France and England in North America, Part III: La Salle, Discovery of The Great West
that means had been used to prejudice the Senecas against them. Not only
could they get no guides, but they were told that if they went to the
Ohio the tribes of those parts would infallibly kill them. Their Dutch
interpreter became disheartened and unmanageable, and, after staying a
month at the village, the hope of getting farther on their way seemed
less than ever. Their plan, it was clear, must be changed; and an Indian
from Otinawatawa, a kind of Iroquois colony at the head of Lake
Ontario, offered to guide them to his village and show them a better way
to the Ohio. They left the Senecas, coasted the south shore of the lake,
passed the mouth of the Niagara, where they heard the distant roar of
the cataract, and on the twenty-fourth of September reached Otinawatawa,
which was a few miles north of the present town of Hamilton. The
inhabitants proved friendly, and La Salle received the welcome present
of a Shawanoe prisoner, who told them that the Ohio could be reached in
six weeks, and that he would guide them to it. Delighted at this good
fortune, they were about to set out; when they heard, to their
astonishment, of the arrival of two other Frenchmen at a neighboring
village.
[Sidenote: LOUIS JOLIET.]
One of the strangers was destined to hold a conspicuous place in the
history of western discovery. This was Louis Joliet, a young man of
about the age of La Salle. Like him, he had studied for the priesthood;
but the world and the wilderness had conquered his early inclinations,
and changed him to an active and adventurous fur-trader. Talon had sent
him to discover and explore the copper-mines of Lake Superior. He had
failed in the attempt, and was now returning. His Indian guide, afraid
of passing the Niagara portage lest he should meet enemies, had led him
from Lake Erie, by way of Grand River, towards the head of Lake Ontario;
and thus it was that he met La Salle and the Sulpitians.
This meeting caused a change of plan. Joliet showed the priests a map
which he had made of such parts of the Upper Lakes as he had visited,
and gave them a copy of it; telling them, at the same time, of the
Pottawattamies and other tribes of that region in grievous need of
spiritual succor. The result was a determination on their part to follow
the route which he suggested, notwithstanding the remonstrances of La
Salle, who in vain reminded them that the Jesuits had preoccupied the
field, and would regard them as intruders. They resolved that the
Pottawattamies should no longer sit in darkness; while, as for the
Mississippi, it could be reached, as they conceived, with less risk by
this northern route than by that of the south.
La Salle was of a different mind. His goal was the Ohio, and not the
northern lakes. A few days before, while hunting, he had been attacked
by a fever, sarcastically ascribed by Galinée to his having seen three
large rattle-snakes crawling up a rock. He now told his two colleagues
that he was in no condition to go forward, and should be forced to part
with them. The staple of La Salle's character, as his life will attest,
was an invincible determination of purpose, which set at naught all
risks and all sufferings. He had cast himself with all his resources
into this enterprise; and, while his faculties remained, he was not a
man to recoil from it. On the other hand, the masculine fibre of which
he was made did not always withhold him from the practice of the arts of
address, and the use of what Dollier de Casson styles _belles paroles_.
He respected the priesthood, with the exception, it seems, of the
Jesuits; and he was under obligations to the Sulpitians of Montreal.
Hence there can be no doubt that he used his illness as a pretext for
escaping from their company without ungraciousness, and following his
own path in his own way.
[Sidenote: SEPARATION.]
On the last day of September, the priests made an altar, supported by
the paddles of the canoes laid on forked sticks. Dollier said mass; La
Salle and his followers received the sacrament, as did also those of his
late colleagues; and thus they parted, the Sulpitians and their party
descending the Grand River towards Lake Erie, while La Salle, as they
supposed, began his return to Montreal. What course he actually took we
shall soon inquire; and meanwhile, for a few moments, we will follow the
priests. When they reached Lake Erie, they saw it tossing like an angry
ocean. They had no mind to tempt the dangerous and unknown navigation,
and encamped for the winter in the forest near the peninsula called the
Long Point. Here they gathered a good store of chestnuts, hickory-nuts,
plums, and grapes, and built themselves a log cabin, with a recess at
the end for an altar. They passed the winter unmolested, shooting game
in abundance, and saying mass three times a week. Early in spring, they
planted a large cross, attached to it the arms of France, and took
formal possession of the country in the name of Louis XIV. This done,
they resumed their voyage, and, after many troubles, landed one evening
in a state of exhaustion on or near Point Pelée, towards the western
extremity of Lake Erie. A storm rose as they lay asleep, and swept off a
great part of their baggage, which, in their fatigue, they had left at
the edge of the water. Their altar-service was lost with the rest,--a
misfortune which they ascribed to the jealousy and malice of the Devil.
Debarred henceforth from saying mass, they resolved to return to
Montreal and leave the Pottawattamies uninstructed. They presently
entered the strait by which Lake Huron joins Lake Erie, and landing near
where Detroit now stands, found a large stone, somewhat suggestive of
the human figure, which the Indians had bedaubed with paint, and which
they worshipped as a manito. In view of their late misfortune, this
device of the arch-enemy excited their utmost resentment. "After the
loss of our altar-service," writes Galinée, "and the hunger we had
suffered, there was not a man of us who was not filled with hatred
against this false deity. I devoted one of my axes to breaking him in
pieces; and then, having fastened our canoes side by side, we carried
the largest piece to the middle of the river, and threw it, with all the
rest, into the water, that he might never be heard of again. God
rewarded us immediately for this good action, for we killed a deer and a
bear that same day."
[Sidenote: AT STE. MARIE DU SAUT.]
This is the first recorded passage of white men through the Strait of
Detroit; though Joliet had, no doubt, passed this way on his return from
the Upper Lakes.[14] The two missionaries took this course, with the
intention of proceeding to the Saut Ste. Marie, and there joining the
Ottawas, and other tribes of that region, in their yearly descent to
Montreal. They issued upon Lake Huron; followed its eastern shores till
they reached the Georgian Bay, near the head of which the Jesuits had
established their great mission of the Hurons, destroyed, twenty years
before, by the Iroquois;[15] and, ignoring or slighting the labors of
the rival missionaries, held their way northward along the rocky
archipelago that edged those lonely coasts. They passed the Manitoulins,
and, ascending the strait by which Lake Superior discharges its waters,
arrived on the twenty-fifth of May at Ste. Marie du Saut. Here they
found the two Jesuits, Dablon and Marquette, in a square fort of cedar
pickets, built by their men within the past year, and enclosing a chapel
and a house. Near by, they had cleared a large tract of land, and sown
it with wheat, Indian corn, peas, and other crops. The new-comers were
graciously received, and invited to vespers in the chapel; but they very
soon found La Salle's prediction made good, and saw that the Jesuit
fathers wanted no help from St. Sulpice. Galinée, on his part, takes
occasion to remark, that, though the Jesuits had baptized a few Indians
at the Saut, not one of them was a good enough Christian to receive the
Eucharist; and he intimates that the case, by their own showing, was
still worse at their mission of St. Esprit. The two Sulpitians did not
care to prolong their stay; and, three days after their arrival, they
left the Saut,--not, as they expected, with the Indians, but with a
French guide, furnished by the Jesuits. Ascending French River to Lake
Nipissing, they crossed to the waters of the Ottawa, and descended to
Montreal, which they reached on the eighteenth of June. They had made no
discoveries and no converts; but Galinée, after his arrival, made the
earliest map of the Upper Lakes known to exist.[16]
[Sidenote: LA SALLE'S DISCOVERIES.]
We return now to La Salle, only to find ourselves involved in mist and
obscurity. What did he do after he left the two priests? Unfortunately,
a definite answer is not possible; and the next two years of his life
remain in some measure an enigma. That he was busied in active
exploration, and that he made important discoveries, is certain; but the
extent and character of these discoveries remain wrapped in doubt. He is
known to have kept journals and made maps; and these were in existence,
and in possession of his niece, Madeleine Cavelier, then in advanced
age, as late as the year 1756; beyond which time the most diligent
inquiry has failed to trace them. Abbé Faillon affirms that some of La
Salle's men, refusing to follow him, returned to La Chine, and that the
place then received its name, in derision of the young adventurer's
dream of a westward passage to China.[17] As for himself, the only
distinct record of his movements is that contained in a paper, entitled
"Histoire de Monsieur de la Salle." It is an account of his
explorations, and of the state of parties in Canada previous to the year
1678,--taken from the lips of La Salle himself, by a person whose name
does not appear, but who declares that he had ten or twelve
conversations with him at Paris, whither he had come with a petition to
the Court. The writer himself had never been in America, and was
ignorant of its geography; hence blunders on his part might reasonably
be expected. His statements, however, are in some measure intelligible;
and the following is the substance of them.
After leaving the priests, La Salle went to Onondaga, where we are left
to infer that he succeeded better in getting a guide than he had before
done among the Senecas. Thence he made his way to a point six or seven
leagues distant from Lake Erie, where he reached a branch of the Ohio,
and, descending it, followed the river as far as the rapids at
Louisville,--or, as has been maintained, beyond its confluence with the
Mississippi. His men now refused to go farther, and abandoned him,
escaping to the English and the Dutch; whereupon he retraced his steps
alone.[18] This must have been in the winter of 1669-70, or in the
following spring; unless there is an error of date in the statement of
Nicolas Perrot, the famous _voyageur_, who says that he met him in the
summer of 1670, hunting on the Ottawa with a party of Iroquois.[19]
[Sidenote: THE RIVER ILLINOIS.]
But how was La Salle employed in the following year? The same memoir has
its solution to the problem. By this it appears that the indefatigable
explorer embarked on Lake Erie, ascended the Detroit to Lake Huron,
coasted the unknown shores of Michigan, passed the Straits of
Michilimackinac, and, leaving Green Bay behind him, entered what is
described as an incomparably larger bay, but which was evidently the
southern portion of Lake Michigan. Thence he crossed to a river flowing
westward,--evidently the Illinois,--and followed it until it was joined
by another river flowing from the northwest to the southeast. By this,
the Mississippi only can be meant; and he is reported to have said that