French Pathfinders in North America

by William Henry Johnson

Fort of the Iroquois

As they confidently marched forward, imagine their amazement when the ranks of the enemy suddenly opened, and their steel-clad champion stepped to the front! It was an apparition that might well cause consternation among these men of the wilderness, not one of whom probably had ever seen a white man.

What follows is thus described by Champlain: "I looked at them, and they looked at me. When I saw them getting ready to shoot their arrows at us, I leveled my arquebuse, which I had loaded with four balls, and aimed straight at one of the three chiefs. The shot brought down two and wounded another. On this, our Indians set up such a yelling that one could not have heard a thunder-clap, and all the while the arrows flew thick on both sides. The Iroquois were greatly astonished and frightened to see two of their men killed so quickly, in spite of their arrow-proof armor." When one of Champlain's companions fired a shot from the woods, panic sized them, and they fled in terror. The victory was complete. Some of the Iroquois were killed, more were taken, and their camp, canoes, and provisions all fell into the lands of the visitors.

This fight, insignificant in itself, had tremendous consequences. Champlain had inconsiderately aroused the vengeance of a terrible enemy. From that day forth, the mighty confederacy of the Five Nations, embracing the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, was the deadly foe of the French. This circumstance gave to the English, in the long struggle for the supremacy of America, the aid of the craftiest, boldest, and most formidable native warriors on the continent.

Another noteworthy thing is that this fight occurred in just the year in which Hudson ascended the river since named for him. His exploration, made in the interest of the Dutch, led to their planting trading-posts on the river.[4]

Previously the Iroquois had been at a disadvantage, because their enemies, the Hurons, could procure fire-arms from the French, whereas they had not any. But the Dutch traders on the Hudson soon began to sell guns to the Iroquois; and thus one of the first effects of the coming of white men into the wilderness was to equip these two savage races for a deadlier warfare.

The next summer Champlain had another opportunity of taking a hand in a fight between Indians. A canoe came with the exciting news that, a few miles away in the woods, a band of Algonquins had surrounded an invading party of Iroquois who were making a desperate stand within an inclosure of trees. His Indians snatched their weapons and raced for the scene, shouting to Champlain to follow, but leaving him and four of his men to find their way as best they could. They were soon lost in the dense woods. The day was hot, and the air was full of mosquitoes. The Frenchmen struggled on through black mud and knee-deep water and over fallen trees and slimy logs, panting under their heavy corselets; but not a sound could they hear to guide them to the spot.

At last two Indians running to the fight overtook them and led them to the place where the Iroquois, within a circular barricade of trees and interlaced boughs, were fighting savagely. They had beaten off their assailants with heavy loss. When the Frenchmen came up, they received a flight of well-aimed arrows from the desperate defenders. One split Champlain's ear and tore through the muscles of his neck. Another inflicted a similar wound on one of his men. The Indians, seeing the Europeans' heads and breasts covered with steel, had aimed at their faces. But fire-arms soon changed the situation. The Frenchmen ran up close to the barricade, thrust their weapons through the openings, and poured dismay and death among the defenders. The Indian assailants, too, encouraged by this example, rushed in and dragged out the trees of the barricade. At the same time a boat's crew of fur-traders, who had been attracted by the firing, rushed upon the scene and used their guns with deadly effect.

The Iroquois, surrounded and overwhelmed by numbers, fought to the last. The most were killed on the spot. Only fifteen survived and were taken prisoners. Thus the fiercest warriors of North America experienced a second disaster which could not but result in deepening their hatred of the French. These early successes of Champlain were dearly paid for by his country-men long after he was dead.

In the following spring (1611) Champlain did another memorable thing: he established a post, which afterward grew into a trading-station, at Montreal. Thus the two oldest and most historic towns of Canada owe their foundation to him.

Champlain purposed accompanying a great force of Algonquins and Hurons in an inroad into the Iroquois country. The savage warriors, however, unwilling to wait for him, set out for their villages, taking with them an adventurous friar named Le Caron. But Champlain was not to be baulked by this circumstance. He immediately started on the track of the larger party, with ten Indians and two Frenchmen, one of whom was his interpreter, Etienne Brulé. He went up the Ottawa River, made a portage through the woods, and launched his canoes on the waters of Lake Nipissing, passing through the country of a tribe so sunk in degrading superstitions, that the Jesuits afterward called them "the Sorcerers."

After resting here two days and feasting on fish and deer, which must have been very welcome diet after the scant fare of the journey, he descended French River, which empties the waters of Nipissing into Lake Huron. On the way down, hunger again pinched his party, and they were forced to subsist on berries which, happily, grew in great abundance. At last a welcome sight greeted Champlain. Lake Huron lay before him. He called it the "Mer Douce" (Fresh-water Sea).

Down the eastern shore of the Georgian Bay for more than a hundred miles Champlain took his course, through countless islets, to its lower end. Then his Indians landed and struck into a well-beaten trail leading into the heart of the Huron country, between Lakes Huron and Ontario. Here he witnessed a degree of social advancement far beyond that of the shiftless Algonquins on the St. Lawrence. Here were people living in permanent villages protected by triple palisades of trees, and cultivating fields of maize and pumpkins and patches of sunflowers. To him, coming from gloomy desolation, this seemed a land of beauty and abundance.

The Hurons welcomed him with lavish hospitality, expecting that he would lead them to victory. He was taken from village to village. In the last he found the friar Le Caron with his twelve Frenchmen. Now there were feasts and dances for several days, while the warriors assembled for the march into the Iroquois country. Then the little army set out, carrying their canoes until they came to Lake Simcoe. After crossing this there came another portage, after which the canoes were launched again on the waters of the river Trent. Down this they made their way until they came to a suitable spot for a great hunt. The Frenchmen watched the proceedings and took part in them with great zest. Five hundred men, forming an extended line, moved through the woods, gradually closing in toward a wooded point on which they drove the game. Then they swept along it to its very end. The frightened deer, driven into the water, were easily killed by the canoe-men with spears and arrows. Such a great hunt supplied the place of a commissary department and furnished food for many days.

Out upon Lake Ontario the fleet of frail barks boldly ventured, crossed it safely, and landed on the shore of what is now New York State. Here the Indians hid their canoes. Now they were on the enemy's soil and must move cautiously. For four days they filed silently through the woods, crossing the outlet of Lake Oneida, and plunged deep into the Iroquois country. One day they came upon a clearing in which some of the people of the neighboring villages were gathering corn and pumpkins.

Some of the impetuous young Hurons uttered their savage yell and rushed upon them. But the Iroquois seized their weapons and defended themselves so well that they drove back their assailants with some loss. Only the Frenchmen, opening fire, saved the Hurons from worse disaster. Then the attacking party moved on to the village. This Champlain found to be far more strongly defended than any he had ever seen among the Indians. There were not less than four rows of palisades, consisting of trunks of trees set in the earth and leaning outward; and there was a kind of gallery well supplied with stones and provided with wooden gutters for quenching fire.

Something more than the hap-hazard methods of the Hurons was needed to capture this stronghold, and Champlain instructed them how to set about it. Under his direction, they built a wooden tower high enough to overlook the palisades and large enough to shelter four or five marksmen. When this had been planted within a few feet of the fortification, three arquebusiers mounted to the top and thence opened a deadly raking fire along the crowded galleries. Had the assailants confined themselves to this species of attack and heeded Champlain's warnings, the result would have been different. But their fury was ungovernable. Yelling their war-cry, they exposed themselves recklessly to the stones and arrows of the Iroquois. One, bolder than the rest, ran forward with firebrands to burn the palisade, and others followed with wood to feed the flame. But torrents of water poured down from the gutters quickly extinguished it. In vain Champlain strove to restore order among the yelling savages. Finding himself unable to control his frenzied allies, he and his men busied themselves with picking off the Iroquois along the ramparts. After three hours of this bootless fighting, the Hurons fell back, with seventeen warriors wounded.[5]

Champlain himself was disabled by two wounds, one in the knee and one in the leg, which hindered him from walking. Still he urged the Hurons to renew the attack. But in vain. From overweening confidence the fickle savages had passed to the other extreme. Nothing could inspire them to another assault. Moreover, Champlain had lost much of his peculiar influence over them. They had fancied that, with him in front, success was sure. Now they saw that he could be wounded, and by Indian weapons, and they had experienced a defeat the blame of which they undoubtedly laid at his door. His "medicine" [6] was not the sure thing they had thought it to be, and no words of his could raise their spirits. After a few days of ineffective skirmishing, they hastily broke up in retreat, carrying their wounded in the centre, while the Iroquois pursued and harassed the flanks and rear.

Champlain was treated like the rest of the wounded. Each was carried in a rude basket made of green withes, on the back of a stout warrior. For days he traveled in this way, enduring, he says, greater torment than he had ever before experienced, "for the pain of the wound was nothing to that of being bound and pinioned on the back of a savage." As soon as he could bear his weight, he was glad to walk.

When the shore of Lake Ontario was reached, the canoes were found untouched, and the crest-fallen band embarked and recrossed to the opposite side. Now Champlain experienced one of the consequences of his loss of prestige. The Hurons had promised him an escort to Quebec. But nobody was willing to undertake the journey. The great war-party broke up, the several bands going off to their wonted hunting-grounds, and Champlain was left with no choice but to spend the winter with the Hurons. One of their chiefs invited him to share his lodge, and he was glad to accept this hospitality.

Shortly afterward he met with a notable adventure. The Hurons were waiting for a hard frost to give them passage over the lakes and marshes that lay between them and their towns. Meanwhile they occupied themselves with hunting. One day Champlain was out with them. For ten days twenty-five men had been at work, preparing for a huge "drive." They had built a strong enclosure, from the opening of which ran two diverging fences of posts interlaced with boughs, extending more than half a mile into the woods. At daybreak the most of the warriors formed a long line and, with shouts and the clattering of sticks, drove the deer toward the pound. The frightened animals rushed down the converging lines of fence into the trap, where they were easily killed.

Champlain was enjoying watching the sport, when a strange bird lured him off, and he lost his way. The day was cloudy, there was no sun to guide him, and his pocket-compass he had left in camp.

All his efforts to retrace his steps failed. At last night came on, and he lay down and slept, supperless, at the foot of a tree. The whole of the next day he wandered, but in the afternoon he came to a pond where there were some waterfowl along the shore. He shot some of these, kindled a fire, cooked his food, and ate with relish. It was dreary November weather, and a cold rain set in. He was without covering of any kind. But he was used to hardships, and he said his prayers and calmly lay down to sleep.

Another day of bewildered wandering followed, and another night of discomfort. On the next day he came upon a little brook. The happy thought came to him that, if he should follow this, it would lead him to the river, near which the hunters were encamped. This he did, and when he came in sight of the river, with a lighter heart he kindled his fire, cooked his supper, and bivouacked once more. The next day he easily made his way down the river to the camp, where there was great joy at his coming. The Indians had searched for him far and wide. From that day forth they never let him go into the forest alone.

The scene of this adventure seems to have been somewhere to the north or north-east of the site of Kingston, Ontario. The Indians encamped here several weeks, during which they killed a hundred and twenty deer. When the hard cold came and the marshy country was solid with ice, they resumed their journey, with their sledges laden with venison. Champlain went on with them from village to village, until he reached the one in which he had left Brother Le Caron. When spring came, the Frenchmen traveled homeward by the same circuitous route by which they had come, by the way of Lake Huron and the Ottawa River.

Champlain's arrival at Quebec caused universal rejoicing. He was welcomed as one risen from the grave, for the Indians had reported him dead, and a solemn service of thanksgiving for his safety was held.

Here closes the most adventurous period of his career. Though his heart was in the work of exploration, he was destined to spend his remaining years chiefly in nursing the feeble little colony at Quebec. He had not only to hold the balance even between monks and traders, but to guard the puny little colony against frequent Indian outbreaks.

Eighteen years had passed since the foundation of Quebec, and still the population consisted of only one hundred and five persons, men, women, and children. Only two or three families supported themselves from the soil. All the rest were there either as priests or as soldiers or as traders bent on enriching themselves as quickly as possible and then returning to France. This was one of the greatest difficulties that Champlain had to contend with. The French at this time had little thought of anything else than developing a great trade, whereas the English colonists, with strong good sense, set themselves to tilling the soil and to making true homes for themselves and their children's children. The result was that Canada long remained a sickly infant, while the English colonies were growing sturdily.

An event that must have deeply tried Champlain was the surrender of Quebec by his government to the English. He actually spent some time in London as a prisoner, being treated with great consideration. Eventually, however, Quebec was restored to its former masters and Champlain to the governorship.

Thus were spent the last years of his life. He died on Christmas day, in 1635. At his funeral all the little community, Jesuits, officers, soldiers, traders, and settlers, gathered to pay honor to the dead "Father of New France."

He was a great soul, his faults chiefly those of a too confiding nature, always manly and sincere, a brave soldier and a true gentleman, unselfishly devoted to the work to which he had consecrated his life, and on the rude frontiers of the New World living in a spirit worthy of the best ages of chivalry.

The Father of New France is worthily commemorated by a noble monument erected in 1898 and unveiled in the presence of distinguished representatives of Canada, Great Britain, France, and the United States. It stands within the area once covered by Champlain's fort and presents the hero holding in his hand the King's open commission, while with bared head he salutes the child of his hopes, New France.

[1] This place, at the confluence of the Saguenay with the St. Lawrence, was peculiarly well situated for the fur-trade. The Saguenay, having its head-waters far to the north in the dreary region near Hudson Bay, rich in furs, was the route by which the natives of that wild country brought their peltries to market.

[2] The Indians were much given to various forms of divination by which they believed that they ascertained the will of the unseen powers.

Jonathan Carver, who traveled much among the western tribes, about 1766, relates that once when he was with a band of Christinos, or Crees, on the north shore of Lake Superior, anxiously awaiting the coming of certain traders with goods, the chief told him that the medicine-man, or conjurer, or "clairvoyant" as we should say, would try to get some information from the Manitou. Elaborate preparations were made. In a spacious tent, brightly lighted with torches of pitch-pine, the conjurer, wrapped in a large elk-skin, and corded with about forty yards of elk-hide lariat—"bound up like an Egyptian mummy"—was laid down in the midst of the assembly, in full view of all.

Presently he began to mutter, then to jabber a mixed jargon of several native tongues, sometimes raving, sometimes praying, till he had worked himself into a frenzy and foamed at the mouth.

Suddenly he leaped to his feet, shaking off his bands "as if they were burnt asunder," and announced that the Manitou had revealed to him that, just at noon on the next day, there would arrive a canoe the occupants of which would bring news as to the expected traders.

On the next day Carver and his Indian friends were on the bluff watching. At the appointed hour a canoe (undoubtedly sent by the conjurer) came into view and was hailed by the Indians with shouts of delight. It brought tidings of the early coming of the traders.

[3] This was the established route used by the Indians. By it one could pass by water, with only the short carry between Lake George and the Hudson, all the way from the Great Lakes to the ocean.

[4] The thrifty Hollanders at once saw the importance of securing the fur-trade of the region thus opened to them. To protect it, they first established at the mouth of the river, on Manhattan Island, the post out of which the city of New York has grown. Next they reared a fort on an island a little below Albany; and, in 1623, they built Fort Orange, on the site of Albany. It soon became a most important point, because, until Fort Stanwix, on the Mohawk, was built, it was the nearest white man's post to which the Indians of the great Iroquois confederacy might bring their peltries. We hear much of it in the early history.

The great trading-stations were always on big rivers, because these drained a wide territory, and the supply of furs lasted long. As the French pushed further westward, as we shall see, important stations were opened on the Great Lakes.

[5] We may wonder at so small a list of casualties. The fact is that, until the introduction of fire-arms, Indian open fighting was not very deadly. They might yell and screech and shoot arrows at each other for hours, with very little loss. Surprises and ambuscades were their most effective methods.

[6] This word came into general use among French voyageurs and, later, among white men generally, as the equivalent of an Indian word denoting mysterious power.

Chapter X

JESUIT MISSIONARY PIONEERS

Unselfishness of the Better Class of Jesuits.—Their Achievements in Exploration.—The Great Political Scheme of which they were the Instruments.—Indian Superstitions.—Danger!—The Touching Story of Isaac Jogues.—Ferocity of the Five Nations.—Ruin of the Hurons and of the Jesuit Missions among them.

A class of men whose aims were singularly unselfish were the missionaries of the Roman Catholic Church, mostly Jesuits, that is, members of the Society of Jesus. The first object of the best of them was to convert the Indians and establish a great branch of the Catholic Church in the wilds of America. There were others, however, whose first aim was to increase the power of France. These politician-priests were well represented by the famous Father Allouez who, while he preached the gospel to the Indians, took still greater pains to preach the glory of the French King, whose subjects he wished to make them. On one occasion, supported by a French officer and his soldiers, drawn up under arms, he thus addressed a large assemblage of Indians gathered at Sault Ste. Marie:

"When our King attacks his enemies, he is more terrible than the thunder: the earth trembles; the air and the sea are all on fire with the blaze of his cannon; he is seen in the midst of his warriors, covered over with the blood of his enemies, whom he kills in such numbers that he does not count them by the scalps, but by the streams of blood which he causes to flow. In each city he has storehouses where there are hatchets enough to cut down all your forests, kettles enough to cook all your moose, and beds enough to fill all your lodges. His house is higher than the tallest of your trees and holds more families than the largest of your towns. Men come from every quarter of the earth to listen to and admire him. All that is done in the world is decided by him alone."

But we are not now concerned with such scheming priests. We wish to sketch very briefly the story of some of those faithful and single-hearted men who were true missionaries of religion. In their journeys into the wilds they often proved themselves pathfinders, penetrating regions never before trodden by the foot of a white man. Many a tribe got its first impression of our race from these peaceful preachers. A mission priest, Le Caron, was the first white man who saw Lake Huron. Another, the heroic Jogues, was the first of our race to see Lake George. Thus the work of Catholic missionaries must have a large place in any truthful account of early New France. In fact, the history of Canada is for a long time the history of Jesuit activity.

These men were in the habit of sending to their superiors in the Old World copious accounts of all that they saw or did. These reports, which are known as the "Jesuit Relations," form a perfect storehouse of information about early Canadian affairs and about the Indians with whom the French were in contact.

These Jesuit priests commonly were highly educated men, accustomed to all the refinements of life—some of them of noble families—and we can only measure their devotion to the cause of religion when we realize the contrast between their native surroundings and the repulsive savagery into which they plunged when they went among the Indians. Think of such a man as Father Le Jeune, cultivated and high-minded, exiling himself from his white brethren for a whole season, which he spent with a band of Algonquins, roaming the wintry forests with them, sharing their hunger and cold and filth, sometimes on the verge of perishing from sheer starvation, at other times, when game chanced to be plentiful, revolted by the gorging of his companions, at all times disgusted by their nastiness. "I told them again and again," he writes, "that if dogs and swine could talk, they would use just such speech;" a remark which shows, by the way, that the good friar did not think so highly of dumb animals as we do in these more enlightened days.

But he had abundant charity, and he noted that underneath all this coarse rudeness there was genuine fellowship among these savages; that they cheerfully helped one another, and when food was scarce, fairly distributed the smallest portion among all. Such observations helped him to endure his lot with serenity, even when he was himself made the butt of the coarsest jokes. He survived his hard experiences and, after five months of roaming, exhausted and worn to a shadow, rejoined the brethren in the rude convent at Quebec.

There was much of this fine spirit about the best of the Jesuits. But, besides this individual devotion, there was another important circumstance: they were only private soldiers in a great army. They had no will of their own, for one of the first principles of the Order was absolute obedience. Wherever their superiors might send them they must go without a question. Whatever they might be ordered to do, they must do it without a murmur.

It became the policy of the leading men of the Order in Canada to establish missionary posts among the Hurons who, living in fixed habitations, were more hopeful subjects than the roving Algonquins of the St. Lawrence region. It would be a great gain, they reasoned, if these people could be brought within the pale of the Church. At the same time that so many souls would be saved from everlasting flames, the immensely lucrative fur-trade of a vast region would be secured to the French, and the King would gain thousands of dusky subjects. Canada would flourish, the fur-traders would grow richer than ever, and France would be in the way of extending her rule ever farther and further over the western forests and waters—all through the exertions of a few faithful and single-hearted men who went to preach religion.

The three men chosen for the work among the Hurons were Fathers Brebeuf, Daniel, and Davost. On their journey to their post, if they could have followed a direct line, they would have gone up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, traversed the length of the lake, and then by a short overland journey reached their destination. But this route would have exposed them to the ferocious Iroquois, whose country bordered Lake Ontario on the south. Therefore, it was necessary to take the long and circuitous canoe-voyage which Champlain had taken fifteen years earlier (See map).

At last, after many pains and perils, half-dead with hunger and fatigue, they reached a village of the Huron country. Soon they settled down to the routine of their daily life, of which they have left us a very readable account. Every day they had numerous visitors, some from long distances, who came to gaze in silent wonder at their domestic arrangements. For instance, there was the clock. They squatted on the floor for hours, watching it and waiting to hear it strike. They thought it was alive and asked what it ate. They listened in awe when it struck, sure that they heard the voice of a living being. "The Captain" they called it.

Sometimes one of the French soldiers who accompanied the Jesuits, when "the Captain" had sounded his last stroke, would cry out, "Stop!" Its immediate silence proved that it heard and obeyed.

"What does the Captain say?" the Indians sometimes asked.

"When he strikes twelve times, he says, 'Hang on the kettle,' and when he strikes four times, he says, 'Get up and go home.'"

This was a particularly happy thought; at the stroke of four their visitors would invariably rise and take themselves off.

In spite of the lack of outward signs of success, the good men were making a conquest of the savage people's hearts. Their unwearied patience, their kindness, the innocence of their lives, and the tact with which they avoided every occasion of ill-will, did not fail to gain the confidence of those whom they sought to win, and chiefs of distant villages came to urge that they would take up their abode with them. Soon the Huron country contained no less than six different points where faithful priests preached the gospel.

The Fathers had abundant opportunities of observing the habits of the natives. They have left a most interesting description of the great Feast of the Dead, which was held at intervals of ten or twelve years, and the object of which was to gather into one great burying-place all the dead of the tribe, these being removed from their temporary resting-places on scaffolds and in graves. It was believed that the souls of the dead remained with their bodies until the great common burial, then they would depart to the spirit-world.[1]

This practice, of a great common burial, explains the occurrence, in various parts of the country once occupied by the Hurons, of pits containing the remains of many hundreds of persons all mixed together promiscuously, together with belts of wampum, copper ornaments, glass beads, and other articles. One of these deposits is said to have contained the remains of several thousand persons.[2]

The story of Isaac Jogues is a good example both of the Jesuit missionaries' sufferings and of their fortitude. He had gone to Quebec for supplies and was returning to the Huron country with two young Frenchmen, Goupil and Couture, and a number of Hurons. Suddenly the war-whoop rang in their ears, and a fleet of Iroquois canoes bore down upon them from adjacent islands, with a terrific discharge of musketry. The Hurons for the greater part leaped ashore and fled. Jogues sprang into the bulrushes and could have got away. When he saw some of the converted Indians in the hands of their enemies, he determined to share their fate, came out from his hiding-place, and gave himself up. Goupil was taken prisoner. Couture had got away, but the thought of the fate that probably awaited Jogues decided him to go back and cast in his lot with him. In the affray, however, he had killed an Iroquois. In revenge, the others fell upon him furiously, stripped off all his clothing, tore away his finger-nails with their teeth, gnawed his fingers, and thrust a sword through one of his hands. Jogues broke from his guards, ran to his friend, and threw his arms about his neck. This so incensed the Iroquois that they turned upon him, beat him with their fists and war-clubs till he was senseless, and gnawed his fingers as they had done Couture's. Goupil next received the same ferocious treatment.

The victorious Iroquois now started off with their captives for their country. Their route lay up the river Richelieu, through the length of Lake Champlain, and through the greater part of Lake George to a point where they were wont to leave it and cross over to the Hudson. There was picturesque scenery by the way. But what charm had the beauties of Lake Champlain and distant glimpses of the Adirondacks for the poor prisoners, harassed by the pain and fever of their wounds, in the day cruelly beaten by their captors and at night so tormented by clouds of mosquitoes that they could not sleep? In time they passed the sites of Crown Point and Ticonderoga, sighted romantic Lake George, which these three lonely white men were the first of their race to see, and landed from their canoes at the place where afterward rose Fort William Henry, the scene of one of the most shocking tragedies of the Colonial Wars.

Thirteen dreadful days the journey occupied, from the St. Lawrence to its termination at a palisaded town on the banks of the Mohawk. On Lake Champlain they had met a war-party of Iroquois, and the prisoners, for their delight, had been compelled to run the gauntlet between a double line of braves armed with clubs and thorny sticks. When Jogues fell drenched in blood and half-dead, he was recalled to consciousness by fire applied to his body. Couture's experience illustrates a singular trait of the ferocious Iroquois. There was nothing that they admired so much as bulldog courage; and though he had exasperated them by killing one of their warriors, they punished him only by subjecting him to excruciating tortures. His fortitude under these still further increased their admiration and they ended by adopting him into the tribe. Many years later we read of him still living among the Mohawks. Jogues and Goupil they dragged from town to town, in each place exposing them on a scaffold and subjecting them to atrocities contrived to cause the utmost suffering without endangering life. Yet, in an interval between tortures, Jogues seized an opportunity to baptize some Huron prisoners with a few rain-drops gathered from the husks of an ear of green corn thrown to him for food.

Three of the Hurons were burned to death, and the two Frenchmen expected the same fate. Goupil did indeed meet with his death, but in a different way. He was once seen to make the sign of the cross on the forehead of a grandchild of the Indian in whose lodge he lived. The old man's superstition was aroused, having been told by the Dutch that the sign of the cross came from the Devil. So he imagined that Goupil had bewitched the child.

The next morning, as the two Frenchmen were walking together, talking of the glory of suffering for the sake of Christ, they met two young Indians, one of whom buried his hatchet in Goupil's head. Jogues gave absolution to his dying friend and then, kneeling calmly, bowed his neck to the blow which he expected. Instead, he was ordered to get up and go home.

For a time his life hung on a thread. He would have welcomed death. But the very indifference to it which he showed was probably the reason why the Iroquois spared him. Now he led an existence of horrible drudgery. After a while, as he showed no disposition to escape, he was allowed to come and go as he pleased. So he went from town to town, teaching and baptizing whenever he could get a chance. The gangs of prisoners whom the Iroquois brought home from the Huron country, and whom they almost invariably burned, furnished him an abundance of subjects to work on.

Once it happened that he went with a party of Indians to a fishing-place on the Hudson. Thence some of them went up the river to Fort Orange, a miserable structure of logs, standing within the limits of the present city of Albany. The Dutch settlers there had heard of Jogues's captivity and, strenuous Protestants though they were, had striven to secure his release by offering goods to a large value. Now that he was among them, they urged him not to return to his captors, but to make his escape, since his death was certain, if he went back. They offered to smuggle him on board a vessel that lay in the river and pay his way to France. He resolved to seize the tempting opportunity.

It would make our story too long if we should tell at length the narrow escapes that he still experienced before he succeeded in getting away. At his first attempt to slip away at night, he was severely bitten by a savage dog belonging to the Dutch farmer with whom he and the Indians lodged. When he got off he lay two days hidden in the hold of the vessel that was to carry him away. Then the Indians came out and so frightened its officers that he was sent ashore and put under the care of a miserly old fellow who ate the most of the food that was provided for Jogues. While he was hidden in this man's garret he was within a few feet of Indians who came there to trade. Finally the Dutch satisfied the Indians by paying a large ransom and shipped Jogues down the river. He received nothing but kindness from the Dutch everywhere and, on his arrival at Manhattan (New York), was furnished by the Governor with a suit of clothes, instead of his tattered skins, and given a passage to Europe.

At last he landed on the coast of Brittany. In due time he reached Paris, and the city was stirred with the tale of his sufferings and adventures. He was summoned to court, and the ladies thronged about him to do him reverence, while the Queen kissed his mutilated hands.

Would not one think that Jogues had had enough of the New World, with its deadly perils and cruel pains? But so it was not. His simple nature cared nothing for honors. His heart was over the water, among the savages whom he longed to save. Besides, he was only a private soldier in that great army, the Jesuit brotherhood, of which every member was sworn to act, to think, to live, for but one object, the advancement of religion as it was represented by the Order. And who was so fit for the work among the Indians as Jogues, who knew their language and customs?

So, in the following spring we find him again on the Atlantic, bound for Canada. Two years he passed in peaceful labors at Montreal. Then his supreme trial came. Peace had been made between the French and the Mohawks, and Couture still lived among the latter, for the express purpose of holding them steadfast to their promises. But, for some reason, the French apprehended an outbreak of hostilities, and it was resolved to send envoys to the Indian country. At the first mention of the subject to Jogues he shrank from returning to the scene of so much suffering. But the habit of implicit obedience triumphed, and he quickly announced his willingness to do the will of his superiors, which to him was the will of God. "I shall go, but I shall never return," he wrote to a friend.

He started out with a small party carrying a load of gifts intended to conciliate the Iroquois, and followed the route that was associated in his mind with so much misery, up the Richelieu and Lake Champlain and through Lake George. At the head of this water they crossed over to the Hudson, borrowed canoes from some Indians fishing there, and dropped down the river to Fort Orange. Once more Jogues was among his Dutch friends. Glad as they were to see him, they wondered at his venturing back among the people who had once hunted him like a noxious beast. From Fort Orange he ascended the Mohawk River to the first Indian town. With what wonder the savages must have gazed at the man who had lived among them as a despised slave, and now had come back laden with gifts as the ambassador of a great power! They received him graciously, and when his errand was done, he returned safe to Quebec.

It would have been well for him if his superiors had contented themselves with what he had already done and suffered. But they had a grand scheme of founding a mission among the Iroquois. They knew its perils and called it "The Mission of Martyrs." To this post of danger Jogues was sent. The devoted man went without a murmur. On the way he met Indians who warned him of danger, and his Huron companions turned back, but he went on. Arrived among the Mohawks, he found a strong tide of feeling running against him. The accident that aroused it illustrates Indian superstitiousness. On his former visit, expecting to return, he had left a small box. From the first the Indians suspected it of being, like Pandora's box in the old mythology, full of all kinds of ills. But Jogues opened it and showed them that it contained only some harmless personal effects. After he was gone, however, some Huron prisoners wrought on their terror and at the same time reviled the French, declaring that the latter had almost ruined the Huron nation by their witchcraft and had brought on it drought, plague, pestilence, and famine.

The Iroquois were well-nigh wild with rage and fright. At any moment the small-pox or some other horror might step out of the little box and stalk abroad among them. The three clans that made up the tribe were divided. The clans of the Wolf and the Tortoise were for keeping the peace; but the clan of the Bear was for making war on the French. Just then, by ill fortune, Jogues, approaching the Mohawk villages, encountered a band of Bear warriors. They seized and dragged him to their town. Here he was savagely attacked and beaten with fists and clubs. In vain he reminded them that he had come on an errand of peace. They tortured him cruelly. The Wolf and Tortoise clans protested against this violation of the peace, but the others carried everything before them.

The next day Jogues was bidden to a feast. He did not dare refuse to go. As he entered the lodge of the Bear chief, in spite of the efforts of an Indian who exposed his own life in trying to save him, a hatchet was buried in his brain. Thus died a singularly pure and unselfish man, a Pathfinder, too, for he was one of the three white men who first saw Lake George.

Shortly after the death of Jogues, war broke out again. Nothing could have exceeded the ferocity of the Five Nations. They boasted that they intended to sweep the French and their Indian friends off the face of the earth. No place seemed too remote for them. At the most unexpected moments of the day or the night they rose, as it seemed, out of the earth, and, with their blood-curdling war-whoop, fell upon their intended victims with guns and tomahawks. The poor Algonquins were in a state of pitiable terror. Nowhere were they safe. Even when they retired into the wilderness north of the St. Lawrence, they were tracked by their ruthless foes, slaughtered, burned, and drowned.

We might go on and tell the story of other priests who all fell at the post of duty and died worthily. But of what use would it be to prolong these horrors? Enough to say that the Huron nation was almost annihilated, the feeble remnant left their country and went elsewhere, and the once promising work of the Jesuits among them ended in fire and blood.

A small party of the Hurons accompanied the returning priests to the French settlements and became established, under French protection, near Quebec, at a place called New Lorette, or Indian Lorette, and fought by the side of their white friends in later wars. There, to this day, their descendants, mostly French half-breeds, may be seen engaged in the harmless occupations of weaving baskets and making moccasins. Another band wandered away to the far Northwest, came into conflict with the warlike and powerful Sioux, and, driven back eastward, finally took up its abode near the sites of Detroit and Sandusky. Under the name of Wyandots, its descendants played a conspicuous part in our border wars.

[1] The faith of the Indians in a future life was very sincere and strong. Jonathan Carver tells a touching story of a couple whom he knew who lost a little son of about four years. They seemed inconsolable. After a time the father died. Then the mother dried her tears and ceased her lamentations. When he asked her the reason of this, as it seemed to him, strange conduct, she answered that she and her husband had grieved excessively, because they knew that their little boy would be alone in the other world, without anybody to provide for his wants, but now, his father having gone to join him, her mind was at rest in the assurance that the little fellow would be well cared for and happy.

[2] This usage seems to have been quite general. Jonathan Carver, in 1767, tells of a common burying-place of several bands of the Sioux, to which these roving people carefully brought their dead at a given time, depositing them with great solemnity. These bodies had previously been temporarily placed on rude scaffolds on the limbs of trees, awaiting the general interment.

Chapter XI

JEAN NICOLLET, LOUIS JOLIET, AND
FATHER JACQUES MARQUETTE

THE DISCOVERERS OF THE MISSISSIPPI

Jean Nicollet's Voyage on the Wisconsin.—Louis Joliet and Jacques Marquette are sent by Count Frontenac to follow the Course of the Mississippi.—On the Wisconsin.—The "Great Water" reached.—Hospitably entertained in an Indian Camp.—An Invaluable Gift.—The Mouth of the Missouri and the Mouth of the Ohio passed.—The Outlet of the Arkansas reached.—Hardships of the Return Voyage.—Death of Marquette.—Joliet's Mishap.

A notable coureur de bois (a French-Canadian wood-ranger) was Jean Nicollet. He had lived for years among the savages and had become thoroughly Indian in his habits. He was sent by the French Governor, about 1638, as an ambassador to the Winnebagoes, west of Lake Michigan. He had heard among his Indian friends of a strange people without hair or beard who came from beyond the Great Water to trade with the Indians on the Lakes. Who could these beardless men be but Chinese or Japanese?

So fully possessed was he by this idea that, in order to make a suitable appearance before the Orientals whom he expected to meet, he took along with him a robe of heavy Chinese silk, embroidered with birds and flowers. When he neared the Winnebago town, he sent a messenger ahead to announce his coming, and, having put on his gorgeous robe, followed him on the scene. Never did a circus, making its grand entry into a village in all the glory of gilded chariots and brass band, inspire deeper awe than this primitive ambassador, with his flaming robe and a pair of pistols which he fired continually. His pale face, the first that the Winnebagoes had ever seen, gave them a sense of something unearthly. The squaws and the children fled into the woods, shrieking that it was a manitou (spirit) armed with thunder and lightning. The warriors, however, stood their ground bravely and entertained him with a feast of one hundred and twenty beaver.[1]

But if Nicollet did not succeed in opening relations with Cathay and Cipango (China and Japan), he did something else that entitles him to be commemorated among the Pathfinders. He ascended Fox River to its head-waters, crossed the little divide that separates the waters flowing into the Lakes from those that empty into the Gulf of Mexico, and launched his canoe on the Wisconsin, the first white man, so far as we know, who floated on one of the upper tributaries of the mighty river. This was just about one hundred years after Soto had crossed it in its lower course. On his return, he reported that he had followed the river until he came within three days of the sea. Undoubtedly he misunderstood his Indian guides. The "Great Water" of which they spoke was almost certainly the Mississippi, for that is what the name means.

The first undoubted exploration of the mighty river took place thirty-five years later. It was made by two men who combined the two aspects of Jesuit activity, the spiritual and the worldly. Louis Joliet was born in Canada, of French parents. He was educated by the Jesuits, and was all his life devoted to them. He was an intelligent merchant, practical and courageous. No better man could have been chosen for the work assigned him.

His companion in this undertaking was a Jesuit priest, Jacques Marquette, who was a fine example of the noblest qualities ever exhibited by his order. He was settled as a missionary at Michillimackinac, on Mackinaw Strait, when Joliet came to him from Quebec with orders from Count Frontenac to go with him to seek and explore the Mississippi.

On May 17, 1673, in very simple fashion, in two birch-bark canoes, with five white voyageurs and a moderate supply of smoked meat and Indian corn, the two travelers set out to solve a perplexing problem, by tracing the course of the great river. Their only guide was a crude map based on scraps of information which they had gathered. Besides Marquette's journal, by a happy chance we have that of Jonathan Carver, who traveled over the same route nearly a hundred years later. From him we get much useful and interesting information.

At the first, the explorers' course lay westward, along the northern shore of Lake Michigan and into Green Bay. The Menomonie, or Wild-rice Indians, one of the western branches of the Algonquin family, wished to dissuade them from going further. They told of ferocious tribes, who would put them to death without provocation, and of frightful monsters (alligators) which would devour them and their canoes. The voyagers thanked them and pushed on, up Fox River and across Lake Winnebago.

At the approach to the lake are the Winnebago Rapids, which necessitate a portage, or "carry." Our voyagers do not mention having any trouble here. But, at a later time, according to a tradition related by Dr. R. G. Thwaites, this was the scene of a tragic affair. When the growing fur-trade made this route very important, the Fox Indians living here made a good thing out of carrying goods over the trail and helping the empty boats over the rapids. They eventually became obnoxious by taking toll from passing traders. Thereupon the Governor of New France sent a certain Captain Marin to chastise them. He came up the Fox River with a large party of voyageurs and half-breeds on snow-shoes, surprised the natives in their village, and slaughtered them by hundreds.

At another time the same man led a summer expedition against the Foxes. He kept his armed men lying down in the boats and covered with oilcloth like goods. Hundreds of red-skins were squatting on the beach, awaiting the coming of the flotilla. The canoes ranged up along the shore. Then, at a signal, the coverings were thrown off, and a rain of bullets was poured into the defenceless savages, while a swivel-gun mowed down the victims of this brutality. Hundreds were slaughtered, it is said.

On to the lower Fox River their course led the explorers. This brought them into the country of the Miamis, the Mascoutins, once a powerful tribe, now extinct, and the Kickapoos, all Algonquins of the West.

A council was held, and the Indians readily granted their request for guides to show them the way to the Wisconsin. Through the tortuous and blind course of the little river, among lakes and marshes, they would have had great difficulty in making their way unaided.[2]

When they came to the portage, where now stands the city of Portage,[3] with its short canal connecting the two rivers, they carried their canoes across, and launched their little barks on the Wisconsin. Down this river they would float to the great mysterious stream that would carry them they knew not whither, perhaps to the Sea of Virginia (the Atlantic), perhaps to the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps to the Vermilion Sea (the Gulf of California).

Whether they would ever return from the dim, undiscovered country into which they were venturing, who could say? It seems amazing that one hundred and thirty years after Soto had crossed the great river, intelligent Frenchmen were ignorant even of its outlet. It shows how successfully Spain had suppressed knowledge of the territory which she claimed.

Down the quiet waters of the Wisconsin the voyagers glided, passing the thrifty villages of the Sacs and Foxes, then a powerful people, now almost extinct. On June 17, exactly one month from the day of their starting, their canoes shot out into a rapid current, here a mile wide, and with joy beyond expression, as Marquette writes, they knew that they had achieved the first part of their undertaking. They had reached the "Great Water."

What would have been the feelings of these unassuming voyagers, if they could have looked down the dim vista of time, and have seen the people of a great and prosperous commonwealth (Wisconsin), on June 17, 1873, celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of their achievement!

Strange sights unfolded themselves, as they made their way down the mighty stream and looked on shores that no eyes of a white man had ever beheld. What magnificent solitudes! Only think of it—more than a fortnight without seeing a human being!

They used always extreme caution, as well they might, in view of the tales that had been told them of ferocious savages roaming that region. They went ashore in the evening, cooked and ate their supper, and then pushed out and anchored in the stream, keeping a man on watch till morning.

After more than two weeks of this solitary voyaging, one day they saw a well-trodden path that led to the adjacent prairie. Joliet and Marquette determined to follow it, leaving the canoes in charge of their men. After a walk of some miles inland, they came to an Indian village, with two others in sight. They advanced with beating hearts. What was their reception to be? When they were near enough to hear voices in the wigwams, they stood out in the open and shouted to attract attention. A great commotion ensued, and the inmates swarmed out. Then, to their intense relief, four chiefs advanced deliberately, holding aloft two calumets, or peace-pipes. They wore French cloth, from which it was evident that they traded with the French. These people proved to belong to the great Illinois tribe, the very people some of whom had met Marquette at his mission-station and had begged him, as he says, "to bring them the word of God."

Now, after the pipe of peace had been duly smoked, he had the long-desired opportunity of delivering the message of salvation. He did not fail to add some words about the power and glory of Onontio (Count Frontenac). The head chief replied in a flowery speech, after the most approved fashion of Indian oratory, assuring his guests that their presence made his tobacco sweeter, the river calmer, the sky more serene, and the earth more beautiful. He further showed his friendship by giving them a boy as a slave and, best of all, a calumet, or peace-pipe,[4] which was to serve as a commendation to the goodwill of other Indians. Invaluable the voyagers found it.

The friendly chief also represented very strongly the danger of going further down the Great Water and vainly tried to dissuade them. Feasting followed. After various courses, a dainty dish of boiled dog was served, then one of fat buffalo, much to the Frenchmen's relief. Throughout this entertainment the master of ceremonies fed the guests as if they had been infants, removing fish-bones with his fingers and blowing on hot morsels to cool them, before putting them into their mouths. This was the very pink of Indian courtesy.

The two Frenchmen spent the night with their dusky friends and the next day were escorted to their canoes by several hundreds of them. This first encounter with Indians of the Mississippi Valley on their own soil seems to have taken place not far from the site of Keokuk.

The voyagers' next sensation was experienced after passing the mouth of the Illinois River. Immediately above the site of the city of Alton, the flat face of a high rock was painted, in the highest style of Indian art, with representations of two horrible monsters, to which the natives were wont to make sacrifices as they passed on the river. The sight of them caused in the pious Frenchmen a feeling that they were in the Devil's country, for to Christians of the seventeenth century heathen gods were not mere creatures of the imagination, but living beings, demons, high captains in Satan's great army.

Soon the voyagers were made to fear for their safety by a mighty torrent of yellow mud surging athwart the blue current of the Mississippi, sweeping down logs and uprooting trees, and dashing their light canoes like leaves on an angry brook. They were passing the mouth of the Missouri. A few days later they crossed the outlet of the Ohio, "Beautiful River," as the Iroquois name means.

All the time it was growing hotter. The picturesque shores of the upper river had given place to dense canebrakes, and swarms of mosquitoes pestered them day and night. Now they had a note of danger in meeting some Indians who evidently were in communication with Europeans, for they had guns and carried their powder in small bottles of thick glass. These Europeans could be none other than the Spaniards to the southward, of whom it behooved the Frenchmen to beware, if they did not wish to pull an oar in a galley or swing a pick in a silver-mine. Still there was a satisfaction in the thought that, having left one civilization thousands of miles behind them, they had passed through the wilderness to the edge of another. These Indians readily responded to the appeal of the Frenchmen's calumet, invited them ashore, and feasted them.

On toward the ocean, which they were falsely told was distant only ten days' journey, the voyagers sped, passing the point at which, one hundred and thirty-three years earlier, Soto, with the remnant of his army, had crossed the mighty river in whose bed his bones were destined to rest. Above the mouth of the Arkansas they were for a time in deadly peril from Indians. These were of the Mitchigamea tribe, who, with the Chickasaws and others of the Muskoki family, fought the Spaniards so valiantly. Canoes were putting out above and below, to cut off the explorers' retreat, while some young warriors on the shore were hastily stringing their bows, all animated doubtless by bitter memories of white men inherited from Soto's time. Once more the calumet saved its bearers. Marquette all the while held it aloft, and some of the elders, responding to its silent appeal, succeeded in restraining the fiery young men. The strangers were invited ashore, feasted, as usual, and entertained over night. They had some misgivings, but did not dare refuse these hospitalities; and no harm befell them.

The next stage of their journey brought them to a village just opposite the mouth of the Arkansas River. Here they were received in great state by the Arkansas Indians, notice of their coming having been sent ahead by their new friends. There was the usual speechmaking, accompanied by interminable feasting, in which a roasted dog held the place of honor. There was a young Indian who spoke Illinois well, and through him Marquette was able to preach, as well as to gain information about the river below. He was told that the shores were infested by fierce savages armed with guns.

By this time it was evident that nothing was to be gained by going further. The explorers had ascertained beyond dispute that the Mississippi emptied its waters, not directly into the Atlantic, or into the Pacific, but into the Gulf of Mexico. If they went further, they ran the risk of being killed by Indians or falling into the hands of Spaniards. In either case the result of their discovery would be lost. Therefore they resolved to return to Canada. Just two months from their starting and one month from their discovery of the Great Water they began their return.

Their route was a different one from the original, for on reaching the mouth of the Illinois River they entered and ascended it. On the way, they stopped at a famous village of the Illinois tribe called Kaskaskia. Thence they were guided by a band of young warriors through the route up the Des Plaines River and across the portage to Lake Michigan. Coasting its shore, they reached Green Bay, after an absence of four months.

Thus ended a memorable voyage. The travelers had paddled their canoes more than two thousand, five hundred miles, had explored two of the three routes leading into the Mississippi, and had followed the Great Water itself to within seven hundred miles of the ocean. They had settled one of the knotty geographical points of their day, that of the river's outlet. All this they had done in hourly peril of their lives. Though they experienced no actual violence, there was no time at which they were not in danger.

In the end the voyage cost Marquette his life, for its hardships and exposures planted in his system the germs of a disease from which he never fully recovered, and from which he died, two years later, on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Joliet met with a peculiar misfortune. At the Lachine Rapids, just above Montreal, almost at the very end of his voyage of thousands of miles, his canoe was upset, two men and his little Indian boy were drowned, and his box of papers, including his precious journal, was lost. Undoubtedly his daily record of the voyage would have been very valuable, for he was a man of scholarship as well as of practical ability. But its accidental loss gave the greater fame to Marquette, whose account was printed. In recent years, however, he has been recognized as an equal partner with the noble priest in the great achievement.

[1] These Winnebagoes were the most eastern branch of the great Dakota-Sioux family. Their ancestors were the builders, it is believed, of the Wisconsin mounds.

[2] Carver says, "It is with difficulty that canoes can pass through the obstructions they meet with from the rice-stalks. This river is the greatest resort for wild fowl that I met with in the whole course of my travels; frequently the sun would be obscured by them for some minutes together."

[3] This spot has a remarkable interest as the place where, within a very short distance, rise the waters that flow away to the eastward, through the Great Lakes, into the North Atlantic, and those that now southward to the Mississippi and the Gulf. It is, however, according to Carver, most uninviting in appearance, "a morass overgrown with a kind of long grass, the rest of it a plain, with some few oak and pine trees growing thereon. I observed here," he says, "a great number of rattlesnakes."

[4] The following description of this very important article is taken from Father Hennepin:

"This Calumet is the most mysterious Thing in the World among the Savages of the Continent of the Northern America: for it is used in all their most important Transactions. However, it is nothing else but a large Tobacco-pipe made of Red, Black, or White Marble: The Head is finely polished, and the Quill, which is commonly two Foot and a half long, is made of a pretty strong Reed, or Cane, adorned with Feathers of all Colours, interlaced with Locks of Women's Hair. They tie to it two wings of the most curious Birds they find, which makes their Calumet not unlike Mercury's Wand.

"A Pipe, such as I have described it, is a Pass and Safe Conduct amongst all the Allies of the Nation who has given it; for the Savages are generally persuaded that a great Misfortune would befal 'em, if they violated the Publick Faith of the Calumet."

The French never wearied of extolling the wonderful influence of this symbol of brotherhood. Says Father Gravier, writing of his voyage down the Mississippi, in 1700: "No such honor is paid to the crowns and sceptres of kings as they pay to it. It seems to be the God of peace and war, the arbiter of life and death."

Chapter XII

PIERRE ESPRIT RADISSON AND MÉDARD CHOUART
EXPLORE LAKE SUPERIOR

Who were the Coureurs de bois.—Radisson's Experiences as a Prisoner among the Iroquois.—He plays the Indian Warrior.—Escapes to the Dutch.—Makes his Way back to Canada.—He and his Brother-in-law set out for the Upper Lakes.—Fight with Iroquois.—Storm an Indian Fort.—Reach Lake Superior.—"The Pictured Rocks."—Keweenaw Point.—Long Overland Journey.—Summer and Feasting.—Winter and Famine.—Feasting again.—Fine Ducking.—Start for Home.—Reach Montreal with Great Fleet of Canoes.

The early history of New France owes its romantic interest to the activity of four classes of men. Daring explorers, such as Cartier, Champlain, Joliet, Marquette, La Salle, plunged into the wilderness, penetrated remote regions, made great discoveries, and extended French influence and French trade as far to the west as the Mississippi and to the northeast as far as Hudson Bay. French Catholic missionaries said mass and preached their faith in the heart of the forest primeval and at lonely posts on the shores of the Great Lakes. Able and brilliant Governors, such as Champlain and Frontenac, built forts at commanding points on the inland waters, and ruled, in a fashion, an area vastly greater than that of France itself.

Of these three classes of men and their achievements we have had examples. We come now to speak of a fourth class who exercised a powerful influence on the destinies of New France. If we remember that the material object of French activity in America was furs, we shall easily understand that the men who were busied in the fur-trade were a very important part of the scanty population. They were of two kinds. There were merchants who "kept store" at Quebec, Montreal, Three Rivers, and other trading-posts, bartering their goods to the Indians for peltries. These were brought to them in large quantities in the early summer, when the ice had broken up, and fleets of canoes descended the St. Lawrence laden with skins. Then there was amazing stir at the sleepy little posts on the great river. Painted savages, howling and screeching, mostly half-drunk, swarmed about the stations, and at night the sky was red with the glare of their fires. There was an enormous profit in the traffic, for the Indians had no idea of the cheapness of the goods which they took in exchange for their furs, nor of the high prices which these brought in Europe. It is no wonder that governors and other high officials were charged with having a secret interest in this very lucrative trade, and, for that reason, winking at violations of the King's orders regulating it. Even Jesuit missionaries sometimes were thought by their opponents to be more eager to share this money-making traffic than to win souls.

But a more numerous class than these stationary traders were the so-called coureurs de bois, or wood-rangers. These were wild fellows whom the love of adventure lured into the wilderness not less strongly than the love of gain. They roamed the forests, paddled the streams and lakes, hunted and trapped, trafficked with the Indians wherever and whenever they pleased, often in violation of express orders, and smuggled their forbidden furs into the trading-posts. Sometimes they spent whole seasons, even years, among the savages, taking to wife red women. Lawless fellows as these were, they helped mightily to extend French influence and subdue the continent to the white man's rule. Daring explorers, they penetrated remote regions, hobnobbed with the natives, and brought back accounts of what they had seen.

One of their leaders, Daniel Greysolon du Lhut, whose name is borne by the city of Duluth, in Minnesota, was a conspicuous figure in the wild frontier life. He carried on a vast fur-trade, held his rough followers well in hand, led a small army of them in fighting the battles of his country, and even appeared at the French court at Versailles.

The half-breed children of these coureurs, growing up in Indian wigwams, but full of pride in their French blood, became a strong link binding together the two races in friendly alliance and deciding the Indians, in time of war, to paint themselves and put on their feathers for the French rather than for the English. Therefore any account of pioneer Frenchmen should include a sketch of the coureurs de bois.

To illustrate this type, one is here taken as an example who was born in France, and who was a gentleman by birth and education, but whose insatiable love of adventure led him to take up the coureur's life, with all its vicissitudes. Withal, he was a man of note in his day, played no inconsiderable part in opening up the wilderness, and suggested the formation of that vast monopoly, the Hudson Bay Fur Company. His journals, after lying for more than two hundred years in manuscript, have been published and have proved very interesting. They give such an inside picture of savage life, with its nastiness, its alternate gluttony and starving, and its ferocity, as it would be hard to find elsewhere, drawn in such English as the wildest humorist would not dream of inventing.

Pierre Esprit Radisson was born at St. Malo, in France, and came to Canada in May, 1651. His home was at Three Rivers, where his relatives were settled. One day he went out gunning with two friends. They were warned by a man whom they met that hostile Indians were lurking in the neighborhood. Still they went on, forgetting their danger in the enjoyment of shooting ducks. Finally, however, one of the party said he would not go further, and the other joined him. This led Radisson to banter them, saying that he would go ahead and kill game enough for all.

On he went, shooting again and again, until he had more geese and ducks than he could carry home. Finally, after hiding some of his game in a hollow tree, he started back. When he came near the place where he had left his companions, imagine his horror at finding their bodies, "one being shott through with three boulletts and two blowes of an hatchett on the head, and the other run through in several places with a sword and smitten with an hatchett."

Suddenly he was surrounded by Indians who rose, as it were, out of the ground and rushed upon him, yelling like fiends. He fired his gun, wounding two with the duck-shot, and his pistol, without hurting any one. The next moment he found himself thrown on the ground and disarmed, without a single blow.

His courage had impressed the Indians so favorably that they treated him very kindly. When they pitched their camp, they offered him some of their meat, which smelt so horribly that he could not touch it. Seeing this, they cooked a special dish for him. He says it was a nasty mess, but, to show his appreciation, he swallowed some of it. This pleased his captors, and they further showed their good-will by untying him and letting him lie down comfortably between two of them, covered with a red coverlet through which he "might have counted the starrs."

The Indians traveled homeward in very leisurely fashion, stopping by the way for days at a time and making merry with Radisson, to whom they evidently had taken a strong liking. When they tried to teach him to sing, and he turned the tables by singing to them in French, they were delighted. "Often," he says, "have I sunged in French, to which they gave eares with a deepe silence." They were bent on making a thorough savage of him. So they trimmed his hair after their most approved fashion and plastered it with grease.

He pleased his captors greatly by his good humor and his taking part in chopping wood, paddling, or whatever might be doing, and chiefly by his not making any attempt to escape. In truth, he simply was afraid of being caught and dealt with more severely.

They were traveling the familiar route to the Iroquois country, and in time they came to a fishing-station, the occupants of which greeted the returning warriors uproariously. One of them struck Radisson, who, at a sign from his "keeper," clinched with him. The two fought furiously, wrestling and "clawing one another with hands, tooth, and nails." The Frenchman was delighted that his captors encouraged him as much as their fellow tribesman. He came off best, and they seemed mightily pleased.

The two men whom he had wounded at the time of his capture, far from resenting it, showed him "as much charity as a Christian might have given."

Still things looked squally for Radisson, when he entered the native village of the party and saw men, women, and boys drawn up in a double row, armed with rods and sticks, evidently for the savage ordeal of running the gauntlet. He was on the point of starting, resolved to run his swiftest, when an old woman took him by the hand, led him away to her cabin, and set food before him. How different from being tortured and burned, which was the fate that he expected! When some of the warriors came and took him away to the council-fire, she followed and pleaded so successfully that he was given up to her, to be her adopted son, in the place of one who had been killed.

Now nothing was too good for Radisson. The poor old woman had taken him to her heart, and she lavished kindness on him. Her daughters treated him as a brother, and her husband, a famous old warrior, gave a feast in his honor, presenting him to the company under the name of Orinha, which was that of his son who had been killed. He enjoyed the savage life for a time, having "all the pleasures imaginable," such as shooting partridges and "squerells."

But he soon grew home-sick and eager for an opportunity to escape. One offered itself unexpectedly. He had gone off on a hunt of several days with three Indians who invited him to join them. On the second day out, they picked up a man who was alone and invited him to go with them to their camp, which he gladly did. Imagine Radisson's surprise when this man, while the others were getting supper ready, spoke to him in Algonquin, that is, the language of the people who were allies of the French and mortal enemies of the Iroquois. Evidently he was a prisoner who had been spared and given his liberty.

"Do you love the French?" he asked in a low tone.

"Do you love the Algonquins?" Radisson returned.

"Indeed I do love my own people," he replied. "Why, then, do we live among these people? Let us kill these three fellows to-night with their own hatchets. It can easily be done."

Radisson professes to have been greatly shocked. But in the end he fell in with the plan. The two treacherous villains, after eating a hearty supper with their intended victims, lay down beside them and pretended to sleep. When the three Iroquois were deep in slumber, they rose, killed them with tomahawks, loaded the canoe with guns, ammunition, provisions, and the victims' scalps, which the Algonquin had cut off as trophies, and started on the long journey to Three Rivers.

Fourteen nights they had journeyed stealthily, lying in hiding all the day, for fear of meeting Iroquois on the war-path, and had reached a point but a few miles from Three Rivers, when, venturing to cross Lake St. Peter, a wide expansion of the St. Lawrence, by daylight, they encountered a number of hostile canoes. In vain they turned and paddled their hardest for the shore they had left. The enemy gained on them rapidly and opened fire. At the first discharge the Indian was killed and the canoe was so riddled that it was sinking, when the Iroquois ranged alongside and took Radisson out.

Now he was in trouble indeed. No more junketing! No more singing of jolly French songs to amuse his captors, but doleful journeying along with nineteen prisoners, one Frenchman, one Frenchwoman, and seventeen Huron men and women, the latter constantly chanting their mournful death-song.

Through the day the poor wretches lay in the canoes, pinioned and trussed like fowls; and at night they were laid on the ground securely fastened to posts, so that they could not move hand or foot, while mosquitoes and flies swarmed about them. When the Iroquois country was reached, they furnished sport to the whole population, which turned out everywhere to greet them with tortures. This time Radisson did not wholly escape. But when, for the second time, he was on the point of running the gauntlet, for the second time his "mother" rescued him. His "father" lectured him roundly on the folly of running away from people who had made him one of the family. Still he exerted himself strenuously to save Radisson from the death penalty which hung over him, and succeeded in securing his release after he had been duly tortured.

"Then," he says, "my father goes to seeke rootes, and my sister chaws them and my mother applyes them to my sores as a plaster." After a month of this primitive surgery, he was able to go about again, free.

The winter passed quietly and pleasantly. Then Radisson, anxious to show himself a thorough Iroquois, proposed to his "father" to let him go on a war-party. The old brave heartily approved, and the young renegade set off with a band for the Huron country.

Now follows a dreary account of the atrocities committed. In the end the party, after perpetrating several murders, encountered a considerable number of the enemy, with the loss of one of their men severely wounded. They burned him, to save him from falling into the enemy's hands, and then fled the country. Their arrival at home, with prisoners and scalps, mostly of women and children, was an occasion of great honor, and Radisson came in for his full share.

Being now allowed greater freedom, he improved it to run away to join the Dutch at Fort Orange (Albany). He tramped all the day and all the night without food, and at daylight found himself near a Dutch settler's cabin. The Dutch treated him with great kindness, gave him clothes and shoes, and shipped him down the Hudson to "Menada" (Manhattan, New York), whence he sailed for Amsterdam. From that port he took ship for La Rochelle, in France, and thence back to Canada.

To cover a distance of about two hundred and fifty miles, he had been obliged to travel about seven thousand!

Hitherto we have seen Pierre Radisson figure as a mere coureur de bois. Now we shall see him in the more important role of a discoverer.

Probably he and his brother-in-law, Médard Chouart, who styled himself the Sieur des Groseillers, in the course of their long trading journeys among the Indians, in 1658 reached the Mississippi. One important discovery they unquestionably made a few years later. That they were the first white men trading in the Lake Superior region is proved by Radisson's giving the first description of notable objects on the shores of the lake. His account of the memorable experiences of this journey, considerably abridged, fills the remainder of this chapter.

One cannot but wonder that, until a very recent time, the name of this interesting discoverer has not even been mentioned by historical writers. Here was a man who certainly was of considerable importance in his day, since he was one of two who suggested the formation of the famous Hudson Bay Fur Company, and yet who, until lately, never was spoken of by historians who recorded the achievements of Pathfinders in America. What was the cause of this singular neglect? Chiefly the fact that in his time Canada was full of adventurous voyageurs. The fur-trade was the great and only avenue to wealth, and it attracted the most daring spirits. These hardy fellows penetrated the wilderness in all directions, and it was chiefly they who made the northern portion of our country known to white men. Radisson and his brother-in-law, who was his constant companion, belonged to this class. Their journeys were not made for scientific, but for commercial, purposes. They were simply in quest of furs, and whatever discoveries they made were accidental. Thus, little account was made of them at the time.

The chief reason, however, is that the importance of Radisson's journal escaped attention. It was mistaken for a mere record of wanderings. Places not being named—at that time they had no names but the Indian ones—close attention to the descriptions in the narrative was needed in order to identify them and determine his route. Thus it came to pass that this singularly interesting journal remained unpublished, that is, practically unknown, for more than two hundred years. When, happily, the Prince Society of Boston recognized its value and printed it, in 1885, the writer at once took his rightful place among the Pathfinders.

Radisson and his brother-in-law, in the spring of 1661, applied to the Governor of Canada for permission to go on a trading journey up the lakes. On his refusing, except on the condition of their taking with them two of his servants and giving them half of the profits, they slipped away at midnight without leave, having made an agreement with some Indians, probably Ojibways, of the Sault (Sault Ste. Marie, between Lake Huron and Lake Superior), that these would wait for them at Lake St. Peter, some miles above Three Rivers.

The two parties met, as agreed, and began their long journey. After a few days they found traces of a party that had preceded them, their fires still burning. Judging from certain signs that these were not enemies, they exerted themselves to overtake them. They found them to be a party of Indians from Lake Superior who had been to Montreal and were returning. The two bands united and now formed a considerable force, in fourteen canoes. This union proved a happy circumstance, for the next day they were attacked by a war-party of Iroquois who were lying in wait for the Lake Superior Indians, having observed their passage down the river. The Iroquois, who had fortified themselves, were evidently surprised to find themselves confronted by a far larger force than they expected.

Radisson and an Indian were sent to scout and examine the fort. They found it to be a stockade surrounded by large rocks. The Iroquois made overtures for peace by throwing strings of wampum over the stockade, and that night they slipped away, leaving a free passage to Radisson's party.

The next day, however, there was a brush with Iroquois, in which three were killed, as well as one of Radisson's party. The enemy were not in sufficient force to make a fight in the open and fell back into an old fort—for this region, being on the route to the upper lakes, was a constant battleground. Radisson's party gathered to attack it, the Iroquois meanwhile firing constantly, but doing little harm. Darkness came on, and the assailants filled a barrel with gunpowder and, "having stoped the whole" (stopped the hole) and tied it to the end of a long pole, tried to push it over the stockade. It fell back, however, and exploded with so much force that three of the assailants themselves were killed.

Radisson then made a sort of hand-grenade by putting three or four pounds of powder into a "rind of a tree" (piece of bark) with "a fusey [fuse] to have time to throw the rind." This he flung into the fort, having directed his Indians to follow up the explosion by breaking in with hatchet and sword. Meanwhile the Iroquois were singing their death-song. The grenade fell among them and burst with terrible execution. Immediately Radisson's party broke in, and there was a scene of confusion, assailants and assailed unable in the darkness to distinguish friend from foe.

Suddenly there fell a tremendous downpour of rain, with pitchy darkness, which seemed so timely for the Iroquois that Radisson remarks, "To my thinking, the Devill himselfe made that storme to give those men leave to escape from our hands." All sought shelter. When the storm was over the Iroquois had escaped. The victors found "11 of our ennemy slain'd and 2 only of ours, besides seaven wounded." There were also five prisoners secured. The bodies of their own dead were treated with great respect. "We bourned our comrades," says Radisson, "being their custome to reduce such into ashes being slained in batill. It is an honnour to give them such a buriall."

At daybreak the party resumed their journey, rejoicing in "10 heads and foure prisoners, whom we embarqued in hopes to bring them into our country, and there to burne them att our own leasures for the more satisfaction of our wives." Meanwhile they allowed themselves a little foretaste of that delight. "We plagued those infortunate. We plucked out their nailes one after another." Probably, when Radisson says "we," he means the Indians only, not his brother and himself.

Traveling on, the party espied a large force of Iroquois hovering near. Anticipating an attack, "we killed our foure prisoners, because they embarrassed us." "If ever blind wished the Light, we wished the obscurity of the night, which no sooner approached but we embarqued ourselves without any noise and went along." Radisson thinks the Iroquois must have been encumbered with prisoners and booty: else they would not have let his party get away so easily. Fearing, however, to be pursued, these plied their paddles desperately "from friday to tuesday without intermission," their "feete and leggs" all bloody from being cut in dragging the canoes over sharp rocks in the shallows. After this terrible strain, being "quite spent," they were fain to rest, so soon as they felt themselves safe from pursuit.

The party was following Champlain's old route, up the Ottawa River, across country to Lake Nipissing, then down its outlet, French River, to Lake Huron.

After a hard and perilous journey, having "wrought two and twenty dayes and as many nights, having slept not one houre on land all that while," they came out on Lake Huron. Still trouble beset them, in the form of dearth of food. Game was scarce along the shore, and they were glad of such berries as they found. Radisson records that the "wildmen," as he always calls the Indians, showed themselves "far gratfuller then many Christians even to their owne relations," for whenever they found a good patch of berries they always called him and his brother to get a full share. In due time they reached a strait full of islands (the St. Mary's River), where an abundance of fish relieved their hunger, and came to "a rapid that makes the separation of the lake that we call Superior, or upper" (Sault Ste. Marie).[1]

Some of Radisson's Indian companions were now in their native region. They had promised the two Frenchmen that they "should make good cheare of a fish that they call Assickmack, wch signifieth a white fish," and so it proved.[2]

Game, also, was most abundant; and, after their long hardships and privations, the Frenchmen thought this country "like a terrestriall paradise." Having rested and enjoyed the abundance of food for a while, the party went on, "thwarted (crossed) in a pretty broad place and came to an isle most delightfull for the diversity of its fruits." Here they supped and enjoyed themselves until ten o'clock, when, the night being fine, they embarked again and before daylight reached the south shore of the lake. Here Radisson was shown a place where "many peeces of copper weare uncovered." He and his brother were about to take some specimens, when the Indians told them that they would find far larger quantities at a place to which they were going.

The next evidence that we encounter of the accuracy of Radisson's narrative is his description of the hills of shifting sand that form a striking feature of this part of the coast. One of the Indians climbed an especially high one, and, Radisson says, "being there, did shew no more then a crow." These are the sand-hills, which the Indian legend, in Longfellow's "Hiawatha," says were thrown up by Pau-puk-keewis when he blew up a whirlwind. The sight of so much sand reminded Radisson of "the wildernesses of Turkey land, as the Turques makes their pylgrimages" (the desert of Arabia).

Next the voyagers came to a very "remarquable place, a banke of Rocks that the wildmen made a sacrifice to. They fling much tobacco and other things in its veneration." Radisson thus describes this striking object. "It's like a great Portall, by reason of the beating of the waves. [He means that the dashing of the water against the mass of rock has worn it away in the shape of an arch.] The lower part of that oppening is as bigg as a tower and grows bigger in the going upp. A shipp of 500 tuns could passe, soe bigg is the arch. I gave it the name of the portall of St. Peter, because my name is so called, and that I was the first Christian that ever saw it." The latter statement seems unquestionably true. But Radisson's name did not stick—unfortunately, for "St. Peter's Portal" would be a better-sounding and more significant name than the meaningless "Pictured Rocks," which is the common designation of this famous object.

This natural arch affords a striking illustration of the wearing effect of water. The waves constantly washing and often beating in fury upon the line of sandstone cliffs has, in the course of ages, hollowed this arch at the point where the rock was softest. The immense amount of material thus washed from the face of the cliffs has been thrown ashore, blown along the coast, and heaped up in the sand-hills which Radisson describes, and which are reliably reported to vary from one hundred to three hundred feet in height.

A few days later the party came to a place where they made a portage of some miles, in order to save going around a peninsula jutting far out into the lake. "The way was well beaten," says Radisson, "because of the comers and goers, who by making that passage shortens their journey by 8 dayes." From this circumstance it is evident that our travelers were on a frequented route, and that the Indians knew enough of the geography of the country to avoid a canoe journey of several hundreds of miles, by carrying their light craft and their goods across the base of the peninsula, which is here very narrow, being almost cut in two by a chain of lakes and rivers.[3]

Radisson was told that "at the end of the point there is an isle all of copper." This is not very far from the truth, for this peninsula contains, about Keweenaw Point, the richest copper deposit in the world. In 1857 there was taken from one of the mines a mass of ore weighing 420 tons and containing more than ninety per cent of pure copper.

Traveling on, the party met with some Christinos, or Crees, who joined it "in hopes," says Radisson, "to gett knives from us, which they love better then we serve God, which should make us blush for shame." In time they came to "a cape very much elevated like piramides," probably the "Doric Rock." In a certain "channell" they took "sturgeons of a vast bignesse and Pycks of seaven foot long," probably the well-known muscalonge.[4]

Now the long canoe voyage had come to an end, and as the Indians said that five days' journey would be needed to bring them to their homes, and the two white men had heavy packs which they were loth to carry so long a distance, they decided to remain where they were and let their red friends either come or send back for them. Then, being but two men, surrounded by wild tribes, they built themselves a little triangular log fort by the water-side, with its door opening toward the water. All around it, at a little distance, was stretched a long cord, to which were fastened some small bells, "which weare senteryes" (sentries), Radisson says.[5]

Having thus fortified themselves with a perfect armory within, namely, "5 guns, 2 musquetons, 3 fowling-peeces, 3 paire of great pistoletts, and 2 paire of pocket ons, and every one his sword and daggar," they might feel reasonably safe in a country in which the natives as yet stood in awe of fire-arms. They had some friendly visitors, but would never admit more than one person at a time. Radisson says, in his droll way, "During that time we had severall alarums in ye night. The squerels and other small beasts, as well as foxes, came in and assaulted us." For food there was an abundance of fish and of "bustards" (wild geese), of which Radisson shot a great number.

When, after twelve days, some of their traveling companions reappeared, they were astounded at the sight of the fort and complimented the two Frenchmen by calling them "every foot devills to have made such a machine." They had brought a quantity of provisions, imagining the two white men to be famishing. But, lo! here was a supply of game more than sufficient for the whole party. The Indians wondered how it chanced that the Frenchmen's baggage was so greatly reduced. These accounted for it by saying that, fearing lest the sight of so much wealth should lead to their being murdered, they had taken a great part of their merchandise and sunk it in the water, committing it to the care of their "devill," who was charged "not to lett them to be wett nor rusted, wch he promised faithlesse" that he would do; all of which the simple creatures believed "as ye Christians the Gospell." Radisson explains that he and his brother had really burled the goods across the river. "We told them that lye," he says, "that they should not have suspicion of us."

The two white men immensely enjoyed the profound deference paid them. When they started on their journey, "we went away," says Radisson, "free from any burden, whilst those poor miserables thought themselves happy to carry our Equipage, for the hope that they had that we should give them a brasse ring, or an awle, or an needle."

After traveling four days, our "2 poore adventurers for the honour of our countrey" were told that they were approaching their destination. Runners went ahead to warn the people of their coming. "Every one prepared to see what they never before have seene," that is, white men.

Their entry into the village was made with due pomp, and they "destinated 3 presents, one for the men, one for the women, other for the children, to the end," says Radisson, "that we should be spoaken of a hundred years after, if other Europeans should not come in those quarters." These gifts having been received with great rejoicing, there followed feasting, powwowing in council, and a scalp-dance, all of which occupied three days and consumed, in good Indian fashion, the provisions which should have helped them to get through the fast approaching winter. Accordingly, we soon read of the horrors of famine, amid the gloomy wintry forests, the trees laden and the ground deeply covered with snow. Radisson gives a moving description of it. "It grows wors and wors dayly.… Every one cryes out for hunger. Children, you must die. ffrench, you called yourselves Gods of the earth, that you should be feered; notwithstanding you shall tast of the bitternesse.… In the morning the husband looks upon his wife, the Brother his sister, the cozen the cozen, the Oncle the nevew, that weare for the most part found dead." So for two or three pages he goes on telling of the cruel suffering and of the various substitutes for nourishing food, such as bark ground and boiled; bones that had lain about the camp, picked clean by dogs and crows, now carefully gathered and boiled; then "the skins that weare reserved to make us shoose, cloath, and stokins," and at last even the skins of the tents that covered them.

Radisson and his brother had long since eaten their dogs. About this time "there came 2 men from a strange countrey who had a dogg" the sight of which was very tempting. "That dogge was very leane and as hungry as we weare." Still the sight of him was more than mortal could bear. In vain the two Frenchmen offered an extravagant price for the poor beast; his owners would not part with him. Then they resolved to "catch him cunningly." So Radisson watches his opportunity, prowling at night near the visitors' cabin, and when the dog comes out, snatches him up, stabs him, and carries him to his party, where he is immediately cut up and "broyled like a pigge." Even the snow soaked with his blood goes into the kettles.

Radisson's description of the horrors of that fearful time will not fail to remind readers of Hiawatha of the poet Longfellow's picture of a famine in the same region in which Radisson was. The main features are the same. There is the bitter cold,

O the long and dreary winter!
O the cold and cruel winter!

There is the gloomy, snow-laden forest,

Ever deeper, deeper, deeper
Fell the snow o'er all the landscape,
Fell the covering snow, and drifted
Through the forest, round the village.

There are the pitiful cries of the helpless, starving ones,

O the wailing of the children!
O the anguish of the women!

There is the hunter engaged in his bootless quest,

Vainly walked he through the forest,
Sought for bird or beast and found none,
Saw no track of deer or rabbit,
In the snow beheld no footprints.

Then came the two dread visitors, Famine and Fever, and fixed their awful gaze on Minnehaha, who

Lay there trembling, freezing, burning
At the looks they cast upon her,
At the fearful words they uttered.

Out into the forest rushes Hiawatha, crying frantically to Heaven,

"Give me food for Minnehaha,
For my dying Minnehaha!"
Through the far-resounding forest,
Through the forest vast and vacant
Rang the cry of desolation,
But there came no other answer
Than the echo of the woodlands,
"Minnehaha! Minnehaha!"

All the day he roamed the gloomy depths of the wintry woods, still vainly seeking food. When he came home empty-handed, heavy-hearted, lo! the spirit of Minnehaha had fled to the Islands of the Blessed. Her body they laid in the snow,

In the forest deep and darksome,
Underneath the moaning hemlocks.

The singularly vivid descriptions of Indian life, with its alternations of human affection and fiendish cruelty, of daring and cowardice, of gorging and starving, make one of the most interesting features of Radisson's book. He lived the life himself and left such a picture of it as few white men could have drawn. Accordingly, he soon tells of feasting once more. What broke the famine was a storm of wind and rain that caused the snow to fall from the trees, cleared the forests, and formed, after a freeze, a crust on the snow that enabled the hunters to kill an abundance of game. Deer, with their sharp hoofs, broke through the crust "after they made 7 or 8 capers" (bounds), and were easily taken. There was other food, too, for there came a deputation of Indians to visit the white strangers, accompanied by their women "loaded of Oates, corne that growes in that country." He means wild rice, which formed the staple food of certain tribes. This was a gift, and at its presentation there were elaborate ceremonies, the account of which fills several pages. Still this was only the beginning, for the appointed time for a grand council was approaching, and soon there arrived deputations from eighteen different tribes, until five hundred warriors were assembled. More feasting, more ceremonies, more honors to the white visitors, who received more beaver-skins than they could possibly carry away, and pledges of eternal friendship on both sides.

Hardly were these rites ended, when there came fresh troops of savages, and all began over again. "There weare," says Radisson, "playes, mirths, and bataills for sport. In the publick place the women danced with melody. The yong men that indeavoured to gett a pryse [prize] indeavored to clime up a great post, very smooth, and greased with oyle of beare."

Then followed a most interesting exhibition "in similitud of warrs," the young men going through the various motions of attack, retreat, and the like, without a word, all the commands being given by "nodding or gesture," the old men meanwhile beating furiously on drums made of "earthen potts full of water covered with staggs-skin." There followed a dance of women, "very modest, not lifting much their feete from the ground, making a sweet harmony."

Finally, after more feasting, more "renewing of alliances," more exchange of gifts, in which, of course, the Frenchmen received valuable furs in return for the merest trifles, the great assembly broke up, the red men filed off toward their distant villages, and the honored strangers started on their long homeward journey, with numerous sled-loads of peltry.

All that summer they traveled among the numerous islands on the north shore of the great lake, enjoying an abundance of ducks, fish, and fresh meat. Radisson was amazed at "the great number of ffowles that are so fatt by eating of this graine [wild rice] that heardly they will move from it." He saw "a wildman killing 3 ducks at once with one arrow."

When the final start was made for the French settlements, there were seven hundred Indians in 360 canoes, with a proportionately large quantity of beaver-skins. A stop was made at the River of Sturgeons, to lay in a store of food against the voyage. In a few days over a thousand of these fish were killed and dried.

After they had started again, Radisson came near to parting unwillingly with the splendid fleet of canoes that he was guiding down to the French settlements. One day they espied seven Iroquois. So great was the dread of these formidable savages, that, though these seven took to their heels and discarded their kettles, even their arms, in their flight, the sight of them threw the hundreds with Radisson into a panic. They were for breaking up and putting off their visit to Montreal for a year. Radisson pleaded hard, and, after twelve days of delay and powwowing, he succeeded in prevailing on all except the Crees to go on with him.

Down the St. Mary's River into Lake Huron the great fleet of canoes went in long procession. Then, the wind being favorable, everybody hoisted some kind of sail, and they were driven along merrily until they came to the portage. This passed, they went on down the Ottawa River without misadventure as far as the long rapids. Then another panic seized the Indian fleet, this time on more reasonable grounds, for the party discovered the evidences of a slaughter of Frenchmen. Seventeen of these, with about seventy Algonquins and Hurons, had laid an ambush here for Iroquois, whom they expected to pass this way. Instead, the biter was bitten. The Iroquois, when they came, numbered many hundreds, and they overwhelmed and, after a desperate resistance, destroyed the little band of Frenchmen, with their allies. The appalling evidences of this slaughter were terrible proof that the enemy were numerous in that neighborhood. Even Radisson and his brother were alarmed. They had much ado to persuade their Indian friends to go on with them. As last they succeeded and proudly led to Montreal the biggest canoe-fleet that had ever arrived there, "a number of boats that did almost cover ye whole River."

It was a great triumph for the two daring voyageurs to bring to market such a volume of trade and many Indians from distant tribes who never before had visited the French.

They expected that this service would be recognized. Instead, the Governor put Groseillers in prison and fined both an enormous sum for going away without his leave. Incensed at this injustice, they determined on going to London and offering their services to the English King. This was the reason of Radisson's translating the notes of his travels into a language that was foreign to him, with such queer results as we have seen in the extracts that have been given.

[1] Dr. Reuben G. Thwaites in his "Father Marquette" quotes the following description, written by a Jesuit missionary about eight years after Radisson's visit: "What is commonly called the Saut is not properly a Saut, or a very high water-fall, but a very violent current of waters from Lake Superior, which, finding themselves checked by a great number of rocks, form a dangerous cascade of half a league in width, all these waters descending and plunging headlong together."

[2] It is interesting to learn that the whitefish, so much prized today, was held in equally high esteem so long ago, and even before the coming of the white men. The same writer quoted above by Dr. Thwaites tells of throngs of Indians coming every summer to the rapids to take these fish, which were particularly abundant there, and describes the method. The fisherman, he says, stands upright in his canoe, and as he sees fish gliding between the rocks, thrusting down a pole on the end of which is a net in the shape of a pocket, sometimes catches six or seven at a haul.

[3] The great steamers of to-day follow this route, which the Indian's bark canoe frequented hundreds of years ago. This illustrates the interesting fact that, over all this continent, the Indians were the earliest pathmakers. Important railroads follow the lines of trails made by moccasined feet, and steamboats plough the waters of routes which the birch canoe skimmed for centuries.

[4] Undoubtedly it was one of these "sturgeons of a vast bignesse" that, according to the legend, swallowed both Hiawatha and his canoe. We are now in Hiawatha's country, and we are constantly reminded by Radisson's descriptions of passages in Longfellow's beautiful poem.

[5] This little structure has a peculiar interest, because of its being, in all probability, the first habitation of white men on the shores of Lake Superior. It seems to have stood on Chequamegon Bay.

Chapter XIII

ROBERT CAVELIER, SIEUR DE LA SALLE,
THE FIRST EXPLORER OF THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI

La Salle's Early Association with the Jesuits.—His Domain in Canada.—He starts on an Exploring Expedition.—Disappears from View.—The Favor of Frontenac.—La Salle's Extraordinary Commission.—Niagara Falls.—The First Vessel ever launched on the Upper Lakes.—Great Hardships of the Journey.—Arrival in the Country of the Illinois.—Fort Crèvecoeur built.—Perilous Journey back to Canada.—La Salle starts again for the Illinois Country.—Iroquois Atrocities and Cannibalism.—La Salle goes as far as the Mississippi and returns.—Tonty's Perilous Experiences.—Boisrondet's Ingenuity saves his Life.—La Salle journeys down the Great River.—Interesting Tribes of Indians.—The Ocean!—Louisiana named.—Hardships of the Return Journey.—Fort St. Louis built.

Robert Cavelier, more generally known as La Salle, at the first was connected with the Jesuits, but left the Society of Jesus and, at the youthful age of twenty-three, came to Canada to seek his fortune. He had an elder brother among the priests of St. Sulpice. These, being anxious to have a fringe of settlements outside of their own as a sort of screen against Indian attacks, granted to La Salle a quite considerable tract a few miles from Montreal. Here he laid out a village surrounded by a palisade and let out his land to settlers for a trifling rent.

With a view to exploration, he at once began to study the Indian languages. Like Champlain and all the early explorers, he dreamed of a passage to the Pacific and a new route for the commerce of China and Japan. The name which to this day clings to the place which he settled, La Chine (China), is said to have been bestowed by his neighbors, in derision of what they considered his visionary schemes.

After two or three years La Salle, beginning his real life-work, sold his domain and its improvements, equipped a party, and started out into the wilderness. We trace his route as far as the Seneca country, in western New York. Then for two years we lose sight of him altogether. This time he passed among the Indians; and there is the best reason for believing that he discovered the Ohio River and, quite probably, the Illinois.

When Joliet and Marquette ascertained that the outlet of the Great Water was in the Gulf of Mexico, their discovery put an end to the fond hope of establishing a new route to East India and China by way of the Mississippi, but it inspired a brilliant thought in La Salle's mind. Why should France be shut up in Canada, with its poverty, its rigorous climate, its barren soil, covered with snow for half the year? Why not reach out and seize the vast interior, with its smiling prairies and thousands of miles of fertile soil, with the glorious Mississippi for a waterway? She already held the approach at one end, namely, through the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Let her go forward on the path which lay open before her. To realize this splendid dream became the purpose of his life.

The coming of Count Frontenac to Canada as its governor was a boon to La Salle. Both were essentially men of the world, with ambitions of their own. Both were strong men, daring, ardent, and resolute; and both heartily hated the Jesuits and were hated by them with equal fervor. Both, too, were men of small means who aimed at vast results. In short, they were kindred spirits. But the one was Governor of Canada, and the other was an almost penniless adventurer. This fact determined their relations. La Salle became a partisan of Frontenac, siding with him against certain fur-traders and the Jesuits. Frontenac became the protector of La Salle, backing his schemes with his influence and giving him a strong recommendation to the King.

Now, Frontenac had built a fort near the lower end of Lake Ontario, about the site of Kingston. It had the look of being a great public benefit, for it would help to hold the Iroquois in check and it would cut off trade from the English. On these grounds the expense of building it was justified. But the Jesuits and the fur-traders were opposed to it, the fur-traders because they foresaw the loss of a large part of their trade. Indians bringing their annual canoe-loads of peltry to market would not take the long trip to Montreal and Quebec, if they could barter them off at a much nearer point. They suspected, with good reason, that this new fort, erected ostensibly for the defence of the country, was really meant to cut off from them the trade that came down the Lakes and turn it into the hands of the Governor and those who might be in secret league with him.

The feeling was very strong, and attempts were made to induce the King to have the obnoxious fort demolished. Just then La Salle sailed for France with strong letters from Frontenac. Imagine the rage of his opponents when he returned not only master of the fort, but a titled man, the Sieur de La Salle, with the King's patent in his pocket giving him a princely grant of many square miles on the mainland and the adjacent islands!

But how was a needy adventurer to raise the money to pay for the fort and to do all the high-sounding things that he had promised the King? He counted on raising money on the strength of his great expectations. He was not disappointed. His friends and relatives rejoicing in his good fortune, which they naturally hoped to share, lent large sums of money to enable him to carry out his agreement with his royal master. Now he began piling up a mass of debts that alone would have crushed a common man. He had, besides, a tremendous combination to fight, nearly all the merchants of the colony, backed by the influence of the Jesuits.

Still La Salle might have settled down in his seigniory, commanded his soldiers, lorded it over his colony, controlled the trade of the Lakes, paid off his debts, and have grown enormously rich within a few years from the profits of the fur-trade. But he flew at higher game than money, and cared for it only as it might serve his ambition. He was dreaming of the Gulf of Mexico and in imagination ruling a Southwestern New France many times larger than the old.

Therefore he took ship again for France. This time he went crowned with success. He had done all and more than all that he had engaged to do. He had torn down the wooden fort and replaced it with one of stone, surmounted with nine cannon. He had erected a forge, a mill, a bakery, barracks, and officers' quarters. He had gathered about him a village of Iroquois, who were under the teaching of two Recollet friars. Some French families had been settled on farms. Land had been cleared and planted. Cattle, fowls, and swine had been brought up from Montreal. Four small vessels had been built for use on the lake and river. Altogether, French civilization was handsomely represented at this lonely outpost; and La Salle had shown what he was capable of doing as an organizer and ruler. Now he went to ask another grant.

Fancy the dismay of his opponents when he came back, in the following year, with an extraordinary commission that gave him authority to "labor at the discovery of the western parts of New France, through which, to all appearance, a way may be found to Mexico." The last words show its true purpose. Louis aimed a blow at his enemy, Spain, the mistress of Mexico, and La Salle was the arm through which he meant to strike. The document gave him authority to build forts wherever he saw fit, and to own and govern them under the same conditions as Fort Frontenac. In short, he had a roving commission to go wherever he pleased between the eastern end of Lake Ontario and the borders of Mexico, and to exercise the authority of a royal governor anywhere in all that vast region. But he must do all at his own expense, and he must do it all within five years.

His most serious need was that of money. But, with his usual success in drawing other men's means into his schemes, he obtained a large sum, on which he was to pay interest at the rate of forty per cent. We can see that he was piling up debts fast enough to meet the wishes of his heartiest haters.

Now La Salle was in a position to enter on his grand undertaking, the dream to which he devoted his life. His first step was to send a party of men ahead in canoes to Lake Michigan, to trade with the Indians and collect provisions against his coming, while another party, one of whom was the famous Father Hennepin, started in a small vessel up Lake Ontario, to await La Salle's coming at Niagara. In due time they reached the Niagara River, and the earliest published account of the great cataract is Father Hennepin's.[1]

This advance party had orders to begin a fort on the Niagara River, but the distrust of the Senecas proved to be an obstinate barrier. This famous tribe, occupying the Genesee Valley northward to the shore of Lake Ontario, while on the west its territory extended to Lake Erie, was fiercely jealous of white men's coming to plant themselves in their country.

When La Salle arrived, however, with his usual tact in managing Indians, he succeeded in securing their consent to his putting up, not a fort, but a fortified warehouse at the mouth of the Niagara River and building a vessel above the Falls.

Now the first of a series of misfortunes befell him in the loss of the little vessel that had brought him to Niagara. She was freighted with the outfit for his great exploration and with goods for barter. But everything was lost, except only the anchors and cables intended for the vessel that was to be built. He bore the loss with his unvarying fortitude.

At last all difficulties were so far overcome that the keel of the little vessel was laid. While the work was going on, Indians were hanging around watching it sullenly, and a squaw told the French that her people meant to burn it. The weather was cold, and the men of the party themselves had little heart in the enterprise. The loss of provisions in the wrecked vessel had put them on short allowance. Only the skill of two Mohegan hunters kept them supplied with food. It was hard work, too, for the builders needed to bring loads from the other vessel on their backs, a distance of some twelve miles.

In spite of all these difficulties, the little craft was finished, and, at the opening of the ice in the spring, there glided down into the Niagara the first keel that ever cut the water of the Upper Lakes, the forerunner of to-day's enormous tonnage. Her figure-head was a mythical monster, and her name the "Griffin," both taken from Frontenac's coat of arms.

On August 7, the "Griffin" fired her cannon, spread her sails, and bore away up Lake Erie, carrying the expedition which La Salle hoped would make him master of the Mississippi Valley. The plan was to sail to the head of Lake Michigan, near the site of Chicago, then to march to the Illinois River; there to build another vessel, and in the latter to sail down the Mississippi, into the Gulf, and to the very West Indies—an enterprise of Titanic audacity.

The first part of the voyage was delightful. We may wonder whether our voyagers saw one amazing sight which Jonathan Carver describes. "There are," he says, "several islands near the west end of it [Lake Erie] so infested with rattlesnakes that it is very dangerous to land on them. The lake is covered, near the banks of the islands, with the large pond-lily, the leaves of which lie on the water so thick as to cover it entirely for many acres together; and on each of these lay, when I passed over it, wreaths of water-snakes basking in the sun, which amounted to myriads!"

On the shore were verdant prairies and fine forests. When the voyagers entered Detroit River they saw herds of deer and flocks of wild turkeys, and the hunters easily kept the party supplied with venison and bear meat. On they sailed, across Lake St. Clair and out upon Lake Huron, passed within sight of the Manitoulins, and finally came to anchor in the cove of Mackinaw Strait, where were the famous trading-post and mission-station of Michillimackinac.

At Green Bay La Salle found some of his men who had remained faithful and had collected a large store of furs. This circumstance caused him new perplexity. He had furs enough to satisfy his creditors, and he was strongly moved to go back to the colony and settle with them. On the other hand, he dreaded leaving his party, which would surely be tampered with by his enemies. Should his strong hand be withdrawn, the party probably would go to pieces. Finally he decided to remain with the expedition and to send the "Griffin" back with her valuable cargo to Fort Niagara and with orders to return immediately to the head of Lake Michigan. It was an unfortunate decision. The vessel's pilot was already under suspicion of having treacherously wrecked the vessel which perished on Lake Ontario. The "Griffin" sailed and never was heard of again. Whether she foundered on the lake, was dashed on the shore, or was plundered and scuttled, La Salle never knew. He believed the latter to have been the case. Her loss was the breaking of an indispensable link in the chain. But La Salle was still ignorant of it, and he went on his way hopefully to the head of Lake Michigan.

A hard time the men had in paddling the heavily laden canoes, subsisting on a scant ration of Indian corn, and at night dragging the canoes up a steep bank and making their cheerless camp. By the time that they reached the site of Milwaukee all were worn out.

They were glad enough when they saw two or three eagles among a great gathering of crows or turkey-buzzards, and, hastening to the spot, they found the torn carcass of a deer, lately killed by wolves. However, as they neared the head of the lake, game became more abundant, and La Salle's famous Mohegan hunters had no difficulty in providing bear's meat and venison.

Winter was fast setting in, and La Salle was anxious to go on to the Illinois towns before the warriors should go away on their usual winter hunting. But he was compelled to wait for Tonty, an Italian officer of great courage and splendid loyalty who had come out to America as his lieutenant. With twenty men, he was making his way by land down the eastern shore. At last he appeared, with his men half-starved, having been reduced to living on acorns. But where was the "Griffin"? This was the place appointed for her meeting with the expedition. But there were no tidings of her fate. After waiting as long as he could, La Salle, with heavy forebodings, pushed on.

Now the explorers shouldered their canoes and struck out across the frozen swamps. At last they came to a sluggish streamlet, the headwaters of the Kankakee. They launched their canoes on it and were carried, within a few days, into a prairie country strewn with the carcasses of innumerable buffalo, for this was a favorite hunting-ground of the Indians. But not one of the animals was in sight. The men were nearly starving and, at the best, discontented and sullen. Two lean deer and a few geese, all the game that the hunters had been able to secure within several days, were short commons for thirty-three men with appetites sharpened by traveling in the keen December air. It was a God-send when they found a buffalo-bull mired fast. The famished men quickly despatched him, and by the efforts of twelve of their number dragged the huge carcass out of the slough.

Down the Illinois River the voyagers traveled until they came in sight of wigwams on both sides of the river. La Salle expected trouble, for his enemies had been busy among the Illinois, stirring them up against him by representing that he had incited the Iroquois to make war upon them. He ordered his men to take their arms. Then the eight canoes in line abreast drifted down between the two wings of the encampment.

There was great confusion on both banks. The women screeched, and the men yelled and seized their bows and war-clubs. La Salle knew well how to deal with Indians and that it was poor policy to show himself too eager for peace. He leaped ashore, followed by his men, arms in hand. The Indians were more frightened by his sudden appearance than disposed to attack him, as they at once showed by holding up a peace pipe. And soon they overwhelmed the strangers with lavish hospitality.

These people, who formed one of the largest branches of the Algonquin stock, were particular objects of hatred to the Iroquois. At one time they were driven across the Mississippi by these ruthless foes, who had traveled five or six hundred miles to attack them. There, probably, they encountered equally savage enemies, the Sioux. At all events, they returned to their old abode on the Illinois River, where La Salle found them. The deadly enmity of the Iroquois toward them burst out again shortly afterward, as we shall see.

La Salle took advantage of the opportunity to assure his hosts that if the Iroquois attacked them, he would stand by them, give them guns, and fight for them. Then he shrewdly added that he intended building a fort among them and a big wooden canoe in which he would descend to the sea and bring goods for them. All this looked very plausible and won their hearts. The next day La Salle and his companions were invited to a feast and, of course, went. The host seized the opportunity of warning them against descending the Great Water. He told them that its banks were infested by ferocious tribes and its waters full of serpents, alligators, dangerous rocks, and whirlpools; in short, that they never would reach the ocean alive.

This harangue was interpreted to La Salle's men by two coureurs de bois who understood every word of it. La Salle saw dismay overspreading the faces of his already disheartened men. But when his turn came to speak, he gave the Indians a genuine surprise. "We were not asleep," he said, "when the messenger of my enemies told you that we were spies of the Iroquois. We know all his lies and that the presents he brought you are at this moment buried in the earth under this lodge." This proof of what seemed more than human sagacity overwhelmed the Indians, and they had nothing more to say, little dreaming that La Salle had received secret information from a friendly chief.

Nevertheless, the next morning, when La Salle looked about for his sentinels, not one of them was to be seen. Six of his men, including two of the best carpenters, upon whom he depended for building the vessel, had deserted.

To withdraw his men from the demoralizing influences of the Indian camp, La Salle chose a naturally strong position at some distance down the river, fortified it, and built lodgings for the men, together with a house for the friars. This, the first habitation reared by white men in the territory now comprised in the State of Illinois, stood a little below the site of Peoria and was called Fort Crèvecoeur. This name, Fort Break-Heart, was taken from that of a celebrated fortification in Europe. It was to be a heart-breaker to the enemy.

La Salle believed in the doctrine of work as the best preventive of low spirits, and he kept his men at it. No sooner was the fort finished than he began to build the vessel. Two of his carpenters, we remember, had deserted. "Seeing," he says, "that if I should wait to get others from Montreal, I should lose a whole year, I said one day before my people that I was so vexed to find that the absence of two sawyers would defeat my plans, that I was resolved to try to saw the planks myself, if I could find a single man who would help me with a will." Two men stepped forward and said they would try what they could do. The result was that the work was begun and was pushed along so successfully that within two weeks the hull of the vessel was half finished.

La Salle now felt free to make the unavoidable journey to Montreal, to look after his affairs. His men were in better heart, and the vessel was well on its way to completion. Leaving the faithful Tonty in charge of the fort with its garrison, mostly of scoundrels, he set out with his trusty Mohegan and four Frenchmen.

A few days earlier he had sent off Father Hennepin with two Frenchmen, to explore the lower part of the Illinois. In another place we shall read the story of their adventures.

We shall not follow La Salle on his journey back to Canada. It was a terribly hard experience of sixty-five days' travel through a country beset with every form of difficulty and swarming with enemies, "the most arduous journey," says the chronicler, "ever made by Frenchmen in America." But there was a worse thing to come. When La Salle reached Niagara, he learned not only the certainty of the "Griffin's" loss, with her valuable cargo, but that a vessel from France freighted with indispensable goods for him had been wrecked at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and a party of twenty hired men on their way from Europe to join him had, on their arrival, been so disheartened by reports of his failure and death, that only four persisted in their purpose.

This was but the beginning of a series of disasters. His agents at Fort Frontenac had plundered him; his creditors had seized his property; several of his canoes loaded with furs had been lost in the rapids of the St. Lawrence; and a letter from Tonty, brought to him by two voyageurs, told him that nearly all the men, after destroying Fort Crèvecoeur, had deserted.

What a blow! Fort Crèvecoeur, with its supplies, was the base of his great enterprise. Now it was destroyed, its garrison gone, and Tonty, with a few faithful men, alone remained of his costly expedition. But this lion-hearted man, whom no disasters could daunt, borrowed more money at ruinous rates of interest, captured a party of his deserters on Lake Ontario, killing two who resisted arrest and locking up the others at Fort Frontenac, and hastened off on the long journey to relieve Tonty in the Illinois country.

When the party reached the Illinois River they beheld a stirring sight. Far and near, the prairie was alive with buffalo, while hundreds were plunging and snorting in the water. The opportunity was not to be lost. The voyagers landed and encamped for a hunt. For three days they gave themselves up to the excitement of the chase, killing twelve buffalo, besides deer, geese, and swans. Then, with an ample supply of dried and smoked meat, they re-embarked.

When they reached the site of the populous Illinois town, the place was desolate, not a human being in sight. Only heaps of ashes and charred poles and stakes showed where the lodges had stood. The whole meadow was blackened by fire. Hundreds of wolves skulked about the burial ground of the village. The ground was strewn with broken bones and mangled corpses. Every grave had been rifled, and the bodies had been thrown down from the scaffolds where many of them had been placed.

It was evident what had happened. The Iroquois had made a descent, in some way had missed their prey, and had wreaked their vengeance on the dead. But where were Tonty and his men? There was no sign of their having been killed. Neither had any trace been observed of their passing up the river. It must be that they had escaped down the river with the Illinois in their flight. La Salle promptly determined what to do. Leaving a part of his men, he hid his baggage and started down the stream with a few trusty men carrying little besides their arms. When they reached the ruins of Fort Crèvecoeur, they found the vessel on the stocks untouched.

La Salle pushed on down to the mouth of the river, without finding a trace of his missing countrymen. Now the Great Water rolled before him. Once he had dreamed night and day of seeing it. But to see it under such circumstances as these,—what a mockery of his hopes! The one thought on his mind was to find and rescue Tonty. There was no sign of him here. To go further would have been useless, and La Salle turned back, paddling day and night, and rejoined his men whom he had left. Then all started northward. On their way down they had followed the Kankakee. Now they took the Des Plaines route. Near a bark cabin a bit of wood that had been cut with a saw showed that Tonty and his men had gone this way. If they had but left at the fork of the stream some sign of their passage, La Salle's party would have seen it on their way down, and all this anxiety would have been obviated.

With his mind relieved, La Salle was glad to rest for a while at his little Fort Miami, situated at the mouth of the St. Joseph River.

Tonty had passed through perilous straits. The desertion of the larger part of his men left him with but three fighting men and two friars.

Next came a tremendous war-party of Iroquois to attack the Illinois, in the midst of whom he was. For various reasons, the Illinois suspected that the Frenchmen had brought this trouble upon them and, but for Tonty's coolness, would have mobbed and murdered the little handful of white men. When the Iroquois began the attack, Tonty went among them, at the peril of his life, actually receiving a wound from an infuriated young warrior, and succeeded in stopping the fighting by telling the Iroquois that the Illinois numbered twelve hundred, and that there were sixty armed Frenchmen, ready to back them.

The effect of this timely fabrication was magical. The Iroquois at once were for peace and employed Tonty to arrange a truce. That night the Illinois slipped away down the river. The Iroquois followed them, on the opposite shore, watching for an opportunity to attack. This did not offer itself, but they actually drove the Illinois out of their own country, after perpetrating a butchery of women and children.

Meanwhile they had discovered Tonty's deception and were enraged. He had robbed them of a prey for which they had marched hundreds of miles. Only a wholesome fear of Count Frontenac, of whom the Indians stood in great awe, kept them from falling on the little band. As it was, matters looked so stormy that the Frenchmen stood on the watch all night, expecting an attack. At daybreak the chiefs bade them begone. Accordingly they embarked in a leaky canoe and started up the river.

At their first stop Father Ribourde strolled away. When he did not reappear his comrades became alarmed. Tonty and one of the men went in search of him. They followed his tracks until they came to the trail of a band of Indians who had apparently carried him off. They afterward learned that a roving band of Kickapoos, one of the worst specimens of the Algonquin stock, prowling around the Iroquois camp in search of scalps, had murdered the inoffensive old man and carried his scalp in triumph to their village.

Another of their party came near to meeting with an untimely end, but his ingenuity saved his life. They had abandoned their worthless canoe and were making their way on foot, living on acorns and roots, when the young Sieur de Boisrondet wandered off and was lost. The flint of his gun had dropped out, and he had no bullets. But he cut a pewter porringer into slugs, discharged his gun with a fire-brand, and thus killed wild turkeys. After several days he was so fortunate as to rejoin his party.

The poor fellows suffered terribly from cold and hunger while making their way along the shore of Lake Michigan, but finally found a hospitable refuge among the Pottawattamies, of Green Bay, a friendly Algonquin tribe.

La Salle's heart was as much as ever set on following the Great Water to the sea. But he had learned the difficulties in the way of building a vessel and had resolved to travel by canoe.

The winter at Fort Miami was spent by him in organizing the expedition. With this view he gathered about him a number of Indians from the far East who had fled for safety to the western wilds after the disastrous issue of King Philip's War, chiefly Abenakis, from Maine, and Mohegans from the Hudson. These New England Indians, who had long been the deadly foes of the English Puritans, were happy in enrolling themselves under a Frenchman and were ready to go with La Salle anywhere. His plan was to form a great Indian confederation, like that of the Five Nations, and powerful enough to resist it. With this powerful body of Indians, backed by a sufficient number of French guns, he could hold the Mississippi Valley against all enemies, white or red.

When he had opened the route to the Gulf of Mexico by passing down the Great River and taking possession of its whole length in the name of the French King, there would be a new outlet for the immensely valuable fur-trade of all that vast area drained by it and its tributaries. Instead of the long journey down the Lakes and the St. Lawrence, trade would take the shorter and easier route to the Gulf of Mexico.

But how could even La Salle fail to see the enormous difficulties in the way,—the hostility of remote tribes down the river; the sure opposition of Spain, which was supreme on and around the Gulf, and, most of all, the bitter enmity of the French in Canada? The scheme meant disaster to their interests, by turning a large part of their trade into another channel and setting up on the Mississippi a new and powerful rival of Canada, with La Salle at its head.

All commercial Canada and nearly all official Canada were already incensed against him on the mere suspicion of his purposes. If they saw these taking actual form, would they not rage and move heaven and earth, that is to say, Louis the Great,[2] to crush them? A man of less than La Salle's superhuman audacity would not in his wildest moments have dreamed of such a thing. He deliberately cherished the scheme and set himself calmly to executing it.

On December 21, 1682, the expedition started from Fort Miami. It consisted of twenty-three white men, eighteen Indian warriors, and ten squaws, with three children. These New England savages had made a bloody record in their own country, knew well how to use guns, and were better adapted to the work in hand than raw Europeans, however brave, who had no experience of Indian warfare.

On February 6 the voyagers saw before them the broad current of the Mississippi, full of floating ice. For a long distance they paddled their canoes down the mighty current without adventure. As they fared on day by day, they realized that they were entering a summer land. The warm air and hazy sunlight and opening flowers were in delightful contrast with the ice and snow from which they had emerged. Once there seemed to be danger of an attack from Indians whose war-drum they could hear beating. A fog lifted, and the Indians, looking across the river, saw the Frenchmen at work building a fort. Peace signals were displayed from both sides, and soon the white men and their Indian allies from rugged New England were hobnobbing in the friendliest way with these dusky denizens of the southwestern woods. These were a band of the Arkansas, the same people who had treated Joliet and Marquette so handsomely. They lavished every kind attention on their guests and kept them three days. The friar, Membré, who chronicled the expedition, describes them as "gay, civil, and free-hearted, exceedingly well-formed and with all so modest that not one of them would take the liberty to enter our hut, but all stood quietly at the door." He adds, "we did not lose the value of a pin while we were among them."

La Salle had now reached the furthest point of Joliet and Marquette's exploration. He reared a cross, took possession of the country in his master's name, and pushed on. On the western side of the river they visited the home of the Taensas Indians and were amazed at the degree of social advancement which they found among them. There were square dwellings, built of sun-baked mud mixed with straw, and arranged in regular order around an open area; and the King was attended by a council of sixty grave old men wearing white cloaks of the fine inner fibre of mulberry bark. The temple was a large structure, full of a dim, mysterious gloom, within which burned a sacred fire, as an emblem of the sun, watched and kept up unceasingly by two aged priests.

Altogether, the customs and social condition of these people were more like those of the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans than those of the wild tribes with whom the explorers were familiar. When the chief visited La Salle he came in great state, preceded by women who bore white fans, and wearing a disk of burnished copper,—probably to indicate that he was a child of the Sun, for the royal family claimed this high lineage.

The next day the Frenchmen visited a kindred tribe, the Natchez, among whom they observed similar usages. They were hospitably entertained and spent the night in their villages. Their chief town was some miles distant, near the site of the city of Natchez. Here again La Salle planted a cross, less as a symbol of Christianity than of French occupation.[3]

Near the mouth of the Red River, in the neighborhood of the place where Soto had been buried, the voyagers, while attempting to follow some fleeing natives, received a shower of arrows from a canoe. La Salle, anxious to avoid a hostile encounter, drew his men off. No doubt the Indians of this region preserved proud traditions of their forefathers' pursuit of the escaping Spaniards, the remnant of Soto's expedition.

On April 6 with what elation must La Salle have beheld the waters of the Gulf sparkling in the rays of the southern sun! The dream of years was realized. His long struggle and his hopes and failures and renewed efforts were crowned with success. One hundred and ninety years after Columbus's discovery, at enormous expense, he had led a party from the great fresh-water seas to the southern ocean, and had opened, he fondly believed, a new route for trade. But long years were to elapse ere his vision should become a reality.

Proudly and hopefully, in full view of the sea, he reared a cross and a column bearing the arms of France and, with the singing of hymns and volleys of musketry, solemnly proclaimed Louis, of France, to be the rightful sovereign "of this country of Louisiana," as he named it, "the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all the nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers within the extent of the said Louisiana, and also to the mouth of the River of Palms" (the Rio Grande). A tremendous claim surely, the historian Parkman remarks, covering a region watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand war-like tribes, in short, an empire in itself, and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile!

Alas! at that very time, La Salle's enemies in Canada had gained the upper hand and had secured the recall of his mainstay, Count Frontenac. This meant that he could do nothing more from Canada as a base of operations.

On the return voyage the party had a hard time. There was the labor of paddling the canoes, day after day, against the strong current, under a blazing sun. Their supplies were exhausted, and they had little to eat but the flesh of alligators. In their extremity, they applied to the Quinipissas, a little above the site of New Orleans, for corn. They got it, but had to repulse a treacherous attack at night. The Coroas, too, who at the first had shown themselves very friendly, were evidently bent on murdering the guests whom they entertained with pretended hospitality. Only the watchfulness of the Frenchmen and the terror inspired by their guns saved them from attack. Plainly these natives had grown suspicious. Then La Salle was seized with sickness which nearly cut him off, and which detained him for weeks. So soon as he was able to travel, he moved on by slow stages and, about the end of August, still weak and suffering, reached Fort Miami, from which he had started eight months before. Of course, he had come back empty-handed, and there was nothing substantial to show for the vast expense that had been incurred. His associates in Canada, who had advanced the money, must fain content themselves with the expectation that the future would repay them.

In the meantime La Salle was carrying out his plan of founding a colony of French and Indians on the banks of the Illinois. Here he built Fort St. Louis on a cliff, probably the one now called "Starved Rock," at the mouth of Vermilion River. Around its base, under its protection, were clustered the lodges of various Indian bands, of different tribes, while the Illinois, numbering several thousands, were encamped on the other side of the river. But La Salle soon found that, with the new governor, La Barre, inimical to him, he could get no supplies from Canada. The men whom he sent for goods were detained, and finally the Governor seized Fort Frontenac and put men in charge of it.

La Salle had no resource but to appeal from the Governor's high-handed injustice to the King. He left Tonty in command of Fort St. Louis and departed for France.

[1] The famous falls are first mentioned in the Jesuit "Relations" of 1648. Their name is of Iroquois origin and in the Mohawk dialect is pronounced Nyagarah.

[2] The chosen emblem of the "Grand Monarch" was the Sun.

[3] The Taensas and the Natchez were singularly interesting tribes. Their social organization did not differ radically from that of other Indians. But they had developed one peculiar feature: the principal clan had become a ruling caste, and the chiefs were revered as demi-gods and treated with extravagant honor, numerous human victims being sacrificed at the death of one.

The following remarks about the Taensas and the Natchez are taken from Father Gravier's account of his voyage, in 1700, down the Mississippi:—"The Natchez and the Taensas practice polygamy, steal, and are very vicious, the girls and women more than the men and boys. The temple having been reduced to ashes last year by lightning, the old man who sits guardian said that the spirit was incensed because no one was put to death on the decease of the last chief, and that it was necessary to appease him. Five women had the cruelty to cast their children into the fire, in sight of the French who recounted it to me; and but for the French there would have been a great many more children burned."

At their first coming, the French found a warm welcome among the Natchez, and Fort Rosalie in the Natchez country (built shortly after the founding of New Orleans) was the scene for many years of constant friendly reunions of the two races. But an arrogant and cruel commandant, by his ill-judged severity, at a time when the warlike Chickasaws were inciting the Natchez to rise, produced a fearful explosion. One day a solitary soldier appeared in the hamlet of New Orleans with fearful news. Fort Rosalie had been surprised, its garrison of over two hundred men massacred, and two hundred and fifty women and children taken prisoners. In the war that followed, the Choctaws sided with the French, the Chickasaws and Yazoos with the Natchez. Finally the French, under St. Dénis, won a complete victory, the women and children taken at Fort Rosalie were recaptured and brought to New Orleans, and the Natchez tribe was completely broken up. The prisoners were sent to die in the cruel slavery of the San Domingo sugar plantations, while a few who escaped the French were adopted into the Chickasaw nation.

Chapter XIV

LA SALLE AND THE FOUNDING OF LOUISIANA

La Salle leads an Expedition to seize the Mouth of the Mississippi.—A Series of Mishaps.—Landing at Matagorda Bay.—Fort St. Louis of Texas.—Seeking the Mississippi, La Salle explores the Interior of Texas.—Mounted Comanches.—La Salle starts out to go to Canada for Relief.—Interesting Experiences.—La Salle assassinated.—Tonty's Heroic Efforts to rescue him and his Party.—Supplement: The Founding of New Orleans.

On a day in February, 1685, a party landed from one of three vessels lying off the entrance of Matagorda Bay, on the coast of Texas. They were under the command of La Salle. What was this extraordinary man doing there? In accordance with the plan which had long filled his mind, of planting French forts and colonies in the valley of the Great River and giving its trade an outlet into the Gulf of Mexico, he had come to establish a fort on the Mississippi. This, the first part of his plan, was very rational, if only he had the vast resources needed for such an undertaking.

But the second part was so crazy that we must suppose that his mind was beginning to give way. With a handful of Frenchmen and an army of fifteen thousand savages, which he professed to be able to muster and to march down the Mississippi, he had promised the King of France that he would conquer the northern province of Mexico, called New Biscay, and get possession of its valuable silver mines.

Louis had cheerfully accepted this insane proposition—insane, if we consider the pitiful equipment that La Salle said would suffice, namely, two ships and two hundred men. Louis was indeed furiously jealous of the Spanish King's success in the New World and irritated by his arrogant treatment of the Gulf of Mexico as private property of Spain,—as completely a "closed sea" as if it had been a duck-pond in his palace yard. Moreover, there was war now between the two countries, and he would gladly seize an opportunity of striking his rival a blow in what seemed an exposed part. Besides, the risk would be small. If La Salle failed, the loss would be chiefly his; if he succeeded, a province of Mexico would be a shining jewel in the French crown.

So here was La Salle, with an outfit corresponding with his mad scheme—but three ships, only one a man-of-war, the "Joly," one a little frigate, the "Belle," and one a transport, the "Aimable"; for soldiers, the destined army of invasion, a parcel of rapscallions raked up from the docks and the prisons; for colonists some mechanics and laborers, priests and volunteers, with the usual proportion of "broken gentlemen," some peasant families looking for homes in the New World, and even some wretched girls who expected to find husbands in the land of promise. This ill-assorted little mob to seize and colonize the mouth of the Mississippi and to wrest a province from Spain!

From the first everything had gone wrong. La Salle and the ship-captains, who could not endure his haughty manners, quarreled incessantly. A Spanish cruiser captured his fourth vessel, laden with indispensable supplies for the colony. Then he was seized with a dangerous fever; and while the vessels waited at San Domingo for him to be well enough to resume the voyage, his villains roamed the island and rioted in debauchery.

Its destination being the mouth of the Mississippi, what was the expedition doing at Matagorda Bay, in Texas? This was the result of another folly. Not a soul on board knew the navigation of the Gulf, so carefully had Spain guarded her secret. The pilots had heard much of the currents in those waters, and they made so excessive allowance for them that when land was sighted, instead of being, as they supposed, about Appalachee Bay, they were on the coast of Texas, probably about Galveston Bay. In the end it proved to be a fatal mistake, wrecking the enterprise.

On New Year's day La Salle landed and found only a vast marshy plain. Clearly, this was not the mouth of the Great River. He returned on board, and the vessel stood westward along the coast, every eye on board strained to catch some indication of what they sought, whereas they were all the time sailing further from it. At one point where they stopped, some Indians, who doubtless were familiar with the sight of white men, swam out through the surf and came on board without any sign of fear. But, nobody knowing their language, nothing could be learned from them.

After hovering for three weeks in sight of land, La Salle, perplexed beyond measure, but forced to decide because the captain of the man-of-war was impatient to land the men and to sail for France, announced that they were at one of the mouths of the Mississippi and ordered the people and stores put ashore.

Scarcely were they landed, when a band of Indians set upon some men at work and carried off some of them. La Salle immediately seized his arms, called to some of his followers, and started off in pursuit. Just as he was entering the Indian village, the report of a cannon came from the bay. It frightened the savages so that they fell flat on the ground and gave up their prisoners without difficulty. But a chill foreboding seized La Salle. He knew that the gun was a signal of disaster, and, looking back, he saw the "Aimable" furling her sails. Her captain, in violation of orders, and disregarding buoys which La Salle had put down, had undertaken to come in under sail and had ended by wrecking her. Soon she began to break up, and night fell upon the wretched colonists bivouacking on the shore, strewn with boxes and barrels saved from the wreck, while Indians swarmed on the beach, greedy for plunder, and needed to be kept off by a guard.

What a situation, ludicrous, had it not been tragic! Instead of holding the key of the Mississippi Valley, the expeditionists did not even know where they were. Instead of the fifteen thousand warriors who were expected to march with them to the conquest of New Biscay, the squalid savages in their neighborhood annoyed them in every possible way, set fire to the prairie when the wind blew toward them, stole their goods, ambushed a party that came in quest of the missing articles, and killed two of them.

Next came sickness, due to using brackish water, carrying off five or six a day. When the captain of the little "Belle," the last remaining vessel—for the man-of-war had sailed for France—got drunk and wrecked her on a sand-bar, the situation was truly desperate. Nobody knew where they were, and the last means of getting away by water had perished.

In the meantime La Salle had chosen a place for a temporary fort, on a river which the French called La Vache (Cow River), on account of the buffaloes in its vicinity, and which retains the name, in the Spanish form, Lavaca.

La Salle returned from an exploration unsuccessful. He had found nothing, learned nothing; only, he knew now that he was not near the Mississippi. The summer had worn away, steadily filling the graveyard, and, with the coming of the autumn, he prepared for a more extensive exploration. On the last day of October he started out with fifty men on his grand journey of exploration, leaving Joutel, his faithful lieutenant, in command of the fort, which contained thirty-four persons, including three Recollet friars and a number of women and girls.

The winter passed not uncomfortably for the party in the fort. The surrounding prairie swarmed with game, buffaloes, deer, turkeys, ducks, geese, and plover. The river furnished an abundance of turtles, and the bay of oysters. Joutel gives a very entertaining account of his killing rattlesnakes, which his dog was wont to find, and of shooting alligators. The first time that he went buffalo-hunting, the animals were very numerous, but he did not seem to kill any. Every one that he fired at lumbered away, as if it were unhurt. After some time he found one dead, then others, and he learned that he had killed several. After their wont they had kept their feet while life lasted. Even the friars took a hand in buffalo-hunting.

La Salle and his party, meanwhile, were roaming wearily from tribe to tribe, usually fighting their way, always seeking the Mississippi. At last they came to a large river which at first they mistook for it. Here La Salle built a stockade and left some of his men, of whose fate nothing was afterward heard. Then he set out to return to Fort St. Louis, as he called his little fort on Lavaca. One day in March he reappeared with his tattered and footsore followers, some of them carrying loads of buffalo-meat.

Surely the condition of affairs was dismal in the extreme. More than a year gone, and as yet the Frenchmen did not even know where they were. The fierce heat of another summer was near. Still La Salle, with his matchless courage, so soon as he recovered from a fit of illness, formed a desperate resolve. He would start out again, find the Mississippi, ascend that river and the Illinois to Canada, and bring relief to the fort. This time the party was composed of twenty men, some of them clad in deerskin, others in the garments of those who had died. On April 11 they started out.

Months went by. Then, to the surprise of those in the fort, one evening La Salle reappeared, followed by eight men of the twenty who had gone out with him. One had been lost, two had deserted, one had been seized by an alligator, and six had given out on the march and probably perished. The survivors had encountered interesting experiences. They had crossed the Colorado on a raft. Nika, La Salle's favorite Shawanoe hunter, who had followed him to France and thence to Texas, had been bitten by a rattlesnake, but had recovered. Among the Cenis Indians, a branch of the Caddo family, which includes the famed Pawnees, they met with the friendliest welcome and saw plenty of horses, silver lamps, swords, muskets, money, and other articles, all Spanish, which these people had obtained from the fierce Comanches, who had taken them in raids on the Mexican border. They also met some of the Comanches themselves and were invited to join them in a foray into New Mexico. But La Salle had, necessarily, long since given up his mad scheme of conquest and was thinking only of extricating himself from his pitiable dilemma.

This seems to have been the first meeting of Frenchmen with mounted Indians of the plains. The possession of horses, which had strayed or been stolen from Spanish settlements, had transformed these wild rovers from foot-travelers, such as Cabeza de Vaca and Coronado found them, having no other domestic animals than dogs, into matchless horsemen and the most dangerous brigands on the continent, capable of covering hundreds of miles in an incredibly short space of time. Splendid specimens of savage manhood, presenting the best type of the Shoshonee stock, they amply avenged the terror which the sight of mounted Spaniards at first struck into the hearts of the aborigines, by harrying the colonists and laying the border in blood and ashes, as they sometimes do to this day.[1]

From the Cenis villages, where they bought five horses, the Frenchmen went as far, perhaps, as the Sabine River, encamped there for two months, detained by La Salle's illness with fever, and then, on account of their weakened condition, returned to Fort St. Louis.

A deeper pall of gloom settled upon the little band of exiles. They had now been two years on that forlorn spot, and still they had not even found their way out. From one hundred and eighty their number had dwindled to forty-five. Clearly, there was but one thing to be done. If anybody was to remain alive, the journey to Canada must be accomplished, at all costs. This time La Salle determined to take Joutel with him, leaving Barbier in command of the little party in the fort.

The New Year, 1687, came, and a few days later, with sighs and tears, the parting took place which many felt was for all time, and the travelers went away in mournful silence, with their meagre outfit packed on the horses, leaving Barbier to hold the fort with his little band of twenty persons, including all the women and children and a few disabled men.

We shall not attempt to trace closely the movements of the travelers. For more than two months they journeyed in a northeasterly direction. At the best, they were in wretched plight, with nothing for shoes but raw buffalo-hide, which hardened about the foot and held it in the grip of a vise. After a while they bought dressed deerskin from the Indians and made themselves moccasins. Rivers and streams they crossed, two or three at a time, in a boat made of buffalo-hide, while the horses swam after them. They met Indians almost daily and held friendly intercourse with them.[2]

Once they saw a band of a hundred and fifty warriors attacking a herd of buffalo with lances, and a stirring sight it was. These warriors entertained the Europeans most handsomely. Says La Salle's brother, the priest Cavelier, "They took us straight to the cabin of their great chief or captain, where they first washed our hands, our heads, and our feet with warm water; after which they presented us boiled and roast meat to eat, and an unknown fish, cooked whole, that was six feet long, laid in a dish of its length. It was of a wonderful taste, and we preferred it to meat." Here the way-worn travelers were glad to buy thirty horses—enough to give every one of them a mount, and to carry their baggage besides—all for thirty knives, ten hatchets, and six dozen needles!

In one of the villages they witnessed the catching of an alligator twelve feet long on a large hook made of bone and baited with meat. The Indians amused themselves an entire day with torturing it. They would have been keenly disappointed, had they known how little this animal, so low in the scale of life as to be almost insensible to pain, suffered from their ingenious cruelty.

The Colorado and the Trinity were reached. A deluge of rain kept them weather-bound for four or five days. It was a gloomy time. What added fuel to the flame was that La Salle had with him a young nephew, named Moranget, who presumed on his relation to the leader and behaved most overbearingly to the men.

One day it chanced that some of the men were separated from the main body when Nika killed two buffaloes. They sent word to La Salle, in order that he might have the meat brought in on the horses. Accordingly, he dispatched his nephew, Moranget, with two other men, for that purpose. This was just the opportunity the malcontents desired. Besides, Moranget incensed them by flying into a passion because they had reserved certain portions of the meat for themselves, and by seizing the whole of it. They laid their plans and, in the dead of the night, murdered him, La Salle's servant Saget, and his faithful Indian, Nika.

Now they had to choose between killing La Salle and being killed by him, as soon as he should learn the facts. They laid an ambush for him, and when he came in the morning to look after the missing men, they shot him dead. Then the murderers stripped his body, dragged it into the bushes, and left it to be torn by buzzards.

Thus died, in the prime of his manhood, one who had done more than any other toward the opening of our continent. He had traversed regions where white men were almost unheard of. He had launched the first vessel that ever floated on the vast inland seas above Niagara Falls. He had established the French in the Illinois region, opening the way for the possession of the Mississippi Valley. He had drawn hostile Indian tribes together into a league strong enough to resist the Long House. He had traveled thousands and thousands of miles on foot and by canoe. He had led the first party of white men from the Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. His foresight had grasped the commercial value of the Mississippi Valley, and, triumphing over enormous difficulties, he had opened the Great West to our race. And now all his greatness was come to this, to die in the wilderness by an assassin's hand!

After the death of the leader, a little party, among whom were Joutel and La Salle's brother, the friar Cavelier, after many strange experiences, finally made their way down the Arkansas River to the Mississippi. There, to their inexpressible joy, they found two of their countrymen who had been left there by Tonty. That brave man and loyal friend, when he received the news, by the way of France, of his former leader's disastrous landing, had at once, at his own expense, fitted out an expedition and led it down the Illinois to the mouth of the Mississippi. Of course, he did not find La Salle or any trace of him there. He had then returned to his post, leaving some of his men at the mouth of the Arkansas. These escorted the survivors of La Salle's party to Canada, whence they sailed to France, having made one of the most remarkable journeys on record. They arrived in Europe, the sole known survivors of the expedition that had left France three years before.

Louis the Great, when he heard the news of the failure of the enterprise, took no steps to relieve the forlorn little band of exiles on the coast of Texas. Not so Tonty. That brave soul determined to rescue them, if possible. For the third time he voyaged down the Mississippi, turned up the Red River, and penetrated as far as the country of the Caddoes.[3] There he lost the most of his ammunition in crossing a river, his men mutinied and refused to go further, and he was compelled to turn back. On his way down the Red River he encountered a flood and traveled more than a hundred miles through country covered with water. The party slept on logs laid side by side and were reduced to eating their dogs. Few men who figure in our country's early story are more deserving of honorable remembrance than this man with one hand and with the heart of a lion.

The French King neglected the exiles in Texas, but the Spanish King did not. He ordered a force sent from Mexico, to destroy the nest of invaders. When the Spanish soldiers arrived on the spot, not a human being was to be seen. The poor little fort was a ruin, and a few skeletons were all that remained of its former inmates. The Indians in the neighborhood told a story of a band of warriors who had entrapped the garrison into opening the gates, on the plea of trading, and then had rushed in and massacred them.