A MAP IN THE RELATION OF 1662-1663 (This map includes Lake Ontario and the Iroquois Country. It shows the relative positions of the Five Nations and Fort d'Orange (Albany). It also gives plans of the forts on the Richelieu and shows their location)
Never had such an expedition been seen before on the St. Lawrence. Drums beat reveille at peep of dawn. Fifes outshrilled the roar of rapids, and stately figures in gold braid and plumed hats glided over the waters of the Richelieu among the painted forests of the frost-tinted maples. Indians have a way of conveying news that modern trappers designate as "the moccasin telegram." "Moccasin telegram" now carried news of the coming army to the Iroquois villages, and the alarm ran like wildfire from Mohawk to Onondaga and from Onondaga to Seneca. When the French army struck up the Mohawk River, and to beat of drum charged in full fury out of the rain-dripping forests across the stubble fields to attack the first palisaded village, they found it desolate, deserted, silent as the dead, though winter stores crammed the abandoned houses and wildest confusion showed that the warriors had fled in panic. So it was with the next village and the next. The Iroquois had stampeded in blind flight, and the only show of opposition was a wild whoop here and there from ambush. De Tracy took possession of the land for France, planted a cross, and ordered the villages set on fire. For a time, at least, peace was assured with the Iroquois.
Who first discovered the Province of Ontario? Before Champlain had ascended the Ottawa, or the Jesuits established their missions south of Lake Huron, young men sent out as wood rovers had canoed up the Ottawa and gone westward to the land of the Sweet Water Seas. Was it Vignau, the romancer, or Nicolet, the coureur de bois, or the boy Etienne Brulé, who first saw what has been called the Garden of Canada, the rolling meadows and wooded hills that lie wedged in between the Upper and the Lower of the Great Lakes? Tradition says it was Brulé; but however that may be, little was known of what is now Ontario except in the region of the old Jesuit missions around Georgian Bay. It was not even known that Michigan and Huron were two lakes. The Sulpicians of Montreal had a mission at the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario, and the south shore of the lake, where it touched on Iroquois territory, was known to the Jesuits; but from Quinte Bay to Detroit—a distance equal to that from New York to Chicago, or London to Italy—was an unknown world.
But to return to the explorations which Jean Talon, the Intendant, had set in motion—
When Dollier de Casson, the soldier who had become Sulpician priest, returned from the campaign against the Iroquois, he had been sent as a missionary to the Nipissing Country. There he heard among the Indians of a shorter route to the Great River of the West—the Mississippi—than by the Ottawa and Sault Ste. Marie. The Indians told him if he would ascend the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, he could portage overland to the Beautiful River,—Ohio,—which would carry him down to the Mississippi.
The Sulpicians had been encouraged by Talon in order to eclipse and hold in check the Jesuits. They were eager to send their missionaries to the new realm of this Great River, and hurried Dollier de Casson down to Quebec to obtain Intendant Talon's permission.
There, curiously enough, Dollier de Casson met Cavalier de La Salle, the shy young seigneur of La Chine, intent on almost the same aim,—to explore the Great River. Where the Sulpicians had granted him his seigniory above Montreal he had built a fort, which soon won the nickname of La Chine,—China,—because its young master was continually entertaining Iroquois Indians within the walls, to question them of the Great River, which might lead to China.
Governor Courcelle and Intendant Talon ordered the priest and young seigneur to set out together on their explorations. The Sulpicians were to bear all expenses, buying back La Salle's lands to enable him to outfit canoes with the money. Father Galinée, who understood map making, accompanied Dollier de Casson, and the expedition of seven birch canoes, with three white men in each, and two dugouts with Seneca Indians, who had been visiting La Salle, set out from Montreal on July 6, 1669. Not a leader in the party was over thirty-five years of age. Dollier de Casson, the big priest, was only thirty-three and La Salle barely twenty-six. Corn meal was carried as food. For the rest, they were to depend on chance shots. With numerous portages, keeping to the south shore of the St. Lawrence because that was best known to the Seneca guides, the canoes passed up Lake St. Louis and Lake St. Francis and glided through the sylvan fairyland of the Thousand Islands, coming out in August on Lake Ontario, "which," says Galinée, "appeared to us like a great sea." Striking south, they appealed to the Seneca Iroquois for guides to the Ohio, but the Senecas were so intent on torturing some prisoners recently captured, that they paid no heed to the appeal. A month was wasted, and the white men proceeded with Indian slaves for guides, still along the south shore of the lake.