France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West
North America," _Introduction_.) Among the Natchez and Taensas, the
principal clan formed a ruling caste; and its chiefs had the attributes
of demi-gods. As descent was through the female, the chief's son never
succeeded him, but the son of one of his sisters; and as she, by the
usual totemic law, was forced to marry in another clan,--that is, to
marry a common mortal,--her husband, though the destined father of a
demi-god, was treated by her as little better than a slave. She might
kill him, if he proved unfaithful; but he was forced to submit to her
infidelities in silence.
The customs of the Natchez have been described by Du Pratz, Le Petit,
Penecaut, and others. Charlevoix visited their temple in 1721, and found
it in a somewhat shabby condition. At this time, the Taensas were
extinct. In 1729 the Natchez, enraged by the arbitrary conduct of a
French commandant, massacred the neighboring settlers, and were in
consequence expelled from their country and nearly destroyed. A few
still survive, incorporated with the Creeks; but they have lost their
peculiar customs.
[242] In St. Charles County, on the left bank, not far above New
Orleans.
[243] Hennepin uses this incident, as well as most of those which have
preceded it, in making up the story of his pretended voyage to the Gulf.
[244] In the passages omitted above, for the sake of brevity, the Ohio
is mentioned as being called also the _Olighin_-(Alleghany) _Sipou_, and
_Chukagoua_; and La Salle declares that he takes possession of the
country with the consent of the nations dwelling in it, of whom he names
the Chaouanons (Shawanoes), Kious, or Nadouessious (Sioux), Chikachas
(Chickasaws), Motantees (?), Illinois, Mitchigamias, Arkansas, Natchez,
and Koroas. This alleged consent is, of course, mere farce. If there
could be any doubt as to the meaning of the words of La Salle, as
recorded in the _Procès Verbal de la Prise de Possession de la
Louisiane_, it would be set at rest by Le Clerc, who says: "Le Sieur de
la Salle prit au nom de sa Majesté possession de ce fleuve, _de toutes
les rivières qui y entrent, et de tous les pays qu'elles arrosent_."
These words are borrowed from the report of La Salle (see Thomassy, 14).
A copy of the original _Procès Verbal_ is before me. It bears the name
of Jacques de la Metairie, Notary of Fort Frontenac, who was one of the
party.
CHAPTER XXI.
1682, 1683.
ST. LOUIS OF THE ILLINOIS.
Louisiana.--Illness of La Salle: his Colony on the Illinois.--Fort
St. Louis.--Recall of Frontenac.--Le Febvre de la Barre.--Critical
Position of la Salle.--Hostility Of the New Governor.--Triumph of
the Adverse Faction.--La Salle sails for France.
Louisiana was the name bestowed by La Salle on the new domain of the
French crown. The rule of the Bourbons in the West is a memory of the
past, but the name of the Great King still survives in a narrow corner
of their lost empire. The Louisiana of to-day is but a single State of
the American republic. The Louisiana of La Salle stretched from the
Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains; from the Rio Grande and the Gulf to
the farthest springs of the Missouri.[245]
La Salle had written his name in history; but his hard-earned success
was but the prelude of a harder task. Herculean labors lay before him,
if he would realize the schemes with which his brain was pregnant. Bent
on accomplishing them, he retraced his course, and urged his canoes
upward against the muddy current. The party were famished. They had
little to subsist on but the flesh of alligators. When they reached the
Quinipissas, who had proved hostile on their way down, they resolved to
risk an interview with them, in the hope of obtaining food. The
treacherous savages dissembled, brought them corn, and on the following
night made an attack upon them, but met with a bloody repulse. The party
next revisited the Coroas, and found an unfavorable change in their
disposition towards them. They feasted them, indeed, but during the
repast surrounded them with an overwhelming force of warriors. The
French, however, kept so well on their guard, that their entertainers
dared not make an attack, and suffered them to depart unmolested.[246]
[Sidenote: ILLNESS OF LA SALLE.]
And now, in a career of unwonted success and anticipated triumph, La
Salle was arrested by a foe against which the boldest heart avails
nothing. As he ascended the Mississippi, he was seized by a dangerous
illness. Unable to proceed, he sent forward Tonty to Michilimackinac,
whence, after despatching news of their discovery to Canada, he was to
return to the Illinois. La Salle himself lay helpless at Fort Prudhomme,
the palisade work which his men had built at the Chickasaw Bluffs on
their way down. Father Zenobe Membré attended him; and at the end of
July he was once more in a condition to advance by slow movements
towards Fort Miami, which he reached in about a month.
In September he rejoined Tonty at Michilimackinac, and in the following
month wrote to a friend in France: "Though my discovery is made, and I
have descended the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, I cannot send you
this year either an account of my journey or a map. On the way back I
was attacked by a deadly disease, which kept me in danger of my life for
forty days, and left me so weak that I could think of nothing for four
months after. I have hardly strength enough now to write my letters, and
the season is so far advanced that I cannot detain a single day this
canoe which I send expressly to carry them. If I had not feared being
forced to winter on the way, I should have tried to get to Quebec to
meet the new governor, if it is true that we are to have one; but in my
present condition this would be an act of suicide, on account of the bad
nourishment I should have all winter in case the snow and ice stopped me
on the way. Besides, my presence is absolutely necessary in the place to
which I am going. I pray you, my dear sir, to give me once more all the
help you can. I have great enemies, who have succeeded in all they have
undertaken. I do not pretend to resist them, but only to justify myself,
so that I can pursue by sea the plans I have begun here by land."
This was what he had proposed to himself from the first; that is, to
abandon the difficult access through Canada, beset with enemies, and
open a way to his western domain through the Gulf and the Mississippi.
This was the aim of all his toilsome explorations. Could he have
accomplished his first intention of building a vessel on the Illinois
and descending in her to the Gulf, he would have been able to defray in
good measure the costs of the enterprise by means of the furs and
buffalo-hides collected on the way and carried in her to France. With a
fleet of canoes, this was impossible; and there was nothing to offset
the enormous outlay which he and his associates had made. He meant, as
we have seen, to found on the banks of the Illinois a colony of French
and Indians to answer the double purpose of a bulwark against the
Iroquois and a place of storage for the furs of all the western tribes;
and he hoped in the following year to secure an outlet for this colony
and for all the trade of the valley of the Mississippi, by occupying the
mouth of that river with a fort and another colony. This, too, was an
essential part of his original design.
But for his illness, he would have gone to France to provide for its
execution. Meanwhile, he ordered Tonty to collect as many men as
possible, and begin the projected colony on the banks of the Illinois. A
report soon after reached him that those pests of the wilderness the
Iroquois were about to renew their attacks on the western tribes. This
would be fatal to his plans; and, following Tonty to the Illinois, he
rejoined him near the site of the great town.
[Sidenote: "STARVED ROCK."]
The cliff called "Starved Rock," now pointed out to travellers as the
chief natural curiosity of the region, rises, steep on three sides as a
castle wall, to the height of a hundred and twenty-five feet above the
river. In front, it overhangs the water that washes its base; its
western brow looks down on the tops of the forest trees below; and on
the east lies a wide gorge or ravine, choked with the mingled foliage of
oaks, walnuts, and elms; while in its rocky depths a little brook creeps
down to mingle with the river. From the trunk of the stunted cedar that
leans forward from the brink, you may drop a plummet into the river
below, where the cat-fish and the turtles may plainly be seen gliding
over the wrinkled sands of the clear and shallow current. The cliff is
accessible only from behind, where a man may climb up, not without
difficulty, by a steep and narrow passage. The top is about an acre in
extent. Here, in the month of December, La Salle and Tonty began to
intrench themselves. They cut away the forest that crowned the rock,
built store-houses and dwellings of its remains, dragged timber up the
rugged pathway, and encircled the summit with a palisade.[247]
[Sidenote: LA SALLE'S COLONY.]
Thus the winter passed, and meanwhile the work of negotiation went
prosperously on. The minds of the Indians had been already prepared. In
La Salle they saw their champion against the Iroquois, the standing
terror of all this region. They gathered round his stronghold like the
timorous peasantry of the middle ages around the rock-built castle of
their feudal lord. From the wooden ramparts of St. Louis,--for so he
named his fort,--high and inaccessible as an eagle's nest, a strange
scene lay before his eye. The broad, flat valley of the Illinois was
spread beneath him like a map, bounded in the distance by its low wall
of woody hills. The river wound at his feet in devious channels among
islands bordered with lofty trees; then, far on the left, flowed calmly
westward through the vast meadows, till its glimmering blue ribbon was
lost in hazy distance.
There had been a time, and that not remote, when these fair meadows were
a waste of death and desolation, scathed with fire, and strewn with the
ghastly relics of an Iroquois victory. Now all was changed. La Salle
looked down from his rock on a concourse of wild human life. Lodges of
bark and rushes, or cabins of logs, were clustered on the open plain or
along the edges of the bordering forests. Squaws labored, warriors
lounged in the sun, naked children whooped and gambolled on the grass.
Beyond the river, a mile and a half on the left, the banks were studded
once more with the lodges of the Illinois, who, to the number of six
thousand, had returned, since their defeat, to this their favorite
dwelling-place. Scattered along the valley, among the adjacent hills,
or over the neighboring prairie, were the cantonments of a half-score of
other tribes and fragments of tribes, gathered under the protecting ægis
of the French,--Shawanoes from the Ohio, Abenakis from Maine, Miamis
from the sources of the Kankakee, with others whose barbarous names are
hardly worth the record.[248] Nor were these La Salle's only
dependants. By the terms of his patent, he held seigniorial rights over
this wild domain; and he now began to grant it out in parcels to his
followers. These, however, were as yet but a score,--a lawless band,
trained in forest license, and marrying, as their detractors affirm, a
new squaw every day in the week. This was after their lord's departure,
for his presence imposed a check on these eccentricities.
La Salle, in a memoir addressed to the Minister of the Marine, reports
the total number of the Indians around Fort St. Louis at about four
thousand warriors, or twenty thousand souls. His diplomacy had been