Heroes of the Middle West Part 3

Jolliet, with his canoe of voyageurs, his maps and papers, and the young Indian boy given him by the Illinois chief, went on to Montreal. His canoe was upset in the rapids of Lachine just above Montreal, and he lost two men, the Indian boy, his papers, and nearly everything except his life. But he was able to report to the governor all that he had seen and done.

Marquette lay ill, at the Bay of the Puans, of dysentery, brought on by hardship; and he was never well again. Being determined, however, to go back and preach to the tribe on the Illinois River, he waited all winter and all the next summer to regain his strength. He carefully wrote out and sent to Canada the story of his discoveries and labors. In autumn, with Pierre Porteret and the voyageur Jacques, he ventured again to the Illinois. Once he became so ill they were obliged to stop and build him a cabin in the wilderness, at the risk of being snowed in all winter.

It was not until April that he reached what he called his Mission of the Immaculate Conception, on the Illinois River, through snow, and water and mud, hunger and misery. He preached until after Easter, when, his strength being exhausted, Pierre and Jacques undertook to carry him home to the Mission of St. Ignace. Marquette had been two years away from his palisaded station on the north sh.o.r.e, and nine years in the New World.

It was the 19th of May, and Pierre and Jacques were paddling their canoe along the east side of that great lake known now as Michigan. A creek parted the rugged coast, and dipping near its shallow mouth they looked anxiously at each other.

"What shall we do?" whispered Jacques.

"We must get on as fast as we can," answered Pierre.

They were gaunt and weather-beaten themselves from two years' tramping the wilderness. But their eyes dwelt most piteously on the dying man stretched in the bottom of the canoe. His thin fingers held a cross.

His white face and bright hair rested on a pile of blankets. Pierre and Jacques felt that no lovelier, kinder being than this scarcely breathing missionary would ever float on the blue water under that blue sky.

He opened his eyes and saw the creek they were slipping past, and a pleasant knoll beside it, and whispered:--

"There is the place of my burial."

"But, Father," pleaded Pierre, "it is yet early in the day. We can take you farther."

"Carry me ash.o.r.e here," he whispered again.

So they entered the creek and took him ash.o.r.e, building a fire and sheltering him as well as they could. There a few hours afterward he died, the weeping men holding up his cross before him, while he thanked the Divine Majesty for letting him die a poor missionary. When he could no longer speak, they repeated aloud the prayers he had taught them.

They left him buried on that sh.o.r.e with a large cross standing over his grave. Later his Indians removed his bones to the Mission of St. Ignace, with a procession of canoes and a priest intoning. They were placed under the altar of his own chapel. If you go to St. Ignace, you may see a monument now on that spot, and people have believed they traced the foundation of the old bark chapel. But the spot where he first lay was long venerated.

A great fur trader and pioneer named Gurdon Hubbard made this record about the place, which he visited in 1818:--

"We reached Marquette River, about where the town of Ludington now stands on the Michigan sh.o.r.e. This was where Father Marquette died, about one hundred and forty years before, and we saw the remains of a red-cedar cross, erected by his men at the time of his death to mark his grave; and though his remains had been removed to the Mission, at Point St. Ignace, the cross was held sacred by the voyageurs, who, in pa.s.sing, paid reverence to it, by kneeling and making the sign of the cross. It was about three feet above the ground, and in a falling condition. We reset it, leaving it out of the ground about two feet, and as I never saw it after, I doubt not that it was covered by the drifting sands of the following winter, and that no white man ever saw it afterwards."

III.

THE MAN WITH THE COPPER HAND.

One day at the end of August, when Marquette's bones had lain under his chapel altar nearly two years and a half, the first ship ever seen upon the lakes was sighted off St. Ignace. Hurons and Ottawas, French traders, and coureurs de bois, or wood-rangers, ran out to see the huge winged creature scudding betwixt Michilimackinac Island and Round Island. She was of about forty-five tons' burden. Five cannon showed through her port-holes, and as she came nearer, a carved dragon was seen to be her figurehead; she displayed the name Griffin and bore the white flag of France. The priest himself felt obliged to receive her company, for three Recollet friars, in the gray robe of St. Francis, appeared on the deck. But two men, one in a mantle of scarlet and gold, and the other in white and gold French uniform, were most watched by all eyes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BUILDING OF THE GRIFFIN.

From the Original Engraving in Father Hennepin's "Nouvelle Decouverte,"

Amsterdam, 1704.]

The ship fired a salute, and the Indians howled with terror and started to run; then turned back to see her drop her sails and her anchor, and come up in that deep crescent-shaped bay. She had weathered a hard storm in Lake Huron; but the men who handled her ropes were of little interest to coureurs de bois on sh.o.r.e, who watched her masters coming to land.

[Ill.u.s.tration: La Salle.]

"It is the Sieur de la Salle in the scarlet mantle," one coureur de bois said to another. "And this is the ship he hath been building at Niagara.

First one hears that creditors have seized his fort of Frontenac, and then one beholds him sailing here in state, as though naught on earth could daunt him."

"I would like service with him," said the other coureur de bois.

His companion laughed.

"Service with La Salle means the hardest marching and heaviest labor a voyageur ever undertook. I have heard he is himself tough as iron. But men hereabouts who have been in his service will take to the woods when they hear he has arrived; traders that he sent ahead with goods. If he gets his hand on them after he finds they have squandered his property, it will go hard with them."

"He has a long gray-colored face above his broad shoulders. I have heard of this Sieur Robert Cavelier de la Salle ever since he came to the province more than ten years ago, but I never saw him before. Is it true that Count Frontenac is greatly bound to him?"

"So true that Sieur de la Salle thereby got favor at court. It was at court that a prince recommended to him yon swart Italian in white and gold that he brought with him on his last voyage from France. Now, there is a man known already throughout the colony by reason of his hand."

"Which hand?"

"The right one."

"I see naught ailing that. He wears long gauntlets pulled well over both wrists."

"His left hand is on his sword hilt. Doth he not hold the right a little stiffly?"

"It is true. The fingers are not bent."

"They never will be bent. It is a hand of copper."

"How can a man with a copper hand be of service in the wilderness?"

The first ranger shrugged. "That I know not. But having been maimed in European wars and fitted with a copper hand, he was yet recommended to Sieur de la Salle."

"But why hath an Italian the uniform of France?"

"He is a French officer, having been exiled with his father from his own country."

The coureur de bois, who had reached the settlement later than his companion, grunted.

"One would say thou wert of the Griffin crew thyself, with the latest news from Quebec and Montreal."

"Not I," laughed the first one. "I have only been in the woods with Greysolon du Lhut, who knows everything."

"Then he told thee the name of this Italian with the copper hand?"

"a.s.suredly. This Italian with the copper hand is Sieur Greysolon du Lhut's cousin, and his name is Henri de Tonty."

"I will say this for Monsieur Henri de Tonty: a better made man never stepped on the strand at St. Ignace."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Autograph of Tonty.]

Greysolon du Lhut was the captain of coureurs de bois in the northwest.

No other leader had such influence with the lawless and daring. When these men were gathered in a settlement, spending what they had earned in drinking and gaming, it was hard to restrain them within civilized bounds. But when they took service to shoulder loads and march into the wilderness, the strongest hand could not keep them from open rebellion and desertion. There were few devoted and faithful voyageurs, such as Pierre Porteret and Jacques had proved themselves in following Marquette. The term of service was usually two years; but at the first hardship some might slip away in the night, even at the risk of perishing before they reached the settlements.

St. Ignace made a procession behind La Salle's party and followed them into the chapel to hear ma.s.s--French traders, Ottawas, Hurons, coureurs de bois, squaws, and children. When the priest turned from the altar, he looked down on complexions ranging from the natural pallor of La Salle to the black-red of the most weather-beaten native.