Tonty and his companions still occupied their hut; but the Iroquois, becoming suspicious of them, forced them to remove to the fort, crowded as it was with the savage crew. On the second day, there was an alarm. The Illinois appeared in numbers on the low hills, half a mile behind the town; and the Iroquois, who had felt their courage, and who had been told by Tonty that they were twice as numerous as themselves, showed symptoms of no little uneasiness. They proposed that he should act as mediator, to which he gladly assented, and crossed the meadow towards the Illinois, accompanied by Membré, and by an Iroquois who was sent as a hostage. The Illinois hailed the overtures with delight, gave the ambassadors some refreshment, which they sorely needed, and sent back with them a young man of their nation as a hostage on their part. This indiscreet youth nearly proved the ruin of the negotiation; for he was no sooner among the Iroquois than he showed such an eagerness to close the treaty, made such promises, professed such gratitude, and betrayed so rashly the numerical weakness of the Illinois, that he revived all the insolence of the invaders. They turned furiously upon Tonty and charged him with having robbed them of the glory and the spoils of victory. "Where are all your Illinois warriors, and where are the sixty Frenchmen that you said were among them?" It needed all Tonty's tact and coolness to extricate himself from this new danger.
The treaty was at length concluded; but scarcely was it made, when the Iroquois prepared to break it, and set about constructing canoes of elm- bark in which to attack the Illinois women and children in their island sanctuary. Tonty warned his allies that the pretended peace was but a snare for their destruction. The Iroquois, on their part, grew hourly more jealous of him, and would certainly have killed him, had it not been their policy to keep the peace with Frontenac and the French.
Several days after, they summoned him and Membré to a council. Six packs of beaver skin were brought in, and the savage orator presented them to Tonty in turn, explaining their meaning as he did so. The first two were to declare that the children of Count Frontenac, that is, the Illinois, should not be eaten; the next was a plaster to heal Tonty's wound; the next was oil wherewith to anoint him and Membré, that they might not be fatigued in travelling; the next proclaimed that the sun was bright; and the sixth and last required them to decamp and go home. [Footnote: An Indian speech, it will be remembered, is without validity, if not confirmed by presents, each of which has its special interpretation. The meaning of the fifth pack of beaver, informing Tonty that the sun was bright,—"que le soleil étoit beau," that is, that the weather was favorable for travelling,—is curiously misconceived by the editor of the Dernières Découvertes, who improves upon his original by substituting the words "par le cinquième paquet ils nous exhortoient à adorer le Soleil.">[ Tonty thanked them for their gifts, but demanded when they themselves meant to go and leave the Illinois in peace. At this the conclave grew angry, and, despite their late pledge, some of them said that before they went, they would eat Illinois flesh. Tonty instantly kicked away the packs of beaver skin, the Indian symbol of the scornful rejection of a proposal; telling them that since they meant to eat the Governor's children, he would have none of their presents. The chiefs, in a rage, rose and drove him from the lodge. The French withdrew to their hut, where they stood all night on the watch, expecting an attack, and resolved to sell their lives dearly. At daybreak, the chiefs ordered them to begone.
Tonty, with an admirable fidelity and courage, had done all in the power of man to protect the allies of Canada against their ferocious assailants; and he thought it unwise to persist farther in a course which could lead to no good, and which would probably end in the destruction of the whole party. He embarked in a leaky canoe with Membré, Ribourde, Boisrondet, and the remaining two men, and began to ascend the river. After paddling about five leagues, they landed to dry their baggage and repair their crazy vessel, when Father Ribourde, breviary in hand, strolled across the sunny meadows for an hour of meditation among the neighboring groves. Evening approached, and he did not return. Tonty with one of the men went to look for him, and, following his tracks, presently discovered those of a band of Indians, who had apparently seized or murdered him. Still, they did not despair. They fired their guns to guide him, should he still be alive; built a huge fire by the bank, and, then crossing the river, lay watching it from the other side. At midnight, they saw the figure of a man hovering around the blaze; then many more appeared, but Ribourde was not among them. In truth, a band of Kickapoos, enemies of the Iroquois, about whose camp they had been prowling in quest of scalps, had met and wantonly murdered the inoffensive old man. They carried his scalp to their village, and danced around it in triumph, pretending to have taken it from an enemy. Thus, in his sixty-fifth year, the only heir of a wealthy Burgundian house perished under the war-clubs of the savages, for whose salvation he had renounced station, ease, and affluence. [Footnote: Tonty, Mémoire, MS. Membré in Le Clercq, ii. 191. Hennepin, who hated Tonty, unjustly charges him with having abandoned the search too soon, admitting, however, that it would have been useless to continue it. This part of his narrative is a perversion of Membré's account.]
Meanwhile, a hideous scene was enacted at the ruined village of the Illinois. Their savage foes, balked of a living prey, wreaked their fury on the dead. They dug up the graves; they threw down the scaffolds. Some of the bodies they burned; some they threw to the dogs; some, it is affirmed, they ate. [Footnote: "Cependant les Iroquois, aussitôt après le départ du Sr. de Tonty, exercèrent leur rage sur les corps morts des Ilinois, qu'ils déterrèrent ou abbattèrent de dessus les échafauds où les Ilinois les laissent longtemps exposés avant que de les mettre en terre. Ils en brûlèrent la plus grande partie, ils en mangèrent même quelques uns, et jettèrent le reste aux chiens. Ils plantérent les têtes de ces cadavres à demi décharnés sur des pieux," etc.—Relation des Découvertes, MS.] Placing the skulls on stakes as trophies, they turned to pursue the Illinois, who, when the French withdrew, had abandoned their asylum and retreated down the river. The Iroquois, still, it seems, in awe of them, followed them along the opposite bank, each night encamping face to face with them; and thus the adverse bands moved slowly southward, till they were near the mouth of the river. Hitherto, the compact array of the Illinois had held their enemies in check; but now, suffering from hunger, and lulled into security by the assurances of the Iroquois that their object was not to destroy them, but only to drive them from the country, they rashly separated into their several tribes. Some descended the Mississippi; some, more prudent, crossed to the western side. One of their principal tribes, the Tamaroas, more credulous than the rest, had the fatuity to remain near the mouth of the Illinois, where they were speedily assailed by all the force of the Iroquois. The men fled, and very few of them were killed; but the women and children were captured to the number, it is said, of seven hundred. [Footnote: Relation des Découvertes, MS. Frontenac to the King, N.Y. Col. Docs., ix. 147. A memoir of Duchesneau makes the number twelve hundred.] Then followed that scene of torture, of which, some two weeks later, La Salle saw the revolting traces. [Footnote: "Ils [les Illinois] trouvèrent dans leur campement des carcasses de leurs enfans que ces anthropophages avoient mangez, ne voulant même d'autre nourriture que la chair de ces infortunez."—La Potherie, ii. 145, 146. Compare note, ante, p. 196.] Sated, at length, with horrors, the conquerors withdrew, leading with them a host of captives, and exulting in their triumphs over women, children, and the dead.
After the death of Father Ribourde, Tonty and his companions remained searching for him till noon of the next day, and then, in despair of again seeing him, resumed their journey. They ascended the river, leaving no token of their passage at the junction of its northern and southern branches. For food, they gathered acorns and dug roots in the meadows. Their canoe proved utterly worthless; and, feeble as they were, they set out on foot for Lake Michigan. Boisrondet wandered off, and was lost. He had dropped the flint of his gun, and he had no bullets; but he cut a pewter porringer into slugs with which he shot wild turkeys, by discharging his piece with a firebrand; and after several days he had the good fortune to rejoin the party. Their object was to reach the Pottawattamies of Green Bay. Had they aimed at Michillimackinac, they would have found an asylum with La Forest at the fort on the St. Joseph; but unhappily they passed westward of that post, and, by way of Chicago, followed the borders of Lake Michigan northward. The cold was intense, and they had much ado to grub up wild onions from the frozen ground to save themselves from starving. Tonty fell ill of a fever and a swelling of the limbs, which disabled him from travelling, and hence ensued a long delay. At length they neared Green Bay, where they would have starved had they not gleaned a few ears of corn and frozen squashes in the fields of an empty Indian town. It was the end of November before they found the Pottawattamies, and were warmly greeted by their chief, who had befriended La Salle the year before, and who, in his enthusiasm for the French, was wont to say that he knew but three great captains in the world, Frontenac, La Salle, and himself. [Footnote: Membré, in Le Clercq, ii. 199. Of the three, or rather four narratives, on which this chapter mainly rests, the best is that contained in the manuscript of 1681, entitled the Relation des Découvertes. This portion of it, which bears every evidence of accuracy, was certainly supplied by Tonty himself or one of his companions. The Mémoire of Tonty is wholly distinct. It is a modest and simple statement, of which the chief fault is its brevity. He undoubtedly wrote another and more detailed narrative, which has been used by the editor of the Dernières Découvertes, printed with Tonty's name. The editor seems to have taken less liberties with his original in this part of the book than in many others. The narrative of Membré sustains that of Tonty, except in one or two unimportant points, where the writer's vanity seems to have gained the better of his veracity.]
While Tonty rests at Green Bay, and La Salle at the fort on the St. Joseph, we will leave them for a time to trace the strange adventures of the errant friar, Father Louis Hennepin.
THE ILLINOIS TOWN.
The site of the great Illinois town.—This has not till now been determined, though there have been various conjectures concerning it. From a study of the contemporary documents and maps, I became satisfied, first, that the branch of the River Illinois, called the "Big Vermilion," was the Aramoni of the French explorers; and, secondly, that the cliff called "Starved Rock" was that known to the French as Le Rocher, or the Rock of St. Louis. If I was right in this conclusion, then the position of the Great Village was established; for there is abundant proof that it was on the north side of the river, above the Aramoni, and below Le Rocher. I accordingly went to the village of Utica, which, as I judged by the map, was very near the point in question, and mounted to the top of one of the hills immediately behind it, whence I could see the valley of the Illinois for miles, bounded on the farther side by a range of hills, in some parts rocky and precipitous, and in others covered with forests. Far on the right, was a gap in these hills, through which the Big Vermilion flowed to join the Illinois; and somewhat towards the left, at the distance of a mile and a half, was a huge cliff, rising perpendicularly from the opposite margin of the river. This I assumed to be Le Rocher of the French, though from where I stood I was unable to discern the distinctive features which I was prepared to find in it. In every other respect, the scene before me was precisely what I had expected to see. There was a meadow on the hither side of the river, on which stood a farm-house; and this, as it seemed to me, by its relations with surrounding objects, might be supposed to stand in the midst of the space once occupied by the Illinois town.
On the way down from the hill, I met Mr. James Clark, the principal inhabitant of Utica, and one of the earliest settlers of this region. I accosted him, told him my objects, and requested a half hour's conversation with him, at his leisure. He seemed interested in the inquiry, and said he would visit me early in the evening at the inn, where, accordingly, he soon appeared. The conversation took place in the porch, where a number of farmers and others were gathered. I asked Mr. Clark if any Indian remains were found in the neighborhood. "Yes," he replied, "plenty of them." I then inquired if there was any one spot where they were more numerous than elsewhere. "Yes," he answered again, pointing towards the farm-house on the meadow: "on my farm down yonder by the river, my tenant ploughs up teeth and bones by the peck every spring, besides arrow-heads, beads, stone hatchets, and other things of that sort." I replied that this was precisely what I had expected, as I had been led to believe that the principal town of the Illinois Indians once covered that very spot. "If," I added, "I am right in this belief, the great rock beyond the river is the one which the first explorers occupied as a fort, and I can describe it to you from their accounts of it, though I have never seen it except from the top of the hill where the trees on and around it prevented me from seeing any part but the front." The men present now gathered around to listen. "The rock," I continued, "is nearly a hundred and fifty feet high, and rises directly from the water. The front and two sides are perpendicular and inaccessible, but there is one place where it is possible for a man to climb up; though with difficulty. The top is large enough and level enough for houses and fortifications." Here several of the men exclaimed, "That's just it." "You've hit it exactly." I then asked if there was any other rock on that side of the river which could answer to the description. They all agreed that there was no such rock on either side, along the whole length of the river. I then said, "If the Indian town was in the place where I suppose it to have been, I can tell you the nature of the country which lies behind the hills on the farther side of the river, though I know nothing about it except what I have learned from writings nearly two centuries old. From the top of the hills you look out upon a great prairie reaching as far as you can see, except that it is crossed by a belt of woods following the course of a stream which enters the main river a few miles below." (See ante, p. 205, note.) "You are exactly right again," replied Mr. Clark, "we call that belt of timber the 'Vermilion Woods,' and the stream is the Big Vermilion." "Then," I said, "the Big Vermilion is the river which the French called the Aramoni: 'Starved Rock' is the same on which they built a fort called St. Louis, in the year 1682; and your farm is on the site of the great town of the Illinois."