The new governor, perplexed by the multitude of counsellors, presently received a missive from the King, directing him not to fight the Outagamies if he could help it, "since the consequences of failure would be frightful."[344] On the other hand, Beauharnois was told that the English had sent messages to the Lake tribes urging them to kill the French in their country, and that the Outagamies had promised to do so. "This," writes the governor, "compels us to make war in earnest. It will cost sixty thousand livres."[345]
Dupuy, the intendant, had joined with Beauharnois in this letter to the minister; but being at the time in a hot quarrel with the governor, he soon after sent a communication of his own to Versailles, in which he declares that the war against the Outagamies was only a pretext of Beauharnois for spending the King's money, and enriching himself by buying up all the furs of the countries traversed by the army.[346]
Whatever the motives of the expedition, it left Montreal in June, under the Sieur de Lignery, followed the rugged old route of the Ottawa, and did not reach Michilimackinac till after midsummer. Thence, in a flotilla of birch canoes carrying about a thousand Indians and five hundred French, the party set out for the fort at the head of Green Bay.[347] Here they caught one Outagamie warrior and three Winnebagoes, whom the Indian allies tortured to death. Then they paddled their canoes up Fox River, reached a Winnebago village on the twenty-fourth of August, followed the channel of the stream, a ribbon of lazy water twisting in a vague, perplexing way through the broad marsh of wild rice and flags, till they saw the chief village of the Outagamies on a tract of rising ground a little above the level of the bog.[348] It consisted of bark wigwams, without palisades or defences of any kind. Its only inmates were three squaws and one old man. These were all seized, and, to the horror of Père Crespel, the chaplain, were given to the Indian allies, who kept the women as slaves, and burned the old man at a slow fire.[349] Then, after burning the village and destroying the crop of maize, peas, beans, and squashes that surrounded it, the whole party returned to Michilimackinac.[350]
The expedition was not a success. Lignery had hoped to surprise the enemy; but the alert and nimble savages had escaped him. Beauharnois makes the best of the miscarriage, and writes that "the army did good work;" but says a few weeks later that something must be done to cure the contempt which the western allies of the French have conceived for them "since the last affair."[351]
Two years after Lignery's expedition, there was another attempt to humble the Outagamies. Late in the autumn of 1730 young Coulon de Villiers, who twenty-four years later defeated Washington at Fort Necessity, appeared at Quebec with news that the Sieur de Villiers, his father, who commanded the post on the St. Joseph, had struck the Outagamies a deadly blow and killed two hundred of their warriors, besides six hundred of their women and children. The force under Villiers consisted of a body of Frenchmen gathered from various western posts, another body from the Illinois, led by the Sieurs de Saint-Ange, father and son, and twelve or thirteen hundred Indian allies from many friendly tribes.[352]
The accounts of this affair are obscure and not very trustworthy. It seems that the Outagamies began the fray by an attack on the Illinois at La Salle's old station of Le Rocher, on the river Illinois. On hearing of this, the French commanders mustered their Indian allies, hastened to the spot, and found the Outagamies intrenched in a grove which they had surrounded with a stockade. They defended themselves with their usual courage, but, being hard pressed by hunger and thirst, as well as by the greatly superior numbers of their assailants, they tried to escape during a dark night, as their tribesmen had done at Detroit in 1712. The French and their allies pursued, and there was a great slaughter, in which many warriors and many more women and children were the victims.[353]
The offending tribe must now, one would think, have ceased to be dangerous; but nothing less than its destruction would content the French officials. To this end, their best resource was in their Indian allies, among whom the Outagamies had no more deadly enemy than the Hurons of Detroit, who, far from relenting in view of their disasters, were more eager than ever to wreak their ire on their unfortunate foe. Accordingly, they sent messengers to the converted Iroquois at the Mission of Two Mountains, and invited them to join in making an end of the Outagamies. The invitation was accepted, and in the autumn of 1731 forty-seven warriors from the Two Mountains appeared at Detroit. The party was soon made up. It consisted of seventy-four Hurons, forty-six Iroquois, and four Ottawas. They took the trail to the mouth of the river St. Joseph, thence around the head of Lake Michigan to the Chicago portage, and thence westward to Rock River. Here were the villages of the Kickapoos and Mascoutins, who had been allies of the Outagamies, but having lately quarrelled with them, received the strangers as friends and gave them guides. The party now filed northward, by forests and prairies, towards the Wisconsin, to the banks of which stream the Outagamies had lately removed their villages. The warriors were all on snow-shoes, for the weather was cold and the snow deep. Some of the elders, overcome by the hardships of the way, called a council and proposed to turn back; but the juniors were for pushing on at all risks, and a young warrior declared that he would rather die than go home without killing somebody. The result was a division of the party; the elders returned to Chicago, and the younger men, forty Hurons and thirty Iroquois, kept on their way.
At last, as they neared the Wisconsin, they saw on an open prairie three Outagamies, who ran for their lives. The Hurons and Iroquois gave chase, till from the ridge of a hill they discovered the principal Outagamie village, consisting, if we may believe their own story, of forty-six wigwams, near the bank of the river. The Outagamie warriors came out to meet them, in number, as they pretended, much greater than theirs; but the Huron and Iroquois chiefs reminded their followers that they had to do with dogs who did not believe in God, on which they fired two volleys against the enemy, then dropped their guns and charged with the knife in one hand and the war-club in the other. According to their own story, which shows every sign of mendacity, they drove back the Outagamies into their village, killed seventy warriors, and captured fourteen more, without counting eighty women and children killed, and a hundred and forty taken prisoners. In short, they would have us believe that they destroyed the whole village, except ten men, who escaped entirely naked, and soon froze to death. They declared further that they sent one of their prisoners to the remaining Outagamie villages, ordering him to tell the inhabitants that they had just devoured the better part of the tribe, and meant to stay on the spot two days; that the tribesmen of the slain were free to attack them if they chose, but in that case, they would split the heads of all the women and children prisoners in their hands, make a breastwork of the dead bodies, and then finish it by piling upon it those of the assailants.[354]
Nothing is more misleading than Indian tradition, which is of the least possible value as evidence. It may be well, however, to mention another story, often repeated, touching these dark days of the Outagamies. It is to the effect that a French trader named Marin, whom they had incensed by levying blackmail from him, raised a party of Indians, with whose aid he surprised and defeated the unhappy tribe at the Little Butte des Morts, that they retired to the Great Butte des Morts, higher up Fox River, and that Marin here attacked them again, killing or capturing the whole. Extravagant as the story seems, it may have some foundation, though various dates, from 1725 to 1746, are assigned to the alleged exploit, and contemporary documents are silent concerning it. It is certain that the Outagamies were not destroyed, as the tribe exists to this day.[355]
In 1736 it was reported that sixty or eighty Outagamie warriors were still alive.[356] Their women, who when hard pushed would fight like furies, were relatively numerous and tolerably prolific, and their villages were full of sturdy boys, likely to be dangerous in a few years. Feeling their losses and their weakness, the survivors of the tribe incorporated themselves with their kindred and neighbors, the Sacs, Sakis, or Saukies, the two forming henceforth one tribe, afterwards known to the Americans as the Sacs and Foxes. Early in the nineteenth century they were settled on both banks of the upper Mississippi. Brave and restless like their forefathers, they were a continual menace to the American frontiersmen, and in 1832 they rose in open war, under their famous chief, Blackhawk, displaying their hereditary prowess both on foot and on horseback, and more than once defeating superior numbers of American mounted militia. In the next year that excellent artist, Charles Bodmer, painted a group of them from life,—grim-visaged savages, armed with war-club, spear, or rifle, and wrapped in red, green, or brown blankets, their heads close shaven except the erect and bristling scalp-lock, adorned with long eagle-plumes, while both heads and faces are painted with fantastic figures in blue, white, yellow, black, and vermilion.[357]