A Brief History of the United States Part 13

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRENCH PRIEST AND INDIANS IN BIRCH-BARK CANOE.]

THE KING'S MAIDENS.--For fifty years after the founding of Quebec few settlers came to Canada. Then the French king sent over each year a hundred or more young women who were to become wives of the settlers. [4]

Besides encouraging farming, the government tried to induce the men to engage in cod fishing and whaling; but the only business that really nourished in Canada was trading with the Indians for furs.

THE FUR TRADE.--Each year a great fair was held outside the stockade of Montreal, to which hundreds of Indians came from the far western lakes.

They brought canoe loads of beaver skins and furs of small animals, and exchanged them for bright-colored cloth, beads, blankets, kettles, and knives.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INDIAN AND FUR TRADER.]

This great trade was a monopoly. Its profits could not be enjoyed by everybody. Numbers of hardy young men, therefore, took to the woods and traded with the Indians far beyond the reach of the king's officers. By so doing these wood rangers (_coureurs de bois_), as they were called, became outlaws, and if caught, might be flogged and branded with a hot iron. They built trading posts at many places in the West, and often married Indian women, which went a long way to make the Indians friends of the French. [5]

THE MISSISSIPPI.--When the priests and traders reached the country about Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, they heard from the Indians of a great river called the Mississippi--that is, "Big Water" or "Father of Waters."

Might not this, it was asked, be the long-sought northwest pa.s.sage to the Indies? In hopes that it was, Father Marquette (mar-ket'), a priest who had founded a mission on the Strait of Mackinac (mack'i-naw) between Lakes Huron and Michigan, and Joliet (zho-le-a'), a trapper and soldier, were sent to find the river and follow it to the sea.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FRENCH CLAIMS, MISSIONS, AND TRADING POSTS IN MISSISSIPPI VALLEY IN 1700]

They started in the spring of 1673 with five companions in two canoes.

Their way was from the Strait of Mackinac to Green Bay in Wisconsin, up the Fox River, across a portage to the Wisconsin River, and down this to the Mississippi, on whose waters they floated and paddled to a place probably below the mouth of the Arkansas. There the travelers stopped, and turned back toward Canada, convinced that the great river [6] must flow not to the Pacific, but to the Gulf of Mexico.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARQUETTE AND JOLIET AT A PORTAGE.]

LA SALLE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, 1682.--The voyage of Marquette and Joliet was of the greatest importance to France. Yet the only man who seems to have been fully awake to its importance was La Salle. If the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, a new and boundless Indian trade lay open to Frenchmen. But did it flow into the Gulf? That was a question La Salle proposed to settle; but three heroic attempts were made, and two failures, which to other men would have been disheartening, were endured, before he pa.s.sed down the river to its mouth in 1682. [7]

LOUISIANA.--Standing on the sh.o.r.e of the Gulf of Mexico, La Salle put up a rude cross, nailed to it the arms of France, and, in the name of the French king, Louis XIV, took formal possession of all the region drained by the Mississippi and its branches. He named the country Louisiana.

La Salle knew little of the extent of the region he thus added to the possessions of France in the New World. But the claim was valid, and Louisiana stretched from the unknown sources of the Ohio River and the Appalachian Mountains on the east, to the unknown Rocky Mountains on the west, and from the watershed of the Great Lakes on the north, to the Gulf of Mexico on the south.

LA SALLE ATTEMPTS TO OCCUPY LOUISIANA, 1682.--But the great work La Salle had planned was yet to be done. Louisiana had to be occupied.

A fort was needed far up the valley of the Mississippi to overawe the Indians and secure the fur trade. Hurrying back to the Illinois River, La Salle, in December, 1682, on the top of a steep cliff, built a stockade and named it Fort St. Louis.

A fort and city also needed to be built at the mouth of the Mississippi to keep out the Spaniards and afford a place whence furs floated down the river might be shipped to France. This required the aid of the king.

Hurrying to Paris, La Salle persuaded Louis XIV to help him, and was sent back with four ships to found the city.

LA SALLE IN TEXAS, 1684.--But the little fleet missed the mouth of the river and reached the coast of Texas. There the men landed and built Fort St. Louis of Texas. Well knowing that he had pa.s.sed the river, La Salle left some men at the fort, and with the rest started on foot to find the Mississippi--but never reached it. He was murdered on the way by his own men.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LA SALLE'S HOUSE (CANADA) IN 1900.]

Of the men left in Texas the Indians killed some, and the Spaniards killed or captured the rest, and the plans of this great explorer failed utterly.

[8]

BILOXI.--La Salle's scheme of founding a city near the mouth of the Mississippi, however, was carried out by other men. Fear that the English would seize the mouth of the river led the French to act, and in 1699 a gallant soldier named Iberville (e-ber-veel') built a small stockade and planted a colony at Bilox'i on the coast of what is now Mississippi.

NEW ORLEANS FOUNDED.--During fifteen years and more the little colony, which was soon moved from Biloxi to the vicinity of Mobile (map, p. 134), struggled on as best it could; then steps were taken to plant a settlement on the banks of the Mississippi, and (1718) Bienville (be-an-veel') laid the foundation of a city he called New Orleans.

SUMMARY

1. After many failures, a French colony was planted at Port Royal in Acadia (Nova Scotia) in 1601; but this was abandoned for a time, and the first permanent French colony was planted by Champlain at Quebec in 1608.

2. From these settlements grew up the two French colonies called Acadia and New France or Canada.

3. New France was explored by Champlain, and by many brave priests.

4. Marquette and Joliet reached the Mississippi and explored it from the Wisconsin to the Arkansas (1673).

5. Their unfinished work was taken up by La Salle, who went down the Mississippi to the Gulf (1682), and formally claimed for France all the region drained by the river and its tributaries--a vast area which he called Louisiana.

6. Occupation of the Mississippi valley by the French followed; forts and trading posts were built, and in 1718 New Orleans was founded.

[Ill.u.s.tration: AN INDIAN VILLAGE.]

FOOTNOTES

[1] Samuel de Champlain (born in 1567) had been a captain in the royal navy, and had visited the West Indies, Mexico, and the Isthmus of Panama, across which he suggested a ca.n.a.l should be cut. In 1603 he was offered a command in a company of adventurers to New France. On this voyage Champlain went up the St. Lawrence to the site of the Indian town called Hochelaga by Cartier (p. 30); but the village had disappeared. Returning to France, he joined the party of De Monts (1604).

[2] The year 1609 is important in our history. Then it was that Champlain fought the Iroquois; that the second Virginia charter was granted; and that Hudson's expedition gave the Dutch a claim to territory in the New World.

[3] The fight with the Iroquois took place not far from Ticonderoga. When the two parties approached, Champlain advanced and fired his musket. The woods rang with the report, and a chief fell dead. "There arose," says Champlain," a yell like a thunderclap and the air was full of arrows." But when another and another gun shot came from the bushes, the Iroquois broke and fled like deer. The victory was won; but it made the Iroquois the lasting enemies of the French. Read Parkman's _Pioneers of France in the New World_, pp. 310-324.

[4] About 1000 came in eight years. When married, they received each "an ox, a cow, a pair of swine, a pair of fowls, two barrels of salted meat, and eleven crowns in money." Read Parkman's _Old Regime in Canada_, pp. 219-225.

[5] The fur trade, which was the life blood of Canada, is finely described in Parkman's _Old Regime in Canada_, pp. 302-315.

[6] Marquette named the river Immaculate Conception. He noted the abundance of fish in its waters, the broad prairies on which grazed herds of buffalo, and the flocks of wild turkeys in the woods. On his way home he ascended the Illinois River, and crossed to Lake Michigan, pa.s.sing over the site where Chicago now stands. Read Mary Hartwell Catherwood's _Heroes of the Middle West_; also Parkman's _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_, pp. 48-71; and Hart's _American History as told by Contemporaries_, Vol. I, pp. 136-140.

[7] In the first attempt he left Fort Frontenac, coasted along the north sh.o.r.e of Lake Ontario, crossed over and went up the Niagara River, and around the Falls to Lake Erie. There he built a vessel called the _Griffin_, which was sailed through the lakes to the northern part of Lake Michigan (1679). Thence he went in canoes along the sh.o.r.e of Lake Michigan to the river St. Joseph, where he built a fort (Fort St. Joseph), and then pushed on to the Illinois River and (near the present city of Peoria) built another called Fort Crevecoeur (crav'ker). There he left Henri de Tonty in charge of a party to build another ship, and went back to Canada.

When he returned to the Illinois in 1680, on his second trip, Crevecoeur was in ruins, and Tonty and his men gone. In hope of finding them La Salle went down the Illinois to the Mississippi, but he turned back and pa.s.sed the winter on the river St. Joseph. (Read Parkman's description of the great town of the Illinois and its capture by the Iroquois, in _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_, pp. 205-215.)

From the St. Joseph, after another trip to Canada, La Salle (with Tonty) started westward for the third time (late in 1681), crossed the lake to where Chicago now is, went down the Illinois and the Mississippi, and in April, 1682, floated out on the waters of the Gulf.

On his first expedition La Salle was accompanied by Father Hennepin, whom he sent down the Illinois and up the Mississippi. But the Sioux (soo) Indians captured Father Hennepin, and took him up the Mississippi to the falls which he named St. Anthony, now in the city of Minneapolis.

[8] Read Parkman's _La Salle_, pp. 275-288, 350-355, 396-405.

CHAPTER X

WARS WITH THE FRENCH

KING WILLIAM'S WAR.--When James II was driven from his throne (p. 93), he fled to France. His quarrel with King William was taken up by Louis XIV, and in 1689 war began between France and England. The strife thus started in the Old World soon spread to the New, and during eight years the frontier of New England and New York was the scene of French and Indian raids, ma.s.sacres, and burning towns.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SCENE OF THE EARLY WARS WITH THE FRENCH.]