A Half Century of Conflict Volume I Part 21

Two years after Lignery's expedition, there was another attempt to humble the Outagamies. Late in the autumn of 1730 young Coulon de Villiers, who twenty-four years later defeated Washington at Fort Necessity, appeared at Quebec with news that the Sieur de Villiers, his father, who commanded the post on the St. Joseph, had struck the Outagamies a deadly blow and killed two hundred of their warriors, besides six hundred of their women and children. The force under Villiers consisted of a body of Frenchmen gathered from various western posts, another body from the Illinois, led by the Sieurs de Saint-Ange, father and son, and twelve or thirteen hundred Indian allies from many friendly tribes.[352]

The accounts of this affair are obscure and not very trustworthy. It seems that the Outagamies began the fray by an attack on the Illinois at La Salle's old station of Le Rocher, on the river Illinois. On hearing of this, the French commanders mustered their Indian allies, hastened to the spot, and found the Outagamies intrenched in a grove which they had surrounded with a stockade. They defended themselves with their usual courage, but, being hard pressed by hunger and thirst, as well as by the greatly superior numbers of their a.s.sailants, they tried to escape during a dark night, as their tribesmen had done at Detroit in 1712. The French and their allies pursued, and there was a great slaughter, in which many warriors and many more women and children were the victims.[353]

The offending tribe must now, one would think, have ceased to be dangerous; but nothing less than its destruction would content the French officials. To this end, their best resource was in their Indian allies, among whom the Outagamies had no more deadly enemy than the Hurons of Detroit, who, far from relenting in view of their disasters, were more eager than ever to wreak their ire on their unfortunate foe.

Accordingly, they sent messengers to the converted Iroquois at the Mission of Two Mountains, and invited them to join in making an end of the Outagamies. The invitation was accepted, and in the autumn of 1731 forty-seven warriors from the Two Mountains appeared at Detroit. The party was soon made up. It consisted of seventy-four Hurons, forty-six Iroquois, and four Ottawas. They took the trail to the mouth of the river St. Joseph, thence around the head of Lake Michigan to the Chicago portage, and thence westward to Rock River. Here were the villages of the Kickapoos and Mascoutins, who had been allies of the Outagamies, but having lately quarrelled with them, received the strangers as friends and gave them guides. The party now filed northward, by forests and prairies, towards the Wisconsin, to the banks of which stream the Outagamies had lately removed their villages. The warriors were all on snow-shoes, for the weather was cold and the snow deep. Some of the elders, overcome by the hardships of the way, called a council and proposed to turn back; but the juniors were for pushing on at all risks, and a young warrior declared that he would rather die than go home without killing somebody. The result was a division of the party; the elders returned to Chicago, and the younger men, forty Hurons and thirty Iroquois, kept on their way.

At last, as they neared the Wisconsin, they saw on an open prairie three Outagamies, who ran for their lives. The Hurons and Iroquois gave chase, till from the ridge of a hill they discovered the princ.i.p.al Outagamie village, consisting, if we may believe their own story, of forty-six wigwams, near the bank of the river. The Outagamie warriors came out to meet them, in number, as they pretended, much greater than theirs; but the Huron and Iroquois chiefs reminded their followers that they had to do with dogs who did not believe in G.o.d, on which they fired two volleys against the enemy, then dropped their guns and charged with the knife in one hand and the war-club in the other. According to their own story, which shows every sign of mendacity, they drove back the Outagamies into their village, killed seventy warriors, and captured fourteen more, without counting eighty women and children killed, and a hundred and forty taken prisoners. In short, they would have us believe that they destroyed the whole village, except ten men, who escaped entirely naked, and soon froze to death. They declared further that they sent one of their prisoners to the remaining Outagamie villages, ordering him to tell the inhabitants that they had just devoured the better part of the tribe, and meant to stay on the spot two days; that the tribesmen of the slain were free to attack them if they chose, but in that case, they would split the heads of all the women and children prisoners in their hands, make a breastwork of the dead bodies, and then finish it by piling upon it those of the a.s.sailants.[354]

Nothing is more misleading than Indian tradition, which is of the least possible value as evidence. It may be well, however, to mention another story, often repeated, touching these dark days of the Outagamies. It is to the effect that a French trader named Marin, whom they had incensed by levying blackmail from him, raised a party of Indians, with whose aid he surprised and defeated the unhappy tribe at the Little b.u.t.te des Morts, that they retired to the Great b.u.t.te des Morts, higher up Fox River, and that Marin here attacked them again, killing or capturing the whole. Extravagant as the story seems, it may have some foundation, though various dates, from 1725 to 1746, are a.s.signed to the alleged exploit, and contemporary doc.u.ments are silent concerning it. It is certain that the Outagamies were not destroyed, as the tribe exists to this day.[355]

In 1736 it was reported that sixty or eighty Outagamie warriors were still alive.[356] Their women, who when hard pushed would fight like furies, were relatively numerous and tolerably prolific, and their villages were full of st.u.r.dy boys, likely to be dangerous in a few years. Feeling their losses and their weakness, the survivors of the tribe incorporated themselves with their kindred and neighbors, the Sacs, Sakis, or Saukies, the two forming henceforth one tribe, afterwards known to the Americans as the Sacs and Foxes. Early in the nineteenth century they were settled on both banks of the upper Mississippi. Brave and restless like their forefathers, they were a continual menace to the American frontiersmen, and in 1832 they rose in open war, under their famous chief, Blackhawk, displaying their hereditary prowess both on foot and on horseback, and more than once defeating superior numbers of American mounted militia. In the next year that excellent artist, Charles Bodmer, painted a group of them from life,--grim-visaged savages, armed with war-club, spear, or rifle, and wrapped in red, green, or brown blankets, their heads close shaven except the erect and bristling scalp-lock, adorned with long eagle-plumes, while both heads and faces are painted with fantastic figures in blue, white, yellow, black, and vermilion.[357]

Three or four years after, a party of their chiefs and warriors was conducted through the country by order of the Washington government, in order to impress them with the number and power of the whites. At Boston they danced a war-dance on the Common in full costume, to the delight of the boy spectators, of whom I was one.

FOOTNOTES:

[320] Rameau, _Notes historiques sur la Colonie Canadienne du Detroit_.

[321] See "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West," 315.

[322] "Ce poste, le premier de tous par droit d'antiquite."--_Journal historique_, 403 (ed. 1744).

[323] The old parish registers of Kaskaskia are full of records of these mixed marriages. See Edward G. Mason, _Illinois in the Eighteenth Century_.

[324] The two other members were La Loire des Ursins, director of the Mississippi Company, and Michel Cha.s.sin, its commissary,--he who wrote the curious letter to Ponchartrain, asking for a wife, quoted in the last chapter, pp. 317-318.

[325] _Vaudreuil au Ministre, 16 Septembre, 1714._

[326] _Idem, 2 Octobre, 1723._

[327] _N. Y. Col. Docs._, v. 65.

[328] _Memoire presente au Comte de Ponchartrain par M. d'Auteuil, procureur-general du Roy, 1708._

[329] _Marest a Vaudreuil, 21 Janvier, 1712._

[330] _Vaudreuil et Begon au Ministre, 15 Novembre, 1713._

[331] _Vaudreuil au Ministre, 16 Septembre, 1714._

[332] "Les Renards [Outagamies] sont placez sur une riviere qui tombe dans la Baye des Puants [Green Bay]."--_Registre du Conseil de la Marine, 28 Mars, 1716._

[333] "Ou il y a des Francois et des sauvages, c'est un enfer ouvert."--_Registre du Conseil de Marine, 28 Mars, 1716._

[334] Le Page du Pratz.

[335] _Louvigny au Ministre, 14 Octobre, 1716._ Louvigny's account of the Outagamie defences is short, and not very clear. La Mothe-Cadillac, describing similar works at Michilimackinac, says that the palisades of the innermost row alone were set close together, those of the two other rows being separated by s.p.a.ces of six inches or more, through which the defenders fired from their loopholes. The plan seems borrowed from the Iroquois.

[336] _Depeche de Vaudreuil, 14 Octobre, 1716._

[337] _Vaudreuil au Conseil de Marine, 28 Octobre, 1719._

[338] _Paroles des Renards _[Outagamies]_ dans un Conseil tenu le 6 Septembre, 1722._

[339] _Reponse du Ministre a la lettre du Marquis de Vaudreuil du 11 Octobre, 1723._

[340] _Memoire sur les Renards, 27 Avril, 1727._

[341] _Memoire concernant la Paix que M. de Lignery a faite avec les Chefs des Renards, Sakis _[Sacs]_, et Puants _[Winnebagoes]_, 7 Juin, 1726._

[342] _Memoire sur les Renards, 27 Avril, 1727._

[343] _Ibid._

[344] _Memoire du Roy, 29 Avril, 1727._

[345] _Beauharnois et Dupuy au Ministre, 25 Octobre, 1727._

[346] _Memoire de Dupuy, 1728._

[347] Desliettes came to meet them, by way of Chicago, with five hundred Illinois warriors and twenty Frenchmen. _La Perriere et La Fresniere a Beauharnois, 10 Septembre, 1728._

[348] _Guignas a Beauharnois, 29 Mai, 1728._

[349] _Depeche de Beauharnois, 1 Septembre, 1728._

[350] The best account of this expedition is that of Pere Emanuel Crespel. Lignery made a report which seems to be lost, as it does not appear in the Archives.

[351] _Beauharnois au Ministre, 15 Mai, 1729_; _Ibid., 21 Juillet, 1729_.

[352] _Beauharnois et Hocquart au Ministre, 2 Novembre, 1730._ An Indian tradition says that about this time there was a great battle between the Outagamies and the French, aided by their Indian allies, at the place called Little b.u.t.te des Morts, on the Fox River. According to the story, the Outagamies were nearly destroyed. Perhaps this is a perverted version of the Villiers affair. (See _Wisconsin Historical Collections_, viii, 207.) Beauharnois also reports, under date of 6 May, 1730, that a party of Outagamies, returning from a buffalo hunt, were surprised by two hundred Ottawas, Ojibwas, Menominies, and Winnebagoes, who killed eighty warriors and three hundred women and children.

[353] Some particulars of this affair are given by Ferland, _Cours d'Histoire du Canada_, ii. 437; but he does not give his authority. I have found no report of it by those engaged.

[354] _Relation de la Defaite des Renards par les Sauvages Hurons et Iroquois, le 28 Fevrier, 1732._ (Archives de la Marine.)

[355] The story is told in Snelling, _Tales of the Northwest_ (1830), under the t.i.tle of _La b.u.t.te des Morts_, and afterwards, with variations, by the aged Augustus Grignon, in his _Recollections_, printed in the _Collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society_, iii.; also by Judge M. L. Martin and others. Grignon, like all the rest, was not born till after the time of the alleged event. The nearest approach to substantial evidence touching it is in a letter of Beauharnois, who writes in 1730 that the Sieur Dubuisson was to attack the Outagamies with fifty Frenchmen and five hundred and fifty Indians, and that Marin, commander at Green Bay, was to join him. _Beauharnois au Ministre, 25 Juin, 1730._

[356] _Memoire sur le Canada, 1736._

[357] Charles Bodmer was the artist who accompanied Prince Maximilian of Wied in his travels in the interior of North America.

The name Outagamie is Algonquin for a fox. Hence the French called the tribe Renards, and the Americans, Foxes. They called themselves Musquawkies, which is said to mean "red earth," and to be derived from the color of the soil near one of their villages.