Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1672 to 1688, part 3

The river gathered volume as it rolled southward, carving the clay cliffs of its banks in a thousand fantastic forms.

Where the bank was broken, the prairies were seen in heaving seas of grass billowing to the wind like water, herds of countless buffalo pasturing knee-deep.

To Marquette and Jolliet, burning with enthusiasm, it seemed as if they were finding a new world for France half as large as all Europe.

For two weeks not a sail, not a canoe, not a soul did they see.

Then the river carried them into the country of the Illinois, past Illinois Indians who wore French clothing, and pictured rocks where the Indians had painted their sign language.

There was no doubt now in the explorers' minds,--the Mississippi did not lead to China but emptied in the Gulf of Mexico.

A

furious torrent of boiling muddy water pouring in on the right forewarned the Missouri; and in a few more days they passed on the left the clear current of Beautiful River,--the Ohio.

It was now midsummer.

The heat was heavy and humid.

Marquette's health began to suffer, and the two explorers spread an awning of sailcloth above the canoe as they glided with the current.

Towards the Arkansas, Indians appeared on the banks, brandishing weapons of Spanish make.

Though Jolliet, with a peace pipe from the Illinois Indians, succeeded in reassuring the hostiles, it was unsafe to go farther south.

They had established the fact,--the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of Mexico,--and on July 17 turned back.

It was harder going against stream, which did not mend Marquette's health; so when the Illinois Indians offered to show them a shorter way to Lake Michigan, they followed up Illinois River and crossed the Chicago portage {134} to Lake Michigan.

Jolliet went on down to Quebec with his report.

Marquette remained half ill to establish missions in Michigan.

Here, traveling with his Indians in 1675, the priest died of the malady contracted in the Mississippi heat, and was buried in a lonely grave of the wildwood wilderness where he had wandered.

Louis Jolliet married and settled down on his seigniory of Anticosti Island.

Though he had as yet little to show for the La Chine estate, which he had sacrificed, La Salle had not been idle, but was busy pushing French dominion by another route to the Mississippi.

Count Frontenac had come to New France as all the viceroys came--penniless, to mend his fortunes; and as the salary of the Governor did not exceed a year, the only way to wealth was by the fur trade;

but which way to look for fur trade!

Hudson Bay, thanks to Radisson, was in the hands of England.

Taudoussac was farmed out to the King.

The merchants of Quebec and Three Rivers and Montreal absorbed all the furs of the tribes from the Ottawa; and New England drained the Iroquois land.

There remained but one avenue of new trade, and that was west of the Lakes, where Jolliet had been.

Taking only La Salle into his confidence, Frontenac issued a royal mandate commanding all the officers and people of New France to contribute a quota of men for the establishment of a fort on Lake Ontario.

By June 28, 1673, the same year that Jolliet had been dispatched for the Mississippi, there had gathered at La Chine, La Salle's old seigniory near Montreal, four hundred armed men and one hundred and twenty canoes, which Frontenac ordered painted gaudily in red and blue.

With these the Governor moved in stately array up the St. Lawrence, setting the leafy avenues of the Thousand Islands ringing with trumpet and bugle, and sweeping across Lake Ontario in martial lines to the measured stroke of a hundred paddles.

Long since, La Salle's scouts had scurried from canton to canton, rallying the Iroquois to the council of great "Onontio."

At break of day, July 13, while the sunrise was just bursting up {135} over the lake, Frontenac, with soldiers drawn up under arms, himself in velvet cloak laced with gold braid, met the chiefs of the Iroquois Confederacy at the place to be known for years as Fort Frontenac, now known as Kingston, a quiet little city at the entrance of Lake Ontario on the north shore.

[Illustration: ROBERT DE LA SALLE] Ostensibly the powwow was to maintain peace.

In reality, it was to attract the Iroquois, and all the tribes with whom they traded, away from the English, down to Frontenac's new fort with their furs.

It is a question if all the military pomp deceived a living soul.

Before the Governor had set his sappers to work on the foundations of a fort, the merchants of Montreal--the Le Bers and Le Moynes and Le Chesnayes and Le Fôrests--were furious with jealousy.

Undoubtedly Fort Frontenac would be the most valuable fur post in America.

{136} [Illustration: OLD PLAN OF FORT FRONTENAC] Determined to have the support of the Court, where his wife was in high favor, Count Frontenac dispatched La Salle to France in 1674 with letters of strongest recommendation, which, no doubt, Jean Talon, the former Intendant, indorsed on the spot.

La Salle's case was a strong one.

He was to offer to found a line of forts establishing French dominion from Lake Ontario to the valley of the Mississippi, which Jolliet had just explored.

In return, he asked for patent of nobility and the grant of a seigniory at Fort Frontenac; in other words, the monopoly of the furs there, which would easily clear him ,000 a year.

It has never been proved, but one may suspect that his profits were to be divided with Count Frontenac.

Both requests were at once granted; and La Salle came back to a hornet's nest of enmity in Canada.

Space forbids to tell of the means taken to defeat him; for, by promising to support Recollet friars at his fort instead of Jesuits, La Salle had added {137} to the enmity of the merchants, the hatred of the Jesuits.

Poison was put in his food.

Iroquois were stirred up to hostility against him.

Meanwhile no enmity checks his ardor.

He has replaced the wooden walls of Fort Frontenac with stone, mounted ten cannon, manned the fort with twenty soldiers, maintained more than forty workmen, cleared one hundred acres for crops, and in 1677 is off again for France to ask permission to build another fort above Niagara.

This time, when La Salle comes out, he is accompanied by a man famous in American annals, a soldier of fortune from Italy, cousin of Duluth the bushrover, one Henry Tonty, a man with a copper hand, his arm having been shattered in war, who presently comes to have repute among the Indians as a great "medicine man," because blows struck by that metal hand have a way of being effective.

By 1678 the fort is built above Niagara.

By 1679 a vessel of forty-five tons and ten cannon is launched on Lake Erie, the _Griffon_, the first vessel to plow the waters of the Great Lakes.

As she slides off her skids, August 17, to go up to Michilimackinac for a cargo of furs, _Te Deum_ is chanted from the new fort, and Louis Hennepin, the Dutch friar, standing on deck in full vestments, asks Heaven's blessing on the ship's venture.

Scant is the courtesy of the Michilimackinac traders as the _Griffon's_ guns roar salute to the fort.

Cold is the welcome of the Jesuits as La Salle enters their chapel dressed in scarlet mantle trimmed with gold.

And to be frank, though La Salle was backed by the King, he had no right to trade at Michilimackinac, for his monopoly explicitly states he shall not interfere with the trade of the north, but barter only with the tribes towards the Illinois.

Never mind!

he loads his ships to the water line with furs to pay his increasing debts, and sends the ship on down to Niagara with the cargo, while he and Tonty, with different parties, proceed to the south end of Lake Michigan to cross the Chicago portage leading to the Mississippi.

Did the jealous traders bribe the pilot to sink the ship to bottom?

Who knows?

Certain it is when Tonty and La Salle went down the {138} Illinois early in the new year of 1680, news of disasters came thick and fast.

The _Griffon_ had sunk with all her cargo.

The ship from France with the year's supplies for La Salle at Fort Frontenac had been wrecked at the mouth of the St. Lawrence; and worse than these losses, which meant financial ruin, here among the Illinois Indians were Mascoutin Indian spies bribed to stir up trouble for La Salle.

Small wonder that he named the fort built here Fort Crèvecoeur,--Fort Broken Heart.

[Illustration: THE BUILDING OF THE _GRIFFON_ (After the engraving in Father Hennepin's "Nouvelle Découverte," Amsterdam, 1704)] If La Salle had been fur trader only, as his enemies averred, and not patriot, one wonders why he did not sit still in his fort at Frontenac and draw his profits of ,000 a year, instead of risking loss and poison and ruin and calumny and death by chasing the phantom of his great desire to found a New France on the Mississippi.

Never pausing to repine, he orders Hennepin, the friar, to take two voyageurs and descend Illinois River as far as the Mississippi.

Tonty he leaves in charge of the Illinois fort.

He {139} himself proceeds overland the width of half a continent, to Fort Frontenac and Montreal.

Friar Hennepin's adventures have been told in his own book of marvels, half truth, half lies.

Jolliet, it will be remembered, had explored the Great River south of the Wisconsin.

Hennepin struck up from the mouth of the Illinois, to explore north, and he found enough adventure to satisfy his marvel-loving soul.

The Sioux captured him somewhere near the Wisconsin.

In the wanderings of his captivity he went as far north as the Falls of St. Anthony, the site of Minnesota's Twin Cities, and he finally fell in with a band of Duluth's bushrovers from Kaministiquia (modern Fort William), Lake Superior.

The rest of the story of La Salle on the Mississippi is more the history of the United States than of Canada, and must be given in few words.

When La Salle returned from interviewing his creditors on the St. Lawrence, he found the Illinois Indians dispersed by hostile Iroquois whom his enemies had hounded on.

Fort Crèvecoeur had been destroyed and plundered by mutineers among his own men.

Only Tonty and two or three others had remained faithful, and they had fled for their lives to Lake Michigan.

Not knowing where Tonty had taken refuge, La Salle pushed on down the Illinois River, and for the first time beheld the Mississippi, the goal of all his dreams; but anxiety for his lost men robbed the event of all jubilation.

Once more united with Tonty at Michilimackinac, La Salle returned dauntlessly to the Illinois.

Late in the fall of 1681 he set out with eighteen Indians and twenty Frenchmen from Lake Michigan for the Illinois.

February of 1682 saw the canoes floating down the winter-swollen current of the Illinois River for the Mississippi, which was reached on the 6th.

A week later the river had cleared of ice, and the voyageurs were camped amid the dense forests at the mouth of the Missouri.

The weather became warmer.

Trees were donning their bridal attire of spring and the air was heavy with the odor of blossoms.

Instead of high cliffs, carved fantastic by {140} the waters, came low-lying swamps, full of reeds, through which the canoes glided and lost themselves.

Camp after camp of strange Indian tribes they visited, till finally they came to villages where the Indians were worshipers of the sun and wore clothing of Spanish make.

By these signs La Salle guessed he was nearing the Gulf of Mexico.

Fog lay longer on the river of mornings now.

Ground was lower.

They were nearing the sea.

April 6 the river seemed to split into three channels.

Different canoes followed each channel.

The muddy river water became salty.

Then the blue sky line opened to the fore through the leafy vista of the forest-grown banks.

Another paddle stroke, and the canoes shot out on the Gulf of Mexico,--La Salle erect and silent and stern as was his wont.

April 9, 1682, a cross is planted with claim to this domain for France.

To fire of musketry and chant of Te Deum a new empire is created for King Louis of France.

Louisiana is its name.

Take a map of North America.

Look at it.

What had the pathfinders of New France accomplished?

Draw a line from Cape Breton to James Bay, from James Bay down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Gulf of Mexico across to Cape Breton.

Inside the triangle lies the French empire of the New World,--in area the size of half Europe.

That had the pathfinders accomplished for France.

La Salle was too ill to proceed at once from the Mississippi to Quebec.

As long as Frontenac remained governor, La Salle could rely on his hungry creditors and vicious enemies--now eager as wolves, to confiscate his furs and seize his seigniory at Fort Frontenac--being restrained by the strong hand of the Viceroy; but while La Salle lay ill at the Illinois fort, Frontenac was succeeded by La Barre as viceroy; and the new Governor was a weak, avaricious old man, ready to believe any evil tale carried to his ears.

He at once sided with La Salle's enemies, and wrote the French King that the explorer's "_head was turned_"; that La Salle "_accomplished nothing, but spent his life leading bandits through the forests, pillaging Indians; {141} that all the story of discovering the Mississippi was a fabrication_."

When La Salle came from the wilderness he found himself a ruined man.

Fort Frontenac had been seized by his enemies.

Supplies for the Mississippi had been stopped, and officers were on their way to seize the forts there.

Leaving Tonty in charge of his interests, La Salle sailed for France where he had a strong friend at court in Frontenac.

As it happened, Spain and France were playing at the game of checkmating each other; and it pleased the French King to restore La Salle's forts and to give the Canadian explorer four ships to colonize the Mississippi by way of the Gulf of Mexico.

This was to oust Spain from her ancient claim on the gulf; but Beaujeu, the naval commander of the expedition, was not in sympathy with La Salle.

Beaujeu was a noble by birth; La Salle, only a noble of the merchant classes.

The two bickered and quarreled from the first.

By some blunder, when the ships reached the Gulf of Mexico, laden with colonists, in December of 1684, they missed the mouth of the Mississippi and anchored off Texas.

The main ship sailed back to France.

Two others were wrecked, and La Salle in desperation, after several trips seeking the Mississippi, resolved to go overland by way of the Mississippi valley and the Illinois to obtain aid in Canada for his colonists.

All the world knows what happened.

Near Trinity River in Texas some of his men mutinied.

Early in the morning of the 19th of March, 1687, La Salle left camp with a friar and Indian to ascertain what was delaying the plotters, who had not returned from the hunt.

Suddenly La Salle seemed overwhelmed by a great sadness.

He spoke of death.

A

moment later, catching sight of one of the delinquents, he had called out.

A shot rang from the underbush; another shot; and La Salle reeled forward dead, with a bullet wound gaping in his forehead.

The body of the man who had won a new empire for France was stripped and left naked, a prey to the foxes and carrion birds.

So perished Robert Cavelier de La Salle, aged forty-four.

Nor need the fate of the mutineers be told here.

The fate of mutineers is the same the world over.

Having slain their {142} commander, they fell on one another and perished, either at one another's hands or among the Indians.

As for the colonists of men, women, and girls left in Texas, the few who were not massacred by the Indians fell into the hands of the Spaniards.

La Salle's debts at the time of his death were what would now be half a million dollars.

His life had ended in what the world calls ruin, but France entered into his heritage.

With the passing of Robert de La Salle passes the heroic age of Canada,--its age of youth's dream.

Now was to come its manhood,--its struggles, its wars, its nation building, working out a greater destiny than any dream of youth.

{143} CHAPTER VIII FROM 1679 TO 1713