Heroes of the Middle West Part 5

Having crossed the river and reached the prairie, Tonty and his allies saw the Iroquois. They came prancing and screeching on their savage march, and would have been ridiculous if they had not been appalling.

These Hodenosaunee, or People of the Long House, as they called themselves, were the most terrible force in the New World. Tonty saw at once it would go hard with the Illinois nation. Never at any time as hardy as their invaders, who by frequent attacks had broken their courage, and weakened by the absence of their best warriors, they wavered in their first charge.

He put down his gun and offered to carry a peace belt to the Iroquois to stop the fight. The Illinois gladly gave him a wampum girdle and sent a young Indian with him. Boisrondet and etienne Renault also walked at his side into the open s.p.a.ce between two barbaric armies. The Iroquois did not stop firing when he held up and waved the belt in his left hand.

Bullets spattered on the hummocky sod of the prairie around him.

"Go back," Tonty said to Boisrondet and Renault and the young Indian.

"What need is there of so many? Take the lad back, Boisrondet."

They hesitated to leave him.

"Go back!" he repeated sharply, so they turned, and he ran on alone. The Iroquois guns seemed to flash in his face. It was like throwing himself among furious wolves. Snarling lips and snaky eyes and twisting sinuous bodies made nightmares around him. He felt himself seized; a young warrior stabbed him in the side. The knife glanced on a rib, but blood ran down his buckskins and filled his throat.

"Stop!" shouted an Iroquois chief. "This is a Frenchman; his ears are not pierced."

Tonty's swarthy skin was blanching with the anguish of his wound, which turned him faint. His black hair clung in rings to a forehead wet with cold perspiration. But he held the wampum belt aloft and spat the blood out of his mouth.

"Iroquois! The Illinois nation are under the protection of the French king and Governor Frontenac! I demand that you leave them in peace!"

A young brave s.n.a.t.c.hed his hat and lifted it on the end of a gun.

At that the Illinois began a frenzied attack, thinking he was killed.

Tonty was spun around as in a whirlpool. He felt a hand in his hair and a knife at his scalp.

"I never," he thought to himself, "was in such perplexity in my life!"

"Burn him!" shouted some.

"But he is French!" others cried. "Let him go!"

Through all the uproar he urged the peace belt and threatened them with France. The wholesome dread which Governor Frontenac had given to that name had effect on them. Besides, they had not surprised the Illinois, and if they declared a truce, time would be gained to consider their future movements.

The younger braves were quieted, and old warriors gave Tonty a belt to carry back to the Illinois. He staggered across the prairie. Father Ribourde and Father Membre, who had just reached the spot, ran to meet him, and supported him as he half fainted from loss of blood.

Tonty and his allies withdrew across the river. But the Iroquois, instead of retreating, followed. Seeing what must happen, Tonty thought it best for the Illinois to give up their town and go to protect their women and children, while he attempted as long as possible to keep the invaders at bay. Lodges were set on fire, and the Illinois withdrew quietly down river, leaving some of their men in the bluffs less than a league from the town, to bring them word of the result. The Frenchmen, partially rebuilding their own lodge, which had been wrecked when their goods were thrown in the river, stood their ground in the midst of insulting savages.

For the Iroquois, still determined on war and despoiling, opened maize pits, scattering and burning the grain; trampled corn in the fields; and even pulled the dead off their scaffolds. They were angry at the French for threatening them with that invisible power of France, and bent on chasing the Illinois. Yet Tonty was able to force a kind of treaty between them and the retreating nation, through the men left in the bluffs. As soon as they had made it, however, they began canoes of elm bark, to follow the Illinois down river.

Two or three days pa.s.sed, while the Frenchmen sat covering the invaded tribe's retreat. They scarcely slept at night. Their enemies prowled around their lodge or celebrated dances on the ruins of the town.

The river flowed placidly, and the sun shone on desolation and on the unaltered ferny b.u.t.tresses of the great rock and its castellated neighbors. Tonty heard with half delirious ears the little creatures which sing in the gra.s.s and fly before man, but return to their singing as soon as he pa.s.ses by. The friars dressed and tended his fevered wound, and when the Iroquois sent for him to come to a council, Father Membre went with him.

Within the rude fort of posts and poles saved from ruined lodges, which the Iroquois had built for themselves, adding a ruff of freshly chopped trees, the two white men sat down in a ring of glowering savages. Six packs of beaver skins were piled ready for the oration; and the orator rose and addressed Tonty.

With the first two the Indian spokesman promised that his nation would not eat Count Frontenac's children, those cowardly Illinois.

The next was a plaster to heal Tonty's wound.

The next was oil to anoint him and the Recollets, so their joints would move easily in traveling.

The next said that the sun was bright.

And the sixth and last pack ordered the French to get up and leave the country.

When the speaker sat down, Tonty came to his feet and looked at the beaver skins piled before them. Then he looked around the circle of hard weather-beaten faces and restless eyes, and thanked the Iroquois for their gift.

"But I would know," said Tonty, "how soon you yourselves intend to leave the country and let the Illinois be in peace?"

There was a growl, and a number of the braves burst out with the declaration that they intended to eat Illinois flesh first.

Tonty raised his foot and kicked the beaver skins from him. In that very way they would have rejected a one-sided treaty themselves. Up they sprang with drawn knives and drove him and Father Membre from the fort.

All night the French stood guard for fear of being surprised and ma.s.sacred in their lodge. At daybreak the chiefs ordered them to go without waiting another hour, and gave them a leaky boat.

Tonty had protected the retreat of the Illinois as long as he could.

With the two Recollets, Boisrondet, young Renault, and L'Esperance, and with little else, he set out up the river.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SITE OF FORT ST. LOUIS OF THE ILLINOIS.

From a Recent Photograph.]

IV.

THE UNDESPAIRING NORMAN.

"The northward current of the eastern sh.o.r.e of Lake Michigan and the southward current of the western sh.o.r.e," says a writer exact in knowledge, "naturally made the St. Joseph portage a return route to Canada, and the Chicago portage an outbound one." But though La Salle was a careful observer and must have known that what was then called the Chekago River afforded a very short carrying to the Desplaines or upper Illinois, he saw fit to use the St. Joseph both coming and going.

His march to Fort Frontenac he afterwards described in a letter to one of the creditors interested in his discoveries.

"Though the thaws of approaching spring greatly increased the difficulty of the way, interrupted as it was everywhere by marshes and rivers, to say nothing of the length of the journey, which is about five hundred leagues in a direct line, and the danger of meeting Indians of four or five different nations, through whose country we were to pa.s.s, as well as an Iroquois army which we knew was coming that way; though we must suffer all the time from hunger; sleep on the open ground, and often without food; watch by night and march by day, loaded with baggage, such as blanket, clothing, kettle, hatchet, gun, powder, lead, and skins to make moccasins; sometimes pushing through thickets, sometimes climbing rocks covered with ice and snow; sometimes wading whole days through marshes where the water was waist deep or even more,--all this did not prevent me from going to Fort Frontenac to bring back the things we needed and to learn myself what had become of my vessel."

Carrying their canoes where the river was frozen, and finally leaving them hidden near where the town of Joliet now stands, La Salle and his men pushed on until they reached the fort built at the mouth of the St.

Joseph. Here he found the two voyageurs he had sent to search for the Griffin. They said they had been around the lake and could learn nothing of her. He then directed them to Tonty, while he marched up the eastern sh.o.r.e. This Michigan region was debatable ground among the Indians, where they met to fight; and he left significant marks on the trees, to make prowlers think he had a large war party. A dozen or twenty roving savages, ready to pounce like ferocious wildcats on a camp, always peeled white places on the trees, and cut pictures there of their totem, or tribe mark, and the scalps and prisoners they had taken. They respected a company more numerous than themselves, and avoided it.

Stopping to nurse the sick when some fell ill of exposure, or to build canoes when canoes were needed, La Salle did not reach Fort Niagara until Easter, and it was May when Fort Frontenac came into view.

No man ever suffered more from treachery. Before he could get together the supplies he needed, trouble after trouble fell upon him.

The men that Tonty had sent to tell him about the destruction of Fort Crevecoeur were followed by others who brought word that the deserters had destroyed his forts at the St. Joseph River and Niagara, and carried off all the goods. The Griffin was certainly lost. And before going back to the Illinois country he was obliged to chase these fellows and take from them what could be recovered. But when everybody else seemed to be against him, it was much comfort to remember he had a faithful lieutenant while the copper-handed Italian lived.

La Salle gathered twenty-five men of trades useful to him, and another outfit with all that he needed for a ship, having made new arrangements with his creditors; and going by way of Michilimackinac, he reached the St. Joseph early in November.

Whenever, in our own day, we see the Kankakee still gliding along its rocky bed, or the solemn Illinois spreading betwixt wooded banks, it is easy to imagine a birch canoe just appearing around a bend, carrying La Salle or Tonty, and rowed by buckskin-clad voyageurs. On the Kankakee thousands of buffaloes filled the plains, and La Salle's party killed many, preparing the flesh in dried flakes by smoking it.

The buffaloes were left behind when they approached the great town on the Illinois. La Salle glanced up at the rock he wanted fortified, but no palisade or Frenchman was to be seen.

"It seems very quiet," he said to the men in his canoe, "and we have not pa.s.sed a hunter. There--there is the meadow where the town stood; but where is the town?"

Heaps of ashes, charred poles, broken scaffolds, wolves prowling where papooses had played, crows whirling in black clouds or sitting in rows on naked branches, bones,--a horrible waste plain had taken the place of the town.