France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West
smallest sign that could indicate the presence of Frenchmen. Once more
descending the river, they soon reached its mouth. Before them, a broad
eddying current rolled swiftly on its way; and La Salle beheld the
Mississippi,--the object of his day-dreams, the destined avenue of his
ambition and his hopes. It was no time for reflections. The moment was
too engrossing, too heavily charged with anxieties and cares. From a
rock on the shore, he saw a tree stretched forward above the stream; and
stripping off its bark to make it more conspicuous, he hung upon it a
board on which he had drawn the figures of himself and his men, seated
in their canoe, and bearing a pipe of peace. To this he tied a letter
for Tonty, informing him that he had returned up the river to the ruined
village.
His four men had behaved admirably throughout, and they now offered to
continue the journey if he saw fit, and follow him to the sea; but he
thought it useless to go farther, and was unwilling to abandon the three
men whom he had ordered to await his return. Accordingly, they retraced
their course, and, paddling at times both day and night, urged their
canoe so swiftly that they reached the village in the incredibly short
space of four days.[177]
[Sidenote: THE COMET.]
The sky was clear, and as night came on the travellers saw a prodigious
comet blazing above this scene of desolation. On that night, it was
chilling with a superstitious awe the hamlets of New England and the
gilded chambers of Versailles; but it is characteristic of La Salle,
that, beset as he was with perils and surrounded with ghastly images of
death, he coolly notes down the phenomenon, not as a portentous
messenger of war and woe, but rather as an object of scientific
curiosity.[178]
He found his three men safely ensconced upon their island, where they
were anxiously looking for his return. After collecting a store of
half-burnt corn from the ravaged granaries of the Illinois, the whole
party began to ascend the river, and on the sixth of January reached the
junction of the Kankakee with the northern branch. On their way downward
they had descended the former stream; they now chose the latter, and
soon discovered, by the margin of the water, a rude cabin of bark. La
Salle landed and examined the spot, when an object met his eye which
cheered him with a bright gleam of hope. It was but a piece of wood; but
the wood had been cut with a saw. Tonty and his party, then, had passed
this way, escaping from the carnage behind them. Unhappily, they had
left no token of their passage at the fork of the two streams; and thus
La Salle, on his voyage downward, had believed them to be still on the
river below.
With rekindled hope, the travellers pursued their journey, leaving their
canoes, and making their way overland towards the fort on the St.
Joseph.
"Snow fell in extraordinary quantities all day," writes La Salle, "and
it kept on falling for nineteen days in succession, with cold so severe
that I never knew so hard a winter, even in Canada. We were obliged to
cross forty leagues of open country, where we could hardly find wood to
warm ourselves at evening, and could get no bark whatever to make a hut,
so that we had to spend the night exposed to the furious winds which
blow over these plains. I never suffered so much from cold, or had more
trouble in getting forward; for the snow was so light, resting suspended
as it were among the tall grass, that we could not use snow-shoes.
Sometimes it was waist deep; and as I walked before my men, as usual, to
encourage them by breaking the path, I often had much ado, though I am
rather tall, to lift my legs above the drifts, through which I pushed
by the weight of my body."
[Sidenote: FORT MIAMI.]
At length they reached their goal, and found shelter and safety within
the walls of Fort Miami. Here was the party left in charge of La Forest;
but, to his surprise and grief, La Salle heard no tidings of Tonty. He
found some amends for the disappointment in the fidelity and zeal of La
Forest's men, who had restored the fort, cleared ground for planting,
and even sawed the planks and timber for a new vessel on the lake.
And now, while La Salle rests at Fort Miami, let us trace the adventures
which befell Tonty and his followers, after their chief's departure from
Fort Crèvecoeur.
FOOTNOTES:
[172] _Robert Cavelier, Sr. de la Salle, à François Daupin, Sr. de
la Forest, 10 Juin, 1679._
[173] This date is from the _Relation_. Membré says the twenty-eighth;
but he is wrong, by his own showing, as he says that the party reached
the Illinois village on the first of December, which would be an
impossibility.
[174] "Il ne restoit que quelques bouts de perches brulées qui
montroient quelle avoit été l'étendue du village, et sur la plupart
desquelles il y avoit des têtes de morts plantées et mangées des
corbeaux."--_Relation des Découvertes du Sr. de la Salle._
[175] "Beaucoup de carcasses à demi rongées par les loups, les
sépulchres démolis, les os tirés de leurs fosses et épars par la
campagne; ... enfin les loups et les corbeaux augmentoient encore par
leurs hurlemens et par leurs cris l'horreur de ce spectacle."--_Relation
des Découvertes du Sr. de la Salle._
The above may seem exaggerated; but it accords perfectly with what is
well established concerning the ferocious character of the Iroquois and
the nature of their warfare. Many other tribes have frequently made war
upon the dead. I have myself known an instance in which five corpses of
Sioux Indians placed in trees, after the practice of the Western bands
of that people, were thrown down and kicked into fragments by a war
party of the Crows, who then held the muzzles of their guns against the
skulls, and blew them to pieces. This happened near the head of the
Platte, in the summer of 1846. Yet the Crows are much less ferocious
than were the Iroquois in La Salle's time.
[176] "On ne sçauroit exprimer la rage de ces furieux ni les tourmens
qu'ils avoient fait souffrir aux misérables Tamaroa [_a tribe of the
Illinois_]. Il y en avoit encore dans des chaudières qu'ils avoient
laissées pleines sur les feux, qui depuis s'étoient éteints," etc.,
etc.--_Relation des Découvertes._
[177] The distance is about two hundred and fifty miles. The letters of
La Salle, as well as the official narrative compiled from them, say that
they left the village on the second of December, and returned to it on
the eleventh, having left the mouth of the river on the seventh.
[178] This was the "Great Comet of 1680." Dr. B. A. Gould writes me: "It
appeared in December, 1680, and was visible until the latter part of
February, 1681, being especially brilliant in January." It was said to
be the largest ever seen. By observations upon it, Newton demonstrated
the regular revolutions of comets around the sun. "No comet," it is
said, "has threatened the earth with a nearer approach than that of
1680." (_Winthrop on Comets, Lecture II_. p. 44.) Increase Mather, in
his _Discourse concerning Comets_, printed at Boston in 1683, says of
this one: "Its appearance was very terrible; the Blaze ascended above 60
Degrees almost to its Zenith." Mather thought it fraught with terrific
portent to the nations of the earth.
CHAPTER XVI.
1680.
TONTY AND THE IROQUOIS.
The Deserters.--The Iroquois War.--The Great Town of the
Illinois.--The Alarm.--Onset of the Iroquois.--Peril of Tonty.--A
Treacherous Truce.--Intrepidity of Tonty.--Murder of Ribourde.--War
upon the Dead.
When La Salle set out on his rugged journey to Fort Frontenac, he left,
as we have seen, fifteen men at Fort Crèvecoeur,--smiths,
ship-carpenters, house-wrights, and soldiers, besides his servant
L'Espérance and the two friars Membré and Ribourde. Most of the men were
ripe for mutiny. They had no interest in the enterprise, and no love for
its chief. They were disgusted with the present, and terrified at the
future. La Salle, too, was for the most part a stern commander,
impenetrable and cold; and when he tried to soothe, conciliate, and
encourage, his success rarely answered to the excellence of his
rhetoric. He could always, however, inspire respect, if not love; but
now the restraint of his presence was removed. He had not been long
absent, when a fire-brand was thrown into the midst of the discontented
and restless crew.
It may be remembered that La Salle had met two of his men, La Chapelle
and Leblanc, at his fort on the St. Joseph, and ordered them to rejoin
Tonty. Unfortunately, they obeyed. On arriving, they told their comrades
that the "Griffin" was lost, that Fort Frontenac was seized by the
creditors of La Salle, that he was ruined past recovery, and that they,
the men, would never receive their pay. Their wages were in arrears for
more than two years; and, indeed, it would have been folly to pay them
before their return to the settlements, as to do so would have been a
temptation to desert. Now, however, the effect on their minds was still
worse, believing, as many of them did, that they would never be paid at
all.
[Sidenote: THE DESERTERS.]
La Chapelle and his companion had brought a letter from La Salle to
Tonty, directing him to examine and fortify the cliff so often
mentioned, which overhung the river above the great Illinois village.
Tonty, accordingly, set out on his errand with some of the men. In his
absence, the malcontents destroyed the fort, stole powder, lead, furs,
and provisions, and deserted, after writing on the side of the
unfinished vessel the words seen by La Salle, "_Nous sommes tous
sauvages_."[179] The brave young Sieur de Boisrondet and the servant
L'Espérance hastened to carry the news to Tonty, who at once despatched
four of those with him, by two different routes, to inform La Salle of
the disaster.[180] Besides the two just named, there now remained with
him only one hired man and the Récollet friars. With this feeble band,
he was left among a horde of treacherous savages, who had been taught to
regard him as a secret enemy. Resolved, apparently, to disarm their
jealousy by a show of confidence, he took up his abode in the midst of
them, making his quarters in the great village, whither, as spring
opened, its inhabitants returned, to the number, according to Membré, of
seven or eight thousand. Hither he conveyed the forge and such tools as
he could recover, and here he hoped to maintain himself till La Salle
should reappear. The spring and the summer were past, and he looked
anxiously for his coming, unconscious that a storm was gathering in the
east, soon to burst with devastation over the fertile wilderness of the
Illinois.
[Sidenote: THE IROQUOIS WAR.]
I have recounted the ferocious triumphs of the Iroquois in another
volume.[181] Throughout a wide semi-circle around their cantons, they
had made the forest a solitude; destroyed the Hurons, exterminated the
Neutrals and the Eries, reduced the formidable Andastes to helpless
insignificance, swept the borders of the St. Lawrence with fire, spread
terror and desolation among the Algonquins of Canada; and now, tired of
peace, they were seeking, to borrow their own savage metaphor, new
nations to devour. Yet it was not alone their homicidal fury that now
impelled them to another war. Strange as it may seem, this war was in no
small measure one of commercial advantage. They had long traded with the
Dutch and English of New York, who gave them, in exchange for their
furs, the guns, ammunition, knives, hatchets, kettles, beads, and brandy
which had become indispensable to them. Game was scarce in their
country. They must seek their beaver and other skins in the vacant
territories of the tribes they had destroyed; but this did not content