France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West
wealthy relative, he found means to appease his creditors and even to
gain fresh advances. To this end, however, he was forced to part with a
portion of his monopolies. Having first made his will at Montreal, in
favor of a cousin who had befriended him,[229] he mustered his men, and
once more set forth, resolved to trust no more to agents, but to lead on
his followers, in a united body, under his own personal command.[230]
[Sidenote: THE TORONTO PORTAGE.]
At the beginning of autumn he was at Toronto, where the long and
difficult portage to Lake Simcoe detained him a fortnight. He spent a
part of it in writing an account of what had lately occurred to a
correspondent in France, and he closes his letter thus: "This is all I
can tell you this year. I have a hundred things to write, but you could
not believe how hard it is to do it among Indians. The canoes and their
lading must be got over the portage, and I must speak to them
continually and bear all their importunity, or else they will do nothing
I want. I hope to write more at leisure next year, and tell you the end
of this business, which I hope will turn out well: for I have M. de
Tonty, who is full of zeal; thirty Frenchmen, all good men, without
reckoning such as I cannot trust; and more than a hundred Indians, some
of them Shawanoes, and others from New England, all of whom know how to
use guns."
It was October before he reached Lake Huron. Day after day and week
after week the heavy-laden canoes crept on along the lonely wilderness
shores, by the monotonous ranks of bristling moss-bearded firs; lake and
forest, forest and lake; a dreary scene haunted with yet more dreary
memories,--disasters, sorrows, and deferred hopes; time, strength, and
wealth spent in vain; a ruinous past and a doubtful future; slander,
obloquy, and hate. With unmoved heart, the patient voyager held his
course, and drew up his canoes at last on the beach at Fort Miami.
FOOTNOTES:
[224] _Relation des Découvertes._ Compare _Lettre de La Salle_ (Margry,
ii. 144).
[225] This seems to have been taken from the secret repositories, or
_caches_, of the ruined town of the Illinois.
[226] "En ce genre, il étoit le plus grand orateur de l'Amérique
Septentrionale."--_Relation des Découvertes._
[227] Translated from the _Relation_, where these councils are reported
at great length.
[228] Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 208. Tonty, in his memoir of 1693, speaks
of the joy of La Salle at the meeting. The _Relation_, usually very
accurate, says, erroneously, that Tonty had gone to Fort Frontenac. La
Forest had gone thither, not long before La Salle's arrival.
[229] _Copie du Testament du deffunt Sr. de la Salle, 11 Août, 1681._
The relative was François Plet, to whom he was deeply in debt.
[230] "On apprendra à la fin de cette année, 1682, le succès de la
découverte qu'il étoit résolu d'achever, au plus tard le printemps
dernier ou de périr en y travaillant. Tant de traverses et de malheurs
toujours arrivés en son absence l'ont fait résoudre à ne se fier plus à
personne et à conduire lui-même tout son monde, tout son équipage, et
toute son entreprise, de laquelle il espéroit une heureuse conclusion."
The above is a part of the closing paragraph of the _Relation des
Découvertes_, so often cited.
CHAPTER XX.
1681-1682.
SUCCESS OF LA SALLE.
His Followers.--The Chicago Portage.--Descent of the
Mississippi.--The Lost Hunter.--The Arkansas.--The Taensas.--The
Natchez.--Hostility.--The Mouth of the Mississippi.--Louis XIV.
proclaimed Sovereign of the Great West.
The season was far advanced. On the bare limbs of the forest hung a few
withered remnants of its gay autumnal livery; and the smoke crept upward
through the sullen November air from the squalid wigwams of La Salle's
Abenaki and Mohegan allies. These, his new friends, were savages whose
midnight yells had startled the border hamlets of New England; who had
danced around Puritan scalps, and whom Puritan imaginations painted as
incarnate fiends. La Salle chose eighteen of them, whom he added to the
twenty-three Frenchmen who remained with him, some of the rest having
deserted and others lagged behind. The Indians insisted on taking their
squaws with them. These were ten in number, besides three children; and
thus the expedition included fifty-four persons, of whom some were
useless, and others a burden.
On the 21st of December, Tonty and Membré set out from Fort Miami with
some of the party in six canoes, and crossed to the little river
Chicago.[231] La Salle, with the rest of the men, joined them a few days
later. It was the dead of winter, and the streams were frozen. They made
sledges, placed on them the canoes, the baggage, and a disabled
Frenchman; crossed from the Chicago to the northern branch of the
Illinois, and filed in a long procession down its frozen course. They
reached the site of the great Illinois village, found it tenantless, and
continued their journey, still dragging their canoes, till at length
they reached open water below Lake Peoria.
[Sidenote: PRUDHOMME.]
La Salle had abandoned for a time his original plan of building a vessel
for the navigation of the Mississippi. Bitter experience had taught him
the difficulty of the attempt, and he resolved to trust to his canoes
alone. They embarked again, floating prosperously down between the
leafless forests that flanked the tranquil river; till, on the sixth of
February, they issued upon the majestic bosom of the Mississippi. Here,
for the time, their progress was stopped; for the river was full of
floating ice. La Salle's Indians, too, had lagged behind; but within a
week all had arrived, the navigation was once more free, and they
resumed their course. Towards evening they saw on their right the mouth
of a great river; and the clear current was invaded by the headlong
torrent of the Missouri, opaque with mud. They built their camp-fires in
the neighboring forest; and at daylight, embarking anew on the dark and
mighty stream, drifted swiftly down towards unknown destinies. They
passed a deserted town of the Tamaroas; saw, three days after, the mouth
of the Ohio;[232] and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp, landed
on the twenty-fourth of February near the Third Chickasaw Bluffs.[233]
They encamped, and the hunters went out for game. All returned,
excepting Pierre Prudhomme; and as the others had seen fresh tracks of
Indians, La Salle feared that he was killed. While some of his followers
built a small stockade fort on a high bluff[234] by the river, others
ranged the woods in pursuit of the missing hunter. After six days of
ceaseless and fruitless search, they met two Chickasaw Indians in the
forest; and through them La Salle sent presents and peace-messages to
that warlike people, whose villages were a few days' journey distant.
Several days later Prudhomme was found, and brought into the camp,
half-dead. He had lost his way while hunting; and to console him for his
woes La Salle christened the newly built fort with his name, and left
him, with a few others, in charge of it.
Again they embarked; and with every stage of their adventurous progress
the mystery of this vast New World was more and more unveiled. More and
more they entered the realms of spring. The hazy sunlight, the warm and
drowsy air, the tender foliage, the opening flowers, betokened the
reviving life of Nature. For several days more they followed the
writhings of the great river on its tortuous course through wastes of
swamp and cane-brake, till on the thirteenth of March[235] they found
themselves wrapped in a thick fog. Neither shore was visible; but they
heard on the right the booming of an Indian drum and the shrill outcries
of the war-dance. La Salle at once crossed to the opposite side, where,
in less than an hour, his men threw up a rude fort of felled trees.
Meanwhile the fog cleared; and from the farther bank the astonished
Indians saw the strange visitors at their work. Some of the French
advanced to the edge of the water, and beckoned them to come over.
Several of them approached, in a wooden canoe, to within the distance of
a gun-shot. La Salle displayed the calumet, and sent a Frenchman to meet
them. He was well received; and the friendly mood of the Indians being
now apparent, the whole party crossed the river.
[Sidenote: THE ARKANSAS.]
On landing, they found themselves at a town of the Kappa band of the
Arkansas, a people dwelling near the mouth of the river which bears
their name. "The whole village," writes Membré to his superior, "came
down to the shore to meet us, except the women, who had run off. I
cannot tell you the civility and kindness we received from these
barbarians, who brought us poles to make huts, supplied us with firewood
during the three days we were among them, and took turns in feasting us.
But, my Reverend Father, this gives no idea of the good qualities of
these savages, who are gay, civil, and free-hearted. The young men,
though the most alert and spirited we had seen, are nevertheless so
modest that not one of them would take the liberty to enter our hut, but
all stood quietly at the door. They are so well formed that we were in
admiration at their beauty. We did not lose the value of a pin while we
were among them."
Various were the dances and ceremonies with which they entertained the
strangers, who, on their part, responded with a solemnity which their
hosts would have liked less if they had understood it better. La Salle
and Tonty, at the head of their followers, marched to the open area in
the midst of the village. Here, to the admiration of the gazing crowd of
warriors, women, and children, a cross was raised bearing the arms of
France. Membré, in canonicals, sang a hymn; the men shouted _Vive le
Roi_; and La Salle, in the King's name, took formal possession of the
country.[236] The friar, not, he flatters himself, without success,
labored to expound by signs the mysteries of the Faith; while La Salle,
by methods equally satisfactory, drew from the chief an acknowledgement
of fealty to Louis XIV.[237]
[Sidenote: THE TAENSAS.]
After touching at several other towns of this people, the voyagers
resumed their course, guided by two of the Arkansas; passed the sites,
since become historic, of Vicksburg and Grand Gulf; and, about three
hundred miles below the Arkansas, stopped by the edge of a swamp on the
western side of the river.[238] Here, as their two guides told them,
was the path to the great town of the Taensas. Tonty and Membré were
sent to visit it. They and their men shouldered their birch canoe
through the swamp, and launched it on a lake which had once formed a
portion of the channel of the river. In two hours, they reached the
town; and Tonty gazed at it with astonishment. He had seen nothing like
it in America,--large square dwellings, built of sun-baked mud mixed
with straw, arched over with a dome-shaped roof of canes, and placed in
regular order around an open area. Two of them were larger and better
than the rest. One was the lodge of the chief; the other was the temple,
or house of the Sun. They entered the former, and found a single room,
forty feet square, where, in the dim light,--for there was no opening
but the door,--the chief sat awaiting them on a sort of bedstead, three
of his wives at his side; while sixty old men, wrapped in white cloaks
woven of mulberry-bark, formed his divan. When he spoke, his wives
howled to do him honor; and the assembled councillors listened with the
reverence due to a potentate for whom, at his death, a hundred victims
were to be sacrificed. He received the visitors graciously, and
joyfully accepted the gifts which Tonty laid before him.[239] This
interview over, the Frenchmen repaired to the temple, wherein were kept