A Half-Century of Conflict - Volume II
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Title: A Half-Century of Conflict - Volume II
Author: Francis Parkman
Release date: December 1, 2004 [eBook #7064]
Most recently updated: December 30, 2020
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HALF-CENTURY OF CONFLICT - VOLUME II ***
Produced by Don Kretz, David Moynihan, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
A HALF-CENTURY OF CONFLICT
BY FRANCIS PARKMAN
VOL. II
CONTENTS
CHAPTER XV.
1697-1741.
FRANCE IN THE FAR WEST.
French Explorers.--Le Sueur on the St. Peter's.--Canadians on the
Missouri.--Juchereau de Saint-Denis.--Bénard de la Harpe on Red
River.--Adventures of Du Tisné.--Bourgmont visits the Comanches.--The
Brothers Mallet in Colorado and New Mexico.--Fabry de la Bruyère.
CHAPTER XVI.
1716-1761.
SEARCH FOR THE PACIFIC.
The Western Sea.--Schemes for reaching it.--Journey of Charlevoix.--The
Sioux Mission.--Varennes de la Vérendrye.--His Enterprise.--His
Disasters.--Visits the Mandans.--His Sons.--Their Search for the Western
Sea.--Their Adventures.--The Snake Indians.--A Great War-Party.--The Rocky
Mountains.--A Panic.--Return of the Brothers.--Their Wrongs and their Fate.
CHAPTER XVII.
1700-1750.
THE CHAIN OF POSTS.
Opposing Claims.--Attitude of the Rival Nations.--America a French
Continent.--England a Usurper.--French Demands.--Magnanimous
Proposals.--Warlike Preparation.--Niagara.--Oswego.--Crown Point.--The
Passes of the West secured.
CHAPTER XVIII.
1744, 1745.
A MAD SCHEME.
War of the Austrian Succession.--The French seize Canseau and attack
Annapolis.--Plan of Reprisal.--William Vanghan.--Governor Shirley.--He
advises an Attack on Louisbourg.--The Assembly refuses, but at last
consents.--Preparation.--William Pepperrell.--George Whitefield.--Parson
Moody.--The Soldiers.--The Provincial Navy.--Commodore Warren.--Shirley as
an Amateur Soldier.--The Fleet sails.
CHAPTER XIX.
1745.
LOUISBOURG BESIEGED.
Seth Pomeroy.--The Voyage.--Canseau.--Unexpected Succors.--Delays.
--Louisbourg.--The Landing.--The Grand Battery taken.--French Cannon turned
on the Town.--Weakness of Duchambon.--Sufferings of the Besiegers.--Their
Hardihood.--Their Irregular Proceedings.--Joseph Sherburn.--Amateur
Gunnery.--Camp Frolics.--Sectarian Zeal.--Perplexities of Pepperrell.
CHAPTER XX.
1745.
LOUISBOURG TAKEN.
A Rash Resolution.--The Island Battery.--The Volunteers.--The Attack.--The
Repulse.--Capture of the "Vigilant."--A Sortie.--Skirmishes.--Despondency
of the French.--English Camp threatened.--Pepperrell and Warren.--Warren's
Plan.--Preparation for a General Attack.--Flag of Truce.--Capitulation.
--State of the Fortress.--Parson Moody.--Soldiers dissatisfied.--Disorders.
--Army and Navy.--Rejoicings.--England repays Provincial Outlays.
CHAPTER XXI.
1745-1747.
DUC D'ANVILLE.
Louisbourg after the Conquest.--Mutiny.--Pestilence.--Stephen
Williams.--His Diary.--Scheme of conquering Canada.--Newcastle's
Promises.--Alarm in Canada.--Promises broken.--Plan against Crown
Point.--Startling News.--D'Anville's Fleet.--Louisbourg to be
avenged.--Disasters of D'Anville.--Storm.--Pestilence.--Famine.--Death of
D'Anville.--Suicide of the Vice-Admiral.--Ruinous Failure.--Return
Voyage.--Defeat of La Jonquière.
CHAPTER XXII.
1745-1747.
ACADIAN CONFLICTS.
Efforts of France.--Apathy of Newcastle.--Dilemma of Acadians.--Their
Character.--Danger of the Province.--Plans of Shirley.--Acadian
Priests.--Political Agitators.--Noble's Expedition.--Ramesay at
Beaubassin.--Noble at Grand-Pré.--A Winter March.--Defeat and Death of
Noble.--Grand-Pré re-occupied by the English.--Threats of Ramesay against
the Acadians.--The British Ministry will not protect them.
CHAPTER XXIII.
1740-1747.
WAR AND POLITICS.
Governor and Assembly.--Saratoga destroyed.--William Johnson.--Border
Ravages.--Upper Ashuelot.--French "Military Movements."--Number
Four.--Niverville's Attack.--Phineas Stevens.--The French repulsed.
CHAPTER XXIV.
1745-1748.
FORT MASSACHUSETTS.
Frontier Defence.--Northfield and its Minister.--Military Criticisms of
Rev. Benjamin Doolittle.--Rigaud de Vaudreuil.--His Great War-Party.--He
attacks Fort Massachusetts.--Sergeant Hawks and his Garrison.--A Gallant
Defence.--Capitulation.--Humanity of the French.--Ravages.--Return to Crown
Point.--Peace of Aix-la Chapelle.
APPENDIX.
A. FRANCE CLAIMS ALL NORTH AMERICA EXCEPT THE SPANISH COLONIES.
B. FRENCH VIEWS OF THE SIEGE OF LOUISBOURG.
C. SHIRLEY'S RELATIONS WITH THE ACADIANS.
A HALF-CENTURY OF CONFLICT.
CHAPTER XV.
1697-1741.
FRANCE IN THE FAR WEST.
FRENCH EXPLORERS.--LE SUEUR ON THE ST. PETER'S.--CANADIANS ON THE
MISSOURI.--JUCHEREAU DE SAINT-DENIS.--BÉNARD DE LA HARPE ON RED
RIVER.--ADVENTURES OF DU TISNÉ.--BOURGMONT VISITS THE COMANCHES.--THE
BROTHERS MALLET IN COLORADO AND NEW MEXICO.--FABRY DE LA BRUYÈRE.
The occupation by France of the lower Mississippi gave a strong impulse to
the exploration of the West, by supplying a base for discovery, stimulating
enterprise by the longing to find gold mines, open trade with New Mexico,
and get a fast hold on the countries beyond the Mississippi in anticipation
of Spain; and to these motives was soon added the hope of finding an
overland way to the Pacific. It was the Canadians, with their indomitable
spirit of adventure, who led the way in the path of discovery.
As a bold and hardy pioneer of the wilderness, the Frenchman in America has
rarely found his match. His civic virtues withered under the despotism of
Versailles, and his mind and conscience were kept in leading-strings by an
absolute Church; but the forest and the prairie offered him an unbridled
liberty, which, lawless as it was, gave scope to his energies, till these
savage wastes became the field of his most noteworthy achievements.
Canada was divided between two opposing influences. On the one side were
the monarchy and the hierarchy, with their principles of order,
subordination, and obedience; substantially at one in purpose, since both
wished to keep the colony within manageable bounds, domesticate it, and
tame it to soberness, regularity, and obedience. On the other side was the
spirit of liberty, or license, which was in the very air of this wilderness
continent, reinforced in the chiefs of the colony by a spirit of adventure
inherited from the Middle Ages, and by a spirit of trade born of present
opportunities; for every official in Canada hoped to make a profit, if not
a fortune, out of beaverskins. Kindred impulses, in ruder forms, possessed
the humbler colonists, drove them into the forest, and made them hardy
woodsmen and skilful bushfighters, though turbulent and lawless members of
civilized society.
Time, the decline of the fur-trade, and the influence of the Canadian
Church gradually diminished this erratic spirit, and at the same time
impaired the qualities that were associated with it. The Canadian became a
more stable colonist and a steadier farmer; but for forest journeyings and
forest warfare he was scarcely his former self. At the middle of the
eighteenth century we find complaints that the race of _voyageurs_ is
growing scarce. The taming process was most apparent in the central and
lower parts of the colony, such as the Côte de Beaupré and the opposite
shore of the St. Lawrence, where the hands of the government and of the
Church were strong; while at the head of the colony,--that is, about
Montreal and its neighborhood,--which touched the primeval wilderness, an
uncontrollable spirit of adventure still held its own. Here, at the
beginning of the century, this spirit was as strong as it had ever been,
and achieved a series of explorations and discoveries which revealed the
plains of the Far West long before an Anglo-Saxon foot had pressed their
soil.
The expedition of one Le Sueur to what is now the State of Minnesota may be
taken as the starting-point of these enterprises. Le Sueur had visited the
country of the Sioux as early as 1683. He returned thither in 1689 with the
famous _voyageur_ Nicolas Perrot. [Footnote: _Journal historique de
l'Etablissement des Français à la Louisiane_, 43.] Four years later,
Count Frontenac sent him to the Sioux country again. The declared purpose
of the mission was to keep those fierce tribes at peace with their
neighbors; but the Governor's enemies declared that a contraband trade in
beaver was the true object, and that Frontenac's secretary was to have half
the profits. [Footnote: _Champigny au Ministre, 4 Nov._ 1693.] Le
Sueur returned after two years, bringing to Montreal a Sioux chief and his
squaw,--the first of the tribe ever seen there. He then went to France, and
represented to the court that he had built a fort at Lake Pepin, on the
upper Mississippi; that he was the only white man who knew the languages of
that region; and that if the French did not speedily seize upon it, the
English, who were already trading upon the Ohio, would be sure to do so.
Thereupon he asked for the command of the upper Mississippi, with all its
tributary waters, together with a monopoly of its fur-trade for ten years,
and permission to work its mines, promising that if his petition were
granted, he would secure the country to France without expense to the King.
The commission was given him. He bought an outfit and sailed for Canada,
but was captured by the English on the way. After the peace he returned to
France and begged for a renewal of his commission. Leave was given him to
work the copper and lead mines, but not to trade in beaver-skins. He now
formed a company to aid him in his enterprise, on which a cry rose in
Canada that under pretence of working mines he meant to trade in
beaver,--which is very likely, since to bring lead and copper in bark
canoes to Montreal from the Mississippi and Lake Superior would cost far
more than the metal was worth. In consequence of this clamor his commission
was revoked.
Perhaps it was to compensate him for the outlays into which he had been
drawn that the colonial minister presently authorized him to embark for
Louisiana and pursue his enterprise with that infant colony, instead of
Canada, as his base of operations. Thither, therefore, he went; and in
April, 1700, set out for the Sioux country with twenty-five men, in a small
vessel of the kind called a "felucca," still used in the Mediterranean.
Among the party was an adventurous youth named Penecaut, a ship-carpenter
by trade, who had come to Louisiana with Iberville two years before, and
who has left us an account of his voyage with Le Sueur. [Footnote:
_Relation de Penecaut_. In my possession is a contemporary manuscript
of this narrative, for which I am indebted to the kindness of General J.
Meredith Reade.]
The party slowly made their way, with sail and oar, against the muddy
current of the Mississippi, till they reached the Arkansas, where they
found an English trader from Carolina. On the 10th of June, spent with
rowing, and half starved, they stopped to rest at a point fifteen leagues
above the mouth of the Ohio. They had staved off famine with the buds and
leaves of trees; but now, by good luck, one of them killed a bear, and,
soon after, the Jesuit Limoges arrived from the neighboring mission of the
Illinois, in a canoe well stored with provisions. Thus refreshed, they
passed the mouth of the Missouri on the 13th of July, and soon after were
met by three Canadians, who brought them a letter from the Jesuit Marest,
warning them that the river was infested by war-parties. In fact, they
presently saw seven canoes of Sioux warriors, bound against the Illinois;
and not long after, five Canadians appeared, one of whom had been badly
wounded in a recent encounter with a band of Outagamies, Sacs, and
Winnebagoes bound against the Sioux. To take one another's scalps had been
for ages the absorbing business and favorite recreation of all these
Western tribes. At or near the expansion of the Mississippi called Lake
Pepin, the voyagers found a fort called Fort Perrot, after its builder;
[Footnote: Penecaut, _Journal. Procès-verbal de la Prise de Possession du
Pays des Nadouessioux, etc., par Nicolas Perrot_, 1689. Fort Perrot
seems to have been built in 1685, and to have stood near the outlet of the
lake, probably on the west side. Perrot afterwards built another fort,
called Fort St. Antoine, a little above, on the east bank. The position of
these forts has been the subject of much discussion, and cannot be
ascertained with precision. It appears by the _Prise de Possession_,
cited above, that there was also, in 1689, a temporary French post near the
mouth of the Wisconsin.] and on an island near the upper end of the lake,
another similar structure, built by Le Sueur himself on his last visit to
the place. These forts were mere stockades, occupied from time to time by
the roving fur-traders as their occasions required.
Towards the end of September, Le Sueur and his followers reached the mouth
of the St. Peter, which they ascended to Blue Earth River. Pushing a league
up this stream, they found a spot well suited to their purpose, and here
they built a fort, of which there was great need, for they were soon after
joined by seven Canadian traders, plundered and stripped to the skin by the
neighboring Sioux. Le Sueur named the new post Fort l'Huillier. It was a
fence of pickets, enclosing cabins for the men. The neighboring plains were
black with buffalo, of which the party killed four hundred, and cut them
into quarters, which they placed to freeze on scaffolds within the
enclosure. Here they spent the winter, subsisting on the frozen meat,
without bread, vegetables, or salt, and, according to Penecaut, thriving
marvellously, though the surrounding wilderness was buried five feet deep
in snow.
Band after band of Sioux appeared, with their wolfish dogs and their sturdy
and all-enduring squaws burdened with the heavy hide coverings of their
teepees, or buffalo-skin tents. They professed friendship and begged for
arms. Those of one band had blackened their faces in mourning for a dead
chief, and calling on Le Sueur to share their sorrow, they wept over him,
and wiped their tears on his hair. Another party of warriors arrived with
yet deeper cause of grief, being the remnant of a village half exterminated
by their enemies. They, too, wept profusely over the French commander, and
then sang a dismal song, with heads muffled in their buffalo-robes.
[Footnote: This weeping over strangers was a custom with the Sioux of that
time mentioned by many early writers. La Mothe-Cadillac marvels that a
people so brave and warlike should have such a fountain of tears always at
command.] Le Sueur took the needful precautions against his dangerous
visitors, but got from them a large supply of beaver-skins in exchange for
his goods.
When spring opened, he set out in search of mines, and found, not far above
the fort, those beds of blue and green earth to which the stream owes its
name. Of this his men dug out a large quantity, and selecting what seemed
the best, stored it in their vessel as a precious commodity. With this and
good store of beaver-skins, Le Sueur now began his return voyage for
Louisiana, leaving a Canadian named D'Éraque and twelve men to keep the
fort till he should come back to reclaim it, promising to send him a
canoe-load of ammunition from the Illinois. But the canoe was wrecked, and
D'Éraque, discouraged, abandoned Fort l'Huillier, and followed his
commander down the Mississippi. [Footnote: In 1702 the geographer De l'Isle
made a remarkable MS. map entitled _Carte de la Rivière du Mississippi,
dressée sur les Mémoires de M. Le Sueur_.]
Le Sueur, with no authority from government, had opened relations of trade
with the wild Sioux of the Plains, whose westward range stretched to the
Black Hills, and perhaps to the Rocky Mountains. He reached the settlements
of Louisiana in safety, and sailed for France with four thousand pounds of
his worthless blue earth. [Footnote: According to the geologist
Featherstonhaugh, who examined the locality, this earth owes its color to a
bluish-green silicate of iron.] Repairing at once to Versailles, he begged
for help to continue his enterprise. His petition seems to have been
granted. After long delay, he sailed again for Louisiana, fell ill on the
voyage, and died soon after landing. [Footnote: Besides the long and
circumstantial _Relation de Penecaut_, an account of the earlier part
of Le Sueur's voyage up the Mississippi is contained in the _Mémoire du
Chevalier de Beaurain_, which, with other papers relating to this
explorer, including portions of his Journal, will be found in Margry, VI.
See also _Journal historique de l'Etablissement des Français à la
Louisiane_, 38-71.]
Before 1700, the year when Le Sueur visited the St. Peter, little or
nothing was known of the country west of the Mississippi, except from the
report of Indians. The romances of La Hontan and Matthieu Sagean were
justly set down as impostures by all but the most credulous. In this same
year we find Le Moyne d'Iberville projecting journeys to the upper
Missouri, in hopes of finding a river flowing to the Western Sea. In 1703,
twenty Canadians tried to find their way from the Illinois to New Mexico,
in hope of opening trade with the Spaniards and discovering mines.
[Footnote: _Iberville à ----, 15 Fév. 1703_ (Margry, VI. 180).] In
1704 we find it reported that more than a hundred Canadians are scattered
in small parties along the Mississippi and the Missouri; [Footnote:
_Bienville au Ministre_, 6 _Sept._ 1704.] and in 1705 one Laurain
appeared at the Illinois, declaring that he had been high up the Missouri
and had visited many tribes on its borders. [Footnote: Beaurain, _Journal
historique_.] A few months later, two Canadians told Bienville a similar
story. In 1708 Nicolas de la Salle proposed an expedition of a hundred men
to explore the same mysterious river; and in 1717 one Hubert laid before
the Council of Marine a scheme for following the Missouri to its source,
since, he says, "not only may we find the mines worked by the Spaniards,
but also discover the great river that is said to rise in the mountains
where the Missouri has its source, and is believed to flow to the Western
Sea." And he advises that a hundred and fifty men be sent up the river in
wooden canoes, since bark canoes would be dangerous, by reason of the
multitude of snags. [Footnote: Hubert, _Mémoire envoyé au Conseil de la
Marine._]
In 1714 Juchereau de Saint-Denis was sent by La Mothe-Cadillac to explore
western Louisiana, and pushed up Red River to a point sixty-eight leagues,
as he reckons, above Natchitoches. In the next year, journeying across
country towards the Spanish settlements, with a view to trade, he was
seized near the Rio Grande and carried to the city of Mexico. The
Spaniards, jealous of French designs, now sent priests and soldiers to
occupy several points in Texas. Juchereau, however, was well treated, and
permitted to marry a Spanish girl with whom he had fallen in love on the
way; but when, in the autumn of 1716, he ventured another journey to the
Mexican borders, still hoping to be allowed to trade, he and his goods were
seized by order of the Mexican viceroy, and, lest worse should befall him,
he fled empty handed, under cover of night. [Footnote: Penecaut,
_Relation_, chaps, xvii., xviii. Le Page du Pratz, _Histoire de la
Louisiane_, I. 13-22. Various documents in Margry, VI. 193-202.]
In March, 1719, Bénard de la Harpe left the feeble little French post at
Natchitoches with six soldiers and a sergeant [Footnote: For an interesting
contemporary map of the French establishment at Natchitoches, see Thomassy,
_Géologie pratique de la Louisiane._]. His errand was to explore the
country, open trade if possible with the Spaniards, and establish another
post high up Red River. He and his party soon came upon that vast
entanglement of driftwood, or rather of uprooted forests, afterwards known
as the Red River raft, which choked the stream and forced them to make
their way through the inundated jungle that bordered it. As they pushed or
dragged their canoes through the swamp, they saw with disgust and alarm a
good number of snakes, coiled about twigs and boughs on the right and left,
or sometimes over their heads. These were probably the deadly
water-moccason, which in warm weather is accustomed to crawl out of its
favorite element and bask itself in the sun, precisely as described by La
Harpe. Their nerves were further discomposed by the splashing and plunging
of alligators lately wakened from their wintry torpor. Still, they pushed
painfully on, till they reached navigable water again, and at the end of
the month were, as they thought, a hundred and eight leagues above
Natchitoches. In four days more they reached the Nassonites.
These savages belonged to a group of stationary tribes, only one of which,
the Caddoes, survives to our day as a separate community. Their enemies the
Chickasaws, Osages, Arkansas, and even the distant Illinois, waged such
deadly war against them that, according to La Harpe, the unfortunate
Nassonites were in the way of extinction, their numbers having fallen,
within ten years, from twenty-five hundred souls to four hundred.
[Footnote: Bénard de la Harpe, in Margry, VI. 264.]
La Harpe stopped among them to refresh his men, and build a house of
cypress-wood as a beginning of the post he was ordered to establish; then,
having heard that a war with Spain had ruined his hopes of trade with New
Mexico, he resolved to pursue his explorations.
With him went ten men, white, red, and black, with twenty-two horses bought
from the Indians, for his journeyings were henceforth to be by land. The
party moved in a northerly and westerly course, by hills, forests, and
prairies, passed two branches of the Wichita, and on the 3d of September
came to a river which La Harpe calls the southwest branch of the Arkansas,
but which, if his observation of latitude is correct, must have been the
main stream, not far from the site of Fort Mann. Here he was met by seven
Indian chiefs, mounted on excellent horses saddled and bridled after the
Spanish manner. They led him to where, along the plateau of the low,
treeless hills that bordered the valley, he saw a string of Indian
villages, extending for a league and belonging to nine several bands, the
names of which can no longer be recognized, and most of which are no doubt
extinct. He says that they numbered in all six thousand souls; and their
dwellings were high, dome-shaped structures, built of clay mixed with reeds
and straw, resting, doubtless, on a frame of bent poles. [Footnote:
Beaurain says that each of these bands spoke a language of its own. They
had horses in abundance, descended from Spanish stock. Among them appear to
have been the Ouacos, or Huecos, and the Wichitas,--two tribes better known
as the Pawnee Picts. See Marcy, _Exploration of Red River._] With them
were also some of the roving Indians of the plains, with their conical
teepees of dressed buffalo-skin.
The arrival of the strangers was a great and amazing event for these
savages, few of whom had ever seen a white man. On the day after their
arrival the whole multitude gathered to receive them and offer them the
calumet, with a profusion of songs and speeches. Then warrior after warrior
recounted his exploits and boasted of the scalps he had taken. From eight
in the morning till two hours after midnight the din of drums, songs,
harangues, and dances continued without relenting, with a prospect of
twelve hours more; and La Harpe, in desperation, withdrew to rest himself
on a buffalo-robe, begging another Frenchman to take his place. His hosts
left him in peace for a while; then the chiefs came to find him, painted
his face blue, as a tribute of respect, put a cap of eagle-feathers on his
head, and laid numerous gifts at his feet. When at last the ceremony ended,
some of the performers were so hoarse from incessant singing that they
could hardly speak. [Footnote: Compare the account of La Harpe with that of
the Chevalier de Beaurain; both are in Margry, VI. There is an abstract in
_Journal historique._]
La Harpe was told by his hosts that the Spanish settlements could be
reached by ascending their river; but to do this was at present impossible.
He began his backward journey, fell desperately ill of a fever, and nearly
died before reaching Natchitoches.
Having recovered, he made an attempt, two years later, to explore the
Arkansas in canoes, from its mouth, but accomplished little besides killing
a good number of buffalo, bears, deer, and wild turkeys. He was confirmed,
however, in the belief that the Comanches and the Spaniards of New Mexico
might be reached by this route.
In the year of La Harpe's first exploration, one Du Tisné went up the
Missouri to a point six leagues above Grand River, where stood the village
of the Missouris. He wished to go farther, but they would not let him. He
then returned to the Illinois, whence he set out on horseback with a few
followers across what is now the State of Missouri, till he reached the
village of the Osages, which stood on a hill high up the river Osage. At
first he was well received; but when they found him disposed to push on to
a town of their enemies, the Pawnees, forty leagues distant, they angrily
refused to let him go. His firmness and hardihood prevailed, and at last
they gave him leave. A ride of a few days over rich prairies brought him to
the Pawnees, who, coming as he did from the hated Osages, took him for an
enemy and threatened to kill him. Twice they raised the tomahawk over his
head; but when the intrepid traveller dared them to strike, they began to
treat him as a friend. When, however, he told them that he meant to go
fifteen days' journey farther, to the Padoucas, or Comanches, their deadly
enemies, they fiercely forbade him; and after planting a French flag in
their village, he returned as he had come, guiding his way by compass, and
reaching the Illinois in November, after extreme hardships. [Footnote:
_Relation de Bénard de la Harpe. Autre Relation du même. Du Tisné à
Bienville._ Margry, VI. 309, 310, 313.]
Early in 1721 two hundred mounted Spaniards, followed by a large body of
Comanche warriors, came from New Mexico to attack the French at the
Illinois, but were met and routed on the Missouri by tribes of that region.
[Footnote: _Bienville au Conseil de Régence, 20 Juillet, 1721._] In
the next year, Bienville was told that they meant to return, punish those
who had defeated them, and establish a post on the river Kansas; whereupon
he ordered Boisbriant, commandant at the Illinois, to anticipate them by
sending troops to build a French fort at or near the same place. But the
West India Company had already sent one Bourgmont on a similar errand, the
object being to trade with the Spaniards in time of peace, and stop their
incursions in time of war. [Footnote: _Instructions au Sieur de
Bourgmont, 17 Jan. 1722._ Margry, VI. 389.] It was hoped also that, in
the interest of trade, peace might be made between the Comanches and the
tribes of the Missouri. [Footnote: The French had at this time gained a
knowledge of the tribes of the Missouri as far up as the Arickaras, who
were not, it seems, many days' journey below the Yellowstone, and who told
them of "prodigiously high mountains,"--evidently the Rocky Mountains.
_Mémoire de la Renaudière_, 1723.]
Bourgmont was a man of some education, and well acquainted with these
tribes, among whom he had traded for years. In pursuance of his orders he
built a fort, which he named Fort Orléans, and which stood on the Missouri
not far above the mouth of Grand River. Having thus accomplished one part
of his mission, he addressed himself to the other, and prepared to march
for the Comanche villages.
Leaving a sufficient garrison at the fort, he sent his ensign, Saint-Ange,
with a party of soldiers and Canadians, in wooden canoes, to the villages
of the Kansas higher up the stream, and on the 3d of July set out by land
to join him, with a hundred and nine Missouri Indians and sixty-eight
Osages in his train. A ride of five days brought him again to the banks of
the Missouri, opposite a Kansas town. Saint-Ange had not yet arrived, the
angry and turbid current, joined to fevers among his men, having retarded
his progress. Meanwhile Bourgmont drew from the Kansas a promise that their
warriors should go with him to the Comanches. Saint-Ange at last appeared,
and at daybreak of the 24th the tents were struck and the pack-horses
loaded. At six o'clock the party drew up in battle array on a hill above
the Indian town, and then, with drum beating and flag flying, began their
march. "A fine prairie country," writes Bourgmont, "with hills and dales
and clumps of trees to right and left." Sometimes the landscape quivered
under the sultry sun, and sometimes thunder bellowed over their heads, and
rain fell in floods on the steaming plains.
Renaudière, engineer of the party, one day stood by the side of the path
and watched the whole procession as it passed him. The white men were about
twenty in all. He counted about three hundred Indian warriors, with as many
squaws, some five hundred children, and a prodigious number of dogs, the
largest and strongest of which dragged heavy loads. The squaws also served
as beasts of burden; and, says the journal, "they will carry as much as a
dog will drag." Horses were less abundant among these tribes than they
afterwards became, so that their work fell largely upon the women.
On the sixth day the party was within three leagues of the river Kansas, at
a considerable distance above its mouth. Bourgmont had suffered from
dysentery on the march, and an access of the malady made it impossible for
him to go farther. It is easy to conceive the regret with which he saw
himself compelled to return to Fort Orléans. The party retraced their
steps, carrying their helpless commander on a litter.
First, however, he sent one Gaillard on a perilous errand. Taking with him
two Comanche slaves bought for the purpose from the Kansas, Gaillard was
ordered to go to the Comanche villages with the message that Bourgmont had
been on his way to make them a friendly visit, and though stopped by
illness, hoped soon to try again, with better success.
Early in September, Bourgmont, who had arrived safely at Fort Orléans,
received news that the mission of Gaillard had completely succeeded; on
which, though not wholly recovered from his illness, he set out again on
his errand of peace, accompanied by his young son, besides Renaudière, a
surgeon, and nine soldiers. On reaching the great village of the Kansas he
found there five Comanche chiefs and warriors, whom Gaillard had induced to
come thither with him. Seven chiefs of the Otoes presently appeared, in
accordance with an invitation of Bourgmont; then six chiefs of the Iowas
and the head chief of the Missouris. With these and the Kansas chiefs a
solemn council was held around a fire before Bourgmont's tent; speeches
were made, the pipe of peace was smoked, and presents were distributed.
On the 8th of October the march began, the five Comanches and the chiefs of
several other tribes, including the Omahas, joining the cavalade. Gaillard
and another Frenchman named Quesnel were sent in advance to announce their
approach to the Comanches, while Bourgmont and his followers moved up the
north side of the river Kansas till the eleventh, when they forded it at a
point twenty leagues from its mouth, and took a westward and southwestward
course, sometimes threading the grassy valleys of little streams, sometimes
crossing the dry upland prairie, covered with the short, tufted dull-green
herbage since known as "buffalo grass." Wild turkeys clamored along every
watercourse; deer were seen on all sides, buffalo were without number,
sometimes in grazing droves, and sometimes dotting the endless plain as far
as the eye could reach. Ruffian wolves, white and gray, eyed the travellers
askance, keeping a safe distance by day, and howling about the camp all
night. Of the antelope and the elk the journal makes no mention. Bourgmont
chased a buffalo on horseback and shot him with a pistol,--which is
probably the first recorded example of that way of hunting.
The stretches of high, rolling, treeless prairie grew more vast as the
travellers advanced. On the 17th, they found an abandoned Comanche camp.
On the next day as they stopped to dine, and had just unsaddled their
horses, they saw a distant smoke towards the west, on which they set the
dry grass on fire as an answering signal. Half an hour later a body of wild
horsemen came towards them at full speed, and among them were their two
couriers, Gaillard and Quesnel, waving a French flag. The strangers were
eighty Comanche warriors, with the grand chief of the tribe at their head.
They dashed up to Bourgmont's bivouac and leaped from their horses, when a
general shaking of hands ensued, after which white men and red seated
themselves on the ground and smoked the pipe of peace. Then all rode
together to the Comanche camp, three leagues distant. [Footnote: This
meeting took place a little north of the Arkansas, apparently where that
river makes a northward bend, near the 22d degree of west longitude. The
Comanche villages were several days' journey to the southwest. This tribe
is always mentioned in the early French narratives as the Padoucas,--a name
by which the Comanches are occasionally known to this day. See Whipple and
Turner, _Reports upon Indian Tribes,_ in _Explorations and Surveys
for the Pacific Railroad,_ (Senate Doc., 1853,1854).]
Bourgmont pitched his tents at a pistol-shot from the Comanche lodges,
whence a crowd of warriors presently came to visit him. They spread
buffalo-robes on the ground, placed upon them the French commander, his
officers, and his young son; then lifted each, with its honored load, and
carried them all, with yells of joy and gratulation, to the lodge of the
Great Chief, where there was a feast of ceremony lasting till nightfall.
On the next day Bourgmont displayed to his hosts the marvellous store of
gifts he had brought for them--guns, swords, hatchets, kettles, gunpowder,
bullets, red cloth, blue cloth, hand-mirrors, knives, shirts, awls,
scissors, needles, hawks' bells, vermilion, beads, and other enviable
commodities, of the like of which they had never dreamed. Two hundred
savages gathered before the French tents, where Bourgmont, with the gifts
spread on the ground before him, stood with a French flag in his hand,
surrounded by his officers and the Indian chiefs of his party, and
harangued the admiring auditors.
He told them that he had come to bring them a message from the King, his
master, who was the Great Chief of all the nations of the earth, and whose
will it was that the Comanches should live in peace with his other
children,--the Missouris, Osages, Kansas, Otoes, Omahas, and Pawnees,--with
whom they had long been at war; that the chiefs of these tribes were now
present, ready to renounce their old enmities; that the Comanches should
henceforth regard them as friends, share with them the blessing of alliance
and trade with the French, and give to these last free passage through
their country to trade with the Spaniards of New Mexico. Bourgmont then
gave the French flag to the Great Chief, to be kept forever as a pledge of
that day's compact. The chief took the flag, and promised in behalf of his
people to keep peace inviolate with the Indian children of the King. Then,
with unspeakable delight, he and his tribesmen took and divided the gifts.
The next two days were spent in feasts and rejoicings. "Is it true that you
are men?" asked the Great Chief. "I have heard wonders of the French, but I
never could have believed what I see this day." Then, taking up a handful
of earth, "The Spaniards are like this; but you are like the sun." And he
offered Bourgmont, in case of need, the aid of his two thousand Comanche
warriors. The pleasing manners of his visitors, and their unparalleled
generosity, had completely won his heart.
As the object of the expedition was accomplished, or seemed to be so, the
party set out on their return. A ride of ten days brought them again to the
Missouri; they descended in canoes to Fort Orléans, and sang Te Deum in
honor of the peace. [Footnote: _Relation du Voyage du Sieur de Bourgmont,
Juin-Nov._, 1724, in Margry, VI. 398. Le Page du Pratz, III. 141.]
No farther discovery in this direction was made for the next fifteen years.
Though the French had explored the Missouri as far as the site of Fort
Clark and the Mandan villages, they were possessed by the idea--due,
perhaps, to Indian reports concerning the great tributary river, the
Yellowstone--that in its upper course the main stream bent so far southward
as to form a waterway to New Mexico, with which it was the constant desire
of the authorities of Louisiana to open trade. A way thither was at last
made known by two brothers named Mallet, who with six companions went up
the Platte to its South Fork, which they called River of the Padoucas,--a
name given it on some maps down to the middle of this century. They
followed the South Fork for some distance, and then, turning southward and
southwestward, crossed the plains of Colorado. Here the dried dung of the
buffalo was their only fuel; and it has continued to feed the camp-fire of
the traveller in this treeless region within the memory of many now living.
They crossed the upper Arkansas, and apparently the Cimarron, passed Taos,
and on the 22d of July reached Santa Fé, where they spent the winter. On
the 1st of May, 1740, they began their return journey, three of them
crossing the plains to the Pawnee villages, and the rest descending the
Arkansas to the Mississippi. [Footnote: _Journal du Voyage des Frères
Mallet, présenté à MM. de Bienville et Salmon_. This narrative is meagre
and confused, but serves to establish the main points. _Copie du
Certificat donné à Santa Fé aux sept [huit] Français par le Général
Hurtado, 24 Juillet, 1739. Père Rébald au Père de Beaubois, sans date.
Bienville et Salmon au Ministre, 30 Avril_, 1741, in Margry, VI.
455-468.]
The bold exploit of the brothers Mallet attracted great attention at New
Orleans, and Bienville resolved to renew it, find if possible a nearer and
better way to Santa Fé, determine the nature and extent of these mysterious
western regions, and satisfy a lingering doubt whether they were not
contiguous to China and Tartary. [Footnote: _Instructions données par
Jean-Baptiste de Bienville à Fabry de la Bruyère, 1 Juin, 1741_.
Bienville was behind his time in geographical knowledge. As early as 1724
Bénard de la Harpe knew that in ascending the Missouri or the Arkansas one
was moving towards the "Western Sea,"--that is, the Pacific,--and might,
perhaps, find some river flowing into it. See _Routes qu'on peut tenir
pour se rendre à la Mer de l'Ouest,_ in _Journal historique_,
387.] A naval officer, Fabry de la Bruyère, was sent on this errand, with
the brothers Mallet and a few soldiers and Canadians. He ascended the
Canadian Fork of the Arkansas, named by him the St. André, became entangled
in the shallows and quicksands of that difficult river, fell into disputes
with his men, and after protracted efforts, returned unsuccessful.
[Footnote: _Extrait des Lettres du Sieur Fabry._]
While French enterprise was unveiling the remote Southwest, two indomitable
Canadians were pushing still more noteworthy explorations into more
northern regions of the continent.
CHAPTER XVI.
1716-1761.
SEARCH FOR THE PACIFIC.
THE WESTERN SEA.--SCHEMES FOR REACHING IT.--JOURNEY OF CHARLEVOIX.--THE
SIOUX MISSION.--VARENNES DE LA VÉRENDRYE.--HIS ENTERPRISE.--HIS
DISASTERS.--VISITS THE MANDANS.--HIS SONS.--THEIR SEARCH FOR THE WESTERN
SEA.--THEIR ADVENTURES.--THE SNAKE INDIANS.--A GREAT WAR-PARTY.--THE ROCKY
MOUNTAINS.--A PANIC.--RETURN OF THE BROTHERS.--THEIR WRONGS AND THEIR FATE.
In the disastrous last years of Louis XIV, the court gave little thought to
the New World; but under the regency of the Duke of Orléans interest in
American affairs revived. Plans for reaching the Mer de l'Ouest, or Pacific
Ocean, were laid before the Regent in 1716. It was urged that the best hope
was in sending an expedition across the continent, seeing that every
attempt to find a westward passage by Hudson Bay had failed. As
starting-points and bases of supply for the expedition, it was proposed to
establish three posts, one on the north shore of Lake Superior, at the
mouth of the river Kaministiguia, another at Lac des Cristineaux, now
called Lake of the Woods, and the third at Lake Winnipeg,--the last being
what in American phrase is called the "jumping-off place," or the point
where the expedition was to leave behind the last trace of civilization.
These posts were to cost the Crown nothing; since by a device common in
such cases, those who built and maintained them were to be paid by a
monopoly of the fur-trade in the adjacent countries. It was admitted,
however, that the subsequent exploration must be at the charge of the
government, and would require fifty good men, at 300 francs a year each,
besides equipment and supplies. All things considered, it was reckoned that
an overland way to the Pacific might be found for about 50,000 francs, or
10,000 dollars. [Footnote: _Mémoire fait et arresté par le Conseil de
Marine, 3 Fév. 1717; Mémoire du Roy, 26 Juin, 1717._]
The Regent approved the scheme so far as to order the preliminary step to
be taken by establishing the three posts, and in this same year, Lieutenant
La Noue, of the colony troops, began the work by building a stockade at the
mouth of the Kaministiguia. Little more was done in furtherance of the
exploration till three years later, when the celebrated Jesuit, Charlevoix,
was ordered by the Duke of Orléans to repair to America and gain all
possible information concerning the Western Sea and the way to it.
[Footnote: _Charlevoix au Comte de Morville, 1 Avril_, 1723.]
In the next year he went to the Upper Lakes, and questioned missionaries,
officers, _voyageurs,_ and Indians. The results were not satisfactory.
The missionaries and the officers had nothing to tell; the voyagers and
Indians knew no more than they, but invented confused and contradictory
falsehoods to hide their ignorance. Charlevoix made note of everything, and
reported to the Comte de Toulouse that the Pacific probably formed the
western boundary of the country of the Sioux, and that some Indians told
him that they had been to its shores and found white men there different
from the French.
Believing that these stories were not without foundation, Charlevoix
reported two plans as likely to lead to the coveted discovery. One was to
ascend the Missouri, "the source of which is certainly not far from the
sea, as all the Indians I have met have unanimously assured me;" and the
other was to establish a mission among the Sioux, from whom after
thoroughly learning their language, the missionaries could, as he thinks,
gain all the desired information. [Footnote: The valuable journal of
Charlevoix's western travels, written in the form of letters, was published
in connection with his _Histoire de la Nouvelle France_. After his
visit to the Lakes, he went to New Orleans, intending to return in the
spring and continue his inquiries for the Western Sea; but being unable to
do this, he went back to France at the end of 1722. The official report of
his mission is contained in a letter to the Comte de Toulouse, 20 Jan.
1723.]
The Regent approved the plan of the mission; but the hostile disposition of
the Sioux and the Outagamies prevented its execution for several years. In
1727 the scheme was revived, and the colonial minister at Versailles
ordered the Governor of Canada to send two missionaries to the Sioux. But
the mission required money, and the King would not give it. Hence the usual
expedient was adopted. A company was formed, and invested with a monopoly
of the Sioux fur-trade, on condition of building a fort, mission-house, and
chapel, and keeping an armed force to guard them. It was specially provided
that none but pious and virtuous persons were to be allowed to join the
Company, "in order," says the document, "to attract the benediction of God
upon them and their business." [Footnote: _Traité de la Compagnie des
Sioux, 6 Juin, 1727._] The prospects of the Company were thought good,
and the Governor himself was one of the shareholders. While the mission was
given the most conspicuous place in the enterprise, its objects were rather
secular than spiritual,--to attach the Sioux to the French interest by the
double ties of religion and trade, and utilize their supposed knowledge to
reach the Pacific. [Footnote: On this scheme, _Vaudreuil et Bégon au
Ministre, 4 Oct. 1723; Longueuil et Bégon au Ministre, 31 Oct. 1725;
Beauharnois et Dupuy au Ministre, 25 Sept. 1727._]
Father Guignas was made the head of the mission, and Boucher de la Perrière
the military chief. The party left Montreal in June, and journeying to the
Mississippi by way of Michillimackinac, Green Bay, Fox River, and the
Wisconsin, went up the great river to Lake Pepin, where the adventurous
Nicolas Perrot had built two trading-posts more than forty years before.
Even if his timeworn tenements were still standing, La Perrière had no
thought of occupying them. On the north, or rather west, side of the lake
his men found a point of land that seemed fit for their purpose,
disembarked, cut down trees, and made a square stockade enclosing the
necessary buildings. It was near the end of October before they were all
well housed. A large band of Sioux presently appeared, and set up their
teepees hard by. When the birthday of the Governor came, the party
celebrated it with a display of fireworks and vociferous shouts of _Vive
le Roi, Vive Charles de Beauharnois,_ while the Indians yelped in fright
and amazement at the pyrotechnics, or stood pressing their hands upon their
mouths in silent amazement. The French called their fort Fort Beauharnois,
and invited the aid of Saint Michael the Archangel by naming the mission in
his honor. All went well till April, when the water rose with the spring
floods and filled fort, chapel, and houses to the depth of nearly three
feet, ejecting the whole party, and forcing them to encamp on higher ground
till the deluge subsided. [Footnote: _Guignas à Beauharnois, 28 Mai,
1728._]
Worse enemies than the floods soon found them out. These were the
irrepressible Outagamies, who rose against the intruding French and incited
the Sioux to join them. There was no profit for the Company, and no safety
for its agents. The stockholders became discouraged, and would not support
the enterprise. The fort was abandoned, till in 1731 a new arrangement was
made, followed by another attempt. [Footnote: _Beauharnois et Hocquart au
Ministre, 25 Oct. 1729; Idem, 12 Oct. 1731._] For a time a prosperous
trade was carried on; but, as commonly happened in such cases, the
adventurers seem to have thought more of utilizing their monopoly than of
fulfilling the terms on which they had received it. The wild Sioux of the
plains, instead of being converted and turned into Frenchmen, proved such
dangerous neighbors that in 1737 Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, who then
commanded the post, found himself forced to abandon it. [Footnote:
_Relation du Sieur de Saint-Pierre, 14 Oct. 1737._] The enterprise had
failed in both its aims. The Western Sea was still a mystery, and the Sioux
were not friends, but enemies. Legardeur de Saint-Pierre recommended that
they should be destroyed, benevolent advice easy to give, and impossible to
execute. [Footnote: "Cet officier [Saint-Pierre] a ajouté qu'il seroit
avantageux de detruire cette nation." _Mémoire de Beauharnois, 1738._]
René Gaultier de Varennes, lieutenant in the regiment of Carignan, married
at Three Rivers, in 1667, the daughter of Pierre Boucher, governor of that
place; the age of the bride, Demoiselle Marie Boucher, being twelve years,
six months, and eighteen days. Varennes succeeded his father-in-law as
governor of Three Rivers, with a salary of twelve hundred francs, to which
he added the profits of a farm of forty acres; and on these modest
resources, reinforced by an illicit trade in furs, he made shift to sustain
the dignity of his office. His wife became the mother of numerous
offspring, among whom was Pierre, born in 1685,--an active and hardy youth,
who, like the rest of the poor but vigorous Canadian _noblesse_,
seemed born for the forest and the fur-trade. When, however, the War of the
Spanish Succession broke out, the young man crossed the sea, obtained the
commission of lieutenant, and was nearly killed at the battle of
Malplaquet, where he was shot through the body, received six sabre-cuts,
and was left for dead on the field. He recovered, and returned to Canada,
when, finding his services slighted, he again took to the woods. He had
assumed the designation of La Vérendrye, and thenceforth his full name was
Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Vérendrye. [Footnote: M. Benjamin Sulte
has traced out the family history of the Varennes in the parish registers
of Three Rivers and other trustworthy sources. See _Revue Canadienne_,
X. 781, 849, 935.]
In 1728, he was in command of a small post on Lake Nipegon, north of Lake
Superior. Here an Indian chief from the River Kaministiguia told him of a
certain great lake which discharged itself by a river flowing westward. The
Indian further declared that he had descended this river till he reached
water that ebbed and flowed, and terrified by the strange phenomenon, had
turned back, though not till he had heard of a great salt lake, bordered
with many villages. Other Indians confirmed and improved the story. "These
people," said La Vérendrye to the Jesuit Degonnor, "are great liars, but
now and then they tell the truth." [Footnote: _Relation du Père Degonnor,
Jésuite, Missionnaire des Sioux, adressée à M. le Marquis de
Beauharnois_.] It seemed to him likely that their stories of a western
river flowing to a western sea were not totally groundless, and that the
true way to the Pacific was not, as had been supposed, through the country
of the Sioux, but farther northward, through that of the Cristineaux and
Assinniboins, or, in other words, through the region now called Manitoba.
In this view he was sustained by his friend Degonnor, who had just returned
from the ill-starred Sioux mission.
La Vérendrye, fired with the zeal of discovery, offered to search for the
Western Sea if the King would give him one hundred men and supply canoes,
arms, and provisions. [Footnote: _Relation de Degonnor: Beauharnois au
Ministre, 1 Oct_. 1731.] But, as was usual in such cases, the
King would give nothing; and though the Governor, Beauharnois, did all in
his power to promote the enterprise, the burden and the risk were left to
the adventurer himself. La Vérendrye was authorized to find a way to the
Pacific at his own expense, in consideration of a monopoly of the fur-trade
in the regions north and west of Lake Superior. This vast and remote
country was held by tribes who were doubtful friends of the French, and
perpetual enemies of each other. The risks of the trade were as great as
its possible profits, and to reap these, vast outlays must first be made:
forts must be built, manned, provisioned, and stocked with goods brought
through two thousand miles of difficult and perilous wilderness. There were
other dangers, more insidious, and perhaps greater. The exclusive
privileges granted to La Vérendrye would inevitably rouse the intensest
jealousy of the Canadian merchants, and they would spare no effort to ruin
him. Intrigue and calumny would be busy in his absence. If, as was likely,
his patron, Beauharnois, should be recalled, the new governor might be
turned against him, his privileges might be suddenly revoked, the forts he
had built passed over to his rivals, and all his outlays turned to their
profit, as had happened to La Salle on the recall of his patron, Frontenac.
On the other hand, the country was full of the choicest furs, which the
Indians had hitherto carried to the English at Hudson Bay, but which the
proposed trading-posts would secure to the French. La Vérendrye's enemies
pretended that he thought of nothing but beaver-skins, and slighted the
discovery which he had bound himself to undertake; but his conduct proves
that he was true to his engagements, and that ambition to gain honorable
distinction in the service of the King had a large place among the motives
that impelled him.
As his own resources were of the smallest, he took a number of associates
on conditions most unfavorable to himself. Among them they raised money
enough to begin the enterprise, and on the 8th of June, 1731, La Vérendrye
and three of his sons, together with his nephew, La Jemeraye, the Jesuit
Messager, and a party of Canadians, set out from Montreal. It was late in
August before they reached the great portage of Lake Superior, which led
across the height of land separating the waters of that lake from those
flowing to Lake Winnipeg. The way was long and difficult. The men, who had
perhaps been tampered with, mutinied, and refused to go farther. [Footnote:
_Mémoire du Sieur de la Vérendrye du Sujet des Etablissements pour
parvenir a la Découverte de la Mer de l'Ouest,_ in Margry, VI. 585.] Some of
them, with much ado, consented at last to proceed, and, under the lead of
La Jemeraye, made their way by an intricate and broken chain of lakes and
streams to Rainy Lake, where they built a fort and called it Fort St.
Pierre. La Vérendrye was forced to winter with the rest of the party at the
river Kaministiguia, not far from the great portage. Here months were lost,
during which a crew of useless mutineers had to be fed and paid; and it was
not till the next June that he could get them again into motion towards
Lake Winnipeg.
This ominous beginning was followed by a train of disasters. His associates
abandoned him; the merchants on whom he depended for supplies would not
send them, and he found himself, in his own words "destitute of
everything." His nephew, La Jemeraye, died. The Jesuit Auneau, bent on
returning to Michillimackinac, set out with La Vérendrye's eldest son and a
party of twenty Canadians. A few days later, they were all found on an
island in the Lake of the Woods, murdered and mangled by the Sioux.
[Footnote: _Beauharnois au Ministre, 14 Oct. 1736; Relation du Massacre
au Lac des Bois, en Juin, 1736; Journal de la Vérendrye, joint à la lettre
de M. de Beauharnois du ---- Oct. 1737_.] The Assinniboins and
Cristineaux, mortal foes of that fierce people, offered to join the French
and avenge the butchery; but a war with the Sioux would have ruined La
Vérendrye's plans of discovery, and exposed to torture and death the French
traders in their country. Therefore he restrained himself and declined the
proffered aid, at the risk of incurring the contempt of those who offered
it.
Beauharnois twice appealed to the court to give La Vérendrye some little
aid, urging that he was at the end of his resources, and that a grant of
30,000 francs, or 6,000 dollars, would enable him to find a way to the
Pacific. All help was refused, but La Vérendrye was told that he might let
out his forts to other traders, and so raise means to pursue the discovery.
In 1740 he went for the third time to Montreal, where, instead of aid, he
found a lawsuit. "In spite," he says, "of the derangement of my affairs,
the envy and jealousy of various persons impelled them to write letters to
the court insinuating that I thought of nothing but making my fortune. If
more than forty thousand livres of debt which I have on my shoulders are an
advantage, then I can flatter myself that I am very rich. In all my
misfortunes, I have the consolation of seeing that M. de Beauharnois enters
into my views, recognizes the uprightness of my intentions, and does me
justice in spite of opposition." [Footnote: Mémoire du Sieur de la
Vérendrye au sujet des Etablissements pour parvenir à la Découverte de la
Mer de l'Quest.]
Meanwhile, under all his difficulties, he had explored a vast region
hitherto unknown, diverted a great and lucrative fur-trade from the English
at Hudson Bay, and secured possession of it by six fortified posts,--Fort
St. Pierre, on Rainy Lake; Fort St. Charles, on the Lake of the Woods; Fort
Maurepas, at the mouth of the river Winnipeg; Fort Bourbon, on the eastern
side of Lake Winnipeg; Fort La Reine, on the Assinniboin; Fort Dauphin, on
Lake Manitoba. Besides these he built another post, called Fort Rouge, on
the site of the city of Winnipeg; and, some time after, another, at the
mouth of the River Poskoiac, or Saskatchawan, neither of which, however,
was long occupied. These various forts were only stockade works flanked
with block-houses; but the difficulty of building and maintaining them in
this remote wilderness was incalculable. [Footnote: _Mémoire en abrégé de
la Carte qui représente les Etablissements faits par le Sieur de la
Vérendrye et ses Enfants_ (Margry, VI. 616); _Carte des Nouvelles
Découvertes dans l'Ouest du Canada dressée sur les Mémoires de Mr. de la
Vérandrie et donnée au Dépôt de la Marine par M. de la Galissonnière,_
1750; Bellin, _Remarques surla Carte de l'Amérique,_ 1755;
Bougainville, _Mémoire sur l'Etat de la Nouvelle France, _1757.
Most of La Vérendrye's forts were standing during the Seven Years' War, and
were known collectively as _Postes de la Mer de l'Ouest_.]
He had inquired on all sides for the Pacific. The Assinniboins could tell
him nothing. Nor could any information be expected from them, since their
relatives and mortal enemies, the Sioux, barred their way to the West. The
Cristineaux were equally ignorant; but they supplied the place of knowledge
by invention, and drew maps, some of which seem to have been made with no
other intention than that of amusing themselves by imposing on the
inquirer. They also declared that some of their number had gone down a
river called White River, or River of the West, where they found a plant
that shed drops like blood, and saw serpents of prodigious size. They said
further that on the lower part of this river were walled towns, where dwelt
white men who had knives, hatchets, and cloth, but no firearms. [Footnote:
_Journal de la Vérendrye joint à la Lettre de M. de Beauharnois du ----
Oct. 1737_.]
Both Assinniboins and Cristineaux declared that there was a distant tribe
on the Missouri, called Mantannes (Mandans), who knew the way to the
Western Sea, and would guide him to it. Lured by this assurance, and
feeling that he had sufficiently secured his position to enable him to
begin his Western exploration, La Vérendrye left Fort La Reine in October,
1738, with twenty men, and pushed up the River Assinniboin till its rapids
and shallows threatened his bark canoes with destruction. Then, with a band
of Assinniboin Indians who had joined him, he struck across the prairie for
the Mandans, his Indian companions hunting buffalo on the way. They
approached the first Mandan village on the afternoon of the 3d of December,
displaying a French flag and firing three volleys as a salute. The whole
population poured out to see the marvellous visitors, who were conducted
through the staring crowd to the lodge of the principal chief,--a capacious
structure so thronged with the naked and greasy savages that the Frenchmen
were half smothered. What was worse, they lost the bag that held all their
presents for the Mandans, which was snatched away in the confusion, and
hidden in one of the _caches_, called cellars by La Vérendrye, of
which the place was full. The chief seemed much discomposed at this mishap,
and explained it by saying that there were many rascals in the village.
The loss was serious, since without the presents nothing could be done. Nor
was this all; for in the morning La Vérendrye missed his interpreter, and
was told that he had fallen in love with an Assinniboin girl and gone off
in pursuit of her. The French were now without any means of communicating
with the Mandans, from whom, however, before the disappearance of the
interpreter, they had already received a variety of questionable
information, chiefly touching white men cased in iron who were said to live
on the river below at the distance of a whole summer's journey. As they
were impervious to arrows,--so the story ran,--it was necessary to shoot
their horses, after which, being too heavy to run, they were easily caught.
This was probably suggested by the armor of the Spaniards, who had more
than once made incursions as far as the lower Missouri; but the narrators
drew on their imagination for various additional particulars.
The Mandans seem to have much declined in numbers during the century that
followed this visit of La Vérendrye. He says that they had six villages on
or near the Missouri, of which the one seen by him was the smallest, though
he thinks that it contained a hundred and thirty houses. [Footnote:
_Journal de la Vérendrye_, 1738,1739. This journal, which is
ill-written and sometimes obscure, is printed in Brymner, _Report on
Canadian Archives_, 1889.] As each of these large structures held a
number of families, the population must have been considerable. Yet when
Prince Maximilian visited the Mandans in 1833, he found only two villages,
containing jointly two hundred and forty warriors and a total population of
about a thousand souls. Without having seen the statements of La Vérendrye,
he speaks of the population as greatly reduced by wars and the
small-pox,--a disease which a few years later nearly exterminated the
tribe. [Footnote: Le Prince Maximilien de Wied-Neuwied, _Voyage dans
l'Intérieur de l'Amérique du Nord_, II. 371, 372 (Paris, 1843). When
Captains Lewis and Clark visited the Mandans in 1804, they found them in
two villages, with about three hundred and fifty warriors. They report
that, about forty years before, they lived in nine villages, the ruins of
which the explorers saw about eighty miles below the two villages then
occupied by the tribe. The Mandans had moved up the river in consequence of
the persecutions of the Sioux and the small-pox, which had made great havoc
among them. _Expedition of Lewis and Clark_, I. 129 (ed. Philadelphia,
1814).These nine villages seem to have been above Cannon-ball River, a
tributary of the Missouri.]
La Vérendrye represents the six villages as surrounded with ditches and
stockades, flanked by a sort of bastion,--defences which, he says, had
nothing savage in their construction. In later times the fortifications
were of a much ruder kind, though Maximilian represents them as having
pointed salients to serve as bastions. La Vérendrye mentions some peculiar
customs of the Mandans which answer exactly to those described by more
recent observers.
He had intended to winter with the tribe; but the loss of the presents and
the interpreter made it useless to stay, and leaving two men in the village
to learn the language, he began his return to Fort La Reine. "I was very
ill," he writes, "but hoped to get better on the way. The reverse was the
case, for it was the depth of winter. It would be impossible to suffer more
than I did. It seemed that nothing but death could release us from such
miseries." He reached Fort La Reine on the 11th of February, 1739.
His iron constitution seems to have been severely shaken; but he had sons
worthy of their father. The two men left among the Mandans appeared at Fort
La Reine in September. They reported that they had been well treated, and
that their hosts had parted from them with regret. They also declared that
at the end of spring several Indian tribes, all well supplied with horses,
had come, as was their yearly custom, to the Mandan villages to barter
embroidered buffalo hides and other skins for corn and beans; that they had
encamped, to the number of two hundred lodges, on the farther side of the
Missouri, and that among them was a band said to have come from a distant
country towards the sunset, where there were white men who lived in houses
built of bricks and stones.
The two Frenchmen crossed over to the camp of these Western strangers,
among whom they found a chief who spoke, or professed to speak, the
language of the mysterious white men, which to the two Frenchmen was
unintelligible. Fortunately, he also spoke the language of the Mandans, of
which the Frenchmen had learned a little during their stay, and hence were
able to gather that the white men in question had beards, and that they
prayed to the Master of Life in great houses, built for the purpose,
holding books, the leaves of which were like husks of Indian corn, singing
together and repeating _Jésus, Marie_. The chief gave many other
particulars, which seemed to show that he had been in contact with
Spaniards,--probably those of California; for he described their houses as
standing near the great lake, of which the water rises and falls and is not
fit to drink. He invited the two Frenchmen to go with him to this strange
country, saying that it could be reached before winter, though a wide
circuit must be made, to avoid a fierce and dangerous tribe called Snake
Indians (_Gens du Serpent_). [Footnote: _Journal du Sieur de la
Vérendrye_, 1740, in Archives de la Marine.]
On hearing this story, La Vérendrye sent his eldest son, Pierre, to pursue
the discovery with two men, ordering him to hire guides among the Mandans
and make his way to the Western Sea. But no guides were to be found, and in
the next summer the young man returned from his bootless errand.
[Footnote: _Mémoire du Sieur de la Vérendrye, joint à sa lettre du 31
Oct. 1744_]
Undaunted by this failure, Pierre set out again in the next spring, 1742,
with his younger brother, the Chevalier de la Vérendrye. Accompanied only
by two Canadians, they left Port La Reine on the 29th of April, and
following, no doubt, the route of the Assinniboin and Mouse River, reached
the chief village of the Mandans in about three weeks.
Here they found themselves the welcome guests of this singularly
interesting tribe, ruined by the small-pox nearly half a century ago, but
preserved to memory by the skilful pencil of the artist Charles Bodmer, and
the brush of the painter George Catlin, both of whom saw them at a time
when they were little changed in habits and manners since the visit of the
brothers La Vérendrye. [Footnote: Prince Maximilian spent the winter of
1832-33 near the Mandan villages. His artist, with the instinct of genius,
seized the characteristics of the wild life before him, and rendered them
with admirable vigor and truth. Catlin spent a considerable time among the
Mandans soon after the visit of Prince Maximilian, and had unusual
opportunities of studying them. He was an indifferent painter, a shallow
observer, and a garrulous and windy writer; yet his enthusiastic industry
is beyond praise, and his pictures are invaluable as faithful reflections
of aspects of Indian life which are gone forever.]
[Footnote: Beauharnois calls the Mandans _Blancs Barbus_, and says
that they have been hitherto unknown. _Beauharnois au Ministre, 14
Août_, 1739. The name Mantannes, or Mandans, is that given them by the
Assinniboins.]
Thus, though the report of the two brothers is too concise and brief, we
know what they saw when they entered the central area, or public square, of
the village. Around stood the Mandan lodges, looking like round flattened
hillocks of earth, forty or fifty feet wide. On examination they proved to
be framed of strong posts and poles, covered with a thick matting of
intertwined willow-branches, over which was laid a bed of well-compacted
clay or earth two or three feet thick. This heavy roof was supported by
strong interior posts. [Footnote: The Minnetarees and other tribes of the
Missouri built their lodges in a similar way.] The open place which the
dwellings enclosed served for games, dances, and the ghastly religious or
magical ceremonies practised by the tribe. Among the other structures was
the sacred "medicine lodge" distinguished by three or four tall poles
planted before it, each surmounted by an effigy looking much like a
scarecrow, and meant as an offering to the spirits.
If the two travellers had been less sparing of words, they would doubtless
have told us that as they entered the village square the flattened earthen
domes that surrounded it were thronged with squaws and children,--for this
was always the case on occasions of public interest,--and that they were
forced to undergo a merciless series of feasts in the lodges of the chiefs.
Here, seated by the sunken hearth in the middle, under the large hole in
the roof that served both for window and chimney, they could study at their
ease the domestic economy of their entertainers. Each lodge held a
_gens_, or family connection, whose beds of raw buffalo hide,
stretched on poles, were ranged around the circumference of the building,
while by each stood a post on which hung shields, lances, bows, quivers,
medicine-bags, and masks formed of the skin of a buffalo's head, with the
horns attached, to be used in the magic buffalo dance.
Every day had its sports to relieve the monotony of savage existence, the
game of the stick and the rolling ring, the archery practice of boys,
horse-racing on the neighboring prairie, and incessant games of chance;
while every evening, in contrast to these gayeties, the long, dismal wail
of women rose from the adjacent cemetery, where the dead of the village,
sewn fast in buffalo hides, lay on scaffolds above the reach of wolves.
The Mandans did not know the way to the Pacific, but they told the brothers
that they expected a speedy visit from a tribe or band called Horse
Indians, who could guide them thither. It is impossible to identify this
people with any certainty. [Footnote: The Cheyennes have a tradition that
they were the first tribe of this region to have horses. This may perhaps
justify a conjecture that the northern division of this brave and warlike
people were the Horse Indians of La Vérendrye; though an Indian tradition,
unless backed by well-established facts, can never be accepted as
substantial evidence.] The two travellers waited for them in vain till
after midsummer, and then, as the season was too far advanced for longer
delay, they hired two Mandans to conduct them to their customary haunts.
They set out on horseback, their scanty baggage and their stock of presents
being no doubt carried by pack-animals. Their general course was
west-southwest, with the Black Hills at a distance on their left, and the
upper Missouri on their right. The country was a rolling prairie, well
covered for the most part with grass, and watered by small alkaline streams
creeping towards the Missouri with an opaque, whitish current. Except along
the watercourses, there was little or no wood. "I noticed," says the
Chevalier de la Vérendrye, "earths of different colors, blue, green, red,
or black, white as chalk, or yellowish like ochre." This was probably in
the "bad lands" of the Little Missouri, where these colored earths form a
conspicuous feature in the bare and barren bluffs, carved into fantastic
shapes by the storms. [Footnote: A similar phenomenon occurs farther west
on the face of the perpendicular bluffs that, in one place, border the
valley of the river Rosebud.]
For twenty days the travellers saw no human being, so scanty was the
population of these plains. Game, however, was abundant. Deer sprang from
the tall, reedy grass of the river bottoms; buffalo tramped by in ponderous
columns, or dotted the swells of the distant prairie with their grazing
thousands; antelope approached, with the curiosity of their species, to
gaze at the passing horsemen, then fled like the wind; and as they neared
the broken uplands towards the Yellowstone, they saw troops of elk and
flocks of mountain-sheep. Sometimes, for miles together, the dry plain was
studded thick with the earthen mounds that marked the burrows of the
curious marmots, called prairie-dogs, from their squeaking bark. Wolves,
white and gray, howled about the camp at night, and their cousin, the
coyote, seated in the dusk of evening upright on the grass, with nose
turned to the sky, saluted them with a complication of yelpings, as if a
score of petulant voices were pouring together from the throat of one small
beast.
On the 11th of August, after a march of about three weeks, the brothers
reached a hill, or group of hills, apparently west of the Little Missouri,
and perhaps a part of the Powder River Range. It was here that they hoped
to find the Horse Indians, but nobody was to be seen. Arming themselves
with patience, they built a hut, made fires to attract by the smoke any
Indians roaming near, and went every day to the tops of the hills to
reconnoitre. At length, on the 14th of September, they descried a spire of
smoke on the distant prairie.
One of their Mandan guides had left them and gone back to his village. The
other, with one of the Frenchmen, went towards the smoke, and found a camp
of Indians, whom the journal calls Les Beaux Hommes, and who were probably
Crows, or Apsaroka, a tribe remarkable for stature and symmetry, who long
claimed that region as their own. They treated the visitors well, and sent
for the other Frenchmen to come to their lodges, where they were received
with great rejoicing. The remaining Mandan, however, became
frightened,--for the Beaux Hommes were enemies of his tribe,--and he soon
followed his companion on his solitary march homeward.
The brothers remained twenty-one days in the camp of the Beaux Hommes, much
perplexed for want of an interpreter. The tribes of the plains have in
common a system of signs by which they communicate with each other, and it
is likely that the brothers had learned it from the Sioux or Assinniboins,
with whom they had been in familiar intercourse. By this or some other
means they made their hosts understand that they wished to find the Horse
Indians; and the Beaux Hommes, being soothed by presents, offered some of
their young men as guides. They set out on the 9th of October, following a
south-southwest course. [Footnote: _Journal du Voyage fait par le
Chevalier de la Vérendrye en 1742._ The copy before me is from the
original in the Depot des Cartes de la Marine. A duplicate, in the Archives
des Affaires Etrangères, is printed by Margry. It gives the above date as
November 9th instead of October 9th. The context shows the latter to be
correct.]
In two days they met a band of Indians, called by them the Little Foxes,
and on the 15th and 17th two villages of another unrecognizable horde,
named Pioya. From La Vérendrye's time to our own, this name "villages" has
always been given to the encampments of the wandering people of the plains.
All these nomadic communities joined them, and they moved together
southward, till they reached at last the lodges of the long-sought Horse
Indians. They found them in the extremity of distress and terror. Their
camp resounded with howls and wailings; and not without cause, for the
Snakes, or Shoshones,--a formidable people living farther westward,--had
lately destroyed most of their tribe. The Snakes were the terror of that
country. The brothers were told that the year before they had destroyed
seventeen villages, killing the warriors and old women, and carrying off
the young women and children as slaves.
None of the Horse Indians had ever seen the Pacific; but they knew a people
called Gens de l'Arc, or Bow Indians, who, as they said, had traded not far
from it. To the Bow Indians, therefore, the brothers resolved to go, and by
dint of gifts and promises they persuaded their hosts to show them the way.
After marching southwestward for several days, they saw the distant prairie
covered with the pointed buffalo-skin lodges of a great Indian camp. It was
that of the Bow Indians, who may have been one of the bands of the western
Sioux,--the predominant race in this region. Few or none of them could ever
have seen a white man, and we may imagine their amazement at the arrival of
the strangers, who, followed by staring crowds, were conducted to the lodge
of the chief. "Thus far," says La Vérendrye, "we had been well received in
all the villages we had passed; but this was nothing compared with the
courteous manners of the great chief of the Bow Indians, who, unlike the
others, was not self-interested in the least, and who took excellent care
of everything belonging to us."
The first inquiry of the travellers was for the Pacific; but neither the
chief nor his tribesmen knew anything of it, except what they had heard
from Snake prisoners taken in war. The Frenchmen were surprised at the
extent of the camp, which consisted of many separate bands. The chief
explained that they had been summoned from far and near for a grand
war-party against that common foe of all,--the Snakes. [Footnote: The
enmity between the Sioux and the Snakes lasted to our own time. When the
writer lived among the western Sioux, one of their chiefs organized a
war-party against the Snakes, and numerous bands came to join the
expedition from a distance in some cases of three hundred miles. Quarrels
broke out among them, and the scheme was ruined.] In fact, the camp
resounded with war-songs and war-dances. "Come with us," said their host;
"we are going towards the mountains, where you can see the great water that
you are looking for."
At length the camp broke up. The squaws took down the lodges, and the march
began over prairies dreary and brown with the withering touch of autumn.
The spectacle was such as men still young have seen in these Western lands,
but which no man will see again. The vast plain swarmed with the moving
multitude. The tribes of the Missouri and the Yellowstone had by this time
abundance of horses, the best of which were used for war and hunting, and
the others as beasts of burden. These last were equipped in a peculiar
manner. Several of the long poles used to frame the teepees, or lodges,
were secured by one end to each side of a rude saddle, while the other end
trailed on the ground. Crossbars lashed to the poles just behind the horse
kept them three or four feet apart, and formed a firm support, on which was
laid, compactly folded, the buffalo-skin covering of the lodge. On this,
again, sat a mother with her young family, sometimes stowed for safety in a
large open willow basket, with the occasional addition of some domestic
pet,--such as a tame raven, a puppy, or even a small bear cub. Other horses
were laden in the same manner with wooden bowls, stone hammers, and other
utensils, along with stores of dried buffalo-meat packed in cases of
rawhide whitened and painted. Many of the innumerable dogs--whose manners
and appearance strongly suggested their relatives the wolves, to whom,
however, they bore a mortal grudge--were equipped in a similar way, with
shorter poles and lighter loads. Bands of naked boys, noisy and restless,
roamed the prairie, practising their bows and arrows on any small animal
they might find. Gay young squaws--adorned on each cheek with a spot of
ochre or red clay, and arrayed in tunics of fringed buckskin embroidered
with porcupine quills--were mounted on ponies, astride like men; while lean
and tattered hags--the drudges of the tribe, unkempt and hideous--scolded
the lagging horses, or screeched at the disorderly dogs, with voices not
unlike the yell of the great horned owl. Most of the warriors were on
horseback, armed with round, white shields of bull-hide, feathered lances,
war-clubs, bows, and quivers filled with stone-headed arrows; while a few
of the elders, wrapped in robes of buffalo-hide, stalked along in groups
with a stately air, chatting, laughing, and exchanging unseemly jokes.
[Footnote: The above descriptive particulars are drawn from repeated
observation of similar scenes at a time when the primitive condition of
these tribes was essentially unchanged, though with the difference that the
concourse of savages counted by hundreds, and not by thousands.]
"We continued our march," says La Vérendrye, "sometimes south-southwest,
and now and then northwest; our numbers constantly increasing by villages
of different tribes which joined us." The variations of their course were
probably due to the difficulties of the country, which grew more rugged as
they advanced, with broken hills, tracts of dingy green sage-bushes, and
bright, swift streams, edged with cottonwood and willow, hurrying northward
to join the Yellowstone. At length, on the 1st of January, 1743, they saw
what was probably the Bighorn Range of the Rocky Mountains, a hundred and
twenty miles east of the Yellowstone Park.
A council of all the allied bands was now called, and the Frenchmen were
asked to take part in it. The questions discussed were how to dispose of
the women and children, and how to attack the enemy. Having settled their
plans, the chiefs begged their white friends not to abandon them; and the
younger of the two, the Chevalier, consented to join the warriors, and aid
them with advice, though not with arms.
The tribes of the Western plains rarely go on war-parties in winter, and
this great expedition must have been the result of unusual exasperation.
The object was to surprise the Snakes in the security of their winter camp,
and strike a deadly blow, which would have been impossible in summer.
On the 8th of January the whole body stopped to encamp, choosing, no doubt,
after the invariable winter custom of Western Indians, a place sheltered
from wind, and supplied with water and fuel. Here the squaws and children
were to remain, while most of the warriors advanced against the enemy. By
pegging the lower edge of the lodge-skin to the ground, and piling a ridge
of stones and earth upon it to keep out the air, fastening with wooden
skewers the flap of hide that covered the entrance, and keeping a constant
fire, they could pass a winter endurable to Indians, though smoke, filth,
vermin, bad air, the crowd, and the total absence of privacy, would make it
a purgatory to any civilized white man.
The Chevalier left his brother to watch over the baggage of the party,
which was stored in the lodge of the great chief, while he himself, with
his two Canadians, joined the advancing warriors. They were on horseback,
marching with a certain order, and sending watchmen to reconnoitre the
country from the tops of the hills. [Footnote: At least this was done by a
band of Sioux with whom the writer once traversed a part of the country
ranged by these same Snakes, who had lately destroyed an entire Sioux
village.]
Their movements were so slow that it was twelve days before they reached
the foot of the mountains, which, says La Vérendrye, "are for the most part
well wooded, and seem very high." [Footnote: The Bighorn Range, below the
snow line, is in the main well timbered with pine, fir, oak, and juniper.]
He longed to climb their great snow-encumbered peaks, fancying that he
might then see the Pacific, and never dreaming that more than eight hundred
miles of mountains and forests still lay between him and his goal.
Through the whole of the present century the villages of the Snakes were at
a considerable distance west of the Bighorn Range, and some of them were
even on the upper waters of the Pacific slope. It is likely that they were
so in 1743, in which case the war-party would not only have reached the
Bighorn Mountains, but have pushed farther on to within sight of the great
Wind River Range. Be this as it may, their scouts reached the chief winter
camp of the Snakes, and found it abandoned, with lodges still standing, and
many household possessions left behind. The enemy had discovered their
approach, and fled. Instead of encouraging the allies, this news filled
them with terror, for they feared that the Snake warriors might make a
circuit to the rear, and fall upon the camp where they had left their women
and children. The great chief spent all his eloquence in vain, nobody would
listen to him; and with characteristic fickleness they gave over the
enterprise, and retreated in a panic. "Our advance was made in good order;
but not so our retreat," says the Chevalier's journal. "Everybody fled his
own way. Our horses, though good, were very tired, and got little to eat."
The Chevalier was one day riding with his friend, the great chief, when,
looking behind him, he missed his two French attendants. Hastening back in
alarm, he found them far in the rear, quietly feeding their horses under
the shelter of a clump of trees. He had scarcely joined them when he saw a
party of fifteen hostile Indians stealthily creeping forward, covered by
their bull-hide shields. He and his men let them approach, and then gave
them a few shots; on which they immediately ran off, firearms being to them
an astounding novelty.
The three Frenchmen now tried to rejoin the great chief and his band, but
the task was not easy. The prairie, bare of snow and hard as flint, showed
no trace of foot or hoof; and it was by rare good fortune that they
succeeded, on the second day, not in overtaking the chief, but in reaching
the camp where the women and children had been left. They found them all in
safety; the Snakes had not attacked them, and the panic of the warriors was
needless. It was the 9th of February. They were scarcely housed when a
blizzard set in, and on the night of the 10th the plains were buried in
snow. The great chief had not appeared. With such of his warriors as he
could persuade to follow him, he had made a wide circuit to find the trail
of the lost Frenchmen, but, to his great distress, had completely failed.
It was not till five days after the arrival of the Chevalier and his men
that the chief reached the camp, "more dead than alive," in the words of
the journal. All his hardships were forgotten when he found his white
friends safe, for he had given them up for lost. "His sorrow turned to joy,
and he could not give us attention and caresses enough."
The camp broke up, and the allied bands dispersed. The great chief and his
followers moved slowly through the snowdrifts towards the east-southeast,
accompanied by the Frenchmen. Thus they kept on till the 1st of March, when
the two brothers, learning that they were approaching the winter village of
a people called Gens de la Petite Cerise, or Choke-Cherry Indians, sent one
of their men, with a guide, to visit them. The man returned in ten days,
bringing a message from the Choke-Cherry Indians, inviting the Frenchmen to
their lodges.
The great chief of the Bow Indians, who seems to have regarded his young
friends with mingled affection, respect, and wonder, was grieved at the
thought of losing them, but took comfort when they promised to visit him
again, provided that he would make his abode near a certain river which
they pointed out. To this he readily agreed, and then, with mutual regret,
they parted. [Footnote: The only two tribes of this region who were a match
for the Snakes were the Sioux and the Blackfeet. it is clear that the Bow
Indians could not have been Blackfeet, as in that case, after the war-party
broke up, they would have moved northward towards their own country,
instead of east-southeast into the country of their enemies. Hence I
incline to think the Bow Indians a band of Sioux, or Dakota,--a people
then, as since, predominant in that country.] [Footnote: The banks of the
Missouri, in the part which La Vérendrye would have reached in following an
east-southeast course, were occupied by numerous bands or sub-tribes of
Sioux, such as the Minneconjou, Yankton, Oncpapa, Brulé, and others,
friends and relatives of the Bow Indians, supposing these to have been
Sioux.]
The Frenchmen repaired to the village of the Choke-Cherry Indians, who,
like the Bow Indians, were probably a band of Sioux. [Footnote: The Sioux,
Cheyennes, and other prairie tribes use the small astringent wild cherry
for food. The squaws pound it, stones and all, and then dry it for winter
use.] Hard by their lodges, which stood near the Missouri, the brothers
buried a plate of lead graven with the royal arms, and raised a pile of
stones in honor of the Governor of Canada. They remained at this place till
April; then, mounting their horses again, followed the Missouri upward to
the village of the Mandans, which they reached on the 18th of May. After
spending a week here, they joined a party of Assinniboins, journeyed with
them towards Fort La Reine, and reached it on the 2d of July,--to the great
relief of their father, who was waiting in suspense, having heard nothing
of them for more than a year.
Sixty-two years later, when the vast western regions then called Louisiana
had just been ceded to the United States, Captains Lewis and Clark left the
Mandan villages with thirty-two men, traced the Missouri to the mountains,
penetrated the wastes beyond, and made their way to the Pacific. The first
stages of that remarkable exploration were anticipated by the brothers La
Vérendrye. They did not find the Pacific, but they discovered the Rocky
Mountains, or at least the part of them to which the name properly belongs;
for the southern continuation of the great range had long been known to the
Spaniards. Their bold adventure was achieved, not at the charge of a
government, but at their own cost and that of their father,--not with a
band of well-equipped men, but with only two followers.
The fur-trading privilege which was to have been their compensation had
proved their ruin. They were still pursued without ceasing by the jealousy
of rival traders and the ire of disappointed partners. "Here in Canada more
than anywhere else," the Chevalier wrote, some years after his return,
"envy is the passion _à la mode,_ and there is no escaping it."
[Footnote: Le Chevalier de la Vérendrye au Ministre, 30 Sept. 1750.] It was
the story of La Salle repeated. Beauharnois, however, still stood by them,
encouraged and defended them, and wrote in their favor to the colonial
minister. [Footnote: _La Vérendrye père au Ministre, 1 Nov. 1746,_ in
Margry VI. 611.] It was doubtless through his efforts that the elder La
Vérendrye was at last promoted to a captaincy in the colony troops.
Beauharnois was succeeded in the government by the sagacious and able
Galissonière, and he too befriended the explorers. "It seems to me," he
wrote to the minister, "that what you have been told touching the Sieur de
la Vérendrye, to the effect that he has been more busy with his own
interests than in making discoveries, is totally false, and, moreover, that
any officers employed in such work will always be compelled to give some of
their attention to trade, so long as the King allows them no other means of
subsistence. These discoveries are very costly, and more fatiguing and
dangerous than open war." [Footnote: _La Galissonière au Ministre, 23
Oct. 1747._] Two years later, the elder La Vérendrye received the cross
of the Order of St. Louis,--an honor much prized in Canada, but which he
did not long enjoy; for he died at Montreal in the following December, when
on the point of again setting out for the West.
His intrepid sons survived, and they were not idle. One of them, the
Chevalier, had before discovered the river Saskatchawan, and ascended it as
far as the forks. [Footnote: _Mémoire en abrégé des Établissements et
Découvertes faits par le Sieur de la Vérendrye et ses Enfants._] His
intention was to follow it to the mountains, build a fort there, and thence
push westward in another search for the Pacific; but a disastrous event
ruined all his hopes. La Galissonière returned to France, and the Marquis
de la Jonquière succeeded him, with the notorious François Bigot as
intendant. Both were greedy of money,--the one to hoard, and the other to
dissipate it. Clearly there was money to be got from the fur-trade of
Manitoba, for La Vérendrye had made every preparation and incurred every
expense. It seemed that nothing remained but to reap where he had sown.
His commission to find the Pacific, with the privileges connected with it,
was refused to his sons, and conferred on a stranger. La Jonquière wrote to
the minister: "I have charged M. de Saint-Pierre with this business. He
knows these countries better than any officer in all the colony."
[Footnote: _La Jonquière au Ministre, 27 Fev. 1750_.] On the contrary,
he had never seen them. It is difficult not to believe that La Jonquière,
Bigot, and Saint-Pierre were partners in a speculation of which all three
were to share the profits.
The elder La Vérendrye, not long before his death, had sent a large
quantity of goods to his trading-forts. The brothers begged leave to return
thither and save their property from destruction. They declared themselves
happy to serve under the orders of Saint-Pierre, and asked for the use of
only a single fort of all those which their father had built at his own
cost. The answer was a flat refusal. In short, they were shamefully robbed.
The Chevalier writes: "M. le Marquis de la Jonquière, being pushed hard,
and as I thought even touched, by my representations, told me at last that
M. de Saint-Pierre wanted nothing to do with me or my brothers." "I am a
ruined man," he continues. "I am more than two thousand livres in debt, and
am still only a second ensign. My elder brother's grade is no better than
mine. My younger brother is only a cadet. This is the fruit of all that my
father, my brothers, and I have done. My other brother, whom the Sioux
murdered some years ago, was not the most unfortunate among us. We must
lose all that has cost us so much, unless M. de Saint-Pierre should take
juster views, and prevail on the Marquis de la Jonquière to share them. To
be thus shut out from the West is to be most cruelly robbed of a sort of
inheritance which we had all the pains of acquiring, and of which others
will get all the profit." [Footnote: _Le Chevalier de la Vérendrye au
Ministre, 30 Sept. 1750._]
His elder brother writes in a similar strain: "We spent our youth and our
property in building up establishments so advantageous to Canada; and after
all, we were doomed to see a stranger gather the fruit we had taken such
pains to plant." And he complains that their goods left in the
trading-posts were wasted, their provisions consumed, and the men in their
pay used to do the work of others. [Footnote: _Mémoire des Services de
Pierre Gautier de la Vérendrye l'aisné, présenté à Mg'r. Rouille, ministre
et secrétaire d'Etat._]
They got no redress. Saint-Pierre, backed by the Governor and the
Intendant, remained master of the position. The brothers sold a small piece
of land, their last remaining property, to appease their most pressing
creditors. [Footnote: Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, in spite of his treatment
of the La Vérendrye brothers, had merit as an officer. It was he who
received Washington at Fort Le Buf in 1754. He was killed in 1755, at the
battle of Lake George. See _Montcalm and Wolfe,_ I. 303.]
Saint-Pierre set out for Manitoba on the 5th of June, 1750. Though he had
lived more or less in the woods for thirty-six years, and though La
Jonquière had told the minister that he knew the countries to which he was
bound better than anybody else, it is clear from his own journal that he
was now visiting them for the first time. They did not please him. "I was
told," he says, "that the way would grow harder and more dangerous as we
advanced, and I found, in fact, that one must risk life and property every
moment." Finding himself and his men likely to starve, he sent some of
them, under an ensign named Niverville, to the Saskatchawan. They could not
reach it, and nearly perished on the way. "I myself was no more fortunate,"
says Saint-Pierre. "Food was so scarce that I sent some of my people into
the woods among the Indians,--which did not save me from a fast so rigorous
that it deranged my health and put it out of my power to do anything
towards accomplishing my mission. Even if I had had strength enough, the
war that broke out among the Indians would have made it impossible to
proceed."
Niverville, after a winter of misery, tried to fulfil an order which he had
received from his commander. When the Indians guided the two brothers La
Vérendrye to the Rocky Mountains, the course they took tended so far
southward that the Chevalier greatly feared it might lead to Spanish
settlements; and he gave it as his opinion that the next attempt to find
the Pacific should be made farther towards the north. Saint-Pierre had
agreed with him, and had directed Niverville to build a fort on the
Saskatchawan, three hundred leagues above its mouth. Therefore, at the end
of May, 1751, Niverville sent ten men in two canoes on this errand, and
they ascended the Saskatchawan to what Saint-Pierre calls the "Rock
Mountain." Here they built a small stockade fort and called it Fort La
Jonquière. Niverville was to have followed them; but he fell ill, and lay
helpless at the mouth of the river in such a condition that he could not
even write to his commander.
Saint-Pierre set out in person from Fort La Reine for Fort La Jonquière,
over ice and snow, for it was late in November. Two Frenchmen from
Niverville met him on the way, and reported that the Assinniboins had
slaughtered an entire band of friendly Indians on whom Saint-Pierre had
relied to guide him. On hearing this he gave up the enterprise, and
returned to Fort La Reine. Here the Indians told him idle stories about
white men and a fort in some remote place towards the west; but, he
observes, "nobody could reach it without encountering an infinity of tribes
more savage than it is possible to imagine."
He spent most of the winter at Fort La Reine. Here, towards the end of
February, 1752, he had with him only five men, having sent out the rest in
search of food. Suddenly, as he sat in his chamber, he saw the fort full of
armed Assinniboins, extremely noisy and insolent. He tried in vain to quiet
them, and they presently broke into the guard-house and seized the arms. A
massacre would have followed, had not Saint-Pierre, who was far from
wanting courage, resorted to an expedient which has more than once proved
effective on such occasions. He knocked out the heads of two barrels of
gunpowder, snatched a firebrand, and told the yelping crowd that he would
blow up them and himself together. At this they all rushed in fright out of
the gate, while Saint-Pierre ran after them, and bolted it fast. There was
great anxiety for the hunters, but they all came back in the evening,
without having met the enemy. The men, however, were so terrified by the
adventure that Saint-Pierre was compelled to abandon the fort, after
recommending it to the care of another band of Assinniboins, who had
professed great friendship. Four days after he was gone they burned it to
the ground.
He soon came to the conclusion that farther discovery was impossible,
because the English of Hudson Bay had stirred up the Western tribes to
oppose it. Therefore he set out for the settlements, and, reaching Quebec
in the autumn of 1753, placed the journal of his futile enterprise in the
hands of Duquesne, the new governor. [Footnote: _Journal sommaire du
Voyage de Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, chargé de la Découverte de la
Mer de l'Ouest_ (British Museum).]
Canada was approaching her last agony. In the death-struggle of the Seven
Years' War there was no time for schemes of Western discovery. The brothers
La Vérendrye sank into poverty and neglect. A little before the war broke
out, we find the eldest at the obscure Acadian post of Beauséjour, where he
wrote to the colonial minister a statement of his services, which appears
to have received no attention. After the fall of Canada, the Chevalier de
la Vérendrye, he whose eyes first beheld the snowy peaks of the Rocky
Mountains, perished in the wreck of the ship "Auguste," on the coast of
Cape Breton, in November, 1761.
[Footnote: The above narrative rests mainly on contemporary documents,
official in character, of which the originals are preserved in the archives
of the French Government. These papers have recently been printed by M.
Pierre Margry, late custodian of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies at
Paris, in the sixth volume of his _Découvertes et Établissements des
Français dans l'Amérique Septentrionale,_--a documentary collection of
great value, published at the expense of the American Government. It was M.
Margry who first drew attention to the achievements of the family of La
Vérendrye, by an article in the _Moniteur_ in 1852. I owe to his
kindness the opportunity of using the above-mentioned documents in advance
of publication. I obtained copies from duplicate originals of some of the
principal among them from the Dépôt des Cartes de la Marine, in 1872. These
answer closely, with rare and trivial variations, to the same documents as
printed from other sources by M. Margry. Some additional papers preserved
in the Archives of the Marine and Colonies have also been used.]
[Footnote: My friends, Hon. William C. Endicott, then Secretary of War, and
Captain John G. Bourke, Third Cavalry, U. S. A., kindly placed in my hands
a valuable collection of Government maps and surveys of the country between
the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains visited by the brothers La Vérendrye;
and I have received from Captain Bourke, and also from Mr. E. A. Snow,
formerly of the Third Cavalry, much information concerning the same region,
repeatedly traversed by them in peace and war.]
CHAPTER XVII.
1700-1750.
THE CHAIN OF POSTS.
OPPOSING CLAIMS.--ATTITUDE OF THE RIVAL NATIONS.--AMERICA A FRENCH
CONTINENT--ENGLAND A USURPER.--FRENCH DEMANDS.--MAGNANIMOUS
PROPOSALS.--WARLIKE PREPARATION.--NIAGARA.--OSWEGO.--CROWN POINT.--THE
PASSES OF THE WEST SECURED.
We have seen that the contest between France and England in America divided
itself, after the Peace of Utrecht, into three parts,--the Acadian contest;
the contest for northern New England; and last, though greatest, the
contest for the West. Nothing is more striking than the difference, or
rather contrast, in the conduct and methods of the rival claimants to this
wild but magnificent domain. Each was strong in its own qualities, and
utterly wanting in the qualities that marked its opponent.
On maps of British America in the earlier part of the eighteenth century,
one sees the eastern shore, from Maine to Georgia, garnished with ten or
twelve colored patches, very different in shape and size, and defined, more
or less distinctly, by dividing lines which, in some cases, are prolonged
westward till they touch the Mississippi, or even cross it and stretch
indefinitely towards the Pacific. These patches are the British provinces,
and the westward prolongation of their boundary lines represents their
several claims to vast interior tracts, founded on ancient grants, but not
made good by occupation, or vindicated by any exertion of power.
These English communities took little thought of the region beyond the
Alleghanies. Each lived a life of its own, shut within its own limits, not
dreaming of a future collective greatness to which the possession of the
West would be a necessary condition. No conscious community of aims and
interests held them together, nor was there any authority capable of
uniting their forces and turning them to a common object. Some of the
servants of the Crown had urged the necessity of joining them all under a
strong central government, as the only means of making them loyal subjects
and arresting the encroachments of France; but the scheme was plainly
impracticable. Each province remained in jealous isolation, busied with its
own work, growing in strength, in the capacity of self-rule and the spirit
of independence, and stubbornly resisting all exercise of authority from
without. If the English-speaking populations flowed westward, it was in
obedience to natural laws, for the King did not aid the movement, the royal
governors had no authority to do so, and the colonial assemblies were too
much engrossed with immediate local interests. The power of these colonies
was that of a rising flood slowly invading and conquering, by the
unconscious force of its own growing volume, unless means be found to hold
it back by dams and embankments within appointed limits.
In the French colonies all was different. Here the representatives of the
Crown were men bred in an atmosphere of broad ambition and masterful and
far-reaching enterprise. Achievement was demanded of them. They recognized
the greatness of the prize, studied the strong and weak points of their
rivals, and with a cautious forecast and a daring energy set themselves to
the task of defeating them.
If the English colonies were comparatively strong in numbers, their numbers
could not be brought into action; while if the French forces were small,
they were vigorously commanded, and always ready at a word. It was union
confronting division, energy confronting apathy, military centralization
opposed to industrial democracy; and, for a time, the advantage was all on
one side.
The demands of the French were sufficiently comprehensive. They repented of
their enforced concessions at the Treaty of Utrecht, and in spite of that
compact, maintained that, with a few local and trivial exceptions, the
whole North American continent, except Mexico, was theirs of right; while
their opponents seemed neither to understand the situation, nor see the
greatness of the stakes at issue.
In 1720 Father Bobé, priest of the Congregation of Missions, drew up a
paper in which he sets forth the claims of France with much distinctness,
beginning with the declaration that "England has usurped from France nearly
everything that she possesses in America," and adding that the
plenipotentiaries at Utrecht did not know what they were about when they
made such concessions to the enemy; that, among other blunders, they gave
Port Royal to England when it belonged to France, who should "insist
vigorously" on its being given back to her.
He maintains that the voyages of Verrazzano and Ribaut made France owner of
the whole continent, from Florida northward; that England was an interloper
in planting colonies along the Atlantic coast, and will admit as much if
she is honest, since all that country is certainly a part of New France. In
this modest assumption of the point at issue, he ignores John Cabot and his
son Sebastian, who discovered North America more than twenty-five years
before the voyage of Verrazzano, and more than sixty years before that of
Ribaut.
When the English, proceeds Father Bobé, have restored Port Royal to us,
which they are bound to do, though we ceded it by the treaty, a French
governor should be at once set over it, with a commission to command as far
as Cape Cod, which would include Boston. We should also fortify ourselves,
"in a way to stop the English, who have long tried to seize on French
America, of which they know the importance, and of which," he observes with
much candor, "they would make a better use than the French do...The
Atlantic coast, as far as Florida, was usurped from the French, to whom it
belonged then, and to whom it belongs now." [Footnote: "De maniere qu'on
puisse arreter les Anglois, qui depuis longtems tachent de s'emparer de
l'Amerique françoise, dont ils conoissent l'importance et dont ils feroient
un meillieur usage que celuy qui les françois en font."] England, as he
thinks, is bound in honor to give back these countries to their true owner;
and it is also the part of wisdom to do so, since by grasping at too much,
one often loses all. But France, out of her love of peace, will cede to
England the countries along the Atlantic, from the Kennebec in New France
to the Jordan [Footnote: On the river Jordan, so named by Vasquez de
Ayllon, see _Pioneers of France in the New World_, pp. 11, 39 (revised
edition) _note_. It was probably the Broad River of South Carolina.]
in Carolina, on condition that England will restore to her all that she
gave up by the Treaty of Utrecht. When this is done, France, always
generous, will consent to accept as boundary a line drawn from the mouth of
the Kennebec, passing thence midway between Schenectady and Lake Champlain
and along the ridge of the Alleghanies to the river Jordan, the country
between this line and the sea to belong to England, and the rest of the
continent to France.
If England does not accept this generous offer, she is to be told that the
King will give to the Compagnie des Indes (Law's Mississippi Company) full
authority to occupy "all the countries which the English have usurped from
France;" and, pursues Father Bobé, "it is certain that the fear of having
to do with so powerful a company will bring the English to our terms." The
company that was thus to strike the British heart with terror was the same
which all the tonics and stimulants of the government could not save from
predestined ruin. But, concludes this ingenious writer, whether England
accepts our offers or not, France ought not only to take a high tone
(_parler avec hauteur_), but also to fortify diligently, and make good
her right by force of arms. [Footnote: _Second Mémoire concernant les
Limites des Colonies présenté en 1720 par Bobé, prêtre de la Congrégation
de la Mission_ (Archives Nationales).]
Three years later we have another document, this time of an official
character, and still more radical in its demands. It admits that Port Royal
and a part of the Nova Scotian peninsula, under the name of Acadia, were
ceded to England by the treaty, and consents that she shall keep them, but
requires her to restore the part of New France that she has wrongfully
seized,--namely, the whole Atlantic coast from the Kennebec to Florida;
since France never gave England this country, which is hers by the
discovery of Verrazzano in 1524. Here, again, the voyages of the Cabots, in
1497 and 1498, are completely ignored.
"It will be seen," pursues this curious document, "that our kings have
always preserved sovereignty over the countries between the 30th and the
50th degrees of north latitude. A time will come when they will be in a
position to assert their rights, and then it will be seen that the
dominions of a king of France cannot be usurped with impunity. What we
demand now is that the English make immediate restitution." No doubt, the
paper goes on to say, they will pretend to have prescriptive rights,
because they have settled the country and built towns and cities in it; but
this plea is of no avail, because all that country is a part of New France,
and because England rightfully owns nothing in America except what we, the
French, gave her by the Treaty of Utrecht, which is merely Port Royal and
Acadia. She is bound in honor to give back all the vast countries she has
usurped; but, continues the paper, "the King loves the English nation too
much, and wishes too much to do her kindness, and is too generous to exact
such a restitution. Therefore, provided that England will give us back Port
Royal, Acadia, and everything else that France gave her by the Treaty of
Utrecht, the King will forego his rights, and grant to England the whole
Atlantic coast from the 32d degree of latitude to the Kennebec, to the
extent inland of twenty French leagues [about fifty miles], on condition
that she will solemnly bind herself never to overstep these limits or
encroach in the least on French ground."
Thus, through the beneficence of France, England, provided that she
renounced all pretension to the rest of the continent, would become the
rightful owner of an attenuated strip of land reaching southward from the
Kennebec along the Atlantic seaboard. The document containing this
magnanimous proposal was preserved in the Château St. Louis at Quebec till
the middle of the eighteenth century, when, the boundary dispute having
reached a crisis, and commissioners of the two powers having been appointed
to settle it, a certified copy of the paper was sent to France for their
instruction. [Footnote: _Demandes de la France_, 1723 (Archives des
Affaires Etrangères).]
Father Bobé had advised that France should not trust solely to the justice
of her claims, but should back right with might, and build forts on the
Niagara, the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the Alabama, as well as at other
commanding points, to shut out the English from the West. Of these
positions, Niagara was the most important, for the possession of it would
close the access to the Upper Lakes, and stop the Western tribes on their
way to trade at Albany. The Five Nations and the Governor of New York were
jealous of the French designs, which, however, were likely enough to
succeed, through the prevailing apathy and divisions in the British
colonies. "If those not immediately concerned," writes a member of the New
York council, "only stand gazing on while the wolff is murthering other
parts of the flock, it will come to every one's turn at last." The warning
was well founded, but it was not heeded. Again: "It is the policy of the
French to attack one colony at a time, and the others are so besotted as to
sit still." [Footnote: _Colonel Heathcote to Governor Hunter, 8 July_,
1715. _Ibid, to Townshend, 12 July_, 1715.]
For gaining the consent of the Five Nations to the building of a French
fort at Niagara, Vaudreuil trusted chiefly to his agent among the Senecas,
the bold, skilful, and indefatigable Joncaire, who was naturalized among
that tribe, the strongest of the confederacy. Governor Hunter of New York
sent Peter Schuyler and Philip Livingston to counteract his influence. The
Five Nations, who, conscious of declining power, seemed ready at this time
to be all things to all men, declared that they would prevent the French
from building at Niagara, which, as they said, would "shut them up as in a
prison." [Footnote: _Journal of Schuyler and Livingston_, 1720.] Not
long before, however, they had sent a deputation to Montreal to say that
the English made objection to Joncaire's presence among them, but that they
were masters of their land, and hoped that the French agent would come as
often as he pleased; and they begged that the new King of France would take
them under his protection. [Footnote: _Vaudreuil au Conseil de
Marine_, 24 _Oct._ 1717.] Accordingly, Vaudreuil sent them a
present, with a message to the effect that they might plunder such English
traders as should come among them. [Footnote: _Vaudreuil et Bégon au
Conseil de Marine_, 26 _Oct._ 1719]
Yet so jealous were the Iroquois of a French fort at Niagara that they sent
three Seneca chiefs to see what was going on there. The chiefs found a few
Frenchmen in a small blockhouse, or loopholed storehouse, which they had
just built near Lewiston Heights. The three Senecas requested them to
demolish it and go away, which the Frenchmen refused to do; on which the
Senecas asked the English envoys, Schuyler and Livingston, to induce the
Governor of New York to destroy the obnoxious building. In short, the Five
Nations wavered incessantly between their two European neighbors, and
changed their minds every day. The skill and perseverance of the French
emissaries so far prevailed at last that the Senecas consented to the
building of a fort at the mouth of the Niagara, where Denonville had built
one in 1687; and thus that important pass was made tolerably secure.
Meanwhile the English of New York, or rather Burnet, their governor, were
not idle. Burnet was on ill terms with his Assembly, which grudged him all
help in serving the province whose interests it was supposed to represent.
Burnet's plan was to build a fortified trading-house at Oswego, on Lake
Ontario, in the belief that the Western Indians, who greatly preferred
English goods and English prices, would pass Niagara and bring their furs
to the new post. He got leave from the Five Nations to execute his plan,
bought canoes, hired men, and built a loopholed house of stone on the site
of the present city of Oswego. As the Assembly would give no money, Burnet
furnished it himself; and though the object was one of the greatest
importance to the province, he was never fully repaid. [Footnote: "I am
ashamed to confess that he built the fort at his private expense, and that
a balance of above £56 remains due to his estate to this very day." Smith,
_History of New York_, 267 (ed. 1814).] A small garrison for the new
post was drawn from the four independent companies maintained in the
province at the charge of the Crown.
The establishment of Oswego greatly alarmed and incensed the French, and a
council of war at Quebec resolved to send two thousand men against it; but
Vaudreuil's successor, the Marquis de Beauharnois, learning that the court
was not prepared to provoke a war, contented himself with sending a summons
to the commanding officer to abandon and demolish the place within a
fortnight. [Footnote: _Mémoire de Dupuy_, 1728. Dupuy was intendant of
Canada. The King approved the conduct of Beauharnois in not using force.
_Dépêche du Roy, 14 Mai, 1728._] To this no attention was given; and
as Burnet had foreseen, Oswego became the great centre of Indian trade,
while Niagara, in spite of its more favorable position, was comparatively
slighted by the Western tribes. The chief danger rose from the obstinate
prejudice of the Assembly, which, in its disputes with the Royal Governor,
would give him neither men nor money to defend the new post.
The Canadian authorities, who saw in Oswego an intrusion on their domain
and a constant injury and menace, could not attack it without bringing on a
war, and therefore tried to persuade the Five Nations to destroy it,--an
attempt which completely failed. [Footnote: When urged by the younger
Longueuil to drive off the English from Oswego, the Indians replied, "Drive
them off thyself." _"Chassez-les toi-même." Longueuil fils au Ministre,
19 Oct. 1728._] They then established a trading-post at Toronto, in the
vain hope of stopping the Northern tribes on their way to the more
profitable English market, and they built two armed vessels at Fort
Frontenac to control the navigation of Lake Ontario.
Meanwhile, in another quarter the French made an advance far more
threatening to the English colonies than Oswego was to their own. They had
already built a stone fort at Chambly, which covered Montreal from any
English attack by way of Lake Champlain. As that lake was the great highway
between the rival colonies, the importance of gaining full mastery of it
was evident. It was rumored in Canada that the English meant to seize and
fortify the place called Scalp Point (_Pointe à la Chevelure_) by the
French, and Crown Point by the English, where the lake suddenly contracts
to the proportions of a river, so that a few cannon would stop the passage.
As early as 1726 the French made an attempt to establish themselves on the
east side of the lake opposite Crown Point, but were deterred by the
opposition of Massachusetts. This eastern shore was, however, claimed not
only by Massachusetts, but by her neighbor, New Hampshire, with whom she
presently fell into a dispute about the ownership, and, as a writer of the
time observes, "while they were quarrelling for the bone, the French ran
away with it." [Footnote: Mitchell, _Contest in America_, 22.]
At length, in 1731, the French took post on the western side of the lake,
and began to intrench themselves at Crown Point, which was within the
bounds claimed by New York; but that province, being then engrossed, not
only by her chronic dispute with her Governor, but by a quarrel with her
next neighbor, New Jersey, slighted the danger from the common enemy, and
left the French to work their will. It was Saint-Luc de la Corne,
Lieutenant du Roy at Montreal, who pointed out the necessity of fortifying
this place, [Footnote: _La Corne au Ministre, 15 Oct. 1730._] in order
to anticipate the English, who, as he imagined, were about to do so,--a
danger which was probably not imminent, since the English colonies, as a
whole, could not and would not unite for such a purpose, while the
individual provinces were too much absorbed in their own internal affairs
and their own jealousies and disputes to make the attempt. La Corne's
suggestion found favor at court, and the Governor of Canada was ordered to
occupy Crown Point. The Sieur de la Fresnière was sent thither with troops
and workmen, and a fort was built, and named Fort Frédéric. It contained a
massive stone tower, mounted with cannon to command the lake, which is here
but a musket-shot wide. Thus was established an advanced post of France,--a
constant menace to New York and New England, both of which denounced it as
an outrageous encroachment on British territory, but could not unite to rid
themselves of it. [Footnote: On the establishment of Crown Point,
_Beauharnois et Hocquart au Roy_, 10 Oct. 1731; _Beauharnois et
Hocquart au Ministre_, 14 Nov. 1731.]
While making this bold push against their neighbors of the South, the
French did not forget the West; and towards the middle of the century they
had occupied points controlling all the chief waterways between Canada and
Louisiana. Niagara held the passage from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie. Detroit
closed the entrance to Lake Huron, and Michillimackinac guarded the point
where Lake Huron is joined by Lakes Michigan and Superior; while the fort
called La Baye, at the head of Green Bay, stopped the way to the
Mississippi by Marquette's old route of Fox River and the Wisconsin.
Another route to the Mississippi was controlled by a post on the Maumee to
watch the carrying-place between that river and the Wabash, and by another
on the Wabash where Vincennes now stands. La Salle's route, by way of the
Kankakee and the Illinois, was barred by a fort on the St. Joseph; and even
if, in spite of these obstructions, an enemy should reach the Mississippi
by any of its northern affluents, the cannon of Fort Chartres would prevent
him from descending it.
These various Western forts, except Fort Chartres and Fort Niagara, which
were afterwards rebuilt, the one in stone and the other in earth, were
stockades of no strength against cannon. Slight as they were, their
establishment was costly; and as the King, to whom Canada was a yearly
loss, grudged every franc spent upon it, means were contrived to make them
self-supporting. Each of them was a station of the fur-trade, and the
position of most of them had been determined more or less with a view to
that traffic.
Hence they had no slight commercial value. In some of them the Crown itself
carried on trade through agents who usually secured a lion's share of the
profits. Others were farmed out to merchants at a fixed sum. In others,
again, the commanding-officer was permitted to trade on condition of
maintaining the post, paying the soldiers, and supporting a missionary;
while in one case, at least, he was subjected to similar obligations,
though not permitted to trade himself, but only to sell trading licenses to
merchants. These methods of keeping up forts and garrisons were of course
open to prodigious abuses, and roused endless jealousies and rivalries.
France had now occupied the valley of the Mississippi, and joined with
loose and uncertain links her two colonies of Canada and Louisiana. But the
strength of her hold on these regions of unkempt savagery bore no
proportion to the vastness of her claims or the growing power of the rivals
who were soon to contest them. [Footnote: On the claim of France that all
North America, except the Spanish colonies of Mexico and Florida, belonged
to her, see Appendix A.]
CHAPTER XVIII.
1744, 1745.
A MAD SCHEME.
WAR OF THE AUSTRIAN SUCCESSION.--THE FRENCH SEIZE CANSEAU AND ATTACK
ANNAPOLIS.--PLAN OF REPRISAL.--WILLIAM VAUGHAN.--GOVERNOR SHIRLEY.--HE
ADVISES AN ATTACK ON LOUISBOURG.--THE ASSEMBLY REFUSES, BUT AT LAST
CONSENTS.--PREPARATION.--WILLIAM PEPPERRELL.--GEORGE WHITEFIELD.--PARSON
MOODY.--THE SOLDIERS.--THE PROVINCIAL NAVY.--COMMODORE WARREN.--SHIRLEY AS
AN AMATEUR SOLDIER.--THE FLEET SAILS.
The Peace of Utrecht left unsettled the perilous questions of boundary
between the rival powers in North America, and they grew more perilous
every day. Yet the quarrel was not yet quite ripe; and though the French
Governor, Vaudreuil, and perhaps also his successor, Beauharnois, seemed
willing to precipitate it, the courts of London and Versailles still
hesitated to appeal to the sword. Now, as before, it was a European, and
not an American, quarrel that was to set the world on fire. The War of the
Austrian Succession broke out in 1744. When Frederic of Prussia seized
Silesia and began that bloody conflict, it meant that packs of howling
savages would again spread fire and carnage along the New England border.
News of the declaration of war reached Louisbourg some weeks before it
reached Boston, and the French military Governor, Duquesnel, thought he saw
an opportunity to strike an unexpected blow for the profit of France and
his own great honor.
One of the French inhabitants of Louisbourg has left us a short sketch of
Duquesnel, whom he calls "capricious, of an uncertain temper, inclined to
drink, and when in his cups neither reasonable nor civil." [Footnote:
_Lettre d'un Habitant de Louisbourg contenant une Relation exacte et
circonstanciée de la Prise de l'Isle Royale par les Anglois._] He adds
that the Governor had offended nearly every officer in the garrison, and
denounces him as the "chief cause of our disasters." When Duquesnel heard
of the declaration of war, his first thought was to strike some blow before
the English were warned. The fishing-station of Canseau was a tempting
prize, being a near and an inconvenient neighbor, at the southern end of
the Strait of Canseau, which separates the Acadian peninsula from the
island of Cape Breton, or Isle Royale, of which Louisbourg was the place of
strength. Nothing was easier than to seize Canseau, which had no defence
but a wooden redoubt built by the fishermen, and occupied by about eighty
Englishmen thinking no danger. Early in May, Duquesnel sent Captain
Duvivier against it, with six hundred, or, as the English say, nine hundred
soldiers and sailors, escorted by two small armed vessels. The English
surrendered, on condition of being sent to Boston, and the miserable
hamlet, with its wooden citadel, was burned to the ground.
Thus far successful, the Governor addressed himself to the capture of
Annapolis,--which meant the capture of all Acadia. Duvivier was again
appointed to the command. His heart was in the work, for he was a
descendant of La Tour, feudal claimant of Acadia in the preceding century.
Four officers and ninety regular troops were given him, [Footnote:
_Lettre d'un Habitant de Louisbourg._] and from three to four hundred
Micmac and Malecite Indians joined him on the way. The Micmacs, under
command, it is said, of their missionary, Le Loutre, had already tried to
surprise the English fort, but had only succeeded in killing two unarmed
stragglers in the adjacent garden. [Footnote: _Mascarene to the
Besiegers, 3 July,_ 1744. Duquesnel had written to all the missionaries
"d'engager les sauvages à faire quelque coup important sur le fort"
(Annapolis). _Duquesnel à Beauharnois, 1 Juin_, 1744.]
Annapolis, from the neglect and indifference of the British ministry, was
still in such a state of dilapidation that its sandy ramparts were
crumbling into the ditches, and the cows of the garrison walked over them
at their pleasure. It was held by about a hundred effective men under Major
Mascarene, a French Protestant whose family had been driven into exile by
the persecutions that followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
Shirley, governor of Massachusetts, sent him a small reinforcement of
militia; but as most of these came without arms, and as Mascarene had few
or none to give them, they proved of doubtful value.
Duvivier and his followers, white and red, appeared before the fort in
August, made their camp behind the ridge of a hill that overlooked it, and
marched towards the rampart; but being met by a discharge of cannon-shot,
they gave up all thoughts of an immediate assault, began a fusillade under
cover of darkness, and kept the garrison on the alert all night.
Duvivier had looked for help from the Acadians of the neighboring village,
who were French in blood, faith, and inclination. They would not join him
openly, fearing the consequences if his attack should fail; but they did
what they could without committing themselves, and made a hundred and fifty
scaling-ladders for the besiegers. Duvivier now returned to his first plan
of an assault, which, if made with vigor, could hardly have failed. Before
attempting it, he sent Mascarene a flag of truce to tell him that he hourly
expected two powerful armed ships from Louisbourg, besides a reinforcement
of two hundred and fifty regulars, with cannon, mortars, and other enginery
of war. At the same time he proposed favorable terms of capitulation, not
to take effect till the French war-ships should have appeared. Mascarene
refused all terms, saying that when he saw the French ships, he would
consider what to do, and meanwhile would defend himself as he could.
The expected ships were the "Ardent" and the "Caribou," then at Louisbourg.
A French writer says that when Duquesnel directed their captains to sail
for Annapolis and aid in its capture, they refused, saying that they had no
orders from the court. [Footnote: _ettre d'un Habitant de
Louisbourg._] Duvivier protracted the parley with Mascarene, and waited
in vain for the promised succor. At length the truce was broken off, and
the garrison, who had profited by it to get rest and sleep, greeted the
renewal of hostilities with three cheers.
Now followed three weeks of desultory attacks; but there was no assault,
though Duvivier had boasted that he had the means of making a successful
one. He waited for the ships which did not come, and kept the Acadians at
work in making ladders and fire-arrows. At length, instead of aid from
Louisbourg, two small vessels appeared from Boston, bringing Mascarene a
reinforcement of fifty Indian rangers. This discouraged the besiegers, and
towards the end of September they suddenly decamped and vanished. "The
expedition was a failure," writes the _Habitant de Louisbourg_,"
though one might have bet everything on its success, so small was the force
that the enemy had to resist us."
This writer thinks that the seizure of Canseau and the attack of Annapolis
were sources of dire calamity to the French. "Perhaps," he says, "the
English would have let us alone if we had not first insulted them. It was
the interest of the people of New England to live at peace with us, and
they would no doubt have done so, if we had not taken it into our heads to
waken them from their security. They expected that both parties would
merely stand on the defensive, without taking part in this cruel war that
has set Europe in a blaze."
Whatever might otherwise have been the disposition of the "Bastonnais," or
New England people, the attacks on Canseau and Annapolis alarmed and
exasperated them, and engendered in some heated brains a project of wild
audacity. This was no less than the capture of Louisbourg, reputed the
strongest fortress, French or British, in North America, with the possible
exception of Quebec, which owed its chief strength to nature, and not to
art.
Louisbourg was a standing menace to all the Northern British colonies. It
was the only French naval station on the continent, and was such a haunt of
privateers that it was called the American Dunkirk. It commanded the chief
entrance of Canada, and threatened to ruin the fisheries, which were nearly
as vital to New England as was the fur-trade to New France. The French
government had spent twenty-five years in fortifying it, and the cost of
its powerful defences--constructed after the system of Vauban--was reckoned
at thirty million livres.
This was the fortress which William Vaughan of Damariscotta advised
Governor Shirley to attack with fifteen hundred raw New England militia.
[Footnote: Smollett says that the proposal came from Robert Auchmuty, judge
of admiralty in Massachusetts. Hutchinson, Douglas, Belknap, and other
well-informed writers ascribe the scheme to Vaughan, while Pepperrell says
that it originated with Colonel John Bradstreet. In the Public Record
Office there is a letter from Bradstreet, written in 1753, but without
address, in which he declares that he not only planned the siege, but "was
the Principal Person in conducting it,"--assertions which may pass for what
they are worth, Bradstreet being much given to self-assertion.] Vaughan was
born at Portsmouth in 1703, and graduated at Harvard College nineteen years
later. His father, also a graduate of Harvard, was for a time
lieutenant-governor of New Hampshire. Soon after leaving college, the
younger Vaughan--a youth of restless and impetuous activity--established a
fishing-station on the island of Matinicus, off the coast of Maine, and
afterwards became the owner of most of the land on both sides of the little
river Damariscotta, where he built a garrison-house, or wooden fort,
established a considerable settlement, and carried on an extensive trade in
fish and timber. He passed for a man of ability and force, but was accused
of a headstrong rashness, a self-confidence that hesitated at nothing, and
a harebrained contempt of every obstacle in his way. Once, having fitted
out a number of small vessels at Portsmouth for his fishing at Matinicus,
he named a time for sailing. It was a gusty and boisterous March day, the
sea was rough, and old sailors told him that such craft could not carry
sail. Vaughan would not listen, but went on board and ordered his men to
follow. One vessel was wrecked at the mouth of the river; the rest, after
severe buffeting, came safe, with their owner, to Matinicus.
Being interested in the fisheries, Vaughan was doubly hostile to
Louisbourg,--their worst enemy. He found a willing listener in the
Governor, William Shirley. Shirley was an English barrister who had come to
Massachusetts in 1731 to practise his profession and seek his fortune.
After filling various offices with credit, he was made governor of the
province in 1741, and had discharged his duties with both tact and talent.
He was able, sanguine, and a sincere well-wisher to the province, though
gnawed by an insatiable hunger for distinction. He thought himself a born
strategist, and was possessed by a propensity for contriving military
operations, which finally cost him dear. Vaughan, who knew something of
Louisbourg, told him that in winter the snow-drifts were often banked so
high against the rampart that it could be mounted readily, if the
assailants could but time their arrival at the right moment. This was not
easy, as that rocky and tempestuous coast was often made inaccessible by
fogs and surf; Shirley therefore preferred a plan of his own contriving.
But nothing could be done without first persuading his Assembly to consent.
On the 9th of January the General Court of Massachusetts--a convention of
grave city merchants and solemn rustics from the country villages--was
astonished by a message from the Governor to the effect that he had a
communication to make, so critical that he wished the whole body to swear
secrecy. The request was novel, but being then on good terms with Shirley,
the Representatives consented, and took the oath. Then, to their amazement,
the Governor invited them to undertake forthwith the reduction of
Louisbourg. The idea of an attack on that redoubtable fortress was not
new. Since the autumn, proposals had been heard to petition the British
ministry to make the attempt, under a promise that the colonies would give
their best aid. But that Massachusetts should venture it alone, or with
such doubtful help as her neighbors might give, at her own charge and risk,
though already insolvent, without the approval or consent of the ministry,
and without experienced officers or trained soldiers, was a startling
suggestion to the sober-minded legislators of the General Court. They
listened, however, with respect to the Governor's reasons, and appointed a
committee of the two houses to consider them. The committee deliberated for
several days, and then made a report adverse to the plan, as was also the
vote of the Court.
Meanwhile, in spite of the oath, the secret had escaped. It is said that a
country member, more pious than discreet, prayed so loud and fervently, at
his lodgings, for light to guide him on the momentous question, that his
words were overheard, and the mystery of the closed doors was revealed. The
news flew through the town, and soon spread through all the province.
After his defeat in the Assembly, Shirley returned, vexed and disappointed,
to his house in Roxbury. A few days later, James Gibson, a Boston merchant,
says that he saw him "walking slowly down King Street, with his head bowed
down, as if in a deep study." "He entered my counting-room," pursues the
merchant, "and abruptly said, 'Gibson, do you feel like giving up the
expedition to Louisbourg?'" Gibson replied that he wished the House would
reconsider their vote. "You are the very man I want!" exclaimed the
Governor. [Footnote: Gibson, _Journal of the Siege of Louisbourg_.]
They then drew up a petition for reconsideration, which Gibson signed,
promising to get also the signatures of merchants, not only of Boston, but
of Salem, Marblehead, and other towns along the coast. In this he was
completely successful, as all New England merchants looked on Louisbourg as
an arch-enemy.
The petition was presented, and the question came again before the
Assembly. There had been much intercourse between Boston and Louisbourg,
which had largely depended on New England for provisions. [Footnote:
_Lettre d'un Habitant de Louisbourg_.] The captured militia-men of
Canseau, who, after some delay, had been sent to Boston, according to the
terms of surrender, had used their opportunities to the utmost, and could
give Shirley much information concerning the fortress. It was reported that
the garrison was mutinous, and that provisions were fallen short, so that
the place could not hold out without supplies from France. These, however,
could be cut off only by blockading the harbor with a stronger naval force
than all the colonies together could supply. The Assembly had before
reached the reasonable conclusion that the capture of Louisbourg was beyond
the strength of Massachusetts, and that the only course was to ask the help
of the mother-country. [Footnote: _Report of Council, 12 Jan. 1745_.]
The reports of mutiny, it was urged, could not be depended on; raw militia
in the open field were no match for disciplined troops behind ramparts; the
expense would be enormous, and the credit of the province, already sunk
low, would collapse under it; we should fail, and instead of sympathy, get
nothing but ridicule. Such were the arguments of the opposition, to which
there was little to answer, except that if Massachusetts waited for help
from England, Louisbourg would be reinforced and the golden opportunity
lost. The impetuous and irrepressible Vaughan put forth all his energy; the
plan was carried by a single vote. And even this result was said to be due
to the accident of a member in opposition falling and breaking a leg as he
was hastening to the House.
The die was cast, and now doubt and hesitation vanished. All alike set
themselves to push on the work. Shirley wrote to all the colonies, as far
south as Pennsylvania, to ask for co-operation. All excused themselves
except Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, and the whole burden
fell on the four New England colonies. These, and Massachusetts above all,
blazed with pious zeal; for as the enterprise was directed against Roman
Catholics, it was supposed in a peculiar manner to commend itself to
Heaven. There were prayers without ceasing in churches and families, and
all was ardor, energy, and confidence; while the other colonies looked on
with distrust, dashed with derision. When Benjamin Franklin, in
Philadelphia, heard what was afoot, he wrote to his brother in Boston,
"Fortified towns are hard nuts to crack, and your teeth are not accustomed
to it; but some seem to think that forts are as easy taken as snuff."
[Footnote: Sparks, _Works of Franklin_, VII. 16.] It has been said of
Franklin that while he represented some of the New England qualities, he
had no part in that enthusiasm of which our own time saw a crowning example
when the cannon opened at Fort Sumter, and which pushes to its end without
reckoning chances, counting costs, or heeding the scoffs of ill-wishers.
The prevailing hope and faith were, it is true, born largely of ignorance,
aided by the contagious zeal of those who first broached the project; for
as usual in such cases, a few individuals supplied the initiate force of
the enterprise. Vaughan the indefatigable rode express to Portsmouth with a
letter from Shirley to Benning Wentworth, governor of New Hampshire. That
pompous and self-important personage admired the Massachusetts Governor,
who far surpassed him in talents and acquirements, and who at the same time
knew how to soothe his vanity. Wentworth was ready to do his part, but his
province had no money, and the King had ordered him to permit the issue of
no more paper currency. The same prohibition had been laid upon Shirley;
but he, with sagacious forecast, had persuaded his masters to relent so far
as to permit the issue of £50,000 in what were called bills of credit to
meet any pressing exigency of war. He told this to Wentworth, and succeeded
in convincing him that his province might stretch her credit like
Massachusetts, in case of similar military need. New Hampshire was thus
enabled to raise a regiment of five hundred men out of her scanty
population, with the condition that a hundred and fifty of them should be
paid and fed by Massachusetts. [Footnote: Correspondence of Shirley and
Wentworth, in _Belknap Papers, Provincial Papers of New Hampshire_,
V.]
Shirley was less fortunate in Rhode Island. The Governor of that little
colony called Massachusetts "our avowed enemy, always trying to defame us."
[Footnote: _Governor Wanton to the Agent of Rhode Island, 20 Dec.
1745,_ in _Colony Records of Rhode Island_, V.] There was a grudge
between the neighbors, due partly to notorious ill-treatment by the
Massachusetts Puritans of Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, and
partly to one of those boundary disputes which often produced ill-blood
among the colonies. The Representatives of Rhode Island, forgetting past
differences, voted to raise a hundred and fifty men for the expedition,
till, learning that the project was neither ordered nor approved by the
Home Government, they prudently reconsidered their action. They voted,
however, that the colony sloop "Tartar," carrying fourteen cannon and
twelve swivels, should be equipped and manned for the service, and that the
Governor should be instructed to find and commission a captain and a
lieutenant to command her. [Footnote: _Colony Records of Rhode
Island_, V. (_Feb._ 1745).]
Connecticut promised five hundred and sixteen men and officers, on
condition that Roger Wolcott, their commander, should have the second rank
in the expedition. Shirley accordingly commissioned him as major-general.
As Massachusetts was to supply above three thousand men, or more than three
quarters of the whole force, she had a natural right to name a
Commander-in-chief.
It was not easy to choose one. The colony had been at peace for twenty
years, and except some grizzled Indian fighters of the last war, and some
survivors of the Carthagena expedition, nobody had seen service. Few knew
well what a fortress was, and nobody knew how to attack one. Courage,
energy, good sense, and popularity were the best qualities to be hoped for
in the leader. Popularity was indispensable, for the soldiers were all to
be volunteers, and they would not enlist under a commander whom they did
not like. Shirley's choice was William Pepperrell, a merchant of Kittery.
Knowing that Benning Wentworth thought himself the man for the place, he
made an effort to placate him, and wrote that he would gladly have given
him the chief command, but for his gouty legs. Wentworth took fire at the
suggestion, forgot his gout, and declared himself ready to serve his
country and assume the burden of command. The position was awkward, and
Shirley was forced to reply, "On communicating your offer to two or three
gentlemen in whose judgment I most confide, I found them clearly of opinion
that any alteration of the present command would be attended with great
risk, both with respect to our Assembly and the soldiers being entirely
disgusted." [Footnote: _Shirley to Wentworth, 16 Feb._ 1745.]
The painter Smibert has left us a portrait of Pepperrell,--a good bourgeois
face, not without dignity, though with no suggestion of the soldier. His
spacious house at Kittery Point still stands, sound and firm, though
curtailed in some of its proportions. Not far distant is another noted
relic of colonial times, the not less spacious mansion built by the
disappointed Wentworth at Little Harbor. I write these lines at a window of
this curious old house, and before me spreads the scene familiar to
Pepperrell from childhood. Here the river Piscataqua widens to join the
sea, holding in its gaping mouth the large island of Newcastle, with
attendant groups of islets and island rocks, battered with the rack of
ages, studded with dwarf savins, or half clad with patches of whortleberry
bushes, sumac, and the shining wax-myrtle, green in summer, red with the
touch of October. The flood tide pours strong and full around them, only to
ebb away and lay bare a desolation of rocks and stones buried in a shock of
brown drenched seaweed, broad tracts of glistening mud, sandbanks black
with mussel-beds, and half-submerged meadows of eel-grass, with myriads of
minute shellfish clinging to its long lank tresses. Beyond all these lies
the main, or northern channel, more than deep enough, even when the tide is
out, to float a line-of-battle-ship. On its farther bank stands the old
house of the Pepperrells, wearing even now an air of dingy respectability.
Looking through its small, quaint window-panes, one could see across the
water the rude dwellings of fishermen along the shore of Newcastle, and the
neglected earthwork called Fort William and Mary, that feebly guarded the
river's mouth. In front, the Piscataqua, curving southward, widened to meet
the Atlantic between rocky headlands and foaming reefs, and in dim distance
the Isles of Shoals seemed floating on the pale gray sea.
Behind the Pepperrell house was a garden, probably more useful than
ornamental, and at the foot of it were the owner's wharves, with
storehouses for salt-fish, naval stores, and imported goods for the country
trade.
Pepperrell was the son of a Welshman [Footnote: "A native of Ravistock
Parish, in Wales" Parsons, _Life of Pepperrell_. Mrs. Adelaide Cilley
Waldron, a descendant of Pepperrell, assures me, however, that his father,
the emigrant, came, not from Wales, but from Devonshire.] who migrated in
early life to the Isles of Shoals, and thence to Kittery, where by trade,
ship-building, and the fisheries, he made a fortune, most of which he left
to his son William. The young Pepperrell learned what little was taught at
the village school, supplemented by a private tutor, whose instructions,
however, did not perfect him in English grammar. In the eyes of his
self-made father, education was valuable only so far as it could make a
successful trader; and on this point he had reason to be satisfied, as his
son passed for many years as the chief merchant in New England. He dealt
in ships, timber, naval stores, fish, and miscellaneous goods brought from
England; and he also greatly prospered by successful land purchases,
becoming owner of the greater part of the growing towns of Saco and
Scarborough. When scarcely twenty-one, he was made justice of the peace, on
which he ordered from London what his biographer calls a law library,
consisting of a law dictionary, Danvers' "Abridgment of the Common Law,"
the "Complete Solicitor," and several other books. In law as in war, his
best qualities were good sense and good will. About the time when he was
made a justice, he was commissioned captain of militia, then major, then
lieutenant-colonel, and at last colonel, commanding all the militia of
Maine. The town of Kittery chose him to represent her in the General Court,
Maine being then a part of Massachusetts. Finally, he was made a member of
the Governor's Council,--a post which he held for thirty-two years, during
eighteen of which he was president of the board.
These civil dignities served him as educators better than tutor or village
school; for they brought him into close contact with the chief men of the
province; and in the Massachusetts of that time, so different from our own,
the best education and breeding were found in the official class. At once a
provincial magnate and the great man of a small rustic village, his manners
are said to have answered to both positions,--certainly they were such as
to make him popular. But whatever he became as a man, he learned nothing
to fit him to command an army and lay siege to Louisbourg. Perhaps he felt
this, and thought, with the Governor of Rhode Island, that "the attempt to
reduce that prodigiously strong town was too much for New England, which
had not one officer of experience, nor even an engineer." [Footnote:
_Governor Wanton to the Agent of Rhode Island in London, 20 Dec.
1745._] Moreover, he was unwilling to leave his wife, children, and
business. He was of a religious turn of mind, and partial to the clergy,
who, on their part, held him in high favor. One of them, the famous
preacher, George Whitefield, was a guest at his house when he heard that
Shirley had appointed him to command the expedition against Louisbourg.
Whitefield had been the leading spirit in the recent religious fermentation
called the Great Awakening, which, though it produced bitter quarrels among
the ministers, besides other undesirable results, was imagined by many to
make for righteousness. So thought the Reverend Thomas Prince, who mourned
over the subsiding delirium of his flock as a sign of back-sliding. "The
heavenly shower was over," he sadly exclaims; "from fighting the devil they
must turn to fighting the French." Pepperrell, always inclined to the
clergy, and now in great perplexity and doubt, asked his guest Whitefield
whether or not he had better accept the command. Whitefield gave him cold
comfort, told him that the enterprise was not very promising, and that if
he undertook it, he must do so "with a single eye," prepared for obloquy if
he failed, and envy if he succeeded. [Footnote: Parsons, _Life of
Pepperrell,_ 51.]
Henry Sherburn, commissary of the New Hampshire regiment, begged Whitefield
to furnish a motto for the flag. The preacher, who, zealot as he was,
seemed unwilling to mix himself with so madcap a business, hesitated at
first, but at length consented, and suggested the words, _Nil desperandum
Christo duce_, which, being adopted, gave the enterprise the air of a
crusade. It had, in fact, something of the character of one. The cause was
imagined to be the cause of Heaven, crowned with celestial benediction. It
had the fervent support of the ministers, not only by prayers and sermons,
but, in one case, by counsels wholly temporal. A certain pastor, much
esteemed for benevolence, proposed to Pepperrell, who had at last accepted
the command, a plan, unknown to Vauban, for confounding the devices of the
enemy. He advised that two trustworthy persons should cautiously walk
together along the front of the French ramparts under cover of night, one
of them carrying a mallet, with which he was to hammer the ground at short
intervals. The French sentinels, it seems to have been supposed, on hearing
this mysterious thumping, would be so bewildered as to give no alarm. While
one of the two partners was thus employed, the other was to lay his ear to
the ground, which, as the adviser thought, would return a hollow sound if
the artful foe had dug a mine under it; and whenever such secret danger was
detected, a mark was to be set on the spot, to warn off the soldiers.
[Footnote: Belknap, _Hist. New Hampshire_, II. 208.]
Equally zealous, after another fashion, was the Reverend Samuel Moody,
popularly known as Father Moody, or Parson Moody, minister of York and
senior chaplain of the expedition. Though about seventy years old, he was
amazingly tough and sturdy. He still lives in the traditions of York as the
spiritual despot of the settlement and the uncompromising guardian of its
manners and doctrine, predominating over it like a rough little village
pope. The comparison would have kindled his burning wrath, for he abhorred
the Holy Father as an embodied Antichrist. Many are the stories told of
him by the descendants of those who lived under his rod, and sometimes felt
its weight; for he was known to have corrected offending parishioners with
his cane. [Footnote: Tradition told me at York by Mr. N. Marshall.] When
some one of his flock, nettled by his strictures from the pulpit, walked in
dudgeon towards the church door, Moody would shout after him, "Come back,
you graceless sinner, come back!" or if any ventured to the alehouse of a
Saturday night, the strenuous pastor would go in after them, collar them,
drag them out, and send them home with rousing admonition. [Footnote:
Lecture of Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted by Cabot, Memoir of Emerson, I. 10.
] Few dared gainsay him, by reason both of his irritable temper and of the
thick-skinned insensibility that encased him like armor of proof. And while
his pachydermatous nature made him invulnerable as a rhinoceros, he had at
the same time a rough and ready humor that supplied keen weapons for the
warfare of words and made him a formidable antagonist. This commended him
to the rude borderers, who also relished the sulphurous theology of their
spiritual dictator, just as they liked the raw and fiery liquors that would
have scorched more susceptible stomachs. What they did not like was the
pitiless length of his prayers, which sometimes kept them afoot above two
hours shivering in the polar cold of the unheated meeting-house, and which
were followed by sermons of equal endurance; for the old man's lungs were
of brass, and his nerves of hammered iron. Some of the sufferers ventured
to remonstrate; but this only exasperated him, till one parishioner, more
worldly wise than the rest, accompanied his modest petition for mercy with
the gift of a barrel of cider, after which the Parson's ministrations were
perceptibly less exhausting than before. He had an irrepressible conscience
and a highly aggressive sense of duty, which made him an intolerable
meddler in the affairs of other people, and which, joined to an underlying
kindness of heart, made him so indiscreet in his charities that his wife
and children were often driven to vain protest against the excesses of his
almsgiving. The old Puritan fanaticism was rampant in him; and when he
sailed for Louisbourg, he took with him an axe, intended, as he said, to
hew down the altars of Antichrist and demolish his idols. [Footnote: Moody
found sympathizers in his iconoclastic zeal. Deacon John Gray of Biddeford
wrote to Pepperrell: "Oh that I could be with you and dear Parson Moody in
that church [at Louisbourg] to destroy the images there set up, and hear
the true Gospel of our Lord and Saviour there preached!"]
Shirley's choice of a commander was perhaps the best that could have been
made; for Pepperrell joined to an unusual popularity as little military
incompetency as anybody else who could be had. Popularity, we have seen,
was indispensable, and even company officers were appointed with an eye to
it. Many of these were well-known men in rustic neighborhoods, who had
raised companies in the hope of being commissioned to command them. Others
were militia officers recruiting under orders of the Governor. Thus, John
Storer, major in the Maine militia, raised in a single day, it is said, a
company of sixty-one, the eldest being sixty years old, and the youngest
sixteen. [Footnote: Bourne, _Hist, of Wells and Kennebunk_, 371.] They
formed about a quarter of the fencible population of the town of Wells, one
of the most exposed places on the border. Volunteers offered themselves
readily everywhere; though the pay was meagre, especially in Maine and
Massachusetts, where in the new provincial currency it was twenty-five
shillings a month,--then equal to fourteen shillings sterling, or less than
sixpence a day, [Footnote: Gibson, _Journal; Records of Rhode Island_,
V. Governor Wanton, of that province, says, with complacency, that the pay
of Rhode Island was twice that of Massachusetts.] the soldier furnishing
his own clothing and bringing his own gun. A full third of the
Massachusetts contingent, or more than a thousand men, are reported to have
come from the hardy population of Maine, whose entire fighting force, as
shown by the muster-rolls, was then but 2,855. [Footnote: Parsons, _Life
of Pepperrell_, 54.] Perhaps there was not one officer among them whose
experience of war extended beyond a drill on muster day and the sham fight
that closed the performance, when it generally happened that the rustic
warriors were treated with rum at the charge of their captain, to put them
in good humor, and so induce them to obey the word of command.
As the three provinces contributing soldiers recognized no common authority
nearer than the King, Pepperrell received three several commissions as
lieutenant-general,--one from the Governor of Massachusetts, and the others
from the Governors of Connecticut and New Hampshire; while Wolcott,
commander of the Connecticut forces, was commissioned as major-general by
both the Governor of his own province and that of Massachusetts. When the
levies were complete, it was found that Massachusetts had contributed about
3,300 men, Connecticut 516, and New Hampshire 304 in her own pay, besides
150 paid by her wealthier neighbor. [Footnote: Of the Massachusetts
contingent, three hundred men were raised and maintained at the charge of
the merchant James Gibson.] Rhode Island had lost faith and disbanded her
150 men; but afterwards raised them again, though too late to take part in
the siege.
Each of the four New England colonies had a little navy of its own,
consisting of from one to three or four small armed vessels; and as
privateering--which was sometimes a euphemism for piracy where Frenchmen
and Spaniards were concerned--a favorite occupation, it was possible to
extemporize an additional force in case of need. For a naval commander,
Shirley chose Captain Edward Tyng, who had signalized himself in the past
summer by capturing a French privateer of greater strength than his own.
Shirley authorized him to buy for the province the best ship he could find,
equip her for fighting, and take command of her. Tyng soon found a brig to
his mind, on the stocks nearly ready for launching. She was rapidly fitted
for her new destination, converted into a frigate, mounted with 24 guns,
and named the "Massachusetts." The rest of the naval force consisted of the
ship "Cæsar," of 20 guns; a vessel called the "Shirley," commanded by
Captain Rous, and also carrying 20 guns; another, of the kind called a
"snow," carrying 16 guns; one sloop of 12 guns, and two of 8 guns each; the
"Boston Packet" of 16 guns; two sloops from Connecticut of 16 guns each; a
privateer hired in Rhode Island, of 20 guns; the government sloop "Tartar"
of the same colony, carrying 14 carriage guns and 12 swivels; and, finally,
the sloop of 14 guns which formed the navy of New Hampshire. [Footnote: The
list is given by Williamson, II. 227.]
It was said, with apparent reason, that one or two heavy French
ships-of-war--and a number of such was expected in the spring--would
outmatch the whole colonial squadron, and, after mastering it, would hold
all the transports at mercy; so that the troops on shore, having no means
of return and no hope of succor, would be forced to surrender or starve.
The danger was real and serious, and Shirley felt the necessity of help
from a few British ships-of-war. Commodore Peter Warren was then with a
small squadron at Antigua. Shirley sent an express boat to him with a
letter stating the situation and asking his aid. Warren, who had married
an American woman and who owned large tracts of land on the Mohawk, was
known to be a warm friend to the provinces. It is clear that he would
gladly have complied with Shirley's request; but when he laid the question
before a council of officers, they were of one mind that without orders
from the Admiralty he would not be justified in supporting an attempt made
without the approval of the King. [Footnote: _Memoirs of the Principal
Transactions of the Last War_, 44.]
He therefore saw no choice but to decline. Shirley, fearing that his
refusal would be too discouraging, kept it secret from all but Pepperrell
and General Wolcott, or, as others say, Brigadier Waldo. He had written to
the Duke of Newcastle in the preceding autumn that Acadia and the fisheries
were in great danger, and that ships-of-war were needed for their
protection. On this, the Duke had written to Warren, ordering him to sail
for Boston and concert measures with Shirley "for the annoyance of the
enemy, and his Majesty's service in North America." [Footnote:
_Ibid., 46. Letters of Shirley_ (Public Record Office).]
Newcastle's letter reached Warren only two or three days after he had sent
back his refusal of Shirley's request. Thinking himself now sufficiently
authorized to give the desired aid, he made all sail for Boston with his
three ships, the "Superbe," "Mermaid," and "Launceston." On the way he met
a schooner from Boston, and learned from its officers that the expedition
had already sailed; on which, detaining the master as a pilot, he changed
his course and made directly for Canseau,--the place of rendezvous of the
expedition,--and at the same time sent orders by the schooner that any
King's ships that might arrive at Boston should immediately join him.
Within seven weeks after Shirley issued his proclamation for volunteers,
the preparations were all made, and the unique armament was afloat.
Transports, such as they were, could be had in abundance; for the harbors
of Salem and Marblehead were full of fishing-vessels thrown out of
employment by the war. These were hired and insured by the province for the
security of the owners. There was a great dearth of cannon. The few that
could be had were too light, the heaviest being of twenty-two-pound
calibre. New York lent ten eighteen-pounders to the expedition. But the
adventurers looked to the French for their chief supply. A detached work
near Louisbourg, called the Grand, or Royal, Battery, was known to be armed
with thirty heavy pieces; and these it was proposed to capture and turn
against the town,--which, as Hutchinson remarks, was "like selling the skin
of the bear before catching him."
It was clear that the expedition must run for luck against risks of all
kinds. Those whose hopes were highest, based them on a belief in the
special and direct interposition of Providence; others were sanguine
through ignorance and provincial self-conceit. As soon as the troops were
embarked, Shirley wrote to the ministers of what was going on, telling them
that, accidents apart, four thousand New England men would land on Cape
Breton in April, and that, even should they fail to capture Louisbourg, he
would answer for it that they would lay the town in ruins, retake Canseau,
do other good service to his Majesty, and then come safe home. [Footnote:
_Shirley to Newcastle, 24 March_, 1745. The ministry was not wholly
unprepared for this announcement, as Shirley had before reported to it the
vote of his Assembly consenting to the expedition. _Shirley to Newcastle,
1 Feb_. 1745.] On receiving this communication, the Government
resolved to aid the enterprise if there should yet be time, and accordingly
ordered several ships-of-war to sail for Louisbourg.
The sarcastic Dr. Douglas, then living at Boston, writes that the
expedition had a lawyer for contriver, a merchant for general, and farmers,
fishermen, and mechanics for soldiers. In fact, it had something of the
character of broad farce, to which Shirley himself, with all his ability
and general good sense, was a chief contributor. He wrote to the Duke of
Newcastle that though the officers had no experience and the men no
discipline, he would take care to provide against these defects,--meaning
that he would give exact directions how to take Louisbourg. Accordingly, he
drew up copious instructions to that effect. These seem to have undergone a
process of evolution, for several distinct drafts of them are preserved.
[Footnote: The first draft of Shirley's instructions for taking Louisbourg
is in the large manuscript volume entitled _Siege of Louisbourg_, in
the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The document is called
_Memo for the attacking of Louisbourg this Spring by Surprise_. After
giving minute instructions for every movement, it goes on to say that, as
the surprise may possibly fail, it will be necessary to send two small
mortars and twelve cannon carrying nine-pound balls, "so as to bombard them
and endeavour to make Breaches in their walls and then to Storm them."
Shirley was soon to discover the absurdity of trying to breach the walls of
Louisbourg with nine-pounders.] The complete and final one is among the
Pepperrell Papers, copied entire in the neat, commercial hand of the
General himself. [Footnote: It is printed in the first volume of the
_Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society_. Shirley was so
well pleased with it that he sent it to the Duke of Newcastle enclosed in
his letter of 1 Feb. 1745 (Public Record Office).] It seems to assume
that Providence would work a continued miracle, and on every occasion
supply the expedition with weather precisely suited to its wants. "It is
thought," says this singular document, "that Louisbourg may be surprised if
they [the French] have no advice of your coming. To effect it you must time
your arrival about nine of the clock in the evening, taking care that the
fleet be far enough in the offing to prevent their being seen from the town
in the daytime." He then goes on to prescribe how the troops are to land,
after dark, at a place called Flat Point Cove, in four divisions, three of
which are to march to the back of certain hills a mile and a half west of
the town, where two of the three "are to halt and keep a profound silence;"
the third continuing its march "under cover of the said hills," till it
comes opposite the Grand Battery, which it will attack at a concerted
signal; while one of the two divisions behind the hills assaults the west
gate, and the other moves up to support the attack.
While this is going on, the soldiers of the fourth division are to march
with all speed along the shore till they come to a certain part of the town
wall, which they are to scale; then proceed "as fast as can be" to the
citadel and "secure the windows of the Governor's apartments." After this
follow page after page of complicated details which must have stricken the
General with stupefaction. The rocks, surf, fogs, and gales of that
tempestuous coast are all left out of the account; and so, too, is the
nature of the country, which consists of deep marshes, rocky hills, and
hollows choked with evergreen thickets. Yet a series of complex and
mutually dependent operations, involving long marches through this rugged
and pathless region, was to be accomplished, in the darkness of one April
night, by raw soldiers who knew nothing of the country. This rare specimen
of amateur soldiering is redeemed in some measure by a postscript in which
the Governor sets free the hands of the General, thus: "Notwithstanding the
instructions you have received from me, I must leave you to act, upon
unforeseen emergencies, according to your best discretion."
On the 24th of March, the fleet, consisting of about ninety transports,
escorted by the provincial cruisers, sailed from Nantasket Roads, followed
by prayers and benedictions, and also by toasts drunk with cheers, in
bumpers of rum punch.
[Footnote: The following letter from John Payne of Boston to Colonel Robert
Hale, of the Essex regiment, while it gives no sign of the prevailing
religious feeling, illustrates the ardor of the New England people towards
their rash adventure:--
BOSTON, Apr. 24, 1745.
Sir,
I hope this will find you at Louisbourg with a Bowl of Punch a Pipe and a
P--k of C--ds in your hand and whatever else you desire (I had forgot to
mention a Pretty French Madammoselle). We are very Impatiently expecting to
hear from you, your Friend Luke has lost several Beaver Hatts already
concerning the Expedition, he is so very zealous about it that he has
turned Poor Boutier out of his House for saying he believed you would not
Take the Place.--Damn his Blood says Luke, let him be an Englishman or a
Frenchman and not pretend to be an Englishman when he is a Frenchman in his
Heart. If drinking to your success would Take Cape Briton, you must be in
Possession of it now, for it's a standing Toast. I think the least thing
you Military Gent'n can do is to send us some arrack when you take ye Place
to celebrate your Victory and not to force us to do it in Rum Punch or
Luke's bad wine or sour cyder.
To Collonell Robert Hale
at (or near) Louisbourg.
I am indebted for a copy of this curious letter to Robert Hale Bancroft,
Esq., a descendant of Colonel Hale.]
CHAPTER XIX.
1745.
LOUISBOURG BESIEGED.
SETH POMEROY.--THE VOYAGE.--CANSEAU.--UNEXPECTED SUCCORS.--DELAYS.
--LOUISBOURG.--THE LANDING.--THE GRAND BATTERY TAKEN.--FRENCH CANNON TURNED
ON THE TOWN.--WEAKNESS OF DUCHAMBON.--SUFFERINGS OF THE BESIEGERS.--THEIR
HARDIHOOD.--THEIR IRREGULAR PROCEEDINGS.-JOSEPH SHERBURN.--AMATEUR GUNNERY.
--CAMP FROLICS.--SECTARIAN ZEAL.--PERPLEXITIES OF PEPPERRELL.
On board one of the transports was Seth Pomeroy, gunsmith at Northampton,
and now major of Willard's Massachusetts regiment. He had a turn for
soldiering, and fought, ten years later, in the battle of Lake George.
Again, twenty years later still, when Northampton was astir with rumors of
war from Boston, he borrowed a neighbor's horse, rode a hundred miles,
reached Cambridge on the morning of the battle of Bunker Hill, left his
borrowed horse out of the way of harm, walked over Charlestown Neck, then
swept by the fire of the ships-of-war, and reached the scene of action as
the British were forming for the attack. When Israel Putnam, his comrade in
the last war, saw from the rebel breastwork the old man striding, gun in
hand, up the hill, he shouted, "By God, Pomeroy, you here! A cannon-shot
would waken you out of your grave!"
But Pomeroy, with other landsmen, crowded in the small and malodorous
fishing-vessels that were made to serve as transports, was now in the gripe
of the most unheroic of maladies. "A terrible northeast storm" had fallen
upon them, and, he says, "we lay rolling in the seas, with our sails
furled, among prodigious waves." "Sick, day and night," writes the
miserable gunsmith, "so bad that I have not words to set it forth."
[Footnote: Diary of Major Seth Pomeroy. I owe the copy before me to the
kindness of his descendant, Theodore Pomeroy, Esq.] The gale increased
and the fleet was scattered, there being, as a Massachusetts private
soldier writes in his diary, "a very fierse Storm of Snow, som Rain and
very Dangerous weather to be so nigh ye Shore as we was; but we escaped the
Rocks, and that was all." [Footnote: Diary of a Massachusetts soldier in
Captain Richardson's company (Papers of Dr. Belknap).]
On Friday, April 5th, Pomeroy's vessel entered the harbor of Canseau, about
fifty miles from Louisbourg. Here was the English fishing-hamlet, the
seizure of which by the French had first provoked the expedition. The place
now quietly changed hands again. Sixty-eight of the transports lay here at
anchor, and the rest came dropping in from day to day, sorely buffeted, but
all safe. On Sunday there was a great concourse to hear Parson Moody preach
an open-air sermon from the text, "Thy people shall be willing in the day
of thy power," concerning which occasion the soldier diarist
observes,--"Several sorts of Busnesses was Going on, Som a Exercising, Som
a Hearing Preaching." The attention of Parson Moody's listeners was, in
fact, distracted by shouts of command and the awkward drill of squads of
homespun soldiers on the adjacent pasture.
Captain Ammi Cutter, with two companies, was ordered to remain at Canseau
and defend it from farther vicissitudes; to which end a blockhouse was also
built, and mounted with eight small cannon. Some of the armed vessels had
been sent to cruise off Louisbourg, which they did to good purpose, and
presently brought in six French prizes, with supplies for the fortress. On
the other hand, they brought the ominous news that Louisbourg and the
adjoining bay were so blocked with ice that landing was impossible. This
was a serious misfortune, involving long delay, and perhaps ruin to the
expedition, as the expected ships-of-war might arrive meanwhile from
France. Indeed, they had already begun to appear. On Thursday, the 18th,
heavy cannonading was heard far out at sea, and again on Friday "the
cannon," says Pomeroy, "fired at a great rate till about 2 of the clock."
It was the provincial cruisers attacking a French frigate, the "Renommée,"
of thirty-six guns. As their united force was too much for her, she kept up
a running fight, outsailed them, and escaped after a chase of more than
thirty hours, being, as Pomeroy quaintly observes, "a smart ship." She
carried despatches to the Governor of Louisbourg, and being unable to
deliver them, sailed back for France to report what she had seen.
On Monday, the 22d, a clear, cold, windy day, a large ship, under British
colors, sailed into the harbor, and proved to be the frigate "Eltham,"
escort to the annual mast fleet from New England. On orders from Commander
Warren she had left her charge in waiting, and sailed for Canseau to join
the expedition, bringing the unexpected and welcome news that Warren
himself would soon follow. On the next day, to the delight of all, he
appeared in the ship "Superbe," of sixty guns, accompanied by the
"Launceston" and the "Mermaid," of forty guns each. Here was force enough
to oppose any ships likely to come to the aid of Louisbourg; and Warren,
after communicating with Pepperrell, sailed to blockade the port, along
with the provincial cruisers, which, by order of Shirley, were placed under
his command.
The transports lay at Canseau nearly three weeks, waiting for the ice to
break up. The time was passed in drilling the raw soldiers and forming them
into divisions of four and six hundred each, according to the directions of
Shirley. At length, on Friday, the 27th, they heard that Gabarus Bay was
free from ice, and on the morning of the 29th, with the first fair wind,
they sailed out of Canseau harbor, expecting to reach Louisbourg at nine in
the evening, as prescribed in the Governor's receipt for taking Louisbourg
"while the enemy were asleep." [Footnote: The words quoted are used by
General Wolcott in his journal.] But a lull in the wind defeated this
plan; and after sailing all day, they found themselves becalmed towards
night. It was not till the next morning that they could see the town,--no
very imposing spectacle, for the buildings, with a few exceptions, were
small, and the massive ramparts that belted them round rose to no
conspicuous height.
Louisbourg stood on a tongue of land which lay between its harbor and the
sea, and the end of which was prolonged eastward by reefs and shoals that
partly barred the entrance to the port, leaving a navigable passage not
half a mile wide. This passage was commanded by a powerful battery called
the "Island Battery," being upon a small rocky island at the west side of
the channel, and was also secured by another detached work called the
"Grand," or "Royal Battery," which stood on the shore of the harbor,
opposite the entrance, and more than a mile from the town. Thus a hostile
squadron trying to force its way in would receive a flank fire from the one
battery, and a front fire from the other. The strongest line of defence of
the fortress was drawn across the base of the tongue of land from the
harbor on one side to the sea on the other,--a distance of about twelve
hundred yards. The ditch was eighty feet wide and from thirty to thirty-six
feet deep; and the rampart, of earth faced with masonry, was about sixty
feet thick. The glacis sloped down to a vast marsh, which formed one of the
best defences of the place. The fortress, without counting its outworks,
had embrasures for one hundred and forty-eight cannon; but the number in
position was much less, and is variously stated. Pomeroy says that at the
end of the siege a little above ninety were found, with "a great number of
swivels;" others say seventy-six. [Footnote: Brown, _Cape Breton_,
183. Parsons, _Life of Pepperrell_, 103. An anonymous letter, dated
Louisbourg, 4 July, 1745, says that eighty-five cannon and six mortars have
been found in the town.] In the Grand and Island batteries there were sixty
heavy pieces more. Against this formidable armament the assailants had
brought thirty-four cannon and mortars, of much inferior weight, to be used
in bombarding the fortress, should they chance to fail of carrying it by
surprise, "while the enemy were asleep." [Footnote: _Memoirs of the
Principal Transactions of the Last War_, 40.] Apparently they
distrusted the efficacy of their siege-train, though it was far stronger
than Shirley had at first thought sufficient; for they brought with them
good store of balls of forty-two pounds, to be used in French cannon of
that calibre which they expected to capture, their own largest pieces being
but twenty-two-pounders.
According to the _Habitant de Louisbourg_, the garrison consisted of
five hundred and sixty regular troops, of whom several companies were
Swiss, besides some thirteen or fourteen hundred militia, inhabitants
partly of the town, and partly of neighboring settlements. [Footnote: "On
fit venir cinq ou six cens Miliciens aux Habitans des environs; ce que,
avec ceux de la Ville, pouvoit former treize à quatorze cens
hommes."--_Lettre d'un Habitant de Louisbourg_. This writer says that
three or four hundred more might have been had from Niganiche and its
neighborhood, if they had been summoned in time. The number of militia just
after the siege is set by English reports at 1,310. Parsons, 103.] The
regulars were in bad condition. About the preceding Christmas they had
broken into mutiny, being discontented with their rations and exasperated
with getting no extra pay for work on the fortifications. The affair was so
serious that though order was restored, some of the officers lost all
confidence in the soldiers; and this distrust proved most unfortunate
during the siege. The Governor, Chevalier Duchambon, successor of
Duquesnel, who had died in the autumn, was not a man to grapple with a
crisis, being deficient in decision of character, if not in capacity.
He expected an attack. "We were informed of the preparations from the
first," says the _Habitant de Louisburg_. Some Indians, who had been
to Boston, carried to Canada the news of what was going on there; but it
was not believed, and excited no alarm. [Footnote: _Shirley to Newcastle,
17 June, 1745,_ citing letters captured on board a ship from Quebec.] It
was not so at Louisbourg, where, says the French writer just quoted, "we
lost precious moments in useless deliberations and resolutions no sooner
made than broken. Nothing to the purpose was done, so that we were as much
taken by surprise as if the enemy had pounced upon us unawares."
It was about the 25th of March [Footnote: 14 March, old style.] when the
garrison first saw the provincial cruisers hovering off the mouth of the
harbor. They continued to do so at intervals till daybreak of the 30th of
April, when the whole fleet of transports appeared standing towards Flat
Point, which projects into Gabarus Bay, three miles west of the town.
[Footnote: Gabarus Bay, sometimes called "Chapeau Rouge" Bay, is a spacious
outer harbor, immediately adjoining Louisbourg.] On this, Duchambon sent
Morpain, captain of a privateer, or "corsair," to oppose the landing. He
had with him eighty men, and was to be joined by forty more, already on the
watch near the supposed point of disembarkation. [Footnote: _Bigot au
Ministre, 1 Aout, 1745._] At the same time cannon were fired and
alarm bells rung in Louisbourg, to call in the militia of the neighborhood.
Pepperrell managed the critical work of landing with creditable skill. The
rocks and the surf were more dangerous than the enemy. Several boats,
filled with men, rowed towards Flat Point; but on a signal from the
flagship "Shirley," rowed back again, Morpain flattering himself that his
appearance had frightened them off. Being joined by several other boats,
the united party, a hundred men in all, pulled for another landing-place
called Fresh-water Cove, or Anse de la Cormorandière, two miles farther up
Gabarus Bay. Morpain and his party ran to meet them; but the boats were
first in the race, and as soon as the New England men got ashore, they
rushed upon the French, killed six of them, captured as many more,
including an officer named Boularderie, and put the rest to flight, with
the loss, on their own side, of two men slightly wounded.
[Footnote: _Pepperrell to Shirley, 12 May 1745. Shirley to
Newcastle, 28 Oct. 1745. Journal of the Siege,_ attested
by Pepperrell and four other chief officers (London, 1746).] Further
resistance to the landing was impossible, for a swarm of boats pushed
against the rough and stony beach, the men dashing through the surf, till
before night about two thousand were on shore. [Footnote: Bigot says six
thousand, or two thousand more than the whole New England force, which was
constantly overestimated by the French.] The rest, or about two thousand
more, landed at their leisure on the next day.
On the 2d of May Vaughan led four hundred men to the hills near the town,
and saluted it with three cheers,--somewhat to the discomposure of the
French, though they describe the unwelcome visitors as a disorderly crowd.
Vaughan's next proceeding pleased them still less. He marched behind the
hills, in rear of the Grand Battery, to the northeast arm of the harbor,
where there were extensive magazines of naval stores. These his men set on
fire, and the pitch, tar, and other combustibles made a prodigious smoke.
He was returning, in the morning, with a small party of followers behind
the hills, when coming opposite the Grand Battery, and observing it from
the ridge, he saw neither flag on the flagstaff, nor smoke from the barrack
chimneys. One of his party was a Cape Cod Indian. Vaughan bribed him with a
flask of brandy which he had in his pocket,--though, as the clerical
historian takes pains to assure us, he never used it himself,--and the
Indian, pretending to be drunk, or, as some say, mad, staggered towards the
battery to reconnoitre. [Footnote: Belknap, II.] All was quiet. He
clambered in at an embrasure, and found the place empty. The rest of the
party followed, and one of them, William Tufts, of Medford, a boy of
eighteen, climbed the flagstaff, holding in his teeth his red coat, which
he made fast at the top, as a substitute for the British flag,--a
proceeding that drew upon him a volley of unsuccessful cannon-shot from the
town batteries. [Footnote: John Langdon Sibley, in _N. E. Hist, and Gen.
Register_, XXV. 377. The _Boston Gazette_ of 3 June, 1771, has a
notice of Tufts's recent death, with an exaggerated account of his exploit,
and an appeal for aid to his destitute family.]
Vaughan then sent this hasty note to Pepperrell: "May it please your Honour
to be informed that by the grace of God and the courage of 13 men, I
entered the Royal Battery about 9 o'clock, and am waiting for a
reinforcement and a flag." Soon after, four boats, filled with men,
approached from the town to re-occupy the battery,--no doubt in order to
save the munitions and stores, and complete the destruction of the cannon.
Vaughan and his thirteen men, standing on the open beach, under the fire of
the town and the Island Battery, plied the boats with musketry, and kept
them from landing, till Lieutenant-Colonel Bradstreet appeared with a
reinforcement, on which the French pulled back to Louisbourg. [Footnote:
Vaughan's party seems to have consisted in all of sixteen men, three of
whom took no part in this affair.]
The English supposed that the French in the battery, when the clouds of
smoke drifted over them from the burning storehouses, thought that they
were to be attacked in force, and abandoned their post in a panic. This was
not the case. "A detachment of the enemy," writes the _Habitant de
Louisbourg_, "advanced to the neighborhood of the Royal Battery." This
was Vaughan's four hundred on their way to burn the storehouses. "At once
we were all seized with fright," pursues this candid writer, "and on the
instant it was proposed to abandon this magnificent battery, which would
have been our best defence, if one had known how to use it. Various
councils were held, in a tumultuous way. It would be hard to tell the
reasons for such a strange proceeding. Not one shot had yet been fired at
the battery, which the enemy could not take, except by making regular
approaches, as if against the town itself, and by besieging it, so to
speak, in form. Some persons remonstrated, but in vain; and so a battery of
thirty cannon, which had cost the King immense sums, was abandoned before
it was attacked."
Duchambon says that soon after the English landed, he got a letter from
Thierry, the captain in command of the Royal Battery, advising that the
cannon should be spiked and the works blown up. It was then, according to
the Governor, that the council was called, and a unanimous vote passed to
follow Thierry's advice, on the ground that the defences of the battery
were in bad condition, and that the four hundred men posted there could not
stand against three or four thousand. [Footnote: _Duchambon au Ministre,
2 Sept. 1745_. This is the Governor's official report. "Four hundred
men" is perhaps a copyist's error, the actual number in the battery being
not above two hundred.] The engineer, Verrier, opposed the blowing up of
the works, and they were therefore left untouched. Thierry and his
garrison came off in boats, after spiking the cannon in a hasty way,
without stopping to knock off the trunnions or burn the carriages. They
threw their loose gunpowder into the well, but left behind a good number of
cannon cartridges, two hundred and eighty large bombshells, and other
ordnance stores, invaluable both to the enemy and to themselves. Brigadier
Waldo was sent to occupy the battery with his regiment, and Major Seth
Pomeroy, the gunsmith, with twenty soldier-mechanics, was set at drilling
out the spiked touch-holes of the cannon. These were twenty-eight
forty-two-pounders, and two eighteen-pounders. Several were ready for use
the next morning, and immediately opened on the town,--which, writes a
soldier in his diary, "damaged the houses and made the women cry." "The
enemy," says the _Habitant de Louisbourg_, "saluted us with our own
cannon, and made a terrific fire, smashing everything within range."
[Footnote: _Waldo to Shirley, 12 May, 1745_. Some of the French
writers say twenty-eight thirty-six-pounders, while all the English call
them forty-twos,--which they must have been, as the forty-two-pound shot
brought from Boston fitted them.] [Footnote: Mr. Theodore Roosevelt draws
my attention to the fact that cannon were differently rated in the French
and English navies of the seventeenth century, and that a French thirty-six
carried a ball as large as an English forty-two, or even a little larger.]
The English occupation of the Grand Battery may be called the decisive
event of the siege. There seems no doubt that the French could have
averted the disaster long enough to make it of little help to the invaders.
The water-front of the battery was impregnable. The rear defences consisted
of a loopholed wall of masonry, with a ditch ten feet deep and twelve feet
wide, and also a covered way and glacis, which General Wolcott describes as
unfinished. In this he mistook. They were not unfinished, but had been
partly demolished, with a view to reconstruction. The rear wall was flanked
by two towers, which, says Duchambon, were demolished; but General Wolcott
declares that swivels were still mounted on them, [Footnote: _Journal of
Major-General Wolcott_.] and he adds that "two hundred men might hold
the battery against five thousand without cannon." The English landed their
cannon near Flat Point; and before they could be turned against the Grand
Battery, they must be dragged four miles over hills and rocks, through
spongy marshes and jungles of matted evergreens. This would have required a
week or more. The alternative was an escalade, in which the undisciplined
assailants would no doubt have met a bloody rebuff. Thus this Grand
Battery, which, says Wolcott, "is in fact a fort," might at least have been
held long enough to save the munitions and stores, and effectually disable
the cannon, which supplied the English with the only artillery they had,
competent to the work before them. The hasty abandonment of this important
post was not Duchambon's only blunder, but it was the worst of them all.
On the night after their landing, the New England men slept in the woods,
wet or dry, with or without blankets, as the case might be, and in the
morning set themselves to encamping with as much order as they were capable
of. A brook ran down from the hills and entered the sea two miles or more
from the town. The ground on each side, though rough, was high and dry, and
here most of the regiments made their quarters,--Willard's, Moulton's, and
Moore's on the east side, and Burr's and Pepperrell's on the west. Those on
the east, in some cases, saw fit to extend themselves towards Louisbourg as
far as the edge of the intervening marsh; but were soon forced back to a
safer position by the cannon-balls of the fortress, which came bowling
amongst them. This marsh was that green, flat sponge of mud and moss that
stretched from this point to the glacis of Louisbourg.
There was great want of tents, for material to make them was scarce in New
England. Old sails were often used instead, being stretched over
poles,--perhaps after the fashion of a Sioux teepee. When these could not
be had, the men built huts of sods, with roofs of spruce-boughs overlapping
like a thatch; for at that early season, bark would not peel from the
trees. The landing of guns, munitions, and stores was a formidable task,
consuming many days and destroying many boats, as happened again when
Amherst landed his cannon at this same place. Large flat boats, brought
from Boston, were used for the purpose, and the loads were carried ashore
on the heads of the men, wading through ice-cold surf to the waist, after
which, having no change of clothing, they slept on the ground through the
chill and foggy nights, reckless of future rheumatisms. [Footnote: The
author of _The Importance and Advantage of Cape Breton_ says: "When
the hardships they were exposed to come to be considered, the behaviour of
these men will hardly gain credit. They went ashore wet, had no [dry]
clothes to cover them, were exposed in this condition to cold, foggy
nights, and yet cheerfully underwent these difficulties for the sake of
executing a project they had voluntarily undertaken."]
A worse task was before them. The cannon were to be dragged over the marsh
to Green Hill, a spur of the line of rough heights that half encircled the
town and harbor. Here the first battery was to be planted; and from this
point other guns were to be dragged onward to more advanced stations,--a
distance in all of more than two miles, thought by the French to be
impassable. So, in fact, it seemed; for at the first attempt, the wheels
of the cannon sank to the hubs in mud and moss, then the carriage, and
finally the piece itself slowly disappeared. Lieutenant-Colonel Meserve, of
the New Hampshire regiment, a ship-builder by trade, presently overcame the
difficulty. By his direction sledges of timber were made, sixteen feet long
and five feet wide; a cannon was placed on each of these, and it was then
dragged over the marsh by a team of two hundred men, harnessed with
rope-traces and breast-straps, and wading to the knees. Horses or oxen
would have foundered in the mire. The way had often to be changed, as the
mossy surface was soon churned into a hopeless slough along the line of
march. The work could be done only at night or in thick fog, the men being
completely exposed to the cannon of the town. Thirteen years after, when
General Amherst besieged Louisbourg again, he dragged his cannon to the
same hill over the same marsh; but having at his command, instead of four
thousand militiamen, eleven thousand British regulars, with all appliances
and means to boot, he made a road, with prodigious labor, through the mire,
and protected it from the French shot by an epaulement, or lateral
earthwork. [Footnote: See _Montcalm and Wolfe_, chap. xix.]
Pepperrell writes in ardent words of the cheerfulness of his men "under
almost incredible hardships." Shoes and clothing failed, till many were in
tatters and many barefooted; [Footnote: _Pepperrell to Newcastle, 28
June, 1745._] yet they toiled on with unconquerable spirit, and
within four days had planted a battery of six guns on Green Hill, which was
about a mile from the King's Bastion of Louisbourg. In another week they
had dragged four twenty-two-pound cannon and ten coehorns--gravely called
"cowhorns" by the bucolic Pomeroy--six or seven hundred yards farther, and
planted them within easy range of the citadel. Two of the cannon burst, and
were replaced by four more and a large mortar, which burst in its turn, and
Shirley was begged to send another. Meanwhile a battery, chiefly of
coehorns, had been planted on a hillock four hundred and forty yards from
the West Gate, where it greatly annoyed the French; and on the next night
an advanced battery was placed just opposite the same gate, and scarcely
two hundred and fifty yards from it. This West Gate, the principal gate of
Louisbourg, opened upon the tract of high, firm ground that lay on the left
of the besiegers, between the marsh and the harbor, an arm of which here
extended westward beyond the town, into what was called the Barachois, a
salt pond formed by a projecting spit of sand. On the side of the Barachois
farthest from the town was a hillock on which stood the house of an
_habitant_ named Martissan. Here, on the 20th of May, a fifth battery
was planted, consisting of two of the French forty-two-pounders taken in
the Grand Battery, to which three others were afterwards added. Each of
these heavy pieces was dragged to its destination by a team of three
hundred men over rough and rocky ground swept by the French artillery. This
fifth battery, called the Northwest, or Titcomb's, proved most destructive
to the fortress. [Footnote: _Journal of the Siege_, appended to
Shirley's report to Newcastle; _Duchambon au Ministre_, 2 Sept. 1745;
_Lettre d'un Habitant_; Pomeroy, etc.]
All these operations were accomplished with the utmost ardor and energy,
but with a scorn of rule and precedent that astonished and bewildered the
French. The raw New England men went their own way, laughed at trenches and
zigzags, and persisted in trusting their lives to the night and the fog.
Several writers say that the English engineer Bastide tried to teach them
discretion; but this could hardly be, for Bastide, whose station was
Annapolis, did not reach Louisbourg till the 5th of June, when the
batteries were finished and the siege was nearly ended. A recent French
writer makes the curious assertion that it was one of the ministers, or
army chaplains, who took upon him the vain task of instruction in the art
of war on this occasion. [Footnote: Ferland, _Cours d'Histoire du
Canada_, II. 477. "L'ennemi ne nous attaquoit point dans les formes, et
ne pratiquoit point aucun retranchement pour se couvrir." _Habitant de
Louisbourg_.]
This ignorant and self-satisfied recklessness might have cost the besiegers
dear if the French, instead of being perplexed and startled at the novelty
of their proceedings, had taken advantage of it; but Duchambon and some of
his officers, remembering the mutiny of the past winter, feared to make
sorties, lest the soldiers might desert or take part with the enemy. The
danger of this appears to have been small. Warren speaks with wonder in his
letters of the rarity of desertions, of which there appear to have been but
three during the siege,--one being that of a half-idiot, from whom no
information could be got. A bolder commander would not have stood idle
while his own cannon were planted by the enemy to batter down his walls;
and whatever the risks of a sortie, the risks of not making one were
greater. "Both troops and militia eagerly demanded it, and I believe it
would have succeeded," writes the Intendant, Bigot. [Footnote: _Bigot au
Ministre, 1 Août, 1745._] The attempt was actually made more than
once in a half-hearted way,--notably on the 8th of May, when the French
attacked the most advanced battery, and were repulsed, with little loss on
either side.
The _Habitant de Louisbourg_ says: "The enemy did not attack us with
any regularity, and made no intrenchments to cover themselves." This last
is not exact. Not being wholly demented, they made intrenchments, such as
they were,--at least at the advanced battery; [Footnote: _Diary of Joseph
Sherburn, Captain at the Advanced Battery._] as they would otherwise
have been swept out of existence, being under the concentred fire of
several French batteries, two of which were within the range of a musket
shot.
The scarcity of good gunners was one of the chief difficulties of the
besiegers. As privateering, and piracy also, against Frenchmen and
Spaniards was a favorite pursuit in New England, there were men in
Pepperrell's army who kne
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