Minnesota. Folwell William Watts
the English. Two Jesuit fathers, Guinas and De Gonor, attached themselves to the expedition, and asked for a supply of astronomical instruments. In June, 1727, the expedition set out from Montreal and took the then main traveled road by way of Mackinaw and Green Bay. A letter of De Gonor, which has been preserved, gives an interesting account of the journey.
On September 17, 1727, at noon, La Perrière beached his canoes on a low point of land on the west shore of Lake Pepin, near the steamboat landing at Frontenac. Putting his men to work with axes, he had them all comfortably housed by the end of October. There were three log buildings, each 16 feet wide; one 30, a second 38, and the third 25 feet long. Surrounding them was a stockade of tree-trunks 12 feet out of ground, 100 feet square, “with two good bastions.” The fort was named “Beauharnois” after the governor-general of Canada. To the first mission on Minnesota soil the priests gave the title, “Mission of St. Michael the Archangel.” On November 4 the company celebrated the birthday of the governor, but were obliged by the state of the weather to postpone to the night of the 14th the crowning event of their programme. They then set off “some very fine rockets.” When the visiting Indians saw the stars falling from heaven, the women and children took to the woods, while the men begged for an end of such marvelous medicine. The Sioux were not disposed to be hospitable, and the good behavior of the Sacs and Foxes could not be counted on. In the following season La Perrière departed with the Jesuits and eight other Frenchmen for Montreal. The post was held, and occupied off and on for twenty years or more. No settlement was made about it, no permanent mission work was established, and no expedition towards the Pacific was undertaken. The Indians were unreliable, the French had other interests to attend to, and, contrary to expectation, game was scarce in the region.
One of the successors of La Perrière in command of Fort Beauharnois was Captain Legardeur Saint Pierre, the same officer who in 1753 at his post on French Creek, not far from Pittsburg, was waited on by young Mr. Washington, bearing Governor Dinwiddie’s invitation to the French to get out of Virginian territory.
Another French adventure, although of slight import to Minnesota, deserves mention. The Sieur de la Verendrye, commanding the French post on Lake Nipigon, fell in with the Jesuit Guinas, who went out with La Perrière in 1727, and was inflamed by him with a desire to find the western ocean. At his own post he had found an Indian, Ochaga by name, who sketched for him an almost continuous water route thither; another offered to be his guide. He hastened to Montreal, secured the assent of the governor-general, Beauharnois, and in 1731 dispatched his advance party. It reached the foot of Rainy Lake that year, and there built a fort on the Canadian side. The next year the expedition made its way to the southwest margin of the Lake of the Woods and there built Fort Charles, giving it the Christian name of the governor-general. Whether this fort was on Minnesota soil is undecided.
So ardent was Verendrye’s passion for the glory of discovering the way to the western sea that, encouraged by the Canadian authorities, he kept up the quest for more than ten years longer. On January 12, 1743, the Chevalier Verendrye, as related, climbed one of the foothills of the Shining or Rocky Mountains, and gave it over. Sixty years later Lewis and Clark passed that barrier and won their way to the Pacific.
CHAPTER II
THE ENGLISH DOMINION
If the French failed to establish any permanent settlement in Minnesota, it was not wholly because their passion for trade discouraged home-building and cultivation; they had interests elsewhere in America more important than those of the northwest. La Salle’s proclamation of 1682 asserted dominion of the whole region drained by the Mississippi and its tributaries. For a time the Ohio was regarded as the main river and the upper Mississippi as an affluent. Before the close of the seventeenth century both French and English were awake to the beauty and richness of the Ohio valley and the Illinois country. The building of a fort by Cadillac at Detroit in 1701 revealed the firm purpose of the French to maintain their claim of sovereignty. In the treaty of Utrecht, 1713, the English, with a long look ahead, secured the concession that the Iroquois were the “subjects” of England. In a series of negotiations culminating in a treaty at Lancaster, Pa., the Iroquois ceded to the English all their lands west of the Alleghanies and south of the great lakes. On this cession the English put the liberal construction that the Iroquois were owners of all territory over which they had extended their victorious forays, and these they had good right to convey. In 1748 the Ohio Company, formed in Virginia, sent Christopher Gist to explore the Ohio valley. The next year a governor of Canada sent an expedition down the Ohio to conciliate the Indians and to bury leaden plates at chosen points, asserting the dominion of France. A line of fortified posts was stretched by the French from Quebec to Fort Charles below St. Louis, on the Mississippi.
When in 1754 a French battalion drove off the party of English backwoodsmen who had begun the erection of a fort at the forks of the Ohio, and proceeded to build Fort Duquesne, the French and Indian War began. The course of this struggle, exceeding by far in point of magnitude the war of the Revolution, cannot here be followed. At the close of the campaign of 1757 the French seemed triumphant. In the year following they lost Fort Duquesne, in 1759 Quebec, and in 1760 Montreal. The power of the French in North America was broken. Historians of Canada still name the epoch that of “the Conquest.”
The diplomatic settlement of this contest awaited the outcome of a great war raging in Europe, the so-called Seven Years’ War of Frederick the Great against Austria, Russia, and France. England was early drawn into the support of the Prussian monarch, and supplied his military chest and sent an army to the continent. France presumptuously aspired to wrest the empire of the seas from Britain, with the result that her navies were sunk or battered to useless wrecks. In a separate treaty signed at Paris, February 10, 1763, France surrendered to England all her possessions and claims east of the Mississippi except the city of New Orleans and the island embracing it. The British government, however, was none too desirous to accept this cession. It was a matter of lively debate in the ministry whether it would not be the better policy to leave Canada to the French and strip her of her West Indian possessions. That course might have been adopted, but for the influence exerted by Benjamin Franklin’s famous “Canada Pamphlet,” which is still “interesting reading.” Franklin was in England while the question was pending, and published his views in answer to “Remarks” ascribed to Edmund Burke.
It may be well to note here that in the year preceding the treaty of Paris (1762) France had taken the precaution to assign to Spain, by a secret treaty, all her North American possessions west of the Mississippi, in order to put them out of the reach of England.
It was the 8th of September, 1760, when the capitulation of Montreal was signed, turning all Canada over to the British. Five days later Amherst, the victorious commander, dispatched Major Robert Hayes with two hundred rangers to take possession of the western posts. Expected opposition at Detroit was not offered, and that important strategic point was occupied on November 29. The season was then too late for further movements, and more than a year passed before garrisons were established at Mackinaw and Green Bay. The British were none too welcome among the savages, long accustomed to French dealings and alliances. But French influence was not what it had formerly been. During the long struggle for the mastery of the continent the Indian trade had languished, and in remoter regions the savages had reverted to their ancient ways and standards of living. The trade revived, however, under British rule, which brought peace and protection. In 1762 the British commandant gave a permit to a Frenchman named Pinchon to trade on the Minnesota River, then in Spanish territory. Four years later the old post on Pigeon River was revived and trade was reopened in northern Minnesota. Prairie du Chien became in the course of a decade a village of some three hundred families, mostly French half-breeds, and remained a supply station for the Indian trade of southern and central Minnesota till far into the nineteenth century.
The British authorities in Canada indulged no romantic passion to discover the south or western sea, and were indifferent for a time to the development and protection of trade in the northwest. This fact lends brilliance to the adventures of a single American born subject who in 1766 set out alone for the wilderness, resolved to cross the Rocky Mountains, descend to the western ocean, and cross the Straits of Anion to Cathay. Such was the bold enterprise of Jonathan Carver of Canterbury, Connecticut, at thirty-four years of age. He was not unlettered, for he had studied medicine; and he was not inexperienced,