A Historical Geography of the British Colonies, Vol. V / Canada—Part I, Historical

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

CHAPTER V

THE MISSISSIPPI AND LOUISIANA

French and English views in North America.

What were the French and English fighting for in North America? The answer seems obvious, for North America itself. But what did North America mean? It had a different meaning to different interests. The New Englander cared for little but the New England colonies, and the immediately adjacent lands and seas. To the Acadian settlers the Acadian peninsula, to the Canadian habitant the banks of the St. Lawrence, were all in all. The inland colonists of New York had in their minds not merely the safety of their colony, within its ill-defined boundaries, but also paramount influence over the Five Nations, and unrestricted trade with the western Indians. Longheaded governors of New York and Massachusetts took a still wider view; but the widest of all was held by the French Governors of Canada, and by the roving Canadians, who, with restless spirit and undaunted enterprise, claimed seas and rivers before they were reached or known, magnifying tales of far-off lands and peoples, building in the air and bringing down to earth a fabric of continental dominion. As a rule, the English view was too circumscribed, the French view was too diffuse. The strength of the English lay in effective occupation within narrow limits; the French committed the blunder of perpetually forcing competition upon rivals who had larger resources; but to them belonged the great merit of grasping in some sort the true meaning of North America, and never letting slip the problems of the future.

The search for the Western sea.

The explorers' aim was always to reach the further sea. That it must be somewhere to the west, in the opposite direction to the homes from whence they came, they knew or conjectured; but of the immense distance at which it lay, and of the Rocky Mountain barrier which must be surmounted to find it, they were wholly ignorant. They followed the water, and, when they had gained some knowledge of the great lakes, they reached the closely adjoining sources of the tributaries of the Mississippi, the Wisconsin, the Ohio, and the Illinois; and, borne with the stream, they came in due course not to the west but to the south, not to the Pacific but to the Gulf of Mexico.

The missionaries and Western discovery.

There was the usual mixture of motives—love of adventure, love of gain, political ambition, religious fervour. There was rivalry and competition. One trader or band of traders was jealous of another. One man or set of men was backed by the Governor for the time being, another secured the favour of the Intendant. Missionaries played a great part in exploration. At first they led the van of discovery; they were always in or near the front rank; but, as years went on, and as the simple desire of adding to geographical knowledge, of opening new fields for France and for Christianity, became more and more alloyed with commercial greed, the ministers of religion, when heart-whole themselves, realized that the multiplication of trading posts in the backwoods meant lawlessness of white men, deterioration of natives; and they no longer gave hearty support to the bold French adventurers whose enterprise opened up the West.

The gates of the waterways of Canada.

It will be noticed, on reference to a map of Canada—or rather of that part of the Dominion which was comprised in New France—not only that there is water communication from end to end, from the extreme west of Lake Superior to the Atlantic, but also that there are very distinct points along the way, which are, so to speak, natural toll-bars, where the waters narrow, where the rivers or lakes meet. Here the explorer must pass to reach a goal beyond; here the trader could intercept traffic; here the missionary was sure to find Indians to be converted, and coureurs de bois to be reclaimed; these were the places which must be occupied by the would-be sovereigns of North America. Consequently, at these points of vantage along the route, at one time and another, mission stations, trading posts, and forts were planted.

Montreal itself, at the head of the colony, at the beginning of its hinterland, commanded the junction of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence. At Cataraqui, where the St. Lawrence leaves Lake Ontario, Fort Frontenac was built. A little above the outlet of the Niagara river into Lake Ontario and below the falls, another French fort was reared, Fort Niagara; while on the channel between Lakes Erie and Huron was the fort of Detroit. The Iroquois, as we have seen, knew as well as the French the value of these positions: they feared and resented the building of the forts, as limiting the range of their power, and taking from them the control of the fur trade. On the upper lakes there were at least two posts of prime importance: one was the Sault St. Marie at the junction of Lake Huron and Lake Superior, the other was Michillimackinac at the junction of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. It must not be supposed that the points mentioned were occupied in chronological order, as they have been enumerated above; or that there was any regular series of occupants, that the explorer came first, followed by the missionary, the trader, and so forth: but the net result was that French enterprise and French statesmanship took and kept the gateways on the highroad of Upper Canada.

Lake Michigan. Michillimackinac. Green Bay. The route to the Mississippi from Green Bay,

Lake Michigan was known to the French as the 'Lac des Illinois.' The narrows where it joins Lake Huron were the straits of Michillimackinac, now Mackinac or Mackinaw; and on their northern side stood the trading station of the same name, and the mission of St. Ignace. Within the straits on the western side, is a large indentation, forming a sheet of water which runs south-west, nearly parallel to the main lake. This was at first called, after certain Indians who lived on its shores, the Baie des Puans; but it was subsequently named the Grande Baie, and this title was corrupted into Green Bay, its present name. The Fox river flows into the head of Green Bay, and, if the upward course of this river is followed through Lake Winnebago and beyond, a point is reached at which the waters of the Wisconsin river are not more than a mile and a half distant. The Wisconsin is a tributary of the Mississippi.

and from the end of Lake Michigan.

A slightly longer portage was needed to reach the Mississippi basin from the end of Lake Michigan. Still it was a matter of very few miles to leave the lake, where the city of Chicago now stands, and to strike one or other of the branches of the Illinois river, the nearest being the stream known as Des Plaines. Canoes launched on that stream were carried down into the Illinois, and so to the Mississippi at a point far south of its confluence with the Wisconsin.

The Ohio route.

For adventurers bold enough to diverge from the line of lakes, and to pass overland within reach of the dreaded Five Nations, there was yet a third route, more direct than the other two, to the great river. It was a route well known in after years, and followed the course of the Ohio. The Ohio, the 'beautiful river,' for such is the meaning of its name,¹ is formed by the junction of two rivers, the Alleghany and the Monongahela. At their junction, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the French founded Fort Duquesne, and where Fort Duquesne stood is now the city of Pittsburg. The northern branch, the Alleghany, takes its rise near the southern shore of Lake Erie. One of its affluents flows out of Lake Chautauqua, about eight miles south of Lake Erie, at the point where there is now the small town of Portland; another, the Rivière aux Boeufs, now called French Creek, is very little further from the lake, over against Presque Île and the present town of Erie. A day's march through the forest would therefore bring a traveller from Lake Erie to a stream which, when in full volume, would carry his canoe into the Alleghany, the Ohio, and so to the Mississippi far down its course. No wonder the line of the Ohio became, when geographical knowledge had made some way, a central feature in French politics and French strategy in North America.

¹ The name was given it by the Iroquois.

The head waters of the Mississippi closely adjoin the St. Lawrence basin.

From the above it will be seen how closely the head waters of the Mississippi adjoin the St. Lawrence basin, how short the land journey was from the one to the other. The natives of North America made exploration difficult, but from a geographical point of view, the discoverer's path was comparatively easy.

Early exploration on the upper lakes.

The upper lakes, Lakes Huron and Superior, were visited and explored before there was any adequate knowledge of Lakes Ontario and Erie, and there is no record of white men passing from Lake Erie to Lake Huron by the strait of Detroit before the year 1670. The Five Nations barred the upper St. Lawrence, and the Niagara river and portage; but they did not control to the same extent the alternative route from Montreal to Lake Huron by the Ottawa river. Thus it was that the Jesuits found their way to the Hurons, on Georgian Bay, long before any mission enterprise was attempted on the lower lakes, and as early as 1640 there were Jesuit missionaries at the outlet of Lake Superior, the Sault St. Marie. Later, after the dispersion of the Hurons, there was for a while a mission at the western end of Lake Superior, the place being known as La Pointe, and the mission as the mission of St. Esprit.

Jean Nicollet.

The first white man to reach Lake Michigan was Jean Nicollet. He was a native of Cherbourg, and had come to Canada as early as 1618. Sojourning among the Nipissing Indians, he heard from them of the western tribes; and, listening to Indian tales, seems to have conjectured that a people might be reached in the far West who could be none other than Chinese. With these pictures in his mind, he went, about 1635, as an ambassador of peace to the Puans or Winnebagos, who dwelt on the Green Bay of Michigan, and arrived among them, so the story goes, in an embroidered dress of Chinese damask, as being appropriate to the people whom he hoped to find. He did not find Chinamen, but came near finding the Mississippi; and a claim was made in after years on his behalf that he actually was the first discoverer of that river. The claim however must be disallowed, and the honour of discovering the great river belongs to the two Frenchmen, Joliet and Marquette, who did not reach it till 1673.

Promoters of discovery.

After the destruction of the Huron missions, it was difficult enough for some years to keep life in the struggling colony of New France; and it was not until the King had taken Canada in hand, had sent out soldiers and settlers, had commissioned Tracy and Courcelles to curb the Iroquois, and the Intendant, Talon, to introduce order and system, that progress was made in exploring and opening up the West. The promoters of exploration were Talon himself, before he returned to France; and subsequently the Governor, Frontenac; the Sulpician and Jesuit missionaries, especially the latter; and laymen adventurers, the foremost of whom was Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. La Salle's name is for all time connected with the Mississippi, but Joliet and Marquette were before him in reaching the main river.

Joliet and Marquette.

Of these two companions in travel, Louis Joliet was a layman, though connected with the Jesuits by early training. Born in Canada, he had been sent by Talon to look for copper by Lake Superior, and was subsequently picked out to discover the mysterious river. Jacques Marquette was a Jesuit priest, of the earlier and purer type—a saintly man, humble and single in mind, who early wore his life away in labouring for his faith. He had come out from France in 1666, and about the year 1668 was sent as a missionary to the upper lakes. On the shores of Lake Superior he ministered to Huron and Ottawa refugees at the mission of St. Esprit, where he heard from Illinois visitors of the great river, and from which point, though he knew it not, one feeder of the Mississippi, the St. Croix river, is at no great distance. A Sioux raid broke up the mission, and with the retreating Hurons he established himself at Michillimackinac, where, about 1670, he founded the mission of St. Ignace. About the same time, a mission was also established at the head of Green Bay, and from this point the two travellers, at the end of May, 1673, went forward to the Mississippi.

They reach the Mississippi.

The course up the Fox river and across Lake Winnebago had already been taken by other missionaries, who had not, however, gone as far as the Wisconsin. That river was now reached, and on June 17 it carried the explorers' canoes out into the Mississippi. Down stream they went, past the mouths of the Illinois, the Missouri, and the Ohio, until they came to the confluence of the Arkansas river. There they turned, assured in their own minds that the outlet of the Mississippi was in the Gulf of Mexico—not, as had been supposed, in the Gulf of California—and fearing lest, if they lost their lives at the hands of Indians or of Spaniards,² the tale of their discovery might be lost also. They came back by way of the Illinois and Des Plaines rivers, made the portage to Lake Michigan, and reached Green Bay at the end of September, having made known to white men the great river of the West.

² The lower Mississippi had long been known to the Spaniards.

Their return. Marquette's second journey and death.

Joliet went back to Quebec to report to the Governor, losing all his papers by the way in the rapids of Lachine. He lived to visit Hudson Bay and the coasts of Labrador. Marquette, in broken health, stayed rather more than a year at the Green Bay mission. Then, in the winter of 1674-5, accompanied by two French voyageurs, he revisited the Illinois river, carrying for the last time his message of Christianity to savages, who heard him gladly, and followed him back, a dying man, as far as Lake Michigan. In the month of May he embarked on the lake, making for Michillimackinac; but, as he went, the end came, and he was put on shore to die. His companions buried him at the lonely spot where he died, but at a later date his bones were brought to Michillimackinac by Indians who had loved him well, and were laid to rest with all reverence in the chapel of his own mission.

La Salle. His Seigniory at Lachine.

Marquette, like David Livingstone at a later date, was a missionary explorer. He was carried forward by a faith which could remove mountains. La Salle was cast in another mould. His gift was not religious enthusiasm, but the set purpose of a resolute, masterful man, who made a life-study of his subject. He was born at Rouen, the birthplace of much western enterprise, and went to Canada in the same year as Marquette, the year 1666. An elder brother, who was a Sulpician priest, had gone out before him; and from the Sulpicians, as feudal lords of the island of Montreal, La Salle obtained a grant of the Seigniory of Lachine, eight miles higher up the river than Montreal itself. Here he laid out a settlement, but, as the name 'La Chine' testifies,³ his mind was set on finding a route to China and the East, and in 1669 he gave up his grant, receiving compensation for improvements, and spent what little money he had in beginning his work of discovery.

³ See [above].

He reaches the Ohio.

His early wanderings have not been clearly traced, but there is no reason to doubt that, in the years 1669-71, he found his way from Lakes Ontario and Erie through the Iroquois country to the Ohio. It was perhaps a more difficult feat to accomplish than the subsequent discovery of the Mississippi by way of the lakes. The land journey was longer, and took the explorer well within range of the Five Nations. His success proved his capacity for treating with natives—a quality in which he resembled his staunch friend and supporter Count Frontenac.

His character.

Among white men he had, like Frontenac, many enemies, suspicious priests and jealous merchants. The Jesuits had little love for a man who had no love for them; and the Canadian merchants regarded him as a dangerous rival, recognizing no doubt the element of tenacity in his character. It was the character of one who could hold as well as find, and who was not likely to rest content with the barren honours of discovery. There were in him contradictory elements, and his strength was balanced by failings, which became more conspicuous in the later stages of his adventurous career. He was not in all points a typical Frenchman. He had, it is true, address in dealing with North American Indians; he could lay his case well before the Court and the ministers of France. He enjoyed the friendship and countenance of Count Frontenac, and from more than one of his companions in travel, notably Henri de Tonty, he won unbounded devotion. But he was wanting, as a leader, in tact and sympathy. Solitary and self-contained, facing all dangers, enduring all privations, he spared neither himself nor others. Mutiny and desertion were in consequence rife amongst those who served him, and in the end he lost his life at the hands of his own followers. He had statesmanlike conceptions. He mapped out New France, in his own mind, as extending from sea to sea, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to that of Mexico. Like other Frenchmen, he went too far and tried to do too much; but, if he made mistakes, he was at least no visionary. Until the last stage of his career, his ends were clearly kept in view, and he measured the means to attain them, though he did not always measure aright.

La Salle at Fort Frontenac.

He gave up one Seigniory to find the Ohio. It was not long before he obtained another. Count Frontenac came out to govern Canada, for the first time, in 1672; and determined, as has been told,⁴ to build a fort at the outlet of Lake Ontario. Guided, it would seem, by La Salle's advice, he built it in 1673, at the mouth of the Cataraqui river. In 1675, La Salle, who had paid a visit to France in the autumn of the previous year, became by royal grant Seignior of the new fort and settlement, to which he gave the name of Fort Frontenac. It was a strong position to hold, whether for making money by trade or for prosecuting westward discovery; and bitter was the jealousy against the young Frenchman, who, at thirty-two years of age, and after no more than nine years' residence in Canada, had in spite of strong opposition achieved so much.

⁴ See [above].

His plans for Western discovery.

Two years he remained at Cataraqui, rebuilding and strengthening the fort, clearing the ground and constructing small vessels for trading purposes on Lake Ontario: then, ready to move forward again, he went back to France in 1677, and laid before the King and Colbert a further memorial for permission to discover and colonize the countries of the West. He asked to be confirmed in his Seigniory at Fort Frontenac, to be allowed to establish two other stations, and to be given rights as Seignior and Governor over whatever lands he might discover and colonize within twenty years. He promised, if his request were granted, to plant a colony at the outlet of Lake Erie, and to waive all claim to any share in the trade between the Indians of the western lakes and Canada.

He is given a royal patent.

These conditions are worth special note. La Salle was prepared to assure to France one more link in the chain of rivers and lakes: he was prepared too to disarm trading jealousy by renouncing any plans for intercepting the existing fur trade. He asked in return for a free hand to the south-west, in the lands of the Ohio, the Illinois, and the Mississippi. The answer of the King, given in May, 1678, was permission 'to labour at the discovery of the western parts of New France ... through which to all appearance a way may be found to Mexico,'⁵ and for that purpose to build forts and enjoy possession of them as at Fort Frontenac. The concession was limited to five years; and, while a monopoly in buffalo skins was granted to the petitioner, he was prohibited, as he had contemplated, from trading with the tribes whose furs came down to Montreal.

⁵ Quoted by Parkman in his La Salle (11th ed.), p. 112.

Henri de Tonty. Father Hennepin.

Having secured this patent, La Salle raised funds in France for the furtherance of his enterprise; and in July, 1678, set sail from La Rochelle to Canada, taking with him an Italian officer, Tonty, who had been recommended to him by the Prince de Conti, and whose subsequent faithfulness to his leader became almost proverbial. A companion of a different kind joined him on his return to Canada, Father Hennepin, a Flemish friar, a brave and sturdy traveller, but a man of great personal vanity and convicted of telling more than travellers' tales. He published an account of his travels in La Salle's lifetime, and, after his death, put forth a new edition,⁶ claiming to have anticipated La Salle in descending the Mississippi to the sea. The story has been proved to be an absolute imposture, the more discreditable that it was an attempt to rob a dead man of honour dearly bought.

⁶ The first book, published at Paris in 1683, was entitled Description de la Louisiane nouvellement découverte. The second, published at Utrecht in 1697, was headed Nouvelle découverte d'un très grand pays situé dans l'Amérique.

La Salle builds a fort at Niagara.

On his return from France, La Salle dispatched a party of men in advance to Lake Michigan, to trade and to collect stores against his own arrival. He then set himself, taking Fort Frontenac as his basis, to plant a post at the mouth of the Niagara river below the falls; and, above the falls, to build a ship of some appreciable size for the navigation of the upper lakes. The plan was well thought out. He would hold both ends of Lake Ontario; and, the continuity of advance being broken by the falls of Niagara, he would have, above the falls, an armed vessel plying for merchandise between Niagara and the end of Lake Michigan, where again there should be another fort or factory to safeguard the portage to the waters of the Mississippi.

Suspicions of the Senecas.

It was specially necessary to hold both ends of Lake Ontario, for here was the land of the Senecas. Jealously and sullenly they watched the Frenchmen's work, through the winter of 1678-9, not wholly reassured by a visit from La Salle himself to the chief town of the tribe; but they attempted no armed opposition. Thus the beginning was made of the first Fort Niagara,⁷ on the eastern bank of the river, in the angle formed by its junction with Lake Ontario; while on the same side of the water, five miles above the falls, where a stream called the Cayuga creek enters the main river, a ship was built bearing the name and the emblem of the Griffin, the appropriate arms of truculent Count Frontenac.

⁷ Denonville's fort, referred to [above], was a later structure.

The voyage of the 'Griffin' to Michillimackinac. Loss of the ship.

On August 7, 1679, the Griffin started on her voyage up Lake Erie. On the tenth—the feast of Sainte Claire—she had passed up the Detroit river and was in Lake St. Clair. Against the strong current of the St. Clair river, she found her way into Lake Huron, and, buffeted by storm and wind, reached in the course of the same month the mission of St. Ignace at Michillimackinac. Of the advanced party of traders sent there in the previous year, some had deserted; others, who remained true, were found at Green Bay with a rich store of furs; and on the eighteenth of September La Salle parted with his vessel, sending her to carry back the furs to the portage at Niagara. He never saw the ship again, and her fate was never known. Foundering, it would seem, in Lake Michigan, she left her owner to wait in vain for her return, in want of food, in want of stores for his onward march, with followers whom he could not trust, with Indian tribes to master or appease, with winter making the way harder and the wilderness more drear.

La Salle builds a fort at the end of Lake Michigan. He descends the Illinois river.

After dispatching the Griffin homeward, La Salle pushed on in canoes to the south-eastern end of Lake Michigan. There, at the mouth of the St. Joseph river, which he called the Miami, he built a fort. December came on, but forward he went, up the St. Joseph, across to the Kankakee, a tributary of the Illinois, and down that stream and the Illinois river to where the Illinois Indians were encamped for the time near the present town of Peoria. His plan had been to build another ship on the Illinois, and sail down that river and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

He builds Fort Crèvecoeur on the Illinois. He returns to Canada.

The new year, 1680, opened badly for his enterprise. The Indians were suspicious, his men were deserting, no news had come of the ill-fated Griffin. Yet he held staunchly to his purpose. Again he reared a fort—Fort Crèvecoeur—a little lower down the Illinois than the Indian camp, and again in the far-off wilds, in dead of winter, he turned his men to shipbuilding. Without fittings and supplies it was impossible to proceed, and, accordingly, he determined to go back himself and bring the needed stores. Leaving Tonty in charge of the fort, he retraced his steps to Lake Michigan. At Fort Miami he learnt beyond question the loss of the Griffin. Across the then unknown peninsula of Michigan he took his way, reached the Detroit river, struck Lake Erie, and, passing by way of Niagara, arrived at Fort Frontenac in sixty-five days from leaving the Illinois, having in March and April achieved a feat of travel almost unparalleled even in the early history of Canada. Going down to Montreal, he obtained supplies, and again set his face undaunted to the West.

He goes back to the West. Iroquois raid on the Illinois. Tonty lost

As he came and went, he heard of nothing but disaster. The men left at Fort Crèvecoeur under Tonty's command broke out in open mutiny, and some of them were intercepted on their way back to Fort Frontenac, having destroyed the forts on the Illinois and St. Joseph, looted their employer's property at Michillimackinac and Niagara, and being minded to crown their villainy by killing La Salle himself. They met their fate—were shot or imprisoned—and La Salle pushed on to Tonty's succour. Towards the close of the year he was back on the Illinois river, only to find a scene of utter desolation. In his absence, the Iroquois had invaded the land and swept all before them. Skeletons of men and women, empty huts, an abandoned fort, the hull of a half-built ship, all told a tale of brutish warfare and a ruined enterprise. Tonty was not to be found; and, after following the Illinois down to its confluence with the Mississippi, La Salle returned to Lake Michigan, and wintered on the St. Joseph river at Fort Miami, which had been destroyed by the mutineers but was again rebuilt.

and found. His adventures.

With the spring of 1681 there came a gleam of hope. The western Indians, terror-stricken by the Iroquois—and Indian immigrants from the east, driven out by the English colonists—gathered for protection to the brave, enduring Frenchman, took him for their leader, and hearkened to his word. News came that Tonty was in safety at Green Bay; and at length, about the end of May, La Salle and he joined hands again at Michillimackinac. Tonty had a tale of heroism to tell. Left in charge of the garrison at Fort Crèvecoeur, he had gone, according to his leader's instructions, to prospect a site for a fort a little higher up the river. When his back was turned, his followers destroyed the fort, carried off the stores, and left him with five other Frenchmen, two of whom were Recollet friars, among the Illinois Indians. True to his trust, he stayed among them, when the hordes of the Five Nations broke in, bent on destruction. Between the contending forces he held his life in the balance, vainly striving to stem the tide of massacre; and, having done all that man could do, found his way back to the lakes, saved by his own fearless honesty and by respect for the French name.

Hennepin's travels on the upper Mississippi. Du Luth.

Of the expedition which started in the ill-fated Griffin, there was still another prominent member to be accounted for. This was Father Hennepin. Before La Salle turned home from Fort Crèvecoeur in the spring of 1680, he sent two Frenchmen of his company, and with them Father Hennepin, to explore and to trade on the upper Mississippi. Hennepin and his companions went down the Illinois; and, ascending the Mississippi, fell among the Sioux or Dakota Indians. Carried off to the Sioux lodges, in the present State of Minnesota, the Frenchmen sojourned among them for some months, half captives and half guests, until they were found by Du Luth, fur-trader and coureur de bois, who had already explored these regions, and had crossed from Lake Superior to the Mississippi by the line of the St. Croix river. In his company, Hennepin returned up the Wisconsin; and, before the year 1680 ended, was safe at Michillimackinac. In the following year he went back to Montreal; and soon afterwards, returning to Europe, published the book to which reference has already been made. He was the first European to describe the upper Mississippi and its tributaries, and the Falls of St. Anthony preserve the name of his patron saint—St. Anthony of Padua.

La Salle descends the Mississippi. Fort Prudhomme built on the Mississippi.

The descent to the sea, which in after years he falsely claimed to have made, was soon afterwards achieved by La Salle. After rejoining Tonty at Michillimackinac, he went back with him to Fort Frontenac and Montreal, and once more procured men and money to renew his enterprise. Again turning west, he reached Fort Miami late in the autumn of 1681, and on the shortest day his expedition left Lake Michigan. Crossing from the St. Joseph to the Chicago creek, and from the latter to the Des Plaines river, the northern tributary of the Illinois, they embarked—fifty-four Frenchmen and Indians, including thirteen women and children—in six canoes, and took their way steadily down stream. They joined the Mississippi, they passed the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio. Halfway between the Ohio and the Arkansas, on the east bank of the Mississippi, they built and manned a small wooden fort, naming it Fort Prudhomme after one of their number who for a while lost himself in the woods. Again holding on their course, under softer skies than those of Canada, they reached the mouth of the Arkansas river, whence Joliet and Marquette had turned back; and there, among friendly and wondering Indians, they proclaimed the French King lord of the land. Below the Arkansas they came to other Indian tribes, such as the Spaniards had known, who, under dome-shaped roofs, worshipped the sun. At length the river parted into three channels, as it neared the sea; and, dividing into three parties, the bold voyagers soon met again on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico.

La Salle reaches the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana.

It was April 9, 1682, when, on the southernmost edge of the new domain, a column was reared inscribed with the arms of France and with the name of Louis le Grand. The secret of the great river was won at last, from its source to its mouth; and, claiming all the lands which it watered for the Crown of France,⁸ La Salle called them by the name 'Louisiana.'

⁸ In La Salle's proclamation the basin of the Ohio was excluded from Louisiana, as the words are 'from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio' (Parkman's La Salle, 12th ed., p. 286).

He returns up stream. The colony on the Illinois. Fort St. Louis.

His canoes could not face the open sea, so the explorers retraced their course up stream. They suffered from want of food, the natives attacked them, and La Salle himself was sorely stricken by fever, which kept him many weeks at Fort Prudhomme. It was not till September that he reached Michillimackinac, and rejoined Tonty, who had gone on before him. The winter of 1682-3 was spent in establishing a colony of French and Indians on the Illinois. The place selected for the purpose was on the southern bank of the river, some distance above the site of Fort Crèvecoeur, where a high precipitous cliff towered over wood and stream. The rock had been marked by La Salle in his former sojourn on the river, and it was during Tonty's visit to the spot⁹ that Fort Crèvecoeur was looted and left. Had the Illinois river been the Rhine, the rock would in mediaeval times have been crowned by the castle of a border noble; and on its summit was now built a wooden fort, Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. Round the fort the Indians gathered for protection and for trade, the peasantry as it were of the western wilderness, clustering under the shelter of a feudal stronghold; for in virtue of the royal patent, La Salle was the Seignior of the place. It promised to be a strong outpost of French dominion, if its connexion with Canada was kept intact.

⁹ See [above]. A full description of the rock, known afterwards as 'Starved Rock,' is given in Parkman's La Salle (12th ed.), pp. 293-4, and note.

Opposition to La Salle in Canada. He returns to France.

New France was made by a few individual men, of whom La Salle was one. Their work was perpetually undone by want of efficient co-operation, or rather by efficient antagonism, on the part of their fellow countrymen. Fort Frontenac, Niagara, armed and trading vessels on the upper lakes, Fort Miami, where the lakes end, a fort on the Illinois—constituted the basis of a scheme worthy of support, but support was wanting. Frontenac had been recalled in 1682; and his successor, La Barre, leagued with the enemies of La Salle, cut off his supplies, detained his men, maligned him to the King, seized his Seigniory at Fort Frontenac, and sent an officer to take possession of the fort on the Illinois. La Salle had but one remedy left, to appeal to the King in person; and with that object he sailed for France in 1683, never to see Canada again. His troubled fighting life was soon to end, and its closing scenes were crowded with disaster. He seems to some extent to have lost his balance, to have acted with insufficient knowledge, and to have changed hardihood into recklessness. Yet in all that he attempted there was continuity of aim from first to last, and his final wild adventure, as it seemed to be, had its bearing on the story of the Canadian Dominion.

The patent, which had been given to him in 1678, authorized discovery, trade, and the building of forts, but said nothing of founding colonies. The policy of the French Government was always in the main a forward policy; but the French King and his ministers had the good sense to discourage proposals for colonizing the backwoods, because they saw the obvious danger of dispersing through a large area the scanty population of New France. It was therefore easy for La Salle's enemies to denounce his schemes as opposed to the royal will, as drawing off colonists from the St. Lawrence, where they were sorely needed, and teaching the able-bodied men of Canada to become not habitans but coureurs de bois. These were the charges which La Salle had to rebut. He met them by propounding a still bolder plan than his former ventures, and he induced the King to give his sanction to an enterprise for French colonization on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

His schemes for colonization on the Gulf of Mexico.

It happened that, at the date when he arrived in Paris, there was bad blood between France and Spain, resulting for a short space in open war. The Spaniards claimed to exclude French ships from the Gulf of Mexico, and King Louis, with his minister Seignelay, Colbert's son, contemplated meeting these claims by taking and holding a post on the Gulf. Some scheme of the kind had already been submitted to them by a Spanish refugee from Peru, Count Penalossa by name; and when La Salle advanced similar proposals, suggesting the establishment of a French colony on or near the mouth of the Mississippi, to be connected with Canada, and to be the basis for attacking and conquering the northern province of Mexico, New Biscay, his words fell on willing ears. He spoke with authority. Alone among Frenchmen at the Court of France, he had reached the mouth of the great river, and could tell to a King, with lust of conquest, a story of lands to be won for France, and of peoples ready to follow her lead.

The plan accepted, and La Salle reinstated in favour.

The result was that La Salle's rivals in Canada were discomfited, and peremptory orders were sent to La Barre to restore his Seigniory at Fort Frontenac and his station on the Illinois; while an expedition, destined for the Gulf of Mexico, was fitted out at La Rochelle, and eventually sailed on July 24, 1684.

La Salle's motives.

What was in La Salle's mind in suggesting this southern adventure can only be conjectured. Was it the last desperate stake of a ruined gambler? Or was it an over-sanguine attempt to realize the great object of his life, to master the far West by moving up instead of down its waterways, by entering not through Canada, where every step would be dogged by jealousy and intrigue, but through the mouths of the Mississippi, where climate and natives would be less formidable foes than the Governor of Canada and his unscrupulous clique of confederates? If, as it is reasonable to suppose, he still clung with the determination of his character to the western enterprise, in which he had already achieved so much, he added to it a highly-coloured picture of conquest in Mexico; and he drew his map of Mexico as adjoining the lands on the Mississippi, omitting in ignorance most of the wide area of intervening territory, now included in the State of Texas.

The expedition sails. It reaches the West Indies and the Gulf of Mexico. Landing on the shores of Texas.

Four vessels set sail, freighted with all things necessary to found a colony, carrying soldiers, artisans, married women, and young girls. They were a doomed company; from first to last all went wrong. There was divided command, and Beaujeu, the admiral of the ships, a Norman like La Salle, had with some reason little confidence in the expedition or its leader. They made in the first instance for St. Domingo, but one of the four ships which was carrying the stores was cut off by Spanish buccaneers before reaching the island. At St. Domingo, La Salle was laid low with fever; and, while he was between life and death, his followers rioted and sickened on shore. After a delay of two months, the expedition started again, weakened by desertion and disease. The ships entered the Gulf of Mexico, passed—without knowing it—the mouths of the Mississippi, and on New Year's Day, 1685, anchored off the coast of Texas. Somewhere on this coast, in the vicinity either of Matagorda Bay or of Galveston Bay, La Salle effected a landing, where a series of lagoons that lined the shore concealed, as he thought, the main outlet of the Mississippi. Disaster still attended the enterprise: one of the ships was wrecked on the reefs, the natives of the land proved unfriendly; and when Beaujeu, the admiral, having given what help he could, sailed away in the middle of March, he left behind on desolate shores a despondent band of French men and women groping for a river which could not be found, in present trouble and without clear guidance for the future.

Founding of Fort St. Louis. Distress of the settlement. Attempt to reach Canada.

Skirting the sea-line, the would-be colonists had reached a large bay, into the head of which a river ran; and on the banks of this stream La Salle formed a settlement, to which, as to his colony on the Illinois, he gave the name of Fort St. Louis. Gathered within palisades, the settlers worked and waited, dwindling in numbers, while their leader explored, but explored in vain. Setting out at the end of October, 1685, La Salle returned in the following March, having accomplished nothing and having lost his last vessel, a small frigate, the Belle. Again in a month's time, towards the end of April, 1686, he set out to make his way to Canada; once more, in October, he returned to the fort, baffled and disappointed. His followers were sadly reduced in numbers: of some 180, no more than forty-five were left; and of them he could trust but few. Return to France was cut off, and from France time had shown that no help was forthcoming. There was no alternative but to make one more attempt to reach Canada, and thence to bring rescue to the fort in Texas.

Death of La Salle.

It was a forlorn hope at best, but the attempt was made. Half of the company remained at the fort. The others, including La Salle's brother, the Abbé Cavelier, and two young nephews, followed La Salle himself on his northward journey. It was on January 7, 1687, that the party set out to make their way painfully over prairies, across rivers, through forest, thicket, and scrub. On March 19, near the Trinity river, La Salle fell dead, ambushed and shot by his own men. No career ever had a more squalid or pitiable ending. It ended in commonplace mutiny and murder. Three or four scoundrels, discontented and badly handled, nursed their personal grudges against a severe and domineering leader, until, in an outbreak of irritation, they killed three of his immediate following and the leader himself.

Fate of his company.

The brother escaped; so did one of the nephews, and Joutel, a gardener's son from Rouen—the most honest and capable of the band—who afterwards told the unvarnished tale. They companied for a while with the murderers, roaming among the Indians of the west, until one and another of the guilty men fell by each other's hands or strayed into savagery. In the end seven Frenchmen, with the help of Indian guides, reached the Arkansas river, found an outpost established there by Tonty, made their way thence to the Illinois, and so to Canada and France. On the Illinois and in Canada they concealed, from policy or fear, the fact of La Salle's death. In the dead man's name his brother, the coward priest, obtained from Tonty advances for his home journey; and it was not till after he was safe in Europe, in the autumn of 1688, that the tragedy came to light.

Indifference in France as to La Salle's death.

Few seemed to care. A man had gone, who by the age of forty-three had achieved great deeds, had dared and suffered much; but he was a man who had few friends and many enemies, and he served a Government in whose eyes failure was a crime, and to which gratitude was unknown. An order was given that, if the murderers reappeared in Canada, they should be arrested, and with that order the name of La Salle passed out of official ken.

Extermination of the colony in Texas. Tonty's faithfulness.

The Government made no attempt to relieve the hapless exiles in Texas. They were left to perish, just as, many years before, the Huguenot settlers in Florida had been abandoned and betrayed. Tonty alone was mindful of his friend. Already, in 1686, before La Salle had started on his last march, he had descended the Mississippi to its mouth, and had searched the coast in vain, hoping to bring succour and relief; and when, in the autumn of 1688, he knew the full truth, again he started, to save if possible the remnant of the expedition. He penetrated to the Red river and beyond, but could not reach the fort in Texas; and it was from Spanish sources that the fate of the last settlers was afterwards known. An expedition from Mexico, sent to root out the intruders, found the fort a desolate ruin. The Indians had been beforehand in the work of destruction, and had butchered or carried off the inmates, two or three of whom exchanged captivity among savages for Spanish prisons.

Importance of La Salle's work.

Such was the end of La Salle's last venture—misery, ruin, death, and, for the time, comparative oblivion. Yet his name lives in history and deserves to live, and his work was not all undone. We look back not merely on his hardihood and his sufferings. We see in him not only an explorer of the boldest type; but he stands out pre-eminently as the man, who, above all others, grasped the conception of a North American dominion, which should be from sea to sea—based on the great geographical factor in North America, its nearly continuous water communication—and in which the natives of North America should be banded together in war and peace, under the leadership of France. From the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, by river and lake, his vision was that Frenchmen and their native subjects should come and go, carrying from fort to fort, from settlement to settlement, the produce of forest and prairie, the wealth of the West.

It was a great conception, too great to be realized; but it harmonized with the genius of the French people. Their gift was to be ever moving, their strength was not to sit still. What success they won was on the lines that La Salle marked out. With all his failures, he knew the land and he knew his race.

Colonization of Louisiana by Iberville.

The eighteenth century had not ended before the colonization of Louisiana became more than a dream. Tonty continued to urge it. The English threatened to take it in hand; Spain was reasserting her claim to the ownership of the Gulf of Mexico; and, lest the French should be excluded altogether, Le Moyne d'Iberville, best of Canadian leaders, obtained permission to sail for the Mississippi. More skilful than La Salle, or better informed, he reached its mouth in March, 1699; but the first settlements were made to the east of the river, at Biloxi in the present State of Mississippi, and on Mobile Bay. It was not till the year 1718 that the city of New Orleans was first founded by Bienville, Iberville's brother, who at intervals governed Louisiana for many years. Bandied about from Crown to company, and from company to Crown, the prey of speculators, the scene, like Canada itself, of artificial settlement and regulated colonization, Louisiana made but slow progress. Yet in time it became a factor to be reckoned with in North American history, and to connect it with Canada was in the eighteenth century the aim of the rulers of New France.

The Illinois abandoned by the French.

In 1702, Tonty left Fort St. Louis on the Illinois to join Iberville in the south, and, except for a few years at a little later date, that fort was abandoned. The Indians, too, who had gathered round it, dispersed; some of them moved down to the Mississippi; and connexion between Canada and Louisiana was afterwards sought not so much by the Illinois river, as by the line of the Ohio, the earliest scene of La Salle's discoveries.