HEROES 
 OF THE 
 MIDDLE 
 WEST* 
 
 iitmniiiiilHi 
 
 tt 
 
!^nd COPY, 
 
 1893- 
 
 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 ChapZlT.^opyright No 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
HEROES OF THE MIDDLE WEST 
 
COUNT FRONTENAC. 
 From a Statue at Quebec. 
 
HEROES OF THE 
 MIDDLE WEST 
 
 XTbe jfrencb 
 
 MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD 
 
 BOSTON, U.S.A. 
 GINN AND COMPANY 
 
 1898 
 
r-s^^ 
 
 e.^^ 
 
 20876 
 
 Copyright, 189« 
 By MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 TWO COPIES RECEIVED. 
 
 
PEEFAOE. 
 
 Let any one who thinks it an easy task 
 attempt to cover the French discovery and occu- 
 pation of the middle west, from Marquette and 
 Jolliet to the pulling down of the French flag 
 on Fort Chartres, vivifying men, and while con- 
 densing events, putting a moving picture before 
 the eye. Let him prepare this picture for young 
 minds accustomed Only to the modern aspect of 
 things and demanding a light, sure touch. Let 
 him gather his material — as I have done — from 
 Parkman, Shea, Joutel, Hennepin, St. Cosme, 
 Monette, Winsor, Eoosevelt — from state records, 
 and local traditions richer and oftener more reli- 
 able than history; and let him hang over his 
 theme with brooding affection, moulding and re- 
 moulding its forms. He will find the task he so 
 lightly set himself a terribly hard and exhausting 
 one, and will appreciate as he never before appre- 
 ciated the labors of those who work in historic 
 fields. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. The Discoverers of the Upper Mississippi 
 
 II. Bearers of the Calumet 
 
 III. The Man with the Copper Hand 
 
 IV. The Undespairing Norman 
 V. French Settlements 
 
 VI. The Last Great Indian . 
 
 page 
 1 
 
 19 
 
 44 
 
 71 
 
 102 
 
 117 
 
HEROES OF THE MIDDLE WEST. 
 
 3j^C 
 
 THE DISCOVERERS OF THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI. 
 
 The 17th of May, 1673, Father Jacques 
 Marquette, the missionary priest of St. Ignace, 
 on what is now called the north shore of Michi- 
 gan, and Louis Jolliet, a trader from Montreal, 
 set out on a journey together. 
 
 Huron and Ottawa Indians, with the priest 
 left in charge of them, stood on the beach to 
 see Marquette embark, — the water running up 
 to their feet and receding with the everlasting 
 wash of the straits. Behind them the shore 
 line of St. Ignace was bent like a long bow. 
 Northward, beyond the end of the bow, a rock 
 rose in the air as tall as a castle. But very 
 humble was the small mission station which 
 Father Marquette had founded when driven 
 with his flock from his post on the Upper 
 Lakes by the Iroquois. A chapel of strong 
 1 
 
2 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 cedar posts covered with bark, his own hut, 
 and the lodges of his people were all surrounded 
 by pointed palisades. Opposite St. Ignace, 
 across a league or so of water, rose the turtle- 
 shaped back of Michilimackinac Island, vener- 
 ated by the tribes, in spite of their religious 
 teaching, as a home of mysterious giant fairies 
 who made gurgling noises in the rocks along 
 the beach or floated vast and cloud-like through 
 high pine forests. The evergreens on Michili- 
 mackinac showed as if newborn through the 
 haze of undefined deciduous trees, for it was 
 May weather, which means that the northern 
 world had not yet leaped into sudden and glori- 
 ous summer. Though the straits glittered under 
 a cloudless sky, a chill lingered in the wind, 
 and only the basking stone ledges reflected 
 warmth. The clear elastic air was such a per- 
 fect medium of sight that it allowed the eye to 
 distinguish open beach rims from massed for- 
 ests two or three leagues away on the south 
 shore, and seemed to bring within stone's throw 
 those nearer islands now called Round and Bois 
 Blanc. 
 
 It must have wrung Marquette's heart to leave 
 this region, which has an irresistible chai-m for 
 all who come within its horizon. But he had 
 
The Discoverers of the Upper Mississippi. 3 
 
 long desired to undertake this journey for a 
 double purpose. He wanted to carry his reli- 
 gion as far as possible among strange tribes, 
 and he wanted to find and explore that great 
 river of the west, about which adventurers in 
 the New World heard so much, but which none 
 had seen. 
 
 A century earlier, its channel southward had 
 really been taken possession of by the Spaniards, 
 its first discoverers. But they 
 made no use of their discovery, 
 and on their maps traced it as 
 an insignificant stream. The 
 French did not know whether 
 this river flowed into the Gulf 
 of California — which was 
 called the Red Sea — or to the 
 western ocean, or through Vir- 
 ginia eastward. Illinois In- 
 dians, visiting Marquette's 
 mission after the manner of 
 roving tribes, described the 
 father of waters and its tribu- 
 taries. Count Frontenac, the governor of 
 Canada, thought the matter of sufficient im- 
 portance to send Louis Jolliet with an outfit to 
 join the missionary in searching for the stream. 
 
 Totem of the Illinois. 
 
4 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 The explorers took with them a party of five 
 men. Their canoes, we are told, were of birch 
 bark and cedar splints, the ribs being shaped 
 from spruce roots. Covered with the pitch of 
 yellow pine, and light enough to be carried on 
 the shoulders of four men across portages, these 
 canoes yet had toughness equal to any river 
 voyage. They were provisioned with smoked 
 meat and Indian corn. Shoved clear of the 
 beach, they shot out on the blue water to the 
 dip of paddles. Marquette waved his adieu. 
 His Indians, remembering the dangers of that 
 southern country, scarcely hoped to see him 
 again. Marquette, though a young man, was 
 of no such sturdy build as Jolliet. Among de- 
 scendants of the Ottawas you may still hear 
 the tradition that he had a "white face, and 
 long hair the color of the sun " flowing to the 
 shoulders of his black robe. 
 
 The watching figures dwindled, as did the 
 palisaded settlement. Hugging the shore, the 
 canoes entered Lake Michigan, or, as it was then 
 called, the Lake of the Illinois. All the islands 
 behind seemed to meet and intermingle and to 
 cover themselves with blue haze as they went 
 down on the water. Priest and trader, their 
 skins moist with the breath of the lake, each in 
 
The Discoverers of the Uijper Mississippi. 5 
 
 his own canoe, faced silently the unknown world 
 toward which they were venturing. The shaggy 
 coast line bristled with evergreens, and though 
 rocky, it was low, unlike the white cliffs of 
 Michilimackinac. 
 
 Marquette had made a map from the descrip- 
 tions of the Illinois Indians. The canoes were 
 moving westward on the course indicated by 
 his map. He was peculiarly gifted as a mis- 
 sionary, for already he spoke six Indian lan- 
 guages, and readily adapted himself to any 
 dialect. Marquette, the records tell us, came 
 of " an old and honorable family of Laon," in 
 northern France. Century after century the 
 Marquettes bore high honors in Laon, and their 
 armorial bearings commemorated devotion to 
 the king in distress. In our own Revolution- 
 ary War it is said that three Marquettes fought 
 for us with La Fayette. No young man of his 
 time had a pleasanter or easier life offered him 
 at home than Jacques Marquette. But he chose 
 to devote himself to missionary labor in the 
 New World, and had already helped to found 
 three missions, enduring much hardship. Indian 
 half-breeds, at what is now called the " Soo," 
 on St. Mary's River, betwixt Lake Huron and 
 Lake Superior, have a tradition that Father Mar- 
 
6 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 quette and Father Dablon built their missionary 
 station on a tiny island of rocks, not more than 
 two canoe lengths from shore, on the American 
 side. But men who have written books declare 
 it was on the bank below the rapids. 
 
 Jolliet had come of different though not less 
 worthy stock. He was Canadian born, the son 
 of a wagon-maker in Quebec ; and he had been 
 
 Autograph of Jolliet, 
 
 well educated, and possessed an active, adven- 
 turous mind. He was dressed for this expedi- 
 tion in the tough buckskin hunting suit which 
 frontiersmen then wore. But Marquette re- 
 tained the long black cassock of the priest. 
 Their five voyageurs — or trained woodsmen — 
 in more or less stained buckskin and caps of 
 fur, sent the canoes shooting over the water 
 with scarcely a sound, dipping a paddle now on 
 this side and now on that, Indian fashion ; Mar- 
 quette and Jolliet taking turns with them as the 
 
The Discoverers of the Upper Mississip)pi. 7 
 
 day progressed. For any man, whether voy- 
 ageur, priest, or seignior, who did not know how 
 to paddle a canoe, if occasion demanded, was at 
 sore disadvantage in the New World. 
 
 The first day of any journey, before one meets 
 weariness or anxiety and disappointment, re- 
 mains always the freshest in memory. When 
 the sun went down, leaving violet shadow^s on 
 the chill lake, they drew their boats on shore ; 
 and Pierre Porteret and another Frenchman, 
 named Jacques, gathered driftwood to make a 
 fire, w^hile the rest of the crew unpacked the 
 cargo. They turned each canoe on its side, 
 propping the ends with sticks driven into the 
 ground, thus making canopies like half-roofs to 
 shelter them for the night. 
 
 " The Sieur Jolliet says it is not always that 
 we may light a camp-fire,'* said Pierre Porteret 
 to Jacques, as he struck a spark into his tinder 
 with the flint and steel which a woodsman car- 
 ried everywhere. 
 
 " He is not likely to have one to-night, even 
 in this safe cove," responded Jacques, kneeling 
 to help, and anxious for supper. " Look now^ at 
 me ; I know the Indian way to start a blaze by 
 taking two pieces of wood and boring one into 
 the other, rubbing it thus- between my palms. 
 
8 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 It is a gift. Not many voyageurs can accom- 
 plish that." 
 
 "Rub thy two stupid heads together and 
 make a blaze," said another hungry man, coming 
 with a kettle of lake water. But the fire soon 
 climbed pinkly through surrounding darkness. 
 They drove down two forked supports to hold a 
 crosspiece, and hung the kettle to boil their 
 hulled corn. Then the fish which had been 
 taken by trolling during the day were dressed 
 and broiled on hot coals. 
 
 The May starlight was very keen over their 
 heads in a dark blue sky which seemed to rise 
 to infinite heights, for the cold northern night 
 air swept it of every film. Their first delicious 
 meal was blessed and eaten ; and stretched in 
 blankets, with their feet to the camp fire, the 
 tired explorers rested. They were still on the 
 north shore of what we now call the state of 
 Michigan, and their course had been due west- 
 ward by the compass. A cloud of Indian tobacco 
 smoke rose from the lowly roof of each canoe, 
 and its odor mingled with the sweet acrid breath 
 of burning wood. Jolliet and the voyageurs had 
 learned to use this dried browii weed, which all 
 tribes held in great esteem and carried about 
 with them in their rovings. 
 
The Discoverers of the Upper Mississipin. 9 
 
 " If true tales be told of the water around the 
 Bay of the Puans," one of the voyageurs was 
 heard to say as he stretched himself under the 
 canoe allotted to the men, " we may save our 
 salt when we pass that country." 
 
 "Have you ever heard, Father," JoUiet in- 
 quired of the missionary, " that the word Puan 
 meant foul or ill-smelling instead of salty?" 
 
 "I know," Marquette answered, "that salt 
 has a vile odor to the Indians. They do not 
 use it with their food, preferring to season that 
 instead with the sugar they make from the 
 maple tree. Therefore, the bay into which we 
 are soon to venture they call the Bay of the 
 Fetid, or ill-smelling salty country, on account 
 of saline water thereabout." 
 
 " Then why do the Winnebago tribe on 
 this bay allow themselves to be called 
 Puans?" 
 
 " That has never been explained by the mis- 
 sionaries sent to that post, though the name 
 seems to carry no reproach. They are well 
 made and tall of stature. I find Wild Oats a 
 stranger name — the Menomonies are Wild Oats 
 Indians. Since the gospel has been preached 
 to all these tribes for some years past, I trust 
 we may find good Christians among them." 
 
10 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 " What else have you learned about the coun- 
 try?" 
 
 " Father Dablon told me that the way to the 
 head of that river called Fox, up which we must 
 paddle, is as hard as the way to heaven, spe- 
 cially the rapids. But when you arrive there it 
 is a natural paradise." 
 
 " We have tremendous labor before us," mused 
 Jolliet. " Father, did you ever have speech with 
 that Jean Nicollet, wdio, first of any Frenchman, 
 got intimations of the great river? " 
 
 " I never saw him." 
 
 " There was a man I would have traveled far 
 to see, though he was long a renegade among sav- 
 ages, and returned to the settlements only to die." 
 
 " Heaven save this expedition from becoming 
 renegade among savages by forgetting its high- 
 est object ! " breathed Marquette. 
 
 His companion smiled toward the pleasant 
 fire-light. Jolliet had once thought of becoming a 
 priest himself. He venerated this young apostle, 
 only half a dozen years his senior. But he was 
 glad to be a free adventurer, seeking wealth and 
 honor ; not foreseeing that though the great 
 island of Anticosti in the Gulf of St. Lawrence 
 would be given him for his services, he would 
 die a poor and neglected man. 
 
The Discoverers of the Upper Mississippi. 11 
 
 When, after days of steady progress, the ex- 
 pedition entered the Bay of Puans, now called 
 Green Bay, and found the nation of Menomo- 
 nies or Wild Oats Indians, Marquette was as 
 much interested as Jolliet in the grain which 
 gave these people their bread. It grew like 
 rice, in marshy places, on knotted stalks which 
 appeared above the water in June and rose sev- 
 eral feet higher. The grain seed was long and 
 slender and made plentiful meal. The Indians 
 gathered this volunteer harvest in September, 
 when the kernels were so ripe that they dropped 
 readily into canoes pushed among the stalks. 
 They were then spread out on lattice work and 
 smoked to dry the chaff, which could be trodden 
 loose when the whole bulk, tied in a skin bag, 
 was put into a hollow in the ground made for 
 that purpose. The Indians pounded their grain 
 to meal and cooked it with fat. 
 
 The Menomonies tried to prevent Marquette 
 and Jolliet from going farther. They said the 
 great river was dangerous, full of frightful 
 monsters that swallowed both men and canoes ; 
 that there was a roaring demon in it who could 
 be heard for leagues ; and the heat was so in- 
 tense in those southern countries throuQ^h which 
 it flowed, that if the Frenchmen escaped all 
 
12 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 other dangers, they must die of that. Mar- 
 quette told them his own life was nothing com- 
 pared to the good word he wanted to carry to 
 those southern tribes, and he laughed at the 
 demon and instructed them in his own religion. 
 
 The aboriginal tribes, by common instinct, 
 tried from the first to keep the white man out 
 of countries which he was determined to over- 
 run and possess, regardless of danger. 
 
 At the end of a voyage of thirty leagues, or 
 about ninety miles, the explorers reached the 
 head of the Bay of Puans, and a region thickly 
 settled with Winnebagoes and Pottawotomies 
 between the bay and Winnebago Lake, Sacs on 
 Fox River, and Mascoutins, Kickapoos, and 
 Miamis. Fox River, which they followed from 
 the head of the bay, and of which the lake 
 seemed only an expansion, was a rocky stream. 
 A later traveler has told us that Fox River in 
 its further extent is very crooked, and while 
 seeming wide, with a boundary of hills on each 
 hand, it affords but a slender channel in a marsh 
 full of rushes and wild oats. 
 
 The Kickapoos and Mascoutins were rude, 
 coarse-featured Indians. Though the mission- 
 ary exhorted them as seriously as he did their 
 gentler neighbors, he could not help remarking 
 
The Discoverers of the Upper Mississippi. 13 
 
 to Jolliet that " the Miamis were better made, 
 and the two long earlocks which they wore gave 
 them a good appearance." 
 
 It was the seventh day of June when the 
 explorers arrived in this country of cabins 
 woven of rushes ; and they did not linger here. 
 Frenchmen had never gone farther. They were 
 to enter new lands untrodden by the white race. 
 They were in what is now called the state of 
 Wisconsin, where "the soil was good," they 
 noted, " producing much corn ; and the Indians 
 gathered also quantities of plums and grapes." In 
 these warmer lands the season progressed rapidly . 
 
 Marquette and Jolliet called the chiefs together 
 and told them that Jolliet was sent by the gov- 
 ernor to find new countries, and Marquette had 
 been commissioned of Heaven to preach. Mak- 
 ing the chiefs a present, without which they 
 would not have received the talk seriously, the 
 explorers asked for guides to that tributary 
 which was said to run into the great river. 
 
 The chiefs responded with the gift of a rush 
 mat for Marquette and Jolliet to rest on during 
 their journey, and sent two young Miamis with 
 them. If these kindly Indians disliked to set 
 the expedition further on its way, they said 
 nothing but very polite things about the hardi- 
 
14 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 hood of Frenchmen, who coukl venture with 
 only two canoes, and seven in their party, on 
 unknown worlds. 
 
 The young Miamis, in a boat of their own, 
 led out the procession the tenth morning of 
 June. Taking up paddles, the voyageurs looked 
 back at an assembled multitude — perhaps the 
 last kindly natives on their perilous way — and 
 at the knoll in the midst of prairies where hos- 
 pitable rush houses stood and would stand until 
 the inmates took them down and rolled them 
 up to carry to hunting grounds, and at groves 
 dotting those pleasant prairies where guests were 
 abundantly fed. 
 
 Three leagues up the marshy and oats-choked 
 Fox River, constantly widening to little lakes 
 and receding to a throat of a channel, brought 
 the explorers to tlie portage, or carrying place. 
 The canoes then had to be unloaded, and both 
 cargo and boats carried overland to a bend of 
 the Miscousing, which was the Indian name for 
 Wisconsin River. " This portage," says a trav- 
 eler who afterwards followed that way, " is half 
 a league in length, and half of that is a kind of 
 marsh full of mud." In wet seasons the head 
 of Fox River at that time seemed not unlikely 
 to find the Wisconsin, for Marquette has set 
 
The Discoverers of the TJxjpev Mississippi. 15 
 
 it down in his recital that the portage was only 
 twenty-seven hundred paces. 
 
 When the two Miamis had helped to carry 
 the goods and had set the French on the tribu- 
 tary of the great river, they turned back to their 
 own country. Before the men entered the boats 
 Marquette knelt down with them on the bank 
 and prayed for the success of the undertaking. 
 It was a lovely broad river on w^hich they now 
 embarked, with shining sands showing through 
 the clear water, making shallows like tumbling 
 discs of brilliant metal, — a river in which the 
 canoes might sometimes run aground, but one 
 that deceived the eye pleasantly, with islands all 
 vine covered, so when a boat clove a way between 
 two it was a guess how far the Wisconsin spread 
 away on each side to shores of a fertile land. 
 Oaks, walnuts, whitewood, and thorn trees 
 crowded the banks or fell apart, showing prai- 
 ries rolling to wooded hills. Deer were sur- 
 prised, stretching their delicate necks down to 
 drink at the margin. They looked up with shy 
 large eyes at such strange objects moving on 
 their stream, and shot off through the brush 
 like red-brown arrows tipped with white. The 
 moose planted its forefeet and stared stolidly, 
 its broad horns set in defense. 
 
16 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 ■' Sieur Jolliet," said the missionary, once when 
 the canoes drew together, " we have now left 
 the waters which flow into the great lakes and 
 are discharged through the St. Lawrence past 
 Quebec to the sea. We follow those that lead 
 us into strange lands." 
 
 '' This river Miscousing on which we now 
 are," returned Jolliet, " flows, as we see by our 
 compass, to the southwestward. We know it 
 is a branch of the great river. I am becoming 
 convinced. Father, that the great river cannot 
 discharge itself toward the east, as some have 
 supposed." 
 
 The explorers estimated the distance from the 
 country of the Mascoutins to the portage to 
 be three leagues, and from the portage to the 
 mouth of the Miscousing forty leagues. This 
 distance they covered in a week. Drawing their 
 canoes to the shore at night, they pitched camp, 
 varying the monotony of tlieir stores with fish 
 and game. Perhaps they had learned that wild 
 grapes then budding were not really fit to eat 
 until touched by frost. Pierre Porteret said in 
 Marquette's hearing, " the Indians could make 
 good wine of grapes and plums if they desired." 
 
 The 17th of June, exactly one month from 
 the day on which they had left St. Ignace mis- 
 
The Discoverers of the Upper Mississippi. 17 
 
 sion, the explorers paddled into a gentle clear 
 river, larger than the Miscousing but not yet 
 monstrous in width, which ran southward. 
 High hills guarded the right-hand shore, and 
 the left spread away in fair meadows. Its cur- 
 rent was broken with many little islands, like 
 the Miscousing, though on sounding, Jolliet 
 found the water to be ten fathoms, or sixty feet, 
 deep. The shores receding, and then drawing 
 in, gave unequal and irregular width to the 
 stream. But it was unmistakably the great 
 river they had sought, named then as now 
 by the Indians, Mississippi, though Marquette 
 at once christened it Conception, and another 
 Frenchman who came after him gave it the 
 name of Colbert. It was the river of which 
 Nicollet had brought hints from his wanderings 
 among northwestern tribes : the great artery 
 of the middle continent, or, as that party of 
 explorers believed, of the entire west. Receiv- 
 ing into itself tributaries, it rolled, draining a 
 mighty basin, to unknown seas. 
 
 The first white men ventured forth upon its 
 upper channel in two birch canoes. Five hardy 
 voices raised a shout which was thrown back in 
 an echo from the hills ; five caps were whirled 
 as high as paddles could raise them. But Mar- 
 
18 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 quette said, "This is such joy as we cannot 
 express ! " The men in both canoes silenced 
 themselves while he gave thanks for the dis- 
 covery. 
 
t V 
 
 FATHER JACQUES MARQUETTE. 
 
 From !i Statue in the Capitol at Washing-ton. 
 
11. 
 
 BEARERS OF THE CALUMET. 
 
 Moving clown the Mississippi, league after 
 league, the explorers noted first of all its soli- 
 tude. Wigwam smoke could not be seen on 
 either shore. Silence, save the breathing of 
 the river as it rolled on its course, seemed to 
 surround and threaten them with ambush. 
 Still, day after day, the sweet and awful pres- 
 ence of the wilderness Avas their only company. 
 Once Pierre Porteret dropped his paddle with a 
 yell which was tossed about by echoing islands. 
 A thing with a tiger's forehead and a wildcat's 
 whiskered snout, holding ears and entire gray 
 and black head above the water, swam for the 
 boat. But it dived and disappeared ; and the 
 other voyageurs felt safe in laughing at him. 
 Not long after, Jacques bellowed aloud as he 
 saw a living tree glide under the canoe, jarring 
 it from end to end. The voyageurs soon learned 
 to know the huge sluggish catfish. They also 
 caught plenty of sturgeon or shovel fish when 
 they cast in their nets. 
 
 19 
 
20 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 The river descended from its hilly cradle to 
 a country of level distances. The explorers, 
 seeing nothing of men, gave more attention 
 to birds and animals. Wild turkeys with bur- 
 nished necks and breasts tempted the hunters. 
 The stag uttered far off his whistling call of 
 defiance to other stags. And they began to see 
 a shaggy ox, humped, with an enormous head 
 and short black horns, and a mane hanging over 
 low-set wicked eyes. Its body was covered with 
 curly rough hair. They learned afterwards from 
 Indians to call these savage cattle pisikious, 
 or buffaloes. Herds of many hundreds grazed 
 together, or, startled, galloped away, like thun- 
 der rolling along the ground. 
 
 The explorers kindled very little fire on shore 
 to cook their meals, and they no longer made a 
 camp, but after eating, pushed out and anchored, 
 sleeping in their canoes. Every night a senti- 
 nel was set to guard against surprise. By the 
 25th of June they had passed through sixty 
 leamies of solitude. The whole American con- 
 tinent Avas thinly settled by native tribes, many 
 in name indeed, but of scant numbers. The 
 most dreaded savages in the New World were 
 the Iroquois or Five Nations, living south of 
 Lake Ontario. Yet they were never able to 
 
Bearers of the Calumet. 21 
 
 muster more than about twenty-two hundred 
 fighting men. 
 
 The canoes were skirtmg the western bank, 
 driven by the current, when one voyageur 
 called to another: 
 
 " My scalp for the sight of an Indian ! " 
 "Halt!" the forward paddler answered. 
 " Look to thy scalp, lad, for here is the Indian !" 
 There was no feathered head in ambush, but 
 they saw moccasin prints in the low moist mar- 
 gin and a path leading up to the prairie. 
 
 Marquette and JoUiet held the boats together 
 while they consulted. 
 
 " Do you think it wise to pass by without 
 searching what this may mean, Father? " 
 
 " No, I do not. We might thus leave enemies 
 behind our backs to cut off our return. Some 
 Indian village is near. It would be my counsel 
 to approach and offer friendship." 
 
 "Shall we take the men?" debated Jolliet. 
 " Two of them at least should stay to guard the 
 
 canoes " 
 
 " Let them all stay to guard the canoes. If 
 we go unarmed and unattended, we shall not 
 raise suspicion in the savages' minds." 
 
 "But we may raise suspicion in our own 
 minds." 
 
22 Heroes of the Middle Went 
 
 Marquette laughed. 
 
 " The barbarous peo^Dle ou this unexplored 
 river have us at their mercy," he declared. 
 " We can at best do little to defend our- 
 selves." 
 
 " Let us reconnoitre," said Jolliet. 
 
 Taking some of the goods which they had 
 brought along for presents, Jolliet bade the men 
 wait their return and climbed the bank with 
 the missionary. The path led through prairie 
 grass, gay at that season with flowers. The 
 delicate buttercup-like sensitive plant shrank 
 from their feet in wet places. Neither French- 
 man had yet seen the deadly rattlesnake of 
 these southern countries, singing as a great fly 
 might sing in a web, dart out of its spotted 
 spiral to fasten a death bite upon a victim. 
 They walked in silence, dreading only the 
 human beings they were going to meet. When 
 they had gone about two leagues, the path drew 
 near the wooded bank of a little stream drain- 
 ing into the Mississippi which they had scarcely 
 noticed from the canoes. There they saw an 
 Indian village, and farther off, up a hill, more 
 groups of wigwams. They heard the voices of 
 children, and nobody suspected their approach. 
 
 Jolliet and Marquette halted. Not knowing 
 
Bearers of the Calumet. 23 
 
 how else to announce their presence, they shouted 
 together as loud as they could shout. The sav- 
 ages ran out of their Avigwams and darted about 
 in confusion until they saw the two motionless 
 white men. The long black cassock of Mar- 
 quette had instant effect upon them. For their 
 trinkets and a few garments on their bodies 
 showed that they had trafficked with Euro- 
 peans. 
 
 Four old Indians, slowly and with ceremony, 
 came out to meet the explorers, holding up 
 curious pipes trimmed with many kinds of 
 feathers. As soon as they drew near, Mar- 
 quette called out to them in Algonquin : 
 
 "What tribe is this?" 
 
 " The Illinois," answered the old man. Being 
 a branch of the great Algonquin family, which 
 embraced nearly all northern aboriginal nations, 
 with the notable exception of the Iroquois, these 
 people had a dialect which the missionary could 
 understand. The name Illinois meant "The 
 Men." 
 
 Marquette and JoUiet were led to the prin- 
 cipal lodge. Outside the door, waiting for 
 them, stood another old Indian like a statue 
 of wrinkled bronze. For he had stripped him- 
 self to do honor to the occasion, and held up 
 
24 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 his hands to screen his face from the sun, mak- 
 ing graceful and dignified gestures as he greeted 
 the strangers. 
 
 " How bright is the sun when you come to 
 see us, O Frenchmen ! Our lodges are all open 
 to you." 
 
 The visitors were then seated in the wigwam, 
 and the pipe, or calumet, offered them to smoke, 
 all the Indians crowding around and saying : 
 
 Calumet. 
 
 " You do well to visit us, brothers." 
 
 Obliged to observe this peace ceremony, Mar- 
 quette put the pipe to his lips, but Jolliet, used 
 to the tobacco weed, puffed with a good will. 
 
 The entire village then formed a straggling 
 procession, gazing at the Frenchmen, whom 
 they guided farther to the chief's town. He 
 also met them standing with a naked retinue at 
 his door, and the calumet was again smoked. 
 
 The Illinois lodges were shaped like the 
 rounded cover of an emigrant wagon, high, 
 and very long, having an opening left along 
 
Bearers of the Calumet. 25 
 
 the top for the escape of smoke. They were 
 made of rush mats, which the women wove, 
 overlapped as shingles on a framework of 
 poles. Rush mats also carpeted the ground, 
 except where fires burned in a row along the 
 middle. Each fire was used by two families 
 who lived opposite, in stalls made of blankets. 
 The ends of the lodge had flaps to shut out the 
 weather, but these were left wide open to the 
 summer sun. D uring visits of ceremony a guest 
 stood where he could be seen and heard by all 
 who could crowd into the wigwam. But when 
 the Illinois held important councils they made 
 a circular inclosure, and built a camp-fire in the 
 center. Many families and many fires filled a 
 long wigwam, though Jolliet and Marquette 
 were lodged with the chief, who had one for 
 himself and his household. 
 
 Whitening embers were sending threads of 
 smoke towards a strip of blue sky overhead 
 when the missionary stood up to explain his 
 errand in the crowded inclosure, dividing his 
 talk into four parts with presents. By the first 
 gift of cloth and beads he told his listeners that 
 the Frenchmen were voyaging in peace to visit 
 nations on the river. By the second he said : 
 
 " I declare to you that God, your Creator, has 
 
26 Hei'oes of the Middle West. 
 
 pity on you, since, when you have been so long 
 ignorant of him, he wishes to become known to 
 you. I am sent on his behalf with this design. 
 It is for you to acknowledge and obey him." 
 
 By the third gift they were informed that the 
 chief of the French had s^^read peace and over- 
 come the Iroquois. And the last begged for 
 all the information they could give about the 
 sea and intervening nations. 
 
 When Marquette sat down, the chief stood 
 up and laid his hand on the head of a little 
 slave, prisoner from another tribe. 
 
 " I thank you, Blackgown," he said, " and 
 you. Frenchman, for taking so much pains to 
 come and visit us. The earth has never been 
 so beautiful, nor the sun so bright, as to-day ; 
 never has the river been so calm and free from 
 rocks, which your canoes removed as they passed! 
 Never has our tobacco had so fine a flavor, nor 
 our corn appeared so beautiful as we find it 
 to-day. Here is my son. I give him to you 
 that you may know my heart. Take pity on 
 us and all our nation. You know the Great 
 Spirit who made all : you speak to him and 
 hear him ; ask him to give us life and health 
 and come and dwell with us." 
 
 When the chief had presented his guests with 
 
Bearers of the Calumet. 27 
 
 the Indian boy, and again offered the calumet, 
 he urged them, with belts and garters of 
 buffalo wool, brilliantly dyed, to go no farther 
 down the great river, on account of dangers. 
 These compliments being ended, a feast was 
 brought in four courses. First came a Avooden 
 dish of sagamity or corn-meal boiled in water 
 and grease. The chief took a buffalo-horn 
 spoon and fed his guests as if they had been 
 little children ; three or four spoonfuls he put 
 in Marquette's mouth and three or four spoon- 
 fuls in Jolliet's. Three fish were brought next, 
 and he picked out the bones with his own fin- 
 gers, blew on the food to cool it, and stuffed 
 the explorers with all he could make them 
 accept. It was their part to open their mouths 
 as young birds do. The third course was that 
 most delicate of Indian dishes, a fine dog ; but 
 seeing that his guests shrank from this, the 
 chief ended the meal with buffalo meat, giv- 
 ing them the fattest parts. 
 
 The Illinois were at that time on the west 
 side of the Mississippi, because they had been 
 driven from their own country on the Illinois 
 River by the Iroquois. The Illinois nation was 
 made up of several united tribes : Kaskaskias, 
 Peorias, Kahokias, Tamaroas, and Moingona. 
 
28 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 Flight scattered them, and these were only a 
 few of their villages. They afterwards returned 
 to their own land. Their chief wore a scarf or 
 belt of fur crossing his left shoulder, encircling 
 his waist and hanging in fringe. Arm and leg 
 bands ornamented him, and he also had knee 
 rattles of deer hoofs. Paint made of colored 
 clays streaked his face. This attractive creature 
 sent the Indian crier around, beating a drum of 
 deer hide stretched over a pot, to proclaim the 
 calumet dance in honor of the explorers. 
 
 Marquette and Jolliet were led out in the 
 prairie to a small grove which sheltered the 
 assembly from the afternoon sun. Even the 
 women left their maize fields and the beans, 
 melons, and squaslies that they were cultivating, 
 and old squaws dropped rush braiding, and with 
 papooses swarming about their knees, followed. 
 The Illinois were nimble, well-formed people, 
 skillful with bow and arrow. They had, more- 
 over, some guns among them, obtained from 
 allies who had roved and traded with the 
 French. Young braves imitated the gravity of 
 their elders at this important ceremony. The 
 Illinois never ate new fruits or bathed at the 
 beginning of summer, without first dancing the 
 calumet. 
 
Beavers of the Calmnet 29 
 
 A large gay mat of rushes was spread in the 
 center of the grove, and the warrior selected to 
 dance put his god, or manitou — some tiny 
 carven image which he carried around his per- 
 son and to which he prayed — on the mat 
 beside a beautiful calumet. Around them he 
 spread his bow and arrows, his war club, and 
 
 War Club. 
 
 stone hatchet. The pipe was made of red rock 
 like brilliantly polished marble, hollowed to 
 hold tobacco. A stick two feet long, as thick 
 as a cane, formed the stem. For the dance 
 these pipes were often decked with gorgeous 
 scarlet, green, and iridescent feathers, though 
 white plumes alone made them the symbol of 
 peace, and red quills bristled over them for 
 war. 
 
 Young squaws and braves who were to sing, 
 sat down on the ground in a group near the 
 mat ; but the multitude spread in a great circle 
 around it. Men of importance before taking 
 their seats on the short grass, each in turn lifted 
 the calumet, which was filled, and blew a little 
 
30 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 smoke on the maiiitou. Then the dancer sprang 
 out, and, with graceful curvings in time to the 
 music, seized the pipe and offered it now to the 
 sun and now to the earth, made it dance from 
 mouth to mouth along the Unes of spectators, 
 with all its fluttering plumes spread. The hazy 
 sun shone slanting among branches, tracing a 
 network of flickering leaf shadows on short 
 grass ; and liquid young voices rising and fall- 
 ing chanted, 
 
 "Nanahani, iianahani, iianahani, 
 Xaniango ! " 
 
 The singers were joined by the Indian drum ; 
 and at that another dancer sprang into the 
 
 Stone Hatchet. 
 
 circle and took the weapons from the mat to 
 fight with the principal dancer, who had no 
 defense but the calumet. With measured steps 
 and a floating motion of the body the two ad- 
 vanced and attacked, parried and retreated, 
 until the man with the pipe drove his enemy 
 from the ring. Papooses of a dark brick-red 
 color watched with glistenino- black eyes the 
 
 & "^ & 
 
Bearers of the Calumet. 31 
 
 last part of the dance, which celebrated victory. 
 The names of nations fought, the prisoners 
 taken, and all the trophies brought home were 
 paraded by means of the calumet. 
 
 The chief presented the dancer with a fine 
 fur robe when he ended ; and, taking the calu- 
 met from his hand, gave it to an old man in the 
 circle. This one passed it to the next, and so 
 it went around the huge ring until all had held 
 it. Then the chief approached the white men. 
 
 " Blackgown," he said, '' and you. French- 
 man, I give you this peace-pipe to be your safe- 
 guard wherever you go among the tribes. It 
 shall be feathered with white plumes, and dis- 
 playing it you may march fearlessly among 
 enemies. It has power of life and death, and 
 honor is paid to it as to a manitou. Black- 
 gown, I give you this calumet in token of peace 
 between your governor and the Illinois, and to 
 remind you of your promise to come again and 
 instruct us in your religion." 
 
 The explorers slept soundly all night in the 
 chief's lodge, feeling as safe as among Christian 
 Indians of the north, who stuck thorns in a 
 calendar to mark Sundays and holydays. Next 
 morning the chief went with several hundred 
 of his people to escort them to their canoes; 
 
32 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 but it was three o'clock in the afternoon before 
 the voyageurs, dropping down stream, saw the 
 last of the friendly tribe. 
 
 Day after day the boats moved on without 
 meeting other inhabitants. Mulberries, per- 
 simmons, and hazelnuts were found on the 
 shores. They passed the mouth of the Illinois 
 River without knowing its name, or that it 
 flowed through lands owned by the tribe that 
 had given them the peace-pipe. Farther on, 
 the Mississippi made one of its many bends, 
 carrying them awhile directly eastward, and 
 below great rocks like castles. As the canoes 
 ran along the foot of this east shore, some of 
 the voyageurs cried out. For on the face of the 
 cliff far up were two painted monsters in glaring 
 red, green, and black; each as large as a calf, 
 with deer horns, blood-colored eyes, tiger beard, 
 a human face, and a body covered with scales. 
 Coiled twice around the middle, over the head, 
 and passing between the hind legs of each, 
 extended a tail that ended like a fish. So 
 startling was this sight, which seemed a banner 
 held aloft heralding unseen dangers, that the 
 men felt threatened by a demon. But Mar- 
 quette laughed at them and beckoned for the 
 canoes to be brought together. 
 
Bearers of the Calumet. 33 
 
 " What manner of thing is this, Sieur 
 Jolliet?" 
 
 ''A pair of manitous, evidently. If we had 
 Indians with us, we should see them toss a little 
 tobacco out as an offering in passing by." 
 
 " I cannot think," said Marquette, " that any 
 Indian has been the designer. Good painters 
 in France would find it hard to do as well. 
 Besides this, the creatures are so high upon the 
 rock that it was hard to get conveniently at 
 them to paint them. And how could such 
 colors be mixed in this wilderness ? " 
 
 " We have seen what pigments and clays the 
 Illinois used in daubing themselves. These 
 wild tribes may have among them men with 
 natural skill in delineating," said Jolliet. 
 
 "I will draw them off," Marquette deter- 
 mined, bringing out the papers on which he 
 set down his notes ; and while the men stuck 
 their paddles in the water to hold the canoes 
 against the current, he made his drawing. 
 
 One of the monsters seen by the explorers 
 remained on those rocks until the middle of 
 our own century. It was called by the Indians 
 the Piasa. More than two centuries of beating 
 winter storms had not effaced the brilliant 
 picture when it was quarried away by a stupidly 
 
34 Heroes of the MidrUe West. 
 
 barbarous civilization. The town of Alton, in 
 the state of Illinois, is a little south of that rock 
 where the Piasa dragons were seen. 
 
 As the explorers moved ahead on glassy 
 waters, they looked back, and the line of vision 
 changing, they saw that the figures were cut 
 into the cliff and painted in hollow relief. 
 
 They were still talking about the monsters 
 w^hen they heard the roar of a rapid ahead, and 
 the limpid Mississippi turned southward on its 
 course. It was as if they had never seen the 
 great river until this instant. For a mighty 
 flood, rushing through banks from the west, 
 yellow with mud, noisy as a storm, eddying 
 islands of branches, stumps, whole trees, took 
 possession of the fair stream they had followed 
 so long. It shot across the current of the Mis- 
 sissippi in entering so that the canoes danced 
 like eggshells and were dangerously forced to 
 the eastern bank. Afterwards they learned 
 that this was the Pekitanoiii, or, as we now 
 call it, the Missouri Piver, which flows into the 
 Mississippi not far above the present city of St. 
 Louis; and that by following it to its head 
 waters and making a short portage across a 
 prairie, a man might in time enter the Red or 
 Vermilion Sea of California. 
 
Bearers of the Calumet. 35 
 
 Having slipped out of the Missouri's reach, 
 the explorers were next threatened by a whirl- 
 pool among rocks before they reached the mouth 
 of Ouaboukigou, the Ohio River. They saw 
 purple, red, and violet earths, which ran down 
 in streams of color when wet, and a sand which 
 stained their paddles like blood. Tall canes 
 began to feather the shore, and mosquitoes 
 tormented them as they pressed on through 
 languors of heat. Jolliet and Marquette made 
 awnings of sails which they had brought as a 
 help to the paddles. They were floating down 
 the current of the muddy, swollen river when 
 they saw Indians with guns on the east shore. 
 The voyageurs dropped their paddles and seized 
 their own weapons. Marquette stood up and 
 spoke to the Indians in Huron. They made no 
 answer. He held up the white calumet. Then 
 they began to beckon, and when the party drew 
 to land, they made it clear that they had them- 
 selves been frightened until they saw the Black- 
 robe holding the calumet. A long-haired tribe, 
 somewhat resembling the Iroquois, but calling 
 themselves Tuscaroras; they were rovers, and 
 had axes, hoes, knives, beads, and double glass 
 bottles holding gunpowder, for which they had 
 traded Avith white people eastward. 
 
36 
 
 Heroes of the 3Uddle West. 
 
 They fed the French with buffalo meat and 
 white plums, and declared it was but a ten 
 days' journey to the sea. In this they were mis- 
 taken, for it was more than a thousand miles 
 to the Gulf of Mexico. 
 
 To each tribe as he passed, Marquette preached 
 his faith by the belt of the prayer. For each 
 
 Wampum Girdle. 
 
 he had a wampum girdle to hold while he talked, 
 and to leave for a remembrance. His Avords 
 without a witness would be forgotten. 
 
 Three hundred miles farther the explorers 
 ventured, and had nearly reached the mouth of 
 the Arkansas River, floating on a wide expanse 
 of water between lofty woods, Avhen they heard 
 wild yelling on the west shore, and saw a crowd 
 of savages pushing out huge wooden canoes to 
 surround them. Some swam to seize the French- 
 men, and a war club was thrown over their 
 heads. Marquette held up the peace-pipe, but 
 the wild young braves in the water paid no 
 
Bearers of the Calumet. 37 
 
 attention to it. Arrows were ready to fly from 
 all sides, and Marquette held the peace-pipe 
 on high and continually prayed. At once old 
 Indians restrained the young ones. In their 
 turmoil they liad not at first seen the calumet ; 
 but two chiefs came directly out to bring the 
 strangers ashore. 
 
 Not one of the missionary's six languages was 
 understood by these Indians. He at last found 
 a man who spoke a little Illinois, and Jolliet 
 and he were able to explain their errand. He 
 preached by presents, and obtained a guide to 
 the next nation. 
 
 On that part of the river where the French 
 came to a halt, the Spanish explorer De Soto 
 was said to have died two hundred years before. 
 In this region the Indians had never seen snow, 
 and their land yielded three crops a year. Their 
 pots and plates were of baked earth, and they 
 kept corn in huge gourds, or in baskets woven 
 of cane fibers. They knew nothing of beaver 
 skins; tiieir furs were the hides of buffaloes. 
 Watermelons grew abundantly in their fields. 
 Though they had large wigwams of bark, they 
 wore no clothing, and hung beads from their 
 pierced noses and ears. 
 
 These Akamsea, or Arkansas Indians showed 
 
38 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 traits of the Aztecs under Spanish dominion; 
 for what is now the state of Texas was then 
 claimed by Spain. Marquette and Jolliet held 
 a council. They were certain that the great 
 river discharged itself into the Gulf of Mexico. 
 If they ventured farther, they might fall into 
 the hands of Spaniards, who would imprison 
 them ; or they might be killed by fiercer tribes 
 than any yet encountered, and in either case 
 their discoveries would be lost. So they decided 
 to turn back. 
 
 All day the Arkansas feasted them with 
 merciless savage hospitality, and it was not 
 polite to refuse food or the attention of rock- 
 ing. Two stout Indians would seize a voyageur 
 between them and rock him back and forth for 
 hours. If the motion nauseated him, that was 
 his misfortune. 
 
 Pierre Porteret crept out behind one of the 
 bark lodges looking very miserable in the fog of 
 early morning. His companion on many a long 
 journey, never far out of his shadow, sat down 
 to compare experiences. 
 
 " Did they rock thee all night, Pierre? " 
 
 " They rocked me all night, Jacques. I can 
 well endure what most men can, but this is 
 carrying politeness too far." 
 
Bearers of the Calumet. 39 
 
 "I was not so favored. They would have 
 saved you if they had killed the rest of us. 
 And they would have saved the good father, 
 no doubt, since the chief came and danced the 
 calumet before him." 
 
 " Were these red cradle-rockers intending to 
 make an end of us in the night? " 
 
 " So the chief says ; but he broke up the 
 council, and will set us safely on our journey 
 up river to-day." 
 
 "I am glad of that," said Pierre. "Father 
 Marquette hath not the strength of the Sieur 
 Jolliet for such rude wanderings. These south- 
 ern mists, and torturing insects, and clammy 
 heats, and the bad food have worked a great 
 change in him." 
 
 "We have been gone but two months from 
 the Mission of St. Ignace," said Jacques. " They 
 have the bigness of years." 
 
 " And many more months that have the big- 
 ness of years will pass before we see it again." 
 
 They grew more certain of this, when, after 
 toiling up the current through malarial nights 
 and sweltering days, the explorers left the Mis- 
 sissippi and entered the river Illinois. There, 
 above Peoria Lake, another Illinois town of 
 seventy-four lodges was found, and these Kas- 
 
40 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 kaskias so clung to the Blackrobe that he 
 promised to come back and teach them. From 
 the head waters of the Illinois a portage was 
 made to Lake Michigan, and the French returned 
 to the Bay of the Puans alongshore. They had 
 traveled over twenty-five hundred miles, and 
 accomplished the object of their journey. 
 
 JoUiet, with his canoe of voyageurs, his maps 
 and papers, and the young Indian boy given 
 him by the Illinois chief, went on to Montreal. 
 His canoe was upset in the rapids of Lachine 
 just above Montreal, and he lost two men, the 
 Indian boy, his papers, and nearly everything 
 except his life. But he was able to report to 
 the governor all that he had seen and done. 
 
 Marquette lay ill, at the Bay of the Puans, of 
 dysentery, brought on by hardship ; and he was 
 never well again. Being determined, however, 
 to go back and preach to the tribe on the Illinois 
 River, he waited all winter and all the next sum- 
 mer to regain his strength. He carefully wrote 
 out and sent to Canada the story of his discov- 
 eries and labors. In autumn, with Pierre Por- 
 teret and the voyageur Jacques, he ventured 
 again to the Illinois. Once he became so ill 
 they were obliged to stop and build him a cabin 
 in the wilderness, at the risk of being snowed 
 
Bearers of the Caliimet. 41 
 
 in all Avinter. It was not until April that he 
 reached what he called his Mission of the 
 Immaculate Conception, on the Illinois River, 
 through snow, and water and mud, hunger and 
 misery. He preached until after Easter, when, 
 his strength being exhausted, Pierre and Jacques 
 undertook to carry him home to the Mission of 
 St. Ignace. Marquette had been two years 
 away from his palisaded station on the north 
 shore, and nine years in the New World. 
 
 It was the 19 th of May, and Pierre and 
 Jacques were paddling their canoe along the 
 east side of that great lake known jiow as 
 Michigan. A creek parted the rugged coast, 
 and dipping near its shallow mouth they looked 
 anxiously at each other. 
 
 "What shall we do?" whispered Jacques. 
 
 " We must get on as fast as we can," answered 
 Pierre. 
 
 They were gaunt and weather-beaten them- 
 selves from two years' tramping the wilderness. 
 But their eyes dwelt most piteously on the dying 
 man stretched in the bottom of the canoe. His 
 thin fingers held a cross. His white face and 
 bright hair rested on a pile of blankets. Pierre 
 and Jacques felt that no lovelier, kinder being 
 than this scarcely breathing missionary would 
 
42 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 ever float on the blue water under that blue 
 sky. 
 
 He opened his eyes and saw the creek they 
 were slipping past, and a pleasant knoll beside 
 it, and whispered : — 
 
 " There is the place of my burial." 
 
 "But, Father," pleaded Pierre, "it is yet 
 early in the day. We can take you farther." 
 
 " Carry me ashore here," he whispered again. 
 
 So they entered the creek and took him 
 ashore, building a fire and sheltering him as 
 well as they could. There a few hours after- 
 ward he died, the weeping men holding up his 
 cross before him, while he thanked the Divine 
 Majesty for letting him die a poor missionary. 
 When he could no longer speak, they repeated 
 'aloud the prayers he had taught them. 
 
 They left him buried on that shore with a 
 large cross standing over his grave. Later his 
 Indians" removed his bones to the Mission of St. 
 Ignace, with a procession of canoes and a priest 
 intoning. They were placed under the altar of 
 his own chapel. If you go to St. Ignace, jou 
 may see a monument now on that spot, and 
 people have believed they traced the foundation 
 of the old bark chapel. But the spot where he 
 first lay was long venerated. 
 
Bearers of the Calumet. 43 
 
 A great fur trader and pioneer named Gurdon 
 Hubbard made this record about the place, which 
 he visited in 1818 : — 
 
 " We reached Marquette River, about where 
 the town of Ludington now stands on the 
 Michigan shore. This was where Father Mar- 
 quette died, about one hundred and forty years 
 before, and we saw the remains of a red-cedar 
 cross, erected by his men at the time of his 
 death to mark his grave ; and though his remains 
 had been removed to the Mission, at Point St. 
 Ignace, the cross was held sacred by the voy- 
 ageurs, who, in passing, paid reverence to it, 
 by kneeling and making the sign of the cross. 
 It was about three feet above the ground, and 
 in a falling condition. We reset it, leaving 
 it out of the ground about two feet, and as I 
 never saw it after, I doubt not that it was 
 covered by the drifting sands of the following 
 winter, and that no white man ever saw it 
 afterwards." 
 
III. 
 
 THE MAN WITH THE COPPER HAND. 
 
 One day at the end of August, when Mar- 
 quette's bones had lain under his chapel altar 
 nearly two years and a half, the first ship ever 
 seen upon the lakes was sighted off St. 
 Ignace. Hurons and Ottawas, French traders, 
 and coureurs de bois, or wood-rangers, ran out 
 to see the huge winged creature scudding 
 betwixt Michilimackinac Island and Round 
 Island. She was of about forty-five tons' bur- 
 den. Five cannon showed through her port- 
 holes, and as she came nearer, a carved dragon 
 was seen to be her figurehead; she displayed 
 the name Griffin and bore the white flag 
 of France. The priest himself felt obliged to 
 receive her company, for three Recollet friars, 
 in the gray robe of St. Francis, appeared on the 
 deck. But two men, one in a mantle of scarlet 
 and gold, and the other in white and gold French 
 uniform, were most watched by all eyes. 
 
 The ship fired a salute, and the Indians 
 howled with terror and started to run ; then 
 44 
 
- CO 
 
 = ^ 
 
 ■5 o 
 
 ^ X 
 
 ? m 
 
 = 5 
 
 '_ -n 
 
 i % 
 
The Man ivitli the Copper Hand. 45 
 
 turned back to see her drop her sails and her 
 anchor, and come up in that deep crescent- 
 shaped bay. She had weathered a hard storm 
 in Lake Huron ; but the men who handled her 
 ropes were of 
 little interest to 
 coureurs de bois 
 on shore, who 
 watched her 
 masters coming 
 to land. 
 
 "ItistheSieur 
 de la Salle in the 
 scarlet mantle," 
 one coureur de 
 bois said to an- 
 other. "And this 
 
 ,-, ^ • -i La Salle. 
 
 IS the ship he 
 
 hath been building at Niagara. First one hears 
 
 that creditors have seized his fort of Fronte- 
 
 nac, and then one beholds him sailing here in 
 
 state, as though naught on earth could daunt 
 
 him." 
 
 "I would like service with him," said the 
 other coureur de bois. 
 
 His companion laughed. 
 
 " Service with La Salle means the hardest 
 
46 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 marching and heaviest labor a voyageur ever 
 undertook. I have heard he is himself tough 
 as iron. But men hereabouts who have been 
 in his service will take to the woods when they 
 hear he has arrived ; traders that he sent ahead 
 with goods. If he gets his hand on them after 
 he finds they have squandered his property, it 
 w^ill go hard with them." 
 
 '' He has a long gray-colored face above his 
 broad shoulders. I have heard of this Sieur 
 Robert Cavelier de la Salle ever since he came 
 to the province more than ten years ago, but 
 I never saw him before. Is it true that Count 
 Frontenac is greatly bound to him?" 
 
 " So true that Sieur de la Salle thereby got 
 favor at court. It was at court that a prince 
 recommended to him yon swart Italian in white 
 and gold that he brought with him on his last 
 voyage from France. Now, there is a man 
 known already throughout the colony by reason 
 of his hand." 
 
 "Which hand?" 
 
 " The right one." 
 
 "I see naught ailing that. He wears long 
 gauntlets pulled well over both wrists." 
 
 " His left hand is on his sword hilt. Doth 
 he not hold the right a little stiffly?" 
 
The Man with the Copper Hand. 47 
 
 " It is true. The fingers are not bent." 
 
 " They never will be bent. It is a hand of 
 copper." 
 
 " How can a man with a copper hand be of 
 service in the wilderness?" 
 
 The first ranger shrugged. " That I know 
 not. But having been maimed in European 
 wars and fitted with a copper hand, he was yet 
 recommended to Sieur de la Salle." 
 
 "But why hath an Italian the uniform of 
 France?" 
 
 " He is a French officer, having been exiled 
 with his father from his own country." 
 
 The coureur de bois, Avho had reached the 
 settlement later than his companion, grunted. 
 
 " One would say thou w^ert of the Griffin 
 crew thyself, with the latest news from Quebec 
 and Montreal." 
 
 "Not I," laughed the first one. "I have only 
 been in the woods with Greysolon du Lhut, who 
 knows everything." 
 
 " Then he told thee the name of this Italian 
 with the copper hand?" 
 
 "Assuredly. This Italian with the copper 
 hand is Sieur Greysolon du Lhut's cousin, and 
 his name is Henri de Tonty." 
 
 "I will say this for Monsieur Henri de 
 
48 Heroes of the Middle iVest. 
 
 Tonty : a better made man never stepped on 
 the strand at St. Ignace." 
 
 Greysolon du Lhut was the captain of coureurs 
 
 de bois in the northwest. No other leader had 
 
 such influence with the 
 
 ^^gm^^^ t laAvless and daring. 
 
 '^ J^Jyji^ jfljf When these men were 
 
 m^^^ ^ ir^I gathered in a settlement, 
 
 *^^ spending what they had 
 
 Autograph of Tonty. t . , . , . , 
 
 earned in drinking and 
 gaming, it was hard to restrain them within 
 civilized bounds. But when they took service 
 to shoulder loads and march into the wilderness, 
 the strongest hand could not keep them from 
 open rebellion and desertion. There were few 
 devoted and faithful voyageurs, such as Pierre 
 Porteret and Jacques had proved themselves in 
 following Marquette. The term of service was 
 usually two years ; but at the first hardship some 
 might slip away in the night, even at the risk of 
 perishing before they reached the settlements. 
 
 St. Ignace made a procession behind La Salle's 
 party and followed them into the chapel to hear 
 mass — French traders, Ottawas, Hurons, cou- 
 reurs de bois, squaws, and children. When tlie 
 priest turned from the altar, he looked down on 
 complexions ranging from the natural pallor of 
 
The Man ivith the Copper Hand. 
 
 49 
 
 La Salle to the black-red of the most weather- 
 beaten native. 
 
 The Hurons then living at St. Ignace, whom 
 Father Marquette had led there from his earlier 
 mission, af ter- 
 wards wandered 
 to Detroit and 
 Sandusky, the 
 priests having 
 decided to aban- 
 don St. Ignace 
 and burn the 
 chapel. In our 
 own day we hear 
 of their descend- 
 ants as settled in 
 the Indian Territory, the smallest but wealthiest 
 band of all transplanted Indians. 
 
 Having entered the lake region with impres- 
 sive ceremonies, which he well knew how to 
 employ before ignorant men and savages, La 
 Salle threw aside his splendor, and, with his 
 lieutenant, put on the buckskins for marching 
 and canoe journeying into the wilderness. Some 
 of the men he had sent up the lakes with goods 
 nearly a year before had collected a large store 
 of furs, worth much money; and these he de- 
 
 Totem of the Hurons. 
 
50 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 termined to send back to Canada on the Griffin, 
 to satisfy his creditors and to give him means 
 for carrying on his plans. He had meant, after 
 sending Tonty on to the Illinois country, to 
 return to Canada and settle his affairs. But 
 it became negessary, as soon as he landed at 
 St. Ignace, to divide his party and send Tonty 
 with some of the men to Sault Ste. Marie after 
 plunderers who had made off with his goods. 
 The others Avould doubtless desert if left any 
 length of time without a leader. It was a risk 
 also to send his ship back to the colony without 
 standing guard over its safety himself. But he 
 greatly needed the credit which its load of furs 
 would give him. So he determined to send it 
 manned as it was, with orders to return to the 
 head of Lake Michigan as soon as the cargo was 
 safely landed ; while he voyaged down the west 
 side of the lake, and Tonty, returning from the 
 Sault, came by the east shore. The reunited 
 party would then have the Griffin as a kind of 
 floating fort or refuge, and by means of it keep 
 easily in communication with the settlements. 
 
 La Salle wanted to build a chain of forts from 
 Niagara to the mouth of the Mississippi, when 
 that could be reached. Around each of these, 
 and protected by them, he foresaw settlements 
 
The Man with the Copper Hand. 51 
 
 of French and Indians, and a vast trade in furs 
 and the products of the undeveloped west. Thus 
 France wouki acquire a province many times its 
 own size. The undertaking was greater than 
 conquering a kingdom. Nobody else divined at 
 that time the wonderful promise of the west as 
 La Salle pictured it. Little attention had been 
 paid to the discoveries of Marquette and Jolliet. 
 France would have got no benefit from them 
 had not La Salle so soon followed on the track 
 of missionary and trader, verified what had been 
 done, and pushed on. 
 
 He had seen Jolliet twice. The first time 
 they met near Niagara, when both were explor- 
 ing ; the second time, Jolliet is said to have 
 stopped with his maps and papers before they 
 were lost at Fort Frontenac, on his return from 
 his Mississippi voyage. La Salle, then master 
 of Fort Frontenac, must have examined these 
 charts and journals with interest. It does not 
 appear that the two men were ever very friendly. 
 Jolliet was too easily satisfied to please La 
 Salle ; he had not the ability to spread France's 
 dominion over the whole western wilderness, 
 and that was what La Salle was planning to 
 do before Marquette and Jolliet set out for the 
 Mississippi. 
 
52 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 St. Ignace became once more the starting 
 point of an important expedition, though La 
 Salle, before sending the Griffin back, sailed in 
 her as far as the Bay of Puans, where many of 
 his furs were collected. He parted with this 
 good ship in September. She pointed her prow 
 eastward, and he turned south with fourteen 
 men in four canoes, carrying tools, arms, goods, 
 and even a blacksmith's forge. 
 
 Through storm, and famine, and peril with 
 Indians they labored down the lake, and did 
 not reach the place where they were to meet 
 Tonty until the first of November. La Salle 
 had the three RecoUet friars with him. Though 
 one was a man sixty-four years old, he bore, 
 with his companions, every hardship patiently 
 and cheerfully. The story of priests wlio helped 
 to open the wilderness and who carried religion 
 to savages is a beautiful chapter of our national 
 life. 
 
 Tonty was not at the place where they were 
 to meet him. This was the mouth of the St. 
 Joseph River, which La Salle named the Miamis. 
 The men did not want to w^ait, for they were 
 afraid of starving if they reached the Illinois 
 country after the Indians had scattered to winter 
 hunting grounds. But La Salle would not go on 
 
The Man ivith the Copper Hand. 53 
 
 until Tonty appeared. He put the men to work 
 building a timber stockade, which he called Fort 
 Miamis ; thus beginning in the face of discourage- 
 ment his plan of creating a line of fortifications. 
 
 Tonty, delayed by lack of provisions and the 
 need of hunting, reached Fort Miamis with his 
 men in twenty days. But the Griffin did not 
 come at all. More than time enough had passed 
 for her to reach Fort Niagara, unload her cargo, 
 and return. La Salle watched the lake con- 
 stantly for her sails. He began to be heavy- 
 hearted for her, but he dared wait no longer; 
 so, sending two men back to meet and guide 
 her to this new post, he moved on. 
 
 Eight canoes carried his party of thirty-three 
 people. They ascended the St. Joseph River to 
 find a portage to the head waters of the Illinois. 
 This brought them within the present state of 
 Indiana ; and when they had reached that curve 
 of the river where South Bend now stands, they 
 left St. Joseph to grope for the Theakiki, or 
 Kankakee, a branch called by some Indians the 
 Illinois itself. 
 
 La Salle became separated from the party on 
 this portage, eagerly and fearlessly scouring the 
 woods for the river's beginning. Tonty camped 
 and waited for him, fired guns, called, and 
 
54 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 searched; but he was gone all night and until 
 the next afternoon. The stars were blotted 
 overhead, for a powder of snow thickened the 
 air, weirdly illuminating naked trees in the dark- 
 ness, but shutting in his vision. It was past 
 midnight when he came in this blind circle once 
 more to the banks of the St. Joseph, and saw a 
 fire glinting through dense bushes. 
 
 "Now I have reached camp," thought La 
 Salle, and he fired his gun to let his people know 
 he was approaching. Echoes rolled through the 
 woods. Without waiting for a shot m reply he 
 hurried to the fire. No person was near it. The 
 descending snow hissed, caught in the flames. 
 Here was a home hearth prepared m the wilder- 
 ness, and no welcome to it but silence. La Salle 
 called out in every Indian language he knew. 
 Dead branches grated, and the stream rustled 
 betwixt its edges of ice. A heap of dry grass 
 was gathered for a bed under a tree by the fire, 
 and its elastic top showed the hollow where a 
 man had lain. La Salle put some more wood 
 on the fire, piled a barricade of brush around the 
 bed, and lay do^vn in a place left warm by some 
 strolling Indian whom his gun had frightened 
 away. He slept until morning. In the after- 
 noon he found his own camp. 
 
The Man with the Copimr Hand. 55 
 
 From the first thread of the Kankakee ooziiig 
 out of swamps to the Indian town on the Illi- 
 nois River where Marquette had done his last 
 missionary work, was a long canoe journey. It 
 has been said the rivers of the New World made 
 its rapid settlement possible ; for they were open 
 highways, even in the dead of winter guiding 
 the explorer by their frozen courses. 
 
 The Illinois tribe had scattered to their hunt- 
 ing, and the lodges stood empty. La Salle's 
 men were famished for supplies, so he ventured 
 to open the covered pits in which the Indians 
 stored their corn. Nothing was more precious 
 than this hidden grain ; but he paid for what he 
 took when he reached the Indians. This was not 
 until after New Year's day. He had descended 
 the river as far as that expansion now called 
 Peoria Lake. 
 
 The Illinois, after their first panic at the 
 appearance of strange white men, received La 
 Salle's party kindly, fed all with their owti 
 fingers, and, as they had done with JoUiet and 
 Marquette when those explorers passed them on 
 the Mississippi, tried to coax their guests to go 
 no farther. They and other Indians who came 
 to the winter camp told such tales of danger on 
 that great river about which the French knew 
 
56 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 so little, that six of La Salle's men deserted in 
 one night. 
 
 This caused him to move half a league beyond 
 the Illinois camp, where, on the southern Lank, 
 he built a palisaded fort and called it Crevecoeur. 
 He was by this time convinced that the Griffin 
 was lost. Whether she went down in a storm, 
 or was scuttled and sunk by those to whom he 
 intrusted her, nothing was ever heard of her 
 again. The furs he had sent to pay his credi- 
 tors never in any way reached port. If they 
 escaped shipwreck, they were stolen by the men 
 who escaped with them. 
 
 Nothing could bend La Salle's resolution. He 
 meant in some way to explore the west through 
 which the southern Mississippi ran. But the 
 loss of the Griffin hurt him sorely. He could 
 not go on without more supplies ; and having 
 no vessel to bring them, the fearful necessity 
 was before him of returning on foot and by 
 canoe to Fort Frontenac to bring them him- 
 self. 
 
 He began to build another ship on the Illinois 
 River, aiid needed cables and rigging for her. 
 This vessel being partly finished by the first of 
 March, he left her and Fort Crevecoeur in 
 Tonty's charge, and, taking four Frenchmen 
 
The Man ivith the Copijev Hand. 57 
 
 and a Mohegaii hunter, set out on the long and 
 terrible journey to Fort Frontenac. 
 
 The Italian commandant with the copper hand 
 could number on its metal fingers the only men 
 to be trusted in his garrison of fifteen. One 
 Recollet, Father Louis Hennepin, had been sent 
 with two companions by La Salle to explore the 
 upper Mississippi. Father Ribourde and Father 
 Membre remained. The young Sieur de Bois- 
 rondet might also be relied on, as well as a 
 Parisian lad named Etienne Renault, and their 
 servant L'Esperance. As for the others, smiths, 
 shipwrights, and soldiers were ready to mutiny 
 any moment. They cared nothing about the 
 discovery of the west. They were afraid of La 
 Salle when he was with them ; and, though it 
 is said no man could help loving Tonty, these 
 lawless fellows loved their own wills better. 
 
 The two men that La Salle had sent to look 
 for the Grifiin arrived at Fort Crevecoeur, bear- 
 ing a message from him, having met him on the 
 way. They had no news, but he wrote a letter 
 and sent them on to Tonty. He urged Tonty 
 to take part of the garrison and go and fortify a 
 great rock he had noticed opposite the Illinois 
 town. Whatever La Salle wanted done Tonty 
 was anxious to accomplish, though separating 
 
58 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 himself from Crevecoeur, even for a day, was a 
 dangerous experiment. But he took some men 
 and ascended the river to the rock. Straight- 
 way smiths, shij^wrights, and soldiers in Creve- 
 coeur, seizing powder, lead, furs, and j)ro visions, 
 deserted and made their way back to Canada. 
 Boisrondet, the friars, and L'Esperance hurried 
 to tell Tonty; and thus Fort Crevecoeur and 
 the partly finished shii) had to be abandoned. 
 Tonty dispatched four men to warn La Salle of 
 the disaster. He could neither hold this posi- 
 tion nor fortify the rock in the midst of jealous 
 savages with two friars, one young officer, a lad, 
 and one servant. He took the forge, and tools, 
 and all that was left in Crevecoeur into the very- 
 heart of the Indian village and built a long 
 lodge, shaped like the wigwams of the Illinois. 
 This was the only way to put down their sus- 
 picion. Seeing that the Frenchmen had come 
 to dwell among them, the Indians were pleased, 
 and their women helped with poles and mats to 
 build the lodge. 
 
 For by this time, so long did it take to cover 
 distances in the wilderness, spring and summer 
 were past, and the Illinois were dwelling in their 
 great town, nearly opposite the rock which La 
 Salle desired to have fortified. Tonty often 
 
The Man ivith the Copper Hand. 59 
 
 gazed at it across the river, which flows south- 
 westward there, with a ripple that does not break 
 mto actual rapids. The yellow sandstone height, 
 rising like a square mountain out of the shore, 
 was tufted with ferns and trees. No man could 
 ascend it except at the southeast corner, and at 
 that place a ladder or a rope was needed by the 
 unskillful. It had a flat, grassy top shut in by 
 trees, through which one could see the surround- 
 ing country as from a tower. A ravine behind 
 it was banked and floored with dazzling white 
 sand, and walled at the farther side by a timbered 
 cliff rising to a prairie. With a score of men 
 Tonty could have held this natural fortress 
 against any attack. Buckets might be rigged 
 from overhanging trees to draw up water from 
 the river. Provisions and ammunition only 
 were needed for a garrison. This is now called 
 Starved Rock, and is nearly opposite the town of 
 Utica. Some distance up the river is a longer 
 ridge, yet known as Buffalo Rock, easy of ascent 
 at one end, up which the savages are said to have 
 chased buffaloes ; and precipitous at the other, 
 down which the frightened beasts plunged to 
 death. 
 
 The tenth day of September a mellow autumn 
 sun shone on maize fields where squaws labored. 
 
60 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 on lazy old braves sprawled around buffalo robes, 
 gambling with cherry stones, and on peaceful 
 lodges above which the blue smoke faintly 
 wavered. It was so warm the fires were nearly 
 out. Young warriors of the tribes were away 
 on an expedition ; but the populous Indian town 
 swarmed with its thousands. 
 
 Father Ribourde and Father Membre had 
 that morning withdrawn a league up the river 
 to make what they called a retreat for prayer 
 and meditation. The other Frenchmen were 
 divided between lodge and garden. 
 
 Near this living town was the town of the 
 dead, a hamlet of scaffolds, where, wrapped in 
 skins, above the reach of wolves, Illinois Indians 
 of a past generation slept their winters and 
 summers away. Crows flapped across them 
 and settled on the corn, causing much ado 
 among the papooses who were set to shout 
 and rattle sticks for the protection of the crop. 
 
 Suddenly a man ran into camp, having just 
 leaped from the canoe which brought him across 
 the river. When he had talked an instant old 
 braves bounded to their feet with furious cries, 
 the tribes flocked out of lodges, and women and 
 children caught the panic and came screeching. 
 
 "What is the matter?" exclaimed Tonty, 
 
The Man ivith the Copper Hand. 61 
 
 unable to understand their rapid jargon. The 
 Frenchmen drew together with the instinct of 
 uniting in peril, and, led by old men, the 
 Indian mob turned on them. 
 
 "What is it?" cried Tonty. 
 
 " The Iroquois are coming ! The Iroquois 
 are coming to eat us up I These Frenchmen 
 have brought the Iroquois upon us I " 
 
 " Will you stand off ! '-' Tonty warned them. 
 And every brave in the town knew what they 
 called the medicine hand in his right gauntlet, 
 powerful and hard as a war club. They stood 
 in awe of it as something more than human. 
 He put his followers behind him. The French- 
 men crowded back to back, facing the savage 
 crowd. Hampered by his imperfect knowledge 
 of their language, he hearkened intently to the 
 jangle of raging voices, his keen dark eyes 
 sweeping from face to face. Tonty was a man 
 of impressive presence, who inspired confidence 
 even in Indians. They held back from slaying 
 him and his people, but fiercely accused him. 
 Young braves dragged from the French lodge 
 the goods and forge saved from Fort Crevecoeur, 
 and ran yelling to heave everything into the 
 river. 
 
 " The Iroquois are your friends ! The Iroquois 
 
62 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 are at peace with the French ! But they are 
 marchmg here to eat us up!" 
 
 "We know nothing about the Iroquois!" 
 shouted Tonty. " If they are coming we will 
 go out with you to fight them !" 
 
 Only half convinced, but panic-stricken from 
 former encounters with a foe who always drove 
 them off their land, they turned from threaten- 
 ing Tonty and ran to push out their canoes. 
 Into these were put the women and children, 
 with supplies, and all were paddled down river 
 to an island, where guards could be set. The 
 warriors then came back and prepared for fight- 
 ing. They greased their bodies, painted their 
 faces, made ready their weapons, and danced 
 and howled to excite one another to courage. 
 All night fires along shore, and leaping figures, 
 were reflected in the dark river. 
 
 About dawn, scouts who had been sent to 
 watch the Iroquois came running with news 
 that the enemy were almost in sight across the 
 prairie on the opposite side, slipping under cover 
 of woods along a small branch of the Illinois 
 River. They had guns, pistols, and swords, and 
 carried bucklers of rawhide. The scouts declared 
 that a Jesuit priest and La Salle himself led 
 them. 
 
The Man ivith the Copper Hand. 63 
 
 The Frenchmen's lives seemed hardly a breath 
 long. In the midst of maddened, screeching 
 savages Tonty and his men once more stood 
 back to back, and he pushed off knives with 
 his copper hand. 
 
 " Do you want to kill yourselves ? " he shouted. 
 " If you kill us, the French governor will not 
 leave a man of you alive ! I tell you Monsieur 
 de la Salle is not with the Iroquois, nor is any 
 priest leading them ! Do you not remember the 
 good Father Marquette? Would such men as 
 he lead tribes to fight one another ? If all the 
 Iroquois had stolen French clothes, you would 
 think an army of Jesuits and Messieurs de la 
 Salle were coming against you!" 
 
 '' But some one has brought the Iroquois 
 upon us!" 
 
 " I told you before we know nothing about 
 the Iroquois! But we will go with you now 
 to fight them!" 
 
 At that the Illinois put their knives in their 
 belts and ran shouting to throw themselves into 
 the canoes. Warfare with American Indians 
 was always the rush of a mob, where every one 
 acted for himself without military order. 
 
 " It is well the good friars are away making 
 their retreat," said Tonty to Boisrondet and 
 
64 
 
 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 Etienne Renault while they paddled as fast as 
 they could across the river with the Illinois. 
 " Poor old L'Esperance must be making a 
 retreat, too." 
 
 " I have not myself seen him since last night," 
 Boisrondet remembered. 
 
 "He put out in a canoe when the Indians 
 were embarking their women and children," 
 said Etienne Renault. " I saw him go." 
 
 And so it proved afterwards. But L'Esper- 
 ance had slipped away to bring back Father 
 Membre and Father Ribourde to tend the 
 wounded and dying. 
 
 Having crossed the river and reached the 
 prairie, Tonty and his allies saw the Iroquois. 
 
 Long House of the Iroquois. 
 
 They came prancing and screeching on their 
 savage march, and would have been ridiculous 
 if they had not been appalling. These Hodeno- 
 saunee, or People of the Long House, as they 
 
The Man icith the Coppei' Hand. ^5 
 
 called themselves, were the most terrible force 
 in the New World. Tonty saw at once it would 
 go hard with the Illinois nation. Never at any 
 time as hardy as their invaders, who by frequent 
 attacks had broken their courage, and weakened 
 by the absence of their best warriors, they 
 wavered in their first charge. 
 
 He put down his gun and offered to carry 
 a peace belt to the Iroquois to stop the fight. 
 The Illinois gladly gave him a wampum girdle 
 and sent a young Indian with him. Boisrondet 
 and Etienne Renault also walked at his side 
 into the open space between two barbaric 
 armies. The Iroquois did not stop firing when 
 he held up and waved the belt in his left hand. 
 Bullets spattered on the hummocky sod of the 
 prairie around him. 
 
 "Go back," Tonty said to Boisrondet and 
 Renault and the young Indian. " What need 
 is there of so many ? Take the lad back, Bois- 
 rondet." 
 
 They hesitated to leave him 
 
 "Go back!" he repeated sharply, so they 
 turned, and he ran on alone. The Iroquois 
 guns seemed to flash in his face. It was like 
 throwing himself among furious wolves. Snarl- 
 ing lips and snaky eyes and twisting sinuous 
 
66 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 bodies made nightmares around him. He felt 
 himself seized ; a young warrior stabbed him 
 in the side. The knife glanced on a rib, but 
 blood ran down his buckskins and filled his 
 throat. 
 
 "Stop!" shouted an Iroquois chief. "This 
 is a Frenchman ; his ears are not pierced." 
 
 Tonty's swarthy skin was blanching with the 
 anguish of his wound, which turned him faint. 
 His black hair clung in rings to a forehead wet 
 with cold perspiration. But he held the wam- 
 pum belt aloft and spat the blood out of his 
 mouth. 
 
 " Iroquois! The Illinois nation are under the 
 protection of the French king and Governor 
 Frontenac ! I demand that you leave them 
 in peace!" 
 
 A young brave snatched his hat and lifted it 
 on the end of a gun. At that the Illinois began 
 a frenzied attack, thinking he was killed. Tonty 
 was spun around as in a whirlpool. He felt a 
 hand in his hair and a knife at his scalp. 
 
 "I never," he thought to himself, "was in 
 such perplexity in my life ! " 
 
 " Burn him ! " shouted some. 
 
 " But he is French ! " others cried. " Let 
 him go ! " 
 
The Man with the Copper Hand. 67 
 
 Through all the uproar he urged the peace 
 belt and threatened them with France. The 
 wholesome dread which Governor Frontenac 
 had given to that name had effect on them. 
 Besides, they had not surprised the Illinois, 
 and if they declared a truce, time would be 
 gained to consider their future movements. 
 
 The younger braves were quieted, and old 
 warriors gave Tonty a belt to carry back to 
 the Illinois. He staggered across the prairie. 
 Father Ribourde and Father Membre, who had 
 just reached the spot, ran to meet him, and 
 supported him as he half fainted from loss of 
 blood. 
 
 Tonty and his allies withdrew across the 
 river. But the Iroquois, instead of retreating, 
 followed. Seeing Avhat must happen, Tonty 
 thought it best for the Illinois to give up their 
 town and go to protect their women and chil- 
 dren, while he attempted as long as possible 
 to keep the invaders at bay. Lodges were set 
 on fire, and the Illinois withdrew quietly down 
 river, leaving some of their men in the bluffs 
 less than a league from the town, to bring them 
 word of the result. The Frenchmen, partially 
 rebuilding their own lodge, which had been 
 wrecked when their goods were thrown in the 
 
68 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 river, stood their ground in the midst of insult- 
 ing savages. 
 
 For the Iroquois, still determined on war and 
 despoiling, opened maize pits, scattering and 
 burning the grain ; trampled corn in the fields ; 
 and even pulled the dead off their scaffolds. 
 They were angry at the French for threatening 
 them with that invisible power of France, and 
 bent on chasing the Illinois. Yet Tonty was 
 able to force a kind of treaty between them and 
 the retreating nation, through the men left in 
 the bluffs. As soon as they had made it, how- 
 ever, they began canoes of elm bark, to follow 
 the Illinois down river. 
 
 Two or three days passed, while the French- 
 men sat covering the invaded tribe's retreat. 
 They scarcely slept at night. Their enemies 
 prowled around their lodge or celebrated dances 
 on the ruins of the town. The river flowed 
 placidly, and the sun shone on desolation and 
 on the unaltered ferny buttresses of the great 
 rock and its castellated neighbors. Tonty heard 
 with half delirious ears the little creatures 
 which sing in the grass and fly before man, but 
 return to their singing as soon as he passes 
 by. The friars dressed and tended his fevered 
 wound, and when the Iroquois sent for him to 
 
The Man with the Copper Hand. 69 
 
 come to a council, Father Membre went with 
 him. 
 
 Within the rude fort of posts and poles saved 
 from ruined lodges, which the Iroquois had 
 built for themselves, adding a ruff of freshly 
 chopped trees, the two white men sat down in 
 a ring of glowering savages. Six packs of 
 beaver skins were piled ready for the oration ; 
 and the orator rose and addressed Tonty. 
 
 With the first two the Indian spokesman 
 promised that his nation would not eat Count 
 Frontenac's children, those cowardly Illinois. 
 
 The next was a plaster to heal Tonty's 
 wound. 
 
 The next was oil to anoint him and the 
 Recollets, so their joints Avould move easily 
 in traveling. 
 
 The next said that the sun was bright. 
 
 And the sixth and last pack ordered the 
 French to get up and leave the country. 
 
 When the speaker sat down, Tonty came 
 to his feet and looked at the beaver skins 
 piled before them. Then he looked around the 
 circle of hard weather-beaten faces and rest- 
 less eyes, and thanked the Iroquois for their 
 
 gift. 
 
 " But I would know," said Tonty, " how soon 
 
70 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 you yourselves intend to leave the country and 
 let the Illmois be m peace ? " 
 
 There was a growl, and a number of the 
 braves burst out with the declaration that they 
 intended to eat Illinois flesh first. 
 
 Tonty raised his foot and kicked the beaver 
 skins from him. In that very way they would 
 have rejected a one-sided treaty themselves. 
 Up they sprang with drawn knives and drove 
 him and Father Membre from the fort. 
 
 All night the French stood guard for fear of 
 being surprised and massacred in their lodge. 
 At daybreak the chiefs ordered them to go 
 without waiting another hour, and gave them 
 a leaky boat. 
 
 Tonty had protected the retreat of the Illinois 
 as long as he could. With the two RecoUets, 
 Boisrondet, young Renault, and L'Esperance, 
 and with little else, he set out up the river. 
 
o ~ 
 
IV. 
 
 THE UNDESPAIRING NORMAN. 
 
 " The northward current of the eastern shore 
 of Lake Michigan and the southward current 
 of the western shore," says a writer exact in 
 knowledge, "naturally made the St. Joseph 
 portage a return route to Canada, and the Chi- 
 cago portage an outbound one." But though 
 La Salle was a careful observer and must have 
 known that what was then called the Chekago 
 River afforded a very short carrying to the 
 Desplaines or upper Illinois, he saw fit to use 
 the St. Joseph both coming and going. 
 
 His march to Fort Frontenac he afterwards 
 described in a letter to one of the creditors 
 interested m his discoveries. 
 
 "Though the thaws of approaching spring 
 greatly increased the difficulty of the way, in- 
 terrupted as it was everj^vhere by marshes and 
 rivers, to say nothing of the length of the 
 journey, which is about five hundred leagues iii 
 a direct line, and the danger of meeting Indians 
 of four or five different nations, through whose 
 71 
 
72 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 country we were to pass, as well as an Iroquois 
 army which we knew was commg that way; 
 though we must suffer all the time from hunger ; 
 sleep on the open ground, and often without 
 food ; watch by night and march by day, loaded 
 with baggage, such as blanket, clothing, kettle, 
 hatchet, gun, powder, lead, and skins to make 
 moccasins ; sometimes pushing through thickets, 
 sometimes climbing rocks covered with ice and 
 snow ; sometimes wading whole days through 
 marshes where the water was waist deep or even 
 more, — all this did not prevent me from going 
 to Fort Frontenac to bring back the things we 
 needed and to learn myself what had become of 
 my vessel." 
 
 Carry mg their canoes where the river was 
 frozen, and finally leaving them hidden near 
 where the town of Joliet now stands, La Salle 
 and his men pushed on until they reached the 
 fort built at the mouth of the St. Joseph. Here 
 he found the two voyageurs he had sent to 
 search for the Griffin. They said they had been 
 around the lake and could learn nothmg of 
 her. He then directed them to Tonty, while 
 he marched up the eastern shore. This Michi- 
 gan region was debatable ground among the 
 Indians, where they met to fight; and he left 
 
The Undesjpairing Norman. 73 
 
 significant marks on the trees, to make prowlers 
 think he had a large war party. A dozen 
 or twenty roving savages, ready to pounce like 
 ferocious wildcats on a camp, always peeled 
 white places on the trees, and cut pictures there 
 of their totem, or tribe mark, and the scalps 
 and prisoners they had taken. They respected 
 a company more numerous than themselves, 
 and avoided it. 
 
 Stopping to nurse the sick when some fell ill 
 of exposure, or to build canoes when canoes 
 were needed, La Salle did not reach Fort Niag- 
 ara until Easter, and it was May when Fort 
 Frontenac came into view. 
 
 No man ever suffered more from treachery. 
 Before he could get together the supplies he 
 needed, trouble after trouble fell upon him. 
 The men that Tonty had sent to tell him about 
 the destruction of Fort Crevecoeur were followed 
 by others who brought word that the deserters 
 had destroyed his forts at the St. Joseph River 
 and Niagara, and carried off all the goods. The 
 Griffin was certainly lost. And before going 
 back to the Illinois country he was obliged to 
 chase these fellows and take from them what 
 could be recovered. But when everybody else 
 seemed to be against him, it was much comfort 
 
74 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 to remember he had a faithful lieutenant while 
 the copper-handed Italian lived. 
 
 La Salle gathered twenty-five men of - trades 
 useful to him, and another outfit with all that 
 he needed for a ship, having made new arrange- 
 ments with his creditors; and going by way 
 of Michilimackinac, he reached the St. Joseph 
 early in November. 
 
 Whenever, in our own day, we see the Kan- 
 kakee still gliding along its rocky bed, or the 
 solemn Illinois spreading betwixt wooded banks, 
 it is easy to imagine a birch canoe just appear- 
 ing around a bend, carrying La Salle or Tonty, 
 and rowed by buckskin-clad voyageurs. On 
 the Kankakee thousands of buffaloes filled the 
 plains, and La Salle's party killed many, pre- 
 parmg the flesh in dried flakes by smoking it. 
 
 The buffaloes were left behind wdien they 
 approached the great town on the Illinois. La 
 Salle glanced up at the rock he wanted fortified, 
 but no palisade or Frenchman was to be seen. 
 
 " It seems very quiet," he said to the men in 
 his canoe, " and we have not passed a hunter. 
 There — there is the meadow where the town 
 stood ; but where is the town ? " 
 
 Heaps of ashes, charred poles, broken scaf- 
 folds, wolves prowling where papooses had 
 
The Undesjjairing Korwan. 75 
 
 played, crows whirling in black clouds or 
 sitting in rows on naked branches, bones, — 
 a horrible waste plain had taken the place of 
 the town. 
 
 The Frenchmen scattered over it, eagerly 
 seeking some trace of Tonty and his compan- 
 ions. They labored all day, until the sun set, 
 among dreadful sights which they could never 
 forget, without finding any clue to his fate. 
 
 They piled charred wood together and made 
 a fire and camped among ruins. But La Salle 
 lay awake all night, watching the sharp-pointed 
 autumn stars march overhead, and suffering 
 what must have seemed the most unendurable 
 of all his losses. 
 
 Determined not to give up his friend, he rose 
 next morning and helped the men hide their 
 heavy freight in the rocks, leaving two of them 
 to hide with and guard it, and went on down 
 the Illinois River. On one bank the retreat of 
 the invaded tribe could be traced, and on the 
 other the dead camp-fires of the Iroquois who 
 had followed them. But of Tonty and his 
 Frenchmen there Avas still no sign. 
 
 La Salle saw the ruins of Fort Crevecoeur and 
 his deserted vessel. And so searching he came 
 to the mouth of the Illinois and saw for the first 
 
76 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 time that river of his ambitions, the Mississippi. 
 There he turned back, leaving a letter tied to a 
 tree, on the chance of its sometime falling into 
 the hands of Tonty. There was nothing to do 
 but to take his men and goods from among the 
 rocks near the destroyed town and return to 
 Fort Miamis, on the St. Joseph, which some of 
 his followers had rebuilt. The winter was upon 
 them. 
 
 La Salle never sat and brooded over trouble. 
 He was a man of action. Shut in with his men 
 and goods, and obliged to wait until spring 
 permitted him to take the next step, he began 
 at once to work on Indian hunters, and to draw 
 their tribes towards forming a settlement around 
 the rock he meant to fortify on the Illinois. 
 Had he been able to attach turbulent voyageurs 
 to him as he attached native tribes, his heroic 
 life would have ended in success even beyond 
 his dreams. Tonty could better deal with 
 ignorant men, his military training standing 
 him in good stead ; yet Tonty dared scarcely 
 trust a voyageur out of his sight. 
 
 While Tonty and La Salle were passing 
 through these adventures, the Recollet father, 
 Louis Hennepin, and his two companions, sent 
 by La Salle, explored the upper Mississippi. 
 
The UndesiKiiring Norman. 77 
 
 One of these was named Michael Ako ; the 
 other, Da Gay, a man from Picardy m France. 
 
 They left Fort Crevecoeur on the last day of 
 February, twenty-four hours before La Salle 
 started northward, and entered the Mississippi 
 on the 12th of March. The great food-stocked 
 stream afforded them plenty of game, wild 
 turkeys, buffaloes, deer, and fish. The adven- 
 turers excused themselves from observing the 
 Lenten season set apart by the Church for fast- 
 ing ; but Father Hennepin said prayers several 
 times a day. He was a great robust Fleming, 
 with almost as much endurance as that hardy 
 Norman, La Salle. 
 
 They had paddled about a month up river 
 through the region where Marquette and Jolliet 
 had descended, when one afternoon they stopped 
 to repair their canoe and cook a wild turkey. 
 Hennepin, with his sleeves rolled back, was 
 daubing the canoe with pitch, and the others 
 were busy at the fire, when a war whoop, fol- 
 lowed by continuous yelling, echoed from forest 
 to forest, and a hundred and twenty naked Sioux 
 or Dacotah Indians sprang out of boats to seize 
 them. It was no use for Father Hennepin to 
 show a peace-pipe or offer fine tobacco. The 
 Frenchmen were prisoners. And when these 
 
78 
 
 Heroes of the 3Ilddle West. 
 
 savages learned by questioning with signs, and 
 by drawing on the sand with a stick, that the 
 Miamis, whom they were pursuing to fight, were 
 
 far eastward out of 
 then- reach, three or 
 four old warriors laid 
 their hands on Hen- 
 nepin's shaven crown 
 and began to cry and 
 howl like little boys. 
 The friar in his 
 long gray capote or 
 hooded garment, 
 which fell to his feet, 
 girt about the waist 
 by a rope called the cord of St. Francis, stood, 
 with bare toes showing on his sandals, inclin- 
 ing his fat head with sympathy. He took out 
 his handkerchief and wiped the old men's faces. 
 Du Gay and Ako, in spite of the peril, laughed 
 to see him daub the war paint. 
 
 " The good father hath no suspicion that 
 these old wretches are dooming him to death," 
 said Ako to Du Gay. 
 
 It appeared afterwards that this was what the 
 ceremony meant. For several days the French- 
 men, carried northward in their captors' boats, 
 
 Totem of the Sioux. 
 
The Undesjmlring Norman. 79 
 
 expected to die. No calumet was smoked with 
 them ; and every night one of the old chiefs, 
 named Aquipaguetin, who had lost a son in war 
 and formed a particular intention of taking 
 somebody's scalp for solace, sat by the prisoners 
 stroking them and howling by the hour. One 
 night when the Frenchmen were forced to make 
 their fire at the end of the camp, Aquipaguetin 
 sent word that he meant to finish them without 
 more delay. But they gave him some goods 
 out of the store La Salle had sent with them, 
 and he changed his mind and concluded to wait 
 awhile. He carried the bones of one of his dead 
 relations, dried and wrapped in skins gaily orna- 
 mented witK porcupine-quill work ; and it was 
 his custom to lay these bones before the tribe and 
 request that everybody blow smoke on them. Of 
 the Frenchmen, however, he demanded hatchets, 
 beads, and cloth. This cunning old Sioux wanted 
 to get all he could before the party reached 
 their villages, where the spoil would be divided. 
 Nineteen days after their capture the prison- 
 ers were brought to a place which is now the 
 site of St. Paul in the state of Minnesota, where 
 the Sioux disbanded, scattering to their separate 
 towns. They had finally smoked the peace- 
 pipe Avith the Frenchmen ; and now, fortunately 
 
80 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 without disagreement, portioned their white 
 captives and distributed the goods. Father 
 Hennepin was given to Aquipaguetin, who 
 promptly adopted him as a son. The Flemish 
 friar saw with disgust his gold-embroidered 
 vestments, which a missionary always carried 
 with him for the impressive celebration of 
 mass, displayed on savage backs and greatly 
 admired. 
 
 The explorers were really in the way of seeing 
 as much of the upper Mississippi as they could 
 desire. They were far north of the Wisconsin's 
 mouth, where white men first entered the great 
 river. The young Mississippi, clear as a moun- 
 tain stream, gathered many small tributaries. 
 St. Peter's joined it from a blue-earth channel. 
 This rugged northern world was wonderfully 
 beautiful, with valleys and heights and rocks 
 and waterfalls. 
 
 The Sioux were tall, well-made Indians, and 
 so active that the smaller Frenchmen could 
 hardly keep up with them on the march. They 
 sometimes carried Du Gay and Ako over streams, 
 but the robust friar they forced to wade or swim; 
 and when he lagged lame-footed with exhaus- 
 tion across the prairies, they set fire to grass 
 behind him, obliging him to take to his heels 
 
The Undesj^airinf/ Norman. 81 
 
 with them or burn. By adoption into the family 
 of Aquipaguetin he had a large relationship 
 thrust upon him, for the old weeper had many 
 wives and children and other kindred. Hen- 
 nepin indeed felt that he was not needed and 
 might at any time be disposed of. He never 
 had that confidence in his father Aquipaguetin 
 which a son should repose in a parent. 
 
 He was separated from Ako and Du Gay, 
 who were taken to other villages. By the time 
 he reached father Aquepaguetin's house he was 
 so exhausted, and his legs, cut by ice in the 
 streams, were so swollen that he fell do^vn on 
 a bear robe. The village was on an island in a 
 sheet of water afterwards called Lake Buade. 
 Hennepin was kindly received by his new family, 
 who fed him as well as they were able, for the 
 Sioux had little food when they were not hunt- 
 ing. Seeing him so feeble, they gave him an 
 Indian SAveating bath, which he found good for 
 his health. They made a lodge of skins so tight 
 that it would hold heat, and put into it stones 
 baked to a white heat. On these they poured 
 water and shut Hennepin m the steam until he 
 sweated freely. 
 
 The Sioux had two kinds of lodges — one 
 somewhat resemblmg those of the Illinois, the 
 
82 Heroes of the JMiddle West. 
 
 other a cone of poles with skins stretched 
 around, called a tepee. 
 
 Father Hennepin did little missionary work 
 among these Indians. He suffered much from 
 hunger, being a man who loved good cheer. But 
 the tribes went on a buffalo hunt in July and 
 killed plenty of meat. All that northern world 
 was then clothed in vivid verdure. Honey- 
 suckles and wild grapevines made the woods 
 fragrant. The gentian, which jealously closes 
 its blue-fringed cup from the human eye, grew 
 close to the lakes. Captive though the French- 
 men were, they could not help enjoying the 
 evening camp-fire with its weird flickerings 
 against the dark of savage forests, the heat- 
 lightning which heralded or followed storms, 
 the waters, clear, as if filtered through icebergs, 
 dashing in foam over mossy rocks. 
 
 They met during the buffalo hunt, and it 
 was about this time that some '' spirits," or white 
 men, were heard of, coming from Lake Superior. 
 These proved to be the great ranger Greysolon 
 du Lhut and four other Frenchmen. 
 
 This man, cousin to Tonty, passed nearly his 
 whole life in the woods, going from Indian town 
 to Indian town, or planting outposts of his 
 own in the wilderness. Occasionally he went to 
 
The Unci esjxii ring Norman. 83 
 
 France, and the king's magnificence at ^"e^- 
 sailles was endured by him until he could gain 
 some desired point from the colonial minister 
 and hurry hack. Tlie government relied on him 
 to keep lawless coureurs de hois within hounds, 
 and he traded with nearly all the western tribes. 
 When Greysolon du Lhut appeared, the Sioux 
 treated their prisoners with deference ; and 
 from that time Hennepin, Du Gay, and Ako 
 went where they pleased. 
 
 They seemed to have had no thought of 
 returning to Fort Crevecoeur. In those days 
 when each man took his individual life in his 
 hands and guarded it in ways which seemed 
 best to him, it was often expedient to change 
 one's plan of action. About the time that 
 Tonty was obliged to abandon Fort Crevecoeur, 
 Hennepin and his companions set off eastward 
 with Greysolon du Lhut's party. Hennepin 
 sailed for France as soon as he could and wrote 
 a book about his adventures. It was one of La 
 Salle's misfortunes that this friar should finally 
 even lay claim to discovering the mouth of the 
 Mississippi, adding the glory of that to these 
 real adventures on its upper waters. 
 
 The first of March, La Salle, with a number 
 of the men he had gathered, started from Fort 
 
84 Heroes of the IJiddle West. 
 
 Miamis to the Illinois country. The prairies 
 were one dazzling expanse of snow, and as the 
 party slid along on the broad, flat snowshoes to 
 which their feet were strapped, some of them 
 were so blinded that the pain in their eyes 
 became unendurable. These were obliged to 
 camp in the edge of some woods, while the 
 rest went on. 
 
 La Salle himself was sitting in darkness while 
 the spring sun struck a million sparkles from a 
 world yet locked in winter. The wind chilled 
 his back, and he spread his hands to the camp 
 blaze. In the torment of snow-blindness he 
 wondered whether Tonty was treading these 
 white wastes, seeking him, or lying dead of 
 Indian wounds under the snow crust. The talk 
 of the other snow-blinded men, sitting about 
 or stretched with their feet to the fire, was lost 
 on his ear. Yet his one faithful servant, who 
 went with him on all his journeys, could not 
 see anything but calm fortitude on his face as 
 he lifted it at the approach of snowshoes. 
 
 " I cannot see you, Hunaut," said La Salle. 
 " Did you find some pine leaves ? " 
 
 "I found some, monsieur." 
 
 " Steep them as soon as you can for the men's 
 eyes." 
 
The Undespairing Norman. 
 
 85 
 
 " I wish to tell you, monsieur," the man said 
 as he went about his task with a snow-filled 
 kettle, " that I found also a party of Fox In- 
 dians from Green Bay, and they gave me news 
 of Monsieur de Tonty." 
 
 Hunaut looked at the long, pale face of his 
 master and saw the under lip tremble and 
 twitch. 
 
 " You know I am much bound to Monsieur 
 de Tonty. Is he alive ? " 
 
 " He is alive, monsieur. He has been obliged 
 to pass the winter at Green Bay. Father Hen- 
 nepin has also passed through that country on 
 his way to Montreal." 
 
 La Salle felt his troubles melt with the un- 
 locking of winter. The brief but agonizing 
 snow-blindness passed away with a thaw ; and, 
 overtaking his other men, he soon met the 
 returning Illinois tribe and began the Indian 
 settlement around the rock he intended to 
 fortify. 
 
 Already the Miami tribe was following him, 
 and he drew them into an alliance with the Illi- 
 nois, impressively founding the principality soon 
 to grow there. This eloquent Norman French- 
 man had gifts in height and the large bone and 
 sinew of Normandy, which his Indian allies 
 
86 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 always admired. And he well knew where to 
 impress his talk with coats, shirts, guns, and 
 hunting-knives. As his holdings of land in 
 Canada were made his stepping-stones toward 
 the west, so the footing he gained at Fort 
 Miamis and in the Illinois country was to be 
 used in discovering the real course of the Mis- 
 sissippi and taking possession of its vast basin. 
 
 It was the end of May before he met Tonty 
 at St. Ignace ; Italian and Frenchman coming 
 together with outstretched arms and embracing. 
 Tonty's black eyes were full of tears, but La 
 Salle told his reverses as calmly as if they were 
 another man's. 
 
 "Any one else," said Father Membre, who 
 stood by, '' would abandon the enterprise, but 
 Monsieur de la Salle has no equal for constancy 
 of purpose." 
 
 "But where is Father Ribourde?" La Salle 
 inquired, missing the other Recollet. 
 
 Tonty told him sorrowfully how Father Ri- 
 bourde had gone into the woods when his party 
 camped, after being driven up river in a leaky 
 boat by the Iroquois ; how they had waited and 
 searched for him, and were finally made aware 
 that a band of prowling Kickapoos had mur- 
 dered him. 
 
The Undespairing Norman. 87 
 
 Tonty had aimed at Green Bay by the Chi- 
 cago portage, and tramped along the west shore 
 of Lake Michigan, having found it impossible 
 to patch the boat. 
 
 "We were nearly starved," he said; "but 
 we found a few ears of corn and some frozen 
 squashes in a deserted Indian town. When we 
 reached the bay we found an old canoe and 
 mended it ; but as soon as we were on the water 
 there rose a northwest wind with driving snow, 
 which lasted nearly five days. We ate all our 
 food, and, not knowing what to do, turned back 
 to the deserted town to die by a warm fire in 
 one of the wigwams. On the way the bay 
 froze. We camped to make moccasins out of 
 Father Membre's cloak. I was angry at Etienne 
 Renault for not finishing his ; but he excused 
 himself on account of illness, having a great 
 oppression of the stomach, caused by eating a 
 piece of an Indian rawhide shield which he 
 could not digest. His delay proved our salva- 
 tion, for the next day, as I was urging him to 
 finish the moccasins, a party of Ottawas saw the 
 smoke of our fire and came to us. We gave 
 them such a welcome as never was seen before. 
 They took us into their canoes and carried us 
 to an Indian village only two leagues off. All 
 
88 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 the Indians took pleasure in sending us food ; 
 so, after thirty-four days of starvation, we found 
 our famine turned to abundance." 
 
 Tonty and La Salle, with their followers, 
 paddled the thousand miles to Fort Frontenac, 
 to make another start into the wilderness. 
 
 La Salle was now determined to keep his men 
 together. He set down many of his experiences 
 and thoughts in letters which have been kept ; 
 so we know at this day what was in the great 
 explorer's mind, and how dear he held " Mon- 
 sieur de Tonty, who is full of zeal." 
 
 On his return to the wilderness with another 
 equipment, he went around the head of Lake 
 Michigan and made the short Chicago portage 
 to the Desplaines River. Entering by this 
 branch the frozen Illinois, they dragged their 
 canoes on sledges past the site of the town and 
 reached open water below Peoria Lake. La 
 Salle gave up the plan of building a ship, and 
 determined to go on in his canoes to the mouth 
 of the Mississippi. 
 
 So, pausing to hunt when game was needed, 
 his company of fifty-four persons entered the 
 great river, saw the Missouri rushing into it — 
 muddy current and clear northern stream flow- 
 ing alongside until the waters mingled. They 
 
The TJndespa'iviiKj Norman. 89 
 
 met and overawed the Indians on both shores, 
 building several stockades.- The broad river 
 seemed to fill a valley, doubling and winding 
 upon itself with innumerable curves, in its 
 solemn and lonely stretches. Huge pieces of 
 low-lying bank crumbled and fell in with 
 splashes, for the Mississippi ceaselessly eats 
 away its own shore. 
 
 A hundred leagues below the mouth of the 
 Arkansas they came to a swamp on the west 
 side. Behind this swamp, they had been told, 
 might be found the Arkansas tribe's great town. 
 La Salle sent Tonty and Father Membre, with 
 some voyageurs, to make friends with the 
 Indians and bring him word about the town. 
 
 Tonty had seen nothing like it in the New 
 World. The houses were large and square, of 
 sun-baked brick, with a dome of canes overhead. 
 The two largest were the chiefs house and the 
 temple. Doors were the only openings. Tonty 
 and the friar were taken in where the chief sat 
 on a bedstead with his squaws, and sixty old 
 men, in white mulberry bark cloaks, squatted 
 by with the dignity of a council. The wives, 
 in order to honor the sovereign, yelled. 
 
 The temple was a place where dead chiefs' 
 bones were kept. A mud wall built around it 
 
'90 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 was ornamented with skulls. The inside was 
 very rough. Something like an altar stood in 
 the center of the floor ; and a fire of logs was 
 kept burning before it, and never allowed to go 
 out, filling the place with smoke, and irritating 
 the eyes of two old Indians who tended it in half 
 darkness. The Frenchmen were not allowed to 
 look into a secret place where the temple treasure 
 was kept. But, hearing it consisted of pearls 
 and trinkets, Tonty conjectured the Indians 
 had got it from the Spanish. This tribe was 
 not unlike the Aztecs of Mexico. The chief 
 came in barbaric grandeur to visit La Salle, 
 dressed in white, having fans carried before 
 him, and a plate of burnished copper to repre- 
 sent the sun, for these lower Mississippians 
 were sun-worshipers. 
 
 With gifts and the grave consideration which 
 instantly won Indians, La Salle moved from tribe 
 to tribe towards the Gulf. Red River pulsed 
 upon the course like a discharging artery. The 
 sluggish alligator woke from the ooze and poked 
 up his snout at the canoes. "He is," says a 
 quaint old writer who made that journey after- 
 wards, " the most frightful master-fish that can 
 be seen. I saw one that was as large as half a 
 hogshead. There are some, they say, as large as 
 
The Undespairing Norman. 
 
 91 
 
 a hogshead and twelve to fifteen feet long. I 
 have no doubt they would swallow up a man if 
 they caught him." 
 
 In April La Salle reached his goal. He 
 found that the Mississippi divided its current 
 into three strands 
 
 and entered the Gulf 
 through three mouths. 
 He separated his 
 party; La Salle took 
 the west passage, and 
 Tonty and another 
 lieutenant the middle 
 and the east. At the 
 Gulf of Mexico they 
 came together again, 
 and with solemn cere- 
 monies claimed for 
 France all the country 
 along the great river's 
 entire length, and far eastward and westward, 
 calling* it Louisiana, in honor of King Louis 
 XIV. A metal plate, bearing the arms of 
 France, the king's name, and the date of the 
 discovery, was fixed on a pillar in the shifting 
 soil. 
 
 Hardy as he was, La Salle sometimes fell ill 
 
 La Salle 
 at the Mouth of the Mississippi. 
 
92 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 from the great exposures he endured. And more 
 than once he was poisoned by some revengeful 
 voyageur. It was not until the December fol- 
 lowing his discovery of the Mississippi's mouth 
 that he realized his plan of fortifying the rock 
 on the Illinois River. He and Tonty delighted 
 in it, calling it Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. 
 Storehouses and quarters for a garrison rose 
 around its edges, protected by a palisade. A 
 windlass was rigged to draw water from the 
 river below. On the northeast corner of the 
 rock a low earthwork remains to this day. 
 
 Around this natural castle the Indian tribes 
 gathered to La Salle, as to a sovereign, — Miamis, 
 Abenakis, and Shawanoes, from countries east- 
 ward, and the Illinois returned to spread over 
 their beloved meadow. Instead of one town, 
 many towns of log, or rush, or bark lodges 
 could be seen from the summit of the Rock. 
 Years afterwards the French still spoke of this 
 fortress as Le Rocher. A little principality of 
 twenty thousand inhabitants, strong enough to 
 repel any attack of the Iroquois, thus helped to 
 guard it. La Salle meant to supply his people 
 with goods and give them a market for their 
 furs. At this time he could almost see the suc- 
 cess of his mighty enterprise assured ; he could 
 
The Undespairing Norman. 
 
 93 
 
 reasonably count on strengthening his stockades 
 along the Mississippi, and on building near its 
 mouth a city which would protect the entire 
 west and give an outlet to the undeveloped 
 wealth of the continent. 
 
 In the flush of his discovery and success La 
 Salle went back 
 to France, leav- 
 ing Tonty in 
 charge of the 
 Rock and the 
 gathering In- 
 dian nations, 
 and laid his 
 actual achieve- 
 ments before 
 the king, ask- 
 ing for help. 
 This was made 
 necessary by 
 the change in 
 the colonial 
 government, 
 which had re- 
 moved his friend Count Frontenac and left him 
 at the mercy of enemies. 
 
 The king was not slow to see the capacity of 
 
 Louis XIV., King of France. 
 
94 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 this wonderful man, so shy of civilization that 
 he lodged in a poor street, carrying with him 
 the very breath of the wilderness. La Salle 
 asked for two ships ; the king gave him four ; 
 and many people and supplies were gathered to 
 colonize and stock the west. 
 
 It was La Salle's intention to sail by way of 
 the West Indies, cross the Gulf of Mexico, and 
 enter the mouth of the Mississippi. But the 
 Gulf of Mexico is rimmed with low marshy 
 land, and he had never seen the mouth of the 
 Mississippi from seaward. His unfamiliarity 
 with the coast, or night, or fog cheated him of 
 his destination, and the colony was landed four 
 hundred miles west of it, in a place called Mata- 
 gorda Bay, in Texas, which then belonged to 
 the Spaniards. Although at the time of dis- 
 covery he had taken the latitude of that exact 
 spot where he set the post, he had been unable 
 to determine the longitude ; any lagoon might 
 be an opening of the triple mouth he sought. 
 
 La Salle's brother, a priest, who sailed with 
 him on this voyage, testified afterwards that 
 the explorer died believing he was near the 
 mouth of the Mississippi. Whatever may have 
 been his thoughts, the undespairing Norman 
 grappled with his troubles in the usual way. 
 
The Undespairing Norman. ^ 95 
 
 One of his vessels had been captured by the 
 Spanish. Another had been wrecked in the 
 bay by seamen who were willing to injure him. 
 These contained supplies most needed for the 
 colony. The third sailed away and left him ; 
 and his own little ship, a gift of the king for 
 his use along the coast, was sunk by careless 
 men while he was absent searching northward 
 for the Mississippi. 
 
 Many of the colonists fell sick and died. Men 
 turned sullen and tried to desert. Some went 
 hunting and were never seen again. Indians, 
 who dare not openly attack, skulked near and 
 set the prairie on fire ; and that was a sight of 
 magnificence, the earth seeming to burn like a 
 furnace, or, far as the eye could follow them, 
 billows of flame rushing as across a fire sea. 
 But La Salle was wise, and cut the grass close 
 around his powder and camp. 
 
 Water, plains, trees combined endlessly, like 
 the pieces of a kaleidoscope, to confuse him in 
 his search. Tonty was not at hand to take care 
 of the colony while he groped for the lost river. 
 He moved his wretched people from their camp, 
 with all goods saved off the wreck in the bay, 
 to a better site for a temporary fort, on rising 
 ground. The carpenters proved good for noth- 
 
96 
 
 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 ing. La Salle himself planned buildings and 
 marked out mortises on the logs. First a large 
 house roofed with hides, and divided into apart- 
 ments, was finished to shelter all. Separate 
 
 (>9¥-l6%S 
 
 La Salle's Map of Texas. 
 
 houses were afterwards built for the women and 
 girls, and barracks or rougher cells for the men. 
 A little chapel was finally added. And when 
 high-pointed palisades surrounded the whole. 
 La Salle, perhaps thinking of his invincible rock 
 
The Undespairijig Norman. 97 
 
 on the Illinois and the faithfulness of his copper- 
 handed lieutenant guarding it, called this out- 
 post also Fort St. Louis. Cannon were mounted 
 at the four corners of the large house. As the 
 balls were lost, they were loaded with bullets 
 in bags. 
 
 Behind, the prairies stretched away to forests. 
 In front rolled the bay, with the restless ever- 
 heaving motion of the Mexican Gulf. A deli- 
 cious salty air, like the breath of perpetual spring, 
 blew in, tinglmg the skin of the sulkiest adven- 
 turer with delight in this virgin world. Fierce 
 northers must beat upon the colonists, and the 
 languors of summer must in time follow ; and 
 they were homesick, always watching for sails. 
 Yet they had no lack of food. Oysters were 
 so plentiful in the bay that they could not 
 wade without cutting their feet with the shells. 
 Though the alligator pushed his ugly snout and 
 ridgy back out of lagoons, and horned frogs 
 frightened the children, and the rattlesnake was 
 to be avoided where it lay coiled in the grass, 
 game of all kiuds abounded. Every man was 
 obliged to hunt, and every woman and child to 
 help smoke the meat. Even the priests took guns 
 in their hands. Father Membre had brought 
 some buffalo traditions from the Illinois coun- 
 
98 Heroes of the Middle West 
 
 try. He was of Father Hennepin's opinion that 
 this wild creature might be trained to draw the 
 plow, and he had faith that benevolence was 
 concealed behind its wicked eyes. 
 
 As Father Membre stalked along the prairie 
 with the hunters, his capote tucked up out of 
 his way on its cord, one of the men shot a buf- 
 falo and it dropped. The buffaloes rarely fell 
 at once, even when wounded to death, unless 
 hit in the spine. Father Membre approached 
 it curiously. 
 
 " Come back. Father ! " shouted the hunters. 
 
 Father Membre touched it gently with his 
 gun. 
 
 "Run, Father, run !" cried the hunters. 
 
 "It is dead," asserted Father Membre. "1 
 will rest my gun across its carcass to steady my 
 aim at the other buffaloes." 
 
 He knelt to rest his gun across its back. 
 
 The great beast heaved convulsively to its 
 feet and made a dash at the RecoUet. It sent 
 him revolving heels over head. But Father 
 Membre got up, and, spreading his capote in 
 both hands, danced in front of the buffalo to 
 head it off from escaping. At that, with a 
 bellow, the shaggy creature charged over him 
 across the prairie, dropping to its knees and 
 
The Undespairing Norman. 99 
 
 djdng before the frightened hunters could lift 
 the friar from the ground. 
 
 "Are you hurt, Father?" they all asked, sup- 
 porting him, and finding it impossible to keep 
 from laughing as he sat up, with his reverend 
 face skinned and his capote nearly torn off. 
 
 " Not unto death," responded Father Membre, 
 brushing grass and dirty hoof prints from his 
 garment. " But it hath been greatly impressed 
 on my mind that this ox-savage is no fit beast 
 for the plow. Nor will I longer counsel our 
 women to coax the wild cows to a milking. It 
 is well to adapt to our needs the beasts of a 
 country," said Father Membre, wiping blood 
 from his face. " But this buffalo creature hath 
 disappointed me ! " 
 
 La Salle was prostrated through the month 
 of November. But by Christmas he was able to 
 set out on a final search from Avhich he did not 
 intend to return until he found the Mississippi. 
 All hands in the fort were busied on the outfit 
 necessary for the party. Clothes were made of 
 sails recovered from one of the wrecked vessels. 
 Eighteen men were to follow La Salle, among 
 them his elder brother, the Abbe Cavelier. Some 
 had on the remains of garments they had worn 
 in France, and others were dressed in deer or 
 
100 Heroes of the Middle West 
 
 buffalo skins. He had bought five horses of 
 the Indians to carry the baggage. 
 
 At midnight on Christmas Eve everybody 
 crowded into the small fortress chapel. The 
 priests, celebrating mass, moved before the altar 
 in such gold-embroidered vestments as they had, 
 and the light of torches illuminated the rough 
 log walls. Those who were to stay and keep 
 the outpost, literally lost in the wilderness, were 
 on their knees weeping. Those who were to go 
 knelt also, with the dread of an awful uncer- 
 tainty in their minds. The faithful ones foresaw 
 worse than peril from forests and waters and 
 savages, for La Salle could not leave behind all 
 the villains with whom he was obliged to serve 
 himself. He alone showed the composure of a 
 man who never despairs. If he had positively 
 known that he was setting out upon a fatal 
 journey, — that he was undertaking his last 
 march through the wilderness, — the mass lights 
 would still have shown the firm face of a man 
 who did not turn back from any enterprise. 
 The very existence of these people who had 
 come out to the New World with him depended 
 on his success. Whatever lay in the road he 
 had to encounter it. The most splendid lives 
 may progress and end through what we call 
 
The Undespairing Norman. 101 
 
 traged}^; but it is better to die in the very 
 stress of achievement than to stretch a poor 
 existence through a century. The contagion 
 of his hardihood stole out like the Christinas 
 incense and spread through the chapel. 
 
FRENCH SETTLEMENTS. 
 
 " It was the establishment of military posts 
 throughout this vast valley that eventually 
 brought on a life struggle between the English 
 and the French," says a historian. 
 
 At first the only spot of civilization in bound- 
 less wilderness was Tonty's little fort on the 
 Illinois. Protected by it, the Indians went 
 hunting and brought in buffalo skins and meat ; 
 their women planted and reaped maize ; children 
 were born ; days came and went ; autumn haze 
 made the distances pearly; winter snow lay 
 on the wigwams ; men ran on snowshoes ; and 
 papooses shouted on the frozen river. Still 
 no news came from La Salle. 
 
 Tonty had made a journey to the mouth of 
 the Mississippi to meet him, after he landed 
 with his colony, searching thirty leagues in 
 each direction along the coast. La Salle was 
 at that time groping through a maze of lagoons 
 in Texas. Tonty, with his men, waded swamps 
 to their necks, enduring more suffering than 
 
 102 
 

 
 
 1/ ffncjrr 
 
 MAP OF THE FRENCH SETTLEMENTS. 
 
French Settlements. 103 
 
 he had ever endured in his life before. This 
 was in February of the year 1686. Finding 
 it impossible to reach La Salle, who must be 
 wandering somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico, 
 Tonty wrote a letter to him, intrusting it to the 
 hands of an Indian chief, with directions that it 
 be delivered when the explorer appeared. He 
 also left a couple of men who were willing to 
 wait in the Arkansas villages to meet La Salle. 
 
 Two years passed before those men brought 
 positive proof of the undespairing Norman's 
 fate. The remnant of the party that started 
 with La Salle from Fort St. Louis of Texas 
 spent one winter at Fort St. Louis of the 
 Illinois, bringing word that they had left their 
 leader in good health on the coast. The Abbe 
 Cavelier even collected furs in his brother's 
 name, and went on to France, carrying his 
 secret with him. 
 
 La Salle had been assassinated on the Trinity 
 River, soon after setting out on his last deter- 
 mined search for the Mississippi. The eight- 
 eenth day of March, 1687, some of his brutal 
 voyageurs liid themselves in bushes and shot 
 him. 
 
 So slowly did events move then, and so 
 powerless was man, an atom in the wilderness, 
 
104 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 that the great-hearted Italian, weeping aloud 
 in rage and grief, realized that La Salle's bones 
 had been bleaching a year and a half before the 
 news of his death reached his lieutenant. It 
 was not known that La Salle received burial. 
 The wretches who assassinated him threw him 
 into some brush. It was a satisfaction to Tonty 
 that they all perished miserably afterwards ; 
 those who survived quarrels among themselves 
 being killed by the Indians. 
 
 The undespairing Norman died instantly, 
 without feeling or admitting defeat. And he 
 was not defeated. Though his colony — includ- 
 ing Father Membre, who had been so long with 
 him — perished by the hands of the Indians in 
 Texas, in spite of Tonty's second journey to 
 relieve them, his plan of settlements from the 
 great lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi 
 became a reality. 
 
 Down from Canada came two of the eleven 
 Le Moyne brothers, D 'Iberville and Bienville, 
 fine fighting sons of a powerful colonial family, 
 with royal permission to found near the great 
 river's mouth that city which had been La 
 Salle's dream. Fourteen years after La Salle's 
 death, while D'Iberville was exploring for a 
 site, the old chief, to whom Tonty had given a 
 
French Settlements. 105 
 
 letter for La Salle, brought it carefully wrapped 
 and delivered it into the hands of La Salle's 
 more fortunate successor. 
 
 Tonty was associated with Le Moyne D 'Iber- 
 ville in these labors around the Gulf. 
 
 Autograph of Le Moyne D'Iberville. 
 
 A long peninsula betwixt the Mississippi and 
 Kaskaskia Rivers, known since as the American 
 Bottom, lured away Indians from the great town 
 on the Illinois. The new settlement founded 
 on this peninsula was called Kaskaskia, for one 
 of the tribes. As other posts sprung into ex- 
 istence. Fort St. Louis was less needed. "As 
 early as 1712," we are told, "land titles were 
 issued for a common field in Kaskaskia. Traders 
 had already opened a commerce in skins and 
 furs with the remote post of Isle Dauphine in 
 Mobile Bay." Settlements were firmly estab- 
 lished. By 1720 the luxuries of Europe came 
 into the great tract taken by La Salle in the 
 name of King Louis and called Louisiana. 
 
 Twelve years after La Salle's death a mis- 
 sionary named St. Cosme (Sant' Come) journeyed 
 
106 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 from Canada in a party guided by Tonty. St. 
 Cosme has left this record of the man with the 
 copper hand : — 
 
 "He guided us as far as the Arkansas and 
 gave us much pleasure on the way, winning 
 friendship of some savages and intimidating 
 others who from jealousy or desire to plunder 
 opposed the voyage; not only doing the duty 
 of a brave man but that of a missionary. He 
 quieted the voyageurs, by whom he was gener- 
 ally loved, and supported us by his example in 
 devotion." 
 
 On the Chicago portage a little boy, given 
 to the missionary perhaps because he was an 
 orphan and the western country offered him 
 the best chances in life, started eagerly ahead, 
 though he was told to wait. The rest of the 
 party, having goods and canoes to carr^^ from the 
 Chicago River to the Des Plaines, lost sight of 
 him, and he was never seen again. Autumn 
 grass grew tall over the marshy portage, but 
 they dared not set it afire, though his fate was 
 doubtless hidden in that grass. The party 
 divided and searched for him, calling and firing 
 guns. Three days they searched, and daring to 
 wait no longer, for it was November and the 
 river ready to glaze with ice, they left him to 
 
French Settlements. 107 
 
 some Frencli people at the post of Chicago. 
 But the child was not found. He disappeared 
 and no one ever knew what became of him. 
 
 Like this is Henri de Tonty's disappearance 
 from history. The records show him working 
 with Le Moyne D'Iberville and Le Moyne de 
 Bienville to found New Orleans and Mobile, 
 pushing the enterprises which La Salle had 
 begun. He has been blamed with the misbe- 
 havior of a relative of his, Al^Dhonse de Tonty, 
 who got into disgrace at the post of Detroit. 
 Little justice has been done to the memory of 
 this man, who should not be forgotten in the 
 west. So quietly did he slip out of life that his 
 burial place is unknown. Some people believe 
 that he came back to the Rock long after its 
 buildings were dismantled and it had ceased to 
 be Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. Others say 
 he died in Mobile. But it is probable that both 
 La Salle and Tonty left their bodies to the 
 wilderness which their invincible spirits had 
 conquered. 
 
 After the settlement of Kaskaskia a strong 
 fortress was built sixteen miles above, on the 
 same side of the Mississippi. The king of France 
 spent a million crowns strengthening this place, 
 which was called Fort Chartres. Its massive 
 
108 Heroes of the Middle West, 
 
 walls, inclosing four acres, and its buildings and 
 arched gateway were like some medieval strong- 
 hold strangely transplanted from the Old World. 
 White uniformed troops paraded. A village 
 sprang up around it. Fort Chartres was the 
 center of government until Kaskaskia became 
 the first capital of the Illinois territory. Appli- 
 cations for land had to be made at this post. 
 Indians on the Mississippi, for it was a little 
 distance from the shore, heard drumbeat and 
 sunset gun, and were proud of going in and 
 out of its mighty gateway under the white flag 
 of France. 
 
 Other villages began on the eastern bank of 
 the river — Cahokia, opposite the present city 
 of St. Louis, and Prairie du Rocher, nearer 
 Kaskaskia. Ste. Genevieve also was built in 
 what is now the state of Missouri, on land which 
 then was claimed by the Spaniards. There was 
 a Post of Natchitoches on the Red River, as well 
 as a Post of Washita on the Washita River. 
 Settlements were also founded upon La Fourche 
 and Fausse Riviere above New Orleans. 
 
 " The finest country we have seen," wrote 
 one of the adventurers in those days, "is all 
 from Chicago to the Tamaroas. It is nothing 
 but prairie and clumps of wood as far as you 
 
French Settlements. 109 
 
 can see. The Tamaroas are eight leagues from 
 the Illinois." Chicago was a landing place 
 and portage from the great lakes long before 
 a stockade with a blockhouse was built called 
 Fort Dearborn. 
 
 "Mon jolly," wrote the same adventurer, "or 
 Mount Jolliet, is a mound of earth on the prairie 
 on the right side of the Illinois River as you go 
 down, elevated about thirty feet. The Indians 
 say at the time of the great deluge one of their 
 ancestors escaped, and this little mountain is 
 his canoe which he turned over there." 
 
 La Salle had learned from the Iroquois about 
 the Ohio River. But the region through which 
 it flowed to the Mississippi remained for a long 
 while an unbroken wilderness. The English 
 settlements on their strip of Atlantic coast, 
 howeverj and the French settlements in the 
 west, reached gradually out over this territory 
 and met and grappled. Whichever power got 
 and kept the mastery of the west would get 
 the mastery of the continent. 
 
 The territory of Kentucky, like that of 
 Michigan, was owned by no tribe of Indians. 
 " It was the common hunting and fighting 
 ground of Ohio tribes on the north and Chero- 
 kees and Chickasaws on the south." 
 
110 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 There was indeed one exception to the unin- 
 habited state of all that land stretching betwixt 
 the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. Vincennes, 
 now a town of Indiana, was, after Kaskaskia, 
 the oldest place in the west. This isolated post 
 is said to have been founded by French sol- 
 diers and emigrants. Five thousand acres were 
 devoted to the common field. De Vincennes, 
 for whom it was named, was a nephew of Louis 
 Jolliet. And while it is not at all certain that 
 he founded the post, he doubtless sojourned 
 there in the Indiana country during his roving 
 life. A small stockade on the site of the town 
 of Fort Wayne is said to have been built by 
 him. 
 
 French settlements began to extend south- 
 ward from Lake Erie to the head waters of 
 the Ohio, like a chain to check the English. 
 Presqu'Isle, now Erie, Pennsylvania, was founded 
 about the same time as Vincennes. 
 
 A French settler built his house in an inclo- 
 sure of two or three acres. The unvarying 
 model was one story high, with porches or 
 galleries surrounding it. Wooden walls were 
 filled and daubed with a solid mass of what was 
 called cat-and-clay, a mixture of mortar and 
 chopped straw or Spanish moss. The chimney 
 
French Settlements, 111 
 
 was of the same materials, shaped by four long 
 corner posts, wide apart below, and nearer 
 together at the top. 
 
 As fast as chikben grew up and married they 
 built their cottages in their father's yard ; and 
 so it went on, until with children and grand- 
 children and great-grandchildren, a small vil- 
 lage accumulated around one old couple. 
 
 The French were not anxious to obtain grants 
 of the rich wild land. Every settlement had 
 its common field, large or small, as was desired. 
 A portion of this field was given to each person 
 in the village for his own, and he was obliged 
 to cultivate it and raise food for his family. If 
 a man neglected his ground, it was taken from 
 him. A large tract of land called the common 
 pasture was also inclosed for everybody's cattle 
 to graze in. 
 
 Sometimes houses were set facing one court, 
 or center, like a camp, for defense. But gener- 
 ally the French had little trouble with their 
 savage neighbors, who took very Idndly to 
 them. The story of western settlement is not 
 that dreadful story of continual wars with 
 Indians which reddens the pages of eastern 
 colonies. The French were gay people. They 
 loved to dance and hunt and spend their time 
 
112 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 in amusements. While the serious, stubborn 
 English were grubbing out the foundations of 
 great states on the Atlantic coast, it must be 
 confessed these happy folks cared little about 
 developing the rich Mississippi valley. 
 
 During all its early occupation this hospitable 
 land abounded with game. Though in November 
 the buffaloes became so lean that only their 
 tongues were eaten, swans, geese, and ducks 
 were always plentiful, and the fish could not 
 be exhausted. 
 
 On a day in February, people from Kaskaskia 
 hurried over the road which then stretched a 
 league to the Mississippi, for the town was on 
 the Kaskaskia River bank. There were settlers 
 in blanket capotes, shaped like friars' frocks, 
 with hoods to draw over their heads. If it had 
 been June instead of February, a blue or red 
 kerchief would have covered the men's heads. 
 The dress of an ordinary frontiersman in those 
 days consisted of shirt, breech-cloth, and buck- 
 skin leggins, with moccasins, and neips, or strips 
 of blanket wrapped around the feet for stock- 
 ings. The voyageur so equipped could under- 
 take any hardship. But in the settlements 
 wooden shoes were worn instead of moccasins, 
 and garments of texture lighter than buckskin. 
 
French Settlements. 113 
 
 The women wore short gowns, or long, full 
 jackets, and petticoats; and their moccasins 
 were like those of squaws, ornamented with 
 beautiful quill-work. Their outer wraps were 
 not unlike the men's ; so a multitude of blanket 
 capotes flocked toward the Mississippi bank, 
 which at that time had not been washed away, 
 and rose steeply above the water. They had 
 all run to see a procession of boats pass by from 
 Fort Chartres. 
 
 A little negro had brought the news that the 
 boats were in sight. Black slaves were owned 
 by some of the French ; and Indian slaves, sold 
 by their captors to the settlers, had long been 
 members of these patriarchal households. Many 
 of them had left their work to follow their mas- 
 ters to the river ; the negroes pointing and shout- 
 ing, the Indians standing motionless and silent. 
 
 The sun flecked a broad expanse of water, 
 and down this shining track rushed a fleet of 
 canoes; white uniforms leading, and brick-col- 
 ored heads above dusky-fringed buckskins fol- 
 lowing close after. This little army waved 
 their hands and fired guns to salute the crowd 
 on shore. The crowd all jangled voices in ex- 
 cited talk, no man listening to what another 
 said. 
 
114 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 " See you — there are Monsieur Pierre D'Arta- 
 guette and the Chevalier De Vincennes and 
 excellent Father Senat in the first boat." 
 
 "The young St. Ange and Sieur Lalande 
 follow them." 
 
 " How many of our good Indians have thrown 
 themselves into this expedition ! The Chicka- 
 saw nation may howl when they see this array ! 
 They will be taught to leave the boats from New 
 Orleans alone ! " 
 
 " But suppose Sieur De Bienville and his army 
 do not meet the Commandant D' Artaguette when 
 he reaches the Chickasaw country?" 
 
 " During his two years at Fort Chartres has 
 Sieur D' Artaguette made mistakes ? The expe- 
 dition will succeed." 
 
 " The saints keep that beautiful boy ! — for 
 to look at him, though he is so hardy, Monsieur 
 Pierre D' Artaguette is as handsome as a woman. 
 I have heard the southern tribes sacrifice their 
 own children to the sun. This is a fair company 
 of Christians to venture against such devils." 
 
 The Chickasaws, occupying a tract of coun- 
 try now stretching across northern Mississippi 
 and western Tennessee, were friendly to the 
 English and willing to encroach on the French. 
 They interrupted river traffic and practiced 
 
French Settlements. 115 
 
 every cruelty on their prisoners. D'Artaguette 
 knew as well as the early explorers that in deal- 
 ing with savages it is a fatal policy to overlook 
 or excuse their ill-behavior. They themselves 
 believed in exact revenge, and despised a foe 
 who did not strike back, their insolence becom- 
 ing boundless if not 
 curbed. So he had 
 planned with Le 
 Moyne de Bienville 
 a concerted attack on 
 
 ... p ,1 Autograph of Bienville. 
 
 these allies ot the 
 
 English. Bienville, bringing troops up river 
 
 from New Orleans, was to meet him in the 
 
 Chickasaw country on a day and spot carefully 
 
 specified. 
 
 The brilliant pageant of canoes went on 
 down the river, seeming to grow smaller, until 
 it dwindled to nothingness in the distance. 
 
 But in the course of weeks only a few men 
 came back, sent by the Chickasaws, to tell 
 about the fate of their leaders. The troops 
 from New Orleans did not keep the appoint- 
 ment, arriving too late and then retreating. 
 D'Artaguette, urged by his Indians, made the 
 attack with such force as he had, and his brave 
 array was destroyed. He and the Chevalier 
 
116 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 Vincennes, with Laland, Father Senat, and 
 many others, a circle of noble human torches, 
 perished at the stake. People lamented aloud 
 in Kaskaskia and Cahokia streets, and the white 
 flag of France slipped down to half-mast on 
 Fort Chartres. 
 
 This victory made the Chickasaw Indians so 
 bold that scarcely a French convoy on the river 
 escaped them. There is a story that a young 
 girl reached the gate of Fort Chartres, starving 
 and in rags, from wandering through swamps 
 and woods. She was the last of a family arrived 
 from France, and sought her sister, an officer's 
 wife, in the fort. The Chickasaws had killed 
 every other relative ; she, escaping alone, was 
 ready to die of exposure when she saw the flag 
 through the trees. 
 
 But another captain of Fort Chartres, no 
 bolder than young Pierre D'Artaguette, but 
 more fortunate, named Neyon de Villiers, twenty 
 years afterwards led troops as far east as the 
 present state of Pennsylvania, and helped his 
 brother, Coulon de Villiers, continue the strug- 
 gle betwixt French and English by defeating, 
 at Fort Necessity, the English commanded by 
 a young Virginia officer named George Wash- 
 ington. 
 

 
 --^---^^ 
 
 V 5g^" r^. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE LAST GREAT INDIAN. 
 
 The sound of the Indian drum was heard on 
 Detroit River, and humid May night air carried 
 it a league or more to the fort. All the Potta- 
 watomies and Wyandots were gathered from 
 their own villages on opposite shores to the Ot- 
 tawas on the south bank, facing Isle Cochon. 
 Their women and children squatted about huge 
 fires to see the war dance. The river strait, so 
 limpidly and transparently blue in daytime, that 
 dipping a pailful of it was like dipping a pailful 
 of the sky, scarcely glinted betwixt darkened 
 woods. 
 
 In the center of an open space, which the 
 camp-fires were built to illuminate, a painted 
 post was driven into the ground, and the war- 
 riors formed a large ring around it. Their moc- 
 casined feet kept time to the booming of the 
 drums. With a flourish of his hatchet around 
 his head, a chief leaped into the ring and 
 began to chase an imaginary foe, chanting his 
 own deeds and those of his forefathers. He 
 117 
 
118 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 was a muscular rather than a tall Indian, with 
 high, striking features. His dark skin was col- 
 ored by war paint, and he had stripped himself 
 of everything but ornaments. Ottawa Indians 
 usually wore brilliant blankets, while Wyandots 
 of Sandusky and Detroit paraded in painted 
 shirts, their heads crowned with feathers, and 
 their leggins tinkling with little bells. The 
 Ojibwas, or Chippewas, of the north carried 
 quivers slung on their backs, holding their 
 arrows. 
 
 The dancer in the ring was the Ottawa chief, 
 Pontiac, a man at that time fifty years old, who 
 had brought eighteen savage nations under his 
 dominion, so that they obeyed his slightest word. 
 With majestic sweep of the limbs he whirled 
 through the pantomime of capturing and scalp- 
 ing an enemy, struck the painted post with his 
 tomahawk, and raised the awful war whoop. 
 His young braves stamped and yelled with him. 
 Another leaped into the ring, sung his deeds, 
 and struck the painted post, warrior after war- 
 rior following, until a wild maze of sinewy fig- 
 ures swam and shrieked around it. Blazing 
 pine knots stuck in the ground helped to show 
 this maddened whirl, the very opposite of the 
 peaceful, floating calumet dance. Boy papooses. 
 
The Last Great Indian. 119 
 
 watching it, yelled also, their black eyes kin- 
 dling with full desire to shed blood. 
 
 Perhaps no Indian there, except Pontiac, 
 understood what Avas beginning with the war 
 dance on that May night of the year 1763. He 
 had been laying his plans all winter, and send- 
 ing huge black and purple wampum belts of 
 war, and hatchets dipped in red, to rouse every 
 native tribe. All the Algonquin stock and the 
 Senecas of the Iroquois were united with him. 
 From the small oven-shaped hut on Isle Cochon, 
 where he lived with his squaws and children, 
 to Michilimackinac, from Michilimackinac to 
 the lower Mississippi, and from the eastern end 
 of Lake Erie down to the Ohio, the messengers 
 of this self-made emperor had secretly carried 
 and unfolded his plan, which was to rise and 
 attack all the English forts on the same day, 
 and then to destroy all the English settlers, 
 sparing no white people but the French. 
 
 Two years before, an English army had come 
 over to Canada and conquered it. That was a 
 deathblow to French settlements in the middle 
 west. They dared no longer resist English colo- 
 nists pushing on them from the east. All that 
 chain of forts stretching from Lake Erie down 
 to the Ohio — Presqu' Isle, Le Boeuf, Venango, 
 
120 
 
 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 The White Flag of France. 
 
 Ligonier — had been given up to the English, 
 as well as western posts — Detroit, Fort Miami, 
 
 Ouatanon on 
 the Wabash, 
 and Michili- 
 mackinac. The 
 settlements on 
 the Mississippi, 
 however, still 
 displayed the 
 white flag of 
 France. So 
 large was the dominion in the New World which 
 England now had the right to claim, that she 
 was unable to grasp it all at once. 
 
 The Indians did not like the English, who 
 treated them with contempt, would not offer 
 them presents, and put them in danger of star- 
 vation by holding back the guns and ammu- 
 nition, on which they had learned to depend, 
 instead of their bows and arrows. For two 
 years they had borne the rapid spread of English 
 settlements on land which they still regarded as 
 their own. These intruders were not like the 
 French, who cared nothing about claiming land, 
 and were always ready to hunt or dance with 
 their red brethren. 
 
The Last Great Indian. 121 
 
 All the tribes were, therefore, eager to rise 
 against the English, whom they wanted to drive 
 back into the sea. Pontiac himself knew this 
 could not be done ; but he thought it possible, 
 by striking the English forts all at once, to re- 
 store the French power and so get the French 
 to help him in fighting back their common foe 
 from spreading into the west. 
 
 Pontiac was the only Indian who ever seemed 
 to realize all the dangers which threatened his 
 race, or to have military skill for organizing 
 against them. His work had been secret, and 
 he had taken pains to appear very friendly to 
 the garrison of Detroit, who were used to the 
 noise of Indian yelling and dancing. This fort 
 was the central point of his operations, and he 
 intended to take it next morning by surprise. 
 
 Though La Motte Cadillac was the founder 
 of a permanent settlement on the west shore of 
 Detroit River, it is said that Greysolon du Lhut 
 set up the first palisades there. About a hun- 
 dred houses stood crowded together within the 
 wooden wall of these tall log pickets, which 
 were twenty-five feet high. The houses were 
 roofed with bark or thatched with straw. The 
 streets were mere paths, but a wide road went 
 all around the town next to the palisades. De- 
 
122 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 troit was almost square in shape, with a bastion, 
 or fortified projection, at each corner, and a block- 
 house built over each gate. The river almost 
 washed the front palisades, and two schooners 
 usually anchored near to protect the fort and 
 give it communication with other points. Be- 
 sides the homes of settlers, it contained barracks 
 for soldiers, a council-house, and a little church. 
 
 About a hundred and twenty English soldiers, 
 besides fur traders and Canadian settlers, were 
 in this inclosure, which was called the fort, to 
 distinguish it from the village of French houses 
 up and down the shore. Dwellers outside had 
 their own gardens and orchards, also surrounded 
 by pickets. These French people, who tried to 
 live comfortably among the English, whom they 
 liked no better than the Indians did, raised fine 
 pears and apples and made wine of the wild 
 grapes. 
 
 The river, emptying the water of the upper 
 lakes into Lake Erie, was about half a mile 
 wide. Sunlight next morning showed this 
 blue strait sparkling from the palisades to the 
 other shore, and trees and gardens moist with 
 that dewy breath which seems to exhale from 
 fresh-water seas. Indians swarmed early around 
 the fort, pretending that the young men were 
 
The Last Great Indian. 123 
 
 that day going to play a game of ball in the 
 fields, while Pontiac and sixty old chiefs came 
 to hold a council with the English. More 
 than a thousand of them lounged about, ready 
 for action. The braves were blanketed, each 
 carrying a gun with its barrel filed off short 
 enough to be concealed under his blanket. 
 
 About ten o'clock Pontiac and his chiefs 
 crossed the river in birch canoes and stalked 
 in Indian file, every man stepping in the tracks 
 of the man before him, to the fort gates. The 
 gates on the water side usually stood open until 
 evening, for the English, contemptuously care- 
 less of savages, let squaws and warriors come 
 and go at pleasure. They did not that morning 
 open until Pontiac entered. He found himself 
 and his chiefs walking betwixt files of armed 
 soldiers. The gates were shut behind him. 
 
 Pontiac was startled as if by a sting. He 
 saw that some one had betrayed his plan to the 
 officers. Even fur traders were standing under 
 arms. To this day it is not known who secretly 
 warned the fort of Pontiac's conspiracy; but 
 the most reliable tradition declares it to have 
 been a young squaw named Catherine, who 
 could not endure to see friends whom she loved 
 put to death. 
 
124 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 It flashed through Pontiac's mind that he 
 and his followers were now really prisoners. 
 The captain of Detroit was afterwards blamed 
 for not holding the chief when he had him. 
 The tribes could not rush through the closed 
 gates at Pontiac's signal, which was to be the 
 lifting of a wampum belt upside down, with all 
 its figures reversed. But the cunning savage 
 put on a look of innocence and inquired : — 
 
 " My. father," using the Indian term of respect, 
 " why are so many of your young men standing 
 in the street with their guns?" 
 
 " They have been ordered out for exercise 
 and discipline," answered the officer. 
 
 A slight clash of arms and the rolling of 
 drums were heard by the surprised tribes wait- 
 ing in suspense around the palisades. They 
 did not know whether they would ever see their 
 leader appear again. But he came out, after 
 going through the form of a council, mortified 
 by his failure to seize the fort, and sulkily 
 crossed the river to his lodge. All his plans to 
 bring warriors inside the palisades were treated 
 with contempt by the captain of Detroit. Pon- 
 tiac wanted his braves to smoke the calumet 
 with his English father. 
 
 " You may come in yourself," said the officer, 
 
The Last Great Indian. 125 
 
 " but the crowd you have with you must remain 
 
 outside." 
 
 "I want all my young men," urged Pon- 
 tiac, "to enjoy the fragrance of the friendly 
 calumet." 
 
 " I will have none of your rabble in the fort," 
 
 said the ofhcer. 
 
 Raging like a wild beast, Pontiac then led 
 his people in assault. He threw off every pre- 
 tense of friendliness, and from all directions 
 the tribes closed around Detroit in a general 
 attack. Though it had wooden walls, it was 
 well defended. The Indians, after their first 
 fierce onset, fighting in their own way, behind 
 trees and sheltered by buildings outside the fort, 
 were able to besiege the place indefinitely with 
 comparatively small loss to themselves ; while 
 the garrison, shut in almost without warning, 
 looked forward to scarcity of provisions. 
 
 All English people caught beyond the walls 
 were instantly murdered. But the French set- 
 tlers were allowed to go about their usual 
 affairs unhurt. Queer traditions have come 
 down from them of the pious burial they gave 
 to English victims of the Indians. One old 
 man stuck his hands out of his grave. The 
 French covered them with earth. But next 
 
126 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 time they passed that way they saw the stiff, 
 entreating hands, like pale fungi, again thrust 
 into view. At this the horrified French settlers 
 hurried to their priest, who said the neglected 
 burial service over the grave, and so put the 
 poor Englishman to rest, for his hands pro- 
 truded no more. 
 
 One of the absent schooners kept for the use 
 of the fort had gone down river with letters and 
 dispatches. Her crew knew nothing of the siege, 
 and she narrowly escaped capture. A convoy 
 of boats, bringing the usual spring supplies, was 
 taken, leaving Detroit to face famine. Yet it 
 refused to surrender, and, in spite of Pontiac's 
 rage and his continual investment of the place, 
 the red flag of England floated over that for- 
 tress all summer. 
 
 Other posts were not so fortunate in resisting 
 Pontiac's conspiracy. Fort Sandusky, at the 
 west end of Lake Erie ; Fort Ouatanon, on the 
 Wabash, a little south of where Lafayette, in 
 the state of Indiana, now stands ; Fort Miami, 
 Presqu' Isle, Le Bceuf, Venango, on the eastern 
 border, and Michilimackinac, on the straits, were 
 all taken by the Indians. 
 
 At Presqu' Isle the twenty-seven soldiers 
 went into the blockhouse of the fort and pre- 
 
The Last Great Indian. 127 
 
 pared to hold it, lining and making it bullet- 
 proof. 
 
 A blockhouse was built of logs, or very thick 
 timber, and had no windows, and but one door 
 in the lower story. The upper story projected 
 several feet all around, and had loopholes in 
 the overhanging floor, through which the men 
 could shoot down. Loopholes were also fixed 
 in the upper walls, wide within, but closing to 
 nari'ow slits on the outside. A sentry box or 
 lookout was sometimes put at the top of the 
 roof. With the door barred by iron or great 
 beams of wood, and food and ammunition 
 stored in the lower room, men could ascend a 
 ladder to the second story of a blockhouse and 
 hold it against great odds, if the besiegers did 
 not succeed in burning them out. 
 
 Presqu' Isle was at the edge of Lake Erie, 
 and the soldiers brought in all the water they 
 could store. But the attacking Indians made 
 breastworks of logs, and shot burning arrows 
 on the shingle roof. All the water barrels 
 were emptied putting out fires. While some 
 men defended the loopholes, others dug under 
 the floor of the blockhouse and mined a way 
 below ground to the well in the fort where 
 Indians swarmed. Buildings in the inclosure 
 
128 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 were set on fire, but the defenders of the block- 
 house kept it from catching the flames by tear- 
 ing off shingles from the roof when they began 
 to burn. The mining party reached the well, 
 and buckets of water were drawn up and passed 
 through the tunnel to the blockhouse. Greatly 
 exhausted, the soldiers held out until next day, 
 when, having surrendered honorably, they were 
 all taken prisoners as they left the scorched and 
 battered log tower. For savages were such 
 capricious and cruel victors that they could 
 rarely be depended upon to keep faith. Pon- 
 tiac himself was superior to his people in such 
 matters. If he had been at Presqu' Isle, the 
 garrison would not have been seized after 
 surrendering on honorable terms. However, 
 these soldiers were not instantly massacred, as 
 other prisoners had been in war betwixt French 
 and English, when savage allies could not be 
 restrained. 
 
 Next to Detroit the most important post was 
 Michilimackinac. 
 
 This was not the island in the straits bearing 
 that name, but a stockaded fort on the south 
 shore of Michigan, directly across the strait 
 from St. Ignace. To this day, searching along 
 a beach of deep, yielding sand, so different from 
 
The Last Great Indian. 129 
 
 the rocky strands of the islands, you may find 
 at the forest edge a cellar where the powder 
 house stood, and fruit trees and gooseberry 
 bushes from gardens planted there more than 
 two hundred years ago. 
 
 MichiUmackinac, succeeding St. Ignace, had 
 grown in importance, and was now a stockaded 
 fort, having French houses both within and out- 
 side it, like Detroit. After Father Marquette's 
 old mission had been abandoned and the build- 
 ings burned, another small mission was begun 
 at L' Arbre Croche, not far west of Fort Michil- 
 imackinac, such of his Ottawas as were not scat- 
 tered being gathered here. The region around 
 also was full of Chippewas or Ojibwas. 
 
 All these Indians hated the English. Some 
 came to the fort and said to a young English 
 trader named Alexander Henry, who arrived 
 after the white flag was hauled down and the 
 red one about to be hoisted : — 
 
 " Englishman, although you have conquered 
 the French, you have not conquered us. We 
 are not your slaves. These lakes, these woods 
 and mountains were left to us by our ancestors. 
 They are our inheritance, and we will part with 
 them to none! " 
 
 Though these Ottawas and Chippewas were 
 
130 Heroes of the 3Iiddle West. 
 
 independent of those about Detroit, they had 
 eagerly taken hold of Pontiac's war belt. The 
 missionary priest was able for a while to restrain 
 the Ottawas. The Chippewas, gathered in from 
 their winter's hunting, determined to strike the 
 first blow. 
 
 On the fourth day of June, which was the 
 English king's birthday, they came and invited 
 the garrison to look at a game of ball, or baggat- 
 taway, which they were going to play on the 
 long sandy beach, against some Sac Indians. 
 The fortress gates stood open. The day was 
 very warm and discipline was relaxed. Nobody 
 noticed that squaws, flocking inside the fort, 
 had tomahawks and scalping knives hidden 
 under their blankets, though a few Englishmen 
 afterward remembered that the squaws were 
 strangely huddled in wrappings on a day hot 
 for that climate. 
 
 The young English trader, Alexander Henry, 
 has left a careful account of the massacre at Fort 
 Michilimackinac. He did not go out to see the 
 ball game, because he had important letters to 
 write and send by a canoe just starting to Can- 
 ada. Officers and men, believing the red tribes 
 friendly, lounged about unarmed. Whitewashed 
 French houses shone in the sun, and the surge 
 
The Last Great Indian. 131 
 
 of the straits sounded peacefully on the beach. 
 Nobody could dream that when the shouting 
 Indians drove the ball back from the farthest 
 stake, their cries would suddenly change to 
 war whoops. 
 
 At that horrid yell Henry sprang up and ran 
 to a window of his house. He saw Chippewas 
 filling the fort, and with weapons snatched from 
 the squaws, cutting down and scalping Eng- 
 lishmen. He caught his own gun from its 
 rack, expecting to hear the drum beat to arms. 
 But the surprised garrison were unable even to 
 sound an alarm. 
 
 Seeing that not a Frenchman was touched, 
 Henry slipped into the house of his next neigh- 
 bor, a Canadian named Langlade. The whole 
 family were at the front windows, looking at 
 the horrible sights in the fort ; but an Indian 
 slave, a Pani, or Pawnee woman, beckoned to 
 him and hid him in the attic, locking the dooi 
 and carrying away the key. 
 
 The attic probably had one or two of those 
 tunnel-like dormer windows built in the curv- 
 ing roof of all French houses. Henry found 
 a place where he could look out. He saw his 
 countrymen slaughtered without being able to 
 help them, and it was like a frightful night- 
 
132 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 mare from which there was to be no awaken- 
 ing. Presently the cry rose : — 
 
 "All is finished ! " 
 
 Then the Indians crowded into Langlade's 
 house and inquired whether any Englishmen 
 were hid there. So thin was the attic floor of 
 planks laid across joists, that Henry could hear 
 every word. 
 
 "I cannot say," ansAvered the Frenchman. 
 " You may examine for yourselves." 
 
 Henry looked around the attic for some place 
 to hide in. Moccasined feet were already com- 
 ing upstairs. Savage hands shook the attic door, 
 and impatient guttural voices demanded the 
 key. While some one went for the key, Henry 
 crept into a kind of tunnel made by a heap of 
 birch-bark vessels, used in the maple-sugar sea- 
 son. The door was opening before he could 
 draw himself quite out of sight, and though the 
 pile was in a dark corner, he dreaded displacing 
 some of the birch troughs and making a noise. 
 
 The Indians trod so close to him he thought 
 they must hear him breathe. Their bodies were 
 smeared with blood, which could be seen through 
 the dusk ; and while searching they told Mon- 
 sieur Langlade how many Englishmen they had 
 killed and the number of scalps they had taken. 
 
The Last Great Indian. 133 
 
 Not finding any one, they went away and the 
 door was again locked. Henry crept out of hid- 
 ing. There was a feather bed on the floor and 
 he stretched himself on it, so worn out by what 
 he had seen and endured that he fell asleep. 
 
 He was roused by the door opening again. 
 Madame Langlade came in, and she was sur- 
 prised and frightened at finding him. It was 
 nearly night and a fierce summer rain beat 
 upon the roof, dripping through cracks of 
 the heat-dried bark. Madame Langlade had 
 come to stop a leak. She told Henry that 
 all the English except himself were killed, 
 but she hoped he would escape. She brought 
 him some water to drink. 
 
 As darkness came on, he lay thinking of his 
 desperate state. He was four hundred miles 
 from Detroit, which he did not then know was 
 besieged, and with all his stores captured or 
 destroyed by the Indians, he had no provisions. 
 He could not stay where he was, and if he ven- 
 tured out, the first red man who met him would 
 kill him. 
 
 By morning the Indians came to the house 
 inquiring for Henry, whom they had missed. 
 Madame Langlade was in such fear that they 
 might kill her children if they found Henry 
 
134 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 sheltered in the house, that she told her hus- 
 band where he was and begged to have him 
 given up. This the Frenchman at first refused 
 to do ; but he finally led the Indians again to 
 the attic. 
 
 Henry stood up, expecting to die. 
 
 The Indians were all partially drunk and 
 had satisfied themselves with slaughter. One 
 of them seized Henry by the collar and lifted a 
 knife to plunge into his breast. White man 
 and red man looked intently at each other, and 
 the savage, perhaps moved by the fearless de- 
 spair in the young Englishman's eyes, concluded 
 to take him prisoner. Henry began to think he 
 could not be killed. 
 
 He found that the captain and lieutenant of 
 Michilimackinac were also alive and prisoners 
 like himself. The missionary priest was doing 
 all he could to restrain his maddened flock. At 
 a council held between Chippewas and Otta- 
 was, Henry was bought with presents by a Chip- 
 pewa chief named Wawatam, who loved him, 
 and who had been absent the day of the attack. 
 Wawatam put Henry in his canoe, carried him 
 across the strait to Michilimackinac Island, and 
 hid him in a cave, which is now called Skull 
 Rock by the islanders, because Henry found 
 
The Last Great Indian. 135 
 
 ancient skulls and bones in the bottom of it. 
 As the island was held sacred by the Indians, 
 this was probably one of their old sepulchres. 
 Its dome top is smothered in a tangle of ever- 
 greens and brush. There is a low, triangular 
 entrance, and the hollow inside is shaped like 
 an elbow. More than one island boy has since 
 crept back to the dark bend Avhere Henry lay 
 hidden on the skulls, but only a drift of damp 
 leaves can be found there now. 
 
 The whole story of Alexander Henry's ad- 
 ventures, before he escaped and returned safely 
 to Canada, is a wonderful chapter in western 
 history. 
 
 The Indians were not guilty of all the cru- 
 elties practiced in this war. Bounties were 
 offered for savage scalps. One renegade Eng- 
 lishman, named David Owen, came back from 
 adoption and marriage into a tribe, bringing the 
 scalps of his squaw wdfe and her friends. 
 
 Through the entire summer Pontiac was suc- 
 cessful in everj^thing except the taking of De- 
 troit. He besieged it from May until October. 
 With autumn his hopes began to dwindle. He 
 had asked the French to help him, and re- 
 fused to believe that their king had made a 
 treaty at Paris, giving up to the English all 
 
136 
 
 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 French claims in the New World east of the 
 Mississippi. His cause was lost. He could 
 band unstable warriors together for a common 
 
 good, but he 
 could not con- 
 trol politics in 
 Europe, nor de- 
 fend a people 
 given up by 
 their sover- 
 eign, against 
 the solidly ad- 
 vancing Eng- 
 lish race. 
 But he was 
 unwilling to own himself defeated while the 
 French flag waved over a foot of American 
 ground. This clever Indian, needing supplies 
 to carry on his war, used civilized methods to 
 get them on credit. He gave promissory notes 
 written on birch bark, signed with his own 
 totem, or tribe-mark — a picture of the otter. 
 These notes were faithfully paid. 
 
 When he saw his struggle becoming hopeless 
 eastward, he drew off to the Illinois settlements 
 to fight back the English from taking posses- 
 sion of Fort Chartres, the last French post. 
 
 North America at Close of French Wars, 1763. 
 
The Last Great Indian. 137 
 
 They might come up the Mississippi from New 
 Orleans, or they might come down the Ohio. 
 The Iroquois had always called the Mississippi 
 the Ohio, considering that river which rose 
 near their own country the great river, and 
 the northern branch merely a tributary. 
 
 Pontiac ordered the Illinois Indians to take 
 up arms and stand by him. 
 
 " Hesitate not," he said, " or I will destroy 
 you as fire does the prairie grass ! These are 
 the words of Pontiac." 
 
 They obeyed him. He sent more messengers 
 down as far as New Orleans, keeping the tribes 
 stirred against the English. He camped with 
 his forces around Fort Chartres, cherishing it 
 and urging the last French commandant, St. 
 Ange de Bellerive, to take up arms with him, 
 until that poor captain, tormented by the savage 
 mob, and only holding the place until its Eng- 
 lish owners received it, was ready to march out 
 with his few soldiers and abandon it. 
 
 It is told that while Pontiac was leading his 
 forlorn hope, he made his conquerors ridiculous. 
 Major Loftus with a detachment of troops came 
 up the Mississippi to take possession according 
 to treaty. Pontiac turned him back. Captain 
 Pittman came up the river. Pontiac turned him 
 
138 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 back. Captain Morris started from Detroit, and 
 Pontiac squatted defiantly in his way. Lieuten- 
 ant Frazer descended the Ohio. Pontiac caught 
 him and shipped him to New Orleans by canoe. 
 Captain Croghan was also stopped near Detroit. 
 Both French and Spanish people roared with 
 laughter at the many failures of the coming 
 race to seize what had so easily been obtained 
 by treaty. 
 
 Two years and a half passed between Pon- 
 tiac's attack on Detroit and the formal sur- 
 render of Fort Chartres. The great war chief's 
 heart, with a gradual breaking, finally yielded 
 before the steadily advancing and all-conquering 
 people that were to dominate this continent. 
 
 The second day of winter, late in the after- 
 noon, Pontiac went into the fort unattended by 
 any warrior, and without a word sat down near 
 St. Ange de Bellerive in the officers' quarters. 
 Both veteran soldier and old chief knew that 
 Major Farmar, with a large body of troops, was 
 almost in sight of Fort Chartres, coming from 
 New Orleans. Perhaps before the low winter 
 sun was out of sight, cannon mounted on one 
 of the bastions would have to salute the new 
 commandant. Sentinels on the mound of Fort 
 Chartres could see a frosty valley, reaching to 
 
The Last Great Indian. 139 
 
 the Mississippi, glinting in the distance. That 
 alluvial stretch was, in the course of years, to 
 be eaten away by the river even to the bastions. 
 The fort itself, built at such expense, would 
 soon be abandoned by its conquerors, to sink, 
 piecemeal, a noble and massive ruin. The dome- 
 shaped powder house and stone quarters would 
 be put to ignoble uses, and forest trees, spread- 
 ing the spice of walnut fragrance, or the dense 
 shadow of oaks, would grow through the very 
 room where St. Ange and Pontiac sat. Indians, 
 passing by, would camp in the old place, for- 
 getting how the last hope of their race had 
 clung to it. 
 
 The Frenchman partly foresaw these changes, 
 and it was a bitter hour to him. He wanted to 
 have it over and to cross the Mississippi, to a 
 town recently founded northward on the west 
 shore, where many French settlers had collected, 
 called St. Louis. This was then considered 
 Spanish ground. But if the French king de- 
 serted his American colonies, why should not 
 his American colonists desert him? 
 
 " Father," spoke out Pontiac, with the usual 
 Indian term of respect, " I have always loved 
 the French. We have often smoked the cal- 
 umet together, and we have fought battles 
 
140 Heroes of the Middle West. 
 
 together against misguided Indians and the 
 English dogs." 
 
 St. Ange de Bellerive looked at the dejected 
 chief and thought of Le Moyne de Bienville, 
 now an old man living in France, who was said 
 to have wept and implored King Louis on his 
 knees not to give up to the English that I'ich 
 western domain which Marquette and Jolliet 
 and La Salle and Tonty and many another 
 Frenchman had suffered to gain, and to secure 
 which he himself had given his hest years. 
 
 " The chief must now bury the hatchet," he 
 answered quietly. 
 
 " I have buried it," said Pontiac. " I shall 
 lift it no more." 
 
 " The English are willing to make peace with 
 him, if he recalls all his wampum belts of war." 
 
 Pontiac grinned. " The belts are more than 
 one man can carry." 
 
 "Where does the chief intend to go when he 
 leaves this post? " 
 
 Pontiac lifted his hand and pointed east, west, 
 north, south. He would have no settled abode. 
 It was a sign that he relinquished the inher- 
 itance of his fathers to an invader he hated. 
 His race could not live under the civilization of 
 the Anglo-Saxon. He would have struck out 
 
The Last Great Indian. 141 
 
 to the remotest wilderness, had he foreseen to 
 what a burial place his continual clinging to 
 the French would bring him. For Pontiac was 
 assassinated by an Illinois Indian, whom an Eng- 
 lish trader had bribed, and his body lies some- 
 where to-day under the pavements of St. Louis, 
 English-speaking men treading constantly over 
 him. But if the dead chiefs ears could hear, 
 he would catch also the sound of the beloved 
 French tongue lingering there. 
 
 A cannon thundered from one of the bastions. 
 St. Ange stood up, and Pontiac stood up with 
 him. 
 
 "The English are in sight," said St. Ange 
 de Bellerive. " That salute is the signal for the 
 flag of France to be lowered on Fort Chartres." 
 
ADVERTISEMENTS 
 
REFERENCE BOOKS IN HISTORY 
 
 Guide to the Study of American History. — By Edward Channing 
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 Reference History of the United States. — By Hannah A. Davidson. 
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THE STORY OF OUR CONTINENT 
 
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The BEGINNER'S AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 By D. H. MONIGOMERY, 
 
 Author of the "Leading- Facts of History Series" 
 
 Cloth. 234 pages. Fully illustrated. For introduction, 60 cents. 
 
 The author is Mr. Montgomery, the eminent and successful 
 writer of historical text-books, whose books have stood the test of 
 everyday use in thousands of schools in all parts of the country. 
 
 This book is in no sense an abridgment of the author's 
 "American History," but is entirely new and distinct, and 
 arranged on a very different plan. 
 
 All the main points are covered by interesting biographies. 
 It is almost purely biographical, but care has been taken to make 
 the stories cover, either directly or incidentally, all the main 
 points of the history of our country. It comprises thirty biog- 
 raphies, all in the compass of two hundred and twenty pages, 
 followed by a list of reference books for teachers and a very full 
 index. This makes prominent the biographical idea, and the 
 principal history makers stand out prominently before the eye. 
 
 The special aim of the book is to present those facts and 
 principles in the lives of some of the great men of American 
 history which will be of interest and value to boys and girls 
 who are just beginning to be concerned about the history of 
 their country. Great pains has been taken to relate only such 
 incidents and anecdotes as are believed to rest on authorities 
 beyond question. 
 
 Montgomery's Beginner's American History has never failed 
 to awaken the interest of wide-awake pupils ; to please earnest 
 teachers; to maintain its position with school authorities; to 
 retain its popularity in the schoolroom; to fascinate by its 
 clear, direct style ; and to teach boys and girls the principles of 
 true patriotism. 
 
 GINN & COMPANY, Publishers, 
 
 Boston. New York. Chicago. Atlanta. Dallas. 
 
STAR=LAND 
 
 Talks with Young People about the Wonders of the Heavens. 
 By Sir ROBERT S. BALL, 
 
 Royal Astronomer of Ireland. 
 
 Cloth. 384 pages. Fully illustrated. For introduction, $1.00. 
 
 This is a book of the rarest excellence. It combines the 
 knowledge of a royal astronomer with the happy faculty of 
 the story-teller. 
 
 It is based upon two courses of Christmas lectures de- 
 livered to children at the Royal Institution, Great Britain, 
 and is something of rare quality, — lucid, fascinating, and 
 yet thoroughly scientific. 
 
 This fascinating book treats, in a manner equally true to 
 science and attractive to children, all the chief topics of 
 Astronomy : the sun, the moon, the planets, comets, meteors, 
 and the stars. It is just the book that has been wanted for 
 a long time, and is calculated not only to interest and in- 
 struct, but to lead to greater effort, on the part of the 
 learner, in the right direction. 
 
 -is^ 
 
 The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone: I have now finished reading 
 your luminous and delightful Star-Land, and I am happy to be in a 
 sense enrolled amongst your young pupils. 
 
 GINN & COMPANY, Publishers, 
 
 Boston. New York. Chicago. Atlanta. Dallas. 
 
CLASSICS FOR CHILDREN 
 
 Choice Literature; Judicious Notes; Large Type; 
 Firm Binding; Low Prices. 
 
 For the prices and bibliography of these books, 
 see our High School and College Catalogue. 
 
 Aesop's Fables. 
 
 Andersen's Fairy Tales. First 
 
 Series. 
 Andersen's Fairy Tales. Second 
 
 Series. 
 Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. 
 Burt's Stories from Plato. 
 Chesterfield's Letters. 
 Church's Stories of the Old 
 
 World. 
 Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. 
 Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. 
 Cervantes' Don Quixote of La 
 
 Mancha. 
 Epictetus. 
 Fiske-Irving's Washington and 
 
 His Country. 
 Francillon's Gods and Heroes. 
 Franklin : His Life by Himself. 
 Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. 
 Grimm's Fairy Tales, Part L 
 Grimm's Fairy Tales, Part H. 
 Grote and Segur's Two Great 
 
 Retreats. 
 Hale's Arabian Nights. 
 Hatim Tai. 
 Hudson and Lamb's Merchant of 
 
 Venice. 
 Hughes' Tom Brown at Rugby. 
 Irving's Alhambra. 
 Irving's Sketch-Book. (Six Selec- 
 tions.) 
 
 Johnson's Rasselas. 
 Kingsley's Greek Heroes. 
 Kingsley's Water Babies. 
 Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses. 
 Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare 
 Marcus Aurelius. 
 Martineau's Peasant and the 
 
 Prince. 
 Montgomery's Heroic Ballads. 
 Plutarch's Lives. 
 Ruskin's King of the Golden 
 
 River. 
 Selections from Ruskin. 
 Scott's Guy Mannering, 
 
 Ivanhoe. 
 
 Lady of the Lake. 
 
 Lay of the Last Minstrel. 
 
 Marmion. 
 
 Old Mortality. 
 
 Quentin Durward. 
 
 Rob Roy. 
 
 Tales of a Grandfather. 
 
 Talisman. 
 South ey's Life of N .son. 
 Swift's Gulliver's Travels. 
 White's Natural History of 
 
 Selborne. 
 Williams and Foster's Selections 
 
 for Memorizing. 
 Wyss' Swiss Family Rol^inson. 
 
 GINN & COMPANY, Publishers, 
 
 Boston. New York. Chicago. Atlanta. Dallas. 
 
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