A School History of the United States. John Bach McMaster
%FRENCH CLAIMS% MISSIONS AND TRADING POSTS IN
MISSISSIPPI VALLEY %in 1700%]
Leaving the party there in charge of Henri de Tonty to construct another ship, he with five companions went back to Canada. On his return he found that Fort Crèvecoeur was in ruins, and that Tonty and the few men who had been faithful were gone, he knew not where. In the hope of meeting them he pushed on down the Illinois to the Mississippi. To go on would have been easy, but he turned back to find Tonty, and passed the winter on the St. Joseph River.
From there in November, 1681, he once more set forth, crossed the lake to the place where Chicago now is, went up the Chicago River and over the portage to the Illinois, and early in February floated out on the Mississippi. It was, on that day, a surging torrent full of trees and floating ice; but the explorers kept on their way and came at last to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. There La Salle took formal possession of all the regions drained by the Mississippi, the Ohio, and their tributaries, claiming them in the name of France, and naming the country thus claimed "Louisiana." The iron will, the splendid courage, of La Salle had triumphed over every obstacle and made him one of the grandest characters in history.
But his work was far from ended. The valley he had explored, the territory he had added to France, must be occupied, and to occupy it two things were necessary: 1. A colony must be planted at the mouth of the Mississippi, to control its navigation and shut out the Spaniards. 2. A strong fort must be built on the Illinois, to overawe the Indians.
In order to overawe the Indians, La Salle now hurried back to the Illinois River, where, in December, 1682, near the present town of Ottawa, on the summit of a cliff now known as "Starved Rock," he built a stockade which he called Fort St. Louis. In 1684, while on a voyage from France to plant a colony on the Mississippi, he missed the mouth and brought up on the coast of Texas; and, landing on the sands of Matagorda Bay, the colonists built another Fort St. Louis. But death rapidly reduced their numbers, and, in their distress, they parted. Some remained at the fort and were killed by the Indians. Others, led by La Salle, started for the Illinois River and reached it; but without their leader, whom they had murdered on the way.
SUMMARY
1. After the settlement of Quebec (1608) the French began to explore the regions lying to the west, discovered the Great Lakes, and heard of a great river—the Mississippi.
2. This river Marquette and Joliet explored from the mouth of the Wisconsin to the mouth of the Arkansas (1673).
3. Then La Salle floated down the Mississippi from the Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, took formal possession of the valley in the name of his King, and called it Louisiana (1682).
[Illustration: Starved Rock]
CHAPTER VII
THE INDIANS
[Illustration: A typical Indian]
%57%. When Europeans first set foot on our shores, they found the country already inhabited, and, adopting the name given to the men of the New World by Columbus, they called these people "Indians."
They were not "Indians," or natives of Asia, but a race by themselves, which ages before the time of Columbus was spread over all North and South America.
Like their descendants in the West to-day, they had red or copper-colored skins, their eyes and long straight hair were jet black, their faces beardless, and their cheek bones high.
%58. The Villages.%—East of the Rocky Mountains the Indians lived in villages, often covering several acres in area, and surrounded by stockades of two and even three rows of posts. The stockade was pierced with loopholes, and provided with platforms on which were piles of stones for the defenders to hurl on the heads of their enemies. Sometimes the structures which formed the village were wigwams—rude structures made by driving poles into the ground in a circle, drawing their tops near together, and then covering them with bark or skins. Sometimes the dwellings had rudely framed sides and roofs covered with layers of elm bark. Usually these structures were fifteen or twenty feet wide by 100 feet long. At each end was a door. Along each side were ten or twelve stalls, in each of which lived a family, so that one house held twenty or more families. Down the middle at regular intervals were fire pits where the food was cooked, the smoke escaping through holes in the roof.[1]
[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's Conspiracy of Pontiac, Vol. I., pp. 17, 18.]
[Illustration: Buffalo-skin lodge]
%59. Clans and Tribes.%—All the families living in such a house traced descent from a common female ancestor, and formed a clan. Each clan had its own name—usually that of some animal, as the Wolf, the Bear, or the Turtle—its own sachem or civil magistrate, and its own war chiefs, and owned all the food and all the property, except weapons and ornaments, in common. A number of such clans made a tribe, which had one language and was governed by a council of the clan sachems.
[Illustration: Seneca long house]
%60. The Three Indian Races.%—With slight exceptions, the tribes living east of the Mississippi are divided, by those who have studied their languages, into three great groups:
1. The Muskhogees, who lived south of the Tennessee River and comprised the Creek, the Seminole, the Choctaw, and the Chickasaw tribes.
2. The Iroquoian group, which occupied the country from the Delaware and the Hudson to and beyond the St. Lawrence and Lakes Ontario and Erie, besides isolated tracts in North Carolina and Tennessee. The chief tribes were the Iroquois proper—forming a confederacy in central New York known as the Five Nations (Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks)—the Hurons, the Eries, the Cherokees, and the Tuscaroras.
[Illustration: Moccasin]
3. The Algonquian group, which occupied the rest of what is now the United States east of the Mississippi, besides the larger part of Canada. In this group were the Mohegans, Pequots, and Narragansetts of New England; the Delawares; the Powhatans of Virginia; the Shawnees of the Ohio valley, and many others living around the Great Lakes.
[Illustration: Flint Hatchet]
%61. Weapons and Implements and Clothing.%—All of these tribes had made some progress towards civilization. They used pottery and ornamental pipes of clay. They raised beans and squashes, pumpkins, tobacco, and maize, or Indian corn, which they ground to meal by rubbing between two stones. For hunting they had bows, arrows with stone heads, hatchets of flint, and spears. In summer they went almost naked. In winter they wore clothing made from the skins of fur-bearing animals and the hides of buffalo and deer. For navigating streams and rivers, lakes and bays, they constructed canoes of birch bark sewed together with thongs of deerskin and smeared at the joints with spruce-tree gum.
%62. Traits of Character.%—Living an outdoor life, and depending for daily food not so much on the maize they raised as on the fish they caught and the animals they killed, the Indians were most expert woodsmen. They were swift of foot, quick-witted, keen-sighted, and most patient of hunger, fatigue, and cold. White men were amazed at the rapidity with which the Indian followed the most obscure trail over the most difficult ground, at the perfection with which he imitated the bark of the wolf, the hoot of the owl, the call of the moose, and at the catlike tread with which he walked over beds of autumn leaves the side of the grazing deer.
[Illustration: Ornamental pipe]
[Illustration: Quiver, with bows and arrows]
Courage and fortitude he possessed in the highest degree. Yet with his bravery were associated all the vices, all the dark and crooked ways, which are the resort of the cowardly and the weak. He was treacherous, revengeful, and cruel beyond description. Much as he loved war (and war was his chief occupation), the fair and open fight had no charm for him. To his mind it was madness to take the scalp of an enemy at the risk