Historic Towns of the Western States Part 13

Clark, through reports of spies he had sent out, became satisfied that the Indian hostilities were fomented by the British at the various posts northwest of the Ohio River. He went to Virginia and laid the facts before Governor Patrick Henry. He pointed out that the best, if not the only, way to protect the people of Kentucky was to capture and hold the posts at Kaskaskia, Vincennes, and Detroit; that with those posts in the possession of the Americans they could overawe and hold in subjection the various Indian tribes. He offered in person to lead an expedition for their capture.

[Ill.u.s.tration CLARK AND HIS MEN CROSSING THE RIVER.]

It was known to Governor Henry that the Spaniards west of the Mississippi had been secretly trying, with some encouragement, to induce the people of Kentucky to place themselves under Spanish protection. When Clark approached him with the suggestion to capture the posts northwest of the Ohio, Governor Henry at first regarded the project as chimerical. One day, after a long argument, Clark left his presence with the significant remark "that a country that was not worth defending was not worth possessing."

Interpreting this remark to mean that if Virginia would not help to defend Kentucky the people there would seek protection from Spain, Governor Henry recalled Clark, and after a further conference, authorized him to recruit 350 men for the capture of the posts.

He gave him also a small supply of Virginia money and some ammunition.

Returning to Kentucky, Clark hastily recruited a number of men, without divulging his purpose to them. They rendezvoused on an island in the Ohio River, opposite the site of Louisville. There he explained his full design, and all but about 150 refused to join the expedition. Undismayed, Clark floated the few men remaining with him down the river in boats prepared for the purpose, and captured Kaskaskia on the 4th of July, 1778. Hearing that the British had a large force at Vincennes, and had gathered around the fort a large number of Indians hostile to the Americans, he waited at Kaskaskia till he could get further information.

The cordial welcome which the French inhabitants of Kaskaskia gave the Americans led Clark to believe that the inhabitants of Vincennes would prove friendly. French in both places, they were easily led by their priests. The priest at Kaskaskia, Father Gibault, a warm partisan of Clark, offered to go to Vincennes, sound the inhabitants, and learn the strength of the British there. His offer was accepted, and with a single companion he made the journey. He found the French inhabitants, in the absence of the commander of the post, who had gone to Detroit, willing to welcome a change of rulers, and induced them to go in a body to the little church and take an oath of allegiance to the American colonies. After this they took possession of Fort Sackville, and garrisoned it with some of their own number. Father Gibault also induced the Indians to bury the hatchet and promise to live in peace with the Americans, now the friends, as he reminded them, of their great French father.

The news of his success was speedily sent to Clark. Though he had no troops to send to garrison the fort, he dispatched Captain Leonard Helm to a.s.sume direction of affairs. This was a fortunate selection, for Helm added to great courage, tact and an intimate knowledge of the Indian character.

It was not long before the British authorities at Detroit were informed of the change in the situation at Kaskaskia and Vincennes, and at once began preparations to recover the lost ground. At this time Colonel Henry Hamilton, of the British army, was Lieutenant-Governor of Detroit. He a.s.sembled a force of five hundred men--regulars, militia and Indians--and started for Vincennes. Captain Helm did not learn of the approach of this force until, about the middle of December, it was within three miles of the fort. His garrison consisted of one American and a few inhabitants of Vincennes. Seeing that it would be impossible to defend the fort, the inhabitants quietly dispersed to their homes, leaving Helm and his one American in the fort. Though he knew he could not successfully defend the fort, Helm put on a bold front, loaded his two cannon, and placed himself at one and his solitary soldier at the other. To Hamilton's demand for the surrender of the post, Helm replied that no man could enter the post until the terms of surrender were made known. Being promised the honors of war, he surrendered himself and his one man, to the chagrin of Hamilton, on discovering the size of the garrison.

The approach of the British had been so sudden that Helm was not able to dispatch a messenger to Clark, who in consequence remained for several weeks in ignorance of the change in the situation. The last word he had received from Helm was a request for more supplies. At that time Francis Vigo, a merchant of St. Louis, happened to be in Kaskaskia. Loving the Americans and hating the British, he volunteered to go to Vincennes and make arrangements to furnish the garrison with supplies. Vigo started on his journey at once, but was captured by the British just before he reached Vincennes, and taken before Hamilton. To his demand for immediate release on the score that he was a citizen of St. Louis, Hamilton was deaf, until the Roman Catholic priest, heading a delegation of citizens, notified Hamilton that they would furnish no supplies for the garrison unless Vigo were released.

Vigo was released, after promising against his will that "on his way to St.

Louis he would do no act hostile to the British interest." He at once took a canoe and was rapidly paddled down the Wabash to the Ohio, then on to St.

Louis. Keeping the letter of his pledge he did nothing hostile on his way to St. Louis, but on his arrival there he jumped from the boat to the land and then back into the boat, and pushed with all speed for Kaskaskia, where he told Clark of the condition of affairs.

Clark at once saw the danger surrounding him. The term of enlistment of most of his men was about to expire. By making them large promises he induced about 150 to extend their enlistment for a term of eight months, and recruited about fifty more from the inhabitants of Kaskaskia. He could get no reinforcements short of Virginia, even if he could obtain them there. If he waited until spring Hamilton would be largely reinforced, he would be driven from Kaskaskia, and his whole design frustrated. He determined to make a winter campaign. He sent forty-six of his men in boats carrying provisions and ammunition around by water, and with 170 set off February 5, 1779, to make a march of near two hundred miles. It was a fearful enterprise. The land for most of the way was level, and water, when it rained, or when the snow melted, lay in a broad sheet over the whole country. He did not know how many of his foes were before him. He had no tents to shelter his men and no way of transporting baggage; there were a few pack horses to carry what provisions and ammunition the men could not carry on their backs.

[Ill.u.s.tration GENERAL GEORGE ROGERS CLARK.]

His men were all hardy frontiersmen; their leader had imbued them with his own heroic spirit; they feared no danger. Before they left the little settlement of Kaskaskia, the good priest gave them a blessing, and all the people accompanied them the first three or four miles of their journey.

Scarcely had the farewells been said and the march begun when the rain began to fall, and for nearly twenty days there was but a brief glimpse of sunshine now and then.

Only a few miles had been covered when they struck a long stretch of overflowed land. Although the water was cold, into it they plunged, their gallant leader in front; and until the evening of the 22d they saw no dry land, except an occasional half-acre or so barely peeping above the flood of waters and furnishing a meagre resting-place. It can hardly be said they rested, for on several occasions they had to remain standing throughout the night, or were compelled to walk about to keep from freezing. When they came to a river that had overflowed its banks and was too deep to ford, they made canoes and rafts and floated over.

Always they found the water covered with a thin coating of ice in the morning, and through the ice and water they forced their way. When the water was deep the sergeant carried the drummer boy on his shoulders, and from that perch he beat his charge. Sometimes the water was only knee-deep; sometimes it reached the middle and often to the shoulders; but not one of the men thought of turning back. The boat with provisions that had been sent around by water failed to connect and to their other discomforts hunger was added.

On the morning of the 21st they came within sound of the morning gun at Fort Sackville, but it required two more days of wandering without provisions before they could cross the Wabash River. At last they captured some Indians and with them the half of a buffalo rump, which they made into a broth. On the 23d they arrived at the heights back of the town, and for the first time since their departure had an opportunity to dry their clothing. Clark sent a letter to the French inhabitants of the town, telling them of his presence, but warning them not to give any information to Hamilton. The news caused the greatest excitement; the French ran about the streets telling it with joy, for Hamilton had won their hatred. They sent out provisions to the hungry Americans, who that night marched into the town and by opening fire on the fort gave the first intimation to Hamilton and the garrison of the presence of an enemy. The firing was continued until about nine o'clock the next morning, when a surrender was demanded, accompanied by a threat that if the place had to be taken by storm the officers would be treated as murderers. A parley ensued, followed after a few hours by the surrender of the fort, and once more the American flag floated over Fort Sackville, which was then renamed Fort Patrick Henry.

Hamilton and the other officers were sent to Williamsburg, Va., where they were held in custody for a year or two. From papers found in the fort, Clark learned that reinforcements, bringing supplies and stores, were on the way, and at once sent a part of his little force to intercept and capture the reinforcements, which was promptly done.[9]

Vincennes was now the most important place in the Illinois country. When Colonel John Todd was appointed Lieutenant for the County of Illinois, he made Colonel Legrace his deputy for Vincennes, who established the first court the place ever had. Virginia ceded the territory to the United States, and by the Ordinance of 1787 a civil government was set up, Governor St. Clair sending Winthrop Sargent to a.s.sume direct jurisdiction at Vincennes. The French inhabitants were finally permitted to hold the lands to which they could show t.i.tle, while all the rest were taken by the Government.

Clark added an empire to the domain of the colonies, made possible the Louisiana Purchase and the future extension of the country to the Pacific, and then in his extreme old age Virginia sent him only a sword when he asked for repayment of what he had disbursed for the country.

In 1800 Indiana Territory was established with Vincennes as its capital.

The jurisdiction of the Territory then included what are now the States of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and a part of Minnesota, and to this was afterward added for a short time the whole of the Louisiana Purchase.

On the 4th of July, 1800, the government of Indiana Territory was formally organized. The Governor, William Henry Harrison, was, however, not present.

General John Gibson, who represented him, was one of the Revolutionary heroes. He had married a sister of Logan, the celebrated Mingo chief, and it was to his brother that Logan made his famous speech. On his arrival, Governor Harrison began the work of trading the Indians out of their lands.

He made one treaty after another, until more than one half of the present Indiana, together with a good part of Illinois, was ceded. He erected the first brick house in all that section, perhaps the first west of the Alleghanies, in its day a structure so magnificent as to be called the "Governor's Palace." It is still standing, and near it the tree under which the Governor held his historic interview with Tec.u.mseh, when the Indian chief planned the Governor's death.

[Ill.u.s.tration WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON.]

[Ill.u.s.tration ST. XAVIER'S CHURCH, 1779.]

In 1813 the territorial capital was removed to Corydon, and the political importance of Vincennes ceased. Already a university had been established, Congress giving to it a township of land, and the beginning was made for what is now one of the most valuable libraries in the West. The first church in the Northwest Territory was built in Vincennes about 1742, under the rectorship of Father Meurin, who had come from France to care for the spiritual wants of the settlers. In 1793 M. Rivet, a French priest, driven from his native country by the terrors of the Revolution, arrived at Vincennes and opened the first school taught in Indiana.

The Vincennes of to-day is a thriving, bustling city of ten thousand inhabitants. It has modern schools and modern churches, modern ideas and modern progressiveness. As a city it has had its ups and downs since it lost political prestige, but for some years it has steadily grown, until now it is cla.s.sed as one of the beautiful cities of the State. Surrounded by a magnificent agricultural section, and with many manufacturing interests, it threw off long ago the old French habits and customs and took on a progressive spirit, which promises a bright future.

Vincennes has had a glorious past; it occupies a unique place among the historic towns of the country. Boston may have been the cradle of American independence; Philadelphia the place where that liberty was first announced; but after all Boston gave to the Union only Ma.s.sachusetts, and Philadelphia only Pennsylvania. Vincennes gave us Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, the great Middle West. But for the genius and perseverance of George Rogers Clark, when independence came the United Colonies would have stopped at the Alleghanies. The capture of Vincennes spread the jurisdiction of the colonies to the Mississippi, carrying with it American liberty, American progress, American ideas. More than this, it made possible the Louisiana Purchase, which in turn opened the way to the annexation of Texas, the securing of California and the Pacific coast, and the later acquisition of Hawaii and the Philippines. The capture of Vincennes carried American liberty to a domain stretching from the Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, yea even to the Orient--a domain which else would still be British or Spanish.

It was Indiana, of which Vincennes was the chief part, that stopped the extension of slavery at the Ohio River, and made all the Northwest free territory. It was at Vincennes that Aaron Burr received his first decided check in his great scheme to dismember the Union. It was Benjamin Parke, a citizen of Vincennes, who placed in the first const.i.tution of the State the clause making it obligatory on the Legislature to provide for the care and treatment of the insane, the first provision of the kind made by any civilized government, a provision which has revolutionized the treatment of the insane throughout the world. Such is the story of Vincennes, no frontier town like Albany or Pittsburg, for when its history began Vincennes was hundreds of miles out in the wilderness beyond the frontier line, and was still hundreds of miles beyond when the great event occurred which changed it from a French settlement under the jurisdiction of Great Britain into the chief seat of American power west of the Alleghanies.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

FOOTNOTES:

[8] La Salle, in drawing his maps, made the Ouabache to empty into the Mississippi at Cairo, According to him the Oyo (Ohio) was a tributary of the Ouabache. About 1702, one, M. Juchereau, sent to establish a post for the protection of the traders in peltries, reported that he had established a post about forty leagues above the mouth of the Ouabache. Some writers have taken that to mean Vincennes, and it is so recorded in some of the encyclopaedias, but his post was on what is now called the Ohio, and not on the Wabash.

[9] Clark began at once to organize an expedition against Detroit, but it never started. Francis Vigo, who had let Clark have provisions and money for his expedition against Vincennes, aided in like manner in fitting out the new expedition, lending money to the amount of $8616, for which Clark gave him an order on Virginia. The order was never honored, and an appeal was made to Congress. Finally, in 1872, nearly a century after the debt was contracted, and nearly thirty-seven years after Vigo had died in extreme poverty, Congress referred the matter to the Court of Claims, which four years later allowed the claim, together with more than $41,000 in interest.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHICAGO

LARGE IN EVERY WAY

BY LYMAN J. GAGE

The plotting of the site of Chicago was characteristic of the practical sentiment that has ever stimulated the city. No less a personage than Washington established the streets and boundaries of the national capital; religious romance presided at the founding of San Francisco; interesting legends cl.u.s.ter about the origin of other American communities; and in the old world demiG.o.ds were supposed to have watched over the beginnings of ancient cities. Chicago, though neither hero nor fabled deity was present when its foundations were laid, had a start none the less imposing, for the genius of industry and trade fixed its metes and bounds. And in the growth of the city into perhaps the industrial capital of the continent there has been presented a supreme expression of that resourceful and triumphant ingenuity which has redeemed the American wilderness. The desolation upon which the plodding engineer planted his theodolite three-score-and-ten years ago is a colossal hive of human activity. A marsh has become a metropolis.

The promoters of the Illinois and Michigan Ca.n.a.l were not the first to see the possibility of water communication via the present site of Chicago between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.

In 1673, Joliet wrote to the authorities in Canada that by the cutting of a ca.n.a.l through half a league of prairie it would be possible for boats to "pa.s.s from the Lake of Illinois into the St. Louis River [the Illinois including the Desplaines] which empties into the Mississippi." One hundred years before our Republic was conceived, a mathematician, but no mere _visionnaire_, the son of a wheelwright of Quebec, realized that the "Portage of Checagau" was the meeting-place of the future traffic between the chain of inland seas and the rivers flowing toward the Mexican Gulf.

It is plain that nature located Chicago. The meeting-point between unparalleled watercourses could not but be a place for the distribution of commodities. To the north, awaiting the woodman, were the lumber regions of Michigan and Wisconsin; south and west and east stretched the prairie, to be developed into farms; in Illinois alone, thirty thousand square miles of coal fields were to be uncovered, while Pennsylvania's inexhaustible supply was to find a vast market at this centre of lake shipping; and the iron, red-stone, and copper regions of Lake Superior were to pile their output on Chicago docks. The natural meeting-place of grain, lumber, fuel, and iron would have become a city of commerce and manufactures, even if steam railroads and navigation had not come to a.s.sist in the unique development of this _entrepot_, by making it the half-way house for transcontinental traffic. But though nature, as the Rev. Robert Collyer has said, "called the lakes, the forest, the prairies together in convention, and they decided that on this spot a great city should be built," Chicago has been singularly blessed in the alert and enterprising genius of her citizens.

Her business men have worked with catholic outlook, knowing that what upbuilt the city in general would augment their individual projects.

The city has never been, even in its aboriginal beginnings, an abiding-place for visionaries. The Minneways were a picturesque tribe.

Their chiefs a.s.sumed poetic names, and the young men cherished the traditions of their people; but the tribe did not take advantage of its strategic opportunities. Checagau to them was not a coign of vantage between great waters. At the sh.o.r.e of a vast lake, or the brink of a broad river, their dominion halted, for they were not navigators. In their dialect, "Checagau" meant "wild onion." As if to typify the force that was to dominate their region in later centuries, the Checagau country fell to the conquering "canoe men," the adventurous Pottawatomies, the Chippewas, the Sacs, and kindred tribes who, unafraid to venture on the water, turned to trade, exchanging furs and pelts with the French pioneers for food, blankets, and ornamental trinkets. They became the masters of the lake country, and the broken remnant of the uncommercial tribe fled to the Wabash, there to wail their plaintive songs.[10]

Meanwhile the conquering tribesmen, whose canoes paddled up the Mississippi and the Illinois to the "Checagau Portage," to barter with Canadian _voyageurs_, or glided thence across the Lakes, touching at the outposts of colonizers and missionary friars, were prefiguring the gigantic activities of civilized men who in a later age were to radiate from this same coveted point of distribution. But as they had won their Checagau country by might, and established their holdings by commercial enterprise, so they resisted the coming of their European rivals and masters. Although as early as 1795, by the treaty of Greenville, they ceded much domain to our country, including "one piece of land six miles square, at the mouth of the Checagau River," the intrigue of the powerful Tec.u.mseh and his brother, the Prophet, led the tribes to disregard these and subsequent treaty stipulations. So that when, on the same day that saw the capitulation of Detroit, Fort Dearborn was burned and its garrison ma.s.sacred,

"the last vestige," says Henry Adams, "of American authority on the western lakes disappeared. Thenceforward the line of the Wabash and the Maumee became the military boundary of the United States in the northwest, and the country felt painful doubt whether even that line could be defended."

For four years the unburied bones of the Fort Dearborn victims lay where the bodies had fallen. Then came peace, Christian interment of these pathetic human fragments, and a reorganization of the valuable fur trade of the region. The spot again became the centre of this industry. Trading posts were re-established on the Illinois River and the Kankakee with the Pottawatomies of the prairies; at Rock River with the Winnebagoes; at Milwaukee with the Menomonies, and at Le Large with the Kickapoos. Trains of pack horses carried the furs and peltries to Chicago, and in the spring vessels touching at that port bore these valuable cargoes to Mackinac, where the American Fur Company, organized by John Jacob Astor, had established its headquarters.

[Ill.u.s.tration THE DEARBORN MONUMENT.]