France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West
in Shea's _Early Voyages on the Mississippi_. Barcia, Charlevoix, Kalm,
and other early writers put a low value on Hennepin's veracity.
[201] _Description de la Louisiane_, 218.
[202] La Salle, in the following year, with a far better equipment, was
more than three months and a half in making the journey. A Mississippi
trading-boat of the last generation, with sails and oars, ascending
against the current, was thought to do remarkably well if it could make
twenty miles a day. Hennepin, if we believe his own statements, must
have ascended at an average rate of sixty miles, though his canoe was
large and heavily laden.
[203] Hennepin here falls into gratuitous inconsistencies. In the
edition of 1697, in order to gain a little time, he says that he left
the Illinois on his voyage southward on the eighth of March, 1680; and
yet in the preceding chapter he repeats the statement of the first
edition, that he was detained at the Illinois by floating ice till the
twelfth. Again, he says in the first edition that he was captured by the
Sioux on the eleventh of April; and in the edition of 1697 he changes
this date to the twelfth, without gaining any advantage by doing so.
[204] Le Clerc's book had been made the text of an attack on the
Jesuits. See _Reflexions sur un Livre intitulé Premier Établissement de
la Foi_. This piece is printed in the _Morale Pratique des Jésuites_.
[205] Hennepin may have copied from the unpublished journal of Membré,
which the latter had placed in the hands of his Superior; or he may have
compiled from Le Clerc's book, relying on the suppression of the edition
to prevent detection. He certainly saw and used it; for he elsewhere
borrows the exact words of the editor. He is so careless that he steals
from Membré passages which he might easily have written for himself; as,
for example, a description of the opossum and another of the
cougar,--animals with which he was acquainted. Compare the following
pages of the _Nouvelle Découverte_ with the corresponding pages of Le
Clerc: Hennepin, 252, Le Clerc, ii. 217; H. 253, Le C. ii. 218; H. 257,
Le C. ii. 221; H. 259, Le C. ii. 224; H. 262, Le C. ii. 226; H. 265, Le
C. ii. 229; H. 267, Le C. ii. 233; H. 270, Le C. ii. 235; H. 280, Le C.
ii. 240; H. 295, Le C. ii. 249; H. 296, Le C. ii. 250; H. 297, Le C. ii.
253; H. 299, Le C. ii. 254; H. 301, Le C. ii. 257. Some of these
parallel passages will be found in Sparks's _Life of La Salle_, where
this remarkable fraud was first fully exposed. In Shea's _Discovery of
the Mississippi_, there is an excellent critical examination of
Hennepin's works. His plagiarisms from Le Clerc are not confined to the
passages cited above; for in his later editions he stole largely from
other parts of the suppressed _Établissement de la Foi_.
[206] It is certain that persons having the best means of information
believed at the time in Hennepin's story of his journeys on the Upper
Mississippi. The compiler of the _Relation des Découvertes_, who was in
close relations with La Salle and those who acted with him, does not
intimate a doubt of the truth of the report which Hennepin on his return
gave to the Provincial Commissary of his Order, and which is in
substance the same which he published two years later. The _Relation_,
it is to be observed, was written only a few months after the return of
Hennepin, and embodies the pith of his narrative of the Upper
Mississippi, no part of which had then been published.
[207] In this connection, it is well to examine the various Sioux words
which Hennepin uses incidentally, and which he must have acquired by
personal intercourse with the tribe, as no Frenchman then understood the
language. These words, as far as my information reaches, are in every
instance correct. Thus, he says that the Sioux called his breviary a
"bad spirit,"--_Ouackanché_. _Wakanshe_, or _Wakanshecha_, would express
the same meaning in modern English spelling. He says elsewhere that they
called the guns of his companions _Manzaouackanché_, which he
translates, "iron possessed with a bad spirit." The western Sioux to
this day call a gun _Manzawakan_, "metal possessed with a spirit."
_Chonga (shonka)_, "a dog," _Ouasi (wahsee)_, "a pine-tree," _Chinnen
(shinnan)_, "a robe," or "garment," and other words, are given
correctly, with their interpretations. The word _Louis_, affirmed by
Hennepin to mean "the sun," seems at first sight a wilful inaccuracy, as
this is not the word used in general by the Sioux. The Yankton band of
this people, however, call the sun _oouee_, which, it is evident,
represents the French pronunciation of _Louis_, omitting the initial
letter. This Hennepin would be apt enough to supply, thereby conferring
a compliment alike on himself, Louis Hennepin, and on the King, Louis
XIV., who, to the indignation of his brother monarchs, had chosen the
sun as his emblem.
Various trivial incidents touched upon by Hennepin, while recounting his
life among the Sioux, seem to me to afford a strong presumption of an
actual experience. I speak on this point with the more confidence, as
the Indians in whose lodges I was once domesticated for several weeks
belonged to a western band of the same people.
[208] Called Ako by Hennepin. In contemporary documents, it is written
Accau, Acau, D'Accau, Dacau, Dacan, and D'Accault.
[209] The edition of 1683 says that there were thirty-three canoes; that
of 1697 raises the number to fifty. The number of Indians is the same in
both. The later narrative is more in detail than the former.
[210] And yet it had, by his account, made a distance of thirteen
hundred and eighty miles from the mouth of the Mississippi upward in
twenty-four days!
[211] This weeping and wailing over Hennepin once seemed to me an
anomaly in his account of Sioux manners, as I am not aware that such
practices are to be found among them at present. They are mentioned,
however, by other early writers. Le Sueur, who was among them in
1699-1700, was wept over no less than Hennepin. See the abstract of his
journal in La Harpe.
CHAPTER XVIII.
1680, 1681.
HENNEPIN AMONG THE SIOUX.
Signs of Danger.--Adoption.--Hennepin and his Indian
Relatives.--The Hunting Party.--The Sioux Camp.--Falls of St.
Anthony.--A Vagabond Friar: his Adventures on the
Mississippi.--Greysolon du Lhut.--Return to Civilization.
As Hennepin entered the village, he beheld a sight which caused him to
invoke Saint Anthony of Padua. In front of the lodges were certain
stakes, to which were attached bundles of straw, intended, as he
supposed, for burning him and his friends alive. His concern was
redoubled when he saw the condition of the Picard Du Gay, whose hair and
face had been painted with divers colors, and whose head was decorated
with a tuft of white feathers. In this guise he was entering the
village, followed by a crowd of Sioux, who compelled him to sing and
keep time to his own music by rattling a dried gourd containing a number
of pebbles. The omens, indeed, were exceedingly threatening; for
treatment like this was usually followed by the speedy immolation of the
captive. Hennepin ascribes it to the effect of his invocations, that,
being led into one of the lodges, among a throng of staring squaws and
children, he and his companions were seated on the ground, and presented
with large dishes of birch-bark, containing a mess of wild rice boiled
with dried whortleberries,--a repast which he declares to have been the
best that had fallen to his lot since the day of his captivity.[212]
[Sidenote: THE SIOUX.]
This soothed his fears; but, as he allayed his famished appetite, he
listened with anxious interest to the vehement jargon of the chiefs and
warriors, who were disputing among themselves to whom the three captives
should respectively belong; for it seems that, as far as related to
them, the question of distribution had not yet been definitely settled.
The debate ended in the assigning of Hennepin to his old enemy
Aquipaguetin, who, however, far from persisting in his evil designs,
adopted him on the spot as his son. The three companions must now part
company. Du Gay, not yet quite reassured of his safety, hastened to
confess himself to Hennepin; but Accau proved refractory, and refused
the offices of religion, which did not prevent the friar from embracing
them both, as he says, with an extreme tenderness. Tired as he was, he
was forced to set out with his self-styled father to his village, which
was fortunately not far off. An unpleasant walk of a few miles through
woods and marshes brought them to the borders of a sheet of water,
apparently Lake Buade, where five of Aquipaguetin's wives received the
party in three canoes, and ferried them to an island on which the
village stood.
At the entrance of the chief's lodge, Hennepin was met by a decrepit old
Indian, withered with age, who offered him the peace-pipe, and placed
him on a bear-skin which was spread by the fire. Here, to relieve his
fatigue,--for he was well-nigh spent,--a small boy anointed his limbs
with the fat of a wild-cat, supposed to be sovereign in these cases by
reason of the great agility of that animal. His new father gave him a
bark-platter of fish, covered him with a buffalo-robe, and showed him
six or seven of his wives, who were thenceforth, he was told, to regard
him as a son. The chief's household was numerous; and his allies and
relatives formed a considerable clan, of which the missionary found
himself an involuntary member. He was scandalized when he saw one of his
adopted brothers carrying on his back the bones of a deceased friend,
wrapped in the chasuble of brocade which they had taken with other
vestments from his box.
[Sidenote: HENNEPIN AS A MISSIONARY.]
Seeing their new relative so enfeebled that he could scarcely stand, the
Indians made for him one of their sweating baths,[213] where they
immersed him in steam three times a week,--a process from which he
thinks he derived great benefit. His strength gradually returned, in
spite of his meagre fare; for there was a dearth of food, and the squaws
were less attentive to his wants than to those of their children. They
respected him, however, as a person endowed with occult powers, and
stood in no little awe of a pocket compass which he had with him, as
well as of a small metal pot with feet moulded after the face of a lion.
This last seemed in their eyes a "medicine" of the most formidable
nature, and they would not touch it without first wrapping it in a
beaver-skin. For the rest, Hennepin made himself useful in various ways.
He shaved the heads of the children, as was the custom of the tribe;
bled certain asthmatic persons, and dosed others with orvietan, the
famous panacea of his time, of which he had brought with him a good
supply. With respect to his missionary functions, he seems to have given
himself little trouble, unless his attempt to make a Sioux vocabulary is
to be regarded as preparatory to a future apostleship. "I could gain
nothing over them," he says, "in the way of their salvation, by reason
of their natural stupidity." Nevertheless, on one occasion, he baptized
a sick child, naming it Antoinette in honor of Saint Anthony of Padua.
It seemed to revive after the rite, but soon relapsed and presently
died, "which," he writes, "gave me great joy and satisfaction." In this
he was like the Jesuits, who could find nothing but consolation in the
death of a newly baptized infant, since it was thus assured of a
paradise which, had it lived, it would probably have forfeited by
sharing in the superstitions of its parents.
With respect to Hennepin and his Indian father, there seems to have been
little love on either side; but Ouasicoudé, the principal chief of the