackinac and Green Bay, Kankakee and Illinois Rivers, and the Maumee and Illinois. Now they began to turn their attention to a fourth, the upper Ohio, which was called by the Indians O-hee-yah, or Beautiful River, the French calling it La Belle Riviere, a name well deserved to the present time, but which industrial progress and destruction of forests threaten to make a misnomer. Detroit was founded in 1700, and trading-houses were said to have been established along the Ohio by 1730. Most of the Indians were bought over, and even the Iroquois were induced to be neutral.

But the English were beginning to wake up. As we have seen, the charter of the Jamestown colony extended to the Pacific, never acknowledged. A council of the Iro- and the next step was to extinguish the Indian titles, for French supremacy was quois, who claimed the Ohio country by right of conquest, was held at Lancaster, Pa., in 1744, at which a treaty was made, somewhat indefinite in terms, but which was claimed to cede their western posses- sions to the English, and they proceeded

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HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COUNTY

to act on that basis. On October 7, 1748, England and France, who had been at war, made a treaty of peace at Aix La Chapelle, but it left the Ohio country still an unset- tled question. That same year, Thomas Lee, a member of the Virginia Council, associated with himself thirteen others, in- cluding Lawrence and Augustine, brothers of George Washington, forming what was called the Ohio Company. The object was to carry on the Indian trade on n large scale. A few English traders hind already ventured into this section, but the amount of their traffic was trifling. Lands were to be taken between the Monongahela and Kanawha Rivers, on the south side of the Ohio, but the company was to have the privilege of locating lands on the north side if deemed necessary. Christopher Gist was employed as surveyor, and came as far as the Miami Indians, 200 miles into Ohio. The Indians had been invited to Logstown to form a treaty, without which operations could not be carried on, and notwithstanding the machinations of the French and hostile traders, this was accom- plished on June 13, 1752. In the debates attending this treaty, the Indians re- pndiated the idea that they had ever con- sented to sell their lands. Shortly after the treaty, Mr. Gist laid off a town and fort nt Chartiers Creek, below Pittsburgh, and the company assessed itself four hundred pounds for constructing the fort. Mr. Gist, with eleven families, settled in the Monon- gahela Valley, and goods for trading ar- rived from England but were disposed of before reaching the Ohio. War between the French and English breaking out again, operations were suspended. Efforts were made during a number of years to take up the lands or obtain reimbursement for money expended, but without success. An attempt was then made to merge it with a rival organization, but while this was in progress the Revolutionary War broke out und extinguished both companies. All per- sons concerned in the enterprise were losers, although at the beginning it prom- ised good returns. Other companies were

formed with the same object, but the time had not come for settlements in the Ohio territory.

The French were not idle while all this was going on, but kept a close watch on the English and cultivated friendly rela- tions with the Indians. Among other meth- ods of asserting French sovereignty, Gul- lissonière, the governor-general of New France, as they called their possessions here, organized an expedition under com- mind of Capt. Louis Celoron de Bienville, numbering about three hundred French soldiers, Canadians and friendly Indians. This expedition left Canada in July, 1749, and proceeded from the south shore of Lake Erie to the head waters of the Alle- gheny River, then considered part of the Ohio. The company was provided with leaden plates, which were buried at differ- ent points along the Allegheny and Ohio, on which were inscriptions claiming this territory in the name of the King of France. These plates were 11x716 inches. The party reached Chautauqua Lake on the 22nd, and paddled down the lake the next day. Early on the morning of the 24th they entered the outlet, a narrow stream meandering through a deep morass, bordered by a tall forest. The water being quite low, in order to lighten the canoes, they sent part of their lond overland, and encircled the rapids in this way. Some Indians who noticed them fled, and an em- bassy was sent after them to reassure them us to the "friendly" object of the expe- dition. They entered the Allegheny proper on the 29th, and buried a plate on the south bank of the river, opposite the month of the Chanongon or Conewango, ubont twelve miles south of the present New York line. It will be observed that the French claimed both sides of the river. The usual forms were observed of drawing up the command in battle array, proclaiming ** Vive le Roi," and affixing the royal arms to a neighbor- ing tree. A council was held near here with the Indinns, which was not very satis- factory, as the Iroquois, or dominating powers were favorable to the English. The

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Century History of Steubenville and Jefferson County, Ohio and Representative Citizens, 20th, Part 7

Author: Doyle, Joseph Beatty, 1849-1927 Publication date: 1973 Publisher: Chicago : Richmond-Arnold Pub. Co. Number of Pages: 584

Author: Doyle, Joseph Beatty, 1849-1927
Publication date: 1973
Publisher: Chicago : Richmond-Arnold Pub. Co.
Number of Pages: 584