Breaking the Wilderness / The Story of the Conquest of the Far West, From the Wanderings of Cabeza de Vaca, to the First Descent of the Colorado by Powell, and the Completion of the Union Pacific Railway, With Particular Account of the Exploits of Trappers and Traders

by Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh

A Reception Committee.

Photograph by J. K. Hillers, U. S. Geol. Survey.

The British also began to turn their attention to the New World, and after several explorations along the coast—Raleigh's attempt at settlement in what is now North Carolina; Davis's exploration in the Far North, where his name still remains to designate the strait he discovered—they finally founded on James River their first permanent settlement in 1607, two years after the establishment of Santa Fé, New Mexico. To this they gave the name Jamestown, and from it as a centre they expanded their power. The French were pushing out at the North; the Spaniards controlled the South and West. Then a fourth nation appeared—the Dutch—who settled at what is now New York in 1614, five years after Hudson discovered the river now bearing his name to mark the event. Not long after this Hudson found for England the immense bay to which his name was given, and where his mutinous crew turned him, with some of his adherents, adrift on the icy sea. Never was he heard from again. Then the Mayflower came, freighted heavily with new and forceful ideas and a hardy company, who entered by Plymouth Rock; so that by 1625 all the forces that were to battle for the mastery of North America had established their footings, and with the various native tribes, who opposed their encroachment and their cruelty, they soon turned the land into a pandemonium. Almost daily the natives were given exhibitions of treachery, brutality, butchery, on the part of these newcomers among themselves, even while the good priests held aloft the crucifix and repeated, "Thou shalt not!" Is it a wonder the Amerind refused to believe? He was quick to perceive that, except the priests, the one sole object of all these warring people was pecuniary advantage. This, indeed, was rendered imperative by the European system of life.

As a rule the French were the most humane, the most just; they treated the natives more as if they might be human beings with sensitiveness and intelligence. William Penn, and his followers among the English, and the Hudson Bay Company, also dealt justly with them, but in the eyes of the others the Amerind was a beast of the forest to be exterminated. The French sent their missionaries and traders far to the West and before long had acquired a hold on the continent equal to that of the Spaniards; a hold which it then seemed impossible should ever be lessened. Raddison, the French trader, is said to have been on the head of the Mississippi as early as 1660.

Marquette and Joliet, the former a priest, the latter a trader, were sent by Frontenac, in 1673, to search for a route across the Wilderness to the Pacific by way of a great river, of which much was told by the natives. The river indicated was doubtless the Columbia. Proceeding from Michigan they finally came at the mouth of the Wisconsin to the river forming the eastern boundary of the vaster Wilderness, the Mississippi, called by Marquette Conception, and down it they went, instead of up, as they should have gone to get on the track to the Pacific, their birch-bark canoes gliding swiftly along, while the unfathomed waters for the first time heard the song of the voyageur. Down they went to Soto's burial-place. They were encroaching on the claims of the Spaniards, but boundaries then were as nebulous as the Milky Way, and the sword was the instrument of survey by which all lines were drawn. Their flag was finally carried through to the mouth of the Mississippi by that splendid character Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle,[51] a Frenchman whose qualities shine ever undimmed by the roll of fading centuries. With Tonty and Hennepin he came through the Great Lakes, and, leaving these two men behind, reached with his party the Mississippi at the mouth of the Illinois, and proceeding down it finally, in 1682, standing at the delta beside a great claim-post, he proclaimed the jurisdiction of Louis the Great (XIV.) over all this country of "Louisiana,"

"the seas, harbours, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers, within the extent of said Louisiana, from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio, ... as also along the river Colbert or Mississippi, and the rivers which discharge themselves thereinto, from its source beyond the country of the Nadouessioux ... as far as the mouth of the sea, or Gulf of Mexico, and also to the mouth of the river of Palms, upon the assurance we have from the natives of these countries, that we are the first Europeans who have descended or ascended the said river Colbert."

They had forgotten Pineda and the unfortunate Soto and Moscoso, to say nothing of the still more unfortunate Narvaez, who was wrecked at the river's entrance. This claim certainly was broad; it covered almost everything.

La Salle had a magnificent dream of developing this enormous region for his King, and proceeding to France he came back with vessels laden with supplies and colonists. But they missed the mouth of the river. Then a series of disasters left the leader stranded, as the Narvaez survivors had been, on the coast of Texas. La Salle, of all men, surely deserved more generous treatment from Fortune. But worse was to follow. They struck out for the north-east to reach the French settlements. La Salle was ambushed and shot March 18, 1687, by a villainous member of the company, leagued with other assassins, and his body stripped and thrown to the wolves. But La Salle needed no gorgeous funeral train, no costly sepulchre to carry through the ages to come his illustrious name.

One of the assassin band, he who served as a decoy, was a youth of sixteen named l'Archeveque, who later arrived in New Mexico, lived a highly respected life there, and was eventually killed at the Pawnee village with Villazur.[52] L'Archeveque, with four others from the dismembered La Salle expedition, three young men and a girl, were found among the Tejas, two years after La Salle's murder, by Alonzo de Leon, a Spaniard who came up into Texas from Coahuila, one of the northern provinces of Mexico. He ransomed all and sent them to Mexico. Three years later, 1692, the Spaniards organised a settlement at San Antonio, and henceforth the French and Spaniards began in a hostile way to encounter each other on these wide frontiers. Iberville, in 1699, started near the mouth of the Mississippi the first permanent French settlement, and the French then rapidly spread along that river and its branches, and when the eighteenth century was fairly under way they had explored the country immediately along the Mississippi and the regions between it and Montreal; they had pushed far out into the North-west, even to the banks of the Saskatchewan. Indeed, a Frenchman is said to have reached Hudson Bay in 1656. All through these regions were beaver, bison, deer, panthers, and numerous other fur-bearing animals. The trapping of these and trading for them with the natives formed the chief incentive of the Frenchmen, just as the search for imaginary mines and fabulous cities actuated the Spaniards. The pursuit of the fur business offered a life of wild freedom, particularly fascinating to many Frenchmen, who fraternised with the natives and were able peacefully to travel from tribe to tribe, exchanging European wares for furs and other property the Amerinds had. The Amerinds welcomed these pedlars, for they wanted the goods they brought; and numbers of them ranged the forests, finally being collectively called Coureurs de Bois. They have been described as a kind of outlaw, but they were not exactly that. Their lives, knowing no restriction but their own consciences, highly elastic like almost all the consciences of that time, and perhaps this, were not always models of propriety, but they were in general probably little worse than the throat-cutting gentlemen who composed a large part of the several samples of the European nations which were striving to murder each other, and incidentally the natives, for the purpose of acquiring sole possession of everything in sight. In the perusal of the history of the development of this continent it seems almost ludicrous to describe the natives particularly as the savages. One could fill a library with volumes detailing the murderous brutality of the white race, not only in dealing with the natives, but with each other. The native was hardly more than a good second in rapine and butchery, even when he was employed by one side or the other to raise slaughter to a fine art.