France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West
adds, that, before his allotted five years were ended, his discoveries
had cost them more than five hundred thousand livres (francs).[100] La
Salle himself believed, and made others believe, that there was more
profit than risk in his schemes.
Lodged rather obscurely in Rue de la Truanderie, and of a nature
reserved and shy, he nevertheless found countenance and support from
personages no less exalted than Colbert, Seignelay, and the Prince de
Conti. Others, too, in stations less conspicuous, warmly espoused his
cause, and none more so than the learned Abbé Renaudot, who helped him
with tongue and pen, and seems to have been instrumental in introducing
to him a man who afterwards proved invaluable. This was Henri de Tonty,
an Italian officer, a _protégé_ of the Prince de Conti, who sent him to
La Salle as a person suited to his purposes, Tonty had but one hand, the
other having been blown off by a grenade in the Sicilian wars.[101] His
father, who had been governor of Gaeta, but who had come to France in
consequence of political disturbances in Naples, had earned no small
reputation as a financier, and had invented the form of life insurance
still called the Tontine. La Salle learned to know his new lieutenant on
the voyage across the Atlantic; and, soon after reaching Canada, he
wrote of him to his patron in the following terms: "His honorable
character and his amiable disposition were well known to you; but
perhaps you would not have thought him capable of doing things for which
a strong constitution, an acquaintance with the country, and the use of
both hands seemed absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, his energy and
address make him equal to anything; and now, at a season when everybody
is in fear of the ice, he is setting out to begin a new fort, two
hundred leagues from this place, and to which I have taken the liberty
to give the name of Fort Conti. It is situated near that great cataract,
more than a hundred and twenty _toises_ in height, by which the lakes of
higher elevation precipitate themselves into Lake Frontenac [Ontario].
From there one goes by water, five hundred leagues, to the place where
Fort Dauphin is to be begun; from which it only remains to descend the
great river of the Bay of St. Esprit, to reach the Gulf of
Mexico."[102]
[Sidenote: RETURN TO CANADA.]
Besides Tonty, La Salle found in France another ally, La Motte de
Lussière, to whom he offered a share in the enterprise, and who joined
him at Rochelle, the place of embarkation. Here vexatious delays
occurred. Bellinzani, director of trade, who had formerly taken lessons
in rascality in the service of Cardinal Mazarin, abused his official
position to throw obstacles in the way of La Salle, in order to extort
money from him; and he extorted, in fact, a considerable sum, which his
victim afterwards reclaimed. It was not till the fourteenth of July that
La Salle, with Tonty, La Motte, and thirty men, set sail for Canada, and
two months more elapsed before he reached Quebec. Here, to increase his
resources and strengthen his position, he seems to have made a league
with several Canadian merchants, some of whom had before been his
enemies, and were to be so again. Here, too, he found Father Louis
Hennepin, who had come down from Fort Frontenac to meet him.[103]
FOOTNOTES:
[97] _Mémoire pour Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay sur les
Descouvertes du Sieur de la Salle_, 1682.
[98] _État de la dépense faite par Mr. de la Salle, Gouverneur du
Fort Frontenac. Récit de Nicolas de la Salle. Revue faite au Fort de
Frontenac, 1677; Mémoire sur le Projet du Sieur de la Salle_ (Margry, i.
329). Plan of Fort Frontenac, published by Faillon, from the original
sent to France by Denonville in 1685. _Relation des Découvertes du Sieur
de la Salle._ When Frontenac was at the fort in September, 1677, he
found only four _habitants_. It appears, by the _Relation des
Découvertes du Sieur de la Salle_, that, three or four years later,
there were thirteen or fourteen families. La Salle spent 34,426 francs
on the fort. _Mémoire au Roy, Papiers de Famille._
[99] _Colbert à Duchesneau, 28 Avril, 1677._
[100] _Mémoire au Roy, présenté sous la Régence; Obligation du Sieur de
la Salle envers le Sieur Plet; Autres Emprunts de Cavelier de la Salle_
(Margry, i. 423-432).
[101] Tonty, _Mémoire_, in Margry, _Relations et Mémoires inédits_, 5.
[102] _Lettre de La Salle, 31 Oct., 1678._ Fort Conti was to have been
built on the site of the present Fort Niagara. The name of Lac de Conti
was given by La Salle to Lake Erie. The fort mentioned as Fort Dauphin
was built, as we shall see, on the Illinois, though under another name.
La Salle, deceived by Spanish maps, thought that the Mississippi
discharged itself into the Bay of St. Esprit (Mobile Bay).
Henri de Tonty signed his name in the Gallicized, and not in the
original Italian form _Tonti_. He wore a hand of iron or some other
metal, which was usually covered with a glove. La Potherie says that he
once or twice used it to good purpose when the Indians became
disorderly, in breaking the heads of the most contumacious or knocking
out their teeth. Not knowing at the time the secret of the unusual
efficacy of his blows, they regarded him as a "medicine" of the first
order. La Potherie erroneously ascribes the loss of his hand to a
sabre-cut received in a _sortie_ at Messina.
[103] _La Motte de Lussière à----, sans date; Mémoíre de la Salle sur
les Extorsions commises par Bellinzani; Société formée par La Salle;
Relation de Henri de Tonty_, 1684 (Margry, i. 338, 573; ii. 2, 25).
CHAPTER IX.
1678-1679.
LA SALLE AT NIAGARA.
Father Louis Hennepin: his Past Life; his
Character.--Embarkation.--Niagara Falls.--Indian Jealousy.--La
Motte and the Senecas.--A Disaster.--La Salle and his Followers.
Hennepin was all eagerness to join in the adventure; and, to his great
satisfaction, La Salle gave him a letter from his Provincial, Father Le
Fèvre, containing the coveted permission. Whereupon, to prepare himself,
he went into retreat at the Récollet convent of Quebec, where he
remained for a time in such prayer and meditation as his nature, the
reverse of spiritual, would permit. Frontenac, always partial to his
Order, then invited him to dine at the château; and having visited the
bishop and asked his blessing, he went down to the Lower Town and
embarked. His vessel was a small birch canoe, paddled by two men. With
sandalled feet, a coarse gray capote, and peaked hood, the cord of St.
Francis about his waist, and a rosary and crucifix hanging at his side,
the father set forth on his memorable journey. He carried with him the
furniture of a portable altar, which in time of need he could strap on
his back like a knapsack.
He slowly made his way up the St. Lawrence, stopping here and there,
where a clearing and a few log houses marked the feeble beginning of a
parish and a seigniory. The settlers, though good Catholics, were too
few and too poor to support a priest, and hailed the arrival of the
friar with delight. He said mass, exhorted a little, as was his custom,
and on one occasion baptized a child. At length he reached Montreal,
where the enemies of the enterprise enticed away his two canoe-men. He
succeeded in finding two others, with whom he continued his voyage,
passed the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence, and reached Fort Frontenac
at eleven o'clock at night of the second of November, where his brethren
of the mission, Ribourde and Buisset, received him with open arms.[104]
La Motte, with most of the men, appeared on the eighth; but La Salle and
Tonty did not arrive till more than a month later. Meanwhile, in
pursuance of his orders, fifteen men set out in canoes for Lake Michigan
and the Illinois, to trade with the Indians and collect provisions,
while La Motte embarked in a small vessel for Niagara, accompanied by
Hennepin.[105]
_Father Hennepin Celebrating Mass._
Drawn by Howard Pyle.
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, 132.
[Sidenote: HENNEPIN.]
This bold, hardy, and adventurous friar, the historian of the
expedition, and a conspicuous actor in it, has unwittingly painted his
own portrait with tolerable distinctness. "I always," he says, "felt a
strong inclination to fly from the world and live according to the rules
of a pure and severe virtue; and it was with this view that I entered
the Order of St. Francis."[106] He then speaks of his zeal for the
saving of souls, but admits that a passion for travel and a burning
desire to visit strange lands had no small part in his inclination for
the missions.[107] Being in a convent in Artois, his Superior sent him
to Calais, at the season of the herring-fishery, to beg alms, after the
practice of the Franciscans. Here and at Dunkirk he made friends of the
sailors, and was never tired of their stories. So insatiable, indeed,
was his appetite for them, that "often," he says, "I hid myself behind
tavern doors while the sailors were telling of their voyages. The
tobacco smoke made me very sick at the stomach; but, notwithstanding, I
listened attentively to all they said about their adventures at sea and
their travels in distant countries. I could have passed whole days and
nights in this way without eating."[108]
He presently set out on a roving mission through Holland; and he
recounts various mishaps which befell him, "in consequence of my zeal in
laboring for the saving of souls," "I was at the bloody fight of
Seneff," he pursues, "where so many perished by fire and sword, and
where I had abundance of work in comforting and consoling the poor
wounded soldiers. After undergoing great fatigues, and running extreme
danger in the sieges of towns, in the trenches, and in battles, where I
exposed myself freely for the salvation of others while the soldiers
were breathing nothing but blood and carnage, I found myself at last in
a way of satisfying my old inclination for travel."[109]
He got leave from his superiors to go to Canada, the most adventurous of
all the missions, and accordingly sailed in 1675, in the ship which
carried La Salle, who had just obtained the grant of Fort Frontenac. In
the course of the voyage, he took it upon him to reprove a party of
girls who were amusing themselves and a circle of officers and other
passengers by dancing on deck. La Salle, who was among the spectators,
was annoyed at Hennepin's interference, and told him that
he was behaving like a pedagogue. The friar retorted, by
alluding--unconsciously, as he says--to the circumstance that La Salle
was once a pedagogue himself, having, according to Hennepin, been for
ten or twelve years teacher of a class in a Jesuit school. La Salle, he
adds, turned pale with rage, and never forgave him to his dying day,
but always maligned and persecuted him.[110]
On arriving in Canada, he was sent up to Fort Frontenac, as a
missionary. That wild and remote post was greatly to his liking. He
planted a gigantic cross, superintended the building of a chapel for
himself and his colleague Buisset, and instructed the Iroquois
colonists of the place. He visited, too, the neighboring Indian
settlements,--paddling his canoe in summer, when the lake was open, and
journeying in winter on snow-shoes, with a blanket slung at his back.
His most noteworthy journey was one which he made in the
winter,--apparently of 1677,--with a soldier of the fort. They crossed
the eastern extremity of Lake Ontario on snow-shoes, and pushed
southward through the forests, towards Onondaga,--stopping at evening to
dig away the snow, which was several feet deep, and collect wood for
their fire, which they were forced to replenish repeatedly during the
night, to keep themselves from freezing. At length, they reached the