A history of the Mississippi Valley, from its discovery to the end of foreign domination

Front matter

Class ilS5_2__ Book '"0 74 G(piglitl?

From a portrait by Jarvis, said to be from lift

A History of the

Introduction

This work is to give an account of the things done in the Mississippi Valley during the period of foreign control. It is intended to be a narrative, not a critical, history. The writer has tried to tell about the achievements of the men who traversed the Great Lakes in birch bark canoes, or walked through the passes of the Alleghanies, to reach the Mississippi Valley, and, when there, turned the mighty wilderness into the Garden of the World.

Naturally the story begins with the heroic Frenchmen who first learned the way to the Great Basin. In the days when the people of Massachusetts were establishing a trading post on the Piscataqua River, New Hampshire, and the Virginians were sending an exploring expedition to learn whether a river flowed into Delaware Bay, Jean Nicolet was making peace with the Indians on the shores of Green Bay, Wisconsin. While the Dutch of New Amsterdam were trading with the Indians at Albany, Grosseilliers and Radisson, paddled up the Ottawa River, (though the region was the haunt of the Iroquois), and carried trade goods to the Sioux on the banks of the Mississippi. When the British were taking New York from the Dutch, La Salle was stretching a line of forts from the St. Lawrence River toward the mouth of the Mississippi.

Yet the nation from which the intrepid coureurs de ii Introduction.

hois and explorers sprang produced also other pioneers whose manner of life was so far removed from that of the woods rangers as to furnish the most striking contrast known to American history. For those were the days of Louis XIV. and XV., when women who were not queens ruled the Court of France. It was not "the brief season of the Canadian summer, the weary winter, the hazards of the crop," that brought failure to the French settlements. The settlements in Louisiana were in a kindly climate and they stood on the richest soil of the earth. The French failed at the south as well as the north because of the fungi spread by the shadow of the French Court. The beginning of the French Revolution was seen in America when the man with the axe drove the lace-bedecked vagabond carrying a sword from the lands west of the Alleghanies.

In the meantime, both the French and the British had supplanted, more or less, another race of people — a race of red men known as Indians. In modern times, while the people of the United States have difficult race problems still in hand, it seems worth while remicmbering that because those red men were less developed than the white, they were the wards of the whites. The Indians were children, (they were often called so by the men who knew them best ) , and the white men were rightfully their guardians. It was a responsibility that was ignored and rudely thrust aside, but with such infinitely distressful results as we shall see.

The white men found the Indian passing rapidly from the life of a hunter to that of the agriculturist; but instead of aiding in the transition, the whites, by offering to buy furs, turned the red agriculturists back

Introduction. iii

to the hunter Hfe. They did worse; they created a market for human scalps. For one hundred and jfifty years the red men were, by every means incited to shed the blood of animals and men ; and then the white man looked upon them with horror and disgust because they were ready to fight for their hunting grounds.

But while the white race as a whole were cultivating the red thirst for blood, a few white men, known as Quakers and Moravians, were dealing with the red men on an entirely different basis. The Quakers and Moravians were subjected to many indignities and even outrages for their peculiarity of regard for the less developed red men. Historians have not failed to denounce them, and. frontiersmen have ever groped for words with which to express their disgust when thinking of "Quaker sentiment."

But the story of Gnadenhutten, written in blood that will not "out," proves beyond doubt or question that the tepees and huts of every red village in the land might have been turned into "Tents of Grace."

It is a frightful fact that for every red man slain by by the whites, in the frontier wars, at least three whites were slain by the red. That fact is sufficient to damn the white policy, but it is not all; for because of the policy that was pursued by those who despised "Quaker sentiment," we are even now paying more than ten million dollars a year for the expenses of the Indian Bureau. Yet the fact remains that the cost of converting the Delaware Indians of Gnadenhutten from the red savages, which they had been, to the stump-grubbing farmers, which they became, was less than the waste of any one of hundreds of Indian raids.

iv Introduction.

While the people of the United States have the vestige of a race problem yet unsolved the story of Gnadenhutten is the most instructive of all that are known to the annals of America. Let those who, with bobbing heads, mumble some sort of a creed on Sundays, and live the devil knows how the rest of the week, consider it with care, for to them it has a special significance.

But this is by no means to withhold sympathy from the frontier Americans. Their migration w^as instinctive; it was due to the innate characteristics of a dominant race. It was inevitable, and in every way desirable. No one has a right to complain because they took the hunting grounds of the red man. The Indian should have been deprived of his hunting grounds to the last acre, wnth the utmost possible speed, and supplied with farms and play grounds instead. It was the manner of taking that cursed the frontiersmen, and they are to be pitied with an infinite pity. The effect of the evil policy on the frontiersmen is the important matter. They were the advance guard of the hosts of civilization and were sent forth to be slaughtered for the salvation and benefit of those who came after. Of 250 men in Robertson's Settlement at Nashville, 229 died by violence inside of twelve years.

In connection with the slaughter of the frontiersmen in the Mississippi Valley it is impossible to ignore the fact that the red men were, during the War of the Revolution and for twelve years after it, sicked on by British officers. That is a story to rouse the indignation of every patriot, and, at first thought, one might say it should be glossed over in this era of growing good feeling between nations. On the other hand,

Introduction.

however, one should not forget that to gloss over is to lie. Moreover, the story is worth telling to show the tremendous contrast between that era and the present — a contrast that has been made possible by the development of Christian civilization, and the construction of an American fleet of unequalled war ships.

And that is to say, indirectly, that nations have always been, and are, bullies. They treat the powerful, and no others, with the kindliest consideration. Near the end of the Eighteenth Century we would not create a navy, but we built a ship of war, ballasted it with silver dollars, and sent it to a Mediterranean pirate to purchase his favor. We permitted ourselves to be blackmailed by African corsairs. And in consequence of our craven spirit, the British held a firm grasp on the territory northwest of the Ohio River; the Spanish held Natchez and our southwest territory ; the French with their privateers and naval ships, swept our commerce from the West Indies, and all three powers bullied and browbeat our Government officials at almost every interchange of communications. The American State Papers are instructive if unpleasant reading. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century we have in hand battleships with broadside guns of seven-inch and eight-inch caliber— battleships that are far and away superior to anything conceived elsewhere — and we have unruffled peace, with unopposed progress in the development of our civilization.

If we were led by foolish policies in other days, it was because we were foolish, and not because of any lack of examples in right policies. The story of the work of George Rogers Clark in the Illinois country is vi Introduction.

one of the most instructive in the war annals of the world. There were two methods of repelling the raids of the enemy in those days. The common way was to build a log fort, and when protected by its walls, to shoot every enemy that came in sight. It was a method that became national. We built forts at the Atlantic ports, and, as late as 1890, we built "coast defence" ships. The forts and coast defence ships were not wholly useless. Like the quills of the porcupine, they could prove very useful, under some circumstances. The porcupine method of repelling an enemy was held in high regard for many years by our people.

But George Rogers Clark (an American born a hundred years ahead of his time, he), would have none of the porcupine policy. He saw that the way to protect the frontier was to carry the war to the strongholds of the enemy. He took Kaskaskia and Vincennes. He gave the United States the Northwest Territory. He was urgent for men and means with which to take Detroit. Had his requests been heeded the raids on Kentucky would have ceased, and there would have been no trouble over the Northwest posts in after years.

But because Clark's work was ignored, the broad territory which he had won had to be rewon, and *'Mad" Anthony Wayne was the man for the day. Of all the brigadiers of the Revolution, he is best worth memory, but it is not on his "mad" charges in the face of the enemy that his fame is grounded. Those, indeed, were splendid, but that parade of his men with their hair neatly powdered before the attack on Stony Point is significant; so is the further fact that every dog within three miles of the Point was killed before the attack.

Introduction. vii

But of all that this man did, nothing will be remembered longer than the fact that when he came to reconquer the region Clark had won, he trained more than a thousand men of his legion until they could load and fire their rifles with precision while charging at full speed on the enemy. Anthony Wayne was the best drill master the American army ever had.

As said, this work is to give an account of the things done in the Great Valley, but necessarily a record had to be made of those proceedings elsewhere by which the destinies of the Valley were influenced. The Spanish, who were really the first to see the Valley, and who at the end of the Seven Years War, obtained New Orleans and the region between the Rockies and the Mississippi, took possession of Natchez and a large section of American soil during the War of the Revolution. They were determined, after the war was ended, not only to hold it, but to grasp all the unsettled part of the Great Valley, regardless of American claims. In this matter the French Government earnestly supported them, and the diplomatic complications that grew out of this condition of affairs, are interesting. In their efforts to "cinch" the territory the Spanish amuse or exasperate the student of history according to his mental attitude toward their peculiar characteristics. But the settlers of the Great Valley, in the days of the Spanish complications, never found the situation amusing, and the fact that the Spanish were not swept out of the Mississippi Valley by a flood tide of indignant backwoodsmen must ever remain a matter of wonder and pride to the American patriot.

By unwavering persistence the Americans foiled viii Introduction.

the Spanish shufflings, evasions and obstinacy, so that a time came when Spain traded the great Louisiana territory back to France. The day of its salvation v^as then close at hand. Napoleon ruled France, and for a brief period, he thought to regain for her all the splendid region on which La Salle had filed the French claim. He bought the Louisiana territory; he thought to take the land east of the Mississippi with an army of 10,000 men. But when the eagle alighted before him with one naked claw representing 30,000 "Prime Riflemen," and the other offering him a purse, his vision was cleared. The transfer of Louisiana to the United States was made through the hatred of the British and the fear of America. He prophesied that the valley of the Mississippi would make the United States a "maritime rival" of the British, and a century after his prophesy was made, the greatest transatlantic lines of steamships are controlled by capitalists whose wealth has been drawn from traffic originating in the Great Basin. But, curiously enough, the development which Napoleon hoped for has only served to draw the English-speaking rivals closer together, instead of driving them apart.

It is a long story, this of the Mississippi Valley, but from the year when Grosseiliers and Radisson first traded for beaver skin on the bank of the upper river, until the day when the Gridiron Flag, hoisted at New Orleans, covered the whole Great Basin, it is a story that can be summed up in one word — JVork. From the first to the last, the men whose names are memorable in the history of the Valley, whether they were traders like the courcurs de hois looking for profit ; or empire

Introduction.

IX founders, like La Salle, looking for power; or migrators, like the hosts that followed the Ohio and the Wilderness Road, looking for home sites; or statesmen like Monroe and Livingston, looking for the good of the Nation, all have been men who could and who would work. Work is the one word emblazoned on the escutcheon of the people of the Great Basin,

To show a part of what work has accomplished in the affairs of a mighty region is the chief object of this book, and it is therefore offered to the growing host of good Americans who see clearly that

"The All of Things is an infinite conjugation of the verb To Do"

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. On the Brim of the Great Basin i

II. First Exploration of the Mississippi River 13