France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West
them. The French of Canada were seeking to secure a monopoly of the furs
of the north and west; and, of late, the enterprises of La Salle on the
tributaries of the Mississippi had especially roused the jealousy of the
Iroquois, fomented, moreover, by Dutch and English traders.[182] These
crafty savages would fain reduce all these regions to subjection, and
draw thence an exhaustless supply of furs, to be bartered for English
goods with the traders of Albany. They turned their eyes first towards
the Illinois, the most important, as well as one of the most accessible,
of the western Algonquin tribes; and among La Salle's enemies were some
in whom jealousy of a hated rival could so far override all the best
interests of the colony that they did not scruple to urge on the
Iroquois to an invasion which they hoped would prove his ruin. The
chiefs convened, war was decreed, the war-dance was danced, the war-song
sung, and five hundred warriors began their march. In their path lay the
town of the Miamis, neighbors and kindred of the Illinois. It was always
their policy to divide and conquer; and these forest Machiavels had
intrigued so well among the Miamis, working craftily on their jealousy,
that they induced them to join in the invasion, though there is every
reason to believe that they had marked these infatuated allies as their
next victims.[183]
[Sidenote: THE ILLINOIS TOWN.]
Go to the banks of the Illinois where it flows by the village of Utica,
and stand on the meadow that borders it on the north. In front glides
the river, a musket-shot in width; and from the farther bank rises, with
gradual slope, a range of wooded hills that hide from sight the vast
prairie behind them. A mile or more on your left these gentle
acclivities end abruptly in the lofty front of the great cliff, called
by the French the Rock of St. Louis, looking boldly out from the forests
that environ it; and, three miles distant on your right, you discern a
gap in the steep bluffs that here bound the valley, marking the mouth of
the river Vermilion, called Aramoni by the French.[184] Now stand in
fancy on this same spot in the early autumn of the year 1680. You are in
the midst of the great town of the Illinois,--hundreds of mat-covered
lodges, and thousands of congregated savages. Enter one of their
dwellings: they will not think you an intruder. Some friendly squaw will
lay a mat for you by the fire; you may seat yourself upon it, smoke your
pipe, and study the lodge and its inmates by the light that streams
through the holes at the top. Three or four fires smoke and smoulder on
the ground down the middle of the long arched structure; and, as to
each fire there are two families, the place is somewhat crowded when all
are present. But now there is breathing room, for many are in the
fields. A squaw sits weaving a mat of rushes; a warrior, naked except
his moccasins, and tattooed with fantastic devices, binds a stone
arrow-head to its shaft, with the fresh sinews of a buffalo. Some lie
asleep, some sit staring in vacancy, some are eating, some are squatted
in lazy chat around a fire. The smoke brings water to your eyes; the
fleas annoy you; small unkempt children, naked as young puppies, crawl
about your knees and will not be repelled. You have seen enough; you
rise and go out again into the sunlight. It is, if not a peaceful, at
least a languid scene. A few voices break the stillness, mingled with
the joyous chirping of crickets from the grass. Young men lie flat on
their faces, basking in the sun; a group of their elders are smoking
around a buffalo-skin on which they have just been playing a game of
chance with cherry-stones. A lover and his mistress, perhaps, sit
together under a shed of bark, without uttering a word. Not far off is
the graveyard, where lie the dead of the village, some buried in the
earth, some wrapped in skins and laid aloft on scaffolds, above the
reach of wolves. In the cornfields around, you see squaws at their
labor, and children driving off intruding birds; and your eye ranges
over the meadows beyond, spangled with the yellow blossoms of the
resin-weed and the Rudbeckia, or over the bordering hills still green
with the foliage of summer.[185]
This, or something like it, one may safely affirm, was the aspect of the
Illinois village at noon of the tenth of September.[186] In a hut apart
from the rest, you would probably have found the Frenchmen. Among them
was a man, not strong in person, and disabled, moreover, by the loss of
a hand, yet in this den of barbarism betraying the language and bearing
of one formed in the most polished civilization of Europe. This was
Henri de Tonty. The others were young Boisrondet, the servant
L'Espérance, and a Parisian youth named Étienne Renault. The friars,
Membré and Ribourde, were not in the village, but at a hut a league
distant, whither they had gone to make a "retreat" for prayer and
meditation. Their missionary labors had not been fruitful; they had made
no converts, and were in despair at the intractable character of the
objects of their zeal. As for the other Frenchmen, time, doubtless, hung
heavy on their hands; for nothing can surpass the vacant monotony of an
Indian town when there is neither hunting, nor war, nor feasts, nor
dances, nor gambling, to beguile the lagging hours.
[Sidenote: THE ALARM.]
Suddenly the village was wakened from its lethargy as by the crash of a
thunderbolt. A Shawanoe, lately here on a visit, had left his Illinois
friends to return home. He now reappeared, crossing the river in hot
haste, with the announcement that he had met, on his way, an army of
Iroquois approaching to attack them. All was panic and confusion. The
lodges disgorged their frightened inmates; women and children screamed,
startled warriors snatched their weapons. There were less than five
hundred of them, for the greater part of the young men had gone to war.
A crowd of excited savages thronged about Tonty and his Frenchmen,
already objects of their suspicion, charging them, with furious
gesticulation, with having stirred up their enemies to invade them.
Tonty defended himself in broken Illinois, but the naked mob were but
half convinced. They seized the forge and tools and flung them into the
river, with all the goods that had been saved from the deserters; then,
distrusting their power to defend themselves, they manned the wooden
canoes which lay in multitudes by the bank, embarked their women and
children, and paddled down the stream to that island of dry land in the
midst of marshes which La Salle afterwards found filled with their
deserted huts. Sixty warriors remained here to guard them, and the rest
returned to the village. All night long fires blazed along the shore.
The excited warriors greased their bodies, painted their faces,
befeathered their heads, sang their war-songs, danced, stamped, yelled,
and brandished their hatchets, to work up their courage to face the
crisis. The morning came, and with it came the Iroquois.
Young warriors had gone out as scouts, and now they returned. They had
seen the enemy in the line of forest that bordered the river Aramoni, or
Vermilion, and had stealthily reconnoitred them. They were very
numerous,[187] and armed for the most part with guns, pistols, and
swords. Some had bucklers of wood or raw-hide, and some wore those
corselets of tough twigs interwoven with cordage which their fathers had
used when fire-arms were unknown. The scouts added more, for they
declared that they had seen a Jesuit among the Iroquois; nay, that La
Salle himself was there, whence it must follow that Tonty and his men
were enemies and traitors. The supposed Jesuit was but an Iroquois chief
arrayed in a black hat, doublet, and stockings; while another, equipped
after a somewhat similar fashion, passed in the distance for La Salle.
But the Illinois were furious. Tonty's life hung by a hair. A crowd of
savages surrounded him, mad with rage and terror. He had come lately
from Europe, and knew little of Indians, but, as the friar Membré says
of him, "he was full of intelligence and courage," and when they heard
him declare that he and his Frenchmen would go with them to fight the
Iroquois, their threats grew less clamorous and their eyes glittered
with a less deadly lustre.
[Sidenote: TONTY'S MEDIATION.]
Whooping and screeching, they ran to their canoes, crossed the river,
climbed the woody hill, and swarmed down upon the plain beyond. About a
hundred of them had guns; the rest were armed with bows and arrows. They
were now face to face with the enemy, who had emerged from the woods of
the Vermilion, and were advancing on the open prairie. With unwonted
spirit, for their repute as warriors was by no means high, the Illinois
began, after their fashion, to charge; that is, they leaped, yelled, and
shot off bullets and arrows, advancing as they did so; while the
Iroquois replied with gymnastics no less agile and howlings no less
terrific, mingled with the rapid clatter of their guns. Tonty saw that
it would go hard with his allies. It was of the last moment to stop the
fight, if possible. The Iroquois were, or professed to be, at peace with
the French; and, taking counsel of his courage, he resolved on an
attempt to mediate, which may well be called a desperate one. He laid
aside his gun, took in his hand a wampum belt as a flag of truce, and
walked forward to meet the savage multitude, attended by Boisrondet,
another Frenchman, and a young Illinois who had the hardihood to
accompany him. The guns of the Iroquois still flashed thick and fast.
Some of them were aimed at him, on which he sent back the two Frenchmen
and the Illinois, and advanced alone, holding out the wampum belt.[188]
A moment more, and he was among the infuriated warriors. It was a
frightful spectacle,--the contorted forms, bounding, crouching,
twisting, to deal or dodge the shot; the small keen eyes that shone like
an angry snake's; the parted lips pealing their fiendish yells; the
painted features writhing with fear and fury, and every passion of an
Indian fight,--man, wolf, and devil, all in one.[189] With his swarthy
complexion and his half-savage dress, they thought he was an Indian, and
thronged about him, glaring murder. A young warrior stabbed at his heart
with a knife, but the point glanced aside against a rib, inflicting only
a deep gash. A chief called out that, as his ears were not pierced, he
must be a Frenchman. On this, some of them tried to stop the bleeding,
and led him to the rear, where an angry parley ensued, while the yells
and firing still resounded in the front. Tonty, breathless, and bleeding
at the mouth with the force of the blow he had received, found words to
declare that the Illinois were under the protection of the King and the
governor of Canada, and to demand that they should be left in
peace.[190]
[Sidenote: PERIL OF TONTY.]
A young Iroquois snatched Tonty's hat, placed it on the end of his gun,
and displayed it to the Illinois, who, thereupon thinking he was
killed, renewed the fight; and the firing in front clattered more
angrily than before. A warrior ran in, crying out that the Iroquois were
giving ground, and that there were Frenchmen among the Illinois, who
fired at them. On this, the clamor around Tonty was redoubled. Some
wished to kill him at once; others resisted. "I was never," he writes,
"in such perplexity; for at that moment there was an Iroquois behind me,
with a knife in his hand, lifting my hair as if he were going to scalp
me. I thought it was all over with me, and that my best hope was that
they would knock me in the head instead of burning me, as I believed
they would do." In fact, a Seneca chief demanded that he should be
burned; while an Onondaga chief, a friend of La Salle, was for setting