Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville

Preface

The circumscribed limits of this volume make a word of preface necessary for that general submission of authorities and credentials of which particular note could not be made.

Apart from official documents, Bienville has no bibliography, except the short account of him contained in the ‘‘ Histoire de Longueuil et de la Famille de Longueuil,” by Messrs. Alex. Jodoin and J. L. Vincent. It is to these excellent, painstaking compilers that we are indebted for the publication in book form of the only two unofficial documents of Bienville in existence, — a letter to his brother, and his will ; also, for much new and interesting information about Charles Le Moyne and his family. The authors explain the lack of fuller and more private details of this historical family by the destruction of their accumulations of papers in Montreal, in order to clear out a garret needed for the quartering of troops during the affair of the “Trent.”

For official documents, recourse was had directly to the two separate transcriptions made from the originals \n the Archives de la Marine, by M. Pierre Margry and

VI

PREFACE.

M. Magne, for the State of Louisiana, now in the library of the Tulane University of Louisiana. These, superadded to M. Margry’s ‘‘ Explorations et Decouvertes,” with his resume of the times and circumstances contained in the introductory notes of the fifth and sixth volumes, form a clear and almost perfect documentary history of the French settlement of Louisiana. Use was made of the “Journal Historique ” whenever dates and facts tallied with the above authorities. The rich historical French library of Tulane University, which contains all and more of the bibliography of Louisiana cited, furnished the general information.

The labours of an archiviste of Pans, employed to discover some traces of Bienville after his retirement to that city, were fruitless. The parish registers which might have given a clew to his residence were burned in the Hotel de Ville in 1871. The registers of Montmartre Cemetery, which might have revealed the location of his tomb, are also missing.

No Louisiana historical question can be treated without tributary homage to the Hon. Charles Gayarre. It may be said that it is he, the former of the State Library, the devoted collector of archives and traditions, and, for half a century, the indefatigable explorer in colonial records, who has made intelligent work in Louisiana history possible to the present generation. Acknowledgment is made to him with sincere gratitude.

Grace King.

Paris, April 5, 1892.

Chapter I

Jean Baptiste le Moyne, the son of Charles le Moyne, ^cuyer, Sieur de Longueuil, and of Dame Catherine Primot, his wife, was born at Ville Marie, Canada, on the 23d of February, 1680, and baptized, according to the parish registry, the same day, having for godfather Jean le Ber, son of Jacques le Ber, and for godmother Marianne Jeanne de Carrion, daughter of Philippe de Carrion, Sieur du Fresnoy. He was the twelfth child and eighth son of his parents.

Charles le Moyne and Catherine Primot belonged to that sturdy emigrant stock which, yielding the Canadians the first and best fruits of French blood on American soil furnished a race of pioneers to the New World unsurpassed, if not unequalled, by any that its history chronicles.

When one says Canadian, one says Norman, and when one says Norman, one says Scandinavian. And for bold hardihood, valour, and endurance ; for dauntless

1 Histoire de Longueuil et de la Faraille Longueuil, par Alex. Jodoin et J. L. Vincent.

y£AAT BAPT/STE LE MO FJVE, enterprise, persistent effort, and unextinguishable determination, — for all the rugged, crude essentials of primitive virility, these recrudescent adventurers loom up in the dawn of American settlement with the huge distinction and gigantic proportions of their Homeric ancestors. Without exaggeration it may be said, what France gained in America, she gained through her Normans ; what she lost, she lost in her own capital.

It was from the town of Dieppe that Charles le Moyne issued. He was the son of Pierre le Moyne and Judith Duchesne, and was baptized in the parish church of St. Remi de Dieppe on the 2d of August, 1626, receiving, it is carefully stated, the name of Charles from the honourable man, Charles le Doux, his godfather.

When he was about seven years of age, his parents moved from the parish of St. Remi to that of St. Jacques, — the patron saint of fishermen, — the quarter of the seafaring folk. Here they kept an hostelry.

Ever since the days of Champlain, Dieppe had been one of the busiest stations on the road from the Old France to the New. Through the little Norman seaport, as through a bunghole, gushed a constant stream of emigration, the overflow from the effervescent population inside. Its streets were thronged, its hostelries crowded, by the outgoing, waiting for a bark ; by the incoming, for post-horses. Ship after ship loaded at its quay, — an overload generally of passengers aureoled in advance by the spectators not only with heavenly crowns, but with the more tangible ones of earth, — adventurers seeking a new chance at life, fame, and fortune ; merchants and scientists, grave with secret theories of transatlantic finances and physics ; soldiers, Government appointees, priests, singly or in company with fervent bands of devotees, inflamed, if not inspired, to Christianize the distant savages out of the powers of hell and the devil.

It is easily conceived what the greedy ears and inquisitive eyes of a precocious lad would pick up in such scenes. It is not conceivable that an enterprising lad should hold back at such a time and such a place ; for under the impulse of the Societe de Ville Marie, Dieppe was furnishing, not only the means, but the subjects for emigration from her own and neighbouring precincts. In 1641, at the age of fifteen, Charles Le Moyne, joining a band of his townspeople, shipped for Quebec, where a maternal uncle, Adrien Duchesne, had established himself some twenty years before. By taking service with the Jesuits, he opened his career in the New World with a shrewdness which testifies that he had profited by hearsay in the Old. The Jesuits sent him into the country of the Hurons, where he remained four years, at the end of which he received his pay ; according to the journal of the Jesuits, — twenty crowns and his clothing. But the knowledge of Indian dialects and characteristics, and of the physical, moral, and commercial features of the country acquired during this term of service, furnished the capital out of which he drew his prosperous future.

Le Moyne passed on to Trois Rivieres in the multiple capacity of trader, soldier, and interpreter, — a combination of sails which could not fail to catch some breeze of fortune. The following year he entered into the service of the Soci^t^ de Ville Marie on the then exposed and frontier site of the present Montreal. His loyalty and courage, his skill and address in dealing with the Indians, his youth, strength, and spirit, are all faithfully transcribed by his patrons. He must indeed have soon made himself indispensable to the exalted pietists, who needed all the support of their visions and miracles to enable them to cope with such elements of evil as beset them round about in the bloodthirsty Iroquois and the hardly less cruel rigours of the Canadian climate. It is not surprising that in their acute need for such a servitor they should attribute his presence among them to the direct interposition of Providence on their behalf. But they did not limit their gratitude, nor remit Le Moyne’s remuneration, to Providence. However much his daring with the Indians had commended him to their revenges, and however thick the crowns of saints and martyrs fell about him, his mundane shrewdness enabled him to avoid them, while his thrift worked out his pecuniary profit. At the age of twenty-eight he found himself not only celebrated in his small world on account of his fights and treaties with the Indians, but in addition the possessor of money and the proprietor of a rich concession , — consequently, in a position to marry. Such men marry well.

Catherine Tierry was the adopted daughter of Antoine Primot and Martine Messier, a worthy and well-to-do couple of the diocese of Rouen, who, responding to the call of the time, determined to devote their lives to the work of Ville Marie. Being childless, they obtained the one-year-old babe from her parents, and fetched her across the ocean with them in 1642, — one year after the emigration of her future husband.

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The little one grew and throve in the desperate conditions about her ; the crack of the gun, the terrors of Indian warfare, alternating, when there was an alternation, only with the sound of the church-bell and the ascetic enjoyment of devotion. She acquired the educational necessities of the period, and expanded into such virtue and modesty, according to the chronicle, such beauty of person and character, and such rich religious development, as made her at fourteen the most promising wife and mother in the settlement. Le Moyne asked her in marriage ; and in order, the chronicle says, to secure the preference over any other wooer, contracted by notarial act, dated Dec. lo, 1653, to marry her shortly after that date, putting up six hundred livres as forfeit-money. The adopted parents, no less anxious to secure so advantageous a son-in-law, guaranteed their good faith by a like amount. Monsieur Maisonneuve and Mademoiselle Mance, the spiritual father and mother of the settlement, signed their names, with other witnesses, to the paper. Events justified the estimation of all parties and the importance to the settlement of the event. The marriage was duly celebrated during the next six months ; it is recorded in the registry of the church of Notre-Dame, Montreal. A marriage so creditable to their nascent city received more than verbal approbation from the seigneurs of Ville Marie. Monsieur de Maisonneuve in their name presented the newly wedded ones with a concession of ninety arpents of land, between the St. Lawrence and Jean Saint-Pere rivers, comprising Pointe Saint-Charles, — so named henceforth for Le Moyne.

The chronicle now proceeds, in a double column, to o itemize the ever-ascending account of financial and domestic prosperity. A few years after the marriage, the concession of the present seat of the family was obtained. It was erected into a seigneury, and named Longueuil from the arrondissement in Normandy in which Dieppe stood, and in 1676 the letters of nobility were granted which made Charles Le Moyne Sieur de Longueuil.

None the less, soldier, trader, and interpreter, he ex tended the range of his activities and services from Ville Marie to the whole of Canada ; and while figuring in every account of the Indian fights, treaties, and expeditions of the time, — wounded and captured also once, — he continued his shrewd financial ventures and acquisitions of land, accumulating that provision of fiefs and dowers which his ambition and foresight deemed necessary for his sons and daughters, — an ever-increasing list ; Dame Catherine keeping up her tally well, of wife and mother, as she had promised.

Le Moyne died in 1685. His wife, bravely carrying on his business after him, survived him but five years. The inventory of the estate was princely for the period and place, — domains, silver, and commercial establishments. But it is not this, nor his title of nobility, that makes the Dieppe tavern-keeper’s son important or interesting to us, it is that tally, the keeping of which was confided to Dame Catherine, — the list of sons and daughters, of whom it may be said, with a retrospective view of their good parental equipment of strength, sense, and effectiveness, that no marriage ever contracted within her limits had ever been so profitable to Canada as that of Charles Le Moyne and

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Catherine Primot. Of the twelve sons, nine live distinguished in history, three were killed on the field of battle, and three became governors of cities or provinces. Their names are as follows : Charles, Sieur de Longueuil ; Jacques, Sieur de Sainte-Helene ; Pierre, Sieur d’Iberville ; Paul, Sieur de Maricourt ; Francois, Sieur de Bienville I. ; Joseph, Sieur de Serigny ; Louis, Sieur de Chateauguay I.; Jean Baptiste, Sieur de Bienville II.; Antoine, Sieur de Chateauguay II. ; Frangois Marie, Sieur de Sauvole. There were two daughters. Catherine Jeanne married Pierre Payen, Seigneur of Noyan, of the noble house of Chavoy, captain of marines and Chevalier of Saint Louis. She was the mother of the De Noyans whose connection with their uncle De Bienville, and whose fortunes and misfortunes in Louisiana, are still the subject of local romance there. Marie Anne married the Sieur de la Chassaigne, captain in the marine, Chevalier of Saint Louis, and afterwards governor of Trois Rivieres.

The subject of our biography, as has been seen, was but five years old when he lost his father ; at ten he was completely orphaned. There are no childhood records of these men. Their history begins with their fighting majority, which they fixed themselves according to their spirit and their physical endowment; before this period it is a mere matter of dates. De Bienville himself says^ that the only father he ever knew was his eldest brother, Charles, Sieur and later Baron of Longueuil, with whom he presumably lived before, and certainly after, their mother’s death in 1690.

1 Letter to the Baron de Longueuil, dated Louisiana, 2d Oct., 1713 (Histoirede Longueuil). This letter is given in full later.

JEAN BAPTISTE LE MOVNE,

This was the year in which the great fortress-chateau of Longueuil was finished, — the refuge and wonder of stateliness for the country round ; built all in brick and masonry, with walls and towers, guard-rooms and barracks, handsome church, farmyard, stables, sheepfolds, dovecotes, etc., decorated with all the insignia of nobility, as enumerated in the letter of Louis XIV. which conferred the title of baron on the possessor. Elevated by all the height of one generation above the humble class from which his father sprang, the second Sieur de Longueuil lived up to all the honours and duties of his position with the thoroughness of a descendant of the Crusaders. Not in the rough wars of Canada, but in the elegant campaign of Flanders, did he serve his apprenticeship as page of the Marechal d’Humieres. He had not only been to the court of the Great Monarch, but with his Indian attendant had figured there, as related by the Duchess of Orleans in one of her letters to her sister, the Countess Palatine Louise ; and he married no hourgeoise like his mother, but the daughter of a nobleman. Mademoiselle Claude Elizabeth Souart d’Adoucourt, lady to her Royal Highness of Orleans herself.

It is unmistakably to this house and to these surroundings that Louisiana is indebted for that “ tenue de grand seigneur ” of her young Canadian governor which, however aggravating to his enemies, yet throws a quaint picturesqueness over his ambitions and character, — a picturesqueness kept fresh in the city he founded by occasional haphazards, bits of faded splendour belonging once to the Hotel de Bienville, and by many a recorded ceremonial function and many a rhetorical phrase still

SI EUR DE BIENVILLE.

dimly brilliant in the dusty pages of official documents and private relations of the time.

In 1691, the young De Bienville I. was killed, gallantly fighting at Repentigny. The eleven-year-old Jean Baptiste was invested with the vacated title, — an investiture which comprised only the title, to judge from the stray remarks made from time to time by the inheritor of it. De Bienville, as he is henceforth called, intended to pursue his career upon the sea, following the example of his brothers D’Iberville and De Serigny, who were proving to the world that the Canadians were indomitable coiireurs de mer as well as coureurs de bois. At seventeen he is mentioned as gar de-mar in or midshipman, at Brest and at Rochefort, whence he must have sailed with Serigny’s squadron, which carried to Iberville, then at Placentia, the orders and the reinforcements necessary for another effort against the English establishments of Hudson Bay. He says he served at the side of Iberville on this expedition. It is an expedition which French and Canadian historians love to recall, — a titanesque affair, where, amid all the grim terrors of the Polar regions, after fighting for three weeks with icebergs, which separated him from his fleet, the Canadian commander met, single-handed, three English vessels. Out-sailing and out-manoeuvring them, he sank one, captured the other, and put the third to flight. Driven on the coast and shipwrecked by a tempest during the night, he saved himself, crew, and ammunition, but no provisions ; the nearest lay under the English flag at Fort Bourbon. He was marching on foot to capture them, when his belated fleet arrived. All proceeded together to the fort ; took it, and once lO more put the French flag in temporary possession of the disputed region.

Bienville accompanied Iberville to France. While the latter was discharging his scurvy-stricken crew into the hospital of Port Louis, he was sent for by Maurepas ; the commission to discover and take possession of the mouth of the Mississippi was offered him. He accepted it as summarily as it was offered, and for the new enterprise retained Bienville at his side, as garde-marin.

SI EUR DE BIENVILLE.

Chapter II

There was no time to lose. The sharp eyes of the English were also turned towards the mouth of the Mississippi. The peace of Ryswick, which had liberated French enterprise, liberated theirs no less, and they were as eager to profit by the streak of calm which fell over European politics as their rivals over the Channel. A company had already been formed in London for the establishment of a colonial and trading post upon the banks of the great river ; English vessels, loaded with Huguenot emigrants, it was confidently reported to Iberville, were on the point of sailing to take possession. The geographical prize was evidently to be to the swift. Minister and commander worked with a will. Orders from the former quickly followed, where they did not precede, requisitions from the latter. Two small frigates, the Badine ” and the “ Marin,” were overhauled, chartered, and refitted. Two of the stout Norman fishing-boats, called traversiers, were secured as transports. Crews were selected, and supernumeraries added by Iberville himself, — Canadians whom he knew, filibusters, Spanish deserters from Mexico, and Spanishspeaking Frenchmen. The usual stock-in-trade for Indian presents and barter, the provisions, the arms and ammunition, were all passed under the same keen eye, which could never tolerate the unforeseen in its horizon.

He made his preparations not only to arrive first at the goal, but to fight for it, should he come in second, and in either case to secure it and maintain it against all contestants. The expedition, thus fully and surely equipped, sailed from Brest on Friday, the 24th of October, 1698, at seven o’clock in the morning, Iberville leading, in the ‘‘Badine,” the Comte de Surgeres following in the “ Marin ; ” the heavily freighted, slowersailing traversiers lagging behind.

The voyage over the ocean was uneventful, except for the disappearance of one of the traversiers during a squall off Madeira. After a short search it was abandoned as lost, and the squadron continued without it. In less than six weeks the vessels anchored off Cape Francois, St. Domingo. Here the forced calm of the voyage was replaced by a bustling activity. Flour was made into biscuits, the casks were refilled with water, and one of the long-boats was taken out of frame and mounted.

The corvette “Frangois,” commanded by the Marquis de Chateaubriand, nephew of the great Tourville, reported now to Iberville for escort duty, according to the orders of the Minister of Marine ; and the lost transport made her appearance, belated, but not otherwise injured from the squall.

During their short sojourn on land the crew paid the usual penalty of mortality to the heat, eating imprudences, and the deadly fever, there called Siam fever, which, Iberville wrote to the Minister of Marine, seemed to have a particular grudge against the Canadians and scriveners. 'I'he ranks were replenished, however, with filibusters, — a class of men (tropical Canadians they

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might be called) to whom Iberville ever showed a strong inclination, and one well fitted for the enterprise in view.

Four English vessels had been observed cruising around. Prepossessed with the idea that they were on the same quest as he, Iberville pressed his provisionment to a rapid finish; and on the first day of 1699, the signals were flown from the “ Badine ” for the new start.

Favoured by good weather, but with the pestilential fever still aboard, the squadron made its way along the coast of Cuba, safely doubled Cape Corriente, gained the channel of Yucatan, and passing between Cape St. Antoine and Cape Catoche, dropped into the Gulf of Mexico.

As a general guide over the waters which had been the field of his career for twenty years, the governor of St. Domingo furnished Iberville with Laurent de Graff, one of the most noted filibusters of his time, and one of the leaders in the celebrated expedition which had once taken Vera Cruz and held it for ransom.

By his advice Iberville directed the course of the squadron towards a fine harbour, discovered by a filibuster captain upon a time when, making for St. Domingo, he had been driven into the Gulf by contrary winds, — a harboqr where the Spaniards were in the habit of going for masts, and which, it was rumoured, had been recently taken possession of by them, to prevent any other nation from establishing itself there.

According to Iberville’s and his officers’ calculations, this harbour should be found almost due north from where their vessels entered the Gulf, on the coast of

H

Plorida, somewhere between tlie river marked on their map as the Indios, and the Cabo de Lodo (Mobile Point), or about fifty miles west of the old Spanish possession of Apalache Bay, and about the same distance east of Mobile Bay. Iberville decided to look for the Mississippi in exactly the same location as the Espiritu Santo upon the early maps, and no doubt upon the two in his possession.

The ships sailed cautiously along, feeling their way with the lead, keeping a sharp lookout for the squalls — which, according to Spanish descriptions, made a hell of the Gulf of Mexico — and for the suspicious English vessels, experiencing, however, nothing more disturbing than calms and sudden veerings of the wind, and seeing nothing more alarming than flying-fish, and porpoises sporting under the beautiful blue waters, or the gulls foraging over the surface of them.

The officers took observations and compared notes, the men fished, the frigates heaving to from time to time for the lagging transports to catch up, and all lying by at sunset for the night. The afternoon of the twentythird day, as the ‘‘ Badine ” was casting anchor for the night, land was sighted in the northeast. Iberville shouted to Surgeres, on the “ Marin,” to crowd all sail towards it until sunset. At night the red glare of flames could be distinctly seen in that quarter, — prairies, the Canadians surmised, fired by Indians after buffalo. A long, low, half-inundated streak of land, running east and west, came into view with daylight. Nearer approach revealed shores of glistening white sand, a line of forest, a moderately sized stream, and behind all, far inland, the prairies still smoking from the night’s conflagration.

The steering had been true to the point ; the fleet lay about south of Apalachicola Bay. The vessels anchored for the night off Cape San Bias, firing cannon, to attract the attention of any savages thereabouts.

With the morning, a systematic inspection of the coast-line was organized ; Lescalette, the lieutenant of the “ Badine,” rowing in a barge close in, sounding and exploring every opening that presented itself, the frigates following as near as their draughts permitted, the corvette remaining well out to sea.

The river marked on their map as the Indios was passed, and league after league slowly told off in the course westward, until Lescalette signalled, not only the discovery of the mouth of a river, but the portentous fact that there were masts of vessels in it. The French officers in haste assembled for council on board the man-of-war, whose guns, at the request of Iberville, gave the signal to anchor for the night. The frigates and transports, as usual, answered with volleys of musketry. The vessels in the distant port fired off their guns also, — a defiant menace it sounded to the French. Then a fog fell, and for hours both fleets were insulated in a common cloud of ignorance and disquietude. When it lifted, a white flag was seen flying from one of the masts in the harbour, out of which a sloop advanced half way towards the French, paused until they raised their colours, then returned. The Marquis de Chasteaumorant, elaborate in deferential politeness, and minute in his delicate regard for the susceptibilities of his Canadian commander, had omitted his pennant, and all marks of his superior rank from the Francois.” But as the Francois ” was the largest and best-armed vessel in the squadron, and as the ships in the unknown harbour might be the English, Iberville requested the royal commander to display his colours again, which he did, thus assuming the role of commander-in-chief, for the nonce, of the expedition.

By daylight, Iberville sent Lescalette ashore to find out the name and nationality of the establishment, with careful instructions, however, not to reveal the destination or designs of the French. In order to furnish an excuse to enter the harbour, he was to represent that they were in need of wood and water, that the frigates were in search of a large body of Canadians reported to be on that coast, to whom they were conveying the king’s order to return. The transports were to play the role of freebooters captured by the French, the corvette was to be accounted for as having joined them at St. Domingo upon the rumour that a pirate vessel of fifty or sixty guns was cruising about those waters.

And now the name of the young De Bienville is formally introduced into history by the three relations of the expedition. ‘‘ My brother De Bienville,” and the young brother of M. dTberville,” is henceforward generally well in front when there is a boat to be manned, a message taken, or an adventure attempted. He was sent with Lescalette to remain in the boat and prevent the crew having any communication with the garrison on land. They made their way without difficulty past the sentinel, although the orders were to let no strangers into the harbour. Lescalette landed, and was conducted to the major in command. During his absence, De Bienville, passing himself off as his valet, and speaking English, obtained from a Bayonnais such various informal items as he judged might complete, establish, or refute official statements. Iberville received, on their return, a full budget from both.

The harbour was Santa Maria de Galvez de Pensacola. The Spaniards had been in possession but four months. The commandant was Don Andres de la Riola. The garrison consisted of about three hundred, the greater number galley-slaves and fellows picked up any way, from anywhere, — most of them at the time in irons. The frigates in the harbour, one of eighteen, the other of twenty guns, had fetched the colonists there, and were now ready to return to Vera Cruz, loaded with masts. They had taken the French squadron for the long-expected armadillo from Vera Cruz, and so had fired off their guns in salute of welcome. The country was miserable, the men were mutinous, and the officers dissatisfied. The entire establishment consisted of but shelters for the garrison, and a half-finished stockade fort on the left side of the mouth of the river.

A Spanish officer accompanied Lescalette on his return, the half-finished stockade fort firing a salute as they passed. Chasteaumorant, still acting the role of commander-in-chief, received the Spanish messenger, who brought the regrets of his commander that the French fleet could not be allowed to enter the harbour, as his establishment was a new and feeble one, but offering to have wood and water conveyed to them by his men and boats. As for refreshments, he was in greater lack of them than the French, being entirely dependent on Vera Cruz for them. He sent some present to the French commander, which Chasteaumorant returned with a demi-john of wine.

1 8 y£A,V BAPTISTE LE MOYNE,

During their officer’s absence the Spanish crew availed themselves of the opportunity to beg of the French the charity of some biscuit, as they were, they said, starving. They professed themselves anxious to serve the French king, and offered to desert to Chasteaumorant. He had food distributed to them, but warned them if they deserted he should be forced to return them to the Spanish authorities. He notes in his journal that judging by the way the Spanish officers ate when they dined with him, the story of their lack of food must be correct.

Their first pretext having failed, Chasteaumorant, in concert with, or more likely at the instigation of, Iberville, now wrote to Don Andres de la Riola that not considering the king’s ships to be in safety where they were, he should proceed the next morning to sound the entrance to the harbour, so that he might know it, in case he should be forced to seek shelter there from a south wind. This was in fact thoroughly accomplished at daylight the next morning by Iberville, Surgeres, and De Graff, who sounded up to the very frigates at anchor, before a note from the Spanish commander arrived, begging them to retire immediately, sending his own pilot to remain with them during their stay, and in emergency, to guide them into a place of safety, — any place on the coast was free to them except Pensacola. The French had their anchors raised ready to make the entrance, but they concluded instead, with reluctance, to relieve their anxious hosts and continue their voyage westward.