Historic Highways of America/Volume 3/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
THE ARMS OF THE KING OF FRANCE
IN the year fifteen hundred and forty, Jacques Cartier raised a white cross crowned with the fleur-de-lis of France upon an improvised altar of crossed canoe paddles at Quebec, bearing the inscription "Franciscus Primus, Dei gratia, Francorum Rex Regnat," and formally took possession of a new continent. Two centuries later, in the dawn of early morning, British soldiers wrested from the betrayed Montcalm the mist-enshrouded height where that emblazoned cross had stood, and New France fell—"amid the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin."
All the American Indians soon found, as the Iroquois had, that nothing would do but these newly come Frenchmen must run about over all the country. Each river must be ascended, the portages traversed, and lakes crossed. Every hint of further rivers and lakes resulted forthwith in a thousand questions, if not in the immediate formation of an exploring expedition.
And yet there was method in the madness of this running about. In the first place log forts were founded at various points, and when the world came to know even a fraction as much as the French did about the West, it found that these forts were situated at the most strategic points on the continent. For instance, there was Fort Frontenac near the narrowing of Lake Ontario into the St. Lawrence. This fort commanded that river. Then there was Fort Niagara, which commanded the route to Lake Erie. There was Fort Detroit which commanded all access from Lake Erie to lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior. There were forts La Bœuf, Venango, and Duquesne to hold the Ohio, Fort Sandusky to hold the Sandusky river, Fort Miami at the head of the rapids on the Miami-of-the-Lakes, to hold that river, and the portage to the Wabash, and Vincennes and Kaskaskia and other posts in the Illinois country.
The Indians did not object to these forts because they found that they were really no forts at all, but rather depots and warehouses for the great fur trade, where their heavy stacks of otter and sable and beaver skins could be exchanged for such splendid colored ribbons and tinkling bells, and powder, lead, and whiskey. Each fort became a trading post where the Indians gathered frequently for entertainments—of various character.
Fancy if you can the emparadizing dreams which must have filled the head of many a governor of New France, as he surveyed with heaving breast the vast domains of the Mississippi valley, comprising four million square miles of delectable land, and pictured the mighty empire it would some day sustain—outrivaling the dreams of a Grand Monarque. Fancy, if you can, the great hopes of the builder of Quebec who could see the infant city holding in fee all the great system of lakes beside whose sea-outlet it stood—the Gibraltar of the new continent. Fancy the assemblies of notables which met when a returned Jesuit or forgotten coureur-de-bois came hurrying down the Ottawa in his canoe and reported the finding of a mighty river, yet unchronicled, filled with beaver and otter; a new, bright gem for the Bourbon crown!
And so, we may suppose, such assemblies referred mockingly to the stolid Englishmen living along the Atlantic seaboard to the south. How the French must have scorned England's conception of America. Long after the French had passed from Quebec to the Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, the English had a boat built at home which could be taken apart on the upper waters of the James river, carried across the mountains on wagons, to be put together on the shores of the Pacific Sea. How the French must have laughed when they heard of this; can you not see them drinking hilariously to the portable boat stranded in the Alleghany forests three thousand miles from its destination?
And so it was that the wily emissaries of the Bourbon throne incorporated the fast filling hunting-ground of the Iroquois, with New France. It was an easily acquired country since they brought nothing into it that was not wanted, and took nothing away—but furs! Though of these they were particular respecting the number and the quality, and especially that traders from the English settlements over the mountains should not come and get them.
But it turned out that the English not only came, but even claimed for themselves the Ohio country which lay beyond the Alleghany mountains! If Cabot and Drake discovered the continent, did they not discover its interior as truly as its seaboard? Moreover, the English had by treaty acquired certain rights from the Iroquois which held good, they maintained, wherever the Iroquois had carried their irresistible conquests from Labrador to the everglades of Florida. And who could then say that this did not hold good beyond the Alleghanies, where the Iroquois for so long had been the acknowledged masters?
Thus it was, slowly, naturally, and with the certainty of doom itself, there drew on the terrible war which decided whether the destiny of the new continent should be placed in the hands of a Teutonic or a Gaelic civilization—whether Providence should hold the descendants of the founders of Jamestown or of Quebec responsible for its mighty part in the history of human affairs. This war has received the vague name of the "French and Indian" war. By this is meant the war England and her colonists in America fought against the French and Indians.
It is remarkable enough that this war, which was to settle so much, began from a spark struck in the West. The explanation of this is found in the fact that a great expanse of forest separated the English settlements on the Atlantic seaboard and the great line of French settlements, three thousand leagues in length, which stretched from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. The nearest points of contact were in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for here the rivalry of French and English traders had been most intense.
Virginians found it a very acceptable part to play—this trying the test case with France to decide who was the real master of the land over the mountains. In 1749, a company of Virginian gentlemen received from the King of England a royal charter granting them possession of two hundred thousand acres of the Black Forest between the Monongahela and Kanawha rivers.
The astonishment and anger of the French on the St. Lawrence knew no bounds. Immediately the French governor Galissonière set on foot plans which would result in the withdrawal of the English colonists.
Looking back through the years, it may seem very strange that the governors of New France never anticipated a clash with England on the Ohio and prepared for it, but it appears, that, of all the West, Lake Erie and the Ohio river were the least known to the French. This can be understood by following the romantic story of French exploration:
On a wild October day, Cartier, who raised the altar at Quebec and claimed the new continent, stood on Mt. Royal, looking wistfully westward. Behind him lay the old world throbbing with an intuition of a northwest passage to China and India. Before him shimmered in the sun two water-ways. As we know them now, the southern was the St. Lawrence, the western the Ottawa.
It was a strange providence which compelled Cartier to set the tide of French trade and exploration over the Ottawa rather than up the St. Lawrence. By this France lost, we are told, the Hudson valley—the key to the eastern half of the continent—but gained the Great Lakes. This tide of trappers, merchants, Jesuits, and adventurers went up the western river, across into Georgian Bay, through the lakes, down the Allegheny, Wabash, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Mississippi. Some few braved the dangers of traveling in the domains of the Iroquois and went up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, then across to Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay. The important result was that Lake Erie was the last of all the Great Lakes to be discovered and the country south of it was the last to be explored and claimed by the French. Lakes Ontario and Huron were discovered in 1615, Lake Superior in 1629, Lake Michigan in 1634. Lake Erie was not discovered until 1669—half a century after the two lakes which it joins; and then for a hundred years it was a mystery. Champlain drew it on his map as a widened river; other maps of the day make it a brook, river, strait, or lake, as their authors fancied. One drew it as a river, and, in perplexity over its outlet, ran it into the Susquehanna and down into Chesapeake Bay. And as late as 1750, in the map of Céloron, is written along the southern shore of Lake Erie, "This shore is almost unknown."
It is a custom peculiar to the French to declare possession of a land by burying leaden plates, upon which their professions of sovereignty are incised, at the mouths of its rivers. This has been an immemorial custom, and has been done in recent times in the Pacific sea. La Salle buried a leaden plate at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682, claiming possession of that river and all streams emptying into it and all lands drained by them. But, now, more plates were needed. And so Céloron de Bienville, a gallant Chevalier of St. Louis, departed from Quebec in the fall of the same year with a detachment of eight subaltern officers, six cadets, an armorer, twenty soldiers, one hundred and eighty Canadians, thirty friendly Iroquois, and twenty-five Abnakis, with a load of leaden plates to be buried at the mouths of all the rivers in the Central West. Two plates were buried in what we now call the Allegheny river and one at the mouths of Wheeling creek, the Muskingum, Great Kanawha, and Miami rivers. At the burial of each plate a given formality was observed. The detachment was drawn up in battle array. The leader cried in a loud voice "Vive le Roi," and proclaimed that possession was taken in the name of the king. In each instance, the Arms of the King, stamped upon a sheet of tin, were affixed to the nearest tree, and a Procès Verbal was drawn up and signed by the officers. Each plate bore the following inscription:
"In the year 1749, of the reign of Louis XV., King of France, We, Céloron, commander of a detachment sent by Monsieur the Marquis de la Galissonière, Governor General of New France, to reëstablish tranquillity in some Indian villages of these cantons, have buried [here a space was left for the date and place of burial] this plate of lead near the river Ohio otherwise Belle Rivière, as a monument of the renewal of possession we have taken of the said river Ohio, and of all those which empty into it, and of all lands on both sides as far as the sources of said rivers, as enjoyed by the Kings of France preceding, and as they have there maintained themselves by arms and treaties, especially those of Ryswick, Utrecht, and Aix-la-Chapelle."
Ah! but leaden bullets were more needed in the West than leaden plates! This Céloron found out before he had gone a dozen leagues. Suspicious savages dug up his first plate and hurried with it to the English at Albany. Is it strange that the Indians soon came to the conclusion that there was ever some fatal connection between the art of writing and their home-lands? At Logstown, near the present city of Pittsburg, he found some detested English traders, and a strong anti-French influence. He drove off the intruders with a sharp letter to their governor, but here his Iroquois and Abenaki Indians deserted him, and, on their way north, tore from the trees those sheets which contained yet more of that horrid writing. Céloron hurried homeward by the shortest route—up the Miami river and down the Maumee and through the lakes—and rendered his alarming report. It was decided immediately to fortify Céloron's route. The enterprising successor of Galissonière—Governor Duquesne—sent a detachment from Quebec with orders to proceed to Lake Erie and begin the building of a line of forts down the Ohio frontier, from Lake Erie to the Ohio river. This party, under the command of M. Marin, landed near the present site of Erie, Pennsylvania, and raised a fort.
The ruins of this fort in the West are still perceptible within the limits of the city of Erie. It was a strong work built of chestnut logs, fifteen feet high and one hundred and twenty feet square, with a blockhouse on each side. It had a gate to the south and one to the north, but no portholes. It was first called Fort Duquesne, but later was named Fort Presque Isle from the promontory which juts out into the lake. From Fort Presque Isle M. Marin hewed a road southward, a distance of thirteen miles, twenty-one feet in width, to the Rivière aux Bœufs—river of Buffaloes—later named French creek by Washington. This was the first white man's road—military or otherwise—ever made in the Central West. It was built in 1753, and though it has not been used over its entire length since that day, it marks, in a general way, the important route from the lakes to the Allegheny and Ohio, which became early in the century the great thoroughfare for freight to and from the Ohio valley and the east. For a distance of seven miles out of the city of Erie the old French road of a century and a half ago is the main road south. At that distance from the city the new highway leaves it, but the old route can be followed without difficulty until it meets the Erie-Watertown plank road, the new Shun pike. This plank road follows the road cut by the French general one hundred and forty-nine years ago. Those that traveled over the same road in 1795, speak of the trees which were growing up and blocking the thoroughfare. It seems to have been the first intention of the French to make this road a military road in the European sense, leveling hills and filling the valleys. And for half the distance between Erie and French creek the road had been grubbed by hauling out the stumps of the trees. Travelers refer to the great cavities which were left open, for the road was never completed on the lines originally laid out. It was built with some care and served for the hauling of cannon to the forts along the Allegheny and Ohio. Cannon balls, accoutrements, and pieces of harness were found along the route as late as 1825. In the day of the pioneer, the route was lessened from Erie to French creek to thirteen miles. This Watertown turnpike was a principal thoroughfare for the great salt trade between the east and Pittsburg and Louisville. In return, iron, glass, and flour were freighted over it eastward from the Monongahela, and bacon from Kentucky. The tradition prevails in Erie that, when the French abandoned Fort Presque Isle, at the close of the French and Indian war, treasures were buried either on the site of the fort or on the old road. Spanish silver coins to the value of sixty dollars were found while plowing the site of the old fort within twenty-five years, but these may not have been left by the French. Old walls have been excavated again and again but without extraordinary results. Pottery of singular kinds, knives, bullets, and human bones have been found. Thus, something of the air of romance of the old French days still lingers over this first pathway of the French in the Central West.
At the end of this road was erected Fort La Bœuf on the north bank of the west fork of Rivière aux Bœufs, at the intersection of High and Water streets in what is now the city of Watertown, Pennsylvania. Being an inland fort, it was not ranked or fortified as a first-class one; yet, as a trading fort, it was of much importance in the chain from Quebec to the Ohio. Of it Washington said, "The bastions were made of piles driven into the ground, standing more than twelve feet above it, and sharp at the top, with portholes cut for the cannon, and loopholes for the small arms to fire through. There are eight six-pound pieces mounted in each bastion, and one piece of four pounds before the gate. In the bastions are a guardhouse, chapel, doctor's lodging, and the commander's private stores, round which are laid platforms for the cannon and the men to stand on. There are several barracks without the fort, for the soldiers' dwellings, covered, some with bark, and some with boards, made chiefly of logs. There are also several other houses, such as stables, smith's shop, etc."
Late in the summer of 1753, M. Marin sent fifty men to erect a third fort in the chain from Lake Erie, at Venango, just below the junction of French creek and the Allegheny river, on the present site of Franklin, Pennsylvania. Possession was taken of the site by Captain Chabert de Joncaire, who spent the winter in the trader Frazier's hut, having been opposed by the Delaware chieftain Half King who said "that the land was theirs, and that they would not have them build upon it." In the spring, however, machinery for a saw-mill was brought from Canada, and oak and chestnut trees were cut down and sawn into timbers for a new fort which was completed in April. It was not an elaborate work but answered its purpose as an entrepôt for goods going down to Fort Duquesne. It was named Fort Machault, from Jean Baptiste Machault, a celebrated French financier and politician and favorite of La Pompadour. The fort was a parallelogram about seventy-five by one hundred and five feet with bastions in the form of polygons at the four angles. The gate fronted the river. It contained a magazine protected by three feet of earth, and five barracks two stories high furnished with stone chimneys. The soldiers' barracks consisted of forty-four buildings erected around the fort on the north and east sides.
Thus, strong in her resources of military and civil centralization, France at last moved swiftly into the West. In this, her superiority over the English colonies was as marked as her success in winning her way into the good graces of the Indians. French and English character nowhere show more plainly than in the nature of their contact with the Indians as each met them along the St. Lawrence, Allegheny, and the Great Lakes. The French came to conciliate the Indians, with no scruples as to how they might accomplish their task. The coureur-de-bois threw himself into the spirit of Indian life and very nearly adopted the Indian's ideals. The stolid English trader, keen for a bargain, justly suspicious of his white rival, invariably distant, seldom tried to ingratiate himself into the friendship of the red man. The voyageur flattered, cajoled, entertained in his wild way, regaled at tables, mingled without stint in Indian customs. Sir Guy Carleton wrote, "France did not depend on the number of her troops, but on the discretion of her officers who learned the language of the natives . . . . distributed the king's presents, excited no jealousy and gained the affections of an ignorant, credulous but brave people, whose ruling passions are independence, gratitude, and revenge." The Englishman little affected the conceits of the red man, seldom opened his heart and was less commonly familiar. He ignored as much as possible Indian habits; the Frenchman feigned all reverence for them, with a care never to rupture their stolid complacency. The English trader clad like a ranger or trapper, made no more use of Indian dress than was necessary. The voyageur adopted Indian dress commonly, ornamented himself with vermilion and ochre, and danced with the aborigines before the fires; he wore his hair long, crowned with a coronet of feathers; his hunting frock was trimmed with horse-hair fringe and he carried a charmed rattlesnake's tail. "They were the most romantic and poetic characters ever known in American frontier life. Their every movement attracts the rosiest coloring of imagination. We see them gliding along the streams in their long canoes, shapely and serviceable as any water craft that man has ever designed, yet buoyant and fragile as the wind-whirled autumn leaf. We catch afar off the thrilling cadences of their choruses floating over the prairie and marsh, echoing from forest and hill, startling the buffalo from his haunt in the reeds, telling the drowsy denizens of the posts of the approach of revelry and whispering to the Indian village of gaudy fabrics, of trinkets and of fire water." This was not alone true of the French voyageur, it was more or less true of French soldier and officer. Such deportment was not unknown among English traders but it must have been comparatively rare. Few men of his race had such a lasting and honorable hold upon the Indian as Sir William Johnson and we cannot be wrong in attributing much of his power (of such momentous value to England through so many years) to the spirit of comradeship and familiarity which underlay his studied deportment.
"Are you ignorant," said the French governor Duquesne to a deputation of Indians, "of the difference between the king of France and the English? Look at the forts which the king had built; you will find that under their very walls, the beasts of the forests are hunted and slain; that they are, in fact, fixed in places most frequented by you merely to gratify more conveniently your necessities. The English, on the contrary, no sooner occupy a post, than the woods fall before their hand—the earth is subjected to cultivation—the game disappears—and your people are speedily reduced to combat with starvation." M. Garneau, the French historian, frankly acknowledges that the marquis here accurately described the chief difference between the two civilizations. In 1757, M. Chauvignevie, Jr., a seventeen-year-old French prisoner among the English, said that at Fort La Bœuf the French plant corn around the fort for the Indians, "whose wives and children come to the fort for it, and get furnished also with clothes at the king's expense."
Horace Walpole, speaking of the French and English ways of seating themselves in America, said: "They enslaved, or assisted the wretched nations to butcher one another, instructed them in the use of firearms, brandy, and the New Testament, and at last, by scattered extension of forts and colonies, they have met to quarrel for the boundaries of empires, of which they can neither use nor occupy a twentieth part of the included territory." "But," he sneers elsewhere, "we do not massacre; we are such good Christians as only to cheat."
But, while the French moved down the lakes and the Allegheny, and the English came across the mountains, what of the poor Indian for whose rich lands both were so anxious?
An old Delaware sachem did not miss the mark widely when he asked the question: "The French claim all the lands on one side of the Ohio, and the English on the other: now, where does the Indian's land lie?" Truly, "between their father the French and their brothers the English, they were in a fair way of being lovingly shared out of the whole country."
In 1744, the English paid four hundred pounds to the representatives of the Six Nations for assuming to cede to them the land between the Alleghany Mountains. But, as we have seen, the Six Nations had practically given up their Alleghany hunting-grounds to the other nations who had swarmed in, the Delawares (known to the French as the Loups, "wolves"), and the Shawanese. So, in a loose way, the confederacy of the Six Nations was friendly to the English, while the actual inhabitants of the land which the Six Nations had "sold" were hostile to the English and usually friendly to the French. Besides these (the Delaware and Shawanese nations), many fugitives from the Six Nations, especially Senecas, were found aiding the French as the momentous struggle drew on.