THE UNIVERSITY 
 Or ILLINOIS 
 
 > LIBRARY 
 
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 * 911. 327 
 Os Ss 
 
 S HijT(iS!CAl
 
 thi<* ^ EMI 9i before the 
 1 below. A
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY Of IUIKNS 
 
 y
 
 STARVED ROCK 
 
 H fnstorical Sfeetcb 
 
 BY 
 
 EATON G. OSMAN 
 
 OTTAWA, ILL. 
 
 THE FREK TRADER PRINTING HOUSE 
 1895 
 
 pfsc. 
 3*7
 
 COPYRIGHT BY 
 
 EATON G. OS MAN, 
 
 1895- 
 
 ENGRAVING BY 
 ILLINOIS ENGRAVING Co., CHICAGO. 
 
 PHOTOGRAPHS BY 
 GERDING, BOWMAN AND GUSTAVE KNEUSSL (AMATEUR), 
 
 OTTAWA, ILL., 
 AND IRA B. MYERS (AMATEUR), CHICAGO.
 
 DEER PARK. LOOKING DOWN THE GLEN.
 
 [HE UBHARY 
 
 OF THE 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILUMOIS
 
 PRETACE. 
 
 rRANCIS PARKMAN'S "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great 
 West " must be hereafter the basis of any repetition of the story 
 of the discovery and settlement of the Illinois river valley. That I 
 have, in this little sketch, availed myself of the results of Dr. Park- 
 man's labors will be apparent to ev.ery reader of his'tieligirtfal volumes. 
 1 the more readily acknowledge this indebtedness in view of the fact 
 that even before he had himself stood upon Starved Rock, his studies 
 of the original authorities had led to his rejection of the supposition of 
 Sparks and others, that it was Buffalo Rock which was the site of 
 La Salle's famous " Rock Fort." Dr. Parkman established beyond 
 question, from documents contemporary with La Salle, corroborating 
 this conclusion of the student of manuscripts by subsequent personal 
 observations on the ground, that Starved Rock was the true site of the 
 ancient Fort St. Louis, around which was planted the first permanent 
 settlement of the white race in the Mississippi valley, thus giving to 
 Starved Rock a prestige historically equal to the fame it has ever had 
 as a unique landmark of the Great West. 
 
 I have not attempted here to rewrite the history of the Illinois 
 country, but simply to bring together in one place such authenticated 
 facts relating to Starved Rock, scattered through many volumes, as 
 may assist in giving the Rock its proper perspective on the canvas of 
 western and our national history, as well as interest the thousands of 
 strangers who annually visit this beautiful and interesting spot.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE, ........... 3 
 
 INTRODUCTORY, .......... 5 
 
 THE DISCOVERERS : Marquette and Joliet, .... 9 
 
 THE DISCOVERY: The Voyage of Marquette and Joliet, . 12 
 
 THE FATE OF THE EXPLORERS : The Death of Marquetfe, . 16 
 
 LA SALLE : His Dream of Empire, ..... 19 
 
 LA SALLE'S CAREER : His Earlier Work, .... 22 
 
 TONTY : The Iroquois Raid, . . . . . .25 
 
 STARVED ROCK FORTIFIED : La Salle Takes Possession, . 28 
 
 KISMET : Failure and Death, ....... 32 
 
 LA SALLE'S SUCCESSORS : Two Hundred Years Ago, . . 36 
 
 THE MISSIONS: The Immaculate Conception, ... 40 
 THE DRAMA OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY : The Scenery of 
 
 Tragedy, . 44 
 STARVED ROCK IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY : The Indian 
 
 Sieges, 47 
 
 THE LAST OF THE ILLINI : The Final Tragedy, 53 
 
 THE SEQUEL : The Pottawatomies, . . . _ . . 61 
 
 MODERN STARVED ROCK : The Era of the White Man, . . 65 
 
 THE HISTORIANS : Francis Parkman and John G. Shea, . 69 
 
 THE NOVELIST : Mrs. Catherwood, ..... 75 
 
 THE RELICS : Silent Witnesses, ...... 77
 
 VIEWS FROM TOP OF STARVED ROCK.
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 Here by this stream, in days of old 
 The red men lived, who lie in mould; 
 The leaves that once their history knew 
 Their crumbling pages hide from view. 
 
 "I HAVE stood upon Starved Rock, and gazed for hours 
 upon the beautiful landscape spread out before me," said 
 the late Justice Sydney Breese.* "The undulating plains > 
 rich in their verdure; the rounded hills beyond, clad in their 
 forest livery; and the gentle river, pursuing its noiseless way to the 
 Mississippi and the Gulf, all in harmonious association, makeup a picture 
 over which the eye delfghts to linger ; and when to these are added the 
 recollections of the heroic adventurers who first occupied it, that here the 
 banner of France so many years floated freely in the winds; that here was 
 civilization while all around was barbaric darkness, the most intense and 
 varied emotions cannot fail to be awakened." 
 
 Starved Rock is one of the most noted natural curiosities of the West. 
 Once an arm of the bluff, which here bounds the Illinois river vallay on the 
 south, it now stands alone, an isolated sandstone cliff, whose walls, carved 
 into form by the floods of countless generations, rise one hundred and twen- 
 ty-five feet above the level of the river. Circular in form, the summit of 
 the Rock contains about half an acre of land, which is well covered with a 
 growth of evergreens and scrub-oaks, while its sides are draped with vines and 
 ferns, wild flowers and cedars, and below 
 
 ,,; ;,. "The river calmly flows." 
 
 *BKEESE : "History of Illinois."
 
 STARVED ROCK '. A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 The sqmmit is accessible only from the south, where the flood-eddies have 
 heaped up the sands against the base. Nature's helping hand has been sup- 
 plemented by man, both savage and civilized, who has carved rude steps in 
 the rock, and converted a mere hint for a climbing pathway to the top into a 
 practicable ascent. 
 
 Starved Rock stands apart, like a moss-grown and ivy-clad battle-tower 
 of mediaeval ages. It is a nature-made citadel, as impregnable to assault as 
 Gibralter. Like many a feudal refuge, it has survived the attacks alike of 
 war and time, and to-day stands a monument to brave men and their van- 
 ished dreams of political power and commercial aggrandizement. 
 
 From the summit, the valley of the Illinois for miles lies spread out be- 
 fore the eye as an open book an incomparable view. 
 
 " On either side the river lie 
 Long fields of barley and of rye, 
 That clothe the world and meet the sky ; 
 And through the fields the road runs by 
 
 To many-towered Camelot 
 
 To the east the eye follows the thread of the river, as it flows past cultivated 
 farms and under the shadow of verdure-clad hills. In the distance rises 
 Buffalo Rock, a Starved Rock enlarged and magnified, behind which curls 
 the smoke of Ottawa's busy shops; while afar in the haze beyond the hills 
 of Rutland give shadowy form and contour to the vanishing horizon. On 
 turning to the west, the eye lingers along the meandering stream on whose 
 clear bosom once 
 
 " Voyagers 'gainst time did row." 
 
 Stealing away through broad and fertile fields, or behind low clumps of 
 trees, the silvery trail is at last lost in the far distance, 
 
 " Where gleaming fields of haze 
 Meet the voyageur's gaze.' 1 
 
 In the midst of this haze may be distinguished the outlines of the twin cities 
 of La Salle and Peru; while just below the horizon, extended from bluff to
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 bluff, the great bridge of the Illinois Central Railroad hangs suspended over 
 
 the river, 
 
 Like a triumphal arch 
 Erected o'er its march 
 To the sea. 
 
 From the northern segment of the Rock, one looks down upon the river be- 
 low his feet. 
 
 "No wind stirs its waves, 
 But the spirits of the braves 
 
 Hov'ring o'er, 
 Whose antiquated graves 
 Its still water laves 
 On the shore." 
 
 From the farther shore-line stretches the now cultivated meadow, where 
 once stood the ancient Kaskaskia, the home of the savage tribes who two 
 hundred years ago claimed and occupied the Illinois country as their hunt- 
 ing grounds. Under the brow of the distant bluff sits the Tillage of Utica, 
 wherein dwells but a tithe of the population that once lived upon this site. 
 
 It is and ever has been a rich and beautiful land, for whose possession 
 many a desperate battle has been fought, both before and since the white 
 man came; and the ashes of both the victor and the vanquished enrich the 
 soil on which are grown the " corn and wine" of later generations of men 
 who love the spot as dearly as did the fated red men. It is as beautiful now 
 as then, but changed, 
 
 " Soft hints of meadows, sweet with hay; 
 High banks that rise, thick fringed, between 
 The wood and wave, forever green; 
 A farm lawn, just beyond the way, 
 Alive with youngsters at their play: 
 All these in pictured landscape lie, 
 Framed in pale hues of air and sky."
 
 Deer Park -The Sentinel.
 
 THE DISCOVERERS. 
 
 A fiery soul, which, working out its way, 
 
 Fretted the puny body to decay, 
 
 And o'er informed the tenement of clay. 
 
 j\A ARQUETTE is one of the most interesting, as he is one of the most 
 / I conspicuous, figures of Northwestern discovery. The scion of an 
 illustrious family of French sheriffs and soldiers, whose later genera- 
 tions furnished three sons to die in the cause of American liberty as soldiers 
 in the armies of our French allies in the War for Independence, Jacques, 
 born at Laon in 1637, was destined to be the most celebrated of his race, 
 as well as the last of that long line of priestly explorers and Christian 
 martyrs whose names and deeds are the crown of glory of the Canadian 
 church. 
 
 At the age of seventeen, Marquette entered the Society of Jesus and 
 became a teacher. Later he chose a foreign missionary's career, and was 
 sent to Canada (1666). At Three Rivers he devoted himself so assiduously 
 to the study of Indian languages that he soon mastered six of the root 
 tongues, with most of their dialects. It is probable that no man of his time 
 had a more complete mastery of the Indian languages of the Northwest 
 than Marquette. This learning soon came to be of immense value to him. 
 
 From Three Rivers he went (1668) to Sault de Ste. Marie, where with 
 Dablon, his Father Superior, he built a church. In 1669 he went to La- 
 pointe, at the western end of Lake Superior, where he met some of the
 
 t 
 
 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 Illinois tribes, who had gone thither to trade, and who, he wrote, "are of 
 apparently good disposition." They urged him to come among them, and 
 he longed to do so ; but Indian wars not only prevented his taking this step 
 but moreover drove him back to the Straits ; where he built a chapel, at St. 
 Ignace, " the first sylvan shrine to Catholicity at Mackinaw.'* To this la- 
 borious post the pious priest condemned himself, happy, though suffering 
 all things, if as opportunity offered he might but have the blessed privilege 
 of opening by the baptismal sacrament "the doors of bliss to the dying 
 infant or more aged repenting sinner." Here he remained until summoned 
 (1672) to join Joliet in the discovery and exploration of the Mississippi. 
 
 Joliet is one of "the lesser stars in the galaxy of American explorers 
 and pioneers," a man who had no cotemporary biographer. Dr. John Gil- 
 mary Shea, by infinite labor, has been able to make but a bare outline 
 sketch of his career, from which we obtain the following facts. 
 
 The eon of a wagonmaker, Joliet was born in Canada in 1645. He was 
 educated for the priesthood, but withdrew from the Society of Jesus to be- 
 come a fur trader. He had, perhaps, says Dr. Shea, no distinct elements of 
 character to raise him to greatness ; but he appears to have been a man of 
 considerable learning which he ultimately turned to good account. In his 
 travels as a fur trader he obtained a thorough mastery of the Algonquin 
 language and its dialects. Dablon says he was a man of the tact and pru- 
 dence necessary to carry him through the Indian country ; and furthermore 
 he had "a courage to fear nothing where all is to be feared." 
 
 He had, prior to 1673, performed many perilous missions for his old 
 friends, the Jesuits at Quebec, and had once been sent by the Colonial gov- 
 
 *SHEA : "Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley."
 
 THE DISCOVERERS. 
 
 ernment also to explore the copper mines of Lake Superior, of which Talon, 
 the intendant, had h^ard many rumors. The immediate object of the 
 journey failed of attainment, but the journey itself was one of great value in 
 other respects He had but returned from this adventure in the West when 
 (1672) he was commissioned by Governor Frontenac to find and explore the 
 Mississippi. 
 
 Starved Rock The Pathway to the Top.
 
 THE DISCOVERY. 
 
 The wind blew fair; the white foam flew; 
 
 The furrows followed free; 
 We were the first that ever burst 
 
 Into that silent sea. 
 
 The Ancient Mariner 
 
 THE VOYAGE OF MARQUETTE AND JOLIET. 
 
 1 OLIET reached Point St. Ignace from Quebec on December 8, 1672, 
 CLJ with his instructions from Governor Frontenac. Father Marquette's 
 journal of this memorable voyage thus refers to Joliet's arrival: 
 
 "The day of the Immaculate Conception of the Holy Virgin, whom I 
 had continually invoked since coming to the country of the Ottawas, to ob- 
 tain from God the favor of being enabled to visit the nations on the river 
 Mississippi- this very day was precisely that on which M. Joliet arrived 
 with orders to go with him on this discovery. I was all the more delighted 
 with this news because I saw my plans about to be accomplished, and found 
 myself in the happy necessity of exposing my life for the salvation of all 
 those tribes, especially the Illinois, who, when I was at St. Esprit, had 
 begged me very earnestly to bring the word of God among thsm." 
 
 Champlain had founded Quebec in 1608, thus laying the corner stone of 
 New France and "building the hive whence poured the swarm "of heroic 
 Recollet and Jesuit Fathers, who within the next thirty-five years pushed 
 their examination of the interior of the continent to the farthest limits of the 
 St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes; and as the missions were pushed farther 
 and farther westward, the annual Relations of the missionaries seldom failed 
 to contain mention of the "great water" to the still farther west, of which
 
 STARVED ROCK, LOOKING WEST FROM LOVER'S LEAP.
 
 THE VOYAGE OF MARQUETTE AND JOLIET. 
 
 the good Fathers' Indian flocks gave them information. If, then, they had 
 not themselves actually seen the river prior to 1673, the Fathers knew per- 
 fectly where it would be found and many details of the route to it; so that 
 
 when Joliet and Marquette were commis- 
 TRACV \ sioned by Talon to explore the river, they 
 had only to follow a well known 
 path to find it. Nevertheless, 
 during the winter following Joli- 
 et's meeting with Marquette the 
 two explorers made every preparation for 
 their voyage, gathering information from 
 ^ the Indians concerning their route and the 
 / people they might encounter, determined, 
 writes Marquette, that "if our enterprise 
 was hazardous it should not be foolhardy." 
 
 LAC 
 
 -. On May 17, 1673, the explorers set out from St. Ignace. 
 accompanied by five voyageurs, all in two birch-bark canoes. 
 For the voyage they carried Indian corn and some jerked 
 meat, as well as suitable goods as presents to the natives to be 
 met on the way. "At the outset. Marquette placed the enter- 
 prise under the patronage of the Immaculate Virgin, promis- 
 ing that if she granted them success, the river should be 
 named ' The Conception.' This pledge he strove to keep; but 
 an I Lilian word, the very meaning of which has been disputed, is its desig- 
 nation, "* Ascending the Fox river [of Wisconsin], crossing the portage to 
 the Wisconsin and descending that river, on June i7th, they found them- 
 selves, probably first of white men [except Groseilliers and Radisson ?] 
 since DeSoto's companions fled from the midnight burial of their chief, on 
 the bosom of the Father of Waters. We shall not follow them as they de- 
 scended the mighty flood to a point below the mouth of the Arkansas. Hav- 
 ing satisfied themselves that the river did not flow to the sea of Virginia, 
 but to the Gulf of Mexico, they turned back, July 17, to the north "* 
 
 *HINSDALE : "The Old Northwset." The Map is by Marqaette (greatly reduced).
 
 STARVED ROCK I A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 When they again reached the mouth of Illinois (Riviere de Divine)*, hav- 
 ing been told by the Indians that here was the more direct route to the Lac 
 des Illinois, they entered and followed it to the northeast, delighted with the 
 stream and the country it watered. " We had never seen anything like this 
 river," writes Marquette, " for the richness of the soil, the prairies and 
 woods, the buffaloes, the elks, the deer, the wild cats, the bustards, the 
 
 wild geese, the ducks, the paroquets and even the beavers. It is made up of 
 little lakes and little rivers. That upon which we voyaged is wide, deep 
 and gentle for sixty-five leagues." 
 
 In ascending the river Marquette records one stop, with the Peorias, an 
 Illinois tribe, the location not being mentioned; but he says he here "bap- 
 tized a dying infant a little while before it died, by an admirable providence, 
 
 * Juliet gave the Illinois the name Divine or Outrelaiee, in compliment, it is sup- 
 posed, to Frontenac's wife, noted for her beauty, and Mile. Outrelaise, her facinating 
 friend, who were called in court circles, lea divines. Winsor. 
 
 Joliet's Map is reduced from a reproduction in Winsor's "Cartier to Frontenac."
 
 THE VOYAGE OF MARQUETTE AND JOLIET. 15 
 
 for the salvation of its innocent soul," the tender record of undoubtedly the 
 first baptism on Illinois river. Higher up the stream the voyagers found a 
 village of the Illinois called Kaskaskia, containing seventy-four cabins, where, 
 says Marquette, they were kindly received by the inhabitants, who, he adds, 
 "compelled me to promise to return and instruct them." 
 
 This village was located on the north bank of the Illinois river, under 
 the early morning shadow of Starved Rock; and Marquette's record is thus 
 the first mention in history of " a place which has since become famous in 
 the annals of western discovery." 
 
 The discoverers remained at Kaskaskia but a short time, and then one 
 of the chiefs with his young men escorted them to the lake, via the Chicago 
 portage, whence they returned at last to Green Bay, from which they had 
 set out in the beginning of June. 
 
 "The great discovery by Joliet and Marquette did not at first prompt 
 the French to any schemes for planting colonies to cultivate the rich lands 
 of the Mississippi Valley, and a plan of settlement proposed by Joliet 
 was rejected "* by the Court. It was only when the activity of the English 
 in New York menaced the French fur trade that the struggle for dominion 
 in the Mississippi Valley and the career of La Salle began. f 
 
 * 8HKA : "'Catholic Church in Colonial Days." 
 
 t PAhKMAN : " La Salic and the Dittcoverj/ of the Great Went."
 
 THE EATE OF THE EXPLORERS. 
 
 Ah, weary priest ! with pale hands 
 On thy trobbing brow of pain. 
 
 Whit tier. 
 
 He was a man of comely form, 
 Polished and brave, well learned and kind. 
 
 Puritan Poet. 
 
 THE DEATH OF MARQUETTE. 
 
 MARQUETTE. and Joliet separated at Green Pay, never 
 again to meet. Marquette's constitution was so seriously 
 impaired by the fatigues of the journey that he never after- 
 ward became a well man. Illness followed him so relent- 
 lessly that not until the following year was he able to com- 
 plete his report and send it to his Father Superior at Quebec. 
 In the fall of the same year (1674) he received from Quebec 
 an order to establish a mission at Kaskaskia, (Starved Rock ) His heart 
 was in the work ; and on October 25 he left Green Bay for the Illinois His 
 old malady, dysentery with hemorrhage, returning, however, he was com- 
 pelled to winter with his white companions at the mouth of Chicago river, 
 which place he left for the Illinois river, March 29, 1675, reaching Kaskas- 
 kia April 8 Here, on the plain north of and across the river from Starved 
 Rock, he then founded the mission to which he gave his favorite name, 
 " Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin." 
 
 But it was only for a little while that he was able to teach the benighted 
 Indians; for "continued illness soon obliged him to set forth on that return 
 voyage which brought him to a lonely grave in the wilderness." On the eve 
 of his departure from the village he convened the inhabitants to the number
 
 THE DEATH OF MARQUETTE. I'J 
 
 of two thousand, on a meadow hard by, and there, on a rude altar, exhibited 
 four pictures of the Virgin Mary, explained their significance, and exhorted 
 the chiefs and people to embrace Christianity.* 
 
 Quitting Kaskaskia soon after Easter, which occurred that year April 
 14, he returned to the Lake via the Kankakee portage and St. Joseph river. 
 Unable to proceed further, his companions built for him a rude hut, near 
 the mouth of the river, in which he died, with the names of Jesus and Mary 
 on his lips and his face radiant with joy. He was buried on an eminence 
 overlooking the lake, which he himself had pointed out for his resting place. 
 But two years later his Indian friends from Mackinac removed his bones 
 to St. Ignace, where they were buried in a vault under the floor of the 
 log chapel. In process of time, the mission being afterwards abandoned, 
 their resting place was forgotten ; but it was discovered in 1877 by a Michi- 
 gan clergyman, and a monument has, by the latter's endeavors, been since 
 erected to mark the spot. 
 
 Thus died, at the age of thirty-eight, one of the noblest and purest men 
 whose names adorn the annals of the northwest. 
 
 JOLIET'S SUBSEQUENT CAREER. 
 
 M. Joliet reached Quebec in August, 1674, but within sight of Montreal 
 was nearly drowned, losing all the records of his voyage. He made a verbal 
 report to the Governor, accompanying it with a map made from recollection. 
 He no doubt expected some substantial reward, but was disappointed, at 
 least at that time, though for this and other services he was later granted the 
 island of Anticosti at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, where in 1681 he es- 
 tablished himself with his wife and six servants, and became interested in 
 the fisheries. Being also a skilled navigator and surveyor, he was appointed 
 by Frontenac hydrographer at Quebec. In 1690 the English commander, 
 Sir William Phipps, burned Joliet's Anticosti establishment and took him 
 and his wife prisoners. Joliet was subsequently released, and in 1694 ex- 
 plore4 Labrador on behalf of a seal and whale fishing company. He died, 
 
 *WAULACE : ** Illinois and Louisiana under French Rule."
 
 i8 
 
 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 evidently poor, in 1699 or 1700. His descendants appear to have inherited 
 his virtues and his talent, and several of them have held positions of high 
 trust and responsibility, both civil and ecclesiastical, in the modern Do- 
 minion of Canada. 
 
 FRONTENAC. 
 
 (Reproduced from a reduction, in Winsor's " Cartier to Frontenac, 
 from Suite's " Canadiens-Francais," Vol. ii.)
 
 LA SALLE. 
 
 I hear the tread of pioneers 
 
 Of nations yet to be ; 
 The first low wash of waves where soon 
 
 Shall roll a human sea. 
 
 Whittier. 
 
 HIS DREAM OF EMPIRE. 
 
 IT HAS come to be the fashion in certain quarters to belittle the character 
 and accomplishments of La Salle. While Parkman makes him second 
 only to Champlain as the greatest of all French discoverers of the great west, 
 Shea treats him as simply a follower of paths that others had previously 
 blazed. Parkman bears testimony to the heroic persistence of the man in 
 spite of immense physical difficulties and the more disheartening machina- 
 tions of enemies, whose adverse influence was felt at every step of his career 
 and at every point, from the court of Louis XIV. to the mouth of the Missis- 
 sippi. Dr. Shea, on the other hand, ascribes his failure to a fatal lack of 
 capacity as an explorer. " La Salle was doubtless a persuasive talker in 
 setting forth his projects," he says, "though utterly incapable of carrying 
 out even the simplest." 
 
 There is an element of truth in the latter view of La Salle, but the state- 
 ment is an exaggeration of La Salle's real fault. It is true, La Salle, strictly 
 speaking, discovered nothing except the Ohio river neither the Mississippi 
 nor its outlet, both of which had been seen by the Spaniard a hundred years 
 before La Salle was born ; but these discoveries the Spaniard had also as 
 long ago forgotten, and La Salle's claim of the land for France by right of 
 discovery and occupancy was never disputed. As to the Northwest, though
 
 2O STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 La Salle was neither the first to explore its lakes or rivers, he certainly was 
 the first to enter it as a settler and pioneer of the future settlers. 
 
 Moses* goss even further than Shea, attributing to La Salle a bickering 
 spirit, which certainly is not a characteristic of the man as he is pictured by 
 Parkman, confessedly the most competent historian of this period and de- 
 partment of our American history. Moses says : 
 
 "Had the French governor [Le Barre, La Salle's enemy at all times, 
 as Frontenac was always his friend?] and La Salle pooled their issues, and 
 instead of endeavoring to break each other down worked together, there was 
 nothing to prevent their building up a colony at Fort St, Louis [Starved 
 Rock] which would have been of great advantage to the interests of each, 
 and exerted a controlling influence upon the destiny of New France. Had 
 agriculture and permanent settlement been encouraged in connection with 
 the traffic with the Indians, a prosperous and powerful community might 
 have been established, which, growing and extending to other equally favor- 
 able localities in the Illinois country, might in fifty years have constituted a 
 community which would have proved an insuperable barrier against any 
 foreign encroachment, in consequence of its ability to maintain its own in- 
 tegrity. But the rapacity of one and the ambition of the other prevented 
 the accomplishment of such a result." 
 
 Mr. Moses has overlooked the fact that this very idea was, in truth, the 
 keynote of La Salle's career : that is, to take possession of and settle the 
 Mississippi valley ; but in this purpose he had the opposition of both Le 
 Barre, the governor, and also the Jesuits, neither of whom then desired per- 
 manent settlers about them to interfere with their relations with the Indians. 
 The responsibility of the failure of La Salle's attempts to colonize the Illinois 
 rests much more with the court and the priesthood on the St. Lawrence than 
 with La Salle on 1 the Illinois. His failures, as the result of his own faults, 
 must be attributed, not so much to the withering influences of a soul con- 
 sumed with petty quarrels and bickerings, but rather to his unfortunate ina- 
 bility to create real friendships among his own people, and to his besetting 
 
 *JoHN MOSES : " History of Illinois."
 
 LA SALLE'S DREAM OF EMPIRE. 
 
 sin of trusting no one but himself, even in projects requiring for their suc- 
 cess the co-operation of large bodies of men.* 
 
 More than two hundred years have passed since La Salle perished in 
 the trackless wastes of the far Southwest, and his venturous soul fled to that 
 "bourne from which no traveler returns" ; but even as he stood upon the 
 summit of Starved Rock in 1682 and 1683 and his eye swept over the mag- 
 nificent landscape, his prophetic spirit saw in the then distant future the 
 grandeur of the empire that was yet to come, whose very heart would throb 
 in the fertile lands spread out before him, which he loved to characterize as 
 "a terrestrial paradise." It was the master mind of La Salle that first con- 
 ceived the policy which led on, step by step, from Starved Rock "to Fort 
 Duquesne, Braddock's defeat, and Forbes's march to the Forks of the Ohio, ' 
 and the train of events culminating in the fall of Quebec, f Looking into 
 the future, La Salle saw on these prairies and by the shores of the Great 
 Lakes a New France far more powerful than the old, and this vision, one 
 may truly say, was the guiding star of his romantic career. As the first 
 white man to establish a settlement upon her soil, he has been justly styled 
 "the Father of Illinois"; but it was only when 
 Wolfe triumphed on the Heights of Abraham that 
 the empire which La Salle foresaw and devoted 
 his life to found, became a historic fact. What La 
 Salle did not see was that the great law cf evolution 
 had destined that this great power would be, not 
 Norman but Anglo-Saxon. \ 
 
 * PABKMAN : " La Salle and the Discovery of the Great 
 Wesi>" 
 
 t HINSDALE : " The Old Northwest." 
 t JOHN FISKE : " The Idea of God." 
 
 West End of Buffalo Rock.
 
 LA SALLE'S CAREER. 
 
 Planting strange fruits and sunshine on the shore, 
 I make some coast alluring, some lone isle, 
 To distant men, who must go there or die. 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 HIS EARLIER WORK. 
 
 ROBERT CAVALIER, Sieur de la Salle, born 
 in Rouen, 1643; educated for the priesthood; a 
 Jesuit long enough to legally sacrifice his fortune 
 because of the connection came to America in 
 1666. With a small patrimony as capital he 
 set up as a feudal lord at a place called 
 La Chine, on lands granted him by 
 e.- the Seminary of St. Sulpice, at the 
 most dangerous spot, perhaps, in North 
 America. 
 
 It is clear that La Salle's purpose in com- 
 ing to America was a greater one than to 
 establish himself as landlord of a frightfully 
 dangerous wilderness ; for we find him studying Indian languages and In- 
 dian nature, both of which he came to understand thoroughly and complete- 
 ly. His relations with the natives were always singularly happy. 
 
 The establishment of La Salle at La Chine was a means only to a great 
 er end. In 1669 he made his first expedition of discovery, and it is now 
 generally conceded that in that year and in 1670 he explored the Ohio river 
 at least to the falls at Louisville, rmd possibly to the Mississippi as well as 
 the Illinois river.
 
 LA SALLE'S EARLIER WORK. 23 
 
 In 1674, the discovery of Joliet and Marquette becoming known in Cana- 
 da, disclosed the truth which La Salle had probably come to America to es- 
 tablish. If the latter were the fact, as seems probable, the current of his 
 purpose was thereby changed. Since, therefore, the Spaniards had never 
 taken possession of the Mississippi, it was La Salle's ambition now to profit 
 by that oversight, and by reaching its mouth at the Gulf via the Illinois, he 
 could take verbal possession, at least, of the valley, and by closing the mouth 
 with a fort and by placing others along the rivers from the Lakes to the Gulf, 
 he could hold it against all others, and thus add the best part of a continent 
 to the possessions of Louis XIV. in America. Then the center of French 
 dominion in North America could be transferred from bleak and inhospita- 
 ble Canada to the fertile fields of the fruitful valley, which by agriculture 
 and trade would sooner or later become a mighty empire. It was a grand 
 and eminently practicable conception, which not many years after La Salle's 
 death became the policy of the French government, with what success the 
 history of the Franco-English struggle in America during the eighteenth cen- 
 century amply testifies. 
 
 Returning to France in 1674, La Salle unfolded his great project at the 
 court of Louis the Magnificent. In reward for his discovery of the Ohio he 
 was ennobled ; and having the friendship of Frontenac, the governor of 
 Canada, he obtained liberal grants of lands and exclusive trading privileges 
 both on Lake Ontario and in the new lands of the Illinois country, which he 
 was to explore and settle at his own individual expense, however. 
 
 In the summer of 1679, therefore, he built on Lake Erie the Griffin, the 
 first vessel, except the Indian's canoe, to sail the great lakes ; but while re- 
 turning from Mackinac and Green Bay to Fort Frontenac with her first cargo 
 of furs, the Griffin was lost with all on board. 
 
 La Salle meantime had pushed on to the St. Joseph river, at the mouth 
 of which he built Fort Miamis, thus securing the key to the Illinois via the 
 Kankakee. Here he heard rumors of the loss of the Griffin; but his purpose 
 never faltered. Crossing the portage to the head waters of the Kankakee 
 river, he launched eight canoes with thirty-five men, including the faithful
 
 24 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 Tonty, upon the Illinois, down which he paddled until he came to Starved 
 Rock, or, rather, to the great Indian town " La Vantura," on the plain north 
 and west of the Rock. The town was deserted, but La Salle opened the 
 corn caches of the Indians and removed such as he needed, leaving abundant 
 presents in payment. Then he pushed on to the present Peoria lake, where 
 he built another fort called Crevecoeur, for he was now convinced, by the non- 
 arrival of men and supplies of the Griffin, that his vessel was indeed lost. 
 
 Here he put another boat on the stocks, in which he purposed to sail to 
 the mouth of the Mississippi ; and then, leaving Tonty with fifteen of his 
 men to complete the ship, he started for Canada to repair his loss. It was 
 on this return- journey, depressed by his loss and fearful for the future, that 
 early in March, 1680, he a second time reached the Illinois town La Vantum, 
 now buried in the desolation of very early spring. La Salle's men "saw 
 buffalo wading in the snow, afld they killed one of them."* On the follow- 
 ing day, while the hunters were smoking the meat of the buffalo, La Salle 
 went out to reconnoiter, .and presently met three Indians, one of whom 
 proved to be Chassagoac, the principal chief of the Illinois. The interview 
 (with the latter) was so favorable that the chief at its close promised to be- 
 friend Tonty at Crevecoeur "After several days spent at the deserted 
 town, La Salle prepared to resume his journey," says Parkman. "Before 
 his departure his attention was attracted to the remarkable cliff of yellow 
 sandstone, now called Starved Rock, a mile or more above the village, a 
 natural fortress, which a score of resolute white men might make good 
 against a host of savages ; and [when he arrived at Fort Miamis and found 
 two of his men there waiting for him, he sent by them to] Tonty an order to 
 examine it and make it his stronghold in case of need."f The Rock was 
 indeed admirably adapted for La Salle's purpose. It commanded the river, 
 the highway for all travel from the Lakes to the Gulf, and in addition to be- 
 ing in the midst of a fertile country, it overlooked the great town which 
 would be the center of an immense Indian traffic. 
 
 *PABKMAN : "La Salle," etc., p. 177. 
 fPAKKMAH : "La Salle" etc., p. 178.
 
 Hear ye not the shrill piping sc -earns on the air ? 
 Up, Braves ! For the conflict prepare ye prepare ! 
 Aroused from the canebrake, far south, by your drum, 
 With beaks whet for carnage, the Battle Birds come. 
 ****** 
 
 On the forehead of Earth strikes the Sun in his might, 
 Oh, gibe me with glances as searching as light, 
 In the front of the onslaught to single each crest, 
 Till my hatchet grows red on their bravest and best.* 
 
 Indian War S 
 
 THE IROyUOIS RAID, 
 
 LA SALLE had scarcely bade farewell to Tonty at Crevecreur when eight 
 of the men with the latter, discouraged by the news brought by La 
 Salle's messengers to Tonty from Fort Miamis, of the loss of the Griffin, 
 mutinied, and having plundered the fort and destroyed the ship, deserted 
 while Tonty was examining Starved Rock in accordance with La Salle's 
 order. Having sent four men by different routes to Canada to inform La 
 Salle of this latest disaster, Tonty was left at the Rock with but five white 
 companions, two of whom were Membre and Ribourde, Recollet friars. 
 
 For greater show of confidence, this little band of La Salle's faithful 
 
 *WAB SONG Pe-na-se-wug. From the Algonquin of Schoolcraft, by C. F. Hoffman, 
 See Bchoolcraft's "Western Scenes,"
 
 26 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 followers took up their residence with the Indians, hoping to maintain them- 
 selves until La Salle's return. Here they spent the opening spring and sum- 
 mer. The Illinois among whom they dwelt were an aggregation of distinct 
 though kindred tribes the Kaskaskias, the Peorias, the Kahokias, the Tama- 
 roas, the "Moingona and others,* and were reputed a cowardly and rather 
 contemptible race of Indians. 
 
 The summer had passed uneventfully, and "for the Frenchmen time 
 doubtless hung heavy on their hands ; for nothing can surpass the va- 
 cant monotony of an Indian town when there is neither hunting, nor war, 
 nor feasts, nor dancing, nor gambling to beguile the lagging hours.'' And 
 so out of the interminable monotony came the loth of September ; when 
 "suddenly the village was awakened from its lethargy as by the crash of a 
 thunderbolt." An army of Iroquois from New York had been seen approach- 
 ing to attack them. On the nth the attack came. Tonty and his few men, 
 who then were suspected as allies of the Iroquois and had the day before 
 barely escaped with their lives from the infuriated Illinois, joined with the 
 latter, who were greatly outnumbered by the Iroquois. 
 
 The scene of the struggle was the prairie just at the edge of the woods 
 bordering the Big Vermilion river near its mouth. The Illinois had crossed 
 the river now bearing their name and had attacked the enemy, when Tonty, 
 desirous at all hazards, for the sake of La Salle's interests, of preserving 
 peace, or at least of saving the Illinois from their almost certain massacre, 
 attempted to mediate, and, at infinite personal risk, did obtain a cessation of 
 the battle and a promise from the Iroquois, who were at peace, nominally at 
 least, with the French, to abandon their purpose. 
 
 The Iroquois, however, soon repented and as quickly violated all their 
 promises. Tonty and his followers were compelled to leave the village and 
 that part of the country, while the Iroquois, balked of their living prey, 
 "wreaked their fury on the Illinois dead. They dug up the graves, they 
 threw down the scaffolds. Some of the bodies they burned ; some they threw 
 
 n'AKKMAN : " La Salle," etc., 207 ft
 
 THE IROQUOIS RAID. 2J 
 
 to the dogs ; some, it is affirmed, they ate. "* The Illinois had escaped down 
 the river by keeping together as a compact mass until they reached its mouth. 
 Then some crossed the Mississippi to the western side ; others continued on 
 down the river, while the Tamaroas, remaining near the mouth of the Illi- 
 nois, were destroyed by the Iroquois. 
 
 La Salle with four men reached the scene on his return from Canada 
 in November. But no saluting whoop greeted their ears from the village, as 
 they had expected. ' ' They passed Starved Rock, but as La Salle ascended its 
 lofty top he saw no palisades, no cabins, no sign of human hand, and still 
 its primeval crest of forest overhung the gliding river, "f The town was 
 desolate. They landed. "Before them lay a plain once swarming with 
 wild human life, now a waste of devastation and death. * * Near at band 
 was the burial ground of the village. The travelers sickened with horror as 
 they entered its revolting precincts. * * Every grave had been rifled. A 
 hyena warfare had been waged against the dead. La Salle knew the work 
 of the Iroquois." 
 
 La Salle was consumed with alarm for the fate of Tonty; but finding 
 no trace of white men among the remains, he hoped to find him still alive, and 
 in that hope pushed on to the mouth of the Illinois, trusting to get some 
 clue to his fate or his whereabouts. At the mouth of the river he aban- 
 doned the trail and returned to Fort Miamis, where he spent the winter, 
 while Tonty and his companions, after most fearful suffering, found a 
 refuge at Green Bay. 
 
 *PABEMAN : Ibid., p. 218. This Indian battle is described by Parkman in a most 
 spirited chapter, to which the reader is referred. 
 : Tbid. p. 191 et seq.
 
 STARVED ROCK TORTiriED. 
 
 Strangers came to build a tower, 
 And threw their ashes overland. 
 
 Tli or en n. 
 
 LA SALLE TAKES POSSESSION. 
 
 LA SALLE spent the winter of 1680-81 at Fort Miamis, organizing a 
 league of the western Indians to resist the Iroquois, the league's 
 principal town to be located near the Rock on Illinois river. Then he re- 
 turned to Canada via Mackinac, where he again met Tonty. Having 
 arranged his affairs, he returned in November, 1681, to Fort Miamis, where 
 he found his Indian allies, with eighteen of whom and twenty-three French- 
 men, including Tonty, he set out again for the Illinois. They passed the 
 site of the future Chicago, January 4, 1862, and pushed on without stop- 
 ping to the mouth of the Mississippi, which he reached April 9, 1682, Here 
 La Salle, "in the name of the most high, mighty, invincible Prince, Louis 
 fourteenth of the name," took possession of the country and named it Louisi- 
 ana, "the weather-beaten voyagers joining their voices in the great hymn 
 of Vexilla Regis, which closed the ceremony" 
 
 "The Banners of Heaven's King advance, 
 The mystery of the Cross shines forth." 
 
 "On that day the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous 
 accession " a region that stretched from the Alleghenies to the Rocky 
 Mountains, from the Rio Grande and fhe Gulf to the farthest springs of the 
 Missouri, "all by the virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a 
 mile."* 
 
 *PAHKMAN : "La Salle," etc.
 
 LA SALLE.' 
 
 NOTE. The above portrait is said by Winsor, in " Narrative and 
 Critical History,'' to be based on an engraving preserved in the 
 library of Rouen, entitled " Cavilli de la Salle Fran9ois," and is the 
 only picture of La Salle, except one, meriting notice.
 
 STARVED ROCK FORTIFIED. 2Q 
 
 La Salle had now written his name in history; there remained the 
 greater task of consummating the schemes of his pregnant brain : the founding 
 of a permanent colony on the Illinois and the abandonment of the route to 
 France via Canada for one via Mississippi and the Gulf The Illinois col- 
 ony at Starved Rock, the key of the situation, was to serve " the double pur- 
 pose of a bulwark against the Iroquois and a place of storage for the furs of 
 all the western tribes; and he hoped in the following year to secure an out- 
 let for this colony and for all the trade of the valley of the Mississippi by 
 occupying the mouth of that river by a fort and another colony."* 
 
 At the moment of his triumph, as he returned from the Gulf, La Salle 
 was taken with a dangerous illness and became unable to proceed. He sent 
 Tonty forward to Mackinac, therefore, to dispatch his report to France and 
 then repair to the Rock. In September, however, the two men met at 
 Mackinac, where, hearing a rumor of a coming attack on the western Indi- 
 ans by the Iroquois (which if successful would be the ruination of his pro- 
 ject), La Salle abandoned his intention of going immediately to France, and 
 with Tonty, repaired at once to the Rock, where, in December, 1682, theyi 
 began to entrench themselves. "They cut away the forest that crowned the, 
 Rock, built storehouses and dwellings of its remains, dragged' timber up the: 
 rugged pathway, and encircled the summit with a' palisade." 
 
 Thus the winter passed. The Indians, who saw in La Salle their defense 
 from the Iroquois, "gathered around his stronghold like the timerous peas- 
 antry of the middle ages round the rock built castle of their feudal lord. 
 From the wooden ramparts of St. Louis, high and inaccessible as an eagle's 
 nest, . . . La Salle looked down on a concourse of wild human life. 
 Lodges of bark and rushes, or cabins of logs, were clustered on the open 
 plain or along the edges of the bordering forests Squaws labored, warriors 
 lounged in the sun, naked children whooped and gamboled on the grass 
 Beyond the river, a mile and a half to the left, the banks were studded once 
 more with the lodges of the Illinois, who to the number of six thousand had 
 returned since their defeat to this their favorite dwelling place. Scattered 
 
 *PABKMAN : "La Salle," etc,
 
 LA SALLE'S COLONY 
 
 OB ih. HJiuois , 
 FROM THE MAP OF FRANQUELIN, 
 
 11584,
 
 STARVED ROCK FORTIFIED. 31 
 
 along the valley, or over the neighboring prairie, were the cantonments of a 
 half score of other tribes, and fragmentsof tribes, gathered under the protecting 
 aegis of the French Shawanoes from the Ohio, Abenakis from Maine, Mi- 
 amis from the sources of the Kankakee, with others whose barbarous names 
 are hardly worth the record [in all four thousand warriors, or twenty thou- 
 sand souls] . Nor were these La Salle's only dependents. By the terms of 
 his patent he held seignorial rights over this wild domain; and he now began 
 to grant it out in parcels to his followers. These, however, were as yet but 
 a score; a lawless band, trained in forest license."* 
 
 The village of the Shawanoes was probably located on the edge of the 
 bluff south of Starved Rock, at the intersection of the two ravines, where 
 the remains of their rude earthwork may still be traced. 
 
 *PAEKMAN : '"La SaUe," etc., p. 295 et seq. The Map, p. 30, is from the same work. 
 The picture below is from " Wisconsin," lu "The Stories of the States" series of his- 
 tories. 
 
 faking Possession of Louisiana.
 
 KISMET. 
 
 The sequel of to-day unsolders all 
 The goodliest fellowship of famous Knights 
 Whereof this world has record. Such a sleep 
 They sleep the men I loved. 
 
 Tennyson : ' ' Morte d" 1 Arthur. 
 
 FAILURE AND DEATH 
 
 IN spite of difficulties and hindrances which to other men would have 
 seemed insurmountable, La Salle had succeeded, and the corner stone of a 
 new empire had been laid. It only remained to rear the superstructure on 
 La Salle's foundation. Unfortunately, Frontenac had been recalled and 
 Le Barre in Canada "reigned in his stead." La Salle had his faults; but 
 withal, had Le Barre been his friend, as he might have been, and not his 
 enemy, as he was, the course of American history might have been changed. 
 
 La Salle plead with Le Barre for his rights and to be freed from the 
 machinations of courtiers, fur traders and an unfriendly priesthood, but all 
 in vain. The colony in its present state was, therefore, foreordained to fail- 
 ure. Whereupon La Salle, leaving the faithful Tonty to protect his 
 interests on the Illinois, proceeded to France to organize a colony which 
 should proceed to the Illinois via the Gulf and the Mississippi, taking pos- 
 session of the mouth of the latter; and thus La Salle and the Illinois could 
 be freed from their perennial menace, the provincial government at Quebec 
 
 As always at the court of Louis, La Salle was successful. Several ves- 
 sels and some four hundred colonists sailed in 1684 for the Mississippi, 
 while La Forest was specially commissioned to take command of La Salle's 
 property in Canada, and Tonty restored to the command at Fort St. Louis,
 
 FAILURE AND DEATH. 
 
 3:1 
 
 Le Barre being in a letter accompaning these commissions especially scourged 
 by his royal master, the King. 
 
 Unfortunately, the command of the vessels while at sea was given to 
 another; there was friction among the leaders, and finally a storm drove 
 them to a haven west of the mouth of the great river, and a landing was ef- 
 fected on the shore of the present state of Texas. The rest is a tale of mis- 
 erable disappointment, suffering, treachery, failure and death. While mak- 
 ing a journey in search of the lost Mississippi La 
 Salle was murdered by his own men on Trinity 
 river, Texas, March 19, 1687. A few of the col- 
 onists, including his brother, Jean Cavelier, and the 
 faithful Joutel, reached Fort St. Louis (Starved 
 Rock); a few had returned to France; the rest mis- 
 serably perished. 
 
 "Thus in the vigor of his manhood, at the age 
 of forty-three, died Robert Gavelier de la Salle, 
 ' one of the greatest men,' writes Tonty, 'of the 
 age'; without question one of the most remarkable 
 explorers whose names live in history." 
 
 "It is easy to reckon up his defects, but it is 
 not easy to hide from sight the Roman virtues 
 that redeemed them," writes Parkman. "Beset 
 by a throng of enemies, he stands, like the King 
 of Isarel, head and shoulders above them all. He 
 was a tower of adamant, against whose impregna- 
 ble front hardship and danger, the rage of man 
 and of the elements, the southern sun, the north- 
 ern blast, fatigue, famine and disease, delay, dis- 
 appointment and deferred hope emptied their 
 quivers in vain. That very pride, which Coriola- 
 nus like, declared itself most sternly in the thickest
 
 NOTE. This is a reproduction (from Windsor: "Narrative and Critical History of Amer- 
 ica") of a reproduction in Margry's "Memories," etc., of an old copper plate published a 
 few years after La Salle's death. It was by Van der Gucht, and appears in the London edi- 
 tion (1608) of Hennepin's "New Discovery." The face of La Salle, enlarged, appears as the 
 initial to a previous chapter of this "Sketch" (p. 22.)
 
 FAILURE AND DEATH. 35 
 
 press of foes, has in it something to challenge admiration. Never, under 
 the impenetrable mail of paladin or crusader, beat a heart of more intrepid 
 metal than within the stoic panoply that armed the breast of La Salle. To 
 estimate aright the marvels of his patient fortitude one must follow his 
 track through the vast scene of his interminable journeyings, those thousands 
 of weary miles of forest, marsh and river, where again and again, in the bit- 
 terness of baffled striving, the untiring pilgrim pushed onward toward the 
 goal which he never was to attain. America owes him an enduring memo- 
 ry; for, in this masculine figure, she sees the pioneer who guided her to the 
 possession of her richest heritage." 
 
 The Lambert Tree Statue of La Salle, 
 Lincoln Park, Chicago.
 
 LA SALLE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 His step is firm, his eye is keen, 
 Nor years in brawl and battle spent, 
 Nor toil, nor wounds, nor pain have bent 
 
 The lordly frame of old Castin. 
 
 Scott. 
 
 TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO. 
 
 A veteran of the Sicilian wars, in which he had a hand blown off by a 
 grenade, whom La Salle met in Paris in 1678, is one of the most superb 
 figures in the annals of the Mississippi valley. His industry and energy, 
 his bravery and his tact, his integrity and his faithfulness, his honorable 
 character and amiable disposition, unite to differentiate him from all 
 those whose names as the lesser stars crowd the earlier pages of those an- 
 nals. Parkman calls him, " That brave, loyal and generous man, always vig- 
 ilant and always active, beloved and feared alike by white man and by red." 
 Mrs. Catherwood* says : "La Salle is a definite figure in the popular mind 
 But La Salle's greater friend is known only to historians and students. To 
 me the finest fact in the Norman explorer's career is the devotion he com- 
 manded in Henri de Tonty. No stupid dreamer, no ruffian at heart, no be- 
 trayer of friendships, no mere blundering woodsman as La Salle has been 
 outlined by his enemies could have bound to himself such a man as Tonty. 
 
 *MBS. MARY HABTWELL CATHKBWOOD : "The Story of Tonty."
 
 ME UBftABY 
 OF m 
 
 UNIVERSITY Of ILL
 
 LA SALLE'S SUCCESSORS. 37 
 
 The love of this friend, and the words this friend has left on record, thus 
 honor La Salle. And we who like courage and steadfastness and gentle 
 courtesy in man owe much honor which has never been paid to Henri de 
 Tonty." 
 
 Tonty, while La Salle was making his last voyage to France, was removed 
 from the command of Fort St Louis by order of Le Barre, who was deter- 
 mined to ruin La Salle ; but he remained to keep watch and ward over La 
 Salle's interests at La Rocher. The next year, however, the King reinstated 
 him as La Salle's commandant at the Rock. He no sooner heard at Macki- 
 nac of La Salle's landing and earlier disasters on the Gulf, than he prepared 
 at his own cost an expedition for his relief, composed of twenty-five French- 
 men and eleven Indians. He went to the mouth of the Mississippi, but find- 
 ing no trace of the colony, returned to the Arkansas, where six of his men 
 volunteered to remain, two of whom afterwards rescued La Salle's brother. 
 Cavelier, Joutel and others, who, with unpardonable ingratitude, carefully 
 concealed the fact of La Salle's death, even while they accepted for months 
 Tonty's hospitality on Starved Rock, and took from him, on La Salle's con- 
 tingent order written before his death, furs sufficient to carry Cavelier, at 
 least, in good circumstances back to France. 
 
 Tonty after La Salle's death, remained some time in command of Fort St. 
 Louis as La Salle's representative. In 1690, however, he addressed a peti- 
 tion to Ponchartrain, the minister at Paris, reciting that though he was 
 commissioned and had served as captain for many years, he had received no 
 pay. Frontenac, who by this time was again Governor of Canada, endorsed 
 Tonty's petition, in consequence of which he and La Forest, another faith- 
 ful lieutenant of La Salle, were granted the proprietorship of Fort St. Louis, 
 where they carried on a trade in furs. 
 
 The station was a most important one, as we have seen, both politically 
 and commercially. It was the most considerable Indian village in the Illi- 
 nois country, having a population ranging, according to circumstances, from 
 nothing to twenty thousand souls, but averaging, at times of peace, about 
 eight thousand. The lodges were built along the river bank for a distance
 
 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 of a mile or more, while the meadows were extensively cultivated, yielding 
 large crops, chiefly of Indian corn. 
 
 In 1696, the King issued an order "abandoning Mackillimackinac and 
 other outposts on the lakes, as well as all other advanced posts except Fort 
 St. Louis, in the Illinois, which the King wishes maintained on condition 
 that Sieurs De la Forest and Tonti, to whom he reserves the concession, 
 should not bring or cause to be brought any beaver into the colony." Char- 
 levoix* says : " I have been unable to ascertain on 
 whose advice the King's council adopted this reso- 
 lution. The excursions of the Canadians into new 
 countries certainly ruined the commerce of New 
 France [Canada] ; introduced frightful libertinage; 
 rendered the nation contemptible among all the 
 tribes on the continent, and raised insurmounta- 
 ble obstacles to the progress of religion." 
 
 Whatever the cause of the above order, it is 
 true that during the few years after La Salle's 
 death the influence and trade of the Rock de- 
 clined, both because of the dispersion of the resi- 
 dent tribes by Indian raids, and also because the 
 influences at work in Canada against La Salle and 
 his project had succeeded in changing the route 
 to the Mississippi from the Illinois to that via the 
 Fox river portage to the Wisconsin, f 
 
 In 1702 Tonty was directed to join D'Iberville 
 in lower Louisiana, while La Forest was recalled 
 to Canada. Then for the first time the fort was of- 
 ficially abandoned. It was re-occupied from time 
 to time by coureurs des bois, as an illicit trading 
 post, and formally again in 1718, when a number 
 
 
 *CHABLEVOIX : "'History of New France," V., 181. 
 fWALLAOE : "Illinois and Louisiana under French 
 Rule." 
 
 Canyon near Starved Rock.
 
 LA SALLE'S SUCCESSORS. 
 
 of traders resided there; but when Charlevoix passed down the river in 1721 
 he found it abandoned, only the ruins of its palisades remaining.* 
 
 But little is known of Tonty after he joined D'Iberville; and Charlevoix 
 says he died at Fort St. Louis on the Mobile river, at about the age of fifty- 
 four. N. Matson.f of Princeton, in his lifetime a collector of Indian and 
 French Indian reminiscences, has printed a tradition, which he says he 
 heard from descendants of the old coureurs, old residents now on the Amer- 
 ican Bottom, who had it as it was handed down from father to son, as was 
 the custom among primitive peoples everywhere. The story is that Tonty, 
 years after 1702, returned to the Rock, an old and broken man, where he 
 died, revealing his identity at the supreme moment to the awe-struck Ind- 
 ians and traders who had borne him to the summit where he had so long 
 commanded. Let us hope, if Tonty's brave heart and gentle spirit could 
 find solace and rest dying here, that it was so. But if, as this legend further 
 says, Tonty's body was buried at the foot of Starved Rock where the waters 
 of the quiet Illinois would wash its southern segment, the living of to-day 
 have still a duty to perform: the erection of a stone to mark his last resting 
 place. 
 
 *PABKMAN : "LaSalle, etc.," 411. Note. 
 
 fMATSON : "French and Indians on Illinois River."
 
 THE MISSIONS. 
 
 Oh, the generations old, 
 
 Over whom no church-bells tolled, 
 
 Christless, lifting up blind eyes 
 
 To the silence of the skies. 
 The bells of the Roman mission 
 
 That call from their turrets twain 
 To the boatman on the river, 
 
 To the hunter on the plain. 
 
 Whittier. 
 
 THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION. 
 
 THE earlier American Catholic missionaries to the Indians of North 
 America were to a degree distinguished for " heroic self-devotion, ener- 
 gy of purpose, purity of motive, holiness of design." Nowhere can be found 
 ' ' more that is sublime even to eyes blinded by the glare of human greatness ' ' 
 than in the biographies of these martyrs of the American wilderness. Park- 
 man's volume, "The Jesuits in North America," is one continuous tale of 
 Christian heroism and zeal, which has not been surpassed by any age of the 
 church in any clime. The missionaries who sacrificed all things, suffered all 
 things, endured all things, had not all passed from earth until these men, at 
 least, had met death for Christ's sake and his church. 
 
 We have seen how, in 1675, the gentle Marquette, the last of this line 
 of Jesuit martyrs, established at the Illinois town the mission which he called 
 the "Immaculate Conception"; how, reaching the village, April 8, he went 
 from cabin to cabin instructing the inmates. "Then, when all were suffi- 
 ciently aware of the doctrines of the Cross to follow his discourse, he con- 
 voked a general meeting on a beautiful prairie. There before their wonder-
 
 THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION. 4! 
 
 ing eyes he raised his altar, and .' . . they beheld him offer the holy 
 sacrifice of the mass, on the very day when, over sixteen centuries before, the 
 God he preached had instituted it in the upper room in Jerusalem. Thus on 
 Maundy Thursday was possession taken of Illinois in the name of Catholicity 
 of Jesus and of Mary."* 
 
 * Two years later the indefatiga- 
 
 f f /7j[/0V / J^T C&&t{-& / } ~ ble Claude Allouez was sent to 
 ^-* \_2 Kaskaskia, as this great town 
 
 was known to the churchmen. He arrived April 27, 1676, and was immedi- 
 ately lodged in Marquette's cabin. He worked hard, and on May 3, the feast 
 of the Invention of the Holy Cross, he erected in the midst of the village a 
 cross twenty-five feet high ; but though he baptised thirty-five infants and 
 one adult, his mission at that time has not been counted a success. He was 
 ngain at Kaskaskia in 1678, remaining until 1679, when he retired before the 
 approach of La Salle. 
 
 Though La Salle had an aversion to the Jesuits in general, who, he al- 
 ways believed, and with pome reason, were his enemies, and a dislike to 
 Allouez in particular, he was still a profoundly religious man, and was inva- 
 riably accompanied in his expeditions by the " Black Gowns," notably the 
 Recollet fathers Gabriel de la Ribourde, Zenobius Membre and Louis Hen- 
 nepin In the year 1680 the two former took up the work abandoned by 
 Allouez, and were with Tonty on the memorable day described on pages 26 
 and 27. After their escape from the Iroquois, Tonty and his Frenchmen and 
 the two Fathers embarked, September 18, for Green Bay. On the next 
 day, when the men were repairing their injured canoe, the aged Fathej Ri- 
 bourde retired apart to say his breviary. While thus engaged, he was met 
 by a party of Kickapoos, out against the Iroquois, who ruthlessly murdered 
 him.f Thus, in his seventieth year, and in the fortieth of his priesthood, 
 perished this last scion of a noble Burgundian house, who had renounced the 
 world and its honors and the comforts of Europe for the wilds of Canada 
 and a martyr's death. 
 
 *SHBA : ''Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United States." 
 tSHEA : Ibid.
 
 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 In 1680 Allouez returned to the mission, remaining there until Cavelier, 
 Joutel, Father Douay and the other survivors of La Salle's ill-fated colony 
 arrived from Texas, As these men falsely said that La Salle was still alive 
 and on his way to the Rock, Allouez again retired. Little is known of him 
 after this time, except that he died at La Salle's Fort Miamis in 1690, leav- 
 ing a name imperishably connected with the discovery of the Great West. 
 The year Allouez left Kaskaskia, Father James Gravier visited Illinois, 
 but at that time his mission did not become a permanent one ; and the real 
 successor of Allouez was the famous Sebastian Rale, who was sent thither 
 from Quebec, arriving in the spring of 1682. He found a town of three 
 
 hundred cabins, of four to five fires each, two 
 families to a fire; and a banquet in his hon- 
 or was given by the head chief. Yet, though 
 he was heartily welcomed, the faith he 
 preached made but slow progress. After a 
 two years' stay with the Illinois, Father Rale 
 was recalled to his original charge, the Abe- 
 nakis on the Kennebec river in Maine * 
 
 Father Gravier came a second time to 
 the Kaskaskia mission in March, 1694, and 
 built a chapel within the fort on Starved 
 Rock, by Tonty's permission. He also built 
 a second chapel outside the fort among the 
 Indians, and "planted before it a towering 
 cross amid the shouts and musketry of the 
 French." He remained in general -charge 
 of the mission until 1697, when he was re- 
 called to Mackinac. He was succeeded 
 by Fathers Julius Binneteau and James 
 Pinet. 
 
 Widow's Run Canyon. 
 
 *His career there is intensely interesting; anrl 
 will be found in detail in Francis Park man's " A 
 Half Century of Conflict" Vol. 1.
 
 THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION. 43 
 
 Father Gravier's mission seems to have been the most successful of all, 
 in which work he was not a little assisted by Mary, daughter of the chief 
 and wife of Michael Ako (or d'Acau.) Ako was probably one of Hennepin's 
 companions in his voyage up the Mississippi, who on his return to the Illi- 
 nois wished to marry the Indian maiden against her will but with the consent 
 of her father. Father Gravier sided with the maiden, who at length yielded 
 to her parent's wish in the hope that she might, by this self-sacrifice, be the 
 means of bi inging both Ako and her parents into the fold of Christ. Ultimate- 
 ly her wish we are told by Dr. Shea, in a sympathetic chapter, was fully 
 gratified, she having been the means of bringing many souls to the church. 
 Father Gravier was the first to analyze the Illinois language and compile 
 its grammar and its dictionary, but none of his works are said now to exist 
 except in bare fragments. 
 
 In 1698 came Father Marest, under whose guidance and direction the 
 mission was removed to the new Kaskaskia (the Kaskaskia of our time the 
 first capital of the state of Illinois), on the banks of the Mississippi. This 
 migration of missionaries and Indians, which took place in the year 1699, 
 was the natural result of the decay of the Rock's importance as a military 
 and commercial point, and of a desire for consolidation by the western, or 
 Illinois, tribes against the Iroquois and those firebrands of the west, the 
 Foxes. 
 
 [NOTE. Those who are interested in th > anitlso" the in'ssions may consult Wal- 
 lace and Shea, supva; also John Kip's '''Jesuit Mis.-siorm''" and " Illinois in the Eigh- 
 tsenth Century" (B'ergus Historical Series), b> H-n E. G. Mason.] 
 
 *?
 
 THE DRAMA OE THE EIGHTEENTH 
 CENTURY. 
 
 God said, I am tired of kings, 
 I suffer them no more; 
 
 * * * * 
 
 My angel, his name is Freedom, 
 Choose him to be your King; 
 He shall cut pathways east and wt-st, 
 And fend you with his wing. 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 THE SCENERY OF TRAGEDY. 
 
 ^ TARVED ROCK played its humble role -or, rather, was a part of the 
 . 3 mise en scene of the momentous drama of the eighteenth century, when 
 the great struggle took place between freedom and absolutism for the pos- 
 session of the fairest and greatest part of the North American continent 
 When the century opened, the French empire in America was at the flood 
 tide of its prosperity. The triple alliance of priest, soldier and trader had 
 with unerring instinct and judgment taken possession of every route to the 
 interior of the continent, and had so united the native tribes in the French 
 interest that Canada and her western frontier were deemed so secure that, 
 as we have seen, most of the distant garrisons were withdrawn as unneces- 
 sary to the preservation of colonial autonomy. In the far South, though La 
 Salle's schemes had come to naught, they had been revived seven years after 
 his death by Tonty, who had successfully "urged the seizure of Louisiana 
 for three reasons: firstly, as a base of attack upon Mexico; secondly, as a 
 depot for the furs and lead ores of the interior; and thirdly, as the only 
 means of preventing the English from becoming masters of the west."* 
 
 *PARKMAN : "A Half Century of Conflict."
 
 THE SCENERY OF TRAGEDY. 45 
 
 More successful than La Salle, D'Iberville, though he built his fort at 
 Biloxi [state of Mississippi] and not on the river, had actually taken possession 
 of the mouth of the Mississippi, thus outwitting the English, who were in fact 
 on the point of seizing the river, and retarding for more than a hundred 
 years the development of Louisiana on lines of English freedom. New 
 France had, therefore, two heads: one looking to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, 
 the other to the Gulf of Mexico; and if the northern wing of the empire hnd 
 its hardly concealed jealousy of the southern end, it nevertheless appreciated 
 the value of the latter as an aid to stem the incoming tide of English influ- 
 ence in the north. 
 
 One strategic mistake only had the builders of the Franco-American 
 empire made, but it was vital irremediable: they had neglected the Mohawk 
 and Hudson rivers of New York, which were occupied by the Dutch, who 
 were even shrewder traders than the French and more far-seeing Up to 
 about this time, too, the English had been content to occupy as agricultur- 
 ists a narrow strip along the Atlantic coast, where they busied themselves, 
 and, fortunately for future generations, worried themselves, too, and their 
 governors, with questions of political and religious rights and privileges, 
 rather than with what the continent contained behind the Appalachian wall 
 which few of them cared to penetrate or to cross. The Hudson and the Mo- 
 hawk rivers however pierced that wall; and when now the Dutch possessions 
 in New York came into the hands of the English, the character of the Al- 
 bany colony did not wholly change, but the Englishman began to appreci- 
 ate the possibilities of the vast interior for trade; for he even then was a 
 more successful trader than even the Dutchman. 
 
 For twenty five years the English traders had been established on Hud- 
 son's Bay, diverting the northern trade of New France from the St. Law- 
 rence. If now the English should also get a foot-hold on the Great Lakes and 
 in the famous beaver country of the present Michigan peninsula, the northern 
 wing of New France would be hemmed within very narrow limits indeed, 
 and her trade ruined by the cheaper and better goods of the Yankees. 
 
 The cession to the English by the Iroquois in 170: of all their claims to
 
 STARVED ROCK I A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 the country formerly occupied by the Hurons precipitated the struggle 
 which the shrewd Count Frontenac had long foreseen, but which the politi- 
 co-clerical influence with his successors and the proverbial corruption of 
 the court at Quebec had left the colony more or less unprepared to meet. 
 These Iroquois lands were bounded by the Lakes Ontario, Huron and Erie, 
 "containing in length about 800 miles and in breadth 400 miles, including 
 the country where beavers and all sorts of wild game keep."* They 
 pierced the very heart of New France. 
 
 The problem, then, that confronted the French authorities at Quebec 
 was how to stem this unpropitious tide. The building of a Fort at Detroit 
 by La Mothe Cadillac was the first step in opposition. Another step in the 
 same direction brings us back again to Starved Rock and the Illinois. 
 
 : " The Old Northwest,"
 
 STARVED ROCK IN THE EIGHTEENTH 
 CENTURY. 
 
 Freedom all winged expands, 
 
 Nor perches in a narrow place; 
 
 Her broad van seeks unplanted lands. 
 
 Emerson. 
 
 THE INDIAN SIEGES. 
 
 HEREVER the French came in contact with them, their rela- 
 tions to the Indians were for the most part singularly felicitous. 
 This fact may find explanation, aside from the natural adapta- 
 bility of the French, in the circumstance that they made no effort 
 to dispossess the Indians of their lands or hunting grounds. It was, at least 
 tacitly, agreed that the savages should be left in undisturbed possession of 
 the whole of the vast domain of the West on condition that they allowed the 
 French to control or monopolize its trade.* Besides, the conreurs des bois, 
 who made New France and built the chain of forts which bound the West 
 to Canada, though proud of their French blood and language, were in the 
 bush quite as much Indian as French, and thus they had immense influence 
 over them. Above all, the conreurs hated the English; and being the 
 shrewdest of diplomats they won over the Indians to themselves, and both pa- 
 trolled the forests and lakes as against the venturesome Englishmen. Even 
 the Iroquois had become neutral for the time, and the destiny of America 
 seemed already decided; for " the lilies of France floated without opposition 
 over the entire expanse from Quebec to the mouth of the Mississippi, and 
 from the Alleghenies to the base of the Rocky Mountains." f 
 
 *HEBBEED : " Wisconsin under the Dominion of France." 
 
 tHEBBEKD : Ibid.
 
 48 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 But thi curse of Canada was the monopoly held by the one trading com- 
 pany which had legal control of all the commerce of the colony, and whose 
 goods were not only poorer but were extortionately high as compared with 
 those of the English. The Indians were not slow to discover this difference, 
 and they began to chafe under the French trading yoke. This was especi- 
 ally true of the Foxes of Wisconsin, a nation whose renown for bravery, in- 
 dependence, intractability and endurance was then second to that of no 
 tribe of the West. The behavior of the Foxes so exasperated the French 
 authorities that it was understood (at least among the Indian allies of the 
 French) that the governor desired the utter extermination of the Fox nation.* 
 The massacre of a large part of them at Detroit in 1712 may or may not have 
 been deliberately planned by the French; but it seems to have been so under- 
 stood by the allies, who, after the siege was, over wherein several hundred 
 Foxes were butchered, set out for Quebec to claim the reward which they 
 insisted the governor had promised for the Foxes' destruction.! 
 
 The tragedy at Detroit,^: though it crippled the Fox nation, did not de- 
 stroy it, nor break the spirit of these indomitable savages; it only deepened 
 their dislike of the French into a grim and undying hatred. After a short 
 truce, during which they made an alliance with the Sioux, the Foxes, in 
 small war parties, began to harrass the Illinois, so that by 1714 the latter 
 were practically driven away from their old homes on the Illinois never to 
 return, having settled under the protecting arms of the French at Kaskaskia 
 nnd Fort Chartres on the Mississippi. Indeed, the Foxes by their settle- 
 ment on Fox river of Wisconsin and their destruction of the Illinois, had be- 
 come virtual masters of both lines of travel between the east and the west, 
 and communication between France and Louisiana became extremely difficult 
 and dangerous. In fact, they had almost split the empire of New France 
 asunder. 
 
 The situation had become desperate, therefore; and in 1716 De Lou- 
 vingy was sent with eight hundred French and Indian allies to crush the 
 
 *HEBBERD: '" Wisconsin,''' etc. 
 
 tPABKMAN : " Half Century of Conflict." %Ibid.
 
 THE INDIAN SIEGES. 
 
 Foxes at their Wisconsin village. The latter were again badly punished, 
 and gave hostages to preserve peace; but when, 1718, it appeared that but 
 one of the hostages remained alive and he had lost an eye, the Foxes again 
 became restless and soon began anew to harrass the Illinois tribes.* 
 
 At length the crisis came. The Illinois in 1722 captured the nephew of 
 Oushala, the principal Fox war-chief, and burned him alive; on which the 
 Foxes attacked them, drove them to the top of Starved Rock for refuge, and 
 held them there at mercy. This Illinois tribe was the Peorias, the last of 
 the tribes to cling to the famous stronghold ofrLa Salle at Starved Rock, all 
 the other tribes having fled to the west./ '.'Unluckily we know nothing 
 of the details of the siege, except the number of the slain: twenty Pe- 
 orias and one hundred and twenty of the besiegers," says Hebberd.f 
 "But the bare figures are eloquent; they tell not of a mere blockade, but of 
 fierce assaults, storming parties, desperate attempts to scale the heights the 
 old story of Foxes' fury and reckless courage." 
 
 News of this attack on the Peorias having reached Fort Chartres, a de- 
 tachment of a hundred men, commanded by Chevalier d'Artaguiette and 
 Sieur de Tisne, was sent to their assistance. Before this reinforcement 
 reached the Rock, however, the Foxes raised the siege and departed. The 
 Peorias, nevertheless, abandoned their Illinois home, which they had occu- 
 pied up to this time, and united with the other tribe at, Kaskaskia, so that 
 after all the Foxes had been successful and again had control of the very 
 heart of New France, the Illinois river.:}: "It was a grave disaster for the 
 French," Charlevoix says; "for now that there is nothing to check the 
 raids of the Foxes, communication between .Canada and Louisiana be- 
 came less practicable."^ 
 
 At Versailles this last offense of the Foxes seemed unpardonable, and 
 the colonial minister declared that "The Outagamies [Foxes] must be effect 
 
 * PARKMAN : "Half century of Conflict.'" 
 fHEBBERD : '' Wisconsin under the Dominion of France." 
 tBECKWiTH: "The Illinois and Indiana Indians." 
 
 CHARLEYOIX : "History of New France." A famous traveler of the early 18th 
 century.
 
 50 STARVED ROCK \ A HISTORICAL SKETCtf. 
 
 ually put down, and that his Majesty will reward the officer who will reduce, 
 or rather destroy, them."* In 1728, therefore, Sieur de Lignery went from 
 Quebec with five hundred French and a thousand Indians to destroy the 
 Foxes. In August, they burned the Indians' village in Wisconsin and de- 
 stroyed their crops, but the nimble Foxes escaped him. 
 
 In 1730, Coulon de Villiers, who in 1754 defeated George Washington at 
 Fort Necessity, appeared at Quebec with the news that his father, com- 
 mander of the old Fort Miamis on St. Joseph river, had struck the Foxes a 
 severe blow, killing two hundred of their warriors and six hundred women 
 and children. Villiers' force of one hundred and seventy Frenchmen had been 
 gathered from various western posts and was assisted by twelve to thirteen 
 hundred Indian allies, under Sieurs de Saint-Ange, father and son, from the 
 Illinois settlements, and De Noyelles, from among the Miamis in Indiana. 
 
 "The accounts of the affair are obscure and not very trustworthy," 
 says Parkman.f ''It seems that the Foxes began the fray by an attack on 
 the Illinois at La Salle's old station of La Rocher [Starved Rock], on the 
 river Illinois. On hearing of this the French commanders mustered their 
 Indian allies, hastened to the spot, and found the Foxes intrenched in a grove 
 which they had surrounded with a stockade." 
 
 "The battle began on the igth of August, 1730, and lasted twenty-two 
 days," says Hebberd,| who bases his account upon the narrative of Ferland.^ 
 " The Foxes had chosen an admirable position in a piece of woods upon a 
 gentle slope by the side of a small river. Although outnumbered four to one, 
 they fought with their usual dash and valor, making many desperate sorties, 
 but were each time driven back by the overwhelming numbers of the enemy. 
 The French, on their part, dug trenches and proceeded with all the caution 
 they had been taught by many campaigns against these redoubtable foes. 
 
 " After a while the supply of food gave out, and famine reigned in both 
 camps. The Foxes and the French suffered alike under the calm, cruel im- 
 
 *HARKMAN : ' Half Century of Conflict" 
 
 fPAKKMAN : Ibid. 
 
 ^HEBBBRD: " Wisconsin," etc. 
 
 jFERLAND : ''Cours (THistoire du Canada."
 
 THE INDIAN SIEGES. 5! 
 
 partiality of nature. Two hundred Illinois Indians deserted. But the French 
 persevered, and began the construction of a fort to prevent the besieged 
 from going to the river for water. Further resistance now seemed impossi- 
 ble. But on the 8th of September a violent storm arose, accompanied by 
 heavy thunder and torrents of rain. The following night was rainy, dark 
 and cold ; and under its cover the Foxes stole away from their fort. Before 
 they had gone far the crying of their children betrayed them But the French 
 did not dare to attack them amidst a darkness so dense that it was impossi- 
 ble to distinguish friend from foe. In the morning, however, they set out in 
 hot pursuit." 
 
 The pursuit became a mere massacre (the Foxes being then without 
 ammunition), from which only fifty or sixty of the Foxes escaped. Many of 
 them were burned at the stake. And the Canadian governor's report to Paris 
 closes with the cheering news : "Behold a nation humiliated in such a fash- 
 ion that they will nevermore trouble the earth." 
 
 In truth " the offending tribe must now, one would think, have ceased 
 to be dangerous," but nothing less than its total destruction would content 
 the French.* The French, however, never afterwards sent an expedition 
 against the Foxes, but turned them over to the tender mercies of their allies, 
 especially the Hurons, their deadly enemies. But even they failed to anni- 
 hilate these splendid savages, the remnant of whom allied themselves with 
 the Sauks, a tribe who, as the Sauks and Foxes, were a continued menace 
 to the frontier, and, in 1832, rose in open war with the United States au- 
 thorities under their famous chief Black Hawk. 
 
 Though they met the fate of all their race, nevertheless the Foxes un- 
 consciously, as has been seen, played an important part in shaping the des- 
 tiny of the continent ; for it was no slight service to liberty as opposed to 
 absolutism that they closed the gateway between Canada and Louisiana and 
 for thirty years virtually kept it closed, thus preventing the consolidation 
 of New France and paving the way for the Anglo-Saxon conquest and occu- 
 pation when the time was ripe for that happy event. 
 
 *PABKMAN : '"Half Century of Conflict."
 
 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 Starved Rock, then, as the spot where took place the most important 
 of those struggles between the French and their unconquerable savage foes, 
 thus became a by no means insignificant part of the scenery of that greater 
 contest of races and ideas which ultimately closed by "handing the conti- 
 nent over to its rightful inheritors, the freemen of America." 
 
 ROBERT CAVELIER SIEUR DE LA SALLE. 
 
 [Louis Hennepin's " Nouvelle Decouverte," London Edition 
 
 of 1^88. The picture is interesting, but as a portrait 
 
 it has absolutely no value.]
 
 STARVED ROCK, FROM THE EAST.
 
 IHfcllBKARY 
 
 Of" 1H 
 UNIVERSITY Of ILLINOIS
 
 THE LAST OP THE ILLINOIS. 
 
 Under the hollow sky, 
 Stretched on the prairie lone, 
 
 Center of glory, I, 
 Bleeding, disdain to groan, 
 
 But like a battle-cry 
 Peal forth my thunder moan. 
 
 Bairn wah wah ! 
 
 Hark to those spirit notes ! 
 Ye high heroes divine, 
 
 Hymned from your god-like throats 
 That song of praise is mine ! 
 
 Mine, whose grave-pennon floats 
 O'er the foeman's line. 
 
 Bairn wah wah ! 
 
 Death Song.* 
 
 :'; 
 THE FINAL TRAGEDY. 
 
 IT is generally believed that the tragedy which gave 
 Starved Rock its suggestive name was a part of the 
 aftermath of the wars of the conspiracy of Pontiac ; 
 yet really authentic accounts of this occurrence are 
 so few and of so uncertain authority that Beckwithf 
 insists there is really no authority at all to support it, 
 other than the "vague, though charming, traditions 
 drawn from the wonder stories of many tribes." Yet 
 JUDGE CATON. no reader of this sketch will, I hope, be willing, how- 
 
 ever meagre our authority, to surrender, at Mr. Beckwith's dictum, so pa- 
 
 * DEATH SONG : "4 be tuh ge zhig." Algonquin by bchoolcraft ; English by C. F. 
 Hoffman. 
 
 tBEOKWiTH : "Illinois and Indiana Indians."
 
 54 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 thetic and picturesque a tale, hallowed as it is by the faith in its truth of our 
 pioneer predecessors, who have woven the tale into the very fabric of local 
 historical tradition. There is nothing in the least improbable in the legend ; 
 rather, there is much to support the affirmations of Indian, French and Amer- 
 ican traditions, that the tragedy of the obliteration by starvation here of a 
 race of dusky warriors did actually take place as residents of the Illinois 
 valley have been led to believe for at least seventy-five years. 
 
 It is not proposed to dwell on the Conspiracy of Pontiac. The stu- 
 dent and the reader of romances alike will find the record in Parkman's vol 
 umes bearing that title: a broad historic projection for the student; history 
 as charmingly told as romance for the general reader. Suffice it here to say, 
 that a few days before his death, in 1769, Pontiac made his old friend, Pierre 
 Chouteau, the trader, a visit at St. Louis ; and while there heard of an Ind- 
 ian drinking bout or other festivities about to be held at Cahokia. Thither 
 Pontiac went, in April, 1769, and while drunk, was, at the instigation of an 
 Englishman, murdered, for the bribe of a barrel of whisky, by a Kaskaskia 
 Indian. 
 
 The murder set the whole Illinois country aflame. "The news spread 
 like lightning through the country," says one account, quoted by Parkman.* 
 "The Indians assembled in great numbers, attacked and destroyed all the 
 Peorias, except about thirty families, which were received into fortChartres." 
 All the authorities agree that the murder " brought on successive wars, and 
 the almost total extermination of the Illinois." Parkman's own text says : 
 "Could Pontiac's shade have revisited the scene of his murder, his savage 
 spirit would have exulted in the vengeance which overwhelmed the abettors 
 of the crime. Whole tribes were rooted out to expiate it. Chiefs and sa- 
 chems, whose veins had thrilled with his eloquence ; young warriors, whose 
 aspiring hearts had caught the inspiration of his greatness, mustered to re- 
 venge his fate ; and from the north and the east, their united bands descend- 
 ed on the villages of the Illinois. Tradition has but faintly preserved the 
 memory of the event ; and its only annalists, men who held the intestine 
 
 *PABKMAN : "Conspiracy of Pontiac" Vol. II. p. 313- note 
 
 \
 
 THE FINAL TRAGEDY. 
 
 55 
 
 feuds of the savage tribes in no more account than the quarrels of panthers 
 or wildcats, have left but a meagre record. Yet enough remains to tell us 
 that over the grave of Pontiac more blood was poured out in atonement than 
 fLwed from the veins of the slaughtered heroes on the corpse of Patroclus; 
 and the remnant of the Illinois who survived the carnage remained forever 
 after sunk in u ter insignificance." 
 
 The specific incident with which the nam : of Starved Rock is indisso- 
 lubly linked is nowhere mentioned by the trav^le s' tales or military reports 
 of the time, nor are the Pottawatomie Indians named in connection with the 
 revenge wreaked by Pontiac's Indian friends Nevertheless, the Pottawato- 
 mie Indians, who had by this time come into possession of most of the lands 
 in Illinois formerly held by the tribes who are named as a whole as the Illi- 
 nois, were on the ground at this time, and without doubt took their partjn 
 the general fighting. 
 
 The "wonder story" which Mr. Beckwith cites as the most interesting 
 of those preserving this tradition is that published by the late Judge Caton, 
 in a pamphlet.entitled, "The Last of the Illinois, and a Sketch of the Potta- 
 watomies " The Judge in this sketch says that the wars against the Illinois 
 tribes had so reduced them in numbers that now, in their direst extremity, 
 driven hither as a last refuge, " they found sufficient space upon the half acre 
 of ground which covers the summit of Starved Rock. As its sides are per- 
 pendicular, ten men could repel ten thousand with the means of warfare then 
 at their command. The allies made no attempt to take the fort on the Rock 
 by storm, but closely besieged it on every side On the north, or river, side 
 the upper rock overhangs the water somewhat, and tradition tells us how 
 the confederates placed themselves in canoes under the shelving rock and 
 cut the thongs of the besieged when they lowered their vessels to obtain 
 water from the river, and so reduced them by thirst ; but Meachelle,* as far 
 I know, never mentioned this as one of the means resorted to by the confed- 
 erates to reduce their enemies, nor, from an examination of the ground, do 
 
 * Meachelle was a Pottawatomie chief who told the story to Judge Caton, Meachelle 
 being a boy at the time of the siege.
 
 56 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 I think this probable; but they depended upon a lack of provisions, which 
 we can readily appreciate must soon occur to a savage people who rarely an- 
 ticipate the future in storing up supplies. How long the besieged held out 
 Meachelle did not, and probably could not, tell us; but at last the time came 
 when the unfortunate remnant could hold out no longer. They awaited but 
 a favorable opportunity to attempt their escape. This was at last afforded 
 by a dark and stormy night, when, led by their few remaining warriors, all 
 stole in profound silence down the steep and narrow declivity to be met by 
 a solid wall of their enemies surrounding the point where alone a sortie 
 could be made, and which had been confidently expected. The horrid scene 
 that ensued can be better imagined than described. No quarter was asked 
 or given. For a time the bowlings of the tempest were drowned by the yells 
 of the combatants and the shrieks of the victims. 
 
 "Desperation lends strength to even enfeebled arms, but no efforts of 
 valor could resist the overwhelming numbers actuated by the direst hate. 
 The braves fell one by one, fighting like very fiends, and terribly did they 
 revenge themselves upon their enemies. The few women and children, 
 whom famine had left but enfeebled skeletons, fell easy victims to the war- 
 clubs of the terrible savages, who deemed it as much a duty, and almost as 
 great a glory, to slaughter the emaciated women and the helpless children as 
 to strike down the men who were able to make resistance with arms in their 
 'Hands. They were bent upon the utter extermination of their hated enemies, 
 and most successfully did they bend their savage energies to the bloody task. 
 
 "Soon the victims were stretched upon the sloping ground south and 
 west of the impregnable Rock, their bodies lying stark upon the sand which 
 had been thrown up by the prairie winds. The wails of the feeble and the 
 strong had ceased to fret the night winds, whose mournful sighs through the 
 neighboring pines sounded like a requiem. Here was enacted the fitting 
 finale to that work of death which had been commenced, scarcely a mile 
 away, a century before by the still more savage and terrible Iroquois 
 
 " Still, all were not destroyed. Eleven of the most athletic warriors, in 
 the darkness and confusion of the fight, broke through the besieging lines.
 
 -" 

 
 THE FINAL TRAGEDY. 57 
 
 They had marked well from their high perch on the isolated Rock, the little 
 nook below, where their enemies had moored at least a part of their canoes, 
 and to these they rushed with headlong speed, unnoticed by their foes. In 
 to these they threw themselves, and hurried down the rapids below. They 
 had been trained to the use of the paddle and the canoe, and knew well 
 every intricacy of the channel, so that they could safely thread it, even in 
 the dark and boisterous night. They knew their deadly enemies would soon be 
 in their wake, and that there was no safe refuge for them short of St. Louis. 
 They had no provisions to sustain their waning strength, and yet it was cer- 
 tain death to stop by the way. Their only hope was in pressing forward 
 by night and by day, without a moment's pause, scarcely looking back, yet 
 ever fearing that their pursuers would make their appearance around the 
 point they had last left behind. It was truly a race for life. If they could 
 reach St. Louis, they were safe; if overtaken, there was no hope. We must 
 leave to the imagination the details of a race where the stake was so momentous 
 to the contestants. As life is sweeter even than revenge, we may safely as- 
 sume that the pursued were impelled to even greater exertions than the pur- 
 suers. Those who ran for life won the race. They reached St. Louis be- 
 fore their enemies came in sight, and told their appalling tale to the com- 
 mandant of the fort, from whom they received assurances of protection, and 
 were generously supplied with food, which their famished condition so 
 much required. This had barely been done when their enemies arrived and 
 fiercely demanded their victims, that no drop of blood of their hated enemies 
 might longer circulate in human veins. This was refused, when they retired 
 with impotent threats of future vengeance, which they never had the means 
 of executing. 
 
 "After their enemies had gone, the Illinois, who never after even 
 claimed that name, thanked their entertainers, and, full of sorrow which no 
 words can express, slowly paddled their way across the river, to seek new 
 friends among the tribes who then occupied the southern part of this state, 
 and who would listen with sympathy to the sad tale they had to relate. 
 They alone remained the broken remnant and last representatives of their 
 once great nation. Their name, even now, must be blotted out from among
 
 58 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 the names of the aboriginal tribes. Henceforth they must cease to be of the 
 present, and could only be remembered as a part o*f the past. This is the 
 last we know of the last of the Illinois. They were once a great and pros- 
 perous people, as advanced and as humane as any of the aborigines around 
 them; we do not know that a drop of their blood now animates a human 
 being, but their name is perpetuated in this great state, of whose record of 
 the past all of us feel so proud, and of whose future the hopes of us all are 
 so sanguine. 
 
 "Till the morning light revealed that the canoes were gone the confed- 
 erates believed that their sanguinary work had been so thoroughly done that 
 not a living soul remained. So soon as the escape was discovered, the pur- 
 suit was commenced, but as we have seen, without success. The pursuers 
 returned disappointed and dejected that their enemies' scalps were not hang- 
 ing from their belts. But surely blood enough had been spilled vengeance 
 should have been more than satisfied. 
 
 "I have failed, no doubt, to properly render Meachelle's account of this 
 sad drama, for I have been obliged to use my own language, without the in- 
 spiration awakened in him by the memory of the scene which served as his 
 first baptism in blood. Who can wonder that it made a lasting impression 
 on his youthful mind? Still, he was not fond of relating it, nor would he 
 speak of it except to those who had acquired his confidence and intimacy. 
 It is probably the only account to be had related by an eye-witness, and we 
 may presume that it is the most authentic." 
 
 While the writer must confess that the learned and venerable jurist's 
 version of the Starved Rock tradition is open to the criticism that some of 
 its details seem improbable, nevertheless of the substantial truth of the 
 legend, we believe there can be but little doubt. Even man's wonder stories 
 have always something of fact, of human experience, or of physical pheno- 
 mena behind them, as one might reply to Mr. Beckwith's skepticism. But 
 the story of Starved Rock, as told by Judge Caton, has been corroborated by 
 other competent searchers for truth, especially by Hon. Perry A. Arm- 
 strong, of Morris, one of the pioneers of Illinois, who knew personally 
 many of the famous Indians of this part of the state who died subsequently
 
 THE FINAL TRAGEDY. 5Q 
 
 to the coming of the permanent American settlers. Among these was an old 
 chief named Shick Shack* claiming to be 104 years of age, who, as Mr. Arm- 
 strong said, in an address* at a celebration at Starved Rock, of the two-hun- 
 dredth anniversary (September 10, 1873) of its discovery, told him substan- 
 tially the same story that Meachelle told Judge Caton, which the latter pub- 
 lished in 1876. Shick Shack said he was present at the siege, a boy half grown. 
 
 The late N. Matson.f of Princeton, was another student of this legend. 
 In prosecuting his historical researches, he spent much time (prior to 1882) 
 with the descendants of old French colonists who had lived at Kaskaskia and 
 Cahokia in the last century. Mr. Matson was more than convinced of the 
 truth of the legend, so-called*. Indeed, he goes so far as to identify ' ' the 
 only survivor of the fearful tragedy." This warrior, Mr. Matson tells us, 
 was a young man, ' ' partly white, being a descendant on his father's side from 
 the French. Being alone in the world after the catastrophe, he went to 
 Peoria, joined the colony, and there ended his days. He embraced Christi- 
 anity," Mr. Matson continues, "and became an officer in the church, assum- 
 ing the name of Antonio La Bell ; and his descendants are now (1882) living 
 near Prairie du Rocher [on the Mississippi], one of whom, Charles La Bell, 
 was a party to a suit in the United States court to recover the land on which 
 Peoria now stands." 
 
 Mr. Matson further states that Col. Jos. N. Bourassa, a descendant of 
 the Illinois, French, living (1882) in Kansas, had collected a large number 
 of stories relating to the Starved Rock tragedy; and himself had heard two 
 aged warriors, who participated in the massacre, narrate many incidents 
 which took place at that time. Another old Indian named Mashaw, once 
 well known by early Ottawa and Hennepin traders, Mr Matson says, also 
 made various statements, through an interpreter, in relation to the tragedy, 
 to early American traders and settlers. Mashaw said that seven Indians es- 
 caped from the Rock Medore Jennette, also, an employe of the Chouteaus, 
 the famous fur traders at St. Louis, who lived many years at an Indian vil- 
 
 *Ottawa Free Trader, September, 1873. 
 t MATSON : "Pioneers of Illinois." 1882.
 
 6o STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 lage at the mouth of Fox river, has left many traditions of this tragedy to his 
 descendants, according to Mr. Matson. Jennette came to the country in 
 1772 and says he himself saw the bones of the dead Illinois upon the Rock. 
 An Indian named Shaddy (or Shaty) was still another who gave Mr. Matson 
 details of this story, which he had from his father, who was present. Shad- 
 dy (Shaty) said only one man, the half-breed La Bell, escaped. Two traders, 
 Robert Maillet and Felix La Pance, are said to have left the record that, re- 
 turning from Canada with goods, they saw the buzzards on Starved Rock 
 cleaning the bones of the dead. Further, Mr. Matson adds that Father 
 Buche. a priest of Peoria, traveling up Illinois river the following spring 
 (1770), ascended the Rock and there saw the horrid evidences of the tragedy, 
 the holy Father's written story of this visit being in manuscript (dated April, 
 1770), which, in 1882, was in the hands of one Hypolite Pilette, then living 
 on the American Bottom. 
 
 Not to go further, it may be said in conclusion that there is nothing im- 
 probable in the Starved Rock legend. Speaking of the remorseless massacre 
 of several hundred Foxes (Outagamies) at Detroit, 1712, by French and Ind- 
 ians, Dr. Parkman* says : " There is a disposition to assume that events like 
 that just recounted were a consequence of the contact of white men with red, 
 but the primitive Indian was quite able to enact such tragedies without the 
 aid of Europeans. Before French or English influence had been felt in the 
 interior of the continent, a great part of North America was the frequent 
 witness of scenes more lurid in coloring and on a larger scale of horror. In 
 the first half of the seventeenth century the whole country, from Lake Su- 
 perior to the Tennessee and from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, was rav- 
 aged by wars of extermination, in which tribes, large and powerful, by Ind- 
 ian standards, perished, dwindled into feeble remnants or were absorbed 
 by other tribes and vanished from sight." Extermination by red man's and 
 white man's hands alike was the fate of the Indian; and the Starved Rock 
 tragedy was but an incident of the resistless and remorseless movement of 
 Indian destiny. 
 
 *PARKMAN : "Half Century of Conflict.' 1 ''
 
 CANYON SOUTH OF STARVED ROCK.
 
 THE SEQUEL. 
 
 Far as we are informed, so thick and fast they fell, 
 Scarce twenty of their number at night did get home well. 
 
 Puritan Ballad. 
 
 THE POTTAWATOMIES- 
 
 THE Hon. P. A. Armstrong, of Morris, 111., who has written much upon 
 the Indian wars of Illinois during this century, in 1873 published in 
 the Morris Reformer a series of articles on the Starved Rock tradition, based 
 upon personal interviews had sixty years ago with early pioneers of La Salle 
 and Grundy counties, as well as the retiring red men, trappers, traders and 
 other frontiersmen. After sketching the war which ended with the Rock 
 tragedy, Mr. Armstrong brings the conquering tribes together the following 
 spring on Indian Creek, in La Salle county, north and east of Ottawa, where 
 they met to have a jollification over their victory, and then proceeds sub 
 stantially as follows : 
 
 "On. this occasion weeks were spent in feasting, dancing and merry- 
 making, weeks fraught with the most direful consequences to the peace 
 and harmony of the allies; for at this feast each and every warrior was al- 
 lowed and expected to recite in the most exaggerated manner his prowess as 
 a warrior; the scalps he had taken, the dangers encountered and sufferings 
 endured, commencing ia all instances with ' Big Indian me." Jealousies at 
 once sprung up as each candidate applied for applause, the squaws and pap- 
 pooses naturally siding with the warriors of their respective tribes, and a 
 feeling of distrust, if 'not hate, was soon engendered, which daily increased, 
 so that when the chiefs came to talk about the division of the territory they 
 had acquired, each tribe claimed the lion's share. 
 
 "Of the territory west of the Illinois river they knew nothing, and they
 
 62 STARVED'ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 all desired that territory watered by the Illinois river and its tributaries. 
 An amicable division or adjustment could not be made. The Miamis were 
 by far more numerous than either of the other tribes, and moreover 
 were much better armed, since they had quite a number of muskets while 
 the other tribes had none This rendered the Miamis very domineering and 
 haughty. They demanded all or nearly all of the newly acquired territory, 
 which, of course, the other two tribes resisted; hence an open rupture was 
 made, and a battle ensued upon the very grounds they had used in feasting, 
 the Pottawatomies and Kickapoos uniting their forces against the Miamis. 
 Many were slain on both sides; and after fighting from morning until night, 
 the Miamis took advantage of the night to withdraw, leaving the allies in 
 possession of the battle field. But this battle, although a severe one, was 
 by no means a decisive one. The losses on both sides were heavy, and 
 neither were in a condition to renew the fight for several months, as they 
 were out of provisions and short of clothing and implements of war. 
 
 "The balance of the summer and following winter were spent in pre- 
 paring for a renewal of the contest the following spring. The Miamis went 
 down the river and thence to Kaskaskia, while the Pottawatomies and Kicka- 
 poos remained near their previous winter quarters, collecting provisions and 
 clothing, and constructing bows and arrows and other implements of Indian 
 warfare. Early in the spring following (1771), the Miamis returned north- 
 ward to give battle to their late allies, but now bitter enemies, and were met 
 near Peoria, where another battle was fought, which, like the former one, 
 was not decisive was, indeed, a drawn battle; and each party buried their 
 own dead. The evidences of these two great battles are. (1873) still visible 
 in the numerous mounds where they buried their dead, which are still there 
 to mark the spot; and arrow flints and other implements of Indian warfare 
 have been found in the neighborhood by the bushel. 
 
 ''The war lasted, with indifferent success to either party, for about five 
 years, and many a hard fought battle attested the bravery of these unfortu- 
 nate, passion-blinded savages, who .left their dead buried in many places 
 throughout the coveted territory. In the year 1775 they had worked around
 
 THE POTTAWATOMIES. 63 
 
 and nearly back to the place where their first battle had occurred with the 
 Illini. Harassed and worn by excessively long marches and repeated and 
 sanguinary battles, both armies were well nigh exhausted. 
 
 "A proposition was then made on the part of the Miamis to pick three 
 hundred warriors from each side and let them commence to fight at sunrise 
 and continue the fight until either the one side or the other should conquer 
 This proposition was at once accepted by the Pottawatomies and Kickapoos, 
 upon the condition that the weapons on both sides should be the bow and 
 arrow, tomahawk, knife and spear, or such implements of warfare as were 
 peculiarly Indian, and that the remnant of each army should cross to the 
 east side of the Wabash river, so that no assistance or interference could 
 possibly be made by either side. This agreement was entered into with all 
 the solemnity of the high councils of these respective tribes, and three hun- 
 dred picked warriors were selected from each side, who crossed over to the 
 bloody ground and encamped upon Sugar Creek, which empties into the Wa- 
 bash river. The place selected for this terrible duel was a heavy timber 
 about twenty miles from the Wabash. The battle was to commence at sun- 
 rise the following morning. 
 
 "The fated morning came a calm, cool, bright September morn, and 
 with the coming of the morning sun the battle commenced. Six hundred 
 stalwart warriors engaging in a strife for victory or death. 
 
 ' ' They practiced every pass and word 
 To thrust, to strike, to feint, to guard. 
 
 "Here were the deeds of a Thermopylae re-enacted. Quarter was 
 neither asked nor given 'death was the watchword and reply. 1 Now 
 shielding behind some giant oak every ruse was resorted to in the hope of 
 inducing the enemy to expose his person now grappling in a death struggle, 
 the combatants fell never to rise again. 
 
 "This duel raged from sunrise to sunset, when twelve warriors only re- 
 mainedfive Miamis and seven Pottawatomies and Kickapoos. The five 
 run, the seven are the victors. The great chiefs, Shick Shack, Sugar, Mar- 
 quett and Shaty were among the seven. The Miamis wtre conquered ; and
 
 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 by their agreement gave up all claim to the hunting ground of the annihilat- 
 ed Illini and retired east of the Wabash. 
 
 " Thus did the Pottawattomies and Kickapoos become the successors of 
 the Illini, and soon after this final battle with the Miamis they divided the 
 territory between themselves, the Kickapoos taking all the territory adjoining 
 the Wabash west to a line running north and south through Oliver's Grove 
 in Livingston county, 'and the Pottawatomies all the territory west of that 
 line." 
 
 The Pottawatomies having taken undisputed possession of their con- 
 quest, made their principal village on the plain northwest of Starved Rock, 
 near the present village of Utica, where, among others, the youthful G. S. 
 Hubbard, later one of the founders of the city of Chicago, as representa- 
 tive of the American Fur Company, carried on a trade with them. Here, 
 unlike the vanished Illini, the Pottawatomies lived in tents, not in cabins. 
 Another important village was called Waubunsee (or Wauponehsee), located 
 at the mouth of the Pish-ta-ka (or Poish-tah-le- koosh : antelope), as these Ind- 
 ians called the Fox river of Illinois, and the ancient city of Ottawa. 
 
 In 1814, however, a treaty was made with the Ottawas, Chippewas and 
 Pottawatomies, kindred tribes, by Ninian Edwards. William Clark and Au- 
 guste Chouteau, by which the Indians gave up their Illinois lands south of a 
 line running west from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. A few years later 
 (1834) the Pottawatomies were removed from Illinois to new lands beyond 
 the Mississippi ; and the Indian's part in the history of Starved Rock came 
 to an end forever.
 
 MODERN STARVED ROCK. 
 
 Methinks vou take luxurious pleasure 
 In your novel western leisure. 
 
 Thortan. 
 
 THE ERA OF THE WHITE MAN. 
 
 "THEN the white man 
 came,- pale as the dawn, 
 with a load of thought, 
 with slumbering intelli- 
 gence as a fire raked up. 
 He bought the Indian's 
 moccasins and furs; 
 then he bought his hunt- 
 ing grounds ; and at length he forgot where the Indian was buried and 
 plowed up his bones." The tale is soon told; for it is but a variation of the 
 theme which but now is dying away in the west, as the Indian slowly dis- 
 appears off the face of the earth. And from a feudaLcastle of Sieur de la 
 Salle and a Rocjjjoi Refuge for hunted savages, Starved Rock has passed 
 into its "western leisure." 
 
 Always a landmark of the great West in the more important epochs of 
 its history, it still was such when the English settlers began to invade the 
 Illinois country ; and it would be difficult to find a traveler journeying 
 in the Illinois valley "spying out the land," who has not told of going out 
 of his way to visit and call attention to this remarkable natural curiosity. 
 Flint in his " History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley," published 
 in 1833, devotes a page to "Rock Fort," describing the beauty of the Rock
 
 66 STARVED ROCK: A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 itself and its surroundings and repeating the tradition that has given it its 
 name, though Flint nowhere calls it other than " Rock Fort." Chas. Fenno 
 Hoffman, a then distinguished New York author and litterateur, who visited 
 the Rock in January, 1834, while on a winter tour through the West, on the 
 other hand, calls the place "Starved Rock" and nothing else, showing that such 
 was its common name at that time in the Illinois country. Hoffman has a note, 
 written by an unidentified friend resident in Illinois, which repeats the famil- 
 iar legend, with this single exception, that while the writer says one person 
 escaped from the Rock, that person was a squaw, who was still alive when the 
 Englishmen entered the country. Schoolcraft (1820), in his "Travels through 
 the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley," records having visited the 
 Rock, when he made the sketch from which the engraving used as initial to 
 this chapter has been made. Judge Hall's (Ohio) ' 'Tales of the Border" ( 183-), 
 also contains the Starved Rock legend, which was the common property of 
 all western travelers of that early day. 
 
 Of all the many articles that were written of Starved Rock in the past, 
 however, none, perhaps, came to have a wider circulation, or gave the Rock 
 wider celebrity, than one written by Charles Lanman, an article erroneously 
 attributed by some of our more celebrated local historians to Washington 
 Irving, who unfortunately, so far as I have been able to discover, never saw 
 and certainly never wrote a line about the Rock. The article seems to have 
 been Mr. Lanman's " swan song," but having been published as an " elegant 
 extract in prose from an eloquent writer" in the famous " Sanders Series" of 
 readers (my copy is edition of 1855), "for the use of academies and the 
 higher classes in common and select schools," it was read and declaimed by 
 the youth of that and succeeding decades from one end of the nation to the 
 other ; and I have no doubt that the article so published has been the means 
 of bringing thousands of curious visitors to the Rock in the past forty years. 
 
 The era of the "plowshare and pruning hook" has come to Starved 
 Rock. " Grim-visaged war hath smoothed his wrinkled front," and the 
 frightful and laborious past, soothed and softened by the tempering touch of 
 lapsing time, has left its record, which now is like the
 
 MODERN STARVED ROCK. 6j 
 
 Legends and runes 
 
 Of credulous days ; old fancies that have lain 
 Silent from boyhood, taking voice again, 
 Warmed into life once more, even as tunes 
 That, frozen in the fabled hunting horn, 
 Thawed into sound. 
 
 The modern Starved Rock beleaguererscome arrayed in bicycle suits and 
 picnic habiliments; and where once the Frenchman braved the terrors of 
 savagery, his nineteenth century successors, born of all nations, now invade 
 the land to make an al fresco holiday. 
 
 To-day, too, its Kaskaskia cabins have been replaced by a modern hotel, 
 with broad verandas, an attractive dining room, and large and airy guest 
 chambers, supplied with water, gas, and the comforts of a hotel of the best 
 class, and with private cottages attached for families, many comforts which, 
 to the Rock's earliest master, Louis the Magnificent, would have been impos- 
 sible luxuries. The broad verandas overlook the verdant, peaceful valley, 
 while the cool shade of the forest but a step to the rear of the hotel brings 
 rest and refreshment to the tired worker seeking here summer rest and recre- 
 ation for renewed exertion in the business world. Separated from the hotel 
 is a club house where dancing parties are held ; and again the sound of mu- 
 sic and merry laughter, that once without doubt echoed from the summit 
 of the Rock in the ancient days when the pleasure-loving Frenchmen found 
 themselves at peace with savage foes, is caught up by the sweet south wind 
 to fill again the quiet valley with the harmonies of peace and happiness. 
 
 Near by, and accessible to pleasure seekers, are the cliffs, the glens and 
 the canyons of Illinois river, which unite to make this the most interesting 
 locality from a scenic point of view on the entire stream. Farther away, but 
 still within even walking distance a few miles are the famous Bailey's 
 Falls and Deer Park Glen, the beauty spots of the Big Vermilion river, 
 which itself is for many miles of its length the most interesting region, from 
 the geologist's and artist's point of view, in all northern Illinois. Deer Park 
 Glen has been greatly beautified of late years by the creation of roads and 
 paths and by the removal of the refuse of nature ; but here, as is also the
 
 68 
 
 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 policy of the Starved Rock management, not one jot or tittle of nature's own 
 beauty or handiwork has been or will be disturbed. 
 
 Of all this interesting region the Starved Rock Hotel is the natural cen- 
 ter ; and its management offers its guests all facilities for examining every 
 portion of the region at their leisure. The Hotel, owned by Walther & 
 Huehl, of Chicago, and managed (1895) by Wm. Tatsch, is the equal in all 
 respects of the best summer hotels of the West ; and thus Starved Rock is 
 rapidly becoming the most popular summer resort in the Illinois valley, its 
 register during the past few years having contained names of visitors from 
 nearly every state of the Union.
 
 !Ht HBHftBY 
 
 Of IHfc 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
 
 THE HISTORIANS. 
 
 As year by year his tapestry unrolled, 
 
 What varied wealth its growing length displayed ! 
 
 What long processions flamed in cloth of gold ! 
 What stately forms the flowing robes arrayed ! 
 
 He told the red man's story ; far and wide 
 He searched the unwritten records of his race. 
 
 Oliver Wendell Holmes. 
 
 FRANCIS PARKMAN. 
 
 DR. FRANCIS PARKMAN, born in Boston, September 16 1823, came 
 of an ancestry distinguished for scholarly attainment and achievement; 
 and so early was his own taste and aptitude for literature disclosed that in 
 1840, at the age of seventeen, he was meditating on a history of the French 
 and Indian wars, or, to be more specific, the "History of France and Eng- 
 land in North America." This project took definite shape, and from boyhood 
 to the end the work of a lifetime was pursued with exceptional consistency 
 and inspiring steadfastness of aim and endeavor. It was practically fifty 
 years from the time he began his life's work to the day he completed it by 
 an interesting coincidence naming his last volume, "Fifty Years of Conflict." 
 "The Oregon Trail," which was a prelude to his great undertaking, was 
 the result of a summer journey, undertaken by himself and his cousin, 
 Quincy A. Shaw, in 1846, across the continent into the Black Hills. As Dr. 
 Parkman's nearest friend, Rev. Julius H. Ward,* has said: "This volume 
 shows how he became acquainted with the kind of life which in writing of 
 the early settlement of North America he was called upon to describe. It 
 laid the foundation of the attractive interest and the feeling of reality which 
 
 * See The Outlook, 1893.
 
 FRANCIS PARKMAN, LL D.
 
 THE HISTORIANS. 71 
 
 are every where imparted to his narrative. Mr. Parkman entered into his 
 undertaking with such ardor and enthusiasm that, before he was aware of it, 
 he had overtaxed his strength and had prepared the way for permanent phy- 
 sical infirmity not that of eyesight, except to a limited extent, but a tend- 
 ency to congestion of the brain, which all his life withdrew him from the 
 field of active duty and constantly interfered with his work as a scholar, now 
 reaching him in disability of this organ and now in the infirmity of that, and 
 constantly limiting him in his hours of work and compelling him to go at a 
 snail's pace when he felt as if the only satisfaction to his spirit would have 
 been to march forward like a colonel at the head of his regiment. His phy- 
 sical infirmities were a tremendous drawback in his life-work, but his spirit 
 was so resolute, and he lived so much above his limitations of body, that 
 nothing interfered with his great object, and he lived to complete his work 
 and bring the history down to the year 1760, when the English completed 
 their conquest of New France, and to see the plan which he laid out while a 
 college student developed and treated in every respect as exhaustively as the 
 materials will permit." 
 
 "The Oregon Trail" is an incomparable picture of the life that once ex- 
 isted on the great plains of the Far West, which has now disappeared forever. 
 It was dictated to his traveling companion; and all his life thereafter he was 
 dependent on the pens of his friends or of paid amanuenses not only for the 
 performance of the labor of writing his words at his dictation, but for the 
 collection and collating of materials under his direction. Five times he went 
 to Europe, taking with him trained assistants to aid him in procuring the 
 necessary data for his histories. Tens of thousands of maps and folio copies 
 of documents were made in the museums and public archives of France and 
 England. With infinite patience and labor all of these were examined, in 
 order that the histories might cover every important detail of their time with 
 absolute accuracy. 
 
 In 1850 he married Catherine Bigelow, and for a brief space (less than 
 eight years) found in her companionship sweet solace for an illness which to 
 a lesser man would have been a veritable death in life. Yet these were 
 the happiest years of his life.
 
 72 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 In 1851 the "Conspiracy of Pontiac " appeared, the first of that notable 
 series of historical narratives entitled "France and England in America," 
 though chronologically it is the last. 
 
 Not again until 1858, after the death of his wife, did Dr. Parkman find 
 physical strength to resume his life's work. In the meantime, as a diversion, 
 he essayed the role of a novelist, ' ' Vassall Morton " being his third book. 
 "It was a sucees d'estime." But "the man who could make history more fas- 
 cinating than romance, saw that it was a waste of time and talents to make 
 novels less agreeable than history; and he never repeated the experiment." 
 
 In spite of the fact that for some years he could do absolutely nothing; 
 that for many more he could work but five minutes a day, and that he never 
 was able to work above ten hours, or to compose above five hundred words 
 a day, his purpose never faltered; but the successive volumes came slowly, 
 "The Pioneers of France in the New World" (1865); "The Jesuits in North 
 America" (1867); "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West" (1869); 
 "The Old Regime in Canada" (1874); "Count Frontenac and New France" 
 (1877); "Montcalm and Wolfe" (1884); and "A Half Century of Conflict" 
 (1892) with which last the author laid down his pen (dying November 8, 
 1893), a life task fulfilled fulfilled with the happiness of complete recogni- 
 tion of its significance and uniqueness, and with the world's acknowledge 
 ment that never need the work be repeated. 
 
 "The twelve volumes which constitute the history as it now stands," 
 as Dr. Ward remarks, " constitute a work which has a permanent value. It 
 is a thorough examination of all the facts and an impartial treatment of them. 
 This has been conceded by Catholic and Protestant students. It is as free 
 from excess in one direction as in the other. Mr. Parkman is able to sympa- 
 thize with both parties in the contention for the mastery of North America, 
 and usually allows the facts to speak for themselves and lead us to their ob- 
 vious conclusion. It is these qualities of thoroughness and impartiality 
 which give his work authority, and the charming style in which it is written 
 insures a permanent popularity." 
 
 His publishers, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, have recently issued a
 
 THE HISTORIANS. 
 
 73 
 
 new edition of his works, with his latest revisions, including " The Oregon 
 Trail," characteristically illustrated by Frederick Remington. The edition 
 is superior in workmanship, convenient in size and moderate in price. 
 
 JOHN GILMARY SHEA, LL.D. 
 
 Thou thy worldly task hast done, 
 Home art gone and ta'en thy wages. 
 
 Anon 
 
 JOHN GILMARY SHEA, LL.D. 
 
 After Parkman, no one man, perhaps, has done more to recover the his 
 tory of the early French in the Mississippi valley than Dr Shea. Deeply 
 religious by nature and early training, and, after his graduation from Co-
 
 74 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 lumbia College, of which his father was a professor, for six years a novice of 
 the Society of Jesus, he became as a Catholic much interested in the early 
 history of Catholicism on this continent, and was especially moved, as must 
 be evety imaginative mind, by the heroism of the men who first carried the 
 cross to the Indians of the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes valleys. 
 
 Compelled by precarious health to abandon the university, he resumed 
 the practice of law, interrupted by his connection with the Jesuits ; but his 
 historical studies, one may imagine, consumed much of the time other lawyers 
 would have given to their briefs His preliminary literary work was in the 
 form of contributions to Catholic periodicals, which quickly brought him to 
 the attention of the literary world, especially of .historical students of this 
 country and Europe. At the age of twenty-six (1850), he published his 
 " History of the Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi River," a work 
 whose apparent great research in the buried archives of Canadian govern- 
 mental and sacerdotal records, and whose accuracy and uniqueness, at once 
 placed him in the rank of the first rate historians of his country. It was 
 the first work to give dignity and form to an important part of our western 
 annals. It has been honored and approved by. frequent reference by Dr. 
 Parkman. 
 
 An equally, and perhaps in some respects even more, important service was 
 the editing and publishing by him of twenty six volumes of the missionaries' 
 " Relations" (official reports), all of which were outside and in addition to 
 those published by the Canadian government, covering the early French ex- 
 plorations in the great West and invaluable as a mine for original research. 
 His " History of the Catholic Missions among the Indian Tribes of the United 
 States" is also a monument to his learning, industry and piety. Both of 
 thise works are deeply interesting to the student of to-day. 
 
 He was an indefatigable worker, and a list of his books and contribu- 
 tions to periodicals and historical society records would fill a goodly page. 
 His last and perhaps greatest work was a " History of the Catholic Church 
 in the United States," which he finished on his death-bed. 
 
 As to bis work in generally, Dr. Richard H. Clark, in the "Catholic
 
 THK NOVELIST. 
 
 75 
 
 Family Annual,"* truly says : "His position in the special department of 
 Catholica Americana was unequalled and unique. His advent in our midst 
 at a time when our Catholic historical records and materials were wasting 
 was providential, for he was foremost in teaching us their value and in mak- 
 ing a noble and able use of them. He was by prestige in his day the histo- 
 rian of the American Catholic Church." And, it maybe added, he was also 
 a man in whom the Christian virtues which adorned his private life were 
 covered by a veil of modesty and humility. 
 
 He was born in New York July 22, 1824 ; and died at Elizabeth, N. J., 
 February 22, 1892. 
 
 MRS. MARY H. CATHERWOOD. 
 
 Give to barrows, trays and pans, 
 
 Grace and glimmer of romance. Emerson. 
 
 THE NOVELIST. 
 
 Mrs. Mary Hartwell Catherwood, a resi- 
 dent of Hoopestown, Illinois, in " The Ro- 
 mance of Dollard," "The Story of Ton- 
 ty," etc , has in romance done for the period 
 pf French dominion in North America 
 what Packman has done for it in history: re- 
 created the period for the instruction and 
 amusement of present generations ; and if 
 Parkman has given to history the charm of 
 romance, Mrs. Catherwood has no less 
 served history by reproducing in romance 
 the charm of local color, in the realistic 
 MRS. CATHERWOOD. pictures of the life of the Canadian and 
 
 Illinois people of those far-away days, without which history itself is in- 
 complete and unsatisfactory. 
 
 * I am indebted to this book for the materials of this imperfect sketch, as well as 
 foe the original of the portrait of Dr. Shea herewith.
 
 76 STARVED ROCK: A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 The reader of this sketch is the more interested in "The Story of 
 Tonty," since the characters of the tale are the heroes of Starved Rock, while 
 the Rock itself is the scene of not the least absorbing events of the story. 
 
 "The Story of Tonty" is the story of a friend. The most faithful of 
 servants, Tonty was also the most steadfast of friends that rarest of 
 human blessings, which at best comes to a few men only, and to each but 
 once. Parkman has borne testimony to the disinterested fidelity of Tonty; 
 but it remained for Mrs. Catherwood in "The Story of Tonty" to recreate 
 the living man and present him to us crowned with the praises of "histo- 
 rians, priests, tradition, savages and his own deeds." 
 
 The story opens with the "Beaver Fair" at Montreal, 1678. La Salle 
 and Tonty had just arrived from France to explore the West. The picture 
 of the savage gathering assembled for trade and a pow-wow with Fronte- 
 nac, the governor, is very realistic. The thread of enmity against La Salle 
 that appears in the conversations of the traders and merchants is a hint of 
 his ultimate failure, and discloses also the reasons for it. In Book II the 
 scene is La Salle's Lake Ontario fort, Ft. Frontenac ; and the theme is La 
 Salle's earlier disappointments and the adverse influences operating against 
 him on the St. Lawrence. In Book III the scene is at Starved Rock dur- 
 ing that distressing period when La Salle was in France for the last time ; 
 was murdered in Texas, and when his brother and Joutel, saved from the 
 fate of La Salle, enjoying Tonty's hospitality, hid from him the news of the 
 death of his master and friend, La Salle. 
 
 The story is faithful to the thread of La Salle's career, and so is full of 
 heroism and suffering, deception and treachery, "envy, hatred and malice 
 and all uncharitableness, " relieved, however, by the loving faithfulness of 
 Barbe, La Salle's niece, and Tonty, his friend. Nearly all the celebrated 
 names in northwestern discovery in the seventeenth century are met in the 
 course of the story ; which completes, with its color, the picture, the draw- 
 ing of which was the work of Parkman, the historian. 
 
 NOTE. I am indebted to the courtesy of A. C. McClurg & Co., publishers of " The 
 Story of Tonty," for the portrait of Mrs. Catherwood herewith.
 
 ENTRANCE TO DEER PARK GLEN.
 
 RELICS. 
 
 Some rusted swords appear in dust ; 
 
 One, bending forward, says, 
 " The arms belonged to heroes gone ; 
 We never hear their praise in song." 
 
 Duan of Ca-Lodin. 
 
 THE SILENT WITNESSES. 
 
 ON the bluff about twenty-four hundred feet south of Starved Rock, at 
 the junction of two ravines, as shown by the map on the following page 
 the faint and disappearing remains may be said to be still visible of an old 
 earthwork of irregular shape. The map* made, I believe, from a survey 
 by Col. D. F. Hitt, for many years the owner of Starved Rock, having 
 had his deed directly from the United States government indicates its form 
 and size. Much learned conjecture, not omitting, of course suitable refer- 
 ence to the Aztecs and dates not long subsequent to the Noachian period, 
 has been put on paper touching the origin of this so called fort, which even 
 the French are credited with having built, though its usefulness to them can 
 hardly be conjectured ; but the truth seems to be that it is the remains 
 of a stockade, perhaps, erected by the Shawanoe Indians when they resided 
 there as a part of La Salle's famous settlement of 1682-3. A reference to 
 the Franquelin map (page 30) shows the location of two hundred cabins of 
 the Chaouenon at the point where these remains are found. La Salle, says 
 Parkman, ".undoubtedly supplied Franquelin with materials" for this map. 
 And Parkman also says : "The Shawanoe camp, or village, is placed on 
 the south side of the river, behind the fort (Starved Rock). The country 
 here is hilly, broken, and now, as in La Salle's time, covered with wood, 
 
 *Reproduced (reduced size) from ""Baldwin's History of La Salle County."
 
 7 8 
 
 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 which, however, soon ends in the open prairie. The village of the Shawan- 
 oes on Franquelin's map corresponds with the position of this earthwork." 
 
 Located 7lX) feet Esit an3 5 
 
 b o( Qr.&ct.Cor.beLSert'* 
 
 r5J 
 
 Survey of Old Fort on Bluff South of Slarvea Rock. 
 
 W.i*:^ ! ^5^^^^vgWf 
 
 > vx " : ,rj.Xv ^ / 
 
 "- --TT X j^-^ 
 
 #5r^-^ xri 
 
 S--^L-Xo \ 
 
 .wntiDvt r u .r-..;--..c*n B > 
 
 AN ANCIENT DEED. 
 
 LTRANSLAUON.] 
 
 "The year 1693, the igth of April, I, Francis de la Forest, Captain on 
 the retired list in the marine service, Seignor of part of all the country of 
 Louisiana, otherwise Illinois, granted to Monsieur deTonty and to me by the 
 King to enjoy in perpetuity, we, our heirs, successors, and assigns, the same as 
 it was recognized by the act of the Sovereign Council in Quebec in the month 
 of August, of the year 1691, the said council assembled, declare in the pres- 
 ence of the undersigned witness that I have ceded, sold, and transferred to 
 Mr. Michel Acau* the half of my part of the above described concession, to 
 enjoy the same like myself from the present time, to him, his heirs, succes- 
 sors, and assigns, with the same rights, privileges, prerogatives and benefits 
 
 *8ee chapter on "The Missions," supra.
 
 AN ANCIENT DEED. 
 
 7Q 
 
 FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST DEED EXECUTED IN ILLINOIS.
 
 STARVED ROCK: A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 which have been heretofore accorded to the late M. de la Salle as it appears 
 particularly in the decree of the Council of the King ; and in considerntion 
 of the sum of 6,000 livres in current beaver which the said Mr. Acau shall 
 pay me at Chicagou, where I stay, and upon the making of the payment down 
 I cannot demand from him any advantage neither for the carriage of the said 
 beaver to Montreal nor for the risk, and as there is no notary here for him 
 to pass an instrument of sale I bind myself at the first occasion to send him 
 one, as also a copy compared before a notary of the above mentioned decree 
 of the Council of the King touching the present concession, on faith of which 
 we have both signed the said contract of sile the one and the other the day 
 and the year as above ; and in case that one of us two would dispose of his 
 part the remaining one shall be the first preferred, and this is mutual between 
 M. de Tonty and me. Made in duplicate the day and year aforesaid. 
 "Ds LA FOREST. DE LA DESCOUVERTES, Witness. 
 
 "M. Aco. NICOLAS LAURENS, DE LA CHAPELLE, Witness." 
 
 The deed is indorsed on the back to the following effect : ' ' Bill of sale 
 between Mr. Ako and me conveying the land of the Illinois." 
 
 This deed was purchased in Paris, late in year 1893, by Hon. Edward 
 G. Mason and deposited by him in the archives of the Historical Society 
 of Chicago, January 16, 1894. It is believed to be the first conveyance of 
 Illinois real estate, though how much or where it lay is not very clear, ex- 
 cept that it was the Illinois country, made by deed executed within the 
 borders of this state. The document covers one page of large foolscap 
 paper and is apparently all in the handwriting of La Forest. The paper 
 bears an ancient watermark and is of the same texture and quality as that 
 used in Canada at the time of its date. 
 
 In presenting the document to the Society, Mr. Mason epitomized the 
 facts given in this little book, concluding as follows : 
 
 "The grantee in the deed, whose name is usually written Michel Accau, 
 was the real leader of the party which, by La Salle's direction, explored the 
 Upper Mississippi and discovered the falls of St. Anthony in 1682. Father 
 Hennepin accompanied this expedition as a volunteer, and [having written
 
 THK RELICS. 8l 
 
 an account of his travels on thit occasion] is usually given the credit of its 
 discoveries. Accau subsequently resided in Kaskaskia [Starved Rock] and 
 married a daughter of the chief of the Kaskaskia tribe. A record of their 
 marriage still exists in the ancient register of the [new] parish of the Im- 
 maculate Conception at Kaskaskia [on the Mississppi]. 
 
 ' Of the witnesses, De La Descouverte was a Canadian voyageur from 
 Lachine, who accompanied La Salle to the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682, 
 and La Chapelle was also one of La Salle's men who was with him in the 
 year 1680, and was sent by him from the St. Joseph River and the Michilli- 
 mackinac in search of La Salle's lost vessel, the Griffin, and afterwards join- 
 ed Tonty at Fort Creve-Coeur, near the present site of Peoria. 
 
 "It is quite certain that this document was executed either at Fort St. 
 Louis of the Illinois or at Chicago, with the probability in favor of the latter 
 place. In 1693 there had been already, certainly for eight years, a fort here, 
 and there was near it at that time a Jesuit mission ; and doubtless here oc- 
 curred the first conveyance of real estate in what is now Illinois executed 
 within its boundaries, which this ancient document evidences. It is fitting 
 and fortunate that it should, two hundred years after its execution, come 
 into the possession of the Historical Society of Chicago to be preserved sa- 
 credly by it." 
 
 With the latter paragraph the present writer takes issue ; and those who 
 have followed this narrative thus far will understand that however Mr. Ma- 
 son's civic pride might claim the deed as executed on Chicago's soil, all the 
 facts are against such a conclusion. Fort St. Louis was Acau's (or Ako's) 
 home as well as La Forest's at that time ; it was the capital of the Illinois 
 country and the centre of La Forest's and Tonty's operations; and though 
 a fort was doubtless there on the lake shore, it was a mere station without 
 importance or regular garrison or settlers, either whites or Indians, a depot 
 for the deposit of furs for shipment by lake to Canada.* The deed was in 
 all probability signed at the fort at Starved Rock. 
 
 * S^e La Salle's reference to Chicago in certain of his reports. Translation in the 
 Magazine of American History, Vol. I, p 553.
 
 82 
 
 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 " MARQUETTE'S CROSS." 
 
 The most interesting of the relics of Starved Rock's ancient days is the 
 remarkable cross, of which the above is a picture made from a recent pho- 
 tograph (full size of the original.) It was found near the Rock, and is the 
 property of Col. D. F. Hitt. It is said to be one of the insignia of an arch- 
 bishop. By some it has been called Marquette s Cross ; but it is hardly 
 probable that that modest hero ever owned it. He never held any rank 
 as a churchman above that of priest ; and notwithstanding the fact that the 
 early missionaries frequently exercised the powers of the church's officials
 
 THE RELICS. 83 
 
 of much higher rank, and may even have worn their insignia, nevertheless 
 the location in which it was found is against the probability of Marquette's 
 connection with this particular cross. Marquette at most was at the Kas- 
 kaskia village near Starved Rock not to exceed fifteen days. During those 
 days he was busy trying to save souls ; and seeing that the Indian village 
 was on the north bank of the river and a mile west of the Rock, which was 
 at that time wholly unoccupied, it is not likely that Marquette ever put his 
 foot on that side of the river. The cross may have belonged to one of the 
 priests named in the chapter on " The Missions." 
 
 In explaining, or in endeavoring to explain, the presence of this cross 
 (which is not, as he says, pure gold, but rather brass covered originally with 
 black enamel), Matson* says: "The Archbishop of Rouen sent to Canada 
 one satin robe, and a large gold cross, with other emblems, to be given 
 to the most devoted priest in America. The fathers awarded these gifts to 
 Father Chrisp, chaplain of Fort St. Louis, but he died before their arrival, 
 and in the fall of 1688 these things were presented to Father [Abbe] Cav- 
 elier, brother of La Salle. It is possible," concludes our author, " that the 
 cross herewith may be the one referred to, and was lost by the owner during 
 his rambles around the Rock." 
 
 This is all very interesting, but I am quite of the opinion that there is 
 even less of pure gold in the story than in the cross ; and it certainly is a 
 surprise to know that the Abbe Cavelier had ever been awarded a prize for 
 his piety. No one now-a-days would have suspected it. However, this cross 
 is not gold, as before remarked. 
 
 OTHER CURIOS. 
 
 Many minor relics have been found near the Rock, mostly articles of 
 jewelry, coins of small value, medals, etc. ; and Col. Hitt has unearthed 
 also remains of French underground furnaces or bake-ovens near the Rock, 
 and now wears a heavy gold ring found there. 
 
 Near Ottawa, some years ago, a small cannon was found, which con- 
 sisted of a welded tubef of iron, about an inch and a half in calibre, 
 
 *MATSON : "Pioneers of Illinois." 
 fPARKMAN : "La Salle, etc"
 
 STARVED ROCK : A HISTORICAL SKETCH. 
 
 strengthened by a series of thick iron rings, cooled on after the most ancient 
 as well as the most modern methods of making cannon. It was fourteen 
 inches long, the part near the muzzle having been burst off. Its construc- 
 tion was very rude, and it may have been made by a French blacksmith. As 
 the work of a European cannon m iker, it would have been antiquated even 
 in the time of De Soto or Coronado. 
 
 The apparent pits in the soil on the top of the Rock may be the remains 
 of holes dug by credulous traders early in the last century, who believed 
 they might find gold buried there by Tonty ; but as the "coin " of the Illi- 
 nois in those days was "current beaver" rather than Louis-d'or, it is not 
 recorded that any of the gold seekers found reward for their labor. 
 
 But the noblest of all the relics of Starved Rock is its history ; and it 
 stands as a monument to those weak ones of earth whose mortal sufferings 
 here were, in God's mysterious wisdom, not the least of the many contribu- 
 tions of human sacrifice which have preserved to the people of the Illinois 
 valley, and of the United States, and of the world, the priceless heritage of 
 English Liberty.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 
 977.3270S5S C 001 
 
 STARVED ROCK OTTAWA 
 
 30112025388544 
 
 HHEoBx^y