Stories of the Badger State Part 3

During much of the time that Perrot was commandant of the West, several other great fur traders were conducting operations in Wisconsin. The greatest of these was the Chevalier La Salle, the famous explorer, who plays a large part on the stage of Western history, particularly in the history of the Mississippi valley. It has been claimed for La Salle that he was in Wisconsin in 1671, two years before Joliet, and actually canoed on the Mississippi River, but this is more than doubtful. We do know that in 1673 one of his agents was trading with the Sioux to the west of Lake Superior; and that in 1679 he came to Green Bay in a small vessel called the _Griffin_, the first sailing craft on the Great Lakes above the cataract of Niagara. La Salle was a _coureur de bois_, most of this time, for he operated in a field far larger than that for which he had a license. Leaving his ship, which was afterward wrecked, he and fourteen of his men proceeded in canoes southward along the western coast of Lake Michigan, visiting the sites of Milwaukee and other Wisconsin lakesh.o.r.e cities. Finally, after many strange adventures, they ascended St. Joseph River, crossed over to the Kankakee River, and spent the winter in a log fort which they built on Peoria Lake, a broadening of the Illinois River.

At least one priest was thought necessary in every well-equipped exploring expedition. La Salle had quarreled with the Jesuits, and hated them; hence the ministers of religion in his party were three Franciscan friars, one of them being Father Louis Hennepin, who afterward became famous. When La Salle determined to spend the winter at Peoria Lake, he sent Hennepin forward with two _coureurs de bois_, to explore the upper waters of the Mississippi. These three adventurers descended the Illinois River in their canoe, and then ascended the Mississippi to the Falls of St. Anthony, where now lies the great city of Minneapolis; there they met some Sioux, and went with them upon a buffalo hunt. But the Indians, although at first friendly, soon turned out to be a bad lot, for they robbed their guests, and practically held them as prisoners.

This was in the early summer of 1680. Luckily for Hennepin and his companions, the powerful _coureur de bois_, Daniel Graysolon Duluth (_du Luth_) appeared on the scene. Duluth was, next to Perrot, the leading man in the country around Lake Superior and the Upper Mississippi valley. He had been spending the winter trading with the Sioux in the lake country of northern Minnesota, and along Pigeon River, which is now the dividing line between Minnesota and Canada. With a party of ten of his boatmen, he set out in June to reach the Mississippi, his route taking him up the turbulent little Bois Brule River, over the mile and a half of portage trail to Upper Lake St. Croix, and down St. Croix River to the Mississippi. On reaching the latter, he learned of the fact that Europeans were being detained and maltreated by the Sioux, and at once went and rescued them. The summer was spent among the Indians in company with Hennepin's party, who, now that Duluth was found to be their friend, were handsomely treated. In the autumn, Duluth, Hennepin, and their companions all returned down the Mississippi, up the Wisconsin, and down the Fox, and spent the winter at Mackinac. After that, Duluth was frequently upon the Fox-Wisconsin route, and traded for buffalo hides and other furs with the Wisconsin tribes.

Another famous visitor to Wisconsin, in those early days, was Pierre le Sueur, who in 1683 traveled from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi, over the Fox-Wisconsin route, and traded with the Sioux at the Falls of St.

Anthony and beyond. His fur trade grew, in a few years, to large proportions; for he was a shrewd man, and was related to some of the officials of New France. This enabled him to secure trading licenses for the Western country, and other valuable privileges, which gave him an advantage over the unlicensed traders, like Duluth, who had no official friends. In 1693, Le Sueur was trading in Duluth's old country; and, in order to protect the old Bois Brule and St. Croix route from marauding Indians, he built a log fort at either end, one on Chequamegon Bay, and the other on an island in the Mississippi, below the mouth of the St.

Croix. A few years later, Le Sueur was in France, where he obtained a license to operate certain "mines of lead, copper, and blue and green earth," which he claimed to have discovered along the banks of the Upper Mississippi. In the summer of 1700, he and his party opened lead mines in the neighborhood of the present Dubuque and Galena, and also near the modern town of Potosi, Wisconsin. He does not appear to have been very successful as a miner; but his fur trade was still enormous, and his many explorations led to the Upper Mississippi being quite correctly represented on the maps of America, made by the European geographers.

A missionary priest, Father St. Cosme, of Quebec, was in Green Bay in October, 1699, and proposed to visit the Mississippi region, by way of the Fox and Wisconsin rivers. But the warlike Foxes, who were giving the French a great deal of trouble at this time, had forbidden any white man pa.s.sing over this favorite waterway, so St. Cosme was obliged to go the way that La Salle had followed, up the west sh.o.r.e of Lake Michigan and through Illinois. The party stopped at many places along the Wisconsin lake sh.o.r.e, but the only ones which we can identify are the sites of Sheboygan and Milwaukee, where there were large Indian villages.

It is not to be supposed that these were all the Frenchmen to tarry in or pa.s.s through Wisconsin during the latter half of the seventeenth century. Doubtless there were scores, if not hundreds of others, fur traders, _voyageurs_, soldiers, and priests; we have selected but a few of those whose movements were recorded in the writings of their time.

Wisconsin was a key point in the geography of the West; here were the interlaced sources of rivers flowing north into Lake Superior, east and northeast into Lake Michigan, and west and southwest into the Mississippi River. The canoe traveler from Lower Canada could, with short portages, pa.s.s through Wisconsin into waters reaching far into the interior of the continent, even to the Rocky Mountains, the lakes of the Canadian Northwest, and the Gulf of Mexico. This is why the geography of Wisconsin became known so early in the history of our country, why Wisconsin Indians played so important a part on the stage of border warfare, and why history was being made here at a time when some of the States to the east of us were still almost unknown to white men.

A QUARTER OF A CENTURY OF WARFARE

Wisconsin was important, from a geographical point of view, because here were the meeting places of waters which flowed in so many directions; here were the gates which opened upon widely divergent paths. The explorer and the fur trader soon discovered this, and Wisconsin became known to them at a very early period. France had two important colonies in North America, New France (or Canada), upon the St. Lawrence River, and Louisiana, extending northward indefinitely from the Gulf of Mexico.

It was found necessary, in pushing her claim to the ownership of all of the continent west of the Alleghany Mountains and east of the Rockies, to connect New France and Louisiana with a chain of little forts along the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. The forts at Detroit, Mackinac, Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, and Kaskaskia (in Illinois) were links in this chain, at the center of which was Wisconsin; or, to use another figure, Wisconsin was the keystone of the arch which bridged the two French colonies.

There were six princ.i.p.al canoe routes between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi: one by way of the Maumee and Wabash rivers, another by way of St. Joseph River and the Kankakee and the Illinois, another by way of the St. Joseph, Wabash, and Ohio rivers, still another by way of the Chicago River and the Illinois, and we have already seen that from Lake Superior there were used the Bois Brule and the St. Croix routes. But the easiest of all, the favorite gateway, was the Fox-Wisconsin route, for all the others involved considerable hardship; this is why Wisconsin was so necessary to the French military officers in holding control of the interior of the continent.

Affairs went well enough so long as the French were on good terms with the warlike and crafty Fox Indians, who held control of the Fox River.

But after a time the Foxes became uneasy. The fur trade in New France was in the hands of a monopoly, which charged large fees for licenses, and fixed its own prices on the furs which it bought, and on the Indian goods which it sold to the forest traders. On the other hand, the fur trade in the English colonies east of the Alleghanies was free; any man could engage in it and go wherever he would. The result was that the English, with the strong compet.i.tion among themselves, paid higher prices to the Indians for furs than the French could afford, and their prices for articles which the Indians wanted were correspondingly lower than those of the French.

The Indians were always eager for a bargain; and although the French declared that those trading with the English were enemies of New France, they persisted in secretly sending trading parties to the English, who were now beginning to swarm into the Ohio valley. The Foxes, in particular, grew very angry with the French for charging them such high prices, and resented the treatment which they received at the hands of the traders from Quebec and Montreal. At one time they told Perrot that they would pack up their wigwams, and move in a body to the Wabash River or to the Ohio, and form a league with the fierce Iroquois of New York, who were friends and neighbors of the English. Had they done so, the French fur trade in the West would have suffered greatly.

The Foxes began to make it disagreeable for the French in Wisconsin.

They insisted on collecting tolls on fur trade bateaux which were being propelled up the Fox River, and even stopped traders entirely; several murders of Frenchmen were also charged to them. The French thereupon determined to punish these rebellious savages who sat within the chief gateway to the Mississippi. In the winter of 1706-07, a large party of soldiers, _coureurs des bois_, and half-breeds, under a captain named Marin, ascended the Fox River on snowshoes and attacked the Foxes, together with their allies, the Sacs, at a large village at Winnebago Rapids, near where is now the city of Neenah.

Several hundreds of the savages were killed in this a.s.sault, but its effect was to make the Foxes the more troublesome. A few summers later, this same Marin arranged again to surprise the enemy. His boats were covered with oilcloth blankets, in the manner adopted by the traders to protect the goods against rain; only two _voyageurs_ were visible in each boat to propel it. Arriving at the foot of Winnebago Rapids, the canoes were ranged along the sh.o.r.e, and nearly fifteen hundred Indians came out and squatted on the bank, ready to collect toll of the traders.

All of a sudden the covers were thrown off, and the armed men appeared and raked the Indians with quick volleys of lead, while a small cannon in Marin's boat increased the effectiveness of the attack. Tradition says that over a thousand Foxes and Sacs fell in this ma.s.sacre; this is one of the many incidents in white men's relations with the Indians, wherein savages were outsavaged in the practice of ferocious treachery.

Despite the great slaughter, there appear to have been enough Foxes left to continue giving the French a great deal of annoyance. There were fears at Quebec that it might be necessary to abandon the attempt to connect New France and Louisiana by a trail through the Western woods, in which case the English would have a free run of the Mississippi valley. There seem, however, not to have been any more warlike expeditions to Wisconsin for several years. But in May, 1712, the French induced large numbers of the Foxes, with their friends, the Mascoutins, the Kickapoos, and the Sacs, to come to Detroit for the making of a treaty of peace. At the same time the French also a.s.sembled there large bands of the Pottawattomies and Menominees from Wisconsin, with Illinois Indians, some camps from Missouri, and Hurons and Ottawas from the Lake Huron country; all of these were enemies of the Foxes.

The records do not show just why it happened; but for some reason the French and their allies fired on the Foxes and their friends, who were well intrenched in a palisaded camp outside the walls of Detroit. A great siege ensued, lasting nineteen days, in which the slaughter on both sides was heavy; but at last the Foxes, worn out by loss of numbers, hunger, and disease, took advantage of a dark, rainy night to escape northward. They were pursued the following day, but again intrenched themselves with much skill, and withstood another siege of five days, when they surrendered. The French and their savage allies fell upon the poor captives with fury and slew nearly all of them, men, women, and children.

The poor Foxes had lost in this terrible experience upward of fifteen hundred of the bravest of their tribe, which was now reduced to a few half-starved bands. But their spirit was not gone. Next year the officers at Quebec wrote home to Paris: "The Fox Indians are daily becoming more insolent." They had begun to change their tactics; instead of wasting their energies on the French, they began to make friends with, or to intimidate, neighboring tribes. By means of small, secret war parties, they would noiselessly swarm out of the Wisconsin forests and strike hard blows at the prairie Indians of Illinois, who preferred to remain their enemies. In this manner the Illinois Indians were reduced to a mere handful, and were compelled to seek shelter under the guns of the French fort at Kaskaskia. At the same time the Foxes were in close alliance with the Sioux and other great western tribes, who helped them lock the gate of the Fox-Wisconsin rivers, and plunder and murder French traders wherever they could be found throughout Wisconsin.

Again it seemed evident that New France, unless something were done, could never maintain its chain of communication with Louisiana, or conduct any fur trade in the Northwest. The something decided on was an attempt to destroy the Foxes, root and branch. For this purpose there was sent out to Wisconsin, in 1716, a well-equipped expedition under an experienced captain named De Louvigny, numbering eight hundred men, whites and Indians. The Foxes were found living in a walled town upon the mound now known as Little b.u.t.te des Morts, on the west side of Fox River, opposite the present Neenah. The wall consisted of three rows of stout palisades, reenforced by a deep ditch; tradition says there were here a.s.sembled five hundred braves and three thousand squaws and other noncombatants.

The French found it necessary to lay siege to this forest fortress, just as they would attack a European city of that time; trenches and mines were laid, and pushed forward at night, until, at the close of the third day, everything was ready to blow up the palisades. At this point the Foxes surrendered, but they gained easy terms for those days, for De Louvigny was no butcher of men, and appeared to appreciate their bravery. They gave up their prisoners, they furnished enough slaves to the allies of the French to take the place of the warriors slain, they agreed to furnish furs enough to pay the expenses of the expedition, and sent six hostages to Quebec to answer for their future behavior. The next year, De Louvigny returned to the valley of the Fox, from Quebec, and made a treaty with the Foxes, but nothing came of it. Treaties were easily made with Indian tribes, in the days of New France, and as easily broken by either side.

In the very next year, the Foxes were again making raids on the French-loving Illinois, and the entire West was, as usual, torn by strife. It was evident that the Foxes were trying to gain control of the Illinois River, and thus command both of the princ.i.p.al roads to the Mississippi. The French were at this time enthusiastic over great schemes for opening mines on the Mississippi, operating northward from Louisiana; agriculture was beginning to flourish around Kaskaskia; and grain, flour, and furs were being shipped down the Mississippi to the French islands in the West Indies, and across the ocean to France. More than ever was it necessary to unite Louisiana with Canada by a line of communication.

But just now the Foxes were stronger than they had been at any time.

Their shrewd warriors had organized a great confederacy to shut out the French, and thereby advance the cause of English trade, although it is not known that the English a.s.sisted in this widespread conspiracy. Fox warriors were sent with pipes of peace among the most distant tribes of the West, the South, and the North, and it seemed as if the whole interior of the continent were rising in arms. A French writer of the period says of the Foxes: "Their fury increased as their forces diminished. On every side they raised up new enemies against us. The whole course and neighborhood of the Mississippi is infested with Indians with whom we have no quarrel, and who yet give to the French no quarter."

This condition lasted for a few years. But Indian leagues do not ordinarily long endure. We soon find the Foxes weak again, with few to back them; in 1726, at a council in Green Bay, they were apologizing for having made so much trouble. The French were, however, still afraid of these wily folk, and two years later (1728) a little army of four hundred Frenchmen and nine hundred Indian allies advanced on the Fox villages by way of the Ottawa River route and Mackinac. The Foxes, together with their Winnebago friends, had heard of the approach of the whites, and fled; but the white invaders burned every deserted village in the valley, and destroyed all the crops, leaving the red men to face the rigor of winter with neither huts nor food.

Fleeing from their native valley before the onset of the army, the unhappy fugitives, said to have been four thousand in number, descended the Wisconsin and ascended the Mississippi, to find their Sioux allies in the neighborhood of Lake Pepin. But the Sioux had been won by French presents, distributed from the fur trade fort on that lake, and turned the starving tribesmen away; the ever-treacherous Winnebagoes of the party sided with the Sioux; the Sacs expressed repentance, and hurried home to Green Bay to make their peace with the French; the Mascoutins now proved to be enemies. Thus deserted, the disconsolate Foxes pa.s.sed the winter in Iowa, and sent messengers to the Green Bay fort, begging for forgiveness.

But there was no longer any peace for the Foxes. Indians friendly with the French attacked one of their Iowa camps; and in the autumn of 1729 they sought in humble fashion to return to the valley of the Fox; but they were ambuscaded by a French-directed party of Ottawas, Menominees, Chippewas, and Winnebagoes, and after a fierce fight lost nearly three hundred by death and capture; the prisoners, men, women, and children, were burned at the stake.

Turning southward, the greater part of the survivors of this ill-starred tribe sought a final asylum upon the Illinois River, not far from Peoria. Three noted French commanders, heads of garrisons in the Western country, now gathered their forces, which aggregated a hundred and seventy Frenchmen and eleven hundred Indians; and in August, 1730, gave battle to the fugitives, who were now outnumbered full four to one. The contest, notable for the gallant sorties of the besieged and the cautious military engineering of the besiegers, lasted throughout twenty-two days; probably never in the history of the West has there been witnessed more heroic conduct than was displayed during this remarkable campaign. It was inevitable that the Foxes should lose in the end, but they sold themselves dearly. Not over fifty or sixty escaped; and it is said that three hundred warriors perished in battle or afterwards at the stake, while six hundred women and children were either tomahawked or burned.

It is surprising, after all these ma.s.sacres, that there were any members of the tribe left; yet we learn that two years later (1732) three hundred of them were living peaceably on the banks of the Wisconsin River, when still another French and Indian band swept down upon and either captured or slaughtered them all. Of another small party, which sought mercy from the officer of the fort at Green Bay, several, including the head chief of the Foxes, Kiala, were sent away into slavery, and wore away their lives in menial drudgery upon the tropical island of Martinique.

The remainder took refuge with the Sacs, on Fox River; and the following year the French commander at Green Bay asked the Sacs to give them up.

This time the Sacs proved to be good friends, and refused; and in the quarrel which followed at the Sac town, eight French soldiers were killed. This led to later retaliation on the part of the French, but in the battle which was fought both sides lost heavily; and then both Sacs and Foxes fled from the country, never to return. They settled upon the banks of the Des Moines River, in Iowa, whither French hate again sought them out in 1734. This last expedition, however, was a failure, and the Fox War was finally ended, after twenty-five years of almost continuous bloodshed. During this war not only had the great tribe of the Foxes been almost annihilated, but the power of France in the West had meanwhile been greatly weakened by the persistent opposition of those who had held the key to her position.

THE COMMERCE OF THE FOREST

We have seen in previous chapters why Wisconsin, with her intermingling rivers, was considered the key to the French position in the interior of North America; why it was that fur traders early sought this State, and erected log forts along its rivers and lakes to protect their commerce with the people of the forest. It remains to be told what were the conditions of this widespreading and important forest trade.

The French introduced to our Indians iron pots and kettles, which were vastly stronger than their crude utensils of clay; iron fishhooks, hatchets, spears, and guns, which were not only more durable, but far more effective than their old weapons of stone and copper and bone; cloths and blankets of many colors, from which attractive clothing was more easily made than from the skins of beasts; and gla.s.s beads and silver trinkets, for the decoration of their clothing and bodies, which cost far less labor to obtain than did ornaments made from clam sh.e.l.ls.

To secure these French goods, the Indians had but to hunt and bring the skins to the white men. The Indian who could secure a gun found it easier to get skins than before, and he also had a weapon which made him more powerful against his enemies. It was not long before the Indian forgot how to make utensils and weapons for himself, and became very dependent on the white trader. This is why the fur trade was at the bottom of every event in the forest, and for full two hundred years was of supreme importance to all the people who lived in the Wisconsin woods.

All trade in New France was in the control of a monopoly, which charged heavy fees for licenses, severely punished all the unlicensed traders who could be detected, and fixed its own prices for everything. French traders were obliged, therefore, to charge the Indians more for their goods than the English charged for theirs; and it was a continual and often b.l.o.o.d.y struggle to keep the Indians of the Northwest from having any trade with the English colonists from the Atlantic coast, who had with great labor crossed the Alleghany Mountains and were now swarming into the Ohio River valley. It was impossible to prevent the English trade altogether, but the policy was in the main successful, although it cost the French a deal of anxiety, and sometimes great expense in military operations.

During the greater part of the French regime in Wisconsin, the bulk of the goods for the Indians came up by the Ottawa River route, because the warlike Iroquois of New York favored the English, and for a long time kept Frenchmen from entering the lower lakes of Ontario and Erie.

Finally, however, after the fort at Detroit was built (1701), the lower lakes came to be used.

It was, by either route, a very long and tiresome journey from Quebec or Montreal to Wisconsin, and owing to the early freezing of the Straits of Mackinac, but one trip could be made in a year. It was not, however, necessary for every trader to go to the "lower settlements" each year.

At the Western forts large stocks of goods were kept, and there the furs were stored, sometimes for several seasons, until a great fleet of canoes could be made up by bands of traders and friendly Indians; and then the expedition to Montreal was made, with considerable display of barbaric splendor. When the traders reached Montreal, the inhabitants of the settlement turned out to welcome their visitors from the wilderness, and something akin to a great fair was held, at which speculators bought up the furs, feasts were eaten and drunk, and fresh treaties of peace were made with the Indians. A week or two would thus pa.s.s in universal festivity, at the end of which traders and savages would seek their canoes, and, amid volleys of cannon from the fort, martial music, the fluttering of flags, and the shouts of the _habitants_, the fleet would push off, and soon be swallowed again by the all-pervading forest.

When the French were driven out of Canada, in 1760, and the British a.s.sumed control, the English Hudson Bay Company began spreading its operations over the Northwest. But in 1783, at the close of the Revolutionary War, the Northwest Company was organized, with headquarters at Montreal. The British still held possession of our Northwest long after the treaty with the United States was signed. Soon sailing ships were introduced, and many goods were thus brought to Mackinac, Green Bay, and Chequamegon Bay; nevertheless, canoes and bateaux, together with the more modern "Mackinac boats" and "Durham boats," were for many years largely used upon these long Western journeys from Montreal. To a still later date were these rude craft sent out from the Mackinac warehouses to Wisconsin, or from Mackinac to the famous headquarters of the company at the mouth of Pigeon River, on the western sh.o.r.e of Lake Superior, the "Grand Portage," as it was called.

It was a life filled with great perils, by land and flood; many were the men who lost their lives in storms, in shooting river rapids, in deadly quarrels with one another or with the savages, by exposure to the elements, or by actual starvation. Yet there was a glamour over these wild experiences, as is customary wherever men are a.s.sociated as comrades in an outdoor enterprise involving common dangers and hardships. The excitement and freedom of the fur trade appealed especially to the volatile, fun loving French; and music and badinage and laughter often filled the day.

After the Americans a.s.sumed control, in 1816, Congress forbade the British to conduct the fur trade in our country. This was to prevent them from influencing the Western Indians to war; but turning out the English traders served greatly to help the American Fur Company, founded by John Jacob Astor, and having its headquarters on the Island of Mackinac. Nevertheless the agents, the clerks, and the _voyageurs_ were still nearly all of them Frenchmen, as of old, and there was really very little change in the methods of doing business, except that Astor managed to reap most of the profits.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN JACOB ASTOR]

The fur trade lasted, as a business of prime importance to Wisconsin, until about 1835. It was at its greatest height in 1820, at which time Green Bay was the chief settlement in Wisconsin. By 1835 new interests had arisen, with the development of the lead mines in the southwest, and with the advent of agricultural settlers from the East, upon the close of the Black Hawk War (1832).

The fur trade led the way to the agricultural and manufacturing life of to-day. The traders naturally chose Indian villages as the sites for most of their posts, and such villages were generally at places well selected for the purpose. They were on portage trails, where craft had to be carried around falls or rapids, as at De Pere, Kaukauna, Appleton, and Neenah; or they were on portage plains, between distinct water systems, as at Portage and Sturgeon Bay; or they were at the mouths or junctions of rivers, as at Milwaukee, Sheboygan, Oshkosh, Lacrosse, and Prairie du Chien; or they occupied commanding positions on lake or river bank, overlooking a wide stretch of country. Thus most of the leading cities of Wisconsin are on the sites of old Indian villages; for the reasons which led to their choice by the Indians held good with the white pioneers in the old days when rivers and lakes were the chief highways. Thus we have first the Indian village, then the trading post, and later the modern town.

The Indian trails were also largely used by the traders in seeking the natives in their villages; later these trails developed into public roads, when American settlers came to occupy the country. Thus we see that Wisconsin was quite thoroughly explored, its princ.i.p.al cities and highways located, and its water ways mapped out by the early French, long before the inrush of agricultural colonists.