Illinois : the story of the prairie state

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Geography of Illinois ...... 1

II Before the French Came 4

II Before The French Came

10NG after the voyages of Columbus, long after ^ Spain and France and England and Holland had planted their colonies in America, the valley of the Mississippi was an unknown region. Although DeSoto's journey to the "father of waters'* gave Spain a claim to the Illinois country, and though this claim was confirmed by the Pope, the Spanish did nothing to explore or colonize it. Not until 1673, when the first of the French arrived, does Illinois history really begin.

But back of that, so far back that they are lost in the dim past, stretch slender threads of her story. For when the French came, they found here traces of a vanished people. We call them the "mound builders," from the peculiar mounds they raised. Were they forts, or altars, or sites of towns, or cemeteries, or signal stations ? No one can answer.

The mounds are scattered over Illinois, along the principal waterways. By the shore of Lake Michigan, along the bluffs of the Mississippi, near the Ohio and Rock and Wabash Rivers, you can see to-

BEFORE THE FRENCH CAME 5

day the remnants of their building.^ And curious they are — some as large as seven hundred feet, some made of soil brought from miles away, so numerous they hint at an enormous number of workmen employed.

The very little we know of these people we learn from the mounds themselves, and from the things found in them — flint spades and hoes, pottery, woven cloth, polished stone implements, and others of thin, hammered copper, silver, or iron, all showing a higher stage of development than the Indians had reached, yet far behind the civilization of Central America.^

But it is all so long ago that we can but guess at their history, and only geological words go far enough back to tell it.

Beside these traces of a prehistoric people, the first comers found Indians here, belonging to the Algonquin family. The Illinois were five tribes in a federation — Tamaroas, Michigamies, Kaskaskias, Cahokias and Peorias — like the famous Five Nations in New York State, but not so well organized.^ The name of state and river comes from "Illini," as they called themselves, with a French ending.

The Indians wandered over the prairies, living by hunting and fishing and a most primitive agriculture. Without knowing the use of iron, without domestic animals, without a written language, they were savages, and fighting was their principal occupation. For all the years they lived here, their story is constant warfare — war that was cruel and cowardly and causeless, in which men and women and children alike perished.

And if you argue that the Europeans had no right to take away the Indians' land, expelling the red men from their hunting grounds, for their own selfish advancement, the answer is contained in just those words. For the Indians, they were hunting grounds and nothing more. For the white men they are permanent fields of grain, sites for great cities, for manufacturing and mining, providing a livelihood for thousands and even millions of people, where only a few hundred Indians could live. They make a higher civilization possible, a greater blessing to humanity, a greater good to the greatest number.

And whatever you may say of the white man's unfairness and injustice to the red, not an incident in their history relates such treatment as one Indian tribe frequently gave to another. La Salle tells of an Iroquois invasion into Illinois, and the cruel death of hundreds of the Illinois tribes. And the French accounts show that in fifty-seven years their fighting men were reduced from twelve thousand to only six hundred warriors.*

Our Indian history is picture after picture of gavage war between the Illinois federation and th^

Cahokia, or "Monk's Mound," Madison Co., 111.

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■'4:'^^» '^

SI*.

BEFORE THE FRENCH CAME 7

other tribes living in the state. It is a story of desolation and extermination, for their aim was always to waste and destroy, not to build up. Nearly two hundred years passed, after the coming of the French, before the Indians were finally banished from Illinois.

Ill

THE PRIEST AND THE TRADER

YOU have learned, in your study of United States history, of the coming of the French to America ; how they based their claim on the voyage of Verrazani, how Cartier started a first settlement in Canada, how Champlain founded Quebec and made journeys of discovery to the south and west for a thousand miles. Their first knowledge of Illinois was when Champlain heard from the Lake Huron Indians of a people living still farther west, *'a nation where there is a quantity of buffalo," and so he described the prairie country on his map.^

The French settlements reached out toward the southwest, up the St. Lawrence and along the Great Lakes. Little by little they learned the geography of this country. Traders and priests frequently sent back Indian reports of a great water beyond, hinting of an ocean not far away, or a river running into some western sea. It was to settle this question that the governor in Montreal sent Marquette and Joliet on a trip of exploration, whose chief object,

THE PRIEST AND THE TRADER 9

wrote the Jesuit superior-general in Canada, "was to know in what sea emptied the great river of which the Indians tell so many stories."^ Their aim was the very same that had sent Columbus, nearly two centuries before, across the Atlantic — to find a water route to India. Their journey was, like his, unsuccessful, but they did find something fully as important.

Bom in Quebec, Louis Joliet was a fur-trader. In a trip to the copper mines near Lake Superior, he had won a reputation for courage and skill. He had the prudence necessary for a dangerous voyage, the courage to fear nothing where there was everything to fear. He had enterprise, boldness, determination. He knew several Indian languages. There was not a man in Canada better fitted to undertake a great discovery.^

Joliet was already acquainted with the good priest, Jacques Marquette, who for five years had been a missionary on the lakes. The Illinois tribes had visited his mission station in 1670, telling of the richness of their country, making him eager to visit it, to open the way for Christianity.

Marquette, with face thin and careworn, eyes deep set, dressed in a rusty black robe, with crucifix and rosary, was a religious enthusiast, fired with zeal. Joliet, broad-shouldered, alert, with intelligent face and energetic gesture, was a great contrast. The

Jesuit's one thought, the salvation of souls; the trader's ambition, to win glory for himself and for France — they made a good team, one supplementing the other.*

"My companion," said Marquette to the Indians, "is an envoy of France to discover new countries, and I am an ambassador from God to enlighten them with the gospel."

The winter of 1672 Joliet spent in the mission station at Mackinac, and the two friends completed their plans for the journey.

"As we were going to seek unknown countries," wrote the priest, in a report to his superior, "we took all possible precautions that, if our enterprise was hazardous, it should not be foolhardy ; for this reason we gathered all possible information from Indians who had frequented those parts, and even from their accounts traced a map of all the new country, marking down the rivers on which we were to sail, the names of the nations and places through which we were to pass, the course of the great river, and what direction we should take when we got to it.

"We were not long in preparing our outfit, although we were embarking on a voyage the duration of which we could not foresee. Indian corn, with some dried meat, was our whole stock of provisions. With this we set out in two bark canoes, M. Jollyet, myself, and five men, firmly resolved to do all and suffer all for so glorious an enterprise."**

{THE PRIEST AND JHE TRADER 11

Starting in May, crossing the narrow portage from the Fox River, they paddled down the Wisconsin and "safely entered the Mississippi on the 17th of June, with a joy that I can not express." Hoisting the sails on their canoes, they floated down the "father of waters," between the "broad plains of Illinois and Iowa, all garlanded with majestic forests and chequered with illimitable prairies and island groves."

"At last, on the 25th of June, we perceived footprints of men by the water-side, and a beaten path entering a beautiful prairie. . . . We stopped to examine it, and concluding that it was a path leading to some Indian village, we resolved to go and reconnoitre. . . . M. Jolly et and I . . . followed the little path in silence, and having advanced about two leagues, we discovered a village on the banks of the river. . . . Then, indeed, we recommended ourselves to God, with all our hearts ; and, having implored His help, we passed on undiscovered, and came so near that we even heard the Indians talking. We then deemed it time to announce ourselves, as we did by a cry. . . . The Indians rushed out of their cabins, and having probably recognized us as French, especially seeing a black gown, . . . they deputed four old men to come and speak with us. . . . I . . . asked them who they were ; they answered that they were Ilini, and, in token of peace, they presented their pipes to smoke."

Marquette's report goes on to tell of their entertainment in that village, and how the chief

"begged us, on behalf of his whole nation, not to proceed further, on account of the great dangers to which we exposed ourselves.

"I replied that I did not fear death, and that I esteemed no happiness greater than that of losing my life for the glory of Him who made all. But this those poor people could not understand."

Before they left the Indians

"made us a present, an all-mysterious calumet, . . . than which there is nothing among them more mysterious or more esteemed. Men do not pay to the crowns and sceptres of kings the honor they pay to it ; it seems to be the god of peace and war. . . . Carry it about you and show it, and you can march fearlessly amid enemies. . . . Hence the Ilinois gave me one, to serve as my safeguard amid all the nations that I had to pass on my voyage."

South they went, past the painted bird of Piasa, past the dangerous sweep of the Missouri, where it joins its yellow stream to the Mississippi, the peace pipe about Marquette's neck probably giving them more protection than his cross. And after a month's journey down the Mississippi, satisfied from Indian accounts and their own observations that it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, and fearing they might

THE PRIEST AND THE TRADER 13

fall into the hands of the Spaniards if they reached the sea, they decided to return.

The priest became ill and lay helpless in the bottom of the canoe for weeks, while the little party slowly made their way against the current. Of special interest is their route north, for they left the Mississippi and went up the quiet Illinois, the Indians telling them this was a shorter route and would bring them on their way with little trouble.

"We had seen nothing like this river," writes Marquette, "for the fertility of the land, its prairies, woods, wild cattle, stag, deer, . . . ducks, parrots, and even beaver; its many lakes and rivers."

By way of Chicago and Lake Michigan, they returned to Green Bay in September, without losing a man or receiving any hurt or injury whatever. Joliet, returning to Canada the next spring, was within sight of Montreal when his canoe was upset in the rapids, and his carefully drawn map and full report, telling all that was curious and interesting in their voyage, was lost. Marquette thus becomes the historian of the French discovery of the Mississippi, and the report he wrote from the mission station in Wisconsin is Illinois's first historic document. He was more interested in converting the savages than in explorations, so that his journal is brief, but correct and reliable.^

The French were astonished at the magnitude of their discoveries — the soil and its products, the buffalo, the beauty of the country. And we are equally astonished at this journey — a four months* trip in frail canoes, covering twenty-five hundred miles, discovering the greatest valley in the world.

Marquette remained at the Green Bay mission for a year, regaining his strength after so many hardships, and then started south, to keep his promise and establish a mission among the Illinois tribes. His party arrived at the site of Chicago early in December, describing it as "a snow-covered prairie and an ice-bound river. "^ The priest being ill again, they determined to spend the winter there, and built a rude hut. Though it was cold and bleak, game was plentiful, and some friendly Indians were encamped near by.

By the last of March Marquette was able to travel to Kaskaskia, where he was received as an angel from Heaven. Five hundred chiefs and old men and fifteen hundred youths came to the great council where he said mass and took possession of the land in the name of Christ. He named the mission "the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin," redeeming his vow at the beginning of his voyage with Joliet. The mission kept this name, even when the village was moved south nearly to the mouth of the Kaskaskia River. And the little church and

JHE PRIEST AND THE TRADER 15

parish in New Kaskaskia are to-day called Immaculate Conception.®

Very ill, Marquette had to leave in a few months, and died on the way to Canada. His was a lovely character, and his self-sacrifice endeared him to every one. He gave himself up entirely to the most severe and dangerous service, not with complaints, but with the greatest pleasure. Among all the devout missionaries he has no equal for piety, for holiness of purpose, for the great tasks he performed.

If you would know more about him, read his life, by Thwaites, or chapter five in Parkman's Discovery of the Great West. Read Marquette's own reports, which you will find translated in Breese's Early History of Illinois, and in Shea's Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley; part of Shea's translation is reprinted in the first volume of the collections of the Illinois State Historical Library. You will like especially Marquette's description of the bufifalo, of their stay in the Illinois village, and his unfinished letter telling of his last visit to these tribes, the end of the story written by one of the French priests who accompanied him.

IV

THE news of this discovery set all Canada on fire, and France, too, caught the fever. Most important of the men suddenly enthusiastic for v^restem enterprise was Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. The son of wealthy Rouen parents, he had joined a brother in Montreal and become a fur-trader. He was the first to see how important Marquette's discovery was, and to make the French government realize it and give him authority to carry out his plan. This was no less than to extend the French empire in America into the southwest, to explore the Mississippi, open the country to French trade, and make the river a highway for the world's commerce.^

Something of La Salle's difificulties you already know : how the king gave him a title, a grant of land, command of the forts which he might erect, but no funds at all ; how, when Fort Frontenac was finished, he built a vessel of forty tons, with great white sails and the figurehead of a grifftn; how from his trading-post at Mackinac he sent the Griffin east across Lake Ontario, with a rich cargo of furs; and how then his httle party started south.

Thirty men and three priests — it was certainly not a miHtary expedition ! The rehgious leader was the ambitious Father Hennepin, more explorer than priest. The lieutenant was Henri de Tonty, an Italian, who had lost one hand in a battle in Sicily, and was called by the Indians "the man with the iron hand." They might well have named the leader, La Salle, him of the iron will; for his courage was never daunted, no matter what disasters and misfortunes came to him. Only such a character could have made his achievements possible.

Without waiting for news of the boat's safe arrival, they went up the St. Joe, crossed the portage, down the Kankakee and into Illinois. It was now December, and their provisions were very low. Reaching an Indian village near Ottawa, they were disheartened to find it deserted, the red men away on their winter hunt. But they did find some corn, stored for seed in the spring, and took what they needed.

Farther down the river they overtook the Illinois tribes, paid for the corn with axes, and received permission to build a fort, promising help against the Iroquois. The fort was named Crevecoeur, in English "broken heart." And many writers have thought La Salle chose it because of his disappointments and difficulties. Indeed, Father Hennepin says :

"We named it the fort of Crevecoeur, because of the desertion of our men, and the other difficulties we labored under had almost broke our hearts."*

And certainly La Salle had every reason to be heavy-hearted. For his little group was far in advance of any of the French settlements ; the Indians were at best uncertain friends; two of his carpenters had deserted; his men threatened to mutiny, and had tried to poison him; most of all, if the Griffin were really lost, it meant financial ruin.

Yet, if La Salle were utterly discouraged and heart-broken, would he have told his men? What they needed was encouragement. Crevecoeur may sound romantic, but there must be some explanation; and recent study has perhaps supplied it. A few years before, the army of Louis XIV had captured a fort in the Netherlands called Crevecoeur, and the name may have been a compliment to the king. This is the more credible, since we know now that Tonty, who was for years a French soldier, had taken part in the capture of the Dutch fort.*

The American Crevecoeur was nearly finished, as was the boat they were building, when La Salle divided his men. Father Hennepin, who could, thought the leader, do more good by exploring than by preaching, was sent down the Illinois to its mouth, and then up the Mississippi, In the hope that it led west to India. The whole country seemed so fine and pleasant that the priest says one might justly call it "the delight of America."

At the falls of St. Anthony he and his two men were taken prisoners by the Sioux Indians, detained several months, and finally reached Canada. Like Marquette, Hennepin wrote about his adventures, but some of his accounts are not altogether reliable, though they reached over twenty editions, in six languages. "He writes of what he saw in places where he never was," says a contemporary; "the name of honor they gave him there (in Canada) is the great liar"^

The second division was to return to Canada.

"All the wood had been prepared to finish the bark, but we had neither rigging nor sails nor iron enough," writes Tonty. "La Salle determined in this extremity not to wait longer, but to proceed on foot to Fort Frontenac, five hundred leagues away, for the necessary equipment. The ground was still covered with snow. His outfit must contain a blanket, a kettle, an axe, a gun, powder and lead and dressed skins for shoes (our French shoes being of no use in these western countries). He must push through bushes, walk in marshes and melting snow, sometimes waist high for whole days, sometimes even with nothing to eat, because he must needs depend for subsistence on what he might shoot and drink only the water he might find on the way. Besides this he was constantly exposed to four or five Indian nations making war on each other."

And later Tonty wrote, from his own experience :

"There Is no pleasure in meeting warriors on one's road, especially when they have been unsuccessful/'^

In spite of the severe weather, in spite of storm and famine and sickness, they arrived safely. The Griffin had not been heard from. La Salle straightened out his financial affairs, got a new outfit together, enlisted twenty-five men, and again set out for Illinois.

Meantime Tonty, left at Crevecoeur with "three honest men and a dozen plotting knaves," was having serious troubles. Ten of his followers deserted, looted the magazine, took what food they could carry, and cast the rest into the river. Thrown on the charity of the Indians, Tonty's little party took refuge in their village for six months. Here the Illinois Indians were attacked by their old enemy, the Iroquois. The French tried their best to make a truce between them, the Illinois tribes retreated to the south, and Tonty, forced to leave, returned to Mackinac.

So when La Salle arrived he found the fort absolutely deserted. The savage Iroquois, the moment the French had gone, devastated the village, burned the lodges, and left the ground strewn with corpses of women and children. La Salle searched to see if any Frenchmen were there, turning over body after body, relieved to find no trace of them.^

Hoping to find them prisoners, he followed the Indians down the Illinois River to the Mississippi, searching for loyal Tonty. There his men proposed going on down the great river, but he must find his friends first; so they went north again, and after fourteen months' separation La Salle met his lieutenant.

"Any one else except him," wrote one of the priests, "would have abandoned the enterprise, but he, with a firmness and constancy which never had its equal, was more resolved than ever to push forward his work."^

The two friends had hardly greeted each other before they were planning another expedition ; and in 1682 La Salle and Tonty finally explored the Mississippi clear to the sea. Many were their adventures on the way, many the strange tribes they met. Holding up the calumet, the Italian approached one group, who joined their hands in token of friendship.

"But I, who had but one hand, could only tell my men do the same in response."

At the mouth of the Mississippi, with imposing ceremony, they erected a column and a cross, with the arms of France, and took possession of the country, calling it Louisiana. This valley was an empire far larger than France had in Europe, and extended her American boundary from Niagara to the gulf. La Salle saw at once its great resources and dreamed of its future. He conceived the idea of a New France, controlling the St. Lawrence, the chain of lakes and the Mississippi Valley. He planned a chain of military stations, which should be centers for trade and colonizing, and should hem the English in along the Atlantic coast. He himself built six of these posts, and his far-seeing plan became the policy of the French kings, till there were sixty forts whose possession determined the history of America.®

One of these posts, said La Salle, must be in the Illinois country, to prevent Iroquois raids. On their way north from the Gulf of Mexico, Tonty was left to finish fortifying the great rock on the Illinois River, which nature had begun. Impregnable on three sides, the fourth could be approached only by a narrow winding path. Here the French made additional palisades, felling trees and dragging them up the steep path with incredible labor. Almost like an eagle's nest, the fort was built on the summit and named St. Louis du Rocher.®

In the valley far below gathered the Indians, nearly fourteen thousand of them. La Salle's plan was to protect them, teach them agriculture and Christianity, and sell them French goods in exchange for their furs. As governor of the country, Tonty held this vast group together, kept his garrison busy and contented, and exerted unbounded influence over the Indians.

Priests, traders, even the Illinois tribes, when the Iroquois appeared, found the fort a place of refuge in the wilderness. But after twenty years a jealous governor in Canada took away Tonty's position, the great rock became a trading-post, and later was burned by the Indians. The record of the "Jesuit Relations" says that Tonty died of yellow fever, at Biloxi, in 1704.^^ But the Indian legend is that in the summer of 1718 Tonty's canoe once more arrived at Fort St. Louis, on a sad errand, and here died the brave Italian of the iron hand and loyal heart."

And there is another tradition of this great rock, telling the story of a group of Illinois Indians who took refuge here, hoping to escape the general slaughter that followed Pontiac's death. The savage enemy they easily kept at bay, but hunger and thirst defeated them. With true Indian fortitude they lay down to die, and for years afterward their bones whitened the summit of the rock. And in memory of this tragedy the site of Tonty's fort is called, not St. Louis, but Starved Rock.

You remember the sad ending of La Sailers adventures? How he sailed from France to form a settlement at the mouth of the Mississippi, that Illinois might have a direct connection with the West Indies and Europe; how one ship went down in a storm, and one was captured by the Spanish; how by accident they went too far west and landed in Texas ; and how the dauntless leader, starting overland to get help in Illinois or Canada, was murdered by one of his jealous men?

La Salle was a busy, restless spirit, a man of indomitable energy, untiring in his efforts to promote the interests of France. He was not a trader nor a priest, but an empire builder, seeing beyond his time the future of a continent. He was, writes Tonty, "one of the greatest men of the age, of wonderful abiHty, and capable of accomplishing any enterprise."^^

Would you like to read more of these two friends? Parkman's Discovery of the Great West tells their story, much of it translated from old French reports, and written in a most fascinating style. And you will find, in the first volume of the Illinois Historical Collections, Hennepin's narrative in English, and a memoir of Tonty, quaintly told and full of details.

You'd rather have a real story? Then read the Man with the' Iron Hand, by Parish, and Catherwood's Story of Tonty, where La Salle and his little niece. Father Hennepin and Tonty are the characters at Fort Frontenac and Starved Rock.

UNDER THE FRENCH FLAG

UNLIKE most European colonies, which began with forts and palisades, the French frontier settlements were first a group of Indian lodges, then missionary stations with chapels, then trading-posts with store houses, and finally isolated villages. Vagabond wanderers, voyageurs, as the skilled river boatmen were called, and the forest outlaws, coureurs de hois, mingling with soldiers, priests and traders, formed a picturesque population. Little by little farmers came, and permanent settlements grew up.

Hunting and fishing supplied a living, the soil was very fertile, the climate mild and healthful. Best of all, the French were always on friendly terms with the Indians. In comparison with the English colonies, the early settlements in Illinois had few difficulties. There were no taxes to be paid, no government to be supported, the priests were the leaders of the people.

But France was having constant war in Europe and could not send supplies or men to this distant

UNDER THE FRENCH FLAG 27^

province. So in 1712 the king granted to one of his counselors, Antoine Crozat, the commerce of Louisiana, which included Illinois. He was to search for mines, paying to the crown a fifth of the gold and silver and pearls he found, and a tenth of any other minerals.^ For the French, like Englishmen and Spaniards, believed the country to be fabulously rich.

For four years Crozat's men dug and bored and prospected, finding only the lead mines in Missouri, opposite Kaskaskia. Clearly gold and silver were not here, and the grant was soon surrendered to the king.

Louisiana was then given to the Company of the West, part of John Law's marvelous credit scheme to rebuild the finances of France.^ At the mouth of the Mississippi they founded the city of New Orleans. To protect the Illinois settlements they built Fort Chartres, a few miles above Kaskaskia.

Where the government's notes had been worth only twenty-two per cent., Law's shares were soon selling for thirteen hundred, for all France went crazy over his bank. The great fortunes made were quickly lost, for the scheme was a bubble that burst. The company was wrecked, Louisiana reverted to the crown, and the king made a new government for this province, separate from Canada, with Illinois one of its districts. For the first time men could secure titles to the lands they had held only at the sufferance of the Indians.^

From Law's company the Illinois settlements received a new impulse. New Orleans now offered a market for all their surplus products. Going in convoys for safety, the boats carried flour, buffalo meat and venison, lead from the mines, furs and hides, and brought back in exchange rice, sugar, and cloth from Europe.