France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West
substituting the words "par le cinquième paquet _ils nous exhortoient à
adorer le Soleil_."
[192] Tonty, _Mémoire_; Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 191. Hennepin, who hated
Tonty, unjustly charges him with having abandoned the search too soon,
admitting, however, that it would have been useless to continue it. This
part of his narrative is a perversion of Membré's account.
[193] "Cependant les Iroquois, aussitôt après le départ du Sr. de
Tonty, exercèrent leur rage sur les corps morts des Ilinois, qu'ils
déterrèrent ou abbattèrent de dessus les échafauds où les Ilinois les
laissent longtemps exposés avant que de les mettre en terre. Ils en
brûlèrent la plus grande partie, ils en mangèrent même quelques uns, et
jettèrent le reste aux chiens. Ils plantèrent les têtes de ces cadavres
à demi décharnés sur des pieux," etc.--_Relation des Découvertes_.
[194] _Relation des Découvertes_; Frontenac to the King, _N. Y. Col.
Docs._, ix. 147. A memoir of Duchesneau makes the number twelve hundred.
[195] "Ils [_les Illinois_] trouvèrent dans leur campement des carcasses
de leurs enfans que ces anthropophages avoient mangez, ne voulant même
d'autre nourriture que la chair de ces infortunez."--_La Potherie_, ii.
145, 146. Compare _note, ante_, p. 211.
[196] Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 199. The other authorities for the
foregoing chapter are the letters of La Salle, the _Relation des
Découvertes_, in which portions of them are embodied, and the two
narratives of Tonty, of 1684 and 1693. They all agree in essential
points.
In his letters of this period, La Salle dwells at great length on the
devices by which, as he believed, his enemies tried to ruin him and his
enterprise. He is particularly severe against the Jesuit Allouez, whom
he charges with intriguing "pour commencer la guerre entre les Iroquois
et les Illinois par le moyen des Miamis qu'on engageoit dans cette
négociation afin ou de me faire massacrer avec mes gens par quelqu'une
de ces nations ou de me brouiller avec les Iroquois."--_Lettre (à
Thouret?), 22 Août, 1682_. He gives in detail the circumstances on which
this suspicion rests, but which are not convincing. He says, further,
that the Jesuits gave out that Tonty was dead in order to discourage the
men going to his relief, and that Allouez encouraged the deserters,
"leur servoit de conseil, bénit mesme leurs balles, et les asseura
plusieurs fois que M. de Tonty auroit la teste cassée." He also affirms
that great pains were taken to spread the report that he was himself
dead. A Kiskakon Indian, he says, was sent to Tonty with a story to this
effect; while a Huron named Scortas was sent to him (La Salle) with
false news of the death of Tonty. The latter confirms this statement,
and adds that the Illinois had been told "que M. de la Salle estoit venu
en leur pays pour les donner à manger aux Iroquois."
CHAPTER XVII.
1680.
THE ADVENTURES OF HENNEPIN.
Hennepin an Impostor: his Pretended Discovery; his Actual
Discovery; Captured by the Sioux.--The Upper Mississippi.
It was on the last day of the winter that preceded the invasion of the
Iroquois that Father Hennepin, with his two companions, Accau and Du
Gay, had set out from Fort Crèvecoeur to explore the Illinois to its
mouth. It appears from his own later statements, as well as from those
of Tonty, that more than this was expected of him, and that La Salle had
instructed him to explore, not alone the Illinois, but also the Upper
Mississippi. That he actually did so, there is no reasonable doubt; and
could he have contented himself with telling the truth, his name would
have stood high as a bold and vigorous discoverer. But his vicious
attempts to malign his commander and plunder him of his laurels have
wrapped his genuine merit in a cloud.
Hennepin's first book was published soon after his return from his
travels, and while La Salle was still alive. In it he relates the
accomplishment of the instructions given him, without the smallest
intimation that he did more.[197] Fourteen years after, when La Salle
was dead, he published another edition of his travels,[198] in which he
advanced a new and surprising pretension. Reasons connected with his
personal safety, he declares, before compelled him to remain silent; but
a time at length had come when the truth must be revealed. And he
proceeds to affirm, that, before ascending the Mississippi, he, with his
two men, explored its whole course from the Illinois to the sea,--thus
anticipating the discovery which forms the crowning laurel of La Salle.
[Sidenote: HENNEPIN'S RESOLUTION.]
"I am resolved," he says, "to make known here to the whole world the
mystery of this discovery, which I have hitherto concealed, that I might
not offend the Sieur de la Salle, who wished to keep all the glory and
all the knowledge of it to himself. It is for this that he sacrificed
many persons whose lives he exposed, to prevent them from making known
what they had seen, and thereby crossing his secret plans.... I was
certain that if I went down the Mississippi, he would not fail to
traduce me to my superiors for not taking the northern route, which I
was to have followed in accordance with his desire and the plan we had
made together. But I saw myself on the point of dying of hunger, and
knew not what to do; because the two men who were with me threatened
openly to leave me in the night, and carry off the canoe and everything
in it, if I prevented them from going down the river to the nations
below. Finding myself in this dilemma, I thought that I ought not to
hesitate, and that I ought to prefer my own safety to the violent
passion which possessed the Sieur de la Salle of enjoying alone the
glory of this discovery. The two men, seeing that I had made up my mind
to follow them, promised me entire fidelity; so, after we had shaken
hands together as a mutual pledge, we set out on our voyage."[199]
He then proceeds to recount at length the particulars of his alleged
exploration. The story was distrusted from the first.[200] Why had he
not told it before? An excess of modesty, a lack of self-assertion, or a
too sensitive reluctance to wound the susceptibilities of others, had
never been found among his foibles. Yet some, perhaps, might have
believed him, had he not in the first edition of his book gratuitously
and distinctly declared that he did not make the voyage in question. "We
had some designs," he says, "of going down the river Colbert
[Mississippi] as far as its mouth; but the tribes that took us prisoners
gave us no time to navigate this river both up and down."[201]
[Sidenote: HENNEPIN AN IMPOSTOR.]
In declaring to the world the achievement which he had so long concealed
and so explicitly denied, the worthy missionary found himself in serious
embarrassment. In his first book, he had stated that on the twelfth of
March he left the mouth of the Illinois on his way northward, and that
on the eleventh of April he was captured by the Sioux near the mouth of
the Wisconsin, five hundred miles above. This would give him only a
month to make his alleged canoe-voyage from the Illinois to the Gulf of
Mexico, and again upward to the place of his capture,--a distance of
three thousand two hundred and sixty miles. With his means of
transportation, three months would have been insufficient.[202] He saw
the difficulty; but, on the other hand, he saw that he could not greatly
change either date without confusing the parts of his narrative which
preceded and which followed. In this perplexity he chose a middle
course, which only involved him in additional contradictions. Having, as
he affirms, gone down to the Gulf and returned to the mouth of the
Illinois, he set out thence to explore the river above; and he assigns
the twenty-fourth of April as the date of this departure. This gives him
forty-three days for his voyage to the mouth of the river and back.
Looking further, we find that having left the Illinois on the
twenty-fourth he paddled his canoe two hundred leagues northward, and
was then captured by the Sioux on the twelfth of the same month. In
short, he ensnares himself in a hopeless confusion of dates.[203]
Here, one would think, is sufficient reason for rejecting his story; and
yet the general truth of the descriptions, and a certain verisimilitude
which marks it, might easily deceive a careless reader and perplex a
critical one. These, however, are easily explained. Six years before
Hennepin published his pretended discovery, his brother friar, Father
Chrétien Le Clerc, published an account of the Récollet missions among
the Indians, under the title of "Établissement de la Foi." This book,
offensive to the Jesuits, is said to have been suppressed by order of
government; but a few copies fortunately survive.[204] One of these is
now before me. It contains the journal of Father Zenobe Membré, on his
descent of the Mississippi in 1681, in company with La Salle. The
slightest comparison of his narrative with that of Hennepin is
sufficient to show that the latter framed his own story out of incidents
and descriptions furnished by his brother missionary, often using his
very words, and sometimes copying entire pages, with no other
alterations than such as were necessary to make himself, instead of La
Salle and his companions, the hero of the exploit. The records of
literary piracy may be searched in vain for an act of depredation more
recklessly impudent.[205]
Such being the case, what faith can we put in the rest of Hennepin's
story? Fortunately, there are tests by which the earlier parts of his
book can be tried; and, on the whole, they square exceedingly well with
contemporary records of undoubted authenticity. Bating his exaggerations
respecting the Falls of Niagara, his local descriptions, and even his
estimates of distance, are generally accurate. He constantly, it is
true, magnifies his own acts, and thrusts himself forward as one of the
chiefs of an enterprise to the costs of which he had contributed
nothing, and to which he was merely an appendage; and yet, till he
reaches the Mississippi, there can be no doubt that in the main he tells
the truth. As for his ascent of that river to the country of the Sioux,
the general statement is fully confirmed by La Salle, Tonty, and other
contemporary writers.[206] For the details of the journey we must rest
on Hennepin alone, whose account of the country and of the peculiar
traits of its Indian occupants afford, as far as they go, good evidence
of truth. Indeed, this part of his narrative could only have been
written by one well versed in the savage life of this northwestern
region.[207] Trusting, then, to his own guidance in the absence of
better, let us follow in the wake of his adventurous canoe.
[Sidenote: HIS VOYAGE NORTHWARD.]
It was laden deeply with goods belonging to La Salle, and meant by him
as presents to Indians on the way, though the travellers, it appears,
proposed to use them in trading on their own account. The friar was
still wrapped in his gray capote and hood, shod with sandals, and
decorated with the cord of St. Francis. As for his two companions,
Accau[208] and Du Gay, it is tolerably clear that the former was the
real leader of the party, though Hennepin, after his custom, thrusts
himself into the foremost place. Both were somewhat above the station of
ordinary hired hands; and Du Gay had an uncle who was an ecclesiastic of
good credit at Amiens, his native place.
In the forests that overhung the river the buds were feebly swelling
with advancing spring. There was game enough. They killed buffalo, deer,
beavers, wild turkeys, and now and then a bear swimming in the river.
With these, and the fish which they caught in abundance, they fared
sumptuously, though it was the season of Lent. They were exemplary,