Returning from their hunt some days later, they met these five new white men. Their leader was the Sieur Du Luth, a famous hunter and explorer who had come into the upper end of the Mississippi Valley by way of Lake Superior, and with him were four French coureurs de bois. Du Luth was a cousin of Henry de Tonty, and with great eagerness did he hear from Ako and his friends the story of the band of whites who had settled at the Peoria village and of the fort they had built beside the Illinois River.
There were eight white men now in the band that journeyed northward toward the Sioux towns about the Lake. The Indians soon made up their minds that Du Luth was a man of power among the whites—more so, perhaps, than Ako, the leader of the first three visitors who had come into their country. But neither Ako nor Du Luth seemed to hold the gray-robed friar in the high esteem to which he thought himself entitled.
When they had arrived at the villages the Sioux gave a great feast to the palefaces, who had come into their country from the south and from the north, and for more than a month red men and white lived together in peace, each learning from the other. September drew near to a close, and as winter approached the white men grew anxious to return to their own kind. They secured the consent of Ouasicoudé, who with his own hand traced for them a map of the route they would need to take.
With this chart they embarked in two canoes upon the Rum River, and a few days later they had reached the Mississippi and were carrying their light craft around the Falls of St. Anthony. Here two of Du Luth’s men, much to their leader’s wrath, stole robes which were hanging in the trees as sacrifices to the spirit of the water. They stopped at the mouth of the Wisconsin to smoke the meat of some buffalo they had killed. While they were camped at this point, three Sioux came to tell them of something which had happened since they had left the northern villages. A party of Sioux, led by one of the chiefs, had plotted to follow after the eight white men and kill and plunder them. But Ouasicoudé, the Pierced Pine, the ever friendly chief, was so enraged that he went to the lodge of the chief of the conspirators and in the presence of his friends tomahawked him.
Thankful for their deliverance, the whites paddled their canoes up the Wisconsin River, crossed the portage to the Fox River, and followed that stream to Green Bay and its settlements of French priests and traders. Meantime back in the country they had left, the Sioux were waging fierce war with the Illinois and other nations of the South. Paessa, a Kaskaskia chief who had left the village of his people, in spite of Tonty’s remonstrances, before the coming of the Iroquois, had led a party of Illinois braves into the fastnesses of the Upper Mississippi against their long-time foes.
In the valley of the Illinois and in the valleys of the rivers which flowed together to make the current of the mighty Mississippi, no white man was now to be found. When the first snows came, the tribes of the Upper Mississippi found themselves with a few guns and knives and bits of bright cloth and the memory of the white man’s ways. But instead of the pale-faced Frenchmen, who came bearing presents and asking for peace, they now had with them, skulking through their valleys, the faithless Iroquois, with hands red with the blood of conquered nations and hearts seared with the flames with which they burned their captives.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE MIAMIS REPENT
The camp-fires of five hundred Iroquois glowed in the frosty night air, the smoke hovering above like a drifting cloud under the moon. Some of the five hundred lay sleeping, their weapons close to their hands, while others were standing guard against possible danger. Many weeks had passed since they had hounded the Illinois out of the valley of the river that bore their name, and now all up and down its length was quiet. No Illinois village along the shores sent the smoke of its lodge-fires upwards. No winter hunting party camped by the frozen stream. At the same time, though deserted by its ancient dwellers, the valley was not wanting signs of the thing which had caused their departure. The moon which that night hung over the returning Iroquois shone upon all the length of the river, revealing scenes for a hundred leagues that spoke as plainly of the Iroquois passing as does the track in fresh snow tell of the passing of a wolf.
The trail began at the great village of the Kaskaskias. Here the pale light fell upon the half-burned ruins of lodges, the scattered contents of the caches, the desecrated graveyard, and the wolves that with savage howls still hung about the town their human cousins had ravaged. Down the river went the trail marked by ashes of deserted camps, past the lodges of the Peorias, the ruined Fort Crèvecœur, and the ribs of the unfinished ship gleaming white in the moonlight. Then came the ashes of more camps, always facing each other as they followed the river down to the open meadow near the mouth where stood the grim figures of the tortured Tamaroas.