-u^f- ^p ^Mtin QMinson NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL HISTORY OF AMER- ICA. With Bibliographical and Descriptive Essays on its Historical Sources and Authorities. Profusely illus- trated with portraits, maps, facsimiles, etc. Edited by Justin Winsor, Librarian of Harvard University, with the cooperation of a Committee from the Massachusetts Historical Society, and with the aid of other learned Societies. In eight royal 8vo volumes. Each volume, »ei> $5-5°; sheep, net, J6.50; half morocco, net, ^7.50. {Sold only by subscription for the entire set.) READER'S HANDBOOK OF THE AMERICAN REV- OLUTION. i6mo, $1.25. WAS SHAKESPEARE SHAPLEIGH? i6mo, rubri- cated parchment paper, 75 cents. CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, and how he received and imparted the Spirit of Discovery. With portraits and maps. 8vo, gilt top, $4.00. CARTIER TO FRONTENAC. A Study of Geographical Discovery in the interior of North America, in its his- torical relations, 1534-1700. With full cartographical Illustrations from Contemporary Sources. 8vo, gilt top, J4.00. THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN. The Struggle in America be- tween England and France, 1697-1763. With full car- tographical Illustrations from Contemporary Sources. 8vo, gilt top, $4.00. THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT: The Struggle for the Trans-Allegheny Region, 1763-1797. With full carto- graphical Illustrations from Contemporary Sources. 8vo, $4.00. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, Boston and New York. d)e iWisstssippt Basin THE STRUGGLE IN AMERICA BETWEEN ENGLAND AND FRANCE 1697— 1763 WITH FULL CARTOGRAPHICAL ILLUSTRA- TIONS FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES BY JUSTIN WINSOR BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY Copyright, 1895, Bt JUSTIN WINSOR. All rights reserved. To CLEMENTS EGBERT MARKHAM, C. B., F. R. S. Pbesident of the Royal Geogkaphical Society, London. Deab Mb. Mabkham, — Such an observer as you are knows how the physiography of a conti- nent influences its history ; how it opens avenues of discovery, directs lines of settlement, and gives to the natural rulers of the earth their coign of vantage. I would not say that there are not other compelling influences ; but no other control is so steady. If we appreciate such a dominating power in subjecting the earth to man's uses, we cannot be far from discerning the pith of history, particularly of those periods which show the work of pioneers. The society over which you hold so signal an authority gives itself to the study of geography as elucidating many problems in man's des- tiny. There is, then, a fitness, I trust, in your accepting this homage from one who is enrolled in that society's foreign membership, and also is your friend and servant, Harvard UNivERsrtY, March, 1895. CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. CHAPTER I. The Mississippi Basin at the End of the Seventeenth Cen- tury ^ 1 Illustrations : The Natchez Country, after Danville (1732), 7 ; The Upper Mississippi and the Mille Lacs Region, after Hum- phreys and Abbot (1861), 9 ; The Ohio Basin, after the Same, 19 ; The Green Bay Portage, after Marcel's Reproductions, 23 ; Col- den's Map, showing the Northern Portages, 25 ; The Divide between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin, by Hum- phreys and Abbot, 27 ; The Northern Portages in Joliet's Time, after Marcel's Reproductions, 28, 29 ; The Heads of the Yellow- stone and Snake Rivers, after Humphreys and Abbot, 31. CHAPTER IL Iberville's Expedition. 1697-1700 33 Illustrations : The Mississippi in La Salle's Time, 34 ; The Gulf Coast defectively mapped (1728), 35 ; Portrait of Iberville, 37 ; Roggeveen's Map of the Gulf Coast (1675), 39 ; The Lower Mississippi Basin, after Humphreys and Abbot (1861), 41 ; Coxe's Map of Carolana (1722), 44, 45 ; Mitchell's Map (1755) of Colonel Welch's Route (1698), 47 ; Danville's Carte de la Louisiane, 49 ; Jefferys' Lower Mississippi (1759), 50 ; Homann's Lower Mississippi with Tonty's Route, 51 ; Jefferys' Map of Fort L'Huillier and the Trail to the Pawnees, 53 ; La Salle's and Iberville's Explorations, 55 ; Portrait of Bienville, 67 ; Danville's Map of the Gulf Coast (1732), 69. CHAPTER IIL Throughout the Valley. 1700-1709 61 Illustrations : Delisle's Map of the Gulf Coast, 75 ; Franque- lin's Map of the Mississippi, 77 ; La Potherie's Carte Generalle de la Nouvelle France (1722), 79 ; The Mille Lacs Region, 81 ; La Hontan's Rivifere Longue, 82. VI CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. CHAPTER IV. Crozat and Trade. 1710-1719 83 Illustrations : French Soldiers (1710), 84 ; Red River Basin, after Humphreys and Abbot's Basins of the Mississippi (1861), 89 ; Broutin's Carte des Natchitoches (1722), 91 ; Homann's Map (1720), showing the Routes of St. Denis, 93 ; The Red River Region, after Danville's Louisiane, 95 ; Quivira, etc., by Palairet and Delaroche, 97. CHAPTER V. The Mississippi Bubble. 1714^1720 99 Illustrations : Portrait of John Law, 100 ; Bill of the Banque Royale, 103 ; Country of the Padoucas, etc., 105 ; Law's Map of Louisiana, 107 ; Arms of the Mississippi Company, 107 ; Quinquempoix, 109. CHAPTER VI. The Barriers of Louisiana. 1710-1720 Ill Illustrations : The Upper Mississippi, from the Gentleman's Magazine (1763), 113 ; The Great Lake of the West, from Pop- ple's Map (1732), 113 ; Danville's Map of the Upper Lakes, 117 ; Map of the Illinois Country, 119; Kaskaskia and its Vicin- ity, 121 ; Governor Spotswood's Route to the Valley of Virginia, 129 ; Indian Map of Traders' Paths, 132. CHAPTER Vn. Charlevoix and his Observations. 1720-1729 136 Illustrations : Lafitau's Map of North America, 137 ; De Fer's Map of Santa Fd and the Far Country, 139 ; The Missouri and the Country of the Padoucas, by Bowen and Gibson, 140 ; Dr. James Smith's Map of Louisiana, 142, 143 ; Danville's Upper Mississippi, 147 ; Dumont's Plan of New Orleans, 151 ; The Middle Mississippi, by Bowen and Gibson, 153 ; Mitchell's Map of the Ceuis' Country, 155. CHAPTER VIIL Along the Appalachians. 1720-1727 160 Illustration : The Indian Trail from the Shenandoah, 169. CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. vu CHAPTER IX. The RrrALRiES of France, England, and Spain. 1730-1740 . . 171 Illustrations : Keith's Map of Virginia, 181 ; Fort Rosalie and Vicinity, 189. CHAPTER X. The Search for the Sea of the West. 1727-1753 193 Illustrations : Jefferys' Map of Vdrendrye's Forts and the River of the West, 195 ; Bowen and Gibson's Sioux Country, (1763), 197 ; Vaugondy's Amerique Septentrionale (1750), 205 ; Buache's Mer de VOuest (1752), 207 ; Delisle's Carte d'Ame- rique (1722), 208 ; Buache's Mer de VOuest (1752), 209 ; Le Rouge's River of the West (1746), 215. CHAPTER XL War and Truce. 1741-1748 218 Illustration : Kitchin's Map of the French Settlements (1747), 226, 227. CHAPTER XII. The Portals of the Ohio Valley. 1740-1749 229 Illustrations : Parts of Fry and Jefferson's Map of Virginia, 231, 233, 237; Lewis Evans's Map of Peiisilvania (1749), 240, 241 ; Evans's Middle British Colonies (1758), 244, 245 ; An- drews's New Map of the United States (1783), 247 ; One of Celeron's Plates, 253 ; Map of ChS^S J_, 1^ O H w 3 a 3 p tsl = i o g -§ f8 o. -. M o- =^ H ><■ rt- !z! S" g » W n g >» s §. «1 "* s »TJ ^ 2 o p g. fO to i-d 1-3 ilj 2. O J" H 1 ? 24 THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN. merable lakes, ponds, and streams, clear and pebbly, and the wild rice rustles as the paddle bends its tottering stalks. It was through such a country that the woodsman sought the upper- most reaches of the Mississippi, where that river was first seen by Europeans, and whence Duluth, in 1680, had hoped to find a way to the Gulf of California. Where the pioneer two centuries ago stranded his canoe, the twin cities of an ocean lake now rival Chicago as a distributing centre of produce and trade. Before the end of the seventeenth century, the portages at the head of Lake Michigan had become the best known Lake '^ Michigan of all, and there had been a trading-post for something^ portages. . o t. a like fifteen years at the Chicago River. What Her- man Moll, the English cartographer, called the " land carriage of Chekakou " is described by James Logan, in a communica- tion which he made in 1718 to the English Board of Trade, as running from the lake three leagues up the river, then a half a league of carriage, then a mile of water, next a small carry, then two miles to the Illinois, and then one hundred and thirty leagues to the Mississippi. But descriptions varied with the seasons. It was usually called a carriage of from four to nine miles, according to the stage of the water. In dry seasons it was even farther, while in wet times it might not be more than a mile ; and, indeed, when the intervening lands were " drowned," it was quite possible to pass in a canoe amid the sedges from Lake Michigan to the Des Plaines, and so to the Illinois and the Mississippi. It is along this route that the drainage canal of the city of Chicago is now constructing for the joint purpose of relieving the city of its sewage and opening a passage for its commerce with the interior. There were other portages south of the Chicago River, and at the southwest corner of the lake by the lesser and greater Cal- umet rivers, by which the Kankakee and Des Plaines branches of the Illinois were sometimes reached. It is not always easy, in the early narratives, to determine which of these portages about Chicago was in jDarticular instances used, and in the maps there is some confusion in the Chekagoua and Calumet rivers. In the southeast angle of the lake was the portage of the St. Joseph River, which La Salle was much accustomed to trav- 26 THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN. erse. There was by it about four miles of carriage to the Kankakee. The northward current of the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, and the southward current of the western shore, naturally made the St. Joseph portage a return route to Canada, and the Chicago an outward one. At a later day, this same river was found to afford a carriage to an upper branch of the Wabash, and it became the principal channel of supplies for the settlers at Yincennes. One can weU imagine how this broad prairie land struck the Canadian from his sterile north, — the flower-studded grass of the spring and the tall waving banner- ets of the later season, with the luxury of the river bottoms and their timber margins. There was still a series of portages crowning the narrow strip Lake Erie ®^ ^^^® southcrn watcr-slied of Lake Erie, but they were portages. little uscd tiU the eighteenth century. There is some reason to suppose, from the evidence of Sanson's map, that the Maumee had been explored as early as 1656, and the portage thence to the Wabash had been known to AUouez as early as 1680. A year or two later, La SaUe says it is the most direct of all the routes to the Illinois, but too hazardous because of the prowling Iroquois. It remained almost unfrequented be- cause of these confederates till after the settling of Detroit in 1715. By this time the Miamis' confederacy had possessed the region about the affluents of the Wabash, and the three thou- sand warriors which they could piit in the field were a check upon the Iroquois. The country was an attractive one, with its undidating landscape of meadow and upland, and streams that alternately lingered in calm repose and twirled with the foam- ing rapid. Animal life was brisk with the deer, the wolf, and the bear. The rivulets were alive with the white swan, the crane, and the heron, springing from the wild rice or settling along the grassy isles. On the gentle slopes of the land one heard the turkey and the quail. It was a meeting-ground of the savages, and the ashes of their council fires were seen on the knolls. This portage varied with the state of the water from eight or nine miles to even thirty. For two hundred miles downward from the carry the Wabash was more or less interrupted, but Note. The opposite map is from Humphreys and Abbot's Basins of the Mississippi, etc., War Department, 1801. It sliows tlie line of the divide intersecting the portages between the Oreat Lakes and the Ohio and Mississippi basins. KidsHfu^ftJ Im ujx auJ OMifU- >^ 30 TEE MISSISSIPPI BASIN. beyond that there was about four hundred miles of navigable course for boats not drawing over three feet. Another portage from the Maumee to the west branch of the Big Miami became later the traveled route of the traders from Pennsylvania and Virginia. A short carry from Sandusky to the Scioto became the warpath of the French Indians about the Detroit River against the Choctaws and flat-headed tribes towards Carolina. The portages farther east came into use much later. A short one by way of the Cuyahoga (where Cleveland now stands) led to the upper waters of the Muskingum. That by Presqu' Isle (the modern city of Erie) and French Creek led to the Alle- ghany River, and became eventually the chief approach of the French after they had determined to maintain military posts along the Ohio and bar out the English. It is by the same route to-day that commerce and engineering skill are combining in hope to connect Pittsburgh, the great centre of coal produc- tion, with the Lakes, already coursed with steamers of more than four thousand tons disj^lacement. Still more easterly was that to Chautauqua Lake, the source of the Alleghany, but it proved too much of an incline for transporting heavy supplies. It was also quite possible to pass Lake Onta- fi'om tlic sourccs of the Gcnesce to the springs of the no portages. ^Heghauy, but the route was hardly used except by wanderers and stealthy war parties. The portages from the Iroquois country to the south were mainly of use in passing to the Susquehanna and Delaware. There is a story reported by Begon in a memoir (1716) that The Sea of ^^ early as 1688 the Assiniboine Indians had offered the West. ^Q conduct a French traveler, De Noyen, by what seems to have been the Minnesota River, over a divide to the Red River of the North, and so to Lake Winnipeg. Thence, the memoir claimed, the way was open to the great Sea of the West, where people rode on horseback. The journey to and from would occupy, he said, five months. These are the earliest inti- mations of an overland discovery of the Pacific, by a definite Note. The map on the preceding pages shows the northern portages as understood at the time of Joliet's discoveries. From Marcel's Reproductions, following a map in the Archives of the Marine at Paris. I?* \ » f [From Humphreys and Abbot's Basins of the 3Iississippi, etc., War Department, 1861. It shows the divide between the Yellowstone River and Snake River.] 32 THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN. course, and the first indication of the passage which was to connect the Great Valley with the Mackenzie basin and the polar sea. In 1695, Le Sueur established a post on the upper Missis- sippi, and acted as a pacificator of the ChijDpeways and Sioux. In his search at the same time for a copper mine on the Green River, — which was reached by the ^Minnesota, — he and St. Pe- had, it is supposed, been the earliest to know this affluent of the Mississippi, when he bestowed upon ic the name of St. Peter. / When, in 1673, Marquette descended the Wisconsin and the The Mis- Mississippi, and was going along with the current in soun River, dear Water at a speed of twelve miles an hour, he noticed a great change in the body of the stream, which was produced by the much more rapid influx from the west of a gTcat volume of eddying sediment. He learned from the Indi- ans that this polluting stream was called the Pekitauoiii. At a later day, when the tribe of the Missouris was found to be a leading race among the fourteen nations of savages which inhab- ited the banks of this great river, it was easy for it to become better known as the Missouri, th,us distinguishing it as an afflu- ent of the Mississippi, when the voliune of its current entitled it, rather than the Mississippi, to be called the principal stream. At tliis time Marquette indulged the hope that one day he might be permitted to ascend its turbid course and solve the great problem of the west. It was reserved, however, for the eighteenth century to begin the solution of that geographical riddle which was made clear in the nineteenth. It was then found that the springs of the Platte, which fed the ^Missouri, and its port- ^cre adjaccnt to those of the Colorado, which de- *K^*- bouched into the Gulf of California. Other explor- ers discovered that the sources of the Yellowstone opened portages to those of the Snake, while an upper affluent of the Missouri was contiguous to the headwaters of Clark's Fork. The Snake and this fork were idtimately found to pass their united waters into the Columbia, entered from the Pacific for the first time by a Boston ship at the close of the eighteenth century, and draining a country richer and larger than the combined area of the Atlantic seaboard commonwealths from Maine to Virginia. CHAPTER II. Iberville's expedition. 1697-1700. The treaty of Ryswick, in April, 1697, left France m posses- sion of the two great valleys of North America. Tonty was now at his Rock on the Illinois, a sort of privileged charac- , , Touty. ter in the valley, respected by Indian and white when- ever they came within his influence. Whoever has followed the career of La Salle needs not to be told of the services of this faithful follower. It was well known how valorously and devotedly he had gone down the Mississippi, hoping to res- cue his bewildered leader. A journal which Tonty had kept, falling into irresponsible hands, had only just been published in Paris, but there was so much of interjected error and foolish untruth in it that the hardy adventurer promptly disowned it. The publication, however, had served to increase his fame in France. Before this he had asked that he might be permitted to follow up the discoveries of La Salle at the mouth of the Great River and confirm its possession to the king, but the man of action was not yet thought to be needed. In October, 1697, Louvigny preferred the same request, and held out the hope of invading Mexico successfully, from the Mississippi as a base, — a view of the river's usefulness that was not lost a few years later. In December, De Remonville argued in a Memoire that the development of Louisiana was of great importance to France. He catalogued the variety of products which the country could be made to yield, — game, peltry, wine, siU?, and hemp. The territory, he said, was rich in mines. Its oaks could more than supply the royal navy with masts. He pointed out that a colonizing expedition ought to be sent speedily, lest the English should gain posses- sion in advance. Moreover, he added, a considerable military Amewove septentr THE MISSISSIPPI. [From a map in the Bibliotlieque Nationale, given in Marcel's Reproductions. It was made by the Abbt; Gentil and given to tliat library in 1713. It shows the early explorations of La Salle, and represents the knowledge previous to Iberville's voyage.] IBERVILLE. 35 force was necessary to protect the expedition from the English buccaneers, who infested the coast from New York to Florida. He adduced a rumor that the governor of Pennsylvania had already dispatched fifty men to settle on the Wabash (Oliio), and such an occupation could be but a distinct threat to the French control of the Mississippi. This memoir was addressed to Pontchartrain, who as minis- ter had already been importuned by Iberville, just now released from service in the north by the treaty train and . Til Iberville. of Kyswick. The urgency was great, and the des- 36 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. tined actor was restless. The government yielded, and Iber- ville gathered for the undertaking a company of two hundred emigrants, men, women, and children. It is from Penicault, a carpenter in the company, who kept a running account of events up to his leaving the colony in 1721, that we get a great deal of what we know of these early beginnings of Louisiana. In June, 1698, Iberville obtained command of the " Badine," while another ship, the " Marin," was placed under the Cheva- lier de Surgeres. Fresh reports now came from over the Eng- lish Channel, indicating that their rivals were planning to send out a company of French Protestants. While the government's purpose was to seize the mouths of the Mississippi before the English could get there, Iberville thought it prudent to give out that his destination was the Amazon. It was October be- iberviue ^^^^ ^^^ ^^^ ready to sail, and on the 24th his two saUs. ships, with some tenders, put to sea from Brest. Six weeks later, on December 4, the leading ships reached Cap FrauQois in San Domingo, and the supply vessels came safely in one by one. His company refreshed themselves, but not always prudently, and a number died from over-indulgence. Here the" Francois," having orders which had been sent ahead, joined the expedition. She was a ship of fifty guns, under Chateaumorand, and became a faithful escort. Iberville, who had picked up some filibusters as recruits, left San Domingo on New Year's Day (January 1, 1699), under the piloting of a wild adventurer, Laurent de Graff. The fleet passed beyond Cuba and then steered north. Land Avas made in the early evening of January 23. It was a coast of white sand, and the smoke of fires was seen far inland. Turn- ing west and anchoring each night, three days later the French saw the masts of vessels behind a protecting sand-spit, and pres- ently a sloop came out to reconnoitre. Iberville was now off Pensacola. He avoided intercourse with the inquisitive Span- iards, and crawled away, still westerly, along the coast. On January 81, he was opposite Mobile Bay, but the weather was foul and he did not stop. Ten days later his ships glided under the lee of an island, which was later know^i as Ship Island. Iberville soon started (February 27) in a boat towards the mainland, where he cautiously tried to open communication THE GREAT RIVER FOUND. 37 with the natives. He hoped to get guides from them to aid him in finding the Great River. Some wandering Bayagoulas, whom he encountered among the Biloxi Indians, told him of a great river farther west upon which their tribe lived. IBERVILLE. [From Margry.] There was fortunately among the French the priest, Anas- tase Douay, who had been a companion of La Salle. Moreover, Iberville himself was well informed of what La Salle, Membre, Tonty, and even Hennepin had said of the Mississippi, and counted on their descriptions as aids in identifying the stream. Following the shore south and west, it was on Mai'cli 2 that 38 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. Iberville entered a large river, and struggled up against its turbid flood. His rangfe of vision was bounded bv The . ° "^ Mississippi cauebrakes and willows. As he went on, he began to doubt if it was the river which Hennepin, Joutel, and Tonty had known. Wherever he encamj^ed he marked a tree with the cross. The youthful Bienville, a younger brother of Iberville, usually pushed his boat ahead of the rest. They saw fires in the distance, and occasionally got a sight of the neighboring bayous. Whatever Indians were seen jjossessed canoes fleet enough to escape, but one day a savage was cajoled into coming to them to receive gifts. This enticed others, with whom the French traded trinkets for meat. W^henever they fired a cannon, the amazed natives fell as if struck. The French reached the spot where New Orleans was later Site of New built, and here discovered the portage which led to Orleans. inner waters, by which they could reach their ships. Leaving the examination of this for another occasion, they passed on and landed among the Bayagoulas, who lifted the peaceful calumet as the strangers approached. With this tribe they feasted, and presents were distributed. Its chief wore a serge cloak, which he said had been given to him by Tonty. This was the first incident which went far to convince them that they were at last stemming the current of the Mississippi. They got some fowl from the Indians, and were told that the orisfinal stock came from the shores of the western ocean. To increase their confidence in their identification of the river, they turned to the text of Hennepin, but failing to find all that this priest said of the river, they grew more and more satisfied that the Recollect was the liar which Europe was inclined to believe him. Some of the narratives of those who had been before them Tiie Hou- on tlie river mentioned the villages of the Iloumas, '""•'• and they actually came to one of these. They found a palisaded camp. Iberville says that it had a sort of tem- ple, built of upright logs, and smoothed with mud in the chinks. A conical roof made of canes was covered with painted figures. They counted about two hundred cabins around the temple, and saw a glass bottle which Tonty had left there. The French again raised a cross on the river-bank, and hung up the royal arms. 40 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. Some of the Houmas went along with the French af? guides ^ They told Iberville that the Ascantia, a stream on the right, could be followed to the sea. At one place on the shore was a red-tree trunk, ornamented with the heads of fish and bear, indicating, it was said, the bounds between the Houmas and the Tonicas. Our modern Baton Rouge marks the spot. They were put to great labor in turning the bends against the current, and where they could they struck across the bayous. Their Baya- goula chieftain acted as an intercessor when they came to a new village, to which they usually announced their approach by the discharge of a gun. In some of these native hamlets they were entertained by chanting choirs and dancing-girls ; in all they were feasted. In their turn the French distributed pres- ents. Sometimes gifts of corn and meat were made on the part of the tribes. They heard of a people called the Quini- pissas, and Tonty was known to have been among such a tribe. A Taensas Indian spoke of a lai'ge affluent on the left. Red River. i o ' which proved to be the Eed River. The journal of Membre gave the order of the tribes to be encountered, but they found it difficult to make their observations agree with it. Pres- ently they learned that an Indian chief, who dwelt somewhere near the mouth of the Great Rivey, possessed a letter, intrusted to him by Tonty a good many years before, with injimctions to give it to a Frenchman who was expected to enter the river. It was in fact the letter, dated April 20, 1686, which Tonty'a Touty, tumiug back from the Gulf after his failure to **"*'^' find his chief, but hoping that La Salle might yet ap- pear, had left with the natives. If this letter could be found, or its existence proved, there would be scarcely a doubt that the Mississippi was discovered. Membre's journal seemed to indicate that he and Tonty had descended one of two channels where the river divided. They could find no such parting of the stream, and the Indians said there was no other descending river than the one they were following. With this doubt puzzling them, the boats were turned with the current, and they were soon gliding on in a way that made their progress a recreation. When they reached what in prehistoric times was very likely the main tia or iber- channel of the river, but was now a diverging outlet, viUe River. , , . ,. , , , . , already indicated to them on their way up as the [From Humphreys and Abbot's Basins of the 3Iississippi, etc., War Department, 1861. It shows the lower Mississippi and the Gulf coast. The water-shed oi the rivers flowing into the Gulf east of the Mississippi is bounded by a dotted line.] 42 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. Ascantia, Iberville parted with his brother, and passed through this passage to Lake Poutchartrain, with four men in two canoes, seeking a new route to his ships. Bienville, with the other boats, followed the course by which they had ascended, and as he approached the deltas began to make inquiry for the letter of Tonty. The promise of a hatchet brought forward its possessor, and after fourteen years the paper fell into a Frenchman's hands. There was now no reasonable doubt that the Mississippi had been found at last. This exploration had occupied six weeks, and Bienville was only a few hours behind his brother in reaching the ships. They reported the welcome discovery of Tonty's letter, and that about twenty-five leagues up from the Gulf, Sauvole, one of the party, had found a spot on the eastern bank, high enough to be above the overflow, — an observation that eventually decided upon the place as the site of New Orleans. It was now necessary to find some convenient shore to seat the colony before the ships went back to France. One of them, Chateaumorand's frigate, had already sailed in February. Iberville began search for a site along the shores of what is now called Mississippi Sound ; but it offered few allurements, and the place he selected was but a sand-heap on the northern side of the sound. It was a peninsula at the entrance of a bay, and its prevailing aridness could have had no attractions for an agricultural colony, which unfortunately Iberville's was not. So here in an ungenerous spot rose the nine-foot pali- Fort Maure- i p -ri -»t • pas at sades of Fort Maurepas, and it was soon surrounded by the temporary huts of the little colony. The settle- ment, garrison included, numbered ninety souls, and took a name, Biloxi, from the neighboring tribe. The shallow waters of the sound prevented the near approach of the ships, and it proved a weary task to ferry the guns, forges, and the heavy stores a long distance from the vessels to the shore. There were a few patches of poor soil where they could plant beans and grain ; but their thoughts were much more upon the mines to the westward, of which some Spanish deserters had already told them. When the fort and habitations approached completion, Iber- ville and Surgeres prepared to depart. It was arranged that Sauvole should be left in command. Bienville was to be his I BILOXI. 43 dejjuty. This ardent fellow, though but eighteen years of age, had already shown the courage which was yet to face years of trial in Louisiana. The chief and his associates left the fort on May 2, 1699, and proceeding to Ship Island, on the Ibsrville's next day, sailed thence. During the voyage, Iber- return and •n 11 f 1 • • 1 report. viile worked on a report or his operations, to be pre- sented to Pontchartrain, and dated it at Rochefort after his arrival July 3. He took occasion in it to berate " the Recol- lect [Hennepin] whose lying story had deceived every one. Our sufferings and lack of success," he adds, "• were owing to the time we spent in fruitless search for things which had no exist- ence but in his imagination." Meanwhile, life at Biloxi was far from pleasant. The heat and blinding reflection from the sand were intolerable. The worms were ruining their boats. The water was nauseating. Famine looked at them in a ghastly way, and vessels sent to San Domingo for supplies were still absent. With gloomy prospects before them, they were startled on July 1 Canadians to see some strange canoes. They brought nearly a ^"''"'em. score of other mouths to consume their fast decreasing supplies. The visitors were some Canadians who had accompanied two priests, Montigny and Davion. These fathers, with a third, St. Cosme, had entered the Illinois country from the Lakes the preceding year, and had come down the Mississippi under the escort of Tonty. St. Cosme tells us how helpful this faithful friend, " loved by all the bushrangers," had been to them. He adds that to have Tonty with them was a sure way to escape insults from the Indians. It shows how the Iroquois were terrorizing the shores of Lake Michigan at this time, when the missionary says that his party made a long detour to avoid them, while they were also obliged to take the Chicago portage, because the Foxes were rendering that by Green Bay unsafe. Tonty had parted with his friends near the mouth of the Arkansas River, and returned to his Rock, in the previous De- cember. Since then the priests had been on the lower Missis- sippi, ministering to the Taensas and Tonicas, and from them had heard of Iberville's arrival in the river. There was now for the much-tried colony a hope that the news of their coming- would yet reach Tonty and the French of the upper valley. 44 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. Their intercourse with the natives at Biloxi was now o;ettin2 upon something like a friendly footing ; but there was a source of uneasiness when they learned that in a recent attack by the Chickasaws upon their savage neighbors these dreaded warriors had been led by white men. It showed Dangerous neighbors. COXE'S MAP, them that the English, probably from Carolina, were scouring the country to the north. Other signs of dangerous rivals soon followed. Bienville had found it not a long march to the east to reconnoitre the Spaniards at Pensacola. Later in August, he started west across Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi. THE ENGLISH IN THE RIVER. 45 Leaving the Ascantia, he turned down the stream, and on Sep- tember 15 met an English ship of twelve or fifteen Bienviiie guns. It was at a bend of the river known to this day onthf"^^'^^ as the English Turn. Bienville boarded the stranger, ^Mississippi. and found the commander — Barr or Bank, for the statements PUBLISHED 1722, are confused — one whom Bienville had encountered in Hud- son's Bay. The Englishman said he was searching for the Mississippi. It does not seem to be satisfactorily shown that the usual story is true, in which Bienville is represented as deceiving the visitor by telling him that the Mississippi was 46 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. farther to the west. The English captain was not over urgent for his rights, and yielded to the French claim of prior posses- sion, though not without intimating that he might return later. The occasion of this English visit is now to be accounted for. Heath's and There had been a royal grant to Sir Robert Heath in coxe's grant. ^627, covcriug a stretch of the Carolina coast from 31° to 36° north latitude, and extending westward under the sea-to-sea principle for which the English contended. Doctor Daniel Coxe had recently bought this patent of " Carolana," — as it was called in honor of Charles L, — understanding that it did not cover within those parallels what the Spaniards occupied at St. Augustine and in New Mexico. The property had come to Coxe directly from Lord Maltravers, the original purchaser from Heath. A year before, 1698, Coxe had sent a Colonel Welch to explore the country, and it was claimed that he had traveled from Charleston to the Mississippi. We find his route laid down on English maps, and a son of Coxe, in 1722, published journals which were alleged to have been kept by those who made these inland trips. This publication was at a time when the younger Coxe was seeking to make the coun- try known, and was trying to induce immigration in order to render his heritage profitable. These, and other things in this " Carolana " book of 1722, have been much doubted, being looked upon as mere inventions contrived to bolster Coxe's claim against the French by asserting priority for English explorations. Some such pretensions were palpable invention, as when, to antedate the French occupation under La Salle, it was claimed that some English had traversed the length of the Mississippi in 1676. Coxe, the father, had proposed to found a commonwealth on his ]iatent, and had talked of a stock company to back it with eight thousand shares at five pounds each. He sought at the same time to catch the pious by an avowed intention to propa- gate the gospel among the Indians. In 1698, he had fitted out two armed ships, which took a company of French Huguenots and some English gentlemen, with the alleged object of settling Note. Tlie opposite map is from Mitchell's Map of the British Colonies (1755). It shows the westerly part of the supposed route of Colonel Welch through the Chickasaw country to the Mis- sissippi. The route leaves Charleston, S. C, crosses the Savannah at Fort Moore (Augusta), and extends to the west. 48 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. and building a fort somewhere on the Mississippi. The expe- dition made its way to Charleston, where the new colonists found so much to attract them that they did not proceed far- ther. A single ship, however, actually went ahead to explore, and entering the river was the one met by Bienville at the Eng- lish Turn. It seemed to all but the French that this stray ship was the first really ocean-going vessel to enter the Great Kiver from the sea. The English captain never carried out his threat to return, and all the plans of settlement which Coxe had formed with the royal approval were broken up by the death of William III. So the French were, in fact, without a contestant on the side English o^ ^^^ Gidf ; but the future necessity of blocking the traders. passcs of the AUeghauies, to check the English as La Salle had contemplated, was prefigured in the information which Davion imparted to the anxious company at Biloxi, and which the Pascagoulas who visited Foi-t Maurepas confirmed. This was that English traders had for some time been using the trails over the Alleghanies, and were trafficking among the Choctaws and Chickasaws. Early in December, 1699, the cannon at Ship Island an- iberviiie's nouuccd tlic rctum of Iberville. He brought with arrival. Yivox sixty Canadian bushrangers and a store of pro- visions. He cheered Sauvole and Bienville with new commis- sions wdiicli the government had intrusted to him. Iberville himself was under instructions to discover what the country could furnish in furs, pearls, and ores, and to ascertain if a culture of silk were possible. He had brought with him an adventurous fellow, Juchereau de St. Denis, of whom we shall liear more. A ge- and Le ologist, Le Sucur by name, had been also sent over, and it was his mission to see what use he could make of the " green earth " which he had some years before discov- ered while exploring one of the upper and western affluents of the Mississippi. A party, including Iberville and Le Sueur, started towards Lake Pontchartrain, and here took their lighter boats across the morass to a bit of upland that seemed safe Note. The opposite map is from Danville's Carte de la Louisia7ie, 1732-1752, showing the position of tlie Bayagoulas, Houmas, etc. i [From Jefterys' Course of the Missis.nppi River from Baya- goulas to the Sea, 1759, showing the site of Fort La Boulaye and the first settlement on the river.] HOMANN, 1720 (?). [Showing the route of Tonty from the Chickasaw country.] 52 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. from overflow. The episode of the English ship and the sto- Fort on the ^'^^^ ^^ English traders rendered it necessary to be Mississippi, prepared against attempts to eject them, and on this hisfher land Iberville determined to erect a fort. It was about fifty-four miles from the Gulf, and the site is marked on later maps. It was now January, 1700, and when the palisades were up, ^Tonty Bienville was put in command. In February, while appears. ^^iQy were still at work on the fort, they were sur- prised by the appearance of Henri de Tonty, who came with boats loaded with peltry and manned by Canadian boatmen. He had left his Rock on the Illinois, and had stopped on the way to trade with the Arkansas Indians. While the tidings which Tonty brought were still fresh, Le Le Sueur's Sucur, witli tweuty men and some Indian guides, expedition, started to find his mines of green earth. He was no stranger in the country at the north, having spent six or seven years among the Sioux. During this period he had been a strong advocate of measures to frustrate the English attempts at opening trade along the Ohio. He had taken some chiefs of this distant nation to Quebec, and Frontenac had formally placed the Dacotah tribes under French protection. Concerning the expedition of which Le Sueur was now in charge we have a good account in Penicault's narrative, which is given more consecutively by Margry than in the uncertain English version by French, and this may be supplemented by the memoir of the Chevalier de Beaurain, also given in Margry. There was a new cause for disquiet when the party reaching the Arkansas found a Carolina trader at work. In August, they were at Lake Pepin, and saw the stockade built a few years before by Nicolas Perrot left standing for chance traders to occupy. In September, they had passed the Falls of St. An- thony and entered the St. Peter, now the Minnesota, River. Canoeing into one of its tributaries, the Blue Earth or Green Riv^er, as it was indiscriminately called, at a point a little above 44° north latitude, as he supposed it, Le Sueur built a stockade, and called it after the royal farmer-general, Fort I'Huillior. This was in October, 1701. Slaughtering buffalo and freezing the flesh, Le Sueur's men began to lay in provisions. There was need of it, for seven LE SUEUR. 53 Canadian traders soon joined them and spent the winter, de- pending on Le Sueur's stores. The mine they had sought was close by, and they began to work it. Wandering Sioux passed, and they accumulated some skins by barter. When Callieres at Quebec heard of these doings of Le Sueur, :'"'.::v;' ^^^ by which the trade of the far west was diverted to the Missis- sippi, he wrote complainingiy to the ministry, and asked what was to become of poor Canada if such a course was to be per- mitted. It was hard, if not impossible, to enforce edicts in 54 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. the wilderness, and, as Tonty's ventures had shown, trade had already indicated its future channels. In May, 1701, Le Sueur, loading his canoes with a portion of the green earth which he had dug out, — about four thousand pounds, — descended to the lower stations, leaving a garrison to hold the fort. Misfortune overtook him, and he never saw his fort or his mine again. The Sioux finally drove off his men, and the fort was abandoned. After Le Sueur had started up the river, Iberville proceeded leisurely northward from his fort. Anion sf the Baya- IberviUe i , i i i , /-,i • , • ascends the goulas he learned that the Chickasaws were getting Mississippi. ^ i iirearms irom the iLngiish. It was more than ever apparent, if the colonization upon which he had started was to succeed, that an effort must be made to combine the tribes of the Mississippi in alliance with the French. The passing through the low country with its monotonous canebrakes had ^jjg little exhilaration iu it, but when the party reached the Natchez. elcvatcd territory of the Natchez, there were new sen- sations in store for them, not only in the air and scenery, but in the character of that people. This tribe were, perhaps, dis- tinctly sun-worshipers, though it is pretty evident from the modern researches that throughout the continent all Indians were accustomed to bend to the supreme orb, as recent scientists turn to it for the origin of light, heat, magnetism, and electri- city. Here, among the sun- worshipers, Iberville found St. Cosme conducting a mission. This priest, with Montigny and Davion, formed, as we have seen, the advance-guard of the church, doing from the side of Canada what Iberville was hoping to accomplish from below, so as to secure by the church, as well as by the influence of trade, the control of the valley. The rites of the Natchez, as the French saw them, both at- tracted and repelled them. There was enough of a sort of mock grandeur in them to make theorists associate these children of the sun with the Aztecs, and even with those early peoples of Mexico sometimes termed tlie Toltecs. There was the same constructive energy in raising earth mounds for their buildings which the native American showed almost everywhere. This Note. Tlie opposite map, from the Bibliotlieque Nationalo at Paris, is piven in Marcel's Repro- ductions, No. 17. It shows results of the explorations of La Salle, corrected by those of Ibervilla 84 i. ?■* MPs e CO ** 56 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. has influenced some ethnologists of a later day to trace a con* uection for them with the so-called mound-builders. Their government had some features which induced a belief in the despotism of their headmen, but American Indians were as much committee-ridden as the American people are to-day ; and it is doubtful if their polity varied from that of the rest of the aborigines of the continent in giving a kind of representative character to their civil control. Montigny, whose visit to Biloxi has been already mentioned, had accompanied St. Cosme to this region and was aiidtiie conductins^ a mission amono- the Taensas, a tribe Taeusas. upon one of that link of lakes which lay just west of the Mississippi. While Bienville stayed among the Natchez to prepare an expedition for the Red River, Iberville made Montigny a hurried visit. On his return, he found Bienville tt -ii i i i • n • i rr> on the Red *Bienville had his party well organized, ionty and St. Denis were to accompany him, and the chief object of the undertaking was to reconnoitre the Spanish posts in that direction, for as they understood the Indians, these rivals were established uj) the Red River. It was now March (1700). The country being naturally swampy and the spring not a favorable season, they returned without accomplishing their purpose. They went apparently about a hundred leagues be- yond the Natchitoches, the leading tribe upon the lower parts of the Red River. Tonty soon left his new friends, to go back to the Tonicas with presents. It was now agreed that Tonty and Davion should undertake to keep the Indians on the upper river from forming an English alliance, while Iberville guarded the lower The Indians ^Ivcr wltli a similar purpose. There was need of pre- at the north, clpltatc actloii at the north, for the English were be- coming active, since Robert Livingston was striving to bring about the occupation of Detroit as a vantage-ground for forcing a peace between the Iroquois and the western Indians, and in that way to bring them into support of the English schemes. In the Illinois country tlie dread of the Iro(pioIs had driven Kaskaakia ^lic mlssloii, wlicrc Father Pinet had been working, mission. fi-om the old Kaskaskia on the Illinois River to the site of the modern town of that name on the peninsula between the Kaskaskia River and the Mississippi, and two miles away THE INDIAN TRADE. 57 from the latter river. This transference, made under Jacques Gravier and Gabriel Marest, had probably been accomplished in the autumn of 1700. The mission thus became one of the earliest permanent settlements near the banks of the Traffic Great River, within easy support of the increasing on' the traffic of the French up and down the stream. This Mississippi. BIENVILLE. [From Margry.] traffic was soon to grow perceptibly under the policy which Callieres, the governor of Canada, was pursuing in consequence of orders from France ; namely, to diminish the number of posts in the western country, so as to avoid the cost of garrisons. It was thought that as a result the peltry would be taken down 68 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. tlie Lakes to Montreal. As it turned out, the injunction worked quite as much to the advantage of the new trade springing up alono' the Mississippi, since the bushrangers, pursuing a contra- band trade with the Indians, better escaped police observations by carrying their skins down the Mississippi. All this soon improved the prospects of the new Louisiana colony. It was about this time, also, that Du Charleville, a kinsman of Bienville, sought, as we learn from Le Page du of the Pratz, to extend trade connections farther to the north by following up the Mississippi to its source. The story indicates that, leaving the Illinois, he went up to the Falls of St. Anthony and a hundred leagues beyond. Here he met a party of Sioux hunters, who had some reason for telling him that the distance from the falls to the source was equal to that from the falls to the sea. The exaggeration discouraged him, and the springs of the Great River were for a long period to remain unknown. At the source of the Ohio, the western outposts of the Iro- The quois Confederacy were held by the Senecas, mainly Iroquois. -jj |.|jg French interests, while the English supremacy was still maintained among the eastern portion of the league, nearer Albany. These remoter Indians had, in the summer of 1700, been induced through French agency to make peace with the western tribes, not quite in the sj^irit of Livingston's pro- ject, and through this conciliation there was to be an exchange of prisoners. This bore hard on the Iroquois, as their inces- sant wars had depleted their fighting force, which they liad sought to replenish by the adoption of these same prisoners. The result was that the exchange was unequal, since the con- federates could only produce six warriors whom they had not adopted against the much greater number brought down to Montreal by the western tribes. Furthermore, the conference gave Callieres the opportunity which he desired of extolling French faith and denouncing English perfidy, and he made the most of it. He had good abettors in the Jesuits, for whom the way was now clear to settle in the Iroquois coiuitry. It was a question how long the Canadian governor coukl maintain the hold upon the confederates which he flattered himself he had now acquired. C-l o •a t— 3 C-J o CO ■-1 o "iT fe s •§ »4 o s •^ e X o ■« M ■S 2 5 O o '« » > » o *3 a &o o a fe & ■-? O o .£3 -^ "3 IS 60 IBERVILLE'S EXPEDITION. This condition of things at the north and northeast and the iberviue purposcs of the local governments, as well as the views jiississlppi entertained at Paris, were important aids to the new trade. movcmcnts on the lower Mississippi. Iberville, as we have seen, had pushed far enough to meet the traders and missionaries coming from the St. Lawrence valley. Moreover, he had derived encouragement from Tonty's conceptions of the drift of trade. He was consequently able, on the same day that Bienville started for the Red Kiver, to turn back from the Natchez with some confidence in the future of the Great Valley. When he reached Biloxi, his impressions were again confirmed, since the policy of Callieres was such that Louisiana would get most of the profit. This reassurance came from finding that another party of Canadian rangers had come with peltry for a market, flying from the restrictive measures which the Canadian government was enforcing at Mackinac. Late in May, 1700, Iberville, leaving Bienville to manage the colony, was again on shipboard bound for France, having apparently little apprehension of any trouble with the Spaniards. B aniardsat I* "^^^ ^^^* lo^g, liowcvcr, after he had gone before BUoxi. ^j^g governor of Pensacola ai3peared at Biloxi to pro- test against the French occupation of any territory along the Gulf shore. His claim foreboded peril, inasmuch as he asserted that Florida and Mexico were contiguous, and were not to be wedged apart by intruders. He was content at present to couch his protest in words merely. On the return voyage to Pensacola, the Spanish ships were wrecked, and such of the crews as escaped the waves were shortly afterward back in Biloxi, suppliants for relief. CHAPTER III. THROUGHOUT THE VALLEY. 1700-1709. Iberville's movements on the lower Mississippi had so much aroused the Illinois tribes that they showed a disposition to move down the river to be nearer the new-comers, oravier and Father Gravier, who had left the Miami mission on ^^skaskia. September 8, 1700, encountered the Kaskaskias, a group of the Illinois, well on their migrating way ; but he finally prevailed upon their chiefs to stop at the modern Kaskaskia. The priest himself then started down the stream to see what was goimr on. Some Frenchmen accompanied him in five canoes. They went on, killing buffalo upon the banks and leavino^ their PI 1 T. • 1 1 p 1 Gravier de- carcasses for the wolves, rassing the mouth of the scendsthe nil r\i • r^ • • i Mississippi. river now called the Ohio, Cxravier mentions how that stream, known to him as the Ouabache (Wabash), is formed by three tributaries, the i^resent Wabash, the Ohio (above the confluence of the Wabash), and the affluent which comes from the southeast, upon which live the Shawnees, who trade with the English of Virginia and Carolina. The Indians at this time called the main river, debouching into the Mississippi, the Akansea, after a tribe formerly dwelling there, but which was now seated farther down the Mississippi. As Gravier went on, he tells us that he actually boxed the compass with the windings of the current. In one place he found some Mohegans, of that New England race which had fled west after Philip's war, and who had been faithful some years earlier to La Salle. They were still trading their com- modities with the English, and the English guns, which he soon after found among the Akanseas in their new home, told of further inter-tribal traffic, if not of direct contact with the Carolina traders. The priest found among these Akanseas 62 THROUGHOUT THE VALLEY. some who recollected the advent of Marquette, then nearly a score of years gone by. The party stopped awhile for a visit to Davion and St. Cosme among the Tonicas, and it was late in November when they left the Natchez. They saw cocks and hens in their villages, and conjectured that the progenitors of these birds had been saved from the wreck of some Christian vessel on the Gulf coast. It was December 17 when the voyagers reached the French fort at Poverty Point, as it has since been called, having been sixty-eight days in coursing the Mississippi from the Illinois to its lower curves. In the following February, while still at Iber- ville's fort, Gravier wrote the letter which is our main authority for his descent of the river, and of which Dr. Shea has given us a translation. In the preference which Gravier expressed for the advantages of Biloxi — which he next visited — we have a premonition of the final abandonment of this desolate Missis- sippi stockade. During the autumn of 1700, and in the following winter, Iberville was . in France, considering: future plans. 1700-1. . . ^ ^ Iberville in He was urgcd to pusli liis cxploratioiis westward to- France. . wards New Mexico, and he drew up a plan for reach- ing the Gulf of California. He had his eye, too, on the Spanish fort at Pensacola, — a vision seldom obscured to his successors, — and above aU he urged upon Pontchartrain the military defense of the Mississippi banks as making all these projects sure, and as giving a base for a still more important purpose. This was to push the English back upon Carolina and prevent their selling arms to the populous villages of the Cherokees. A popidation for Louisiana of a hundred and fifty all told, Po^t at and an unhealthy camp at Biloxi, — where Sauvole soon Mobile. ^jgj from the fever — was not promising, unless the home government was prepared to give large succors. At all events, a more salubrious post seemed a necessity, and a site, thought to secure it, was soon found at the head of Mobile Bay. Boisbriant was now sent thither, with a party, to con- struct a fort. Sauvole's death had brought Bienville from the Mississippi i^rviiie fort to take the general command in the dreary waste December ^f Biloxi, witli its bumiug sands and noxious damps, "'*^' and here Iberville found him when, on December 15, TONTY, LE SUEUR, IBERVILLE. 63 1701, accompanied by another brother, Le Moyne de Serigny, he reached the colony. The change to the post at Mobile was at once ordered, but Iberville did not remain to see the new position in complete order, for another hurried visit to France intervened before, in March, 1702, he took again the control, and the course of events once more felt his influence. Tonty had come (March 25, 1702) from the up-country with a baud of Choctaws and Chickasaws in his train, jj^g Indians and it gave Iberville the opportunity to warn these Fre,*chand jarring neighbors that the English purposed to stir up ^°g^'^^- inter-tribal distrust till they exterminated each other. He urged them to a defensive alliance. At the same time he sent to Quebec to ask for missionaries to be sent among them as the best antidote to English intrigue. Turning to the other hand, he equally sought to work upon the fears of his Spanish neigh- bors by representing to them that the French occupation of this region meant in reality giving the Spaniards a barrier against the English. With complications on all sides, the founder of Louisiana, with his health undermined, was not destined to see 1 • 1 in TT- 1 T ■'^^ Sueur's his work completed. His northernmost out])ost, Le fortaban- o » T^ uTT 'IT 1 I' T^ T 1 • doued. 1793. Sueur s r ort d Huillier, even before Helisle, using, as he says, the memoirs of that adventurer, signified its position on his new map of Louisiana (1703), had been abandoned for fear of the Sioux, and its destitute garrison were just now come to report their failure. It was not a grateful outcome of all Iber- ville's hopes of far-reaching influence throughout the Great Val- ley. Burdened with such disappointment he returned to France, never to see his colony again. Pontchartrain, indeed, iberviiie'a recognized his merit, when he made him "Commander i^st years. of the Colony of the Mississippi," but he felt that the title and the authority failed to carry with it the material aid, in conces- sions of land, in mines, and in negroes, which was necessary to make his control successful. He had intended to return, but the ship on which he was expected in August, 1703, brought word that he was too ill for the voyage. He lived for three years, and died July 9, 1706, at Havana, whither he had gone in command of a fleet for the purpose of driving the English from the West Indies, and harrying the Carolina coast. 64 THROUGHOUT THE VALLEY. After tlie departure of his chief in 1702, Bienville was left to his own resources. The Indians in the up-country commaud. abovc Mobilc wBre active, and it was thought that 1702. . ... . . the English were inciting the Alibamons to pillage. To chastise them, Bienville, taking Tonty and St. Denis as lieutenants, marched against them. His party suffered much, and got no real help from some Choctaws and Mobilians, who pretended to act as allies. The movement, therefore, failed ; but later he attempted another by water, and succeeded in burn- ing the enemy's camp in the night. Not long after, Bienville determined to abandon the fort on the Mississippi and concentrate his force at Mobile, where Fort St. Louis had already been built, above the modern tions with city. This union of his forces was not made too soon, for the tribes north of Mobile were becoming turbu- lent ; and it was convenient, if not just, to charge their uneasi- ness upon English machinations. There was perhaps more certainty in the Spanish intrigues to set the ChickasaAvs upon the Choctaws, and as the latter were generally inclined to the French interest, Bienville tried to make the two tribes friends as the surest way to gain immunity from the enmity of the Chickasaws. The mediation did not prove long successful, for the Chickasaws found their profit in disposing of Choctaws g^^ taken in battle as slaves to the Carolinians. Later, Eugiish. when they drove the Tonicas upon the Houmas, there was thought to be another manifestation of English intrigue. Colonel Moore, with a body of Carolinians, was making the English name a dreaded one to every Indian who looked to the French for protection. Distractions like these, as rumors came in, served at least to Life at *^^^ ^^^ P*'^^ colouists at Mobile from their miseries. Mobile. These were not unmixed with apprehensions all the while lest the English should strike them by sea, supplementing the land attacks upon their Choctaw allies. A vessel arriving with marriageable damsels relieved life somewhat by a month of weddings. The poor craft, however, had touched at San Do- mingo and been Infected with yellow fever. The fearful mal- ady soon got a foothold, and among those who succumbed was the valiant Tonty, — not such an end as one would wish for his chivalrous nature. The ship which was the source of all these BIENVILLE AND MOBILE. 65 loves and woes had not enough men escaping the fever to navi- gate her ^way, and some who had come to stay as soldiers, and were sorely needed, were obliged to return as seamen. Cloth- ing ran short, and attempts were made to supply it by spin- ning-bees. New ships would come, but somehow through the weary months the old miseries would recur. There was some relief when Spain became the ally of France in new hostilities, and there was an interchange of French and civilities between Mobile and Pensacola, while certain ^pamards. courteous graces brightened life ; but Bienville never forgot that Pensacola was a threat, though he had the skill to hide his hostile hoiDes. France had too much to do in Europe to grant the aid that was vital in Louisiana, and immigration did little to repair the losses of the colony. With all such symptoms of decadence, nothing but a united and respected government could give a hopeful turn to affairs, and this was wanting. Commandant and priest disagreed, and violent religious factions arose. Squads of bushrangers came down from the upper coun- try with peltry, but it was rather the promise than the fulfill- ment of trade. La Salle, the commissary, was intractable, and defied Bienville till the commander's life was hardly less unbear- able than that of the meanest hind who slunk away to the Indians to avoid starving. When tidings came in October, 1706, of Iberville's death at Havana, faction became rampant, and before many months had passed Bienville's friends had deserted Mowie. ^ . 1706. him, and the poor man was powerless. The distressed colony possessed now less than three hundred inhabitants, and more than two thirds of these were soldiers and slaves, and nearly all, in some way, were pensioners of the public chest. It was apparent that the enemies of Bienville had triumphed, when orders were received for his recall. Presently, Diron d'Artaguette reached the colony (February, 1708). He was a man fit to shape a policy ; but a treacherous future confronted him, for there were ugly stories in the air of a projected combi- nation of the Cherokees and the Alibamons ag'ainst the French and their Mobilian allies. It was of course a disguise for English hostility, or at least was thought so. Condition of 66 THROUGHOUT THE VALLEY. For some years, the rival interests of the French and English The Ohio centred in the region between the Ohio and the couutry. Lakes, which ever since the extinction of the Eries by the Iroquois in the middle of the preceding century had been almost untenanted except by savage hunters. Of late, there had been a movement among the aborigines to reoccupy this region. The danger forced the Virginians on the Atlantic slope to push settlements up toward the mountains, so as to hold the Appalachians like a barrier against the threatened and barbarous inroads. The easy portages which connected this Ohio territory with the basin of the St. Lawrence, and the natural tribute which the region could pay to the lower Mississippi, had soon caused an eager rivalry between the governments of Canada and Lou- isiana for its control, and made them suppliants in turn to the home government for the jurisdiction of it. Iberville's policy had far better grounds than that which Cal- iberviueand liercs had demonstrated in the St. Lawrence basin, caiiieres. jj^ ^ Communication to the minister at Paris, the Louisiana leader had pointed out the mistakes of the Canadian system in yielding to the hunter and excluding the tiller of the soil. This was a fatal blunder, he contended, if France had any hope of maintaining the country against the English. Iberville's plan for the control of the upper Mississippi basin was to establish posts near the mouths of the Missouri, the Ohio, and the Arkansas, and to make these stations permanent centres of French influence. He urged also at a later day to have the tribes of the Illinois settled along the banks of the lower Ohio. All this was a distinct denial of the English claim to this region, and just at the same time Governor Penn was expressing the views of the colonial governors, when he said that " we take the south side of the river [St. Lawrence] and lakes of Canada to be our just and reasonable bounda- ries." Bellomont of New York was also at this time plan- ning a reconnaissance through the Iroquois country along the verge of the Great Valley itself, and gave insti-uctions to that end to Colonel Eomer in September, 1700, bidding him par- ticularly " to go and view a well or sj)ring which is eight miles beyond the Sineks' [Senecas'] farther castle, which they have told me blazes up in a flame when a light coal or firebrand is ENGLISH AND FRENCH CLAIMS. 67 put into it." These burning springs are over the divide, and their waters flow into the Alleghany. Meanwhile the rival powers of London and Paris were plan- ning counter movements to secure the aid of the Iro- English and quois for their respective purposes. Robert Living- counter ston, in May, 1701, while warning the Lords of Trade ''^'^™®' of the French purpose to ^ encompass the English " by posses- sion of the Mississippi basin, represented the Iroquois as a " constant barrier of defense between Virginia and Maryland and the French, and by their constant vigilance they had pre- vented the French making any descent that way." He fur- ther reports that the French were using the best artifices they could to weaken this alliance with the English, and complains that the selfish purposes of the Albany tradesmen were a check upon pioneering towards the west, because they thought that their own peltry trade would be intercepted by it. To counteract all such adverse influences, Lieutenant-Gov- ernor Nanfan of New York is said to have entered upon a treaty July 9, 1701, with the confederates at treaty. Albany, by which the i^egion north of the Ohio and stretching to the Mississippi and Illinois rivers was ceded to the English king. The same treaty covered also a similar cession of the territory north of Lake Erie, stretching east to the Ot- tawa. The Iroquois based their right in this northern portion on their driving the Hurons out of it in 1650, and their hold on the southern part to their conquest of the Fries and others at a later period. The whole cession constituted what the Iro- quois called their beaver-hunting grounds. What purports to be this deed of 1701 has been printed in the New York Colo- nial Documents (iv. 908), setting forth that the grantors in return expected " to be protected therein by the crown of Eng- land ; " but there has been a suspicion that the document was in some part at least a device, trumped up at a later day, to ante- date a treaty which the French made at Montreal in the follow- ing August, and it is not easy to see how both can be TM -\ir 1 -tit Slontreal genuine. Ihe Montreal treaty was made under the treaty. urgent appeal of the Canadian company, who com- plained of the English inroads by the Alleghany and Ohio riv- ers. Callieres, as has been already indicated, had brought about the conciliation in it of the Iroquois and western tribes, 68 THROUGHOUT THE VALLEY. and had bound the confederates by a promise to prevent the erection of English posts throughout their country. The French claimed, and not without warrant, that they had thus made themselves actually the arbiters of the entire Indian question, to which not only the Iroquois but the western Indians were parties. But Indian faith was dependent on annual gratuities, and, as the French soon found, not always sure at that. They had, however, secured what they most needed just at present, and that was the neutrality of the confederates in an impend- ing war with the English. They were not quite as success- ful with their own woodsmen, for the Canadian bushrangers were fully inclined to profit by the better opportunities of trade which were offered at Albany. Bellomont had been petitioned English ^y t^^o of them to be allowed to come to the English Frwfch''^'' mart, and these applicants said they were but the bushrangers, foreruuncrs of othcrs, — " thirty brave fellows laden with peltry," as they said ; and one Samuel York, who had been a prisoner in Canada, testified to the eagerness of these north- ern rangers to cast in their lot with the English. When, in September, James the Stuart exile died, and the War. 1702 French king acknowledged the Pretender, war between England and France was inevitable. King William died in March, 1702 ; Cornbury, the royal governor of New York, arrived in May, but Queen Anne was not proclaimed there till June 17. War meanwhile had been declared on May 4, and when the news of the opening conflict reached Canada, Callieres strengthened the fortifications of Quebec, and set to work at the same time to turn the assured neutrality of the Iroquois into pronounced hostility to the English. Neither he nor Vaudreuil, who upon Callieres's death (1703) became governor, was able to do more than hold the confederates to their neutrality. It was important for England that the union of the French and Spanish crowns should not close the trade of the New World to English merchants ; and it soon became evident that a strug- gle was at hand. The French dreamed of the conquest of New York and Boston, and their emissaries had for some years been clandestinely making maps of the approach by sea to those ports. The English hoped that a small army and a few fri- THE ENGLISH COLONIES. 69 gates would drive the French from Canada, and Dudley was urging- such an undertaking upon the Massachusetts Assembly, for it was these Canadian French who stood most in the way of the English in efforts to penetrate to the Mississippi by the Ohio rovite. The war meant all this, but even more, to the English colonies ; for it implied a better acquaintance of one colony War a.iid the with another, and New England was already, in the English Boston Neios-Letter (1704), superseding the old man- uscript methods of communicating intelligence from one govern- ment to another. The war was likely also to furnish common opportunities of defying the parliamentary navigation laws. It was the chance to teach the colonists the advantage of making their own woolens, and thus to emancipate them from the domination of the British merchant. It meant still more. Robert Livingston of New York looked forward to the time when, if supineness were allowed, the French, " by forts and settlements in the heart of the country and keep- ing a constant correspondence and communication with Misse- sepie," would be able " to make daily incursions upon our plan- tations." The remedy, to his mind, was some scheme of inter- colonial confederation. Livingston's views were not • /n 1 1 1 1 Cornbury Without supporters in Cornbury, the local governor, and and to some extent in a certain royal emissary. Colo- nel Quarry. The chief anxiety, however, of this attentive observer was lest the colonists, in cementing themselves to- gether by common aims, should dare to arrogate to themselves the prerogatives of Parliament. He was pretty sure this was the tendency in the Virginia Assembly. Quarry, nevertheless, was not blinded to the treacherous nature of an Iroquois alli- ance. " They are a very uncertain people to trust to, and do lie under very strong temptation from the French," he said. His remedy in the case was to drive the French from Canada, and he did not think the effort one of insuperable difficulties. It would bring to the English, he said, " the whole trade of the main, which will be of vast consequence." He little thought that the project would take sixty years. While Cornbury and the New Yorkers were thus dreaming of success and laying plots, Vaudreuil kept his trusty lieuten- 70 THROUGHOUT THE VALLEY. ants among the Iroquois to watch the intrigues of the English. The Lords of Trade had been for some time urging Queen Anne to send Protestant missionaries among these confeder- The Iroquois . . <• • • i -r • ' and the atcs, as the best means or wrcum venting the Jesuits missions. . . cinii-r*! t • • now m possession oi the neld. Kobert L/ivmgston at the same time complained that " the Jesuit priests by their insin- uations and false pretenses were decoying a great many of our Indians, and have raised a great faction in their castles [pali- saded villages], and it is feared a great many more will follow unless they have ministers to instruct them in the Christian faith, of which they seem very fond." He adds that French emissaries were among them " all last winter, endeavoring to corrupt their affections from the English, and make ill impres- sions in their minds, to the apparent prejudice of our trade with them, which decays daily more and more." While the Iroquois were uncertain, it was the Canadian policy to spare the New York frontiers ; but there was no hesitancy in harrying the borders of New England, and the story of Deer- field and the ravages of the coast attest their ghastly success. The Senecas, the most westerly of the confederates, soon The west- patclicd up a pcacc with the Miamis, and to keep these em Indians. ^^^ ^.j^g morc distant Hurons and Ottawas in subjec- tion, Vaudreuil continued to dispatch to them his quieting mes- sages. ' These " speeches," nevertheless, had only partial effect. The English influence was not quelled, and the rival suits, as urged by the emissaries from Albany and Quebec, only divided the Miamis. Those who favored the English soon drove away a colony which Juchereau of Montreal had settled near the site of the modern Cairo in Illinois. It had been the pui'i^ose of this pioneer to open thereabouts mines of copper and lead, and to establish a barrier against any adventurous English daring to pass that way. It was the determined policy of the Canadian government to juchereau's withdraw f rom the distant west such posts as interfered colonies. yi\i\y the briuffino; of furs to the market farther down the St. Lawrence valley, and it was equally a satisfaction to the royal government to suppress any manufactures which in- fringed the monopoly of the home producers. Juchereau's pro- ceedings were hardly in harmony with such principles, for he not only was gathering skins, but had established a tannery to THE MIAMI TRADE. 71 turn them into leather. The irrujjtion upon him, therefore, of the English faction among the Miamis was not altogether the sacrifice of French interests which it seemed. The Eng-lish sympathizers among these Indians did not accomplish all that Governor Cornbury had wished, for they failed to carry the tribe as a whole over to the English side. Vaudreuil, though he managed the Indian interests skill- fully, did not hesitate to use coercion with any recalci- •1 -\T T 1 1 • cc • 1 Vaudreuil trant tribe. JNor did his ettorts to square accounts with and New the English lead him beyond a courteous and seeming- willingness to negotiate a peace with Dudley of Massachusetts. These interchanges of diplomatic suavities were protracted through many months, and in 1708, when nothing had come of them, the New England frontiers were again ravaged. Once again aroused, the English compelled the entire Iro- quois confederacy, except the Senecas, to rise against the French, and the Jesuits were at last expelled from their country (1708), never to return. The English emissaries now pushed beyond the Iroquois coun- try, and the Miamis were induced to send some chiefs to Albany and enter into a pact for trade. Five years pf strenuous efforts for this object were thus crowned at last with success, ^rade with and Cornbury, in congratulating himself, gave a young ""^ Miamis. halfbreed, Montour,'" much of the credit for it. The French showed quite as much evidence of their belief in his agency by comiDassing his destruction the next year. This traffic with the Miamis was the formal beginning of a reorganized English trade in the northeastern parts of the Great Valley ; but it was destined to be maintained with difficulty against the incessant plottings of the French. Samuel Vetch, an active man, who had been much on the St. Lawrence, picking: up information to be useful in case o i Vetcli and of an attack on Quebec, was shortly after (1708) Qupbec. in England, urging such an incursion. His pleas were reinforced by Cornbury's representations, and Quarry warned the government that to delay the movement would very likely make it too late. The victories of Marlborough dis- posed the public to the undertaking. The rumors of the inten- tion which reached Quebec induced the Canadians to concen- trate their forces, and this had much to do with their with- drawal from the Iroquois country, as already related. 72 THROUGHOUT THE VALLEY. England, as it turned out, found enough to do in Portugal, and the troops which were promised did not come over. The colonial forces lacking this support, the campaign of which so much was expected proved a failure, and the Boston government did not hesitate to believe that the aj^athy of New York arose from this desire to preserve the Canadian trade. In view of such a fiasco, Jeremy Dummer's ambitious argu- ment, that even Canada of right belonged to the British crown, seemed all the more ridiculous, and served rather to outrage the French than to mollify the disappointment of New England. Better than such pretense and the treaty of 1701 was the sturdy influence of the German Palatines, now begun to be felt along the Mohawk, and still more to be felt when, later on, they constituted the advance-guard of the Teutonic race in pushing towards the headwaters of the Alle- ghany and Monono^ahela. There was at the same Swiss. . '' * - „ . time a movement of the Swiss to purchase lands " beyond the Potomac and in Virginia," where it was supposed there were mines. We have seen that Livingston, in 1699, had been urging Cadiuac Governor Bellomont to seize upon the straits at De- De!troit. troit, as the fittest place from which to control trade 1701. W\t\\ the western Indians. The advantages of this post had been equally apparent to Lomothe Cadillac, and he had the spirit to anticipate the English. Cadillac w^as a Catholic of Franciscan associations, who hated the Jesuits now and in the times to come, and he looked with a sinister eye upon their mission at Mackinac. A Jesuit was assigned to found a mission at the new post ; but Cadillac chose a Kecollect for his chaplain. It was thirty years since St. Lusson, with ambitious parade, had formally attached to the French crown all this upi^er region of the Lakes. The first civil and military government was now to be established in this great domain. In June, 1701, Cadillac"^ left Three Rivers with a hundred soldiers and colonists in twenty-five canoes. He took the Ot- tawa route to hide his movements from the Iroquois. By July 24, the expedition was at the straits, and at the end of August his stockade was completed and named Fort Pontchartrain. The movement raised up enemies hard to conciliate. The I VAUDREUIL. 73 Jesuits never liked to have settlements near tlieir missionary fields. The traders found a diminution of profits, if stores of merchandise were made too accessible to the savage. The oppo- sition of the Canadian packmen before long inured to the ben- efit not only of the English on the Atlantic, but of the French in Louisiana, for it prompted one Jean Pacaud to lease for seventy thousand francs a year the privileges of the old Com- pagnie des Indes, out of which was organized speedily ^^^ ^ ^.^ a new Compasfnie du Canada, under a concession of du cauada. 1701. October 31, 1701. The new company thus secured the exclusive trade at Frontenac and Detroit, the latter post deriv- ing no advantage except that the company set up the estab- lishment there and the king maintained the garrison. Cadillac did not hear of this project till the following July (1702). He protested, and got some modification of the com- pany's power. He even importuned Pontchartrain for the abol- ishment of the company and a separate government for Detroit. Th^e organization still had enough of prescriptive rights to in- cense the old traders. This class would not have been averse to bring on an Iroquois war, if Detroit was to disappear in the conflict. In this they were at one with the English at Albany, and it is sometimes alleged that a fire in the Detroit stockade was a consequence of English influence. A natural result followed. An illicit traffic in peltries sprung up, and the French down the Mississippi and the English at Albany were soon profiting more than the company. Cadillac was hampered ; but the company was more so. Callieres died, and political power in Canada passed into the hands of Vaudreuil, who was so connected by ties of vaudreuii blood with some of the directors of the new company g'*^^'""*"^- that the prospect, in Cadillac's eyes, grew gloomier still. The end, however, was nearer than he thought, and Pontchartrain proved powerful enough to displace the company. That minis- ter, in June, 1704, wrote from Versailles, placing Cadillac in power, and gave him some good advice to ponder over. The Jesuits were still a thorn. Cadillac wrote to Pontchar- train that the only way to keep peace with them was cadiuac in to do their bidding and hold his tongue. If relations ^°'"^^- in this way were jarring, it was hopeful to find the western tribes becoming: amenable to French influence to such a deoree 74 THROUGHOUT THE VALLEY. that they were flocking to settle along the straits. Cadillac had need of their attachment before long ; and they served him well Hostile ^^ repelling an attack of the Sauks and Foxes. The tribes. hostility of tlicse warlike allies was and remained a serious impediment to the success of the French about the upper reaches of the Mississippi, and we have already noted how Le Sueur's followers on a branch of the Minnesota were driven away by the Sioux, ever a treacherous foe. The years that ensued under Cadillac's rule at Detroit were passed in continuous efforts to keep peace, with the Ottawas on the one hand, and with the Miamis on the other, who were always watching for opportunities to strike a blow. Detroit failed in the competition with Mackinac as a mart for furs, and the Eng- lish for the most part got the advantage with cheaper goods and better offers of skins. The Albany traders were quite con- tent with profits that were not lessened by the cost of maintain- ing the posts. The Bay of St. Louis or St. Bernard, on the Texan shore, is well round the northwestern curve of the Mexican Gulf, and towards the south. It is the spot where La Salle had sought to found his colony. His belief that he was near a western outlet of the Mississippi influenced the views of Minet, jtg his engineer, in delineating the southern bends of the cartograpiiy. Q^.g^t Rivcr, and gavc Franquelin the incentive to make a false course for its lower current. Even so late as the close of the eighteenth century, we find a survival of La Salle's mistake in the English Pilot (1794), of Mount and Page. It was left for Delisle, ojjportunely coming forward and proving himself the real founder of modern geographical science, to correct this misconception, but not wholly to eradicate it from the stock notions of the lesser cartographers. Indeed, it is surprising how prevalent the views of half a century before remained with the mere copyists. The maps of Jaillot, De \Vitt, Schenck, AUard, and Danekerts continued for ten years after the new developments mider Iberville to present the views of Sanson of fifty years aback. Their maps pertinaciously rep- resented incomplete outlines of Lakes Michigan and Superior, unmindful of the explorations of La Salle and the Jesuits. All that stood for the principal affluent of the Mexican Gulf on its SITES FROM PENSACOLA TO THE MOUTHS OF THE MISSISSIPPI. [After Delisle.] [It shows the site of the old fort on the Mississippi, abandoned for the new one at Mobile.] 76 THROUGHOUT THE VALLEY. northern shore was a looped bay with a few short coast streams flowing into it. The general southern direction of the great current as Joliet Ma 8 of the reported it in 1673 was accepted by Hennepin in the Mississippi, slotted line of his honest and early map, but in his later dubious draft, disregarding the surveys of Iberville, if he knew them, Hennepin swung over to the views of Franquelin, and had been preceded in doing so by the Englishman, Edward Wells, in his maps. Another error of a still earlier day, and going back to the remoter Siianish explorations, had caused a confusion between the Bay of Mobile and the indentation of the Gulf shore, of which the Mississippi Sound of our day makes Espiritu ^ P^^^- "^^^ name Espiritu Santo, applied in the Santo. early days both to a bay and a river, is not always easy to identify with the modern geography, and we find it, even after the advent of Iberville, sometimes made to do duty for one or the other of such half-inclosed stretches of water. It was a relic of the original Spanish domination of the northern shore of the Gulf that their name of Florida continued for some time to apply, even with the French map-makers, to the region extending from the peninsula and St. Augustine to the confines of Mexico. Notwithstanding the claims which Iberville made for Louisiana bordering here on the Gulf, Delisle, who all the while was working on that commander's data, continued to apply the name of Florida to the territory between Carolina and Texas. It was left for the Belgian cartographer, Nicolas de Fer, to give the alternative appellation of " Louisiane ou Floride." There was at this tjme, among the French cartographers, a general agreement that the national claims were claims and bouudcd ou the cast by the Appalachians. De Fer maps. so recognizes the extent of French jurisdiction in his maps, and was even more liberal than Delisle, who at a later day was forced to reclaim for his king a region along the west- ern bounds of New York and Pennsylvania, which he had been content in some of his earlier maps to give to the English. Delisle even then did not attempt to push the French claims beyond the mountains into Carolina; but, for some reason, Note. A portion of Franquelin's map (in the Marine, reproduced by Marcel, No. 40), which shows his misconceptions, is opposite. •ou 52>., LATIONS J ATT tojs 'ci™^xi^^iftdirro^rDES sio' OuiGcoufrton^ -^*. ^\ rt^C"^ jOcitameiieton' •^ BBS Sioux DE ''sm flJLJiUiES 4 TONS PArS'J3EX'A"2<: ^-M KVVtnd eoiucintai _ -JAIS DElXmrtDN '^■'^5/ '"UICAPOUX .^t' -7V-«fi»sj ^ pupappf Nation NATION'S^Bs Cusr^'fe^AiiUjELv _ iAlSETNJ^10lrtffiS--M^_;.:?S__i,»''-St l^ -KiV^ 'm^zA^s \t m a .AISDELa ^-^i."'-.- "^ N ■".<,; DES ATIOK AN AMOS •^ '^e country. Dauphine Island, and the community was in constant appre- hension of other inroads. They had not infrequent grounds to fear that deserters disclosed their weakness to their enemies. The Choctaws professed to be friendly, but if the Chickasaws and their allies failed of their purpose with these neighbors of the French by friendly solicitation, they were always ready to use the tomahawk, and they trusted to the English leadership in any event. With all these environments of danger and distress, it was 84 CROZAT AND TRADE. not strange the colony suffered from the loss of Theiiiinoia members, who sought better fortune country. gippj. Viucenues had been founded on Father Mermet, and held out lures for settlers, m these upper regions were beginning to thrive, were increasing about them. There was one at some of its best up the Missis- tlie Wabash by The missions and habitations St. Joseph's for Illinois tribes. FRENCH SOLMERS, 1710. the Miamis'and Pottawattamies. Another was at Peoria; but the most successfiU was among the Kaskaskias, at their new settlement near the Mississippi. The effect of this priestly influence had become perceptible among the Illinois Indians, and they had grown far less barbarous than any other tribe. They used ploughs, and in other practices were assuming habits of civilization. The Jesuits taught them the use of windmills, and the Kaskaskias, one of the Illinois tribes, constructed treadmills, and ran them by horses. They obtained these animals by inter-tribal exchanges from a stock reared among the distant Spaniards of New Mexico. The little CADILLAC AND CROZAT. 85 settlemeut at Kaskaskia quickly took on an air of permanence, and we very soon find that they were adopting permanent land records. All these amenities of life were in sorry contrast to the absence of them near the Gulf, and in D'Artaguette's •T Louisiana. day that commander had urged a military post on the Ohio, to confront any advance upon Louisiana by the Eng- lish, who might be tempted to take advantage of their weak- ness. The conditions were not changed now that Cadillac held the reins. His petulancy and imperiousness were to prove ill calculated to atone for the defects of his people and the sorrows of their life. When, in May, 1713, La Jonquiere in a fifty-gun ship star- tled Mobile with his booming cannon, there was much beside the new governor, whom he had brought, to arrives. throw the poor colony into a condition of expecta- tion. There was a new invoice of marriageable damsels for one thing. There were also the tidings of the peace, settled at Utrecht. There was the promise of a fresh policy of trade for the colony, by virtue of a contract signed at Paris, on the 14th of the previous September. This instrument gave to the Sieur Antoine Crozat the right to farm the trade of Louisiana for fifteen years. In the month followinq; the arrival of the news, Crozat's inspiaus. ° . 1714. agents came to carry out the undertaking. The ter- ritory defined by the document as the field of Crozat's opera- tions gave the French claim to the limits of Louisiana, and is a starting-point for the pretensions of the French in Limits of this regard. It is described as including all the ter- lo'"^'='°*- ritory between Carolina and New Mexico, while at the same time it extended from the Gulf of Mexico to the Illinois. Its area towards the east included the basin of what was called the Wabash or the St. Jerome, that is, the modern Ohio ; and towards the west it went up the St. Pierre or the Missouri. It made no claim to go beyond the sources of that river, though there has sometimes been a doubt if France, in ceding Louisi- ana in 1803 to the United States, did not touch the Pacific be- tween the bounds of England on the north and Spain on the south. Thus Louisiana, as maj)ped at this time, took the entire water-shed of the Mississij^pi, except between the Illinois and 86 CROZAT AND TRADE. tlie sources of tlie Great River on its eastern side. At the south it also inckided the valleys of the coast streams which flowed into the Gidf, but it respected the rights of the Spaniards in the southwest, though it was sometimes claimed that the French territorial rights on a more northern parallel stretched to the Gulf of California. There was a disposition, moreover, on the part of the French government at this time not to be too definite in their descrip- tions of limits. A year or two later (January, 1715), Eaudot, in charge under Pontchartrain of the colonies, requested Delisle to remove the dots from his map which marked the limits of Louisiana, " as the court wishes it left indefinite, and does not want French maps to be quoted by foreign nations against us." Delisle generally marked the limits of Canada by the divide which bounded the St. Lawrence basin on the south, and drew those of Louisiana by the mountains which on the east confined the streams feeding the Mississippi. There is hardly exact cor- respondence in these respects among any of the contemporary maps delineating the interior of North America. Crozat had in antecedent years been very helpful to the Crozat's Frcncli king in replenishing his treasury with gold rights. ^^jj silver, and that sovereign hoped his subject's pros- perous ways might inure to the benefit of his American prov- ince. He was willing accordingly to give him manifold advan- tages. He allowed him to open mines, with a due reservation of the crown's share ; but he was compelled to recruit the colo- nists, and to send two ships with supplies every year. He was permitted, also, to send a single ship each twelvemonth to the coast of Guinea for negroes. Further, the charter provided that French law and customs should prevail in the province, " with the usages of the mayoralty and shrievalty of Paris." Crozat's agents at once began to establish posts upon all the The country pi'incipal rivers, and explorers were sent out to search explored. ^^^ miucs. Lead ore was found in southeastern Mis- souri, and the miners got their sujjplies from the Illinois coun- try, where a trading-post was set up. Another station, was placed at the modern Natchez, and De La Tour was sent four hundred miles up the Alabama River at the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa, to build a stockade, which was named Fort Toulouse. Some of Crozat's traders peneti-ated to the TREATY OF UTRECHT. 87 Tennessee country, and built (1714) among the Shawnees a storehouse on a mound near where the modern Nashville stands. An old deserted stockade of the Indians, close by, was occupied as a dwelling. Deerskins and other peltries in large quantities were soon go- ing down the Mississippi. With no competitors in the colony, Crozat counted on large profits. His aims, however, were soon thwarted. The traders got better prices from the English and Spanish, and the skins found their way to Carolina and Pen- sacola. Crozat was soon complaining that the English were seducing the natives from the French interests both on the Red River and on the upper Mississippi. To add to his disappoint- ments, the Spaniards, playing into the hands of the English, warned Crozat's ships away from their Gulf ports, and the de- mand in that direction for his skins was cut off. A grinding monopoly could but create discontent in the province. Before Crozat's plans were fairly organized, the operations of the treaty which had iust brouoht peace debarred him from the importation of Airicans. its provisions had, in fact, transferred the control of the slave trade to England, a plan far-reaching enough to make the mother country responsi- ble for the long bondage of the negro in America. The treaty of Utrecht, after a truce which Bolingbroke had made, and which the victories of Marlborough had . Treaty of induced, was signed March 31 (April 11), 1713. utreciit. France did not by it yield all that four years earlier she might have been compelled to grant. At that time the English, who by the treaty had permission for a yearly ship to trade with the Spanish colonies, might very likely have enforced free trade. The South Sea Company might doubtless have secured a monopoly of the Spanish trade in America. Though the treaty when actually negotiated failed in this, it gave England enough to make her at once the first power in Europe, — a place which France had held for nearly fifty years. The Pretender was forced out of France, and the Protestant succession in England was recognized. The English king became sovereign of New- foundland and Acadia. In gaining these provinces, the British negotiators were not as wary as they shoidd have been, since they fixed the bounds of Acadia by its " ancient limits," which 88 CROZAT AND TRADE. had all the vagueness that France delighted in, when she found occasion to define her own boundaries. Nor did it prove wise to leave Cape Breton in the hands of the French. The ques- tions involved were indeed difficidt and awkward, but perhaps less so than the contention which ensued. Previous to this the French would hardly have admitted that Bounds of ^^^® northern bounds of Canada — still theirs by the cauada. treaty, and with a population not much over eighteen thousand — stopped short of the north pole. Now the Hud- son Bay Company and the British government got the larger part of the basin of that inland sea. There was at last a defi- nite line, where the French had studiously avoided having one. It ran west from the Labrador coast on latitude 58° 30', but from Lake Mistassin it struck 49°, and so continued westward, — the origin of the line which forms the present boundary of the United States on the north along the westerly half of its extent. On August 18, 1713, Governor Hunter proclaimed the peace at New York, and on September 20 he communicated The Iroquois .^ iii c ^ and the it by messcuger to the assembled confederates at Onondaga. He warned them not to intercept the far nations of the MississijDi^i and the Lakes, coming to trade at Albany. The Indians on their jsart implored forgiveness for the Tuscaroras, who had been driven north by the Carolinians, and had now become a sixth nation in the Iroquois Confederacy. In the struggle of the French and English for the Missis- sippi valley, the language of the treaty of Utrecht respecting the Iroquois was by interpretation made of large importance in the future. The contracting nations agreed to respect the country of the tribes allied to each, and the Iroquois were taken under the protection of England. It soon became evident that the English intended to assume a protectorate over all the territory which the Iroquois claimed to have sub- subdued by dued. This included the countrv Ivins; beyond the the Iroquois. ini -p,. .. -'.'o./ Alleghany River, within which the Iroquois had de- stroyed the Fries, and from which they had driven other tribes, and which in the English interpretation stretched to the line of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. The earliest delineation of such a line we find at a later period, and after the English and French had made preparations for the great struggle. The [From Humphreys and Abbot's Basins of the Mississippi, etc., War Department, 1861. It shows the Red River basin and its connection with the Texas rivers on the south, and the Canadian and Kansas rivers on the north.] 90 CROZAT AND TRADE. record as It stands, for instance, on Evans's map (1755) is accompanied by a legend : " The author has been something particular in representing the extent of the country of the con- federates, because whatever is such is expressly conceded to the English by treaty with the French." The extent of this claim would bring the Illinois tribes under English jurisdiction, while The Illinois ^^ reality the French were seated among them and and Foxes, -^^i^ ^j^gj^. sympathies. Ou the other hand, it left the Foxes, or such portion of them as were in AVisconsin, within the French dominion, while they in reality were allies of the Iroquois, and consequently friends of the English, with whom they would trade but for the vexatious interposition of the ubi- quitous French. The Foxes, with all the appliances of savage knavery, had not long before (1712) been forced into an attack on Detroit. The French had in turn repelled the assault by the a^d of the Hurons and Ottawas, when Du Boisson, with his sturdy little garrison of twenty men, secured a victory. But neither the French nor the Foxes forgot the event, and the Iroquois were held responsible for inciting the attack. Charlevoix, in com- paring the Foxes to the Iroquois, speaks of them as just " as brave, less politic, much fiercer, and the French have never been able to tame or subdue them." It was one of Crozat's objects to open trade with the Span- iards in New Mexico by an overland westward route. River The French government, as we have seen, had not been over-solicitous about defining very exactly the limits of Louisiana in this direction, ■ They preferred a vague claim, resting upon the acquaintance which La Salle had ac- quired with the country. This explorer had, in 1686, when among the Cenis, cut the roj^al arms upon a large tree, in token of possession. St. Denis, moreover, had for the last twelve years been making explorations along the valley of the Red River, but without great success. Father de Limoges, as early as 1702, had established a mission among the river tribes. Squads of Canadians were known to have wandered towards New ^Nlex- ico in the hope of finding mines. When the Crozat ride began, it had been reported at Mobile that the Arkansas River had been followed to its source ; but [Broutin's Carle des Natchitoches, 1722, as '^^..j^ f '/« '' reproduced in Thomassy's Geologic pratique ^©e >^'*'!'i*''°,i' if rfe ?a Louisiane " 92 CROZAT AND TRADE. it was scarcely probable at that time. The secrets of the west were indeed still to be probed, and Cadillac was ready to at- tempt it. So St. Denis was dispatched up the Red exploits. River to Natchitoches, whence he struck across the land to the region of the Cenis. Here he took for- mal possession of the country. Finding some savages ready to follow him, he pushed on towards the Rio Grande del Norte. In August, 1714, he found welcome at the mission of Saint Jean-Baptiste, near its banks, which had been founded by the Spaniards. Here St. Denis fell in love with the daughter — or, as some accounts say, the niece — of Raimond, the com- mander of a small body of Spanish troops, stationed there to protect the priests. This officer had already dispatched a mes- senger to headquarters with tidings of this French intruder, when the love affair happened, and rendered the situation rather embarrassing for the vigilant Raimond. After a while St. Denis was sent to the city of Mexico to render an account of himself. Here he agreed to go back with some missionaries to the Texan country, and he faithfully did so, finding it a con- venient opportunity to seek Raimond's post once more and marry his love. This done, he made his way to Mobile, and reported there in August, 1716. The adventure, if it had accomplished little for Louisiana, had satisfied the successful gallant. It had done more for the Spaniards, for it instigated greater alertness to save the Texan country for his Catholic majesty. The Spaniards had, in the days of La Salle, set up a claim that the inlet in which he had Baye de St. ^uilt his f ort, somctimcs called the Baye de St. Ber- La HarpJ!"** nard or St. Louis, or the Baye du Saint Esprit, was ^^^^- quite within the Spanish bounds. The question of ownership was now manifestly to be determined by actual oc- cupation. The Spaniards had already placed a force among the Cenis to secure that position, and they were only waiting the coming of the annual fleet from Spain to have an available force to send to the bay. They hoped by its possession to con- trol the Indian trade along the rivers which have their outlets in its waters. The Spaniards dallied, and had done nothing when, in Au- gust, 1718, the directors of the Company of the West ordered that the bay should be seized. This was followed in November HOMANN, 1720 (?). [It shows the routes of St. Denis.] 94 CROZAT AND TRADE. by a royal order, which further commanded that force should be used to retain possession if the Spaniards interfered. Mar- gry gives a relation of one Simars de Belle-isle, who claims that in 1719 he had been shipwrecked near the bay, and had been kept in captivity by the Indians. But such chance adventures served little more than to keep the French claim in mind, till in August, 1721, La Harpe was sent with instructions from Bienville to occupy the bay. He found the natives hostile, and the difficulties of maintaining a post so far from succor were so great that, on La Harpe's report, Bienville, in December, announced that the post had been abandoned. There were still those, however, who held that this was the true ingress to the Texan country, and Margry gives us a document in which Der- banne regrets that St. Bernard's Bay had not been the chief jDort of the province instead of Mobile. He claimed that the Spaniards had so alienated the savages about the bay that the French could easily ally them against their rivals. The river approach to this disputed Texan territory was more promising'. In October, 1716, St. Denis, now in Mo- st. Denis ^ 1 P . 1 . • 1 1 1 1 on the Red bilc, and lormmg a partnership With othcrs, bought a River. 1716. • p t c r^ ■> i\t • ^ large quantity oi goods from Crozat s stores. \V ith a train carrying these supplies, he made a new move up the Red River. At Christmas he was among the Cenis, and found the Spaniards in possession. In the spring of 1717, he reached the mission where he had met his Spanish bride, and thence he passed on to the city of Mexico to reclaim some of his goods, which had been seized. St. Denis was a man of vain manners and heady temper, and soon found himself in a Spanish prison. In December he was released ; but his tongue was too free for his safety, and his wife's friends helped him escape the country. During the next spring (1719) he found his way to Isle Dauphine. Meanwhile Cadillac, fearing that the Spaniards would be Natchi- before him, sent a force to occupy Natchitoches is- toches. 1717. j.^j^j j^ ^j^g jjg^ jjj^^gj. (January, 1717). Cadillac felt it a matter of life and death to maintain this station, and he wrote full of gloomy forebodings lest the Spaniards should force the French back here. He was equally apprehensive that Spaniarda ^^^^ English ou the east would dislodge his interior set- at Adaea. tlcmcnts and leave the French little beyond Isle Dau- THE RED RIVER. 95 phine. The -Spaniards, on their part, had stoutly taken post at Adaes, and this outpost of the Spanish and that of the French at Natchitoches faced each other across a broad interval. The Spanish government hoped to recruit their settlement from the Canaries ; but few emigrants came. J^ala Qtauie THE RED RIVER REGION. [From Danville's Louisiane (Venice).] It was soon apparent that Natchitoches was not well situ- ated to allure the Spanish trade, and so, to picket the ^^ Harpe country beyond and open more direct communication. Red River La Harpe was sent out with a small force. He had a '^°^^^^y- wide region to traverse, and the country was infested with 96 CROZAT AND TRADE. hordes of hostile savages, so that the transportation of merchan- dise and treasure was dangerous. La Harpe was armed with a letter from Bienville, addressed to the Spanish governor, in which the French commander declared it his wish to live in amity with his Spanish neighbors. Early in 1719, La Harpe built Fort St. Louis de Carlorette, not far from Natchitoches. Thus securing a new fortified base, he pushed toward the up- river tribes, hoping to make new alliances with them. He had heard of the Padoucas, said to be seated near the and Gran spriugs of the Arkausas, Red, and Colorado rivers, and Quiviia. 1 . , , 1 . X \ he was in hopes to reach their country. Just where the sources of the Colorado might lie was not so certain as of the other rivers, but it seemed j^robable that the whole region, assigned in common report to the Padoucas, was the country which the mai^-makers had long designated as Gran Quivira. Efforts to reach this country which lay beyond the Panis (Paw- nees) were still going on by way of the Missouri. The English geograjDher, Herman Moll, in a map of this time (1720) had put a legend upon this region to indicate that " many wander- ing nations of Indians are at the head of these rivers, who use horses and trade with the French and Spaniards." There had been enough chance contact with this people for La Harpe to know them to be powerful, counting something like two thou- sand horsemen. The Spaniards under De Soto had first en- countered them, and they were said to adorn their persons with gold and silver ornaments, which, as well as their horses, they had obtained from the Spaniards. La Harpe's party went on under great difficulties. The car- ries were swampy and infested with noxious animals. At last he reached the Nassonites, and began a fort among them, as he had been instructed to do. In June (1719) he received from the Spanish governor a reply to Bienville's letter, which he had dispatched in April, while among the Cenis. This answer resented the French invasion of Spanish territory. La Harpe, in his rejoinder, referred to the prior occupation of Texas by La Salle, and the later explorations of St. Denis. Further, he argued that there was no question about the French rights to the Mississippi basin, and the Nassonites, among whom the French were now sojourning, were dwellers on an affluent of the Great River, THE EXTREME WEST. [From a map by Palairet, improved by Delaroche, after Dauville, Mitchell, and Bellin. It shows " Qulvira ; " the " River of the West ; " the supposed connection of the Mississippi and Red River of the North ; the country of the Padoucas, Panis, etc.] 98 CROZAT AND TRADE. Not deterred by tlie Spanish protests, La Harpe, getting some horses from the Indians, still pushed on, and The Arkan- sas River. September 3, he found himself beside the Arkansas River. A part of his purpose had been to discover the sources of the Red and Arkansas rivers, but in this he had failed. He learned that other Spanish settlements were higher up the Arkansas, and he believed that both rivers rose some- where in New Mexico. With this information or im^sression, he began his backward journey. CHAPTER V. THE MISSISSIPPI BUBBLE. 1714-1720. " Cadillac always says the opposite of what he believes," said Bienville, who had scant respect for his superior. The governor found others could practice the same art. cadiiiacand Towards the end of 1714, he received from the Illi- -^^niinoir nois what was represented to be ore from mines of ^"i^"^^- that region. Shortly afterwards, Cadillac was on his way up the river to inspect the wonderful deposits. It proved a deceit, and the specimen of silver had been carried there from New Mex- ico. After an absence of nearly a year, Cadillac returned to Mobile in October, 1715. Louis XIV. had died a few weeks before, and France was left with an enormous debt. There was need of eighty -nje debt of million livres to meet the obligations, and the royal ^''^"'^8- treasury could only command about nine millions. Mines or something else were needed, and the possibilities of Louisiana were soon to be made the most of by an extraordinary per- sonage. John Law stands in European history as the creator of one of the most marvelous crazes ever known. This . 1 T i John Law strange manifestation was as much a wonder to Law s and his contemporaries as it is to us. A tract (1720) \n\r- porting to emanate from an Englishman in the colonies, and reflecting upon the consequences of the French occupation of the Great Valley, speaks of Law's success, before he reached the precipice, as " one of the most prodigious events of any age," and sniffs at the skeptics. A Scotchman, extremely nimble of mind; but destitute of sane principles, nurtured a rake and a gambler, Law had fled 100 THE MISSISSIPPI BUBBLE. from London to Amsterdam to avoid arrest. Here liis quick perceptions seized on some methods wliicli he observed in the bank of Amsterdam as affording such great and possible de- velopments as are ever attractive to those holding vagabondish JOHN LAW. [From Hei G-roote Tafered, etc.] notions of finance. He accordingly laid before the Scottish parliament a plan for alluring his countrymen to the glorious capabilities of paper money. The canny Scots were not so easily captured, and he fell back to his old ways and sunk himself once more in dissipation. His hour was not yet come. Meanwhile the leaders of Louisiana, ignorant of what was in store, had enough to occupy their attention. The flat-headed Choctaws, instigated by Bienville, had Events in Louisiana. THE FIRST NATCHEZ WAR. 101 pillaged some English traders, and brought them to Mobile. The French at this time hacl become particularly anxious over the increase of the English trade, and had been much alarmed with rej)orts of what Young and other English emissaries were doing along the Mississippi banks to gain the sympathy of the natives. The action of the Choctaws was simply an effort to show their steadfastness to the French interests. To keep all this region under closer surveillance, the French authorities had already given orders to construct some new stockades, — one above Mobile, another near the Natchez, and a third at the mouth of the Ohio. Bienville was makinsr ready to go up to the Natchez when word reached him of the fearful devastation which that tribe was makino; amonsf the French, trustfully scattered in their neighborhood. It . , The war was the beginning of the ruthless Natchez wars, and with the Natchez. we have the story in the narratives of Richebourg and Penicault. It should be remembered that both of these chron- iclers are partisans of Bienville in his quarrels with Cadillac. They both say that what had angered the tribe was the gov- ernor's impulsive rejection of the Natchez calumet, offered to him while passing up and down the Mississippi in his recent search for mines. Crozat in France sided with the enemies of Cadillac, and set in motion the influence which soon led to his recall. Bienville started up the river with such a force as the governor would spare. All overtures of atonement which the Natchez offered hira were rejected, unless they were accompanied by the surrender of the murderers or their heads. His persistence prevailed ; obedience was rendered, and he even got their help in building a stockade to awe them for the future, port This was the beginning of Fort Rosalie, the earliest ^°'^^'®- permanent station of the French in the Great Valley south of Kaskaskia. Bienville, on his return to Mobile, learned of Cadillac's recall. A new governor, L'Epinay, was to be sent out, but until he arrived Bienville held the chief power. This con- Bienviiie trol lasted from October, 1716, till March, 1717, when Si'ac. L'Epinay came, in company with some soldiers and ^'^*^"^^- emigrants. He had instructions to carry out stringently the monopoly of Crozat. 102 THE MISSISSIPPI BUBBLE. Louisiana had now a population of about seven hundred, for Crozat had done little to increase their numbers. He had neglected even to augment the laboring population by the importation of blacks. The agricultural condition of the province had not, therefore, improved, and Crozat was in real- ity bankrupt after four years of unsuccessful commercial effort. Crozat sur- The rcucwed instructions to L'Epinay had been charte" merely a last gasp of power. Indeed, Crozat was ^"^'- already prepared to seek relief by surrendering his charter, and this he actually did in August, 1717, before he could have known anything of the effect of his last injunctions. All the privileges which Crozat had enjoyed were now vested in a new organization known as " The Company of the West," or more popularly as " The Mississippi Com- Company of . . . c\ the West or pauv. Tlus bodv rcccivcd its charter September 6, Mississippi \ — .„^ . . Company. 1717. Its Capital stock was fixed in December at 1717. . * . a hundred million livres. It was expected to restore the shattered finances of the kingdom by funding as rentes the outstanding Billets d^Etat^ the government guaranteeing four per cent, on its capital. This was to be Law's opportunity. An engrossing search for mines was no longer to imperil the Bienville prosperity of Louisiana, and the Spaniards were to be orthT""^ suffered to get on as best they could without the aid company. q£ j^j-ench ti'adc. Bienville was understood to repre- sent the best spirit in the province, which was to do for Louisi- ana what the Canadian leaders had failed to effect for Canada, — develop its agriculture and at the same time work its mines. In being constituted by the company the governor - general, Bienville felt that he was now to have his opportunity to make manifest the possibilities of the province. Through him the company could regulate all civil matters ; could build forts and arm vessels for its defense. It was claimed that frigates of thirty guns could patrol the Mississippi for six hundred leagues. This new life for Louisiana had a lease of twenty-five years, and it was to be invigorated by bringing into the country six thousand whites and half as many blacks. In five years the company did actually send over seven thousand settlers beside six hundred slaves from Guinea. Law had already attracted the attention of the Regent, and was given the chief control of the company. If inevitable dis- JOHN LAW. 103 aster overtook his stultified adherents in Europe, Louisiana at least got a start in something like the right direc- TT 1 1 • 1 iTf CI 1 Law's influ- tion. Under these impulses the lite ot the colony ence in 1 11 i>i <• Louisiana. began to assume the character which comes irom set- tled labor, and lost many of the haphazard turns which come from vagrancy. V a 1^ > ;2 o 8 > p ^:^ ^ ^ r^ ^ »n X/ t3 1 \r S € o •1 •n f^ |: 5> * § > ?? ►d ^ •1 p» 55" 1 9 ? Q* 1 r C-4 R s 1. s^ f *4 1 a 3 2. £:• (:ii 55* Sr» J About sixteen months before the new company received its charter, Law had opened in Paris (May 2, 1716) j^^^^n a private bank of issue, which the government had ^''"^' ^^^^" favored as a means of absorbing in its capital seventy-five per 104 THE MISSISSIPPI BUBBLE. cent, in its Billets d'Etat. Law treated it as an experiment, hojjing by his success to induce the government to make it a royal bank. The forming of the new company was an oppor- tune help to that end, and Law's position in it served to make it subservient to the wider interests of the kingdom. The main thing was to populate Louisiana, and create an apparent prosperity by numbers and labor on the soil. Concessions ^^,. ^,^ '' . „, , „„ , , of laud in lo this end concessions oi land were ottered to those who could send out settlers, and as a greater induce- ment to speculation the grantees were not required to accom- pany the immigrants. Law himself received a tract on the Arkansas River, and agreed to send out fifteen hundred per- sons. Unluckily, neither he nor others were compelled to be careful in choosing tenants. So we find a good part of the comers for a while to be vagrants and criminals, but on May 9, 1720, an order was issued forbidding such recklessness. There was no lack of general interest in these measures, and one finds occasionally in cartographical collections a " Cours du Maps of Mississippi ou Saint Louis," as the map was called, Louisiana. prepared in 1718, to abet the fever, at the command of the company, by a leading geographer, Nicolas de Fer. Across the English Channel there was an echoing furor, and an old plate of John Senex's " Map of North America " was revamped to meet the demand for information about the new El Dorado. It was inscribed to Law. Herman Moll, the ris- ing English cartographer, inserted (1720) in his map a legend athwart the trans-Mississippi region, saying that " this country is full of mines." At a later day, 1755, Mitchell, in his great map made in the English interests when the final struggle was impending, recalled the fever in the legend : " Mines of Mara- meg, which gave rise to the famous Mississippi sclieme, 1719." Early in February, 1718, tlu-ee ships sent by the Company of Ships the West arrived at Dauphine Island. They brought arrive. 1718. ^^ Bicnvillc a commissiou, giving him the authority of commandant. There were already movements in progress for new surveys of the mouth of the Mississi])pi, so as to establish an entrance from the Gulf more practical)le than that by way of Lake Pontchartrain. Bienville, with his new powers, now sent a party to clear the ground for a trading-post at a spot on the river about a hundred miles from the Gulf, which had :... -7 .^> [This map is from Bowen and Gibson's North America, London, 1763, sliowing the country of the Black Padoucas, tlie Osages, and the alleged milling region upon which Law and his followers based their expectations of wealth.] 106 THE MISSISSIPPI BUBBLE. already attracted the commandant's attention. This was on a New Or- curve of the shore where the banks were about ten leans. 1718. £ggj. abovc the stream. Back from this the land fell off, and when it reached Lake Pontchartrain there was but lit- tle to prevent its waters breaking over the swampy margin. It was nevertheless the most inviting site in the almost universal morass which lined the course of the river. The storehouses and traders' cabins with clay chimneys which soon showed them- selves were the beginning of the destined city of New Orleans. While everything was yet crude and unfinished, some ves- sels sent by the Mississippi Company landed in this infant colony (March 9) three companies of infantry and a small body of colonists. In August, three hundred more settlers came, and they were soon scattered up the river on the various conces- sions. Two men, to whose care in chronicling events we owe much of our knowledge of these early days in Louisiana, were among these grantees. One was Benard de la Harpe, who had a grant on the Red River, and who has left us a jour- and nal of events. The other was Le Page du Pratz, who settled near the Natchez, where he lived for eight years, and gathered much curious information from the Indians. All this he gave to the world in a Histoire de la Louisiane forty years later (1758). In March, 1719, five hundred negroes were landeds in the following October, a large body of Alsatians and other Germans arrived, a portion of whom at least had been sent by Law as settlers upon his own grants. If these developments prom- ised well, a check to them was already prepared in a war with Quadruple Spain. lu August, 1718, the representatives of Eng- WM with^''*^ land, France, Holland, and the Empire had formed a Spain. 1718. quadruple alliance, with the avowed purpose of uphold- ing the treaty of Utrecht and forcing Spain into an observance of its provisions. A declaration of war against Spain proved necessary, and on December 17 (January 9, 1719, New Style), hostilities were decided upon. The news reached Mobile in April, and Bienville at once organized a force to surprise Pen- sacola. After a brief investment by sea and land, Pensacola i i i t i • taken and hc took the placc and sent the prisoners to Havana. lost. 1719. The Spaniards seized the ships which had brought the prisoners, and during the summer returned and retook the 108 THE MISSISSIPPI BUBBLE. town. They tried at the same time to make au impression on the French post at Dauphine Island, but the opportune arri- val of some ships from France completed the discomfiture of the assailants, and they withdrew. It was again Bienville's turn, and Pensacola once more fell, into his hands in Septem- ber, 1719. When Philip, the Spanish king, succumbed and joined the alliance, and there was peace in 1721, Pensacola was confirmed at last to its Spanish founders. Meanwhile, Law's projects were ripening for good, as every- Law's body seemed to think, — at least for everybody's Company, individual good, if not for the public good. The Re- gent, then in power, placed all sorts of privileges in the extended hands of Law. The shares of his company became so buoyant in the market that nobody dreamed of a precipice. The old stories of mines in Louisiana were revived, and their sites were figured, as we have seen, in the maps. Ingots were produced at the mint in evidence, — coming from Mexico, very likely. The one thing more for Law to do was to get all the money in France into a bank of royal prestige. Then loans would no longer be necessary. Interest and taxation would disappear. Both crown and people would happily discover that true credit is what the state gains by an excess of paper over bullion. On January 1, 1719, such a state of financial bliss came in with the new year. The Banque Generale of the Scotch Royaie. proplict bccamc the Banque Royale of France, with the Regent for sole proprietor. A few days later (Jan- uary 5), Law was proclaimed its director. He was allowed to make an unlimited circulation of notes, and the Company of the West existed to work them off. He was permitted to put a tariff upon all things bought and sold. In this way everj'thing was absorbed by it. In May, it was known in Louisiana that the Company of the West had engulfed the Companies of the East, and Company of " t t the Indies, bcforc lonu" the colony was directed to receive more 1719. " . , paper and pay for it with all the coin it had. In June, 1719, the conglomerated companies took the name of the Company of the Indies, while the frenzy still grew on the Paris exchange. In July, the profits of the mint were added to its Note. The opposite view of Quinquempoix is from Net Groote Tofereel der Dicaasfieid, etc. Amsterdam, 1720. J 110 THE MISSISSIPPI BUBBLE. resources, and this privilege was to run for nine years. The stock gave a new bound upward, only to be temporarily de- pressed, upon a rumor of Law's illness. An installment plan was introduced, and so the circle of victims was inordinately widened. By the end of the year (1719), there were half a million foreigners gesticidating in the streets of Paris, eager for something. " Paris," says the English pamphleteer already cited, " like the temple of Fortune among the heathen, is resorted to by innumerable crowds of every nation, quality, and condi- tion, and the dirty kennel of Quinquempoix has for some time been more frequented than the Royal Exchange of London." The capital stock, increased to six hundred thousand shares, rose to fifteen thousand francs a share and even higher, — some thousands per cent, advance in the end. It came to be known that three thousand millions of livres were borne on the face of its aggregated paper. • In January, 1720, Law became comptroller-general of the kingdom. In February, the company absorbed the comptroller- Bauquc Royalc with all its privileges. The entire general. p ^ t ? t money power oi the country was now at Law s dis- posal, and every tax came into his hands. But the fabric had begun to totter. Law was at his wits' end to keep this from being known. In May, he tried a hazardous expedient, and issued a royal decree to reduce values. Within a week he saw he had made a blunder, and the decree was revoked. It proved too late. Shrinking hope had succeeded to buoyant exhilaration. Law worried through the summer and autumn, uncertain how to turn. By December, he was sure that no Law oue could be longer deceived. He put eight hundred disappears, jiyrgg Jq j^jg pockct ouc day and disappeared. The end had come. As soon as the news of Law's flight reached Louisiana Germans in (Juuc, 1721), the Germans who had been sent to oc- Louisiana. cui)y his conccssiou became alarmed, and in the follow- ing November Charlevoix saw their deserted villages. To pacify them, a new grant was made by the authorities, twenty miles up the river from New Orleans, and what is to-day known as the " German Coast " along the stream marks wliere they set- tled. They began a new industry in supplying vegetables for the young capital of the province. * CHAPTER VI. THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. 1710-1720. If La Harpe and St. Denis had failed in finding in the southwest an overland way to the South Sea, there was a vague hope that it might yet be revealed in the and a pas- northwest. If Lahontan's story of his Riviere Longue western was now generally discredited, since Delisle, the lead- ing geographer of France, had pronounced against it, there were, however, still a few credulous cartographers, like Homann of Nuremberg, and Moll the English map-maker, who placed it on their maps. The common opinion among those interested in this problem of a western way to the Pacific pointed rather to the Missouri, or perhaps to some way from Lake Superior by a higher latitude. It was a report that explorers had gone four hundred leagues up the Missouri without encountering any Spaniards, but that a hundred leagues farther tribes were reached who were warring with them. It was a natural appre- hension that Spanish success in an Indian war in this direction might enable these rivals to slip in before the French in this western route. Cadillac shared this fear, and was watchful to report all rumors from the far country to his superiors at Paris. A priest at Versailles, Father Bobe, who had a correspondent at Mobile, was acting just now as an intermediary between Raudot, one of the secretaries of Pontcharti-ain, and BoWand Delisle the cartographer, in the rectification of the ^®^'^i«- latter's maps. He tells the geographer that his letters from Louisiana speak of a populous country, which the Spaniards had discovered, towards the western sea, and suggests that Bourbonia would be a good name for it on the maps. In October, 1717, the Sieur Hubert made a report to the minister of the marine upon an alleged route by the Missouri, 112 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. throiigli a rich mining country, and he supposed it to lead to a mountain barrier, where the springs of eastern and western flowing rivers could not be far apart. The notion was not a novel one, but it had always been veiled in conjecture. Delisle and others put near the eastern edges of their maps a lake, with an outlet towards the Pacific, but they avoided any direct presentation towards the west of the mouth of such rivers. Intimations in the book which Tonty discarded, and in the Carolana of Coxe, had more or less familiarized the reading public with like notions, which were soon to be reinforced in the great English map of Popple. Bourgmont, a trader who had been for fifteen years traffick- ing on the Missouri, was responsible for a story that the Panis (Pawnees) and their kindred in the remote west were trading with other peoples living about a great lake. This far-away race were represented as small of stature and dressed like Europeans. There was a suspicion that they might prove to be Chinese. It was thought by some to be a favorable condition of a roiite The Mis- ^J ^^^^ Missouri, that the tribes along its current were tolhVwest- represented to be more tractable than Indians gen- em sea. erally were, while more to the north the mutual hos- tilities of the Sioux and Christineaux rendered exploring pe- culiarly dangerous. Begon, the Canadian Intendant, informed (October 11, 1718) the Paris government that all hopes of a successful search for the western sea must be abandoned unless these savages could be forced into peace with each other. In a memorial which was prepared at Pai-is in 1718, outlin- ing a plan for giving Louisiana a dominating position in North America, it was made a part of the means to that end that the mines on the Missouri should be worked, and commerce with Mexico established from that base. Inasmuch, it went on to say, as the Missouri has one branch leading to the South Sea, trade can also be opened with Japan and China. In the summer and autumn of 1719, there were two adven- turers, incited by such stories as these, endeavoring LaHarpe "^ . ° on the to discovcr the meannio^ of them. One, La Harpe, Missouri. ,-.,...... . , „ had gone up the Mississip])i m August with a small escort, and was soon among the Osages on the Missouri, finding Note. The opposite cut is a section of Popple's great Mnp of the British, Empire in America (1732), sliowing the supposed lake and its outlet towards the west. GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE, JUNE, 1763. H'^.-- Itj-i^ v^^^Jm*.- •ill**""' ,-». rFftXS^m^ 3 t -laii.^ JJl 4ij 1 --»s.!Lii)tlLU* Jte*~ !^ J « POPPLE, 1732. 114 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. unicorns and other creatures suited to his fanciful expectations. Finally, on September 6, reaching a point on the Missouri among the Tonacaras (latitude 37° 21'), he judged the spot favorable to command the trade of the Padoucas and Spaniards. Perhaps he got rumors of Valverde, the governor of Santa Fe, who just about this time was pushing north into Colorado and Kansas, as far as any Spaniards had yet been. At this point La Harpe found a Chickasaw trader, and in his presence set up a pillar in token of French possession. This was on one branch of the Missouri, and he went no farther. The other explorer, Du Tisne, had followed another branch, and reached the Panis at a point supposed to be where Du Tisn6 on the Mis- Fort Riley now stands. Here he planted the French standard forty leagues beyond the Osages. This peo- ple had unsuccessfully endeavored to bar his progress, and when he passed beyond them he found the Panis hostile, and was put to some anxiety in pacifying them. It proved to be difficult to obtain their consent to going farther to reach the Padoucas, whom they looked upon as foes, saying that they stood in the way of carrying on trade with the Spaniards. Du Tisne, how- ever, was too determined to be withstood, and he succeeded in erecting a column among the Padoucas on September 27, 1719. A more northern route had engaged the attention of the priest Bobe — already mentioned, — who, in the same letter in which he had asked Delisle to efface Lahontan's river from his maps, had referred to the possibility of discovering a western route from the head of the Mississippi. It was far the Missis- f rom Certain at this day where the sources of the Great River were. Cadillac placed its head in 48° north lat- itude, in a lake which had another outlet northward into what is now known as Lake Winnipeg, and this dual outflow was not an infrequent conception for some time to come. The latitude of this source, moreover, varied much, and, " according to Indian reports," there was found occasion among the geographers to place it anywhere from 47° to 55°. Bob^'s idea was that over a divide at this source there would be found a river flowing to the western sea. He added that on the borders of this sea, according to the report of the savages, there were bearded men " who pick up gold dust on the shore." This coveted strand A WESTERN WAY, 115 lay, in his belief, far beyond many other nations, to whom the French had not yet come. These stories, as he affirmed, had been picked up among the Sioux. The passage, meanwhile, which had most engaged the atten- tion of the government was one lying beyond Lake Su- perior, in the direction which Iberville had followed yondLake from Hudson's Bay, twenty years before. It was the route by which ultimately Verendrye reached the Rocky Moun- tains. Vaudreuil had recommended this route, and it was approved by the Regent, June 26, 1717. It was recognized as too far distant from bases of supply to be sustained by the Indian trade, and that the government must consequently sup- port an exploration by grants. De la Noiie had already been dispatched to Lake Superior to gain information, and in 1717 he had reestablished Duluth's old fort at the head of the lake. In September, 1718, Vaudreuil, under the orders he had re- ceived, sent forward a party to begin operations in earnest. These explorers soon found how pestilent the Sioux could be, and the Indians allied with the French in the exploration were under constant irritation at the difficulties which the Sioux in- terposed. The movement resulted in placing two new forts in this country, one upon the Lac des Christineaux or Lake of the Woods, and the other upon the Lac des Assinipoiles. This last was the water later known as Lake Winnipeg, which, as we have seen, was connected with the Mississippi peg and the ^~ ..,,,. - T^ _^ , . T .1 Mississippi. in Cadillac s judgment. Momann, Van der Aa, Jail- lot, and other secondary cartographers, were constantly repre- senting it as the source of the Mississippi. The establishment of these forts served two purposes. They gave advanced positions for further progress. What was per- haps of more importance, they interposed a barrier to prevent the English from pushing west from Hudson's Bay, where they were now well established under the treaty of Utrecht. The forts might possibly sustain themselves by the Indian traffic ; but it was thought that the government would have to make an actual outlay of something like fifty thousand francsi, before this occidental sea could be reached. This was not, neverthe- less, an adequate calculation of the great cost which would have to be incurred in transporting goods from the ships at Montreal to so remote a region. 116 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. In the original grant to Crozat, the Illinois region had been Michi an ^^^^ within the jurisdiction of New France, as the Que- peiiinsuia. |jgg government was officially called. This took all the country, roughly speaking, lying about the Illinois River and eastward to the Wabash, while the lower peninsula of Michigan fell naturally under the oversight of the commander at Detroit, though Lemaire and others extended Louisiana up to the straits. La Salle had crossed this peninsula along its southern edge at a perilous time, but we have little record of any acquaintance w^ith its interior. The map-makers, like Senex, drawing upon report or imagination, represented the divide between Michigan and Huron as an elevated terrace, along which stretched " a walk above two hundred miles in length." So much ignorance, in fact, prevailed, in spite of familiarity with the neighboring portages of Chicago and St. Josej)h, that Jaillot, in 1719, in a map dedicated to the king, slavishly followed the geography of Sanson (1656) and obliterated entirely Lake Michigan, putting in its place the Bay of the Puants (Green Bay) as a pocket of Lake Huron. The years which followed the treaty of Utrecht made an op- French portuuity for France, but the chance was lost. Ri- coiouization. y^lry witli England had failed to teach Ker govern- ment the secrets of successful colonization. It appears, how- ever, from some of the memorials presented to the crown, that the lesson was not lost upon all her subjects. She was content with her greater power over the savages. For the most part she continued to maintain this, despite the fact that in all arti- cles of trade, except firearms, powder, and a few trinkets, she charged the Indians more than the English. The French had failed, nevertheless, to discern what Champlain had clearly seen a hundred years before, that the very qualities which made their character attractive to the Indian unfitted it for the real life of a pioneer, if such an existence meant the subduing of the soil. When Louis XIV. died, on September 1, 1715, he told his Louis xnK grandson that he was conscious of his failure to be a dies. 1715. gQij^gg tQ jjjs people. The history of the French in America, indeed, gives constant tokens of his baleful influence in the colony, which might have been the brightest jewel of his crown. New France had been crushed by grinding monopolies, ^Hyrijjm [From Sayer and Jefferys' reproduction of Danville's North America (London), showing the current conception of the Michigan peninsula.] 118 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. and Louisiana was now undergoing the same degradation. This monopoly diverted energy from building up a state in order that it might sustain the aspirations of hucksters. The Iroquois played fast and loose with this Gallic instinct, The Iroquois ^^ gain what they could, and to let the English gain western morc. To keep the Indians of the west steadfast in tribes. ^YiQ French service, it was necessary either to bind these nearer tribes in peace, or raid their country to keep them at home. Truces were made and unmade according to the savage humor. The western fur trade ebbed and flowed accordingly. The French had reestablished a post at Mackinac (1714), but without great benefit to their trade, for the English gained most by it. Through the Iroquois influence the Foxes (Outa- gamies) and their associates about Green Bay were kept pretty steadily on the English side. The Illinois, as French allies, were fair game for them, and they occasionally pounced upon them, much to the annoyance of their white friends. The Foxes had not forgotten their disasters at Detroit, and had of late been waylaying French traders at the Green Bay portage. The Sauks and Sioux were with them in spirit, and the Iroquois waited their opportunity. The combination threatened a great peril ; the advice of Perrot, now an old man, for effecting a reconciliation, was not followed, and the Quebec government sent Louvigny in March, 1716, to chastise the Foxes. and the Hc was cnjoincd further, if possible, to exterminate them for being the ferocious instigators of the conspir- acy. The campaign was vigorously conducted, and in October Louvigny was back in Quebec, reporting, not the destruction, but the submission of the savages. He had clinched their sub- jection by a treaty, and brought with him some hostages to compel the observance of it. The Foxes, notwithstanding, proved treacherous, and nothing could assuage their implacable hostility. These dangers besetting the older portages led to a more general use of the passage by the Maumee and Wa- northern basli, as Coxc in liis Cciroluna informed the English public in 1722. The post at Vincennes probably be- came a recognized station at this time, though it was nearly twenty years before it can be said to have ripened into a social community. Tliis line of contact by the Maumee between the I THE ILLINOIS COUNTRY. [From a corner map in the large General Map of the British Middle Colonics, as corrected after Pownall, 1776.] 120 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. two great valleys was the only one just now well guarded. That by the Fox and Wisconsin rivers had become well-nigh deserted. The routes near Chicago were also subject to savage raids, and La Salle's fort of Crevecoeur had been abandoned. The French tried to draw the Miamis to settle about and pro- tect the St. Joseph portage ; but the English offered superior inducements for them to cluster about their traders on the Maumee. To keep out the Iroquois, the French constructed a stockade at Ouiatanon (1720), on the north bank of the Wa- bash. East of the Maumee and all along the southern South shore c t t t^ • ^ ri mi of Lake sliorc ot L/akc Erie, the confederates were still a ter- ror. The French had not dared to establish a single post in this wide region, and Governor Spotswood of Virginia was eagerly urging the occupation of it by the English. This southern shore of Lake Erie was to remain little known for a long time. A canoe going west from Niagara River, on its way to Detroit, found this course thirty miles longer than the northern shore. This, added to the terror of the Iroquois, had made the southern banks an untracked wilderness, and no one had dared to follow the footsteps of La Salle athwart the region. The Ottawas and other tribes squatted about Detroit occasionally used the Sandusky portage to reach the Ohio on their raids. Except for this, there was little to alarm the vast herds of buffalo which roamed amid its water-courses. There were reasons, then, why the French government, revers- ing the provisions of Crozat's charter, was ready to The Illinois » ^ . t • • • i i country aiiucx the llluiois couiitry to Louisiana, in order that joined to . . . . , , ., -, Louisiana, its communicatioiis might be more easily preserved. A decree of the king in council, September 27, 1717, establishing this union, came at a period when renewed attention to that ujwiver country was awakened because of fresh accounts of it published in the Lettres Edifiantes. On February 9, Pierre Dugue Boisbriant, a cousin of Bien- Boisbriant villc, arrived at Mobile with a commission to coni- iuinois. mand in the Illinois. He was directed to build a fort 1718. jj^ i^ig government. He was also to keep watch on the English, who might be attracted by the mines which he was expected to open. In October he started up the Missis- sippi in canoes, carrying a hundred men, and in December he was at Kaskaskia. He began his fort sixteen miles above that ",tJ ^ en .^SK, TIL. Vv T *??\\\. rP^ M ftdatne'-^ KASKASKIA AND KAHOKIA. [Part of a Map of the Course of the 3Iississippi, grave par Tardieu.'] 122 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. place on the left bank of the Mississippi, and in the spring of 1720 it was completed, and named Fort Chartres in Chartres. Compliment to the Regent of France. It was placed one mile from the river; but to-day its site is partly covered by the current. The United States land commissioners at Kaskaskia, December, 1809, rej)orted that the neighboring village, which originally stood " a small distance " below the fort, " had been mostly, if not wholly, washed away by the river." The next year, the mission at Kaskaskia was converted into a parish, — a sign of permanence in the life of the Kaskaskia o i and the upper valley which had been slow in coming. It was helped, doubtless, now by a temporary passion for mining, instigated by the fever which, as we have seen, Law was spreading in Paris. One Philippe Francois Kenault brought thither at this day some two hundred miners and five hundred slaves ; but Kaskaskia profited in the end more by the families which came in his train. The lead mines of the mod- ern Galena were opened, and life was active for a while. Canada had now a population of about twenty-three thousand. Some manufactures of coarse fabrics were beginninj^, Canada. a ai and the merchants of Quebec were allowed for the first time to open an exchange, and enjoy partial freedom in their business. It was a slight sign that new ways of life were beginning to operate ; but they were to be too much hampered for a generous competition with the English. There was need to withdraw the attention of Canada from this new activity in the Illinois country. All along Appalachian the Api^alachian rano;e, the natural bulwark of the border. -i-, . . English colonies, the French were constantly looking for English aggression, but only at the northern end in New York, and at the southern end below Carolina, was there im- minent danger. The English had long ingratiated themselves with the Indians who guarded those a]>proaches. Here, as Moll in his maps designated them, the " Charakeys and Iroquois " formed efficient outposts for the English. Though New England was territorially apart from this ex- tended frontier, she had a decided mission in helping to sustain QUEBEC THREATENED. 123 the efficacy of the barrier. This mission was to disconcert any western aggression of the Canadians by keeping their -^^^ attention upon the northeast. To this end, in 1710, ^ugiand. Nicholson's fleet had sailed from Boston, and in October it took Port Koyal in Acadia. All the colonies north of Penn- sylvania only looked upon this success as an earnest of some- thing more. Their governors accordingly held a meeting at New London, and established their respective quotas for a more serious attack the next year. The English government, in the mean while, promised to help them with a naval contin- gent. Sir Hovenden Walker with a fleet reached Bos- ton in due time. With Samuel Vetch commanding armament the provincials, the armament sailed at the end of Quebec. July, 1711, to carry out the confident plans of St. John, the English minister. New England bore the odium of the failure, though, if Jeremy Dummer is to be believed, she did not deserve it. A royal favorite. General Hill, in command furnished quite enough incapacity to relieve the Yankees of the responsibility. Canada was, indeed, ill prepared ; but, fortu- nately for her, she was not put to a severe test. The elements needed no ally, and shattered Walker's fleet in the St. Law- rence (August). Everybody's courage oozed out, and no one dared to repair the loss which the gales had caused, and proceed to the attack. Sir Hovenden, with what was left of his fleet, turned and fled ; and in October the disgraced general was in England charging the New Englanders with his misfortunes. A land force, which had meanwhile gathered at Albany, waiting for happy tidings of a naval victory before advancing by Lake Champlain, never got farther, and Canada breathed freer. Thus New England in this chance failed to do her part iii the general attack, and New York remained inert. There was, per- haps, a too narrow policy of self-protection prevailing at Albany. At any rate, Massachusetts thought so, and (May 11, 1711) complained to Lord Dartmouth "of the criminal neutrality maintained by New York with the French Indians." Robert Hunter had shortly before (June 14, 1710) been transferred as governor from Virg^inia to New York. ~ o New York. He knew that the southern colonies felt as bitterly toward New York as New England did ; for while the Iroquois, 124 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. unchecked, raided down the Apjaalachians to Carolina, the New Yorkers treated them tenderly along- the Mohawk. Logan of Pennsylvania, in a memoir to the home government, a little later, recognized this ; but at the same time he insisted that the safety of the colonies as a whole depended on their maintaining the good-will of the Iroquois in New York. To this end, Gov- ernor Hunter, while he felt there was no effective union of the colonies, was hanging the silver crowns of Queen Anne about the necks of the Ii-oquois warriors in token of their obligations to fight on the English side. All the while, Hunter's assembly was earnestly representing to the throne that the French were scouring all the back country and misguiding the Indians. " He ought to be a cunning man who treats with the Indians," says an English writer at this point, " and therefore the French leave it to the Jesuits." Fortunately, the English had a match for the priest in Madame Montour,"" who was usefully employed Madame occasioually in conferences with the confederates. She Montour. ^^^ ^^^ daughter of a French Canadian by a Huron woman, but had been captured in youth by the Iroquois, and had since lived among them, married to an Oneida chief. The French never forgot her unnatural defection. It was in some respects a more striking influence upon the Iroquois which Schuyler exercised when he took five chiefs in Mohawk chicf s to England, and let them see the evi- dences of British power. They had their portraits taken, and a series of mezzotints following those pictures were favorite prints among our ancestors. Addison and Steele made the sachems play conspicuous parts in the scenic weeks of the Tatler and Spectator. It was not the policy of the French to let the provisions of the treaty of Utrecht have all their effect on the Iro- and the quois ; and the English made steady complaints of the insidious schemes of Joncaire and other French intrifmers to draw the confederates over to the French interests. It grew to be a constant assertion that " the French were de- bauching the Iroquois through the Jesuits and by other means." In July, 1715, Colonel Heathcote notified Governor Hunter that the French had entered the Onondaga country in force, for the purpose of erecting a fort there. He urged the colonial governments to build a line of posts along the frontier, "to THE IROQUOIS. 125 answer the line of settlements the French have for some time been, and are now, making from the Mississippi to Canada." Schuyler, as acting governor, tried in return, but vmsuccessf ully, to induce the Onondagas to drive Joncaire from their villages. All the while, the confederates were not chary of their profes- sions of friendship, and in August, 1715, the record of one of their councils with the English represents them as saying, " We must acquaint you that we have a hatchet of our own, which we have had of old, and which has always been very successful and fortunate. It has subdued a great many nations of Indians, and we have made their habitations a wilderness and desolate, and that hatchet is still lying by us ready, and it is yours as well as ours." These rival bids for the confederates' alliance naturally divided the tribes, and at least a third of them had before this TOT ij*ii 1 •^'^^ Iroquois been drawn away to the St. Lawrence and fallen under on the st. the direct influence of the French. So we find Logan of Pennsylvania rather pitifully complaining, in 1718, that beyond what was left to them of the Iroquois, the English had hardly fifteen hundred Indians in their interests north of Carolina. The great Iroquois trail passed west from Albany, by succes- sive " castles " of the confederates, and so on to the iroquois Niagara portage. Another path branched off among *''^'^®" the Senecas and passed down the upper streams of the Alle- ghany to the Ohio. This was one of the routes along which occupation must be pressed, and the passage made familiar, if the traders from Albany were to join those from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and make good in the end the occupation of the Ohio valley. In these years, large numbers of Lutheran Palatines were seeking asylums in England, and near three thousand ° *' . . Palatines. of them came to swell this westward tide along the Mohawk. Among them were the orphaned Zenger, who was later to champion a free press in Pennsylvania, and the parents of Conrad Weiser, who was to become the conspicuous interme- diary with the Ohio Indians when the decisive epoch came. The French were making ready to check this advance, and at a later day (1721), when Joncaire fortified a post at >T. J V ^' , , , ^ _ Niagara. JSiagara, the act was promptly resented by the Eng- lish as an encroachment. It was, however, as the occupants of 126 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. the post contended, nothing more than a natural result of the possession of that strategical point by La Salle in the previous century. The English sought to counteract this movement, and pre- serve their trade with the remoter tribes, threatened OswcEO* through this occupation of Niagara, by planting their power at Oswego. Burnet, now the governor of New York, strove to make his assembly authorize the construction of a fort at that point ; but failing in this, he used his private means to do it. The governor at Quebec protested. He did not dare to eject the intruders, as he called them, but resorted to new intrigues with the Iroquois to make those Indians drive the English off. The ultimate result of this bold step of Burnet was that the French put two armed vessels on the lake, and tried to intercept the Indian trade by a post at the modern Toronto. The English, on the other hand, hoped to put a stop to the clandestine trade by which Albany supplied goods to the Montreal traders, now prohibited by law (1720). To effect this, they constructed Fort Lydius on the Hudson, fourteen miles from Lake George, — later to become better known as Fort Edward. While the rivals were playing off one measure against The Scotch- another along the Iroquois route, there was no inac- insh. ^Jqjj farther south. Along the Pennsylvania border, the Scotch-Irish were receiving new currents of their valiant blood. This North Irish people had been paid for their devo- tion to the Protestant succession in England by so much perse- cution for their non-conformity that they had sought relief by coming to the American colonies in large numbers. Governor Shute had tried to settle a part of those who had come to Mas- sachusetts along the Maine coast and throughout the northern frontiers, hoj^ing to make them bear the brunt of the Canadian onsets. The first immigration had landed in Boston in 1712. Continued raids of the Indians had so unsettled some of their abodes that a part of these northern frontiersmen were insti- gated to join their kindred in Pennsylvania. Some Palatine Germans, discontented with the aristocratic precmp- Germans. , . tions of lands about them, followed not long after from the Mohawk country, and thus the pioneer blood of the com- SPOTS WOOD OF VIRGINIA. 127 munities pressing against the Alleghanies was doubly reinforced. The tide of emigration which was yet to surge through the moun- tain passes could have no hardier stocks for the task before it. All the while that these people and others, chiefly servants released from contracts, were spreading up the streams toward the mountains, the authorities of Pennsylvania kept out some adventurous youths, wandering afield, so as to observe what the French were doing along the Ohio. In 1718, Governor Keith of Pennsylvania was transmitting the reports of these scouts to the home government. At the same time he urged the p-ear of the Lords of Trade to establish a fort on Lake Erie. ^'^®°<'^- In his Carolana, Coxe was enforcing the dangers of delay, and picturing the risks which would unhappily result if by conni- vance of the Iroquois the French got foothold on the lake. He pointed out how the portages to the Susquehanna and the Juniata would open a way for an attack on Pennsylvania and Virginia. A bustling, active man was now ruling in Virginia. Gov- ernor Spotswood had been a soldier, and had been gpotswood wounded at Blenheim. To show his career in Virginia *° Virgmia. his many letters are fortunately preserved. He had early made inquiries of the Indians about the springs of the Potomac, and had been informed that they were in a lake beyond the moun- tains, whence the current issued and forced its way through the hilly barrier. Spotswood argued that by pushing up this valley and through this gorge, there was a fair chance of being able to cut the line of French communications from Canada to Louisiana. He thought that the English would have an advan- tage in maintaining posts in this trans-montane country over the French, inasmuch as their supplies would be carried by a shorter line. Spotswood was a loyal supporter of the English sea-to-sea charters. He claimed that the grant to Penn went to Li^jitg ^f the borders of Ontario, as some contemporary maps ^"'k'"'*- represent it. The Virginia charter, he contended, included all other territorial rights to the west, north of Carolina. In this he formulated the Virginia claim, which was only abandoned by her cession of the northwest lands at the close of the Kevolu- tionary "War. Under Spotswood's interpretation, this charter covei'ed the Great Lakes from Erie west, and took in a large 128 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. part of the country bordering on the upper branches of the Mississippi. In announcing this, Spotswood showed abundant ignorance of what the French had done. " In which space westward of us," he says, in 1720, " I don't know that the French yet have any set- tlements, nor that any other European nation ever had. Neither is it probable that the French from their new plantations will be able in some years to reach the southern boundaries men- tioned in the charter of Virginia." He then contends that the French posts on the lower Mississippi are within the charter limits of Carolina. By the last advices, he adds, the French have a settlement at " Habbamalas," as he calls the Alabama region, where in fact the French had been seated for more than a decade. In one of his letters (December 10, 1710), Spotswood records TheTaiiey *^^* some ad venturers had recently gone not above a of Virginia, huudrcd milcs beyond the farthest settlements, and had ascended a mountain, before deemed inaccessible, where they had looked down into the valley of Virginia. Though the descent on the farther side seemed easy, they had not tried it because the season was late. Not far from the same time, De Graffenreid described ascending Sugar Loaf Mountain, near the sources of the Potomac, and said that he saw from the summit three distinct ranges, one higher than the other, with beautiful valleys lying between the nearer hills. There is little doubt that an occasional trader had for a long time before this pushed through gaps hereabouts, but with- out making public record of it. The Shawnees were in the lower parts of the valley, and are known to have received, and to have passed west, various products of English manufacture. Such adventurers could scarcely have missed observing the well-defined traces of the buffalo between gap and gap. A few years later (1715), the movement of the English in this direc- tion was exciting alarm among the French. Father Mermet, at Kaskaskia, even reported that the English were building forts. The French were trying to induce the Indians of the Wabash to avoid the English traders who were coming among them. These pioneers were in part from Virginia, which had become, next to Massachusetts, the most populous of the Eng- lish provinces. The great influx of Germans into Virginia KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN HORSESHOE. 129 and his Knights of tlie Golden Horseshoe. 171C. had already begun, and they were pushing back towards the mountains. In 1716, Spotswood made his famous reconnaissance with his Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, for such was the spotswood insignia with which he later decorated his compan- ions on this jaunt of jubilation. We have the journal of John Fontaine, who accompanied the governor, — meagre enough, but with Spotswood's letters it constitutes most of the knowledge which we have of the undertaking. Robert Beverly, the historian of Virginia, was another companion, but he was not so regardful of posterity. SPOTSWOOD'S ROUTE, 1716. [According to Fontaine's Journal.] It lay vipon Spotswood's mind to probe the secrets of this western barrier, and find the sources of the rivers which formed the great highways of the tide-water districts. He wished to discover if it were practicable to reach the great western lakes by passing these Appalachian gaps. The stray hunters and trad- ers who had essayed the task had done nothing to make their routes known. Fontaine's entry of August 20, 1716, is that at Williamsburg he " waited on the governor, who was in read- iness for an expedition over the Appalachian Mountains." On September 5, he writes : " We followed the windings of the James River, observing that it came from the very top of the 130 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. mountains," and reached " to the very head, where it runs no bigger than a man's arm, from under a large stone. We drank King George's health, and all the Royal Family's, at the very top of the Appalachian Mountains." It seems evident that the party, which consisted of fifty persons and a train of pack- horses, were now in the Swift Run gap, which they had reached in thirty-six days from Williamsburg. " About a musket-shot from the spring," says Fontaine, " there is another which rises and runs down the other side. It goes westward, and we thought we could go down that way, but we met with such pro- digious precipices that we were obliged to return to the top again. We found some trees which had been formerly marked [blazed], I suppose, by the northern Indians, and following these trees we found a good safe descent." Going on seven miles and observing " the footing of elks and buffaloes and their beds," a large river flowing west was reached and crossed. They named it the Euphrates ; it was the modern Shenan- doah. " The governor had some graving irons, but could not grave anything, the stones were so hard. . . . He buried a bottle and a paper inclosed, on which he writ that he took pos- session of this place in the name of and for King George the First of England. We had a good dinner, drank the king's health in champagne, and fired a volley." Fontaine next goes on to enumerate an abundant variety of liquors in which they drank the health of others. The return trip was made leisurely, and when they reached Williamsburg, in September, the itiner- ary of their busy days showed that they had traversed a distance of four hundred and forty miles. Spotswood later made a report to the Lords of Trade, and said that " by the relation of the Indians, who frequent those parts, from the pass where I was, it is but three days' march to a great nation of Indians, living on a river which discharges itself in the Lake Erie ; that from the western sides of one of the small mountains which I saw that lake is very visible, and cannot therefore be above five days' march ; and that the way thither is also very practicable, the mountains to the westward of the Great Ridge being smaller than those I passed on the eastern side, which shows how easy a matter it is to gain posses- ion of these lakes." The governor then proceeds to consider the danger from the French occupation of this trans-montane CAROLINA. 131 region. He apparently had not heard, as a contemporary Eng- lish map-maker had, of the " Tionontatecaga," who beyond the mountains inhabited eaves, so as " to defend themselves from the great heat " ! Spotswood's knowledge of the French beyond the Alleghanies had grown of late, and he now began to have a better concep- tion of the problem which the English had to solve. He says further : " The British jjlantations are in a manner surrounded by the [French] commerce with the numerous nations of Indi- ans settled on both sides of the lakes. They may not only en- gross the whole skin trade, but may, when they please, send out such bodies of Indians on the back of these plantations as may greatly distress his Majesty's subjects here. Should they mul- tiply their settlements along these lakes so as to join their do- minions of Canada to their new colony of Louisiana, they might even possess themselves of any of these plantations they pleased. Nature, 'tis true, has formed a barrier for us by that long chain of mountains which runs f i-om the back of South Carolina as far as New York, and which are only passable in some few places ; but even that natural defense may prove rather destruc- tive to us, if they are not possessed by us before they are known to them." He then urges that settlements should be formed on the lakes, and that the passes on the way to them be securely held. Above all he urges settlements on Lake Erie, " by which we shall not only share with the French in the commerce and friendship of these Indians inhabiting the banks of the lakes, but may be able to cut off or disturb the communi- cation between Canada and Louisiana, if a war should happen to break out . . . and we are nearer to support than they to attack. As this country [Virginia] is the nearest, . . . and as I flatter myself I have attained a more exact knowledge than any other Englishman yet has of the situation of the lakes, and the way through which they are most accessible overland, I shall be ready to undertake the executing this project if his Majesty thinks fit to approve of it." Spotswood was complaining in 1711 of the exactions put by the Carolina government upon the Virginia traders. Carolina These impositions had forced the packmen to pass by traders*' preference south into Carolina, and thence to follow ^^^^^^' 132 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. well-establlslied trails to the Cherokee and Chickasaw villages. These routes are shown by pricked lines in a map by Mol] (1720), and the paths connecting the sevei-al tribes are show^n on a map made at this time by the Indians themselves. The con- temporary majjs often put a legend along the Tennessee Eiver to the effect that it formed the usual route from Carolina to the Illinois. INDIAN MAP OF TRADERS' PATHS. The western routes had, however, suddenly become danger- indianwar. o^s. The Tuscai'oras, Yamassecs, and other tribes, '^^^- all along the frontier, had risen (1711) against the English, and the exposed settlements of Swiss and Palatines CAROLINA AND THE INDIANS. 133 under the Carolina jurisdiction had begun to suifer. The con- flict lasted for more than two years, and checked the westward movement up the Neuse River. Colonel Moore, by a success- ful campaign, forced the Tuscaroras out of the country, and they joined, as has already been stated, their kinspeople, the Five Nations in New York, making a sixth in the Iroquois Con- federacy. Quiet followed in 1713, and the traders were once more on their travels. Penicault encountered three of them among the Natchez in 1714, An Englishman, Young by name, is said to have gone beyond the Mississippi to arouse the more distant tribes against the French, and at one time Bienville strove to embroil the Choctaws with the Chickasaws, simply because these latter Indians were manoeuvring in the English interest. The French averred that it was the policy of the English to set one tribe against another, so that they could profit by buying the prisoners to work as slaves on the Caro- Indians as lina plantations. This practice became so prevalent ®^^^®®" that in 1720 it was made a punishable offense. The English, on their part, charged the French with instigating the savages to pillage the traders. It is to be feared that no accusation of any kind can be safely denied against either nation. Rivalry in the American fur trade has always been the source of inhu- manity north and south. The English traders, in pressing their debtors among the nearer Indians and inciting new enmities, provoked Yamassee the Yamassee war, which again in 1715 involved the ^^^' ^^^^' Carolina borders in devastation, not without the suspicion that vagrant Virginia packmen supplied the marauders with guns and powder. Next to the rivalry of the French, that of the English colo- nies among themselves embittered the colonial life. It became a steady complaint in Carolina, as it did in and the Massachusetts, that the New Yorkers did not do all they could to prevent the ravages of the Iroquois on other borders than their own. It was now a grievance in Charles- ton that the confederates, through such remissness at Albany, were raiding south along the Appalachians and harassing the tribes friendly to the Carolinian interests. The Iroquois might have the ostensible purpose of carrying out Governor Hunter's injunction to attack the hostile tribes in the French interests ; 134 THE BARRIERS OF LOUISIANA. but they were pretty sure to be loose in their discrimination when on their southern warpath. The complications were many which marked the deplorable conditions of the English in this Yaraassee war. They might have secured immunity from its evils if they had leagued themselves with their new enemies against the hated northern confederates, but this would have brought fresh disasters along the Appalachian borders in the alienation of the Iroquois. The confederates had already harbored the Tuscaroras, enemies of the south, and the Iroquois had no hesitancy in charging the war upon the Carolinians fail- ing to recompense those tribes who had assisted them in expell- ing the Tuscaroras. Despite these difficulties, the Iroquois were in the main kept to the English interests. They professed that their messengers went " with their lives in their hands," to uro-e the Choctaws to keep the peace, and followed the warning up with active participation on the English side. " If the war does not end soon," said Governor Hunter, " the confederates will go south in still greater force." The French were of course at the bottom of all these border liostilities, or at least the English never failed to think they were. The government of South Carolina, in 1716, was repeat- ing these stock charges against the French to the Lords of Trade. All the while the increased activity in Louisiana, under the influence of Law's system, was creating new grounds of anxiety in Carolina. " It is obvious," said the memo- rialists, " how formidable the French will grow there during peace, considering how industrious they are in fre- quently supplying their settlements with people." Late advices from France, they add, show how many colonists are going from Brest to their new colony of " Luciana in Mississippi, which by the small number of inhabitants in Carolina, the French had the opportunity to begin, and by the present troubles with the Indians are encouraged to increase." The memorial then pro- ceeds to advise that military posts be placed in the Bahamas and on Port Royal Island, supported by cruising vessels. These will be safeguards, it adds, which perhaps the gold mines in the Appalachians will suffice to maintain, if only explorations are made to discover such ore. Just at this juncture (1717) a movement was made to push settlements into the Appalachians on the grant made to Sir MARGRAVATE OF AZILIA. 135 Robert Montgomery. This territory, which was designated as the Margravate of Azilia, lay between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers, and along the southern banks of the latter stream. The project Was to make such settlements a barrier against the French ; but settlers failed, and after three years the grant was reclaimed. As an alternative means of protection, Fort King George was now built at the forks of the Altamaha, where the Oconee and Ocmulgee rivers unite. This fort, however, was not long maintained, and it was, in part at least, because the province was not able to defend the colony against its enemies, that South Carolina now changed its proprietary government for a royal one. At the same time, claimants under the old " Carolana " grant were petitioning the Lords of Trade to settle disputed bounds with the French by making the " Mischacebe by them styled Messisipy " the divi- sion between the two crowns. CHAPTER VII. CHARLEVOIX AND HIS OBSERVATIONS. 1720-1729. The student feels a certain confidence in facing the problems of New France as her leaders learned to know them, if Charlevoix i p i •■ t ' • t • -i • it and the Sea hc kceps Dcfore liim the imijressions which an intelli- of the West. gent observer like Charlevoix was i-eceiving in passing from Mackinac to the Gulf. Not one of these questions was older or of steadier recurrent interest than the riddle of the west. When Charlevoix heard that the climate was less se- vere at Lake Winnipeg than on the St. Lawrence, though it lav farther to the north, he did not fail to conjecture The trough '' • i i • e i i • p i of the that a neiffhbormo^ sea soitened the rigors of a boreal continent. • n?i i • <• i region, ihere was as yet no comprehension of that central longitudinal trough of the continent which could con- duct the southern winds even as far north as the Arctic circle ; and exploration towards the west by Lake Winnijjcg had as yet revealed nothing. The Duke of Orleans had interested himself in geographical questions, and it was in large part to satisfy his curiosity in regard to a route to the Sea of the West that Charlevoix had been dispatched to gather such information on this point as he could. This Jesuit priest landed in Canada in 1720, and pro- ceeded to Mackinac to begin his inquiries. A journal of his Charlevoix's movcmcnts and observations was published in his writings. well-known Histoire de la Nouvelle France (1744), and we have an official report, including his recommendations, in a letter addressed by him to the Count de Toulouse, January 20, 1723. From Mackinac, July 21, 1721, he informed the minister that he had visited every post in the upper country except those on Lake Superior. He had made up for that I [From Lafitau's Mcetirs des Snnvages, Paris, 1724, showing the prevailing view as to the extreme northern position of the source of the Mississippi, and how the springs of the Missouri approached the western sea.] 138 CHARLEVOIX AND HIS OBSERVATIONS. omission by studious inquiry of priest, trader, bushranger, and Indian as to what he could have learned had he gone there. Charlevoix's tendency was to be skeptical. He had heard the story of a ship working eastward from the Pacific Transconti- , . mii iientai througli uorthem water-ways till she reached the Atlantic above Newfoundland ; but he found, as he thought, that the story originated in a bad French translation of a Spanish book. Everywhere the Indians told him that there was a western-flowing river over the great divide which confined the sources of the Mississippi, Missouri, and St. Pierre rivers ; but he found the details so wild and contradictory that he never quite thought the story-tellers honest. Scoui'ing along the Mis- souri appeared to him to unfit every one for a truthful state- ment. La Harpe seemed to suspect that if Charlevoix had been a little more credulous he might better have divined the truth. What the Jesuit did believe seems to have Missouri been in a general way that the Missouri, somewhere route. . , . ° T 1 • 1 1 • 1 1 . 1 in its springs, did interlock with other waters which sought towards the west an unknown sea near which there were white men. As it was evident the Sioux knew more' than any- body else about these contiguous fountains, missionaries among them might elicit the secret, if the church would only take the matter into its hands. This belief was, indeed, not unshared by many, layman and jjriest. French and English tracts, in 1720, quote Indian tes- timony that the source of the Missouri is in " a hill on the other side of which there is a torrent that, forming itself by degrees into a great river, takes its course westward and dis- charges itself into a large lake." Coxe, in his Carolana (1722), seems to have better conjectured the exact geographical rela- tion of the Missouri, when he makes one of its branches inter- lace with a stream' that we may now safely identify with the Columbia, while another branch, o]">ening the way among the Spaniards, led the explorer near the sources of other rivers wliich we may now believe to be the upper waters of the Colo- rado, the Arkansas, and the Eio Bravo del Norte. It was from Santa Fe, on the latter stream, that the Spaniards, „ . ^ in 1720, had started to ioin the Padoucas (Comanches) Spaniards •' ^ fromSaiita Hear the Kansas Rivcr and raid toward the Missouri. T6. 1720. rri • • • • -r< Their ultimate destination was thouuht to be Fort [This map is from Bowen and Gibson's North America, London, 1763, sJiowinpr the upper branches of the Missouri and the supposed country of the Padoucas, Pauis, and Kansas tribes. Tlie "Frencli route to the western Indians" touches the Mississippi opposite the mouth of the Wisconsin [Ouisconsing], whence Canada was reached by the Fox River portage and Green Bay.] THE MISSOURI RIVER. 141 Chartres, and Boisbriant, then in command there, had timely notice of their approach. The purpose, doubtless, was to divert the Indian trade from the Illinois to Santa Fe. Boisbriant was relieved of anxiety when, in May, 1721, he learned that tlwin- vading Spaniards had fallen into a trap among the Osages and had been massacred. The question then of interest was : Could the route laid open by these i-aiders now be found ? On January 17, 1772, the Company of the Indies instructed M. de Bourgmont (Bourmont, Boismont, Bournion), who was already somewhat familiar with the country, on the m^s- to do what he could to hold the line of the Missouri against such inroads of the Spanish. He came to Louisiana, and passed up the Mississippi and Missouri, with the hope of establishing friendly relations with the Indians. This done, it might be easy to find a practicable route for traders to reach New Mexico. There was already some irregular trafficking in that direction. Exploration seemed to be turned toward this channel of trade in preference to discovering the " mountains of monstrous height," that were reported to be somewhere up the river near that source, which Peiiicault says no one had yet found. Bourgmont's first movement was to build a stockade on an island (since disappeared) in the Missouri, which he j-o^t called Fort Orleans. It was a base for further prog- Orleans, gress, and already settlers were passing li'p the stream. A body of Germans was thereabouts in 1723, and in the same year the earliest grant on the river was made to the Sieur Renard.'^ During the year before, Bienville had ordered Boisbriant to in- terpose somewhere on the Jiansas JJiver AJprt against Spanish intrusion, and later (August, 1723) he transmitted through Boisbriant to Bourgmont orders (dated January 17, 1722) to ascend the Missouri from his new fort, and establish another post better situated to engage the Spanish trade. He was di- rected to defend it, if necessary, against any force which might be sent from Santa Fe. To secure the Indians, he was ordered to dole out gifts to them, but in small quantities, in order to hold them in allegiance by the hope of more. Starting from a point near the modern Atchison, and pro- NoTE. The map on the two following pages is from Dr. James Smith's Some Considerations on the Consequetices of the French settling Colonies on the Mississippi. Loudou, 1720. 144 CHARLEVOIX AND HIS OBSERVATIONS. J ceeding througli northern Kansas, Bourgmont approached the Padoticas or Padoucas late in June. He had broken down on the Comanches. jj^arch, and turned back, without accomplishing his purpose. Ill and dispirited, he reached his fort on the Missouri. Another effort succeeded better, and in November he was among the Padoucas, and was able to bring them to a pact, by which they agreed to open the way to the Spaniards through their territory. Suavity and a lavish bestowal of gifts accom- plished all that Bourgmont's instructions called for. The ques- tion was, how long the savage consent would hold good. Charlevoix tells us that in 1721 the French established an p-Q^ armed post at the mouth of the Fox River. They had Indians. ^^^g yg^ eucountcred no people whom they needed so much to overawe as the Foxes. For some years, these savages rendered it a fearful risk for trader or adventurer to traverse the country lying between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi. Allied with the Kickapoos, they seemed determined to bar every avenue to the Sioux, either for the packman or priest. With such vigilant enemies, every attempt to maintain communica- tion between the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi through any territory frequented by these ubiquitous savages was daiiger- ous. They had been known to make devastating swoops almost under the walls of Fort Chartres. A crisis which Charlevoix ap- prehended seemed to impend in 1726, when the Mascoutins and Kickapoos had put a stop to the use of the Green Bay j^ortage. When affairs were the darkest, De Lignery succeeded at Mack- inac in bringing the Foxes to a peace, and they even agreed to spare as allies of the French the Illinois, whom they had been accustomed to worry. De Siette, who had succeeded Boisbriant in command at Fort Chartres, had little faith that the Foxes could be held to their promise. De Ligneiy was suspicious of their attempts to join the Iroquois, and did what he could to block their way to the confederates. With the Foxes thus tempoi^arily, at least, under surveillance, there was a chance that the Sioux could be better The Sioux. , managed. Recourse was accordingly had to Charle- voix's plan of reaching them through a mission. The borders of Lake Pepin, near enough to their territory to attract them, seemed the most eligible position for the effort. FORT BEAUHARNOIS. 145 Father Guignas was selected for the work of the church, and Rene Boucher de la Perriere (or Perier), who had an evil name among the English for liis merciless inroads upon the New England borders, was put in charge of the secular part of the undertaking. The party left Montreal in June, 1727, and trusting to the pacification of the savages near the Green Bay port- g^een Bay age, passed that way. We can follow them in the P°''*^ee. priest's journal. They met friendly greetings among the Win- nebagoes on the pretty little lake where this people dwelt, and on August 15 they arrayed themselves in the village of the Foxes, " a nation," as Guignas describes them, " much dreaded," but without reason, as he thinks, since they are reduced to only about two hundred warriors. He became confused with the perplexing tortuousness of the river, and found the actual port- age little better than half a league of marsh mud. Once upon the Wisconsin, he counted thirty leagues to the Mississippi. Turning up this river, their course lay northerly for fifty-eight leagues, as he measured it, winding among islands, till they reached a widening of the stream, destitute of is- lands, which was known as Lake Pepin. Here, about the middle of September, the party staked out a stockade, a hundred feet square, with two bastions, and in four days com- pleted it, and called it Fort Beauharnois. It was the first set- tlement on the Mississippi north of the Illinois. They had trusted the Indians' advice in placing it, as they supposed, above the highest level of the water, but in the following April a freshet forced the reconstruction of it on higher ground. In due time nearly a hundred cabins of the Sioux sprang up about the fort. The Foxes had proved, however, far less tamable than the Sioux. Their treacherous maraudings still continued. . 1 /^ • 1 1 1 1 The Foxes. The two hundred warriors whom Guignas had thought so placable were still true to the same instincts which, a hun- dred years and more later, their descendants manifested under Blackhawk. De Siette was inclined to renew the war and ex- terminate them, if he could ; but when the king heard of it, he remembered the sad results of past attempts to annihilate the savages, and wrote to Beauharnois, April 29, 1727, to call a halt. The governor counted on help from Louisiana, which 146 CHARLEVOIX AND HIS OBSERVATIONS. was much more exposed to ravages than Canada. He was only anxious to strike the blow before the savages could fly to the Iroquois or to the Sioux of the prairies. In the spring of 1728, it seemed no longer possible to desist from a war, and De Lignery led a formidable force against them ; but the wily savages eluded their pursuers, and little was accomplished. Such were the impediments to western progress which were Charlevoix developed during the years following Charlevoix's study iuinois ^^ ^^ problem. We must now follow his observa- ^^-^- tions on other points. From Mackinac, where Charle- voix pursued these inquiries as to a western way, he passed by the St. Joseph portage to the Kankakee, and so to the Missis- sippi, reaching Cahokia October 10, 1721. There had been a settlement here for a score of years or more. Charlevoix says that its inhabitants told him they had originally built their cabins on the bank of the river. In three years the current had moved so far to the west as to leave them half a league inland. He found the French at Kaskaskia living in ease and taking on the habits of settled life. Boisbriant was shortly afterwards (1722) to sign the earliest land warrant which is on record there, the product of the settlement was and the increasing, and before long supplies were to be regu- larly sent down to New* Orleans. The travelers heard stories of mines ; but though considerable bodies of San Do- mingo negroes had been brought to the region to work these deposits, the French never profited much from mineral wealth. Neither Canada nor Louisiana was quite content with the divided interests of this whole region. The Canadian bush- ranger took advantage of the uncertain control, and passed from one to the other jurisdiction to escape punishment for his mischief. It was from these roving miscreants that the Sioux and Foxes obtained their guns and ammunition. The fact was, that the northern limits of Louisiana were never Limits of definitely determined. The makers of maps drew the Louisiana. divisiou line according to caprice, shifting it up and down between the Natchez and the Ohio. Delisle was still applying the Spanish designation of Florida to the whole north- ern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, between the Appalachians and New Mexico. In 1722, he stretched the province up the [From Sayer and Jeflferys' reproduction of Danville's North America (London), showing the position of Lake Pepin and the upper Mississippi, as then understood.] 148 CHARLEVOIX AND HIS OBSERVATIONS. Mississippi to the line of tlie Missouri, and in 1728 lie stopped it at a point below the Ohio. His " Pays des Ilinois " lies north of this, between the northern parts of New Mexico and the Iroquois country. He places the designation " Pays de Iro- quois " so indefinitely that it does not help to settle the vexed question whether the hunting-grounds of that confederacy stopped westwardly at the Scioto or the Miami, or extended even farther. The country of the Illinois had been added, as we have seen, Bounds of *o Louisiana in 1717, but it was uncertain whether the Illinois, ^j^-g carried the jurisdiction of its dependent governor beyond the Kickapoos and Mascoutins, or to the line of the Wisconsin. Homann, in his maps, ran the division line due west from the Chicago portage to the Mississippi. Moll, the Englishman, and Jaillot, the Frenchman, agreed in stretching it across the country below the Illinois River. Vaudreuil, representing the interests of Canada, claimed that the Louisiana of Crozat's charter had only been increased under the decree of 1717 by the addition of the Illinois country, whatever that may be. It was a dispute between him and Bois- briant, as local governor at Fort Chartres, whether the latter's jurisdiction extended to the sources of all the affluents of the Mississippi or not. Some European geographers, like Homann and Jaillot, even made the Illinois include the basin of Lake Winnipeg, on the theory of the continuous connection of it and tlie Mississippi in one system of water-ways. The territory in dispute between the French and English The Ohio traders was along the Wabash and up the Ohio and country. '^g lateral valleys. Charlevoix speaks of the region north of the Ohio as likely to become the granary of Louisiana. Senex, the English cartographer, made it appear that through this region "of one hundred and twenty leagues the Illinois hunt cows," and he magnified the reports of the trade in buffalo peltries. The waning power of the Iroquois and the coming of the Delawares and Shawnees into the Ohio valley had per- mitted the French to conduct more extensive explorations, and they had found themselves liable to confront aU along the vaUey the equally adventurous English. The Mississippi Company had urged (September 15, 1720) THE OHIO COUNTRY. 149 the LuilJing of a fort on the Wabash as a safeguard against the English, and the need of it had attracted the atten- .^^^^ wabash tion of Charlevoix. Some such precaution, indeed, ^^""'^''y- was quite as necessary to overawe the savages, for now that the Maumee-Wabash portage was coming into favor, the Indians had lately been prowling about it and murdering the passers. La Harpe, in 1724, feared the danger of delay. In 1725, the necessity for some such protection alarmed Boisbriant early in the year. The Carolina traders had put up two booths on the Wabash, and rumors reached Kaskaskia of other stations which they had established farther up the Ohio valley. These last intruders wer$ probably Pennsylvanians, — at least, it is so assumed in the treaty made at Albany in 1754. The language of such treaties is rarely the best authority ; but it is certain that Vaudreuil, in Quebec, believed it at the time. He re- ported to his home government that the English were xhe English haunting the upper waters of the Wabash and trading °" "'^ ^^"°' among the Miamis. As a result, we find the Company of the Indies (December, 1725) instructing Boisbriant to beware of the English, and to let M. Vincennes, then among the Miamis, know that these rivals were moving in that direction. The next year the company informed Perier (September 30, 1726) of their determination to be prepared, and authorized him, in concert with Vincennes, to repel the English if they approached. Vin- cennes had already been reconnoitring up the Ohio valley, to see if any English were there. Here, on the Ohio, the claims of authority between the New Orleans and Quebec governments again clashed. The 1 • 1 TT 1 •! • 1 1 1 Regions region which Vautlreuil wished to protect on the upper indispute Wabash was held by him to be within Canada. But Canada and 1 • T • • f 1 Louisiana. there was a very uncertain line separating it from the lower regions on the same river which Vincennes was ursfinsf the government of Louisiana to strengthen. This lower post, later called Vincennes, after the name of that pioneer, did not take the shape of permanence till about 1734, when some families began to gather about the spot ; but all the while its chief communications seem to have been with Canada by the Maumee portage beyond the post of Ouiatanon. The French always had a certain advantage over the English on the Ohio. Their approach to it from below was assured as 150 CHARLEVOIX AND HIS OBSERVATIONS. long as they held the lower valley of the Mississippi. The Lake Erie portages offered ready communication with outhe Canada. Their possession of Niagara enabled them to watch the approaches from New York and Penn- sylvania. Along the Alleghany River Joncaire was most active in his intrigues with the Shawnees, now scattered upon these upper waters of the valley. He succeeded at times in bi'inging them into treaty relations with Montreal. To strengthen their obligations to the French, he took care that smiths were kept among them to repair their guns. Once more to return to Charlevoix. He passed Fort yChartres in company with a young officer, St. Ange by name, who was destined, forty years and chartres morc later, to haul down its flag, then the last banner Kaskaskia. of Fraucc floating east of the Mississippi. Charlevoix remarked how the increasing settlements between the fort and Kaskaskia were beginning to look like a continuous village. He spent about a month at Kaskaskia (October- November, 1721), noting much of what has already been re- counted as to the condition of the country and of the neigh- boring regions. From Kaskaskia he started, November 10, to descend the Mississippi. Passing the mouth of the Ohio, — he called it the Wabash, — he thought it the finest place in Louisi- ana for a settlement/ the country up the river consisting, as he says, of " vast meadows with many streams, and covered with herds of buffaloes, and affording the shortest route to Can- ada." He felt that an armed post at the mouth of the Ohio could best keep in awe the Cherokees, " the biggest tribe of the continent." Reaching the l)luffs at Natchez, he comments on what he calls Natchez. Ibcrville's fascination with the spot, and the laying out ^^-^' of a settlement there, which had been called Rosalie, after Madame the Duchess of Pontchartrain. " But this pro- ject," says Charlevoix, " is not likely soon to be carried out, though our geogra})]iers choose still to set down such a town on their mai)s." He found a storehouse, but little trade. Farther down the river, the Jesuit stopped and inspected the concessions recently awarded in furtherance of the financial movements in France, and on January 5, 1722, he reached & ^ a ^ ^ DUMONT'S PLAN OF NEW ORLEANS, 1718-1720. 152 CHARLEVOIX AND HIS OBSERVATIONS. New Orleans. Five days later he writes thus : " The eight huii- New Or- dred fine houses and five parishes which the newspapers leans. 1722. ^^^ years ago [in the time of Law's frenzy] said were here are reduced to a hundred cabins for tlie troops, irregularly placed, a storehouse of wood, two or three mean dwellings, and an unfinished warehouse. This wild and desert spot is still nearly all covered with reeds and trees." But, he adds pro- phetically, " the day cannot be distant when it may become a rich town, the capital of an opulent colony." At this time the province had a total population, white and black, of not far from five thousand five hundred, of which about six hundred were slaves. Charlevoix remained in New Orleans till July, and then went to Biloxi. Peace, which had been made with Spain, February 17, 1720, France on ^^'^^ "^^^ lastcd for two years, and France, with Spain's the Gulf. acquiescence, held the Gulf shore westward from the iieiffhborhood of Pensacola as far as she could venture to oc- cupy. In the previous August (1721) Bienville had instructed La Harpe to take possession of the coveted Bay of St. Bernard (Matagorda), but in October it had been abandoned. The sav- af^es who dwelt about it had not softened in their ferocity since the days of La Salle, and it was found impossible to appease them. To control this coast and to keep communications with the Illinois, neither Biloxi nor Mobile had proved well situated. Now that the peace had rendered them less important as bul- warks against the Spaniards at Pensacola, it was evident that many considerations prompted the removal of the seat of gov- ernment to some position on the Great River. Something within her own capability needed to be done if Louisiana was to flourish, for France had of late been very neglectful of colo- nial interests. Unless matters mended, something little better than an independent freebooting existence must be occasionally dreamed of. The colonists could at least in this way get some of the products of enterprise, now checked by monoi^olies and other exactions. Added to this vacillating and neglectful policy Note. Tlie opposite map is from Bowen and Gibson's North America, London, 1763, allowing; tlip basin of tlio Reil River and the Spanish frontiers; and, east of the Mississippi, the country ot the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Alibamons. 154 CHARLEVOIX AND HIS OBSERVATIONS. of the home government, the unpopularity of Bienville and his quarrels with Hubert, the commissary, had not served to make prospects better. Charlevoix came at a time to see this, and exercised his powers as a peacemaker to some effect. For a year or two, the governor had been advocating the removal of the capital, and in 1720 he had sent Le New Or- leans laid Bloud de la Tour to choose a site on the Mississippi. out. 1720. . 11 A town was staked out, as we have seen, and records of baptisms were begun there as early as September 10, 1720. These early days, as Charlevoix found, were dismal ones. Some Swiss who had come for garrison duty had been scattered among the neighboring tribes, the better to feed them. They brought disease with them and fomid more of it. Out of one lot of Germans who sailed from France, not a quarter survived the voyage. The negroes who were brought from Guinea fared better, but not much. Hurricanes swept along the coast in the autumn of 1721, and leveled the huts both at New Orleans and Biloxi. In the spring of 1722, while Charlevoix was looking on, com- jfg^Qr. missioners arrived with orders to transfer the gov- capitaL*^ ernment to New Orleans. In June the removal of ^^""" stores began, and by August Bienville had taken up his residence in the new capital. A fort was soon built at the Balize, in a position which, as Charlevoix describes it, was on the edge of the Gulf, but which is to-day nine miles up the pass. Charlevoix was on the ground in time to understand the per- plexities which environed the poor governor on all sides. The news from the Red River was discouraging, and Bien- River coun- villc rcsolvcd to iucrcasc the fifty men who constituted ^^' the garrison at Natchitoches Island. This was ren- dered necessary, for the S])aniards had made good their posi- tion among the Adayes. Here they had converted a mission into an armed post, bringing up their supplies from the Gulf, and Bienville looked upon it as a distinct threat to the French. He wrote (December 10, 1721) to protest against it, as an unfriendly interjection of alien power between two French posts. The Spaniards maintained at this new post, which was Note. The opposite section of Mitchell's great map of 1765 shows the country of the Cenis, and the positions of the Adayes. 15G CHARLEVOIX AND HIS OBSERVATIONS. but seven leagues from Fort St. Jean Baptiste at Natchitoelies, a hundred men and six cannon, with which they couhl tlireaten the communications of the French with their more distant post among the Nassonites at Cadadaquions. These movements of the French toward the Spaniards met with scant appreciation from Charlevoix. " The neighborhood of the Spanish," he says, "had at all times been a fatal allure- ment to the French, who leave the best of lands untilled to pursue a precarious trade with such neighbors. The neighbor- hood of the Spaniards may have some advantages, but it is better that they should approach us than we go to them. It is not their interest to drive us away. The}^ understand, or will find out, that we are the best barriei* they can desire against the English." At the very date when Bienville was writing his protest to the Spanish jrovernor, he cave instructions to La LaHarpe. ^ -, i- i • c • i • • Harpe, now returned from Ins fruitless mission to St. Bernard's Bay, to proceed up the Arkansas, and secure, if possible, some cattle from Mexico. He varied his mission by searching for emeralds, and returned in May, 1722, unsuccess- ful again. Charlevoix speaks of the ascent of the Arkansas being made TheArkan- witli difficulty bccausc of its rapids and shoals. It sas River. ^^^g ^^^^ ^|^g moutli of thc rivcr that he saw the " sorrowful ruins of Mr. Law's grant, w^here nine thousand Germans were to be sent. It is a great pity they never came," he adds, " for there is not, perhaps, in Louisiana, if we except the Illinois, a country more fit for tillage and cattle." It was just at this time that orders were received from France to build a fort at the mouth of the Arkansas to protect the line of communication between New Orleans and Kaskaskia. A crowd of palisaded cabins soon sprang up on the spot where Joutel, escaping from the assassins of La Salle, had come so happily upon some of Tonty's men in 1687. Convoys Avith provisions from the Illinois were constantly coming down the river, and it was necessary to guard against the famine which too successful raids of prowling savages upon the boats might easily occasion, for this country had hardly been brought, except at a few points, under the subjection of the priests' meliorating influences. MISSIONS. 157 Cliai'levoix, in 1721, did not find a Christian brother to greet him anywhere on the lower Mississippi, except at Yazoo and New Orleans. " It is five years," he says, tiieMissis- " since a priest said mass at the Natchez," and he ^'''^'' mentions that he was called upon while there to give the sanc- tion of the church to sundry couples who had already joined themselves in marriage. The next year, by orders issued in France in May, 1722, more active missionary agencies were at work, and the river became the great highway of the church. The Jesuits had brought the tribes of the Illinois almost to a man over to the faith. '■' They are almost all Christians," says Charlevoix, " mild in temper and often loving towards the French." To the Jesuits the future ecclesiastical control of all the coun- try north of the Ohio was now assigned, and in the following year we find their recruits frequently passing up the river. The lower regions of the valley were divided between the Carmel- ites and the Capuchins, but before long all fell under the con- trol of the Capuchins, who were recognized from the Alabama to the Red Eiver, and up the Great Valley as far as the Natchez. It was upon the Natchez that all eyes were soon to turn. They were restless, and had never been quite recon- ^^g ciled to the presence of the French. In October, ^''^t'^hez- 1723, Bienville led seven hundred men against them and devastated two of their villages. The time for a more fearful outbreak was only put ofp. Meanwhile, Bienville's enemies had brought about his recall to France, and Boisbriant came down from Fort Bienvniein Chartres to take temporary command. On reaching ^■"^"'^s- France, Bienville pressed his defense, and La Harpe, who sup- ports him, says that he had laid up no more than sixty thou- sand livres during his long control in Louisiana, and defies the traducers of the governor to point out a more honest record. Bienville, however, failed of reinstatement. There was some talk of making La Noiie his successor, but the choice p^Her. fell on Boucher de la Perriere (or Perier), who re- ^"^^' ceived the appointment August 9, 1726, and started to his province. Louisiana was now supposed to have a population of eight thousand, of whom three thousand were blacks. 158 CHARLEVOIX AND HIS OBSERVATIONS. Before Perier started, the Company of the Indies (September English aud ^^' 1726) rovealed to him their anxiety about the Encroach- English encroachments on the Wabash, and the Re- ments. gent expressed a hope for peace, not disguising his fear that i^ might become impossible to maintain it. At the same time there were apprehensions on the part of the English. We have an apt expression of them in the Memoirs of John Ker of Kersland (London, 1726). The grounds of this fear were certainly exaggerated, when Ker declares that France had sent over ten thousand troops to Louisiana, but not perhaps so much so when he argued that France intended the conquest of the whole continent. If the Great Valley was what Ker represented it, " of vast extent, with such a temperate, wholesome climate and wonderful, fruitful soil to produce everything useful as good if not better than any other country," ^ngland might well The Jesuits %lit for her sea-to-sea charters. The Jesuits who as planters, ^q^q qow scttlcd on a grant at New Orleans were beginning to show the capabilities of the soil in their planta- tions of oranges, figs, and sugar cane. It is very likely that the country owed the indigo plant also to them. The influx of vagabonds, which the holders of concessions under the Law regime had been sending over, was almost stopped, and new social amenities were appearing. The miry ground, with its stray growths of palmetto, willow, New and brake, the slab sides, bark roofs, and clay chim- orieans. ^g^g q£ ^j-^g gabius, Scattered along streets which bore the high-sounding names of the French nobility, made up the new capital, now becoming a more salubrious town since Perier had completed his levee along the river. The chief evils in life within it came doubtless from the lack of personal loj^alty to the crown and country, which a commercial despotism had done so much to destroy. The salutary effects of domesticity were increasing. The The ursu- Company had agreed with some Ursuline nuns to un- imes. i7'27. dgrtake hospital service and maintain a school, and in July, 1727, they arrived, — a body destined to become one of the wealthiest of the religious corporations of the future com- monwealth. A few years later they built a new convent, which is still standing as the residence of the archbishop, and is I THE URSULINES. 159 perhaps the oldest building in the valley. The king sent over a body o£ worthy, marriageable girls, fitting each out with a small chest of clothing. The Ursulines took the charge pjugg a la of them, saw that they were established in virtuous '=^''^'^"''- homes, and to these "filles a la cassette," it is said, some of the best Creole blood of to-day traces back its origin. CHAPTER VIII. ALONG THE APPALACHIANS. 1720-1727. The concessions of the Frencli nnder the treaty of Utrecht (1713), or what the English claimed to be their con- Treaty of ^ . „ , T r^ ^l• • 1 Utrecht. cBSSions, otten came back to plao^ue those Grallic rivals. 1713. 1 o The great gate of the Mississippi valley at the north- east was in the English opinion securely gained for them when they preempted the rights of the Iroquois. To offset the pre- tensions of the sea-to-sea charters of the English, the French simply made a sweeping pretension that the New World in this northern half of it belonged to France and Spain alone, English and ° , ^ French aiid that Enoland had no claim beyond what France claims had ceded by treaty. Consequently, in the extreme French view, their cession of Acadia gave the English their sole legal possession, while the protection granted to the Eng- lish at Utrecht over the Iroquois carried no territorial rights. When it came to a test, the English cared for little but the right of might, as the French found out and could have antici- pated. In the appendix of his Half Century of Conflict^ Parkman prints two documents which represent these Frencli BoWs views. One is a Memoire by that Father Bobe al- '"^"'*' ready mentioned as the prompter of Delisle (1720), and the other is an official representation (1723) of much tlie same purport. The priest contends that the English in the treaty of St. Germain (1632) restored their American con- quests to France. Even if the English did not intend it, this restoration, he argues, in consideration of the French claim arising from the voyage of Verrazano, covered all America not Spanish, and so included the entire range of English colo- nies along the Atlantic coast. It was a part of this restored territory called Acadia, from the Kennebec eastward, which THE ENGLISH BOUNDS. 161 had been wrested by England from France under the treaty of 1713, and that only constituted the proper and legal possessions of England. Bobe now makes a liberal proposition which was not new, — for Lahontan had expressed it in his map of 1709, — that by French sufferance merely the bounds of the English should run due west from the mouth of the Kennebec, thus throwing Lake Champlain into Canada. The line was then to turn south so as to follow the crest of the AUeghanies to Florida. This being accepted by England, France, says our complacent priest, being generous, will live in peace with her neighbor, provided as a recompense England restores what lies east of the Kennebec, being " Acadia with its ancient limits," to the French crown. If the English, not knowing their hon- orable duty, refuse this, then the terrible power of Law's Mis- sissippi Company is to be brought to bear upon them for their temerity ! It never occurred to the docile priest that England had an equally Jjowerful South Sea Company to offset the other, just now in as high a feather. Unfortunately for Bobe and the Enghsh, before a few months had passed both speculations were to be classed among the world's great failures. The English, however, were in no mood to abate any pretensions. They only accepted the bounds of the Appalachians as a tem- T,,g EngUsu porary necessity. Moll, in his maps, was expressing thtlr°^ the English assumptions for the time being. He ''°""'*®- stretched the western line of the colonies alonir the AUeghanies northward, but bearing enough to the west to strike the Great Lakes at the eastern end of Erie, and so to include the entire region of the Iroquois tribal occupation. Thus all rights were denied the French along the southern shore of Ontario and at Niagara. The Lords of Trade appreciated the situation and memorialized the throne to prevent the weak posts of the French beyond the mountains growing defiantly strong. Byrd of Westover in Virginia looked with wonder on the content of the colonies to be hemmed in by the mountains. " Our country," he says, "has now been inhabited more than a hundred and thirty years, and still we hardly know anything of the Appalachian Mountains, which are nowhere above two hundred and fifty miles from the sea." This English people, whom Colonel Byrd thought so negli- gent of their opportunities, now numbered, with their foreign 162 ALONG THE APPALACHIANS. admixtures, half a million of souls. It was a population toler- The EugUsh ^b^y ^^^11 compacted in New England, where the cur- coiouies. xQnt increase was now become the least, and where the spirit which prefigured the coming independence was most ar- dent. The New England charters were already threatened by the king, but they found a strenuous defender in Jeremy Dum- mer, then the Massachusetts agent in London. He claimed that these charters were contracts which the throne was bound to respect. Thougli the monarch had formally granted the ter- ritory, it had really been won by the pioneers, who had defended it from the French. The bill before Parliament, to which these ai'guments were an answer, was one introduced by the Board of Trade for the express purpose of making the colonies better able to confront the French. The plan was to confederate them under a captain-general, and at one time there was a pur- pose to send over the Earl of Stair to fill that office. Various Proposals Other plaus of union were advanced now and later by for union. Coxc, Bladeu, and others, — all for the same end. The youthful Turgot in France comprehended the drift of sen- timent when he spoke of the " colonies like fruit clinging to the tree only till ripe." Dummer, too, forecast the future when he warned the government in London that to unite the colonies in a vice-royalty was the best way to fit them for future indepen- dence. The bill was withdrawn and the scheme slumbered ; and when, in 1723, Massachusetts sought to unite with the neighboring colonies in a struggle with the Indians, the Board of Trade thought the project mutinous ! But New England was on the outskirts of the great arena. Berkeley had written his verses on the westward and course of empire, and had come to Newport with the ultimate hope of founding a college for savages. Franklin was making an influence to surpass the pulpit by fashioning public opinion through the New England Coiirant. When Jacob Wendell placed the first settlement in the Berk- shire hills, in 1725, and Fort Dummer was built at the modern Brattleboro in Vermont (1721), New England had reached the western limits of her home-country, and must wait a half century and more for her later developments on the Ohio. Not since the days, forty years earlier, when La Salle took some vagrant Mohegans down the Mississippi, had the New England savages passed beyond Albany and the Mohawks. OSWEGO. 163 Settlements which the Dutch had formed on the Hudson, and the intercourse which that people had wisely regulated with the neighboring Indians, had come by the transition of power into the hands of those who fully comprehended the nature of their inheritance. No one among the supplanting English knew it better than Cadwallader Golden. He spoke of New York as " the only pi*ovince that can rival and I the Indian believe outdo the French" in the Indian trade; and trade was on the whole the most important influence now at work in the struggle for a continent. In a pamphlet which Golden had published in 1724, on the encouragement of the Indian trade, he had urged the occupation of the country south of the Great Lakes. It was partly to aid such encouragement, and at the same time to make manifest how the Five Nations could be helpful in such schemes, that he set about preparing a history of those tribes. He hoped by this publication (New York, 1727) to instruct those English statesmen who had shown supreme ignorance of American geography, in contrast to the enlightened apprehensions of their French rivals. The difference between them was naturally much the same as that which Delisle with his care, and Senex and Moll with their wild coniectures, had made manifest in their respective rni 1 • • 1 • T • <• English lack maps. Ihere seemed sometunes m this application of of discern- intellectual discernment in American matters a pre- determined purpose on the part of the insular English to go wrong if possible. When they reprinted Golden's book, in London, in 1747 and in 1750, the text was so perverted as to convey on some points little conception of what the author had written. The influence of Joncaire among the Onondagas and Sene- cas has frequently been mentioned. It might have led to a revulsion among the confederated Iroquois, if they had not been brought to a treaty at Gonestoga in 1721. But far more im- portant for the English interest was the flocking of English traders to Oswego. That little post in the busy season was redolent with the smell of furs, and confused with a Babel of tongues. Nothing could disturb the merchants of Montreal more than this intercepting at Oswego of the annual flotillas from the distant waters. The next year (1722), 164 ALONG THE APPALACHIANS. the southern governors, Spotswood of Virginia, and Keith of Pennsylvania, sought to settle with the Iroquois their more immediate grievances. The confederates agreed not to extend their southern raids beyond the Potomac, and even then to carry their warpaths on the western slope of the Alleghanies At this time the Palatines were pushing farther west and were settling at German Flats (1723), near the portage to Oswego. The air was no longer wild with the savage whoop along the western route, and, the Albany traders began to take The English couragc and to respond to the invitations of the In- westeni diaus ou the Wabash to bring their packs among tribes. them. The confidence was reciprocal, and presently a band of Mackinac Indians appeared at Albany. Along a route of twelve hundred miles they had resisted the efforts of the French to turn them back. , / A sharj) clash was near at hand. Vaudreuil and Burnet Vaudieuii wcrc exchanging diplomatic notes over Oswego. Words and Buruet. .^yg^.g gqual in the contest ; but behind argument there was great disparity. The Canadian governor had a popula- tion of less than thirty thousand at his back. The English governor stood for the rights of twelve or fifteen times as many, who were scattered along the Atlantic seaboard. It was this vast preponderance in the Britons' favor which made Pontchar- train think the time was not far distant — and it was not — when Canada could be pushed to the wall. The post which Joncaire had established at Niagara as a counterfoil to Oswego was become stronger and more 0s'W6fi[0 tind New Eng- threatening to the English, and to draw tJie attention of the English from it, Vaudreuil kept up the bewil- dering attacks along the New England frontiers. These were the orders of the government in Paris, which thought it less a risk than a direct attempt to drive the English from Oswego, as the Canadian governor persistently urged. Vaudreuil was firm in the conviction that the onset upon Oswego should not be longer delayed. He was not suffered to attempt it. He Vaudreuil died, Octobcr 10, 1725, an octogenarian, with a head died. 1.25. ^^.^jj dg^r, and with the zeal of youth. He had been the front of the Quebec government for twenty-one years. He had seen the devastating raids of the Iroquois along the St. TREATY OF 1726. 165 Lawrence. He had made such reprisals as his hopes to win over the confederates indicated, and the New Englanders won- dered why they and not the New Yorkers were the victims of his activity. It was he who proposed that Niagara should be strengthened with a stone fort, and this was hardly done when Beauharnois launched two vessels on Ontario. Meanwhile the English had brought the Senecas, Cayugas, and Onondagas to a new treaty at Albany, in Septem- r^^^^^y ^f ber, 1726. These tribes had endeavored to prevent the ^""''■ French strengthening Niagara, but failing in that they were the more ready to play into the hands of the English. By this pact they confirmed what was claimed to be an earlier cession of the land north of Lake Erie. They also granted a strip sixty miles wide along the southern bank of Ontario, including the post at Oswego, and extending to the modern Cleveland on Lake Erie. They acknowledged their lands to be "protected and defended for the use of us " by the English king. It may be a question if the Indian consciousness quite comf)re- hended the interpretation which the English intended strength-^ by those words. This done, Burnet strengthened the fort at Oswego, and sent eighty soldiers to defend the workmen, while two hundred armed traders assembled there. In August, 1727, Begon, the Canadian intendant, demanded its evacuation, on the ground that the treaty of Utrecht did not allow either party to encroach upon disputed territory until commissioners had established the bounds between them. The French, however, were not prepared to go farther than to protest ; nor did Burnet, in denying the rights of the French to Niagara, act more boldly. The English governor disavowed any other purpose than trade, and in defending his position at Oswego fell back on the provision of the treaty, which allowed each to trade with the Indians, and either to go to the native villages, or to have the savages come to established posts. To be prepared for the worst, it was not long before a large force was put into the Oswego fort. The advantage which Burnet, largely through the expenditure of Albany with his own fortune, had thus secured was soon in some degree neutralized by the intrigue of the Albany merchants, who obtained from the crown a reversal of the governor's order which had prohibited their trade with Montreal. This 166 ALONG THE APPALACHIANS. change opened the way to further intrigues of the French with the Iroquois. The Scotch-Irish element had now begun to strengthen rap- The Scotch- i^^ly throughout the English colonies. Emigration Irish. from Ulster was become a habit, " spreading like a contagious distemper." It is said that, for several years after the second quarter of the century began, something like twelve thousand of this people were landed yearly at the Atlan- tic seaports. They all possessed a tendency to push inland after arriving. In Pennsylvania, they drifted towards those regions where the boundary controversies with Maryland and Virginia were still unsettled, and in these disputes they were to become important agents. In 1724-25, three thousand of them are said to have landed in Philadelphia. It was computed that in the single year 1729 five thousand of them entered Pennsyl- vania. This great influx put the Quaker element of the prov- ince in a decided minority, but it was many years later before the Society of Friends ceased to have a predominant power in the political machinery of the province. Already James Logan, representing the conservative Quakers, was looking to Parlia- ment for relief from what seemed an imijending inundation of this hardy stock. This stream of new-comers forced the settlements farther and The farther west ; and the pioneers were opening the way fiuf Conrad ^^ tlic mountain gaps and toward the valley of Vir- weiser. ginia. Earlier, in 1723, the Palatines, who had been settled on the Mohawk, were seeking freer ser^dce in Pennsyl- vania. One famous among the directors of the western progress in later years, Conrad Weiser, now a vigorous man of thirty- three, proficient in the Maqua tongue, and knowing the Indian character well, had cast in his lot among them in 1729. ISIixed in this human drift toward the upper Susquehanna, and making- head toward the mountain gaps, were a few New Settlers -i-i i t mi c a ^ c r^ from Englanders. Ihey were representatives oi Lonneeti- Comiecticut. ° piii'i- cut come to possess themselves oi lands claimed in opposition to the charter of Penn. These lands were held to be within the sea-to-sea rights as established by the Connecticut charter of 1662, and beyond the interjected claim of the Duke of York along the Hudson, granted by his royal brother in THE VALLEY OF VIRGINIA. 167 1664 and 1674. These interlopers, as Penn's people thought them, were a sturdy race, later to be heard from. The Delawares, once the savage denizens of this region, had already begun to follow the flying game over the mountains, and had found new huntinsr-grounds on Delaware 1 .rxi . mi T» 1 • 1 . and the the Ohio. Ihe Pennsylvania packmen were not tar Pennsyiva- behind, and they soon encountered on the Alleghany the French traders. The two rivals were each anxious to dis- cover the other's routes and purposes, and the secretary of Pennsylvania, in his reports to the Lords of Trade, was com- plaining that the French were pressing even within the limits of the province's charter. As to the more remote regions beyond the forks of the Ohio, New York was already pressing her claims derived The Ohio from the Iroquois, in order to keep out the traders of ''^sion. the other colonies. She held that the parliamentary acts of 1624, 1664, and 1681, which made this, region crown lands, were enough, even without her Iroquois claim, to bar them out. But the urgent question, after all, was whether the activity of the French was not of itself enough to keep the English out. Coxe was expressing the fear that the better knowledge which the French possessed of the mountain passes might, " in con- junction with the French of the Meschacebe," enable them to "insult and harass these colonies." There was one favorable condition, however, — favorable, as he thought, to the British, in that the Chicazas (Chickasaws) were " good friends of the English." Their country extended to the Mississippi, and took in the valley of the Tennessee, which, as we have seen, was often marked in contemporary maps as the traders' route. It was ten years since, from one of the passes of the Blue Ridge, Spotswood, with his Knights of the Golden first set- Horseshoe, had looked down into the valley of the Shenandoah. Shenandoah. If we may safely accept the story, the ^"''^' y' first settler on the river-bank of that leafy basin came in 1726, when a Welshman, Morgan by name, built a house beyond the Blue Ridge. It is possible that, about the same time, some Germans from Germanna, in the lower country of Virginia, where Spotswood had seated a colony of that peoj^le, had also made an entrance into the valley. Two adventurers, Mackey 168 ALONG THE APPALACHIANS. and Sailing, are repoi'ted to have wandered before this through Maokey and ^^^^ valley. Sailing was captured by the Cherokees, Sailing. ^^(j .^yj^g j^gij Ijy them for some years as a prisoner. Experiencing a variety of vicissitudes, he was passed from them to Kaskaskia, thence to the Spaniards, and again to the French in Canada. After an absence of six years, he joined the Eng- lish once more in New York. The Cherokees, the cause of such trials, dominated all this jjjg western region south of the Iroquois and west of the and u!e^^^ mouutaius. They had, in 1721, ceded to the Carolini- traders. ^^^^ ^ tract lying cast of the Alleghanies and between the Edisto and Congaree rivers, — the earliest English acqui- sition from them, stretching up the Carolina streams. The paths of the traders who sought the Cherokee villages from Virginia and the Carolinas united in what is now the extreme northwest of South Carolina among the broken hills of the southern end of the Alleghanies. The Virginians already, in 1728, had a considerable pack-horse traffic with the Cherokees along this path, and there had been an intermittent trade with them car- ried on by the Carolinians for three quarters of a century. Coxe, in 1722, speaks of their centre of trade being only sixty miles distant from the Carolina outposts, and says that the English are " always very kindly entertained by them." But the French were not altogether deficient in influence among them, and both the Cherokees and Creeks were at times objects of solicitude in Carolina. The trail from Virginia was a circuitous one. William Byrd The Virginia ^f Wcstovcr spcaks of its fivc huudrcd miles as most Byr/of likely almost double the necessary distance if the As- westover. geuibly would but order surveys to see if it could be shortened. Byrd's History of the Dividing Line is one of the few readable accounts which have come down to us of the life and sights of this period. lie expresses the inquisitiveness of an active mind when he says, " It is strange that our woodsmen have not had curiosity enough to inform themselves more ex- actly of [this region] ; and it is stranger still that the govern- ment has never thought it worth while [to incur] the expense of making an accurate survey of the mountains, that we might be masters of that natural fortification before the French, who in some places have settlements not very distant from it." It CAROLINA. 169 was rather striking how, in all such statements, what was known to the traders entered so little into the sum of the common knowledge pertaining to the mountains and to what they shut off. [From Jefferys' American Atlas, showing the Indian trail from the Shenandoah country to the Cherokee country. Tooley's Creek is the head of the Holston River.] Joshua Gee, in his tract on the English trade, speaks of Carolina as " a noble colony, the most improvable of jog,,y q^^ any of our colonies; " but he regards it as "liable to "^ Carolina. be overrun by the French and Spaniards for want of a suf- ficient protection." Referring to the French encroachments 170 ALONG THE APPALACHIANS. beyond tlie mountains, he adds : " If we have any sense of the value of that commodious tract of land, it ought to put us upon securing to ourselves such excellent colonies which may, if properly improved, bring this nation a very great treasure ; and at least build some forts on the Appalachian Mountains, to secure us the rights of the mines contained in them ; to protect the Indian and skin trade ; and to preserve the navigation to ourselves of those great rivers which have their fountains in the said hills, and empty themselves through Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, etc., into the Virginia Sea." In 1721, it was estimated that lying between Carolina and the French on the Alabama and Mississippi there were southern Something over nine thousand Indian warriors, of TV whom nearly thirty-five hundred formerly traded with the English, but were now drawn into the French interests. The French were likewise thought to be in a fair way to win over about two thousand who were now neutral. Against about fifty-four hundred who either were at present or were likely to become hostile, the English could count on the friendship of nearly four thousand Cherokees dwelling along the Appala- chians. The danger to Carolina lay in the opportunity which the Dangers of rivcrs cast of the mountains offered for hostile de- caroima. sccuts if thc Chcrokecs ceased to form a barrier. The gi-eater danger was by the Altamaha. This risk had been represented to the Board of Trade, and they had ui'ged the government to dispatch troops to Charleston and to build forts on the rivers. After Pensacola had been finally confirmed to Spain, in 1721, it was held in Carolina that the French could find an easy route from Mobile north till they struck and then de- scended the Altamaha. If they should do this, " it would be the most fatal blow yet to his Majesty's interests." CHAPTER IX. THE RIVALRIES OF PRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN. 1730-1740. In 1730, Montesquieu had predicted that England would be the earliest of the western nations to be abandoned by her colonies. He little anticipated that France would colonies in in reality be the first to be bereft of hers. Just at a time when France had determined to restrict the English to the seaward slope of the Appalachians, in the hope of sharing the greater spaces of the New World with Spain, his Catholic majesty and the English king were formulating policies which were to deprive those monarchs of their American de- j,^^ ^ pendencies. It was the production of sugar which ^^^^^- was to be used in these magisterial ways. Joshua Gee, a con- temporary English economist, was in 1731 urging upon his government to follow the French practice of sending vagrants to the colonies, since by the " incredible numbers " of them which France had sent to the Mississippi she had established a successf id rivalry in the exportation of sugar. " If once the French can bring their settlements," he adds, "to bear upon the back of ours, along that most fertile valley which is watered with the river Overbachee [Wabash] and the great river Ohio, we may expect they will gain a great part of the tobacco trade also." It was observed in London that the non-resident planters of the British Sugar Islands in the West Indies were accustomed to spend money lavishly. The inference was natural that to foster the production of that staple would bring more money still to the mother country. The result was the passage of par- liamentary measures which, in aiding the sugar planters, bore hard on the Atlantic colonies, since the West Indies trade of Boston and Philadelphia was thereby forced to make a circuit 172 RIVALRIES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN. through the British islands for the benefit of the English mer- chants. The colonial merchants were too active and The English i » i • i Pariiment the Atlantic coast too long to insure an exact or even colonial general compliance with such restrictive measures, commerce. , • , , ■ ... rm but any coercive attempt was an irritation. Ihe Viscount Bury and other apologists have asserted that imperial orders, the subject of colonial jeers, and with difficulty en- forced, could not have been oppressive ; but they forget that vexatious and inoperative legislation is sometimes the most irritating. The liquor question in our recent sociological days is one The influ- uiaiuly of domcstic concern ; but in the eighteenth cen- ence of rum. ^^^j on this contiiieiit it affected the destiny of peo- ples. In the rival designs for the possession of the Great Valley, rum — and largely New England rum — played an important part. It was more than a calumet in the intercourse of white and savage. Western progress as tracked by successive pur- chases of lands was a chronicle of rum. " Plenty of wine and punch was given to the Indians," is the usual accompaniment of a deed. Not a victory but the pale-face and his red ally quaffed a glass. " You tell us you have beat the French," said a sachem. " If so you must have taken a great deal of rum from them, and can better spare us some of that hot liquor to make us rejoice with you in the victory." The record reads: "The governor and commissioners ordered a dram of rum to be given to each, in a small dram-glass, which the governor called a French glass." The record of a later day says that the In- dians found the French glasses " unfortunate," referring to their diminutive size. " We now desire you will give us some in English glasses," said the unsated savage. The governor turned it to good account : " We are glad to hear you have such a dislike for what is French. They cheat you in your glasses as well as in everything else." The entry closes with the statement that they all had some rum "in some middle- sized glasses." A French Jesuit complained that an Indian would be bap- tized ten times a day for a pint of brandy. " All the unhappi- ness that befalls you," said the governor of Pennsylvania at an Indian council, " is generally owing to the abuse of that destructive liquor, rum, of which you are so fond ; " but there THE TRADE IN RUM. 173 was very little beyond futile injunctions to prevent the mischiev- ous trader carrying it to the Indian villages. Even in their councils, when the chiefs reprehended the traffic and its effect upon their wayward youngsters, and solemnly vowed to break every cask brought over the mountains, they were seldom averse to being refreshed at the trading-house. Indeed, there were laws of trade that no righteous indignation of white or savage could stay, for by such laws the Indian got more rum for his skins from the English than he coidd get of brandy from the French. Conrad Weiser at one time told the Indians on the Ohio, who were complaining that the English traders brought rum to their villages, that they themselves " sent down their skins by the traders to buy rum. You go yourselves down and bring back horse-loads of strong liquor. Beside this you never agree about it. One will have it ; the other won't have it, — though there are very few of these last ; and a third says. We will have it cheaper. This last we believe speaks out of his heart," and the recorder adds, " Here they laughed." Rum, in fact, was the main prop of the English trade, and the distiller- ies of New England got their full share of the profit. It mat- tered little whether the Yankee product jiassed up the Hudson to Albany, and so clandestinely reached the merchants of Mon- treal and competed with French brandy ; or by an alternative channel found its way to the 'Delaware and Chesapeake Bay, and the pack-horse of the trader bore it over the AUeghanies. There were passages farther south perhaps more effective. '' A great part of the molasses from the Dutch and French islands," says a contemporary tract, " imported into Rhode Island, Mas- sachusetts Bay, etc., is distilled into rum and afterwards shipped by them into Virginia, Carolina," etc. In this traffic the dis- tillers of New England were using yearly some twenty thousand hogslieads of molasses. To conform to the law passed in the interests of the Surar Islands, and ship it through English ports, with increased cost of duties and transportation, was a burden, when not shirked, well calculated to make the merchants of Boston and Newport uneasy. The fact was that besides being a primary cavise of western progress, rum was likely to prove a contingent influence for American independence. The more rum the more beaver, and when the British Parlia- ^he beaver ment listened to Old-Country felt-makers and made ^^^^- 174 RIVALRIES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN. it punishable for the colonists to wear any covering but those furnished by the English furriers, we find hats and nun work- ino- out the great problem together. Parliament was making these two products lawful commodities only by their going through England. It would have been hard to patrol the AUe- ghanies with excisemen ; and skins and rum passed and repassed, and there was free trade across the mountain barrier, while it was embarrassed on the coast. Nothing at the north was shaping this traffic in the colonial interests more than the English post at Oswego, and Fort Fred- nothing angered the French more than the mainte- nance of that station. In order to checkmate the Eng- lish, and to place themselves in the line of communication between Albany and Montreal, the French now advanced along Lake Champlain. We have seen that under the French claims the southern bounds of Canada ran west from the mouth of the Kennebec, and this threw Champlain almost entirely within their limits. Crown Point, or, as the French termed it, Scalp Point, thus became for the first time a prize in the rival con- tentions of French and English, when the Canadians began here, in 1731, the erection of Fort Frederick. This post, accord- ingly, was a direct threat against the Iroquois, who laid claim to the region of the lake, and a daif^er to the English, who saw in it a possible movement which hazarded the connection of New England and New York. Late in the summer of 1731, two Dutchmen came to Albany from Canada, and reported the prog- ress of the fort. They added that in the spring the French intended to take possession of Irondequoit Bay, on the soutliern side of Ontario, and so flank Oswego on the west as Fort Fred- erick did on the east. Nothing had of late occurred to arouse the English more. French Logau scut from Pennsylvania his signal of alarm to Lake cTam- Parliament. Rip van Dam in New York ajipealed plain. £qj,. gyppoi-t on the one hand to Belcher of Massachu- setts, and on the other to Gordon of Pennsylvania. Protests were made in Paris by the British ambassador. Nevertheless, the work at Crown Point went on. There was planted at the same time through the adjacent country by manoi'ial grants a feudal spirit, contrary to English habit. The region was laid THE SHAWNEES. 175 out in seigneuries, parceled out without recompense in a coun- try that the Iroquois called their own, while the English claimed it under the treaty of Utrecht, as being within their jurisdiction. These surveys laid the foundations of disputes of title which it fell to New York to settle in vindication of her own right after the treaty of Paris in 1763. The alarm at the English agitation threw Canada into solici- tude lest the occupation of Crown Point should incite new attacks upon the St. Lawrence. The English, however, had enough to do elsewhere, and the French were suffered to go on strengthening their post, and finally (1737) to put an armed sloop on the lake. It was nearly ten years from the date of the first occupation of Crown Point before Fort Frederick was pronounced complete. The disi3osition of the Shawnees had become a growing fac- tor in the problem of western progress for the Eng- ,J,^^^ lish. These Indians — or such of them as were not s^^wnees. nomadic — had lived for some time, while their villages were on the Susquehanna, in a sort of subjection to the Iroquois. During this period the confederates watched their wards from Shamokin, at the forks of that river, where they kept a repre- sentative chieftain to control them. The Shawnees later claimed that they were forced across the AUeghanies because they would not join the confederates in war against the English. They were certainly restless in being what was termed " petticoated " by the Iroquois, and so sought friendly relations with some Delawares whom they found living on the waters of the AUe- ghany. This took place in 1732, a period of peace flecked with a cloud of danger on Lake Champlain. The French, meanwhile, were assuring the Shawnees in their new Ohio home that the hatchet was buried. In May, 1732, Edmund Cartlidge wrote from the Alleghany valley to Gov- ernor Gordon of Pennsylvania : " The French seem very kind and courteous for the present ; but how long it may hold I know not. The French coming to settle here, there is more necessity for the better regulation of the Indian trade, for the French will take all advantages against us to insinuate with the Indians in order to lessen their esteem for us." When the Shawnees, in September, 1732, sent a deputation to Philadel- 176 RIVALRIES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN. phla, and its members were asked why their tribe had crossed the mountains, and why their chief went so often to Montreal, they protested it was with no evil intent towards the English. That the Shawnees did go to the French, the Pennsylvania traders were sure. These mongrel packmen made the syivania uiost of the pcaceful timcs, and were now swarming over the barrier ridges to pursue a trade always more or less nefarious. It was their custom to give the savages large credit in the autumn. When they exacted payment in the spring, a winter of rum-drinking had brought the poor debtors nigh imto destitution. This "trusting" process was so common hereabouts that, according to a memorial of some traders who had suffered by French blandishments interfering with the spring payments, it was termed " Alleghany ing " the poor Indians. These traders were at this day reporting that the French were building a log fort near the Ohio, and a certain Canadian, Cavelier by name, was said to come year after year among the tribes on the Alleghany to entice them to trade with Montreal. The Iroquois, through that portion of them dwelling on the The Ohio, and known as Mingoes, were another source Mingoes. q£ ^roublc to the English, who trusted the Shawnees. The Mingoes had a full share of the Iroquois longing for room, and were determined to push the Shawnees south of the Ohio. The Shawnees had long been wanderers, and they were not much averse to getting beyond the scrutiny of their quondam masters. The French met the Mingoes, as they had met the Shawnees, with fair speeches ; but the Iroquois were little inclined to brook the presence of the French as far east as the Alleghany, and the French saw in this Mingo aversion the instigation of the English. The ultimate question for the rival whites, as well as for the intermediary natives, was : Who should supply the rum to the distant Ottawas and Miamis ? — and the better bargains at Oswego were sure to tell. It was not long after this that Hocquart, the intendant of Canada, in a memoir which he preiiared on the state The French n ■, i iiiii- and the 01 that couutry, acknowledged that this tradmg advan- tage of the English was beyond question. Oswego, he said, was getting the lion's share of the furs from Lake Su- THE VALLEY OF VIRGINIA. 177 perlor, Mackinac, and Green Bay. The Sioux country, which was now become the principal source of supply, was also a tributary of the English post. There was nothing for the French to do but to outwit their rivals, as they had often done in more artful dij)lomacy with the Indians. English folly could certainly be counted on in the match, when such iniquities as " The Walking Purchase " of the Pennsylvanians were gloried in. The French were already benefiting themselves by their diplomatic skill. Beauharnois had a conference in 1734 with the Onondagas from the heart of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Wabash Indians were welcoming the French among them. Vincennes was becoming a settled post, with Louis St. Ange in command of its garrison. This was something to compensate the decadence of the French allies farther west, for the Illinois, from a powerful tribe as the French first found them, had been reduced to scarce six hundred fighting men. Thomas Salmon, in his Observations^ accounted the French wise in the quiet which they kept " before their designs i,,Qjj^g ^^jj are ripe for execution." The French threat of flank- ^'^^■ ing Oswego at Irondequoit, though for a long time impending, had never been put in action, and by 1737, the English asked the Senecas, living adjacent thereto, for permission to possess and fortify the same bay. To this end the New York legisla- ture made an appropriation to buy the site of the fort, and later it was thus acquired. The Indians on the Alleghany, meanwhile, were as quiet as Salmon thought the French to be, and when some stragglers were reported among them, showing white scalps, they hastened to relieve themselves of the impu- tation of hostility by telling the governor of Pennsylvania that the mischief-makers were wicked vagrants from the far Mississippi. For fifteen or twenty years the valley of Virginia had been looker! into from the gaps of the Bine Ridge. Occa- sionally, hunter or trader had descended from the of Virginia. passes and found the fords of the Shenandoah. But no settlement up to 1730 had, beyond question, been made along its meadows, nor a single tract of its umbrageous paradise been cleared. This year. Governor Gooch issued a warrant for forty thousand acres in the lower parts of the valley to John 178 RIVALRIES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN. and Isaac Vanmeter. The next year (1731), they sold tlieir rights to one Joist Hite of Pennsylvania, and in 1732 Hite set- tled near the site of the future Winchester (founded in 1752). If the claims of Morgan, already mentioned in the preceding chapter, be rejected, Hite is thought to have been the first white settler in the valley of the Shenandoah, and he was instrumen- tal in leading thither sixteen families from Pennsylvania. The early immigrants of the valley were a mixed concourse of hardy people. Among them was a part of that and Ger- Scotch-Irish iuflux which was auimatins: the colonial mans. *o blood in Jersey, and indeed all along the Atlantic coast it brought in the martial spirit of Bothwell Bridge. There were also many of those Rhinelanders and Palatines who had flocked into New York, Pennsylvania, and Carolina, fugi- tives from the horrors which the Thirty Years' War had visited upon the Germans. They had fled from sumptuary laws and official extortions, — symptoms of that same despotism which, nearly a half century later, sent regiments of Hessians and Brunswickers to these same American wilds, when finally those of them who abided here became the stanchest adherents of the Federal Constitution. These Germans were in their own way a merry, hearty people, calculated to make the life of a pioneer as buoyant as a certain sluggishness would permit. Some among them, particularly those lingering by the Potomac, were Catholic, tributary to the only organization in America before the Revo- lution which publicly celebrated mass, — the isolated Roman Church in Philadelphia, — and they were never quite free from the suspicion of their neighbors lest their religious sympathies might too easily affiliate them with the French. The Huguenots. ._,__ /"i t'ti i-i rench Huguenots, as a part oi the un-lLnglish popu- lation, had no such doubts cast upon their sincerity. They had long ago weakened France, and had been denied the chance of strengthening Canada. From Boston to Charleston they were giving a rich strain to the conglomerate races of the seaboard. Some of them were among the first settlers of what is now Augusta, and they did their full share in creating a race of valiant first-goers in the wilderness. The modern local antiquaries of this region are not in full accord as to dates and details of these first comers in the valley of Virginia ; but it seems certain that all or nearly all came up BEVERLY MANOR. 179 the valley from Pennsylvania, after crossing the Potomac. It was later when others from the tidewaters of Virginia ^. First comers crossed the Blue Ridge. In the absence ot surveys, in the vaiiey .... *^ of Virginia. the lands were occupied in large part at a venture, — - a slight cabin, a few hills of corn, or trees blazed along a sup- posed boundary, constituting all the act of possession. The settlement at the modern Woodstock (1734) was in the same year in which all the country west of the Blue Ridge was set up as the county of Orange, extending west "to the utmost bounds of Virginia," according to her sea-to-sea charter. Dur- ing the next few years (1735-1740), the tide moved up the valley to where the sources of the Roanoke and James interlace with those of the Kanawha. It was a region where a single rain-cloud might in a few hours feed, on the one hand, the foun- tains of the Atlantic streams, and on the other those of the Great Valley. In 1735-36, Colonel James Patton, one of the North of Ireland stock, received a grant of 120,000 acres not far from Pattonand where Staunton now is. John Sailing, whom we have ^^^^'"s- already mentioned as a captive of the Cherokees, borne through the Cumberland Gap, after six years of wandering had returned to Virginia, and in 1736 he had settled at the forks of the James west of the Blue Ridge. In September of the same year, Governor Gooch, in pursuance of an Order in Council jj^nor of and in the royal name, created the manor of Beverly ^^^^''^y- ,on the Sherando (Shenandoah). Its precise limits of 118,491 acres signify a supposably careful acquaintance with the coun- try. Indeed, the local names of landmarks defining the bounds of this grant indicate that the region had become more or less familiar. There were, apparently, squatters here and there throughout its extent. The chief patentee was William Beverly, a son of that historian of the name who had been a sharer in the adventurous merriments of Spotswood a score of years be- fore. This manor lay in the upper valley, where Staunton now stands. Beverly soon bought out his copartners and began settling families. Gooch, in the same year (1736), made a grant of land higher up the valley to one Benjamin Borden. In 1736, Colonel William Mayo and a party of surveyors followed the Potomac up to one of its springs, and discovered other waters not far off flowing westward into the Mononga- 180 RIVALRIES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN. hela. The search for river sources fell in with the habit of raakino^ orants between rivers, and these "rants were Colonel ,. . f * ,, . n , t . , . Mayo at the limited, up their valleys, by lines connecting their Potomac. springs. It was a custom that gave rise to many dis- putes in these early apportionments of land, arising from a difference of claim as to what constituted a source, par- ticularly in case of alternative forks. In this way the grant The Fairfax i^adc to Lord Fairfax of a territory between the Rap- grant, pahannock and the Potomac, with bounds at the west defined by the shortest distance between their respective foun- tains, helped materially the settlement of the Beverly manor. His lordship claimed that such a western line for his grant threw the lower parts of the Shenandoah valley within his domain ; but the running of that line depended on which was taken as the source of the Potomac, the fountain of the north or of the south of its upper branches. Fairfax and those who dis- puted his claim naturally stood respectively for that interpreta- tion which increased their lands. The dispute was a long one, and for fifty years served to render the titles in the lower parts of the valley uncertain, and this drove settlers farther south, where no such rival claimants contended. The decision was ultimately against the Fairfaxes (1786). In much the same way, north of the Potomac, the boundary disputes between Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, complicating the service of writs, had a tendency to prevent settlers lingering on their way to the valley of Virginia. The valley had been for years the stamping-ground of the Tiie yaiiey a Chcrokces and Catawbas going north, and of the Dela- warpath. "wares and Iroquois ranging south in counter raids, with a fearful energy that the English, who counted all as allies against the French, often endeavored to assuage. Washington speaks of encountering such war parties when he was surveying for Lord Fairfax in the valley. The Iroquois, in some of these incursions, thinking to secure immunity from English molesta- tion farther south, sometimes tried to get from the frontier officers of Virginia a certificate of the confederates' good inten- tions toward the whites. The practice did not serve to soften the southern Indians, and it became necessary to break up this hostile habit. To hold the valley free from such conflicts fell in large part to the Scotch-Irish, who had been for some years 182 RIVALRIES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN. coming in from Pennsylvania, and proving themselves the virile race which later represented Virginia in the campaign of Braddock and at Point Pleasant. When Governor Gooeh, in 1738, assured to this people liberty of conscience, a new incentive was given to their iui- Western extent of migration, and the valley began to be dotted with ham- lets. This increase needed new legislation for local government, and all the territory of the Virginia charter west of the Blue Ridge was divided into the two counties of Augusta and Frederick, the latter covering the northerly extension to " the utmost limits of Virginia." This act, under the existing pretensions of Virginia, carried her jurisdiction at least to the Mississippi, while to the northwest it included the western parts of Pennsylvania, and gave cause for a long contention with that province. It is quite possible that previous to 1740 there had been an occasional straggler who had crossed the western range Early . . . English on of the Appalachians in some other pursuit than trade the Ohio. i i o • ,-, or the chase. Surveyors and men " prospecting may have gone this way in an adventurous sj)irit. Mitchell, the geographer of a somewhat later day, tells us that he had seen the journals of some Virginia surveyors who had crossed the gaps and followed down Wood River to the Ohio, and had then passed down to New Orleans. He professes to have made from these itineraries a draft of the country which these pioneers had traversed ; but the supporters of England's claim to prior- ity over the French in Mitchell's time are often open to the sus- j)icion of making a case against her rivals by all sorts of possi- bilities stated as facts. At all events, the knowledge which the English had at this time of the trans- Alleghany region must have been very defective. Thomas Salmon, who was now sup- plying (1736) the popular demand in England for geograph- ical knowledge, seemed to comprehend that the headwaters of the York, Potomac, James, and Rappahannock, as he ex- pressed it, " locked within each other, as are also the heads of several other rivers, that rise in the same mountains and run toward the west." But when he undertakes to describe this distant region of western-flowing rivers, he manifests a surjjris- ing ignorance of what the French geographers had published. THE CHEROKEES. 183 " On the west side of the mountains," he says, " are a great many lakes of which the French are in possession, as 't is said, but these have not a communication with each other or with the river St. Lawrence, as is commonly reported." Even the great English map of Popple in 1732 displays little knowledge of any development beyond that represented by Delisle some fifteen years earlier. Farther south, the Cherokees were still the bulwark of Caro- lina. In 1729, word had reached England that the French had succeeded in detaching these Indians from kees and the the British interests, and that with the Creeks they were rendering trade beyond the mountains insecure. It needed a bold stroke to break this savage pact, and bring the Chero- kees back to the English allegiance. The man for it was found. A Scotch baronet. Sir Alexander Cuming, sirAiexan- now a man of about forty, who had been interested in *^^'" *^"™™s- Berkeley's scheme of an Indian college at Bermuda, was sent hither to prej)are the way for a revival of this over-hill trade. With a train which he gathered at Charleston he started on his perilous mission. The account of his journey which we have was brought to light by the late Samuel G. Drake in 1872, and presents a picture of the undaunted Scotchman moving through the hostile country like a potentate, overawing village after village by his daring, and forcing the recalcitrant sav- ages to bend the knee in acknowledgment of the sovereignty of the British king. This, day after day, is the story of his prog- ress between March 13, 1730, when he set out, and his return to Charleston, April 20, when he had accomplished a f n ^ IT •! TTi 1 Treaty with Circuitous tour oi nve hundred miles. He brousfht the chero- kees. 1730. back with him several headmen of the Cherokee vil- lages, and took them to England to verify by a treaty at White- hall, on September 7, 1730, an agreement which he had made with the tribe. " The chain of friendship," says this London document, " be- tween King George and the Cherokee Indians is like the sun, which shines both here and also upon the great moimtains where they live, and equally warms the hearts of the English and the Indians." This warmth induced them to grant to the whites the right to build habitations and forts among them. They 184 RIVALRIES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN. promised also not to trade and not to have other intercourse with any but the English. Of the condition of the Cherokees at this time we have an extended statement by James Adair, a trader for many tion of the ycars amoug them. He is, however, an unsatisfactory guide for the sequence of events, as he gives few dates, and those confused. When he began to trade among the Cher- okees, about 1735, he reckoned that they had nearly six thou- sand warriors. His wanderings took him as well among the Creeks and Choctaws, and he saw everywhere the evidence of their descent from the lost tribes of Israel ! Two years after Cuming's expedition over the mountains, the ^^ , ^ English government reenforced their sea-to-sea claims The charter "^ 5^ of Georgia, by the Georgia charter of June 9, 1732. This docu- ment was a distinct threat to the French, or at least they considered it such, since it was but the beginning of a push westward around the southernmost edge of the Allegha- nies. By this, it was seen, the English might hope to reach the Mississippi and sever Louisiana from Canada. It was quite as distinct a challenge to the Spaniards, when the trustees of the new province sought to push against the Floridian frontier fresh settlements of whatever persecuted people they could drag from the debtors' jails in England or gather in the mountains of the Tyrol. The bounds of Georgia were the Savannah River on the one hand and the Altamaha on the other, and from th^ir respective sources the lines were to run due west to the Pacific or " South Seas," cutting athwart the French on the Mississippi. It was api:>arent that, in parting with something of her territory to the new proprietors. South Carolina had secured a bulwark against the Spaniards, as well as against any hostile Indians coming round the southern verge of the Appalachians. Her dangers were now to be exjiected solely through the gaps toward the modern State of Tennessee from the Indians in the French alli- ance. It was the object of Oglethorpe, at the head of the Georgian settlements, to bring these tribes into friendly rela- tions with the new province. The next year (1733) we find him compacting ^vitll the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws, enlarging the English sovereignty and placating the savasre nature. THE CAROLINA BARRIER. 185 This movement by Oglethorpe was easily an affront to the French, and for some years it was a varying struo^g^le ' , T-i T 1 1 1 -1 1 -MI- • Oglethorpe between the iLno^lish and these rivals on the Missis- aud the 1 T T 1 T • 1 French. sippi to secure the Indian sympathy, it was a trial of English pluck and French blandishments. Adair says that it was about this time (1736) that the French seriously began to think of walling the English in by the Appalachians. Along this southern stretch of those mountains, the help of the Cherokees was essential to that end. The English saw, as the French did, that this tribe held with the Catawbas cherokees, the key to the situation. To make them allies in ^^i^^T' fullest sympathy, it was necessary to force them into '^"°'*' harmony with their old foes, the Iroquois. In 1737, Conrad Weiser was bending his skillful energies to bring about the reconciliation of the northern confederates and the Catawbas. It is to be feared there was quite as much need of a similar spirit of concord among the whites of the Atlantic intercolonial colonies, for intercolonial forbearance had little stead- Je^i°"«'e^- iness. The Carolina traders complained that the Georgian authorities taxed them for a passage across the Savannah on their way to the Cherokees, and in other respects the people of one province or another found their neighbors a burden. We find the average English notion of these Carolina barrier hills in what Salmon was writing at this time in his Salmon's efforts to enhance their glories in the eyes of stay-at- ^'''^^' home Britons. He speaks of " glittering sands being frequently washed down," while acknowledging scant acquaintance with a region where there are no towns or settlements, and no in- habitants, as he says, but wild beasts. " Our people only pass over the mountains when they go to traffic with the Indians near the banks of the Mississippi." Counting little on the intervention of the French, he supposes that there may come a rupture with the Spaniards. If this should happen, he sees nothing " to prevent our passing the mountains and possessing ourselves of the mines of St. Barbe, if we make the Indians of those countries our friends, who are frequently at war with the Spaniards. ... If we suffer [he adds] the French to build forts and fix themselves on the Mississippi or in the neighborhood of the Appalachian Mountains, they will not only be in a con- 186 RIVALRIES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN. dition to invade and liarass our jjlantations from north to south, but will possess themselves of the mines there, . . . which will render that nation more formidable even in Europe than it is at present. ... It is to be wished, therefore, that Spain and Enirland would in turn understand their mutual interest, and enter into a defensive alliance in America, at least since the French can only be defeated in their ambitious and covetous views by the united forces of Great Britain and Spain." This was a welcome complement to the pet scheme of France to unite with Spain and drive the English from the continent. Neither scheme looked promising. The English merchants England and fretted uudcr the vigilance of Spain in thwarting their Spain. smuggling trade with the Spanish islands. Spain saw the same contraband trade successful enough to lessen her commerce, and she was stirred to greater vigilance. This in- creased the British discontent, and Pope and Johnson made the most they could of it in indignant verse, aimed to overthrow an inert ministry. In January, 1739, Walpole made a convention with Spain, and commissioners were named to settle the boun- dary disputes of Georgia and Florida. All this simply delayed, but did not prevent war, and on June 15, 1739, Newcastle no- tified the colonial governors that hostilities with Spain were renewed, and authorized them to seize Spanish property and issue letters of marque. It was not till September that Oglethorpe heard of the actual declaration of war. He strove at once to make War of Eng- i/~(i ti« • i r^ ' ^ land and the Crccks Es good a barrier against the fej)aniards as the Cherokees were towards the French. He ag-reed with the Creeks for cessions of their lands on the Savannah as far' as the Ogeechee and along the coast to the St. John's River, and so inland as far as the tides went. The savages further agreed to bar out the Spanish. In June, 1740, the English had pushed well into Florida, and were before St. Augustine. Here Oglethorpe suffered from the defection of some of his followers, and was obliged to withdi'aw. The ^Moravians whom he had called from Germany, and who had begun to set up missions among the Creeks, revolted at the war, and rather than take part in it turned north to confront later conflicts in Pennsylvania. The campaign closed with the Spaniards likely to hold their own on their side of the Great Valley. THE NATCHEZ WAR. 187 Of the tribes to the east o£ the lower Mississippi, the Chick- asaws were accounted — if Charlevoix reflects the gen- ,p^g eral view — the "bravest of the Louisiana Indians." cinckasaws. Allied with the English, they had provoked in many ways the enmity of the French ; but their allegiance was somewhat in- constant, and their attacks occasionally were directed- against the English. Whichever way their hostile frenzy turned them, those who felt the weight of their resentment, whether English or French, charged the mischief on the instigation of the other, and very likely with entire justice. Lying two hundred miles west of their main country were the Chickasaws' friends, the Natchez, bordering on ^he the Mississippi. This inter-tribal friendship had for Natchez. a long time rendered the situation of Fort Rosalie a source of anxiety to the French. It ought to have opened the eyes of its commandant to the precarious peace of the little colony clus- tered about the fort; but he was an imperious and heedless man, and his character hastened the crisis. The Choctaws, a treacherous people,^ ostensibly friendly to the French, had secretly agreed with the Natchez and ^1,^ Yazoos to rise upon the French and destroy them. It ^an ''^^ was the part assigned to the Choctaws to attack New ^'^'^^-I'^si. Orleans. The Natchez, being impatient, anticipated the ap- pointed day, and so the plot failed of its f idl effect. They fell, November 28, 1729, on the defenseless colonists in and near Fort Rosalie, and massacred nearly all. A single fugitive reached New Orleans, and his bewildered story created the utmost consternation. The Choctaws had recently made warm protestation of fidel- ity, and this had blinded the people in that town to the danger which their insecurity invited. The precipitancy of the attack at Fort Rosalie proved their protection, for by it they were forewarned and escaped like horrors. Excepting a small com- motion occasioned by the Yazoos on the Washita, beyond the Mississippi, the sudden outburst of the Natchez failed of sup- port elsewhere. The French showed their energy in moving toward the Natchez to avenge the massacre. The Choctaws, still professing friendship, were the first on the spot ; but were soon joined by a force from New Orleans. The Natchez yielded their 188 RIVALRIES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN. ground, aiifl, leaving some white prisoners beliind, fled across the Mississippi. They were pursued, but only their women fell into the hands of the French. A kind of guerrilla war lasted for a year, and when Perier brought it to a close (Jan- uary 1, 1731) he found himself possessed of nearly five hun- dred captive Indians, who were sold as slaves in the San Domingo market. There is some question as to the place where the Natchez made their last stand, supposed to be about forty miles northwest of Fort Rosalie. Some contend that it was near the modern Lake Lovelace. The outbreak had shown the necessity of improving the New Orleans defenses of Ncw Orleans, and Perier began to dig a fortified. nioat arouud the town, and to plan forts at several points on the river. There was great need of it, for the rem- nant of the Natchez were active, now falling upon the friendly Tonicas, and now attacking French barges as they struggled up the river, carrying supplies to the upper settlements. A part of the tribe sought refuge among the Chickasaws, and there nurtured their revengeful spirit. This Natchez war was the first serious hostile encounter which the Louisianians had had. The depletion of inJ^in'New New Orlcaus, by sending its available adults to man r eans. ^^^^ ^^^ posts, cxposcd the town to the dangers of a servile insurrection. Nothing but good luck and prompt action, whereby a dozen of black ringleaders were hanged, prevented other scenes of horror in a colony where out of seven thousand souls nearly a third were black and in bondage. The cost of the war and the uncertainty attending it had discouraged the Company of the Indies. Other pa'ny of the schcmes for profit in Asia and Africa were by contrast up i'ts dlar- far morc promising for the company's capital. For this cause their interest slackened, and Louisiana got less and less of their attention. The discontent culminated, January 33, 1731, in a surrender of the company's charter to the king. Louisiana, thus freed from a depressing monopoly and become a royal province, could not be worse off than she had been, and might be better. So the colonists waited develop- ments. The king. May 7, 1732, organized a council of government, and 190 RIVALRIES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN. recalling Perier for promotion, sent back Bienville to Lis old Bienviue post. Unfortunately, little was done to improve the governor of character of the emig-ration which followed, and New 1732. Orleans received a fresh accession of the lazy and vicious, — poor material with which to recuperate its energies. All this was not promising for the serious work which Bien- ville soon took in hand. This was to demand of the theChicka- Chickasaws the surrender of the Natchez fugitives. The governor by gifts sought to gain over the Choctaws for a united campaign against these harborers of the enemy. As the trading-path went, the Chickasaw country was a hundred and sixty miles to the north of the Choctaw villages, between the upper forks of the Mobile River. The march tliither was a more laborious one for the French than for their savage allies ; but there was the prospect of plundering the English traders domesticated among the Chickasaws, and this was lure enough for both. The Chickasaws were known to belong to the savage league which was imperiling the passage of the Mississippi, and Bienville saw no alternative but the trial of war. The Choctaws were not quick to respond to the French en- treaties, though they at last yielded. It took time to lay such plans of cooperation that a supporting army could be brought from the Illinois country for a simultaneous attack. Mean- while, it was determined that Bienville should advance from the south by way of the Mobile anji Tombigbee rivers. On April 1, 1736, Bienville's army left Mobile Fort in thirty piraguas and as many bateaux. In three weeks, they were at Tombigbee, where a fort had already been built, and where the Choctaws, coming across the country, joined them. In a month more, they had gone as far as their boats would carry them ; and at this point, seven leagues from the nearest Chicka- saw village, they built a palisade to protect their boats, and moved on by land. On reaching the Chickasaw village, they saw the English flag flying above the defenses, and recognized some Carolina traders on the ramparts. The attack which was made on May 26 was vigorously re- pelled by the Chickasaws. Firing from pits, they reserved their volleys till the French were close upon them. This method of defense may have given rise to stories, later common, THE CHICKASAW WAR. 191 that the Chickasaws lived in holes like weasels, as we some- times find it stated on legends in contemporary majis. Fifty of the assailants are said to have fallen at the first dis- charge from the fort, and thirty at the second. The Choctaws who accompanied the French are variously stated to have been from six hundred to twice as many in number, and, like all sav- ages, they lost heart rapidly under the steady repulse. So the French, numbering perhaps five hundred, were soon left to themselves, in a condition not much more sanguine than the Choctaw fugitives. All the French plans, indeed, had miscar- ried. The attack had been set down for May 10, when it was supposed the forces from the Illinois would be in position to assault simultaneously on the north. Bienville had been de- layed by rain, and had been obliged to tarry at intervals to build ovens and bake bread. He was accordingly a fortnight and more behind time. He had heard rumors which led him to suspect that D'Artaguette, commanding this northern party, was in position ; but he does not seem to have had confirmation of the story before he himself was obliged to retreat. The fact was that D'Artaguette, leading some four hundred French and Indians, was not pleased with Bienville's D'Ai'ta- orders to make haste slowly, so as not to be ahead of guette'a attack. the attack on the south. When he came upon the northern villages of the Chickasaws, he unadvisedly rushed to an attack. The onset was a failure. The commander was cap- tured, and his Indians fled. The victor secured a supply of powder, and captured some of Bienville's orders, which the English traders deciphered. So the movements on the south were anticipated, and the governor more easily foiled in his attack. Bienville returned to New Orleans with his bedraggled and downcast followers as best he could. He was as de- Bienvuie termined, however, as before to punish the foe ; but for^^'new it took three years to complete his new preparations, campaign. Meanwhile, he kept parties of Choctaws and Illinois skirring along the trails of the English traders to intercept their sup- plies. Other parties were sent to explore different paths of approach to the Chickasaws, so as to find the best. It was finally determined to try that which followed the Mississippi and the Yazoo. Making a new treaty with the Choctaws, to 192 RIVALRIES OF FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND SPAIN get what help he could from their four thousand warriors, he established a base near the modern Memphis. He built here Fort Assumption, and waited the accumulation of supplies from the Illinois country, as well as the coming of troops from France. These, to the number of seven hundred, arrived in 1739. Delays brought the usual embarrassments. Horses and cattle strayed off. Provisions were lavishly consumed. The Indians deserted. It took at last three months to open the roads necessary for the march back from the river. The Illinois colonists had responded generously, and Buisson- A peace foi- nierc and Longueil had come with a good following lows. 1740. fpQj^ p'ori; Chartres. So Bienville found he was ready to start, in March, 1740, with about twelve hundred whites and twice as many Indians. Celoron, come from Canada, was sent ahead with a force fitted to try the temjDer of the enemy. The Chickasaws took alarm, and were induced to send their chiefs to Fort Assmnption. A peace followed, and by April 1, 1740, Bienville was able to boast of success, and returned to New Orleans. It seemed for a while as if France was assured of a future in the Great Valley, and England and Spain were to be The pros- J ^ ^ o i pectsof kept afar. St. Denis had already confronted and New Fr3>nc6< ---, warned the Spaniards on the Red River, and England had nowhere got a footing beyond the Alleghanies. Signs of material prosperity were soon apparent in the French capital on the Mississippi. The rice and tobacco of Louisiana began to find a market in Europe, and timber was sent to the West Indies. But provisions came mostly from the Illinois, and the peace with the Chickasaws was not so effective but that courage was requisite to defend the barges passing up and down with their burdens. It was not a satisfactory sign, for it meant that the English were still stirring the Chickasaws to break their peace with the French, and to offer a bar at every point to any inter- course by land as well as by water from the Gulf to the Ohio. CHAPTER X. THE SEARCH FOR THE SEA OF THE WEST. 1727-1753. Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de Verendrye, was a man approachino- fifty years of age when he attracted . , verendrye. notice as a discoverer. He was the son of the gov- ernor of Three Rivers, and was born in that town. His career had been somewhat varied. He had done his part in ravag- ing- the New England frontiers, and he had campaigned as a soldier-of-fortune in Flanders, where once he had been left for dead on the battlefield. Verendrye had been placed in charge of a fort on Lake Nipi- gon, north of Lake Superior, in 1727, where he heard the Indians tell their stock stories of a westward-run- Nipigon. 1727. ning river, with its ebb and flow, and a great salt lake at its mouth. These tales soon gave him an ambition to lay open the secrets of the continent which lay hidden toward the set- ting sun. He left his post to go east, in order to bring his plans before the government at Quebec. He sought to represent the danger of allowing the English — as old rivals of the French for the Indian trade — to take the lead in the possession of this remote region. It was in the spring of 1728, when going east, that he met Father Guignas at Mackinac, and found him fully believing in a discoverable way to the western ocean. He also fell in with Father Degonnor. This priest had been for a while at Lake Pepin, as the spiritual head of a post established by Beauhar- nois. It was a part of a project of that governor to capture the trade and sympathies of the Sioux, in the hope of securing their assistance in a westward movement from ^hat point. To this end a fort had been lately built on that lake. It was one of the most exposed positions on the 194 THE SEARCH FOR THE SEA OF THE WEST. frontiers, and ever since the Freneli had knowTi its neighbor- hood, they had had strange vicissitudes in all their efforts to make it a trading-post. Floods and attacks had incessantly followed its founding. For the next ten years, the post was to be the centre of intermittent activity against hostile Indians, who came in the main from the region of Green Bay. The dan- ger became eventually (1737) so great that Legardeur de St. Pierre, then in command, had found it prudent to fire the fort and escape. We shall see that at a later day it was to devolve upon St. Piei'i'e to be the successor of the discoverer whose career we have now entered upon. Verendrye's new acquaintance, the priest from Lake Pepin, was ambitious of further duty in even more exposed positions, and the two determined to ask the French government to found a post and maintain a mission among the Assiniboines. This northern tribe, denizens of what is now Manitoba, is sup- posed to have been an offshoot of the Dacotah stock. Their name as just given is in accordance with the designation be- stowed by the French rather than the English, and this diver- sity of ear has supplied a great variety of forms to their tribal appellation. It was Verendrye's belief, and Beauharnois shared it, that the chances of finding a good route towards the west were better here than from Lake Pepin. They counted, not very wisely, on finding these northern Indians more placable than the treacherous Sioux. The rovers of the remotest frontiers had never ceased to be animated by a hope of discovering the great western sea. While at Lake Nipigon, Verendrye had often questioned the Indians, and Pako, a chief, had told him of a great lake to- ward the declining day, which poured its waters in western thrcc different directions, — one outlet being to Ilud- '^'^^' son's Bay, another toward the Mississippi, and the last westward, with an ebb and flow of the stream in the direction of a great salt sea, where there were villages of a dwarfish race. In confirmation of all which Vdrendrye pro- duced a map of an Indian guide, Otehaga, which, in the inter- pretation of. Danville a few years later, was a premonition of the Lake of the Woods, with a western-flowing outlet. These stories of an ocean-side folk far to the west were of 196 THE SEARCH FOR THE SEA OF THE WEST. course nothing but i-ehabilitations of many old fables, such as Sagard, a hundred years before, had repeated. The English were being regaled with them at this same time on Hudson's Bay. La France, a half-breed Indian, told Arthm* Dobbs, now in that region, that in 1726 he had gone with a party to the western sea, where he had seen large black fish sporting in the waves. It was here that he and his companions had attacked a town, and none of the assailers but himself had escaped to tell the story. EUis, another frequenter of Hudson's Bay, a few years later, reports it a common belief among the tribes that there were rivers flowing west to a great ocean far away to the sunsetting, where ships sailed, and men wore beards. Such were among the stories that in the autumn of 1729 A mid-conti- could be citcd iu proof of water-ways to this distant nentai sea. ^^^^ j^ 'g c^ji-Jqus to uote liow a belief in some cen- tral water basin, connecting with all the great oceans surround- ing North America, afforded a leading feature of the experi- mental geography of the continent. Two centuries before, such a faith had encouraged Cartier to leave the salt tide of the St. Lawrence in the hope of finding a central fresh-water sea. Modern geographers find that like physical conditions are im- possible in normal circumstances ; but in the eighteenth cen- tury, they were relied upon and exemplified by Bellin and the leading cartographers, to solve the riddle of a trans-continental watei'-way. It was Verendrye's belief that this lake of multiple outpours v^rendrye's could be reached in twenty days from Nipigon, and that views. ^jj expedition starting from Montreal in May might arrive there in September. Verendrye's representations at Quebec, and, through the governor, at Paris, were not received with confidence sufficient to induce the government to embark any capital in the scheme. The king, however, was quite will- ing to grant a monopoly of the fur trade in this wild region, if Verendrye could induce some merchants to aid him in an outfit. The result was the formation of a new company for trading with the Sioux and other Indians of this region. Note. The opposite map is from Bowen and Gibson's North America, published by Sayer and Bennett, London, 17G3. It shows the Sioux country and the upper waters of the Mississippi River, and the portage connecting Lake Superior and the Lake of the Woods, which was later forgotten. The dotted line "settled by Commissaries" is that of the southern bounds of th« HuU.son Bay Company, " after the treaty of Utrecht." i 198 THE SEARCH FOR THE SEA OF THE WEST. On May 19, 1731, Vcrendrye signed an agreement with some Verendrye's Montreal tiadei's, under which they furnished his auddlT™-- equipment. His party comprised the leader's three ture. 1731. goj^g^ a Jcsuit missiouary, Father Messager, and some Canadian boatmen and hunters. On June 8, 1731, the canoes left Montreal on a long and perilous journey. Verendrye's pur- pose was to take possession of the new country for his royal master, to find a way to the Pacific if possible, and to support himself meanwhile by hunting and trading for furs, while he afforded a profit to his backers if he could. By midsummer, he was on Lake Superior. He avoided all On Lake Communication with the Sieur La Ronde, who was Superior. then at La Pointe, seeking for copper, and sailing a forty-ton bark, — the first on the lake. Late in August, Yeren- drye crossed the portage farther north, but his men were more or less mutinous, and hampered his movements. Having sent forward an exploring party, he wintered on Pigeon River, and built a stockade to guard his supplies and to afford a base for future advances. His first object was to discover if Lake Ouinipigon (Winnipeg), of which he had reports showing it to be an expansion of the great western water-way, offered a suitable field for settlements. In May, 1732, the exploring party came back from Rainy Lake, and early in June, Veren- drye started on, leaving some portion of his followers to hold his fort of St. Pierre. By July, he had passed beyond Rainy At the Lake L^ke, Rud had built Fort St. Charles on the west woodt ^'^^^ o^ ^^^® Lake of the Woods ; and here he wintered 1732-33. (1732-33). From this point he dispatched some canoes back to Montreal, with peltries. He sent at the same time such reports as he could give of his progress, and in the autumn (September, 1733) some supplies reached him, for- warded by his Montreal supporters. Beauharnois continued to manifest interest in the expedition, as his correspondence with the home government shows. The letters from Verendrye which reached the governor from time to time, detailing the party's hardships and the death of Veren- drye's nephew, La Jemeraye, who had led the exploring party, gave him little encouragement to hope that his solicitations to the Paris government to come to Verendrye's assistance would be effective ; and they were not. VERENDRYE'S FORTS. 199 In the spring of 1734, Verendrye sent one of his sons to bnild Fort Maurepas just where the river, flowing- LakeWinni- west from the Lake of the Woods, entered the larger p®^' Lake Winnipeg. It was another of the various stockades which Verendrye within a few years scattered about the coun- try to secure better possession and to increase the trade. In August, 1734, Verendrye and one of his sons returned to Montreal, to give his personal influence to the business side of his undertaking. His stay was not long, and in June, 1735, we find him again turning to the west, and by September he had reached Fort St. Charles (Lake of the Woods), to At the Lake find its garrison almost prostrate from famine. The food's. perils of the undertaking were increasing, and for ^"^^• many months it is a story of disheartenment and misery, in- cluding the loss of a son in an attack by the Sioux upon one of his roving parties. The disasters of 1737, both in the Disasters, loss of men and stores, so discouraged the adventurer ^^^^' that we find him in October advising the minister that he must abandon his whole project. The next year (1738), his spirits recovered, and he was eagerly questioning the Assiniboines and Cristineaux, stories. another tribe of the neighborhood, as to more distant ^"^^" parts. He heard stories of walled towns farther down this supposable westward flowing river, with white inhabitants ; but they were without firearms. These peoples were said to work in iron, however, and an Indian said he had killed one of them, who was cased in iron. These savage informants all told of a people upon the Mis- souri, known as the Mandaus, who lived on the path to the dis- tant sea, and who could probably show the way thither. The Mandans, then, must be found. In the summer of 1738, Verendrye left Fort Maurepas, and passing up the Red River at the southern end of Lake Winni- peg, turned into the Assiniboine. Here he built a new stock- ade, calling it Fort De La Reine (October, 1738), at portDeLa a point where a portage led to Lake Manitoba. Some ^®™®" ^^^^' days later (October 18), with a party of twenty hired men and thirty others, including some Indians, he began his march to- ward the valley of the Missouri, reaching, after a journey of about twenty-six leagues, his first obstacle in what was proba- 200 THE SEARCH FOR THE SEA OF THE WEST. bly Turtle Mountain. From the time when Joliet and Mar- quette, nearly seventy years before, remarked upon the great volume of water which fed the Mississippi from this turbid The northwestern affluent, the hope had not been aban- Missoun. cloned that the Missouri might j^rove the chief chan- nel to the western sea. It came to be believed that it could be followed toward the west a distance corresponding to the practicable ascent of the Ohio toward the east. Mitchell, on his map, records this as a current opinion. The French had from time to time explored it, led by reports of silver mines, and by stories of the access thereto which the Spaniards got by some of its southern branches. AYhile Verendrye was travers- ing its upper reaches, other French were now exploring from its main stream toward New Mexico. Two Frenchmen, Frcucli GX- pioration Mallct by uamc, and one, at least, a priest, in 1739 fol- Spaniards. lowcd up the Plattc, and by its southern fork reached 1739. the plains of Colorado. Passing the upper Arkansas, they were at Santa Fe in July, and tarried through the winter. In the spring (May, 1740), their party divided, and while some went across the plains to the Panis (Pawnees), others coursed down the Arkansas to the Mississippi. Their reports induced Bienville to suspect that the regions they had traversed were parts of China, — a curious survival of the old Asiatic theory of the continent, — and accordingly he sent an exploring party up the Canadian fork of the Arkansas. It accomplished nothing. Meanwhile, Verendrye was having startling experiences among The.Man- ^ pcoplc wliosc unwontcd customs observed by later dans. 1738. gxplorers gavc rise to a theory, welcomed by the Welsh, that in the Mandans were to be found some of the de- scendants of the hapless companions of Prince ISIadoc. Veren- drye first encountered this people on November 28, 1738, and on December 3 he entered their village. His narrative shows that he was struck among his hosts with a physiognomy which was not Indian, and with a mixture of light and dark in their complexions, the women pai'ticularly having in many cases almost flaxen hair. He observed, too, that their method of fortifying their village was not one which he had seen among other tribes. These Mandans told the new-comers that a day's journey off there were white men who were habitual horsemen, and who THE HAND AN VILLAGE. 201 were incased in metal wlien they fought, — and he naturally thought of Spaniards from New Mexico. Verendrye's sojourn among this interesting people was but short, but he lost no time in taking formal possession of their country in the king's name. He left two men among them to learn their language, and to discover, if possible, who these work- ers in metal were. After having suffered, as he says, more fatigue and wretchedness throughout his journey than he .had ever before experienced, he reached La Reine on his return in February, 1739. The men whom he had left behind joined him at La Reine in September, and had a new story to tell him. While they were in the Mandan village, some of a tribe fartjbier west had come to trade there. These strangers reported that white and bearded men lived near their home. They called them pale faces, and said that the}^ built forts of brick and stone and mounted cannon on them. They prayed with books, worshiped the cross, cultivated gardens, and garnered grain, used oxen and horses, wore clothes of cotton, and strapped soles to their feet. Their habitations stood by a large sea, which rose and fell, and whose waters could not be drunk. It was wondered if they were Spaniards upon the Gulf of California. The documents printed by Margry give but scant knowledge of the experiences of these two years ; but Biymner has well supplied the want in the journal, kept by Verendrye, which is printed in the Report of the Dominio7i Archives for 1889. The fatigues of the expedition had told upon the leader, and he spent a part of the winter and spring of 1739 at La Reine, exhausted in body and troubled in mind. In April, LakeMani- he sent his son to explore the portage toward Lake laskatche-^^ Manitoba, and upon that water the yomiger Veren- '"''"'• ^^^^• drye constructed Fort Dauphin, and then pushed on to explore the Saskatchewan region. This period of activity was followed by one of doubt and ex- haustion. In October, 1739, some supplies reached La Reine, but Verendrye found it necessary to go back to Montreal to secure what merchandise was needed for traffic. Reaching the settlements, he found his affairs in a rueful condition : he was 40,000 livres in debt, and a defendant in the courts. His commercial backers were exacting, and his business rivals in the peltry trade harassed him. Beauharnois was almost alone active in his behalf. 202 THE SEARCH FOR THE SEA OF THE WEST. Afterwards, in 1741, Verendrye joined his companions at the v^rendrye's wcst. In the Spring of 1742, he sent his two surviving weltlard ^^^^ ^^ rcnew the western search. They left La Reine ^"^-- on April 20, and proceeding up the Assiniboine and Souris rivers, passed on (July 23) in a west-southwest course over a rolling prairie to the Mandan towns, seeing no one for twenty days. On August 11, they reached some hills. It is now supposed that these elevations were the Powder River range sep- arati'no- the forks of the Little Missouri, a southern affluent of the greater river. To inquiries after the sea, the wanderers got the same answer, which led them on from one tribe to another, each referring them to the one beyond. None had seen this great water ; but later they found a tribe who had captured some Snake Indians, and these prisoners reported it lying still farther west. A war party, prejiariug for an attack on these same Snakes, opened the way for a further advance, and the brothers went on. It was the 1st of January, 1743, when these two sons of They see Verendrye saw what was perhaps the Big Horn Range, ^nuaryT" ^^ outlyiug buttrcss of tlic Rocky Mountains, run- 1743. ning athwart the sources of the Yellowstone, and lying a hundred miles or more east of the Yellowstone Park. Their narrative does not indicate that the sight was in any way a striking one, and there has been doubt expressed as to the iden- tification of the actual summits which were seen. One of the brothers went with the advancing war party to the foot of these mountains, which were " well wooded and very high," as he describes them (January 8). He little dreamed that beyond them, and beyond the Snakes, lay eight hundred miles or more of mountain and declivity, stretching to the coveted sea. The conclusion reached by Professor Whitney in his study of the problem is that the explorers " may have been withiii one or two hundred miles of Snake River. Here they heard accounts of the missions of the Spaniard in California, which contained enough of truthful items to prove beyond doubt that there had been communication across the country between the Pacific coast and the upper Missouri region." Parlonan's study of their route gives much the same conclusions as reached by the present writer, but he thinks it not unlikely that the explorers may also have pushed somewhat beyond this mountain barrier VERENDRYE'S LAST YEARS. 203 of the Big Horn. Their narrative tells us that they reached, at all events, the Snake village which they searched for, but found it abandoned. Thus balked in their purpose, the party, with their white companions, turned back, and left the great barrier of the Rockies unsealed. / In the spring of 1743, the young Verendryes were back on the banks of the Missouri, and here, amid a tribe — very gpring. likely one of the bands of the Sioux — they buried a ^^''^" leaden plate, engraved with the royal arms. Turning up the Missouri, by the middle of May they were again among the Mandans. Here they found a party of Assiniboines traveling east, and falling in with their train on July 2, 1743, they later reached La Reine, having been absent about fifteen months. This period of venturesome exploration stands out amid the dreary monotony of Verendrye's misfortunes. Five , , , . Vtivenclrye's or six years of life remained to him, but they were bar- later years. 1743-1749. ren in i^esults and harassing in incidents. He tried to get the minister to listen to tales of what he had done. He recounted to him the story of the posts he had established, and outlined the promise of further discoveries, but it was the ap- peal of a wearied and poverty-stricken adventurer, and made little impression. At one time he was relieved of command, and then later sent back to try once more ; but nothing came of it. His sons went to Quebec, seeking to gain the attention of the government, or to incite the cupidity of the merchants, but in vain. Kalm, the Swedish traveler, met Verendrye in his last year, and records something of what he learned from him. The re- tired leader told him that he had in some places observed fur- rows in the soil which indicated that a people advanced enough to use ploughs had once been in occupation. He had found, he said, monumental stones, generally without inscriptions, but in one case there were "Tartar characters," but no one could tell their origin. Kalm makes no mention of any mountains, as figuring in Verendrye's story. This is the more singular, be- cause Verendrye knew the Indian map by Otchago, which often figures in contemporary accounts, and which designates what we now know as the Rocky Mountains, as the " Mountains of Bi-io'ht Stones." 204 THE SEARCH FOR THE SEA OF THE WEST. The elder Verendrye died at Three Rivers on December 6, 1749, and on February 27 following, La Jonquiere, dies*" s^c- who was now governor of Canada, wrote to the minis- Legardeur ter at Paris that Legardeur de St. Pierre had been ' '*" selected to follow up the discoveries of the dead hero. It was evident that La Jonquiere was determined to institute La Jon- ^ ^^®^ control of tliis western search, for the younger «i"e western Vercudrye had in vain sought to be appointed to search. carry on the work which his father had enjoined upon him. By the influence of Galissonniere, the cross of St. Louis had been indeed bestowed on the elder discoverer, but this availed little. The new governor had his own plans, and it has been suspected that they involved commercial interests to be shared in common with Bigot, the new intendant, and St. Pierre himself. The governor was by no means sure that Verendrye's search had been in the best direction. He accordingly instructed the Sieur Marin, commanding at Green Bay, to go to the source of the Mississippi, and discover if there was not over the divide " rivers flowing into the western sea." La Jonquiere reported these orders to the minister in October, 1750. The region of many lakes, margined by the birch, maple, and pine, with wild rice plentiful in the glades, which is The source , , , i • t i i of the Ms- now known to gather the multiplied waters that unite to form the Great River, had once been the home of the Dacotahs, but now for twenty years these savages had been scattered before the Chippeways. It was many years yet before the hydrographical relations of the region were to be all under- various stood. Vaugondy was at this very time (1750) mak- coujectures. -j-^^ tlicsc fouutaius of the Mississippi the same with those that sujiplied the smaller affluent of Lake Winnipeg. Bellin, another leading French cartographer, from the period he made the maps for Charlevoix's journal, had advocated various notions, wild to us, of the hydrography of this interior region. He had contended that the " Mer de FOuest " lay not more than three hundred leagues west of Lake Superior, and thought it highly probable that there were connecting waters, rendering easy a passage from one to the other. With this propensity to find interlinking natural canals, Bellin now curiously compli- cates the question of the source of the Mississippi. In his map of 1755, he connects Lake Winnipeg by a continuous LAKE WINNIPEG. 205 channel with the Mississippi, through an intervening link which he calls the " Riviere Rouge," saying that " the course of it is little known." He places the springs of the Mississippi not in Winnipeg or beyond, but on a lateral affluent of this same mysterious river. This " Riviere Rouge " is made one with the "Assiniboils " just before it reaches " Lac Ouinipigon," and the [From Vaugondy's Amerique Septentrionale, 1750, showing the Mississippi rising in the "L. Assinipoils."] " Riviere des Assiniboils " is supposed to be the stream " by which one is believed to go to the sea of the west." Any one, therefore, could at that day appeal to Le Nejitune Francois., in which Bellin's map appeared, as authority for a supposed passage from the Gulf of Mexico, through the Mississippi and connecting streams, to Lake Winnipeg, from which there were 206 THE SEARCH FOR THE SEA OF THE WEST. water-ways to the Pacific and to Hudson's Bay, — a fair ex- position of the geographical delusion clinging about an imag- ined interior basin, with its multiplied outlets. Mitchell, the leading British geographer of the day, is less imaginative in saying that the Mississippi had been ascended to about 45° north latitude, and that its source was supposed to be in 50° of latitude, while in its longitude it lay about mid- way across the continent. Jefferys, the rival of Mitchell, places the source more nearly in 45°, while Danville, in France, puts it at 46°. There is no record of what Marin discovered, but it was given out that his purpose was ultimately to unite with St. Pierre at some point on the Pacific. The movement under St. Pierre began in June, 1750. We St. Pierre. ^^® enabled to follow him by a journal which he drew 1750. ^^p^ g^j-^^i ^vhich is printed both by Margry and Brym- uer. The expedition was absent three years, but accomplished little, though its leader had had many years' experience in wood- ranging, and came of a forest-loving race, for he was a great- grandson of that Jean Nicollet who had got the first intimations of the Mississij)pi. St. Pierre lost time at the start by trying without avail to compose a peace between the Rainy Lake In- dians and the Sioux. He was later impeded by the hardships of his travel and by the treachery of the Assiniboines. He pro- ceeded himself no farther than Fort La Reine on the Assiniboine. He had determined, on any northern march, to avoid Hudson's Bay by turning to the west, and thereby to find, as he thought, the sources of the Missouri, so that its current might be made use of in transporting his supplies. It was Verendrye's mistake, he contended, in not clinging to that river* "by which some settled peoples could be reached, and no other than the Span- iards." It was in this direction that St. Pierre did all that was re- TheSas- markablc in his three years' absence. He sent his expiore'd*" licuteuant, the Chevalier de Niverville, to command a ^^^^- party starting (May 29, 1751) for the Saskatchewan. Some portion of it ascended that river — called by them Pas- koya — " aux montagnes des Roches, — the earliest use, in Kingsford's opinion, of the appellation Rocky to any part of the great range. They built Fort La Jonquiere, three hundred ST. PIERRE AT LA REINE. 207 miles above the river's month, but only to abandon it and fall back to La Reine. St. Pierre, finding further progress in this direction deranged by continued inter-tribal hostilities among Z,a qramire- efe.; t'Or^tnal. n-'ort — ^uc- d'tui iirmplc- (rait, e.t la^Jtlir est LcveC' e/v anUeur d'eatc. EssAl d/ime' Carte aue^ hY Gintlanme JDelisle Pf^ Ge^arraphe' a et de/ UAcade^nue/ deiT Sciences avoitjainb a/