A Half Century of Conflict Volume I Part 18

Among the enemy were some Sakis, or Sacs, fighting for the Outagamies, while others of their tribe were among the allies of the French. Seeing the desperate turn of affairs, they escaped from time to time and came over to the winning side, bringing reports of the state of the beleaguered camp. They declared that sixty or eighty women and children were already dead from hunger and thirst, besides those killed by bullets and arrows; that the fire of the besiegers was so hot that the bodies could not be buried, and that the camp of the Outagamies and Mascoutins was a den of infection.

The end was near. The besieged savages called from their palisades to ask if they might send another deputation, and were told that they were free to do so. The chief, Pemoussa, soon appeared at the gate of the fort, naked, painted from head to foot with green earth, wearing belts of wampum about his waist, and others hanging from his shoulders, besides a kind of crown of wampum beads on his head. With him came seven women, meant as a peace-offering, all painted and adorned with wampum.

Three other princ.i.p.al chiefs followed, each with a gourd rattle in his hand, to the cadence of which the whole party sang and shouted at the full stretch of their lungs an invocation to the spirits for help and pity. They were conducted to the parade, where the French and the allied chiefs were already a.s.sembled, and Pemoussa thus addressed them:--

"My father, and all the nations here present, I come to ask for life. It is no longer ours, but yours. I bring you these seven women, who are my flesh, and whom I put at your feet, to be your slaves. But do not think that I am afraid to die; it is the life of our women and children that I ask of you." He then offered six wampum belts, in token that his followers owned themselves beaten, and begged for mercy. "Tell us, I pray you,"--these were his last words,--"something that will lighten the hearts of my people when I go back to them."

Dubuisson left the answer to his allies. The appeal of the suppliant fell on hearts of stone. The whole concourse sat in fierce and sullen silence, and the envoys read their doom in the gloomy brows that surrounded them. Eight or ten of the allied savages presently came to Dubuisson, and one of them said in a low voice: "My father, we come to ask your leave to knock these four great chiefs in the head. It is they who prevent our enemies from surrendering without conditions. When they are dead, the rest will be at our mercy."

Dubuisson told them that they must be drunk to propose such a thing.

"Remember," he said, "that both you and I have given our word for their safety. If I consented to what you ask, your father at Montreal would never forgive me. Besides, you can see plainly that they and their people cannot escape you."

The would-be murderers consented to bide their time, and the wretched envoys went back with their tidings of despair.

"I confess," wrote Dubuisson to the governor, a few days later, "that I was touched with compa.s.sion; but as war and pity do not agree well together, and especially as I understood that they were hired by the English to destroy us, I abandoned them to their fate."

The firing began once more, and the allied hordes howled round the camp of their victims like troops of ravenous wolves. But a surprise awaited them. Indians rarely set guards at night, and they felt sure now of their prey. It was the nineteenth day of the siege.[284] The night closed dark and rainy, and when morning came, the enemy were gone. All among them that had strength to move had glided away through the gloom with the silence of shadows, pa.s.sed the camps of their sleeping enemies, and reached a point of land projecting into the river opposite the end of Isle au Cochon, and a few miles above the French fort. Here, knowing that they would be pursued, they barricaded themselves with trunks and branches of trees. When the astonished allies discovered their escape, they hastily followed their trail, accompanied by some of the French, led by Vincennes. In their eagerness they ran upon the barricade before seeing it, and were met by a fire that killed and wounded twenty of them. There was no alternative but to forego their revenge and abandon the field, or begin another siege. Encouraged by Dubuisson, they built their wigwams on the new scene of operations; and, being supplied by the French with axes, mattocks, and two swivels, they made a wall of logs opposite the barricade, from which they galled the defenders with a close and deadly fire. The Mississagas and Ojibwas, who had lately arrived, fished and hunted for the allies, while the French furnished them with powder, ball, tobacco, Indian corn, and kettles. The enemy fought desperately for four days, and then, in utter exhaustion, surrendered at discretion.[285]

The women and children were divided among the victorious hordes, and adopted or enslaved. To the men no quarter was given. "Our Indians amused themselves," writes Dubuisson, "with shooting four or five of them every day." Here, however, another surprise awaited the conquerors and abridged their recreation, for about a hundred of these intrepid warriors contrived to make their escape, and among them was the great war-chief Pemoussa.

The Outagamies were crippled, but not disabled, for but a part of the tribe was involved in this b.l.o.o.d.y affair. The rest were wrought to fury by the fate of their kinsmen, and for many years they remained thorns in the sides of the French.

There is a disposition to a.s.sume 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 help 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 still more lurid in coloring, and on a larger scale of horror. In the first half of the seventeenth century the whole country, from Lake Superior to the Tennessee, and from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, was ravaged by wars of extermination, in which tribes, large and powerful by Indian standards, perished, dwindled into feeble remnants, or were absorbed by other tribes and vanished from sight. French pioneers were sometimes involved in the carnage, but neither they nor other Europeans were answerable for it.[286]

FOOTNOTES:

[279] See Chapter I.

[280] _Memoir on the Indians between Lake Erie and the Mississippi_, in _N. Y. Col. Docs._, ix. 885.

[281] _Memoir on the Indians between Lake Erie and the Mississippi._

[282] This paper is printed, not very accurately, in the _Collection de Doc.u.ments relatifs a la Nouvelle France_, i. 623 (Quebec, 1883).

[283] "Cri horrible, dont la terre trembla."--_Dubuisson a Vaudreuil, 15 Juin, 1712._ This is the official report of the affair.

[284] According to the paper ascribed to Lery it was only the eighth.

[285] The paper ascribed to Lery says that they surrendered on a promise from Vincennes that their lives should be spared, but that the promise availed nothing.

[286] _Dubuisson a Vaudreuil, 15 Juin, 1712._ This is Dubuisson's report to the governor, which soon after the event he sent to Montreal by the hands of Vincennes. He says that the great fatigue through which he has just pa.s.sed prevents him from giving every detail, and he refers Vaudreuil to the bearer for further information. The report is, however, long and circ.u.mstantial.

_etat de ce que M. Dubuisson a depense pour le service du Roy pour s'attirer les Nations et les mettre dans ses interets afin de resister aux Outagamis et aux Mascoutins qui etaient payes des Anglais pour detruire le poste du Fort de Ponchartrain du Detroit, 14 Octobre, 1712._ Dubuisson reckons his outlay at 2,901 livres.

These doc.u.ments, with the narrative ascribed to the engineer Lery, are the contemporary authorities on which the foregoing account is based.

CHAPTER XIII.

1697-1750.

LOUISIANA.

The Mississippi to be occupied.--English Rivalry.--Iberville.--Bienville.--Huguenots.--Views of Louis XIV.--Wives for the Colony.--Slaves.--La Mothe-Cadillac.--Paternal Government.--Crozat's Monopoly.--Factions.--The Mississippi Company.--New Orleans.--The Bubble bursts.--Indian Wars.--The Colony firmly established.--The two Heads of New France.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century an event took place that was to have a great influence on the future of French America. This was the occupation by France of the mouth of the Mississippi, and the vindication of her claim to the vast and undefined regions which La Salle had called Louisiana. La Salle's schemes had come to nought, but they were revived, seven years after his death, by his lieutenant, the gallant and faithful Henri de Tonty, who urged the seizure of Louisiana for three reasons,--first, as a base of attack upon Mexico; secondly, as a depot for the furs and lead ore of the interior; and thirdly, as the only means of preventing the English from becoming masters of the West.[287]

Three years later, the Sieur de Remonville, a friend of La Salle, proposed the formation of a company for the settlement of Louisiana, and called for immediate action as indispensable to antic.i.p.ate the English.[288] The English were, in fact, on the point of taking possession of the mouth of the Mississippi, and were prevented only by the prompt intervention of the rival nation.

If they had succeeded, colonies would have grown up on the Gulf of Mexico after the type of those already planted along the Atlantic: voluntary immigrants would have brought to a new home their old inheritance of English freedom; would have ruled themselves by laws of their own making, through magistrates of their own choice; would have depended on their own efforts, and not on government help, in the invigorating consciousness that their destinies were in their own hands, and that they themselves, and not others, were to gather the fruits of their toils. Out of conditions like these would have sprung communities, not brilliant, but healthy, orderly, well rooted in the soil, and of hardy and vigorous growth.

But the principles of absolutism, and not those of a regulated liberty, were to rule in Louisiana. The new French colony was to be the child of the Crown. Cargoes of emigrants, willing or unwilling, were to be shipped by authority to the fever-stricken banks of the Mississippi,--cargoes made up in part of those whom fortune and their own defects had sunk to dependence; to whom labor was strange and odious, but who dreamed of gold mines and pearl fisheries, and wealth to be won in the New World and spent in the Old; who wore the shackles of a paternal despotism which they were told to regard as of divine inst.i.tution; who were at the mercy of military rulers set over them by the King, and agreeing in nothing except in enforcing the mandates of arbitrary power and the withering maxim that the labor of the colonist was due, not to himself, but to his masters. It remains to trace briefly the results of such conditions.

The before-mentioned scheme of Remonville for settling the Mississippi country had no result. In the next year the gallant Le Moyne d'Iberville--who has been called the Cid, or, more fitly, the Jean Bart, of Canada--offered to carry out the schemes of La Salle and plant a colony in Louisiana.[289] One thing had become clear,--France must act at once, or lose the Mississippi. Already there was a movement in London to seize upon it, under a grant to two n.o.blemen. Iberville's offer was accepted; he was ordered to build a fort at the mouth of the great river, and leave a garrison to hold it.[290] He sailed with two frigates, the "Badine" and the "Marin," and towards the end of January, 1699, reached Pensacola. Here he found two Spanish ships, which would not let him enter the harbor. Spain, no less than England, was bent on making good her claim to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, and the two ships had come from Vera Cruz on this errand. Three hundred men had been landed, and a stockade fort was already built. Iberville left the Spaniards undisturbed and unchallenged, and felt his way westward along the coasts of Alabama and Mississippi, exploring and sounding as he went. At the beginning of March his boats were caught in a strong muddy current of fresh water, and he saw that he had reached the object of his search, the "fatal river" of the unfortunate La Salle. He entered it, encamped, on the night of the third, twelve leagues above its mouth, climbed a solitary tree, and could see nothing but broad flats of bushes and canebrakes.[291]

Still pushing upward against the current, he reached in eleven days a village of the Bayagoula Indians, where he found the chief attired in a blue capote, which was probably put on in honor of the white strangers, and which, as the wearer declared, had been given him by Henri de Tonty, on his descent of the Mississippi in search of La Salle, thirteen years before. Young Le Moyne de Bienville, who accompanied his brother Iberville in a canoe, brought him, some time after, a letter from Tonty which the writer had left in the hands of another chief, to be delivered to La Salle in case of his arrival, and which Bienville had bought for a hatchet. Iberville welcomed it as convincing proof that the river he had entered was in truth the Mississippi.[292] After pushing up the stream till the twenty-fourth, he returned to the ships by way of lakes Maurepas and Ponchartrain.

Iberville now repaired to the harbor of Biloxi, on the coast of the present State of Mississippi. Here he built a small stockade fort, where he left eighty men, under the Sieur de Sauvolle, to hold the country for Louis XIV.; and this done, he sailed for France. Thus the first foundations of Louisiana were laid in Mississippi.

Bienville, whom his brother had left at Biloxi as second in command, was sent by Sauvolle on an exploring expedition up the Mississippi with five men in two canoes. At the bend of the river now called English Turn,--_Tour a l'Anglais_,--below the site of New Orleans, he found an English corvette of ten guns, having, as pa.s.sengers, a number of French Protestant families taken on board from the Carolinas, with the intention of settling on the Mississippi. The commander, Captain Louis Bank, declared that his vessel was one of three sent from London by a company formed jointly of Englishmen and Huguenot refugees for the purpose of founding a colony.[293] Though not quite sure that they were upon the Mississippi, they were on their way up the stream to join a party of Englishmen said to be among the Chickasaws, with whom they were trading for Indian slaves. Bienville a.s.sured Bank that he was not upon the Mississippi, but on another river belonging to King Louis, who had a strong fort there and several settlements. "The too-credulous Englishman," says a French writer, "believed these inventions and turned back."[294] First, however, a French engineer in the service of Bank contrived to have an interview with Bienville, and gave him a pet.i.tion to the King of France, signed by four hundred Huguenots who had taken refuge in the Carolinas after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The pet.i.tioners begged that they might have leave to settle in Louisiana, with liberty of conscience, under the French Crown. In due time they got their answer. The King replied, through the minister, Ponchartrain, that he had not expelled heretics from France in order that they should set up a republic in America.[295] Thus, by the bigotry that had been the bane of Canada and of France herself, Louis XIV. threw away the opportunity of establishing a firm and healthy colony at the mouth of the Mississippi.

So threatening was the danger that England would seize the country, that Iberville had scarcely landed in France when he was sent back with a reinforcement. The colonial views of the King may be gathered from his instructions to his officer. Iberville was told to seek out diligently the best places for establishing pearl-fisheries, though it was admitted that the pearls of Louisiana were uncommonly bad. He was also to catch bison calves, make a fenced park to hold them, and tame them for the sake of their wool, which was reputed to be of value for various fabrics. Above all, he was to look for mines, the finding of which the doc.u.ment declares to be "la grande affaire."[296]

On the eighth of January, Iberville reached Biloxi, and soon after went up the Mississippi to that remarkable tribe of sun-worshippers, the Natchez, whose villages were on and near the site of the city that now bears their name. Some thirty miles above he found a kindred tribe, the Taensas, whose temple took fire during his visit, when, to his horror, he saw five living infants thrown into the flames by their mothers to appease the angry spirits.[297]

Retracing his course, he built a wooden redoubt near one of the mouths of the Mississippi to keep out the dreaded English.

In the next year he made a third voyage, and ordered the feeble establishment at Biloxi to be moved to the bay of Mobile. This drew a protest from the Spaniards, who rested their claims to the country on the famous bull of Pope Alexander VI. The question was referred to the two Crowns. Louis XIV., a stanch champion of the papacy when his duties as a Catholic did not clash with his interests as a king, refused submission to the bull, insisted that the Louisiana country was his, and declared that he would hold fast to it because he was bound, as a son of Holy Church, to convert the Indians and keep out the English heretics.[298] Spain was then at peace with France, and her new King, the Duc d'Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV., needed the support of his powerful kinsman; hence his remonstrance against French encroachment was of the mildest.[299]

Besides Biloxi and Mobile Bay, the French formed a third establishment at Dauphin Island. The Mississippi itself, which may be called the vital organ of the colony, was thus far neglected, being occupied by no settlement and guarded only by a redoubt near one of its mouths.

Of the emigrants sent out by the court to the new land of promise, the most valuable by far were a number of Canadians who had served under Iberville at Hudson Bay. The rest were largely of the sort who are described by that officer as "beggars sent out to enrich themselves,"

and who expected the government to feed them while they looked for pearls and gold mines. The paternal providence of Versailles, mindful of their needs, sent them, in 1704, a gift of twenty marriageable girls, described as "nurtured in virtue and piety, and accustomed to work."

Twenty-three more came in the next year from the same benignant source, besides seventy-five soldiers, five priests, and two nuns. Food, however, was not sent in proportion to the consumers; and as no crops were raised in Louisiana, famine and pestilence followed, till the starving colonists were forced to live on sh.e.l.l-fish picked up along the sh.o.r.es.

Disorder and discord filled the land of promise. Nicolas de la Salle, the _commissaire ordonnateur_, an official answering to the Canadian intendant, wrote to the minister Ponchartrain that Iberville and his brothers, Bienville and Chateauguay, were "thieves and knaves."[300] La Vente, cure of Mobile, joined in the cry against Bienville, and stirred soldiers and settlers to disaffection; but the bitterest accuser of that truly valuable officer was the worthy matron who held the unenviable post of directress of the "King's girls,"--that is, the young women sent out as wives for the colonists. It seems that she had matrimonial views for herself as well as for her charge; and she wrote to Ponchartrain that Major Boisbriant, commander of the garrison, would certainly have married her if Bienville had not interfered and dissuaded him. "It is clear," she adds, "that M. de Bienville has not the qualities necessary for governing the colony."[301]

Bienville was now chief in authority. Charges of peculation and other offences poured in against him, and at last, though nothing was proved, one De Muys was sent to succeed him, with orders to send him home a prisoner if on examination the accusations should prove to be true. De Muys died on the voyage. D'Artaguette, the new intendant, proceeded to make the inquiry, but refused to tell Bienville the nature of the charges against him, saying that he had orders not to do so.

Nevertheless, when he had finished his investigation he reported to the minister that the accused was innocent; on which Nicolas de la Salle, whom he had supplanted as intendant, wrote to Ponchartrain that D'Artaguette had deceived him, being no better than Bienville himself.

La Salle further declared that Barrot, the surgeon of the colony, was an ignoramus, and that he made money by selling the medicines supplied by the King to cure his Louisianian subjects. Such were the transatlantic workings of the paternalism of Versailles.

Bienville, who had been permitted to resume his authority, paints the state of the colony to his masters, and tells them that the inhabitants are dying of hunger,--not all, however, for he mentions a few exceptional cases of prosperity. These were certain thrifty colonists from Roch.e.l.le, who, says Bienville, have grown rich by keeping dram-shops, and now want to go back to France; but he has set a watch over them, thinking it just that they should be forced to stay in the colony.[302] This was to add the bars of a prison to the other attractions of the new home.

As the colonists would not work, there was an attempt to make Indian slaves work for them; but as these continually ran off, Bienville proposed to open a barter with the French West Indies, giving three red slaves for two black ones,--an exchange which he thought would be mutually advantageous, since the Indians, being upon islands, could no longer escape. The court disapproved the plan, on the ground that the West Indians would give only their worst negroes in exchange, and that the only way to get good ones was to fetch them from Guinea.