CHAPTER 14

1700-1732. 
THE OUTAGAMIE WAR. 
THE WESTERN POSTS,  DETROIT,  THE ILLINOIS,  PERILS OF THE WEST,  THE OUTAGAMIES,  THEIR TURBULENCE,  ENGLISH INSTIGATION,  LOUVIGNY'S EXPEDITION,  DEFEAT OF OUTAGAMIES,  HOSTILITIES RENEWED,  LIGNERY'S EXPEDITION,  OUTAGAMIES ATTACKED BY VILLIERS; BY HURONS AND IROQUOIS,  LA BUTTE DES MORTS,  THE SACS AND FOXES. 

The rulers of Canada labored without ceasing in their perplexing task of engrossing the fur-trade of the West and controlling the western tribes to the exclusion of the English.  Every day made it clearer that to these ends the western wilderness must be held by forts and trading-posts; and this policy of extension prevailed more and more, in spite of the league of merchants, who wished to draw the fur-trade to Montreal,—in spite of the Jesuits, who felt that their influence over the remoter tribes would be compromised by the presence among them of officers, soldiers, and traders; and in spite of the King himself, who feared that the diffusion of the colony would breed disorder and insubordination. 

Detroit, the most important of the western posts, struggled through a critical infancy in the charge of its founder, La Mothe-Cadillac, till, by a choice not very judicious, he was made governor of Louisiana.  During his rule the population had slowly increased to about two hundred souls; but after he left the place it diminished to a point that seemed to threaten the feeble post with extinction.  About 1722 it revived again; voyageurs and discharged soldiers settled about the fort, and the parish register shows six or eight births in the course of the year. 

Meanwhile, on the banks of the Mississippi another settlement was growing up which did not owe its birth to official patronage, and yet was destined to become the most noteworthy offspring of Canada in the West.  It was known to the French as "the Illinois," from the name of the group of tribes belonging to that region.  La Salle had occupied the banks of the river Illinois in 1682; but the curious Indian colony which he gathered about his fort on the rock of Saint  Louis dispersed after his death, till few or none were left except the Kaskaskias, a sub-tribe of the Illinois.  These still lived in the meadow below Fort Saint  Louis, where the Jesuits Marquette, Allouez, Rale, Gravier, and Marest labored in turn for their conversion, till, in 1700, they or some of them followed Marest to the Mississippi and set up their wigwams where the town of Kaskaskia now stands, near the mouth of the little river which bears the same name.  Charlevoix, who was here in 1721, calls this the oldest settlement of the Illinois, though there is some reason to believe that the village of Cahokia, established as a mission by the Jesuit Pinet, sixty miles or more above Kaskaskia, and nearly opposite the present city of Saint  Louis, is, by a few weeks, the elder of the two.  The voyageurs, coureurs de bois, and other roving Canadians made these young settlements their resort, took to wife converted squaws, and ended with making the Illinois their home.  The missions turned to parishes, the missionaries to curés, and the wigwams to those compact little Canadian houses that cause one to marvel at the ingenuity which can store so multitudinous a progeny within such narrow limits. 

White women from Canada or Louisiana began to find their way to these wilderness settlements, which with every generation grew more French and less Indian.  The river Mississippi was at once their friend and their enemy.  It carried their produce to New Orleans, but undermined their rich alluvial shores, cut away fields and meadows, and swept them in its turbid eddies thirteen hundred miles southward, as a contribution to the mud-banks of the delta. 

When the Mississippi Company came into power, the Illinois, hitherto a dependency of Canada, was annexed to Louisiana.  Pierre Dugué de Boisbriant was sent to take command of it, and under his direction a fort was built on the bank of the Mississippi sixteen miles above Kaskaskia.  It was named Fort Chartres, in honor of the Duc de Chartres, son of the Regent, who had himself once borne the same title.  This work, built at first of wood and earth, was afterwards rebuilt of stone, and became one of the chief links in the chain of military communication between Canada and Louisiana. 

Here, with the commandant at its head, sat the council of three which ruled over the little settlement.  Here too was a garrison to enforce the decrees of the council, keep order among the settlers, and give them a protection which they greatly needed, since they were within striking distance of the formidable Chickasaws, the effects of whose hostility appear year after year on the parish register of deaths at Kaskaskia.  Worse things were in store; for the gallant young Pierre d'Artaguette, who was appointed to the command in 1734, and who marched against the Chickasaws with a band of Frenchmen and Indians, was defeated, captured, and burned alive, astonishing his torturers by the fortitude with which he met his fate.  The settlement had other foes not less dangerous.  These were the Outagamies, or Foxes, between whom and the tribes of the Illinois there was a deadly feud.  We have seen how, in 1712, a band of Outagamies, with their allies, the Mascoutins, appeared at Detroit and excited an alarm, which, after a savage conflict, was ended with their ruin.  In 1714 the Outagamies made a furious attack upon the Illinois, and killed or carried off seventy-seven of them.  A few years later they made another murderous onslaught in the same quarter.  They were the scourge of the West, and no white man could travel between Canada and Louisiana except at the risk of his life. 

In vain the French parleyed with them; threats and blandishments were useless alike.  Their chiefs would promise, sometimes in good faith, to keep the peace and no more offend their father Onontio; but nearly all the tribes of the Lake country were their hereditary enemies, and some bloody revenge for ancient wrongs would excite their young warriors to a fury which the elders could not restrain.  Thus, in 1722 the Saginaws, a fierce Algonquin band on the eastern borders of Michigan, killed twenty-three Outagamies; the tribesmen of the slain returned the blow, other tribes joined the fray, and the wilderness was again on fire. 

The Canadian authorities were sorely perplexed, for this fierce inter-tribal war threatened their whole system of western trade.  Meanwhile the English and Dutch of New York were sending wampum belts to the Indians of the upper lakes, inviting them to bring their furs to Albany; and Ramesay, governor of Montreal, complains that they were all disposed to do so.  "Twelve of the upper tribes," says Lord Cornbury, "have come down this year to trade at Albany;" but he adds that as the Indians have had no presents for above six years, he is afraid "we shall lose them before next summer. " The governor of Canada himself is said to have been in collusion with the English traders for his own profit.  The Jesuits denied the charge, and Father Marest wrote to the governor, after the disaster to Walker's fleet on its way to attack Quebec, "The protection you have given to the missions has drawn on you and the colony the miraculous protection of God. "

Whether his accusers did him wrong or not, Vaudreuil felt the necessity of keeping the peace among the western Indians and suppressing the Outagamie incendiaries.  In fact, nothing would satisfy him but their destruction.  "They are the common enemies of all the western tribes," he writes.  "They have lately murdered three Frenchmen and five Hurons at Detroit.  The Hurons ask for our help against them, and we must give it, or all the tribes will despise us. "

He put his chief trust in Louvigny, formerly commandant at Michilimackinac.  That officer proposed to muster the friendly tribes and march on the Outagamies just as their corn was ripening, fight them if they stood their ground, or if not, destroy their crops, burn their wigwams, and encamp on the spot till winter; then send out parties to harass them as they roamed the woods seeking a meagre subsistence by hunting.  In this way he hoped to cripple, if not destroy them. 

The Outagamies lived at this time on the Fox River of Green Bay,—a stream which owes its name to them.  Their chief village seems to have been between thirty and forty miles from the mouth of the river, where it creeps through broad tracts of rushes, willows, and wild rice.  In spite of their losses at Detroit in 1712, their strength was far from being broken. 

During two successive summers preparations were made to attack them; but the march was delayed, once by the tardiness of the Indian allies, and again by the illness of Louvigny.  At length, on the first of May, 1716, he left Montreal with two hundred and twenty-five Frenchmen, while two hundred more waited to join him at Detroit and Michilimackinac, where the Indian allies were also to meet him.  To save expense in pay and outfit, the Canadians recruited for the war were allowed to take with them goods for trading with the Indians.  Hence great disorder and insubordination, especially as more than forty barrels of brandy were carried in the canoes, as a part of these commercial ventures, in consequence of which we hear that when French and Indians were encamped together, "hell was thrown open. "

The Outagamies stood their ground.  Louvigny says, with probable exaggeration, that when he made his attack their village held five hundred warriors, and no less than three thousand women,—a disparity of sexes no doubt due to the inveterate fighting habits of the tribe.  The wigwams were enclosed by a strong fence, consisting of three rows of heavy oaken palisades.  This method of fortification was used also by tribes farther southward.  When Bienville attacked the Chickasaws, he was foiled by the solid wooden wall that resisted his cannon, being formed of trunks of trees as large as a man's body, set upright, close together, and made shot-proof by smaller trunks, planted within so as to close the interstices of the outer row. 

The fortified village of the Outagamies was of a somewhat different construction.  The defences consisted of three rows of palisades, those of the middle row being probably planted upright, and the other two set aslant against them.  Below, along the inside of the triple row, ran a sort of shallow trench or rifle-pit, where the defenders lay ensconced, firing through interstices left for the purpose between the palisades. 

Louvigny had brought with him two cannon and a mortar; but being light, they had little effect on the wooden wall, and as he was provided with mining tools, he resolved to attack the Outagamie stronghold by regular approaches, as if he were besieging a fortress of Vauban.  Covered by the fire of three pieces of artillery and eight hundred French and Indian small-arms, he opened trenches during the night within seventy yards of the palisades, pushed a sap sixty feet nearer before morning, and on the third night burrowed to within about twenty-three yards of the wall.  His plan was to undermine and blow up the palisades. 

The Outagamies had made a furious resistance, in which their women took part with desperation; but dreading the threatened explosion, and unable to resist the underground approaches of their enemy, they asked for a parley, and owned themselves beaten.  Louvigny demanded that they should make peace with all tribes friendly to the French, give up all prisoners, and make war on distant tribes, such as the Pawnees, in order to take captives who should supply the place of those they had killed among the allies of the French; that they should pay, in furs, the costs of the war, and give six chiefs, or sons of chiefs, as hostages for the fulfilment of these conditions. 

On the twelfth of October Louvigny reached Quebec in triumph, bringing with him the six hostages. 

The Outagamie question was settled for a time.  The tribe remained quiet for some years, and in 1718 sent a deputation to Montreal and renewed their submission, which the governor accepted, though they had evaded the complete fulfilment of the conditions imposed on them.  Yet peace was not secure for a moment.  The Kickapoos and Mascoutins would not leave their neighbors, the Illinois, at rest; the Saginaws made raids on the Miamis; and a general war seemed imminent.  "The difficulty is inconceivable of keeping these western tribes quiet," writes the governor, almost in despair. 

At length the crisis came.  The Illinois captured the nephew of Oushala, the principal Outagamie war-chief, and burned him alive; on which the Outagamies attacked them, drove them for refuge to the top of the rock on which La Salle's fort of Saint  Louis had been built, and held them there at mercy.  They would have starved to death, had not the victors, dreading the anger of the French, suffered them to escape.  For this they took to themselves great credit, not without reason, in view of the provocation.  At Versailles, however, their attack on the Illinois seemed an unpardonable offence, and the next ship from France brought a letter from the colonial minister declaring that the Outagamies must be effectually put down, and that "his Majesty will reward the officer who will reduce, or rather destroy, them. "

The authorities of Canada were less truculent than their masters at the court, or were better able to count the costs of another war.  Longueuil, the provisional governor, persisted in measures of peace, and the Sieur de Lignery called a council of the Outagamies and their neighbors, the Sacs and Winnebagoes, at Green Bay.  He told them that the Great Onontio, the King, ordered them, at their peril, to make no more attacks on the Illinois; and they dutifully promised to obey, while their great chief, Oushala, begged that a French officer might be sent to his village to help him keep his young warriors from the war-path.  The pacific policy of Longueuil was not approved by Desliettes, then commanding in the Illinois country; and he proposed to settle accounts with the Outagamies by exterminating them.  "This is very well," observes a writer of the time; "but to try to exterminate them and fail would be disastrous. "

The Marquis de Beauharnois, who came out as governor of Canada in 1726, was averse to violent measures, since if an attempt to exterminate the offending tribe should be made without success, the life of every Frenchman in the West would be in jeopardy.  Lignery thought that if the Outagamies broke the promises they had made him at Green Bay, the forces of Canada and Louisiana should unite to crush them.  The missionary, Chardon, advised that they should be cut off from all supplies of arms, ammunition, and merchandise of any kind, and that all the well-disposed western tribes should then be set upon them,—which, he thought, would infallibly bring them to reason. 

The new governor, perplexed by the multitude of counsellors, presently received a missive from the King, directing him not to fight the Outagamies if he could help it, "since the consequences of failure would be frightful. " On the other hand, Beauharnois was told that the English had sent messages to the Lake tribes urging them to kill the French in their country, and that the Outagamies had promised to do so.  "This," writes the governor, "compels us to make war in earnest.  It will cost sixty thousand livres. "

Dupuy, the intendant, had joined with Beauharnois in this letter to the minister; but being at the time in a hot quarrel with the governor, he soon after sent a communication of his own to Versailles, in which he declares that the war against the Outagamies was only a pretext of Beauharnois for spending the King's money, and enriching himself by buying up all the furs of the countries traversed by the army. 

Whatever the motives of the expedition, it left Montreal in June, under the Sieur de Lignery, followed the rugged old route of the Ottawa, and did not reach Michilimackinac till after midsummer.  Thence, in a flotilla of birch canoes carrying about a thousand Indians and five hundred French, the party set out for the fort at the head of Green Bay.  Here they caught one Outagamie warrior and three Winnebagoes, whom the Indian allies tortured to death.  Then they paddled their canoes up Fox River, reached a Winnebago village on the twenty-fourth of August, followed the channel of the stream, a ribbon of lazy water twisting in a vague, perplexing way through the broad marsh of wild rice and flags, till they saw the chief village of the Outagamies on a tract of rising ground a little above the level of the bog.  It consisted of bark wigwams, without palisades or defences of any kind.  Its only inmates were three squaws and one old man.  These were all seized, and, to the horror of Père Crespel, the chaplain, were given to the Indian allies, who kept the women as slaves, and burned the old man at a slow fire.  Then, after burning the village and destroying the crop of maize, peas, beans, and squashes that surrounded it, the whole party returned to Michilimackinac. 

The expedition was not a success.  Lignery had hoped to surprise the enemy; but the alert and nimble savages had escaped him.  Beauharnois makes the best of the miscarriage, and writes that "the army did good work;" but says a few weeks later that something must be done to cure the contempt which the western allies of the French have conceived for them "since the last affair. "

Two years after Lignery's expedition, there was another attempt to humble the Outagamies.  Late in the autumn of 1730 young Coulon de Villiers, who twenty-four years later defeated Washington at Fort Necessity, appeared at Quebec with news that the Sieur de Villiers, his father, who commanded the post on the Saint  Joseph, had struck the Outagamies a deadly blow and killed two hundred of their warriors, besides six hundred of their women and children.  The force under Villiers consisted of a body of Frenchmen gathered from various western posts, another body from the Illinois, led by the Sieurs de Saint-Ange, father and son, and twelve or thirteen hundred Indian allies from many friendly tribes. 

The accounts of this affair are obscure and not very trustworthy.  It seems that the Outagamies began the fray by an attack on the Illinois at La Salle's old station of Le Rocher, on the river Illinois.  On hearing of this, the French commanders mustered their Indian allies, hastened to the spot, and found the Outagamies intrenched in a grove which they had surrounded with a stockade.  They defended themselves with their usual courage, but, being hard pressed by hunger and thirst, as well as by the greatly superior numbers of their assailants, they tried to escape during a dark night, as their tribesmen had done at Detroit in 1712.  The French and their allies pursued, and there was a great slaughter, in which many warriors and many more women and children were the victims. 

The offending tribe must now, one would think, have ceased to be dangerous; but nothing less than its destruction would content the French officials.  To this end, their best resource was in their Indian allies, among whom the Outagamies had no more deadly enemy than the Hurons of Detroit, who, far from relenting in view of their disasters, were more eager than ever to wreak their ire on their unfortunate foe.  Accordingly, they sent messengers to the converted Iroquois at the Mission of Two Mountains, and invited them to join in making an end of the Outagamies.  The invitation was accepted, and in the autumn of 1731 forty-seven warriors from the Two Mountains appeared at Detroit.  The party was soon made up.  It consisted of seventy-four Hurons, forty-six Iroquois, and four Ottawas.  They took the trail to the mouth of the river Saint  Joseph, thence around the head of Lake Michigan to the Chicago portage, and thence westward to Rock River.  Here were the villages of the Kickapoos and Mascoutins, who had been allies of the Outagamies, but having lately quarrelled with them, received the strangers as friends and gave them guides.  The party now filed northward, by forests and prairies, towards the Wisconsin, to the banks of which stream the Outagamies had lately removed their villages.  The warriors were all on snow-shoes, for the weather was cold and the snow deep.  Some of the elders, overcome by the hardships of the way, called a council and proposed to turn back; but the juniors were for pushing on at all risks, and a young warrior declared that he would rather die than go home without killing somebody.  The result was a division of the party; the elders returned to Chicago, and the younger men, forty Hurons and thirty Iroquois, kept on their way. 

At last, as they neared the Wisconsin, they saw on an open prairie three Outagamies, who ran for their lives.  The Hurons and Iroquois gave chase, till from the ridge of a hill they discovered the principal Outagamie village, consisting, if we may believe their own story, of forty-six wigwams, near the bank of the river.  The Outagamie warriors came out to meet them, in number, as they pretended, much greater than theirs; but the Huron and Iroquois chiefs reminded their followers that they had to do with dogs who did not believe in God, on which they fired two volleys against the enemy, then dropped their guns and charged with the knife in one hand and the war-club in the other.  According to their own story, which shows every sign of mendacity, they drove back the Outagamies into their village, killed seventy warriors, and captured fourteen more, without counting eighty women and children killed, and a hundred and forty taken prisoners.  In short, they would have us believe that they destroyed the whole village, except ten men, who escaped entirely naked, and soon froze to death.  They declared further that they sent one of their prisoners to the remaining Outagamie villages, ordering him to tell the inhabitants that they had just devoured the better part of the tribe, and meant to stay on the spot two days; that the tribesmen of the slain were free to attack them if they chose, but in that case, they would split the heads of all the women and children prisoners in their hands, make a breastwork of the dead bodies, and then finish it by piling upon it those of the assailants. 

Nothing is more misleading than Indian tradition, which is of the least possible value as evidence.  It may be well, however, to mention another story, often repeated, touching these dark days of the Outagamies.  It is to the effect that a French trader named Marin, whom they had incensed by levying blackmail from him, raised a party of Indians, with whose aid he surprised and defeated the unhappy tribe at the Little Butte des Morts, that they retired to the Great Butte des Morts, higher up Fox River, and that Marin here attacked them again, killing or capturing the whole.  Extravagant as the story seems, it may have some foundation, though various dates, from 1725 to 1746, are assigned to the alleged exploit, and contemporary documents are silent concerning it.  It is certain that the Outagamies were not destroyed, as the tribe exists to this day. 

In 1736 it was reported that sixty or eighty Outagamie warriors were still alive.  Their women, who when hard pushed would fight like furies, were relatively numerous and tolerably prolific, and their villages were full of sturdy boys, likely to be dangerous in a few years.  Feeling their losses and their weakness, the survivors of the tribe incorporated themselves with their kindred and neighbors, the Sacs, Sakis, or Saukies, the two forming henceforth one tribe, afterwards known to the Americans as the Sacs and Foxes.  Early in the nineteenth century they were settled on both banks of the upper Mississippi.  Brave and restless like their forefathers, they were a continual menace to the American frontiersmen, and in 1832 they rose in open war, under their famous chief, Blackhawk, displaying their hereditary prowess both on foot and on horseback, and more than once defeating superior numbers of American mounted militia.  In the next year that excellent artist, Charles Bodmer, painted a group of them from life,—grim-visaged savages, armed with war-club, spear, or rifle, and wrapped in red, green, or brown blankets, their heads close shaven except the erect and bristling scalp-lock, adorned with long eagle-plumes, while both heads and faces are painted with fantastic figures in blue, white, yellow, black, and vermilion. 

Three or four years after, a party of their chiefs and warriors was conducted through the country by order of the Washington government, in order to impress them with the number and power of the whites.  At Boston they danced a war-dance on the Common in full costume, to the delight of the boy spectators, of whom I was one.