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Montcalm and Wolfe by Francis Parkman

F >> Francis Parkman >> Montcalm and Wolfe




France had done but little to make good her claims to this grand domain.
East of the Miami she had no military post whatever. Westward, on the
Maumee, there was a small wooden fort, another on the St. Joseph, and
two on the Wabash. On the meadows of the Mississippi, in the Illinois
country, stood Fort Chartres,--a much stronger work, and one of the
chief links of the chain that connected Quebec with New Orleans. Its
four stone bastions were impregnable to musketry; and, here in the
depths of the wilderness, there was no fear that cannon would be brought
against it. It was the centre and citadel of a curious little forest
settlement, the only vestige of civilization through all this region. At
Kaskaskia, extended along the borders of the stream, were seventy or
eighty French houses; thirty or forty at Cahokia, opposite the site of
St. Louis; and a few more at the intervening hamlets of St. Philippe and
Prairie a la Roche,--a picturesque but thriftless population, mixed with
Indians, totally ignorant, busied partly with the fur-trade, and partly
with the raising of corn for the market of New Orleans. They
communicated with it by means of a sort of row galley, of eighteen or
twenty oars, which made the voyage twice a year, and usually spent ten
weeks on the return up the river.[3]

[Footnote 3: Gordon, _Journal_, 1766, appended to Pownall,
_Topographical Description_. In the Depot des Cartes de la Marine at
Paris, C. 4,040, are two curious maps of the Illinois colony, made a
little after the middle of the century. In 1753 the Marquis Duquesne
denounced the colonists as debauched and lazy.]

The Pope and the Bourbons had claimed this wilderness for seventy years,
and had done scarcely more for it than the Indians, its natural owners.
Of the western tribes, even of those living at the French posts, the
Hurons or Wyandots alone were Christian.[4] The devoted zeal of the
early missionaries and the politic efforts of their successors had
failed alike. The savages of the Ohio and the Mississippi, instead of
being tied to France by the mild bonds of the faith, were now in a state
which the French called defection or revolt; that is, they received and
welcomed the English traders.

[Footnote 4: "De toutes les nations domiciliees dans les postes des pays
d'en haut, il n'y a que les hurons du detroit qui aient embrasse la
Religion chretienne." _Memoirs du Roy pour servir d'instruction au S'r.
Marqius de Lajonquiere_.]

These traders came in part from Virginia, but chiefly from Pennsylvania.
Dinwiddie, governor of Virginia, says of them: "They appear to me to be
in general a set of abandoned wretches;" and Hamilton, governor of
Pennsylvania, replies: "I concur with you in opinion that they are a
very licentious people.[5] Indian traders, of whatever nation, are
rarely models of virtue; and these, without doubt, were rough and
lawless men, with abundant blackguardism and few scruples. Not all of
them, however, are to be thus qualified. Some were of a better stamp;
among whom were Christopher Gist, William Trent, and George Croghan.
These and other chief traders hired men on the frontiers, crossed the
Alleghanies with goods packed on the backs of horses, descended into the
valley of the Ohio, and journeyed from stream to stream and village to
village along the Indian trails, with which all this wilderness was
seamed, and which the traders widened to make them practicable. More
rarely, they carried their goods on horses to the upper waters of the
Ohio, and embarked them in large wooden canoes, in which they descended
the main river, and ascended such of its numerous tributaries as were
navigable. They were bold and enterprising; and French writers, with
alarm and indignation, declare that some of them had crossed the
Mississippi and traded with the distant Osages. It is said that about
three hundred of them came over the mountains every year.

[Footnote 5: _Dinwiddie to Hamilton, 21 May, 1753. Hamilton to
Dinwiddie,--May, 1753._]

On reaching the Alleghany, Celeron de Bienville entered upon the work
assigned him, and began by taking possession of the country. The men
were drawn up in order; Louis XV. was proclaimed lord of all that
region, the arms of France, stamped on a sheet of tin, were nailed to a
tree, a plate of lead was buried at its foot, and the notary of the
expedition drew up a formal act of the whole proceeding. The leaden
plate was inscribed as follows: "Year 1749, in the reign of Louis
Fifteenth, King of France. We, Celeron, commanding the detachment sent
by the Marquis de la Galissoniere, commander-general of New France, to
restore tranquillity in certain villages of these cantons, have buried
this plate at the confluence of the Ohio and the Kanaouagon
_[Conewango],_ this 29th July, as a token of renewal of possession
heretofore taken of the aforesaid River Ohio, of all streams that fall
into it, and all lands on both sides to the source of the aforesaid
streams, as the preceding Kings of France have enjoyed or ought to have
enjoyed it, and which they have upheld by force of arms and by treaties,
notably by those of Ryswick, Utrecht, and Aix-la-Chapelle."

This done, the party proceeded on its way, moving downward with the
current, and passing from time to time rough openings in the forest,
with clusters of Indian wigwams, the inmates of which showed a strong
inclination to run off at their approach. To prevent this, Chabert de
Joncaire was sent in advance, as a messenger of peace. He was himself
half Indian, being the son of a French officer and a Seneca squaw,
speaking fluently his maternal tongue, and, like his father, holding an
important place in all dealings between the French and the tribes who
spoke dialects of the Iroquois. On this occasion his success was not
complete. It needed all his art to prevent the alarmed savages from
taking to the woods. Sometimes, however, Celoron succeeded in gaining
an audience; and at a village of Senecas called La Paille Coupee he read
them a message from La Galissoniere couched in terms sufficiently
imperative: "My children, since I was at war with the English, I have
learned that they have seduced you; and not content with corrupting your
hearts, have taken advantage of my absence to invade lands which are not
theirs, but mine; and therefore I have resolved to send you Monsieur de
Celoron to tell you my intentions, which are that I will not endure the
English on my land. Listen to me, children; mark well the word that I
send you; follow my advice, and the sky will always be calm and clear
over your villages. I expect from you an answer worthy of true
children." And he urged them to stop all trade with the intruders, and
send them back to whence they came. They promised compliance; "and,"
says the chaplain, Bonnecamp, "we should all have been satisfied if we
had thought them sincere; but nobody doubted that fear had extorted
their answer."

Four leagues below French Creek, by a rock scratched with Indian
hieroglyphics, they buried another leaden plate. Three days after, they
reached the Delaware village of Attique, at the site of Kittanning,
whose twenty-two wigwams were all empty, the owners having fled. A
little farther on, at an old abandoned village of Shawanoes, they found
six English traders, whom they warned to begone, and return no more at
their peril. Being helpless to resist, the traders pretended obedience;
and Celoron charged them with a letter to the Governor of Pennsylvania,
in which he declared that he was "greatly surprised" to find Englishmen
trespassing on the domain of France. "I know," concluded the letter,
"that our Commandant-General would be very sorry to be forced to use
violence; but his orders are precise, to leave no foreign traders within
the limits of his government."[6]

[Footnote 6: Celoron, _Journal_. Compare the letter as translated in
_N.Y. Col. Docs_., VI. 532; also _Colonial Records of Pa_., V. 325.]

On the next day they reached a village of Iroquois under a female chief,
called Queen Alequippa by the English, to whom she was devoted. Both
Queen and subjects had fled; but among the deserted wigwams were six
more Englishmen, whom Celoron warned off like the others, and who, like
them, pretended to obey. At a neighboring town they found only two
withered ancients, male and female, whose united ages, in the judgment
of the chaplain, were full two centuries. They passed the site of the
future Pittsburg; and some seventeen miles below approached Chininguee,
called Logstown by the English, one of the chief places on the river.[7]
Both English and French flags were flying over the town, and the
inhabitants, lining the shore, greeted their visitors with a salute of
musketry,--not wholly welcome, as the guns were charged will ball.
Celoron threatened to fire on them if they did not cease. The French
climbed the steep bank, and encamped on the plateau above, betwixt the
forest and the village, which consisted of some fifty cabins and
wigwams, grouped in picturesque squalor, and tenanted by a mixed
population, chiefly of Delawares, Shawanoes, and Mingoes. Here, too,
were gathered many fugitives from the deserted towns above. Celoron
feared a night attack. The camp was encircled by a ring of sentries; the
officers walked the rounds till morning; a part of the men were kept
under arms, and the rest ordered to sleep in their clothes. Joncaire
discovered through some women of his acquaintance that an attack was
intended. Whatever the danger may have been, the precautions of the
French averted it; and instead of a battle, there was a council. Celoron
delivered to the assembled chiefs a message from the Governor more
conciliatory than the former, "Through the love I bear you, my children,
I send you Monsieur de Celoron to open your eyes to the designs of the
English against your lands. The establishments they mean to make, and of
which you are certainly ignorant, tend to your complete ruin. They hide
from you their plans, which are to settle here and drive you away, if I
let them. As a good father who tenderly loves his children, and though
far away from them bears them always in his heart, I must warn you of
the danger that threatens you. The English intend to rob you of your
country; and that they may succeed, they begin by corrupting your minds.
As they mean to seize the Ohio, which belongs to me, I send to warn them
to retire."

[Footnote 7: There was another Chiningue, the Shenango of the English,
on the Alleghany.]

The reply of the chiefs, though sufficiently humble, was not all that
could be wished. They begged that the intruders might stay a little
longer, since the goods they brought were necessary to them. It was in
fact, these goods, cheap, excellent, and abundant as they were, which
formed the only true bond between the English and the Western tribes.
Logstown was one of the chief resorts of the English traders; and at
this moment there were ten of them in the place. Celoron warned them
off. "They agreed," says the chaplain, "to all that was demanded, well
resolved, no doubt, to do the contrary as soon as our backs were
turned."

Having distributed gifts among the Indians, the French proceeded on
their way, and at or near the mouth of Wheeling Creek buried another
plate of lead. They repeated the same ceremony at the mouth of the
Muskingum. Here, half a century later, when this region belonged to the
United States, a party of boys, bathing in the river, saw the plate
protruding from the bank where the freshets had laid it bare, knocked it
down with a long stick, melted half of it into bullets, and gave what
remained to a neighbor from Marietta, who, hearing of this mysterious
relic, inscribed in an unknown tongue, came to rescue it from their
hands.[8] It is now in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian
Society.[9] On the eighteenth of August, Celoron buried yet another
plate, at the mouth of the Great Kenawha. This, too, in the course of a
century, was unearthed by the floods, and was found in 1846 by a boy at
play, by the edge of the water.[10] The inscriptions on all these plates
were much alike, with variations of date and place.

[Footnote 8: O.H. Marshall, in _Magazine of American History, March,_
1878.]

[Footnote 9: For papers relating to it, see _Trans. Amer. Antiq. Soc_.,
II.]

[Footnote 10: For a facsimile of the inscription on this plate, see
_Olden Time,_ I. 288. Celoron calls the Kenawha, _Chinodahichetha_. The
inscriptions as given in his Journal correspond with those on the plates
discovered.]

The weather was by turns rainy and hot; and the men, tired and famished,
were fast falling ill. On the twenty-second they approached Scioto,
called by the French St. Yotoc, or Sinioto, a large Shawanoe town at the
mouth of the river which bears the same name. Greatly doubting what
welcome awaited them, they filled their powderhorns and prepared for the
worst. Joncaire was sent forward to propitiate the inhabitants; but they
shot bullets through the flag that he carried, and surrounded him,
yelling and brandishing their knives. Some were for killing him at once;
others for burning him alive. The interposition of a friendly Iroquois
saved him; and at length they let him go. Celoron was very uneasy at the
reception of his messenger. "I knew," he writes, "the weakness of my
party, two thirds of which were young men who had never left home
before, and would all have run at the sight of ten Indians. Still, there
was nothing for me but to keep on; for I was short of provisions, my
canoes were badly damaged, and I had no pitch or bark to mend them. So I
embarked again, ready for whatever might happen. I had good officers,
and about fifty men who could be trusted."

As they neared the town, the Indians swarmed to the shore, and began the
usual salute of musketry. "They fired," says Celoron, "full a thousand
shots; for the English give them powder for nothing." He prudently
pitched his camp on the farther side of the river, posted guards, and
kept close watch. Each party distrusted and feared the other. At length,
after much ado, many debates, and some threatening movements on the part
of the alarmed and excited Indians, a council took place at the tent of
the French commander; the chiefs apologized for the rough treatment of
Joncaire, and Celoron replied with a rebuke, which would doubtless have
been less mild, had he felt himself stronger. He gave them also a
message from the Governor, modified, apparently, to suit the
circumstances; for while warning them of the wiles of the English, it
gave no hint that the King of France claimed mastery of their lands.
Their answer was vague and unsatisfactory. It was plain that they were
bound to the enemy by interest, if not by sympathy. A party of English
traders were living in the place; and Celoron summoned them to withdraw,
on pain of what might ensue. "My instructions," he says, "enjoined me to
do this, and even to pillage the English; but I was not strong enough;
and as these traders were established in the village and well supported
by the Indians, the attempt would have failed, and put the French to
shame." The assembled chiefs having been regaled with a cup of brandy
each,--the only part of the proceeding which seemed to please
them,--Celoron reimbarked, and continued his voyage.

On the thirtieth they reached the Great Miami, called by the French,
Riviere a la Roche; and here Celoron buried the last of his leaden
plates. They now bade farewell to the Ohio, or, in the words of the
chaplain, to "La Belle Riviere,--that river so little known to the
French, and unfortunately too well known to the English." He speaks of
the multitude of Indian villages on its shores, and still more on its
northern branches. "Each, great or small, has one or more English
traders, and each of these has hired men to carry his furs. Behold,
then, the English well advanced upon our lands, and, what is worse,
under the protection of a crowd of savages whom they have drawn over to
them, and whose number increases daily."

The course of the party lay up the Miami; and they toiled thirteen days
against the shallow current before they reached a village of the Miami
Indians, lately built at the mouth of the rivulet now called Loramie
Creek. Over it ruled a chief to whom the French had given the singular
name of La Demoiselle, but whom the English, whose fast friend he was,
called Old Britain. The English traders who lived here had prudently
withdrawn, leaving only two hired men in the place. The object of
Celoron was to induce the Demoiselle and his band to leave this new
abode and return to their old villages near the French fort on the
Maumee, where they would be safe from English seduction. To this end, he
called them to a council, gave them ample gifts, and made them an
harangue in the name of the Governor. The Demoiselle took the gifts,
thanked his French father for his good advice, and promised to follow it
at a more convenient time.[11] In vain Celoron insisted that he and his
tribesmen should remove at once. Neither blandishments nor threats would
prevail, and the French commander felt that his negotiation had failed.

[Footnote 11: Celoron, _Journal_. Compare _A Message from the
Twightwees_ (Miamis) in _Colonial Records of Pa_., V. 437, where they
say that they refused the gifts.]

He was not deceived. Far from leaving his village, the Demoiselle, who
was Great Chief of the Miami Confederacy, gathered his followers to the
spot, till, less than two years after the visit of Celoron, its
population had increased eightfold. Pique Town, or Pickawillany, as the
English called it, became one of the greatest Indian towns of the West,
the centre of English trade and influence, and a capital object of
French jealousy.

Celoron burned his shattered canoes, and led his party across the long
and difficult portage to the French post on the Maumee, where he found
Raymond, the commander, and all his men, shivering with fever and ague.
They supplied him with wooden canoes for his voyage down the river; and,
early in October, he reached Lake Erie, where he was detained for a time
by a drunken debauch of his Indians, who are called by the chaplain "a
species of men made to exercise the patience of those who have the
misfortune to travel with them." In a month more he was at Fort
Frontenac; and as he descended thence to Montreal, he stopped at the
Oswegatchie, in obedience to the Governor, who had directed him to
report the progress made by the Sulpitian, Abbe Piquet, at his new
mission. Piquet's new fort had been burned by Indians, prompted, as he
thought, by the English of Oswego; but the priest, buoyant and
undaunted, was still resolute for the glory of God and the confusion of
the heretics.

At length Celoron reached Montreal; and, closing his Journal, wrote
thus: "Father Bonnecamp, who is a Jesuit and a great mathematician,
reckons that we have travelled twelve hundred leagues; I and my officers
think we have travelled more. All I can say is, that the nations of
these countries are very ill-disposed towards the French, and devoted
entirely to the English."[12] If his expedition had done no more, it had
at least revealed clearly the deplorable condition of French interests
in the West.

[Footnote 12: _Journal de la Campagne que moy Celoron, Chevalier de
l'Ordre Royal et Militaire de St. Louis, Capitaine Commandant un
detachement envoye dans la Belle Riviere par les ordres de M. le Marquis
de La Galissoniere_, etc.

_Relation d'un voyage dans la Belle Riviere sous les ordres de M. de
Celoron, par le Pere Bonnecamp, en_ 1749.]

While Celoron was warning English traders from the Ohio, a plan was on
foot in Virginia for a new invasion of the French domain. An association
was formed to settle the Ohio country; and a grant of five hundred
thousand acres was procured from the King, on condition that a hundred
families should be established upon it within seven years, a fort built,
and a garrison maintained. The Ohio Company numbered among its members
some of the chief men of Virginia, including two brothers of Washington;
and it had also a London partner, one Hanbury, a person of influence,
who acted as its agent in England. In the year after the expedition of
Celoron, its governing committee sent the trader Christopher Gist to
explore the country and select land. It must be "good level land," wrote
the Committee; "we had rather go quite down to the Mississippi than take
mean, broken land."[13] In November Gist reached Logstown, the Chiningue
of Celeron, where he found what he calls a "parcel of reprobate Indian
traders." Those whom he so stigmatizes were Pennsylvanians, chiefly
Scotch-Irish, between whom and the traders from Virginia there was great
jealousy. Gist was told that he "should never go home safe." He declared
himself the bearer of a message from the King. This imposed respect, and
he was allowed to proceed. At the Wyandot village of Muskingum he found
the trader George Croghan, sent to the Indians by the Governor of
Pennsylvania, to renew the chain of friendship.[14] "Croghan," he says,
"is a mere idol among his countrymen, the Irish traders;" yet they met
amicably, and the Pennsylvanian had with him a companion, Andrew
Montour, the interpreter, who proved of great service to Gist. As
Montour was a conspicuous person in his time, and a type of his class,
he merits a passing notice. He was the reputed grandson of a French
governor and an Indian squaw. His half-breed mother, Catharine Montour,
was a native of Canada, whence she was carried off by the Iroquois, and
adopted by them. She lived in a village at the head of Seneca Lake, and
still held the belief, inculcated by the guides of her youth, that
Christ was a Frenchman crucified by the English.[15] Her son Andrew is
thus described by the Moravian Zinzendorf, who knew him: "His face is
like that of a European, but marked with a broad Indian ring of
bear's-grease and paint drawn completely round it. He wears a coat of
fine cloth of cinnamon color, a black necktie with silver spangles, a
red satin waistcoat, trousers over which hangs his shirt, shoes and
stockings, a hat, and brass ornaments, something like the handle of a
basket, suspended from his ears."[16] He was an excellent interpreter,
and held in high account by his Indian kinsmen.

[Footnote 13: Instructions to Gist, in appendix to Pownall,
_Topographical Description of North America_.]

[Footnote 14: _Mr. Croghan's Transactions with the Indians_, in _N.Y.
Col. Docs.,_ VII. 267; _Croghan to Hamilton, 16 Dec_. 1750.]

[Footnote 15: This is stated by Count Zinzendorf, who visited her among
the Senecas. In a plan of the "Route of the Western Army," made in 1779,
and of which a tracing is before me, the village where she lived is
still called "French Catharine's Town."]

[Footnote 16: Journal of Zinzendorf, quoted in Schweinitz, _Life of
David Zeisberger, 112, note_.]

After leaving Muskingum, Gist, Croghan, and Montour went together to a
village on White Woman's Creek,--so called from one Mary Harris, who
lived here. She was born in New England, was made prisoner when a child
forty years before, and had since dwelt among her captors, finding such
comfort as she might in an Indian husband and a family of young
half-breeds. "She still remembers," says Gist, "that they used to be
very religious in New England, and wonders how white men can be so
wicked as she has seen them in these woods." He and his companions now
journeyed southwestward to the Shawanoe town at the mouth of the
Scioto, where they found a reception very different from that which had
awaited Celoron. Thence they rode northwestward along the forest path
that led to Pickawillany, the Indian town on the upper waters of the
Great Miami. Gist was delighted with the country; and reported to his
employers that "it is fine, rich, level land, well timbered with large
walnut, ash, sugar trees and cherry trees; well watered with a great
number of little streams and rivulets; full of beautiful natural
meadows, with wild rye, blue-grass, and clover, and abounding with
turkeys, deer, elks, and most sorts of game, particularly buffaloes,
thirty or forty of which are frequently seen in one meadow." A little
farther west, on the plains of the Wabash and the Illinois, he would
have found them by thousands.

They crossed the Miami on a raft, their horses swimming after them; and
were met on landing by a crowd of warriors, who, after smoking with
them, escorted them to the neighboring town, where they were greeted by
a fusillade of welcome. "We entered with English colors before us, and
were kindly received by their king, who invited us into his own house
and set our colors upon the top of it; then all the white men and
traders that were there came and welcomed us." This "king" was Old
Britain, or La Demoiselle. Great were the changes here since Celeron, a
year and a half before, had vainly enticed him to change his abode, and
dwell in the shadow of the fleur-de-lis. The town had grown to four
hundred families, or about two thousand souls; and the English traders
had built for themselves and their hosts a fort of pickets, strengthened
with logs.

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