Joliet and Marquette down the Mississippi.
(p. 216)
The French growth in America was as steady as it was early in starting. Five years before the Pilgrim fathers and mothers landed at Plymouth, French missionaries had erected bark chapels in Maine, and consigned by devout rites the Pine State to the Virgin’s protection. While the Calvinists of Massachusetts Bay, the Plymouth Colony, and Connecticut were sturdily settling, by wordy argument, the grounds of their religious belief, Fathers Brebeuf, Lallemand, and other Gallic Jesuits were steadily and stealthily acquiring new grounds for the Pope and the French king. Barefooted emissaries, in serge, and girded, like the Baptist in the Judæan wilderness, with girdles about their loins, patiently and slowly travelling twelve hundred miles westward, foot-weary yet sustained by spiritual zeal, skirted those inland seas, Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, and Michigan, crossed the head-waters of the Hudson, the Ohio, and Wisconsin, hauled their birch canoes over regions now boiling with oil-wells, hissing with steam-driven factories, or lit up by the passing splendors of palace rail-cars, and had thus, as early as 1650, planted the Roman cross and the French lily side by side, as far west as Fond du Lac, and the cool head-fountains of Lake Superior. Fur-traders followed the Jesuit missionaries. These sought to clothe the Indians with a warm belief in the teachings of the Society of Jesus, and in the supremacy of his Catholic Majesty of France; those hastened after to unclothe the otter, the beaver, and other living fur-dealers of the small packs which they carried on their own backs, and to obtain possession of those which their fellows had yielded up to the sharp persuasions of the cinnamon-stained hunters and trappers. Religious zeal, inflaming French blood, and glowing through a patriotic national emulation with the English settlements along the Atlantic slope, within the next twenty-five years, launched canoes upon and traversed the great lakes pushed down the principal rivers running southward from Quebec to St. Paul, gathered proselytes by preaching, and skins by trading, and encompassing the needs, instincts, and revenges of the various Indian tribes scattered through this vast region,—excepting always the Five Nations, which uniformly adhered to the English,—established a cordon of French alliances and influences, which in time of peace stretched its protecting line between them and their English rivals, and in war vibrated to their touch, and twanged quivers full of arrows on their hereditary foes. These unwearying teachers and traders were now to take possession, in the name of France and Rome, of the valley of the Mississippi, and to scatter the seeds of Gallic civilization all down its prolific breadth, and over its wide deltas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. In 1673, the Jesuit, James Marquette, having previously penetrated from Quebec through the intervening wilderness to Sault St. Marie, and there established the first white settlement in the present State of Michigan, set out, with Joliet and two tawny interpreters, to trace the mysteries of the Great River of America. Sailing down the Wisconsin River, and reaching in a few days that wide-rolling flood which we now call the Mississippi River, and floating on its rough but kindly bosom for one hundred and eighty miles, they landed on its western bank, and, crossing a narrow portage, struck, without hurting, the Des Moines River. They were the first white men in Iowa, and next to De Soto, one hundred and thirty-one years before them, the only pale children that had ever looked into the wrinkled face of the Father of Waters. Here they were met by four red men, who, in answer to their inquiries, loftily proclaimed themselves to be “Illinois” or “Men.” The spirit of Chicago, thus filtrated, antedated its own settlement over one hundred and fifty years. Re-embarking, these Gallic adventurers swept on down the rapidly rushing river unsnagged; passed in safety the large open mouth of the Missouri; overlooked the future site of St. Louis; refused to listen to the temptation which beckoned them to ascend the Ohio to the future metropolis of bacon; floated along over the rusting armor of De Soto, without diving for it, keeping a good lookout on the dangerous territory of Arkansas on their right, and Mississippi on their left, until they at last reached the point where the Arkansas River hastens to throw its burden of earth and water upon the back of the giant stream. Here they found Indians with European weapons of steel; and they returned back, retracing their courageous steps homeward. Marquette, let us add, preached for two years to the wild men in and around the future Chicago, and finally died upon the borders of a little stream in Michigan, which gratefully perpetuates his name in its own.
Brave Marquette! He escaped the perils of Chicago to yield up his spirit amid the innocencies of Michigan.
In 1682 La Salle, the French fur-trader, ventured down the Mississippi to the Gulf, without stopping to take the bluff outposts that sentinelled the future Vicksburg, and without halting over night at Natchez, and encountering the loss of all his earnings in that hazardous, porous, and absorbing place. Two years later he formed one of a colony sent out from Rochelle, in France, by the minister Colbert, and was wrecked in the Bay of Metagorda, the first of that large series of castaways in that peculiarly enterprising empire called Texas.
France thus added the lone star to her American constellation.
Although the entire French population in America, in 1688, was, by their own count, only eleven thousand two hundred and forty-nine, against more than ten times that number of English-speaking colonists, they had ere the close of that century erected mission-houses and trading-posts from the mouth of the Kennebec, in Maine, westward and northward to the Falls of Minnehaha, and southward down the Mississippi, through Louisiana, Texas, and Southern Mississippi. French forts and stockades showed defiant guns at Niagara, Crown Point, Detroit, St. Louis, and along the mud-bearing delta of the river, that La Salle had, first of white men, overcome with a birch canoe.
Eastward the adventurous French next advanced along the sinuous shores of the Gulf. In 1702, on the western bank of the Mobile River, and upon the thirsty sand-plain which comes down to drink its waters, Mobile was founded by Bienville. Two years following, an invoice of twenty young French girls was sent out to help the census-taker. The lot suiting well, a second consignment of twenty-three was despatched the next year. These vivacious goods, however, it may be incidentally remarked, rose the following year, in price and self-estimation, and formed what is called “The Petticoat Insurrection,” a rebellion against the limited amount of Indian corn served out during a season of scarcity. But more corn coming out they acknowledged it, and went down in pleased submission and quiet.
The “Petticoat Insurrection” in Mobile in 1706.
(p. 221)
Lively Frenchmen now multiplied along the yeasty Gulf. In 1718 Bienville, then the French governor of Louisiana, courageously braving the alligators and swamp snakes, whose crescent attitude might have terrified a son of St. Patrick, began the city of New Orleans, of which, four years afterwards, Charlevoix, the historian and traveller, who visited it, gives this description: “The place has a population of about two hundred. I find it to consist of one hundred cabins disposed with little regularity; a large wooden warehouse; two or three dwellings that would be no ornament to a French village, and the half of a sorry storehouse, which they were pleased to lend to the Lord, but of which he had scarcely taken possession when it was proposed to turn him out to lodge in a tent.” These kind of loans, some maliciously aver, have continued fashionable in the Crescent City from that time to the present. However that may be, certain it is that the French settlements in America—a succinct narrative of which we had purposely deferred to give in connection with their last desperate struggle for power—had at the close of King George’s war, in 1748, reached their greatest extension. Imperial, too, was their stretch. Beginning at St. John’s, New Brunswick, and dotting the wide area that fills seventeen hundred miles between that point and the Mississippi River, at the present spunky little city of St. Paul, and stretching down that river fourteen hundred miles to its outlet, and so spreading westward into Texas, and eastward through Mississippi and Alabama, until they confronted the old Spanish plantation in Florida, these settlements zoned on three sides with a spiked belt the thirteen English Colonies on the Atlantic.