ROBERT DE LA SALLE
Ostensibly the powwow was to maintain peace. In reality, it was to attract the Iroquois, and all the tribes with whom they traded, away from the English, down to Frontenac's new fort with their furs. It is a question if all the military pomp deceived a living soul. Before the Governor had set his sappers to work on the foundations of a fort, the merchants of Montreal—the Le Bers and Le Moynes and Le Chesnayes and Le Fôrests—were furious with jealousy. Undoubtedly Fort Frontenac would be the most valuable fur post in America.
OLD PLAN OF FORT FRONTENAC
Determined to have the support of the Court, where his wife was in high favor, Count Frontenac dispatched La Salle to France in 1674 with letters of strongest recommendation, which, no doubt, Jean Talon, the former Intendant, indorsed on the spot. La Salle's case was a strong one. He was to offer to found a line of forts establishing French dominion from Lake Ontario to the valley of the Mississippi, which Jolliet had just explored. In return, he asked for patent of nobility and the grant of a seigniory at Fort Frontenac; in other words, the monopoly of the furs there, which would easily clear him $20,000 a year. It has never been proved, but one may suspect that his profits were to be divided with Count Frontenac. Both requests were at once granted; and La Salle came back to a hornet's nest of enmity in Canada. Space forbids to tell of the means taken to defeat him; for, by promising to support Recollet friars at his fort instead of Jesuits, La Salle had added to the enmity of the merchants, the hatred of the Jesuits. Poison was put in his food. Iroquois were stirred up to hostility against him.
Meanwhile no enmity checks his ardor. He has replaced the wooden walls of Fort Frontenac with stone, mounted ten cannon, manned the fort with twenty soldiers, maintained more than forty workmen, cleared one hundred acres for crops, and in 1677 is off again for France to ask permission to build another fort above Niagara. This time, when La Salle comes out, he is accompanied by a man famous in American annals, a soldier of fortune from Italy, cousin of Duluth the bushrover, one Henry Tonty, a man with a copper hand, his arm having been shattered in war, who presently comes to have repute among the Indians as a great "medicine man," because blows struck by that metal hand have a way of being effective. By 1678 the fort is built above Niagara. By 1679 a vessel of forty-five tons and ten cannon is launched on Lake Erie, the Griffon, the first vessel to plow the waters of the Great Lakes. As she slides off her skids, August 17, to go up to Michilimackinac for a cargo of furs, Te Deum is chanted from the new fort, and Louis Hennepin, the Dutch friar, standing on deck in full vestments, asks Heaven's blessing on the ship's venture.
Scant is the courtesy of the Michilimackinac traders as the Griffon's guns roar salute to the fort. Cold is the welcome of the Jesuits as La Salle enters their chapel dressed in scarlet mantle trimmed with gold. And to be frank, though La Salle was backed by the King, he had no right to trade at Michilimackinac, for his monopoly explicitly states he shall not interfere with the trade of the north, but barter only with the tribes towards the Illinois. Never mind! he loads his ships to the water line with furs to pay his increasing debts, and sends the ship on down to Niagara with the cargo, while he and Tonty, with different parties, proceed to the south end of Lake Michigan to cross the Chicago portage leading to the Mississippi. Did the jealous traders bribe the pilot to sink the ship to bottom? Who knows? Certain it is when Tonty and La Salle went down the Illinois early in the new year of 1680, news of disasters came thick and fast. The Griffon had sunk with all her cargo. The ship from France with the year's supplies for La Salle at Fort Frontenac had been wrecked at the mouth of the St. Lawrence; and worse than these losses, which meant financial ruin, here among the Illinois Indians were Mascoutin Indian spies bribed to stir up trouble for La Salle. Small wonder that he named the fort built here Fort Crèvecoeur,—Fort Broken Heart.