Minnesota. Folwell William Watts

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СКАЧАТЬ Island, between Red Wing and Hastings. If this interpretation shall at length be confirmed, Groseilliers and Radisson were in Minnesota twenty-four years before Duluth. Subsequent passages of the narrative lend it some support.

      These able and enterprising characters deserve, however, not the least degree of credit as explorers. If they saw the Mississippi and in the later voyage penetrated beyond the Big Woods, they studiously concealed their knowledge. They left no maps, and for no assignable reason suppressed a discovery which would have given them a world-wide fame.

      When Cardinal Mazarin died, in 1661, Louis XIV, then twenty-two years of age, stepped on to the stage, “every inch a king.” He willingly listened to the suggestion of Colbert, his new minister, that it was time for France to follow English example and establish a colonial system for profit and glory. The Company of New France, promoted by Richelieu, which for nearly forty years had governed Canada, were quite content to surrender their franchises. In 1663 the colony was made a royal province. Associated with the governor a so-called “intendant of justice and finance” was provided in the new administration. The first incumbent was Jean Baptiste Talon, a man of brains, energy, and ambition. He was no sooner on the ground than he began to conceive great projects for extending the French dominion, expanding commerce, and fostering settlements. Colbert, although he sympathized, was obliged to restrain him and suggest that “the King would never depopulate France to people Canada.”

      Rumors were multiplying of great openings for trade and missions along and beyond the great lakes. Talon was keen to follow up and verify them. In 1665 the Jesuit father Claude Allouez established a mission at La Pointe on Chequamegon Bay. Upon an excursion to the head of the lake (Superior) he saw some of the Nadouessiouek (Sioux) Indians, dwellers toward the great River Mississippi, in a country of prairies. They gave him some “marsh rye,” as he called their wild rice.

      Four years later Father Jacques Marquette succeeded Allouez in that mission. He also heard stories of a great river flowing to a sea, on which canoes with wings might be seen. The Jesuit Relation of 1670-71 gives reports from Indians of a great river which “for more than three hundred leagues from its mouth is wider than the St. Lawrence at Quebec;” and people dwelling near its mouth “have houses on the water and cut down trees with large knives.” In the summer of 1669, Louis Joliet, whom Talon had sent to Lake Superior to search for copper, returned; and it was then, probably on his suggestion, that Talon resolved that it was time for the French to plant a military station at the Sault Sainte Marie, a point of notable strategic importance. He determined also to make an impression of French power on the Indians of the West. In the following year he dispatched Nicholas Perrot, of whom we are to hear later, to summon the Pottawattamies, the Winnebagoes, and other accessible nations to a grand convocation at the Sault Sainte Marie in the spring of 1671. To represent the government, Simon François Daumont, Sieur de St. Lusson, was commissioned and took his journey in October, 1670.

      On the 14th of June, 1671, the appointed day, the council was held. Fourteen Indian nations were represented. Among the French present were Joliet, Father Allouez, and Perrot. The central act was the proclamation by St. Lusson of King Louis’s dominion over “lakes Huron and Superior, … all countries, rivers, lakes and streams, contiguous and adjacent thereto, with those that have been discovered, and those which may be discovered hereafter, … bounded by the seas of the north, west, and south.” This modest claim covered perhaps nine tenths of North America. As usual, a big wooden cross was erected and blest. A metallic plate bearing the king’s arms was nailed up, and a “procès-verbal” drawn and signed. In that day such a proclamation gave title to barbarian lands until annulled in battle by land or sea. Father Allouez made a speech, which has been preserved, describing the power and glory of the French king in extravagant terms.

      Talon could not rest. He was on fire to unlock the secret of the great river and extend the French dominion to the unknown sea into which it might empty. In 1672, with the approval of Colbert, he planned an expedition to penetrate the region in which it was supposed to flow. Joliet was chosen to lead, and at the end of the year he was at Mackinaw. It was probably no accident that Père Marquette had just been transferred from La Pointe to that station. But the enthusiastic intendant was to close his Canadian career. In the very same year Count Frontenac, the greatest figure in Canadian history, came over to be governor. He was already past fifty, had seen many campaigns, and had wasted his fortune at court. He, too, had ideas, and an ambition to do great things for Canada and France. There was not room enough in the province for two such men as Talon and he. The intendant obtained his recall, and disappeared from the scene.

      Frontenac at once adopted Talon’s scheme, and gave Joliet leave to go. Accompanied by Marquette he struck the great river at Prairie du Chien, June 17, 1673, and then followed its flow far enough to satisfy himself that it ran to the Mexican gulf. Joliet’s great map has a truly modern aspect. The importance of this discovery of the Mississippi for the present purpose is, that it was by way of the great river that the French, with a notable exception, pushed their way into Minnesota.

      A company of Canadian merchants resolved to attempt an opening of trade about and beyond the head of Lake Superior, and selected as their agent Daniel Greyloson, the Sieur Duluth, a man of ability and enterprise. He evidently received some kind of public character from Frontenac, whose enemies insinuated that he was to be a sharer in profits. In the spring of 1679 Duluth penetrated to the shores of Mille Lacs, and in a great Sioux village which he understood to be called “Kathio,” on July 2 he planted the king’s arms and took possession in the royal name. Duluth, therefore, was the first white man in Minnesota not ashamed to report and record the fact. In the same season he retraced his steps to the head of the lake, and passed down the north shore to Pigeon River, which forms part of the Canadian boundary. There, on the left bank of that river, he built a trading post, on the site afterwards occupied by Fort William.

      The next dash into the territory of the North Star State was directed by one who has been called the most picturesque figure in American history, Réné Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle. At the age of twenty-three he broke away from the Jesuits with whom he was in training, and set sail for Canada with four hundred francs in his pocket, in the year 1663. When Frontenac came, nine years later, he found in young La Salle a man after his own heart, and sent him to France in 1674 to secure royal support for further explorations. Such support, then withheld, was vouchsafed four years later, when La Salle was again in Paris on the same errand. By a royal patent signed May 12, 1678, La Salle was authorized to extend the scope of Joliet’s exploration to the Gulf of Mexico and to pay his expenses by trade, provided he kept off the preserves of the Montreal traders.

      With the king’s patent in hand, it was easy to attract capital and enlist volunteers. Early in the fall of the same year, La Salle was back in Canada with his men and outfit, and soon set out for the west. After battling with a series of delays and discouragements which need not be narrated, the undaunted leader established himself in a fort built on the east bank of the Illinois River, near Peoria, Illinois, in the winter of 1680. There is no record that La Salle had been authorized to explore the upper Mississippi, but he was not the man to lose a good opportunity for lack of technical instructions. To lead an exploring party up that stream he chose Michael Accault, an experienced voyageur, “prudent, brave, and cool,” and gave him two associates: Antoine Auguelle, called the Picard du Gay, was one; the other was the now famous Father Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan friar of the Recollet branch, who came over in the same ship with La Salle in 1678. He had wandered in many lands, knew some Indian dialects, and shared La Salle’s passion for adventure.

      In a bark canoe laden with their arms, personal belongings, and some packs of merchandise which served for money between whites and Indians, the little party set out, after priestly benediction, on February 28, 1680. They dropped down the Illinois to its mouth, and took their toilsome way against the current of the Mississippi. On April 11, when near the southern line of Minnesota, they encountered a fleet of thirty-three canoes carrying a war-party intent on mischief to certain Illinois tribes. The savages frightened but did not harm the Frenchmen. Accault was able to inform them that the Illinois Indians had crossed the river to hunt. They therefore СКАЧАТЬ