On the 3d of December the whole party of thirty-three persons, in eight canoes, left Fort Miami, as La Salle called his works, and paddled up the river, a distance of seventy miles, toward the south. Considerable time was lost in the endeavor to find the trail or portage which led across, westerly from the St. Joseph's River, to the head waters of the Kankakee, which is the eastern branch of the Illinois River.
La Salle, imprudently exploring alone, became lost in the forest. The darkness of a stormy night, with falling snow, overtook him. He fired his gun as a signal of distress; but silence was the only answer. Soon he espied, in the distance, the light of a fire. It was the encampment of a solitary Indian, who had formed for himself a soft bed of leaves. Alarmed by the report of the gun, he had fled. La Salle appropriated to himself the cheerless quarters and slept soundly until morning. All the forenoon of the next day he wandered, and it was not until the afternoon that he rejoined his companions. He came in with two opossums hanging at his belt, which he had killed.
At length their Indian hunter found the trail. They had gone too far up the river. The men took the canoes and the freight upon their shoulders, and carried them over the portage, of five or six miles, which the Indians had traversed for countless ages. Dreary in the extreme was the wintry landscape which now opened before them. The ground was frozen hard. Ice fringed the stream, and the flat marshy expanse was whitened with snow. For nearly a hundred miles the sluggish Kankakee flowed through a morass, which afforded growth to but little more than rushes and alders. Their provisions were nearly exhausted. No game could be found. They were hungry. Each night they landed, built their fires, and with scarcely any shelter wrapped themselves in their blankets for almost comfortless sleep.
At length the river emerged from these dreary marshes and entered upon a large undulating prairie, treeless, but whose fertility was attested by the tall, yet withered grass. The scene became far more cheering. Though most of the herds, which in summer grazed these rich fields, had wandered far away to the south, their indefatigable hunter succeeded in shooting two deer and a stray buffalo, which was found mired. He also took several fat turkeys and swans.
Thus, with revived spirits, the party, having paddled three hundred miles down the infinite windings of the Kankakee, entered the more majestic and beautiful river Illinois. The length of the stream from this point to its entrance into the Mississippi is two hundred and sixty miles, exclusive of its windings. As they were swept down by the current, they came to a large Indian village on the right bank of the river, near the present town of Ottawa. There were four or five hundred cabins, very substantially built, and covered with thick mats very ingeniously woven from rushes. Extensive corn-fields were near the village, but the harvest had been gathered in.
Silence and solitude reigned there. Not a living being was to be seen. The inhabitants had all migrated, according to their custom, to spend the winter in more southern hunting-grounds. Large quantities of corn were stored away for summer use in dry cellars. La Salle removed fifty bushels to his canoes, hoping to find the owners farther south and amply repay them. It would have been of no avail to have left payment, for it would be carried away by any band of Indians who chanced to be passing by. The hunger of his men, in his judgment rendered the taking of the corn a necessity. This spot was probably near the site of Rock Fort, in La Salle county, Illinois.
For four days they continued their course without coming in sight of any human being or any habitation. Yet they passed through scenery often very charming, presenting a wide-spread ocean of undulating land, with groves and lawns and parks smiling so peacefully in the bright sunshine.
The morning of the 1st of January, 1680, came. All gathered around the missionaries to commemorate the opening of the new year by religious services. Prayers were offered, hymns were chanted, sins were confessed, and the blessing of God was invoked upon their enterprise. At the conclusion of these devotions the canoes were again pushed out into the stream. On the fourth of the month they entered an expansion of the river where the breadth of water assumed the dimension of a lake. This sheet of water, now called Peoria Lake, was twenty miles long and three broad.
At its foot they came upon a very large Indian encampment. La Salle presented the calumet of peace, and fraternal relations were immediately established. At this point he decided to build a large boat to sail down the river. The loss of the Griffin, thus depriving him of his supplies, had frustrated all his plans. He built a strong fort, which he called, from his own grief, "Crèvecœur," or the Broken Hearted. Here this extraordinary man left most of his company, and with five men, in mid-winter, set out to cross the pathless wilderness on foot, a distance of twelve hundred miles, along the southern shores of Erie and Ontario to Fort Frontenac. The wonderful journey, through storms of snow and rain, across bleak plains and morasses and unbridged rivers, was safely accomplished in about seventy days. He obtained the needful supplies, freighted several canoes, engaged new voyagers, and after innumerable perils again reached the head waters of the Illinois. Here he learned that his garrison at Crèvecœur was dispersed and the fort destroyed. This ended his hopes. He went back to Frontenac a disappointed but indomitable man, and the enterprise was for the time relinquished.
Here we must leave La Salle for a time, while we give an account of the expedition from Crèvecœur, up the Mississippi, and of the destruction of the colony.