Quaint and Historic Forts of North America. John Martin Hammond
Several of these guns were opened upon the town the next morning, “which,” wrote a soldier of New England in his diary, “damaged the houses and made the women cry.”
In this good-natured fashion did the whole siege progress. It is hardly possible to write about the informal procedure in an orderly fashion. Accomplishing incredible tasks in fashions opposed to all of the laws of warfare the New Englanders went on with only rudimentary observance of discipline under their merchant commander. While the cannon boomed in front the men behind the lines wrestled, and ran races, and fired at targets, though ammunition was short, and chased French cannon balls for exercise, bringing back the cannon balls to be used in the guns. Some of the men went fishing about two miles away. Now and then some of the fishermen lost their scalps to Indians who prowled about the camps of the besiegers.
At last the impossible happened. Discouraged by humiliating failures and badly, though not fatally, battered, mighty Louisburg surrendered. The strongest work of man in the New World had fallen to ignorant New England fishermen! The soldiers of France received the ridicule of the whole Old World and an effort was made from Versailles to recover the point lost, but unsuccessfully.
Louisburg was restored to the French Crown in 1748 by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. It was to fall again to English arms in the Seven Years War, which ended with the complete extinction of French power in the New World; but with the account of this siege, which was conducted painfully and formally in accord with the rules of war, we need have no concern. The great fortress was then destroyed block by block and Time has continued the work of demolition which the English began.
While Louisburg and Quebec were great eastern strongholds of the French in America, their centre of power in the far west was Fort Chartres on the Mississippi River, at the mouth of the Kaskaskia River, Illinois. Here they held gay sway over a wilderness empire that included many Indian tribes and extended over thousands of miles.
The first Fort Chartres was commenced in 1718 when Lieutenant Pierre Dugue de Boisbriant, a Canadian holding a French commission, accompanied by several officers and a large body of troops, arrived at Kaskaskia by boat from New Orleans. A site was selected about eighteen miles north of that little village and by the spring of 1720 the fort was substantially completed. It was a stockade of wood strengthened with earth between the palisades. Within the enclosure were the commandant’s house, a barracks, a store-house and a blacksmith shop, all constructed of hand-sawed lumber.
Almost immediately a village of Indians and traders sprang up around the place and the enterprising Jesuits built a church, St. Anne de Chartres, where many a service was recited for motley congregations of red and white. For thirty-six years this first Fort Chartres flourished and during this time was the setting for dramatic and pregnant happenings. Here, in 1720, came Phillippe Francois de Renault, bringing with him five hundred San Domingo negroes into the wilderness, thus introducing negro slavery into Illinois. In 1721 the post was visited by the famous Father Xavier de Charlevoix, in whose train was a young Canadian officer, Louis St. Ange de Belle Rive, who was destined afterward to be the commandant of the fort. Under the administration of the Sieur de Liette, 1725–1730, a captain in the Royal army, the French forces were engaged in armed pacification of the Fox Indians. Belle Rive succeeded de Liette and under his sway the post became the scene of social gayety.
In 1736 there left Fort Chartres a disastrous expedition against the Chickasaw Indians on the far distant Arkansas River. The result of this expedition was a defeat in which D’Artaguette, the leader, de Vincennes, for whom the little town of Vincennes, Indiana, is named, Father Senat, a Jesuit, and about fifteen other Frenchmen were taken prisoners and held for ransom. The ransom not arriving, the prisoners were roasted at a slow fire by their savage captors. A second expedition against the Chickasaws in 1739 was somewhat more successful.
By 1751 the fort was much out of repair and in this year there came to command it a French major of engineers (Irish by descent) Chevalier Macarty, who was accompanied by nearly a full regiment of grenadiers. In 1753 the second Fort Chartres, a solid structure of stone and one of the strongest fortifications ever erected on the American continent, was commenced by Macarty and his men. In 1756 it was finished. The site chosen was about a mile above the old fort and about half a mile back from the Mississippi River and would seem to have been a strange selection for such a structure, as it was low and marshy.
Of the first Fort Chartres not a sign remains to-day, and its exact site is a matter of disagreement. Of the second Fort Chartres the old powder magazine is to be seen. The fort itself has succumbed to the encroachments of the river, which cut away its bank even so far back as to undermine the walls of the fort itself and, in 1772, to cause the desertion of the structure by its garrison. The quarry from which the limestone of which the walls were constructed was obtained was located in the great bluffs four miles east of the point. The finer stone with which the arches and ornamental parts were faced came from beyond the Mississippi.
The fort covered altogether about four acres and was capable of sheltering a garrison of three hundred men. The expense of its erection was one million dollars, a sum of money only equalled in those days by the expenditure for the fortifications of Louisburg, Quebec, and Crown Point. It is generally believed that large profits went to the commandant and to others interested in its construction.
The command of the point in 1760 passed from Macarty to Nenon de Villiers, who led the French and Indians against Washington at Great Meadows in the skirmish which virtually was the opening engagement of the French and Indian War, a part of his force on this occasion being drawn from the garrison of Fort Chartres.
The veteran St. Ange de Belle Rive, stationed at Vincennes, took charge of the fort in 1764 and had the melancholy distinction of surrendering it to the English, October 10, 1765, when Captain Thomas Stirling came from Fort Pitt with one hundred Highlanders of the 42d British regiment—a fitting distinction when one remembers that St. Ange had been in command of the first fort shortly after its establishment, and when there was no rival to French power in all of the West.
A predecessor of Fort Chartres in making sure French dominion of the West was Fort St. Louis, on Starved Rock, on the Illinois River, about forty miles southwest of Chicago of to-day and not far distant from the present-day city of Ottawa, Illinois. Of Fort St. Louis there remains not a trace, but to its existence and to La Salle, its intrepid founder, there will for centuries be a natural monument—that great towering crag upon whose flat summit the stronghold was built.
A natural phenomenon of great geologic interest, Starved Rock rises directly from a level river plain. Its sides are as steep as castle wall and attain a height of one hundred feet and more. The river washes its western base and its summit overhangs the stream so that water can be drawn therefrom by means of a bucket and a cord. On three sides the pinnacle of the rock is inaccessible and the fourth side might be held by a handful of men against an army. The top of the cliff measures about two hundred feet in diameter and is flat.
On this ideal site, in 1682, the French built Fort St. Louis. In less than three months fourteen thousand Indians lay encamped on the plains of the river within sound of the guns of the fort. To-day the point is a pleasure park.
From Fort St. Louis many an exploring expedition pushed forth into the wilderness and here many a treaty was concluded with savage tribes. While frequently obliged to give up command temporarily Henry de Tonti, La Salle’s very faithful lieutenant, was supreme at Fort St. Louis practically from its foundation until its abandonment in 1702. In 1718 a number of French traders were making it their headquarters, but its military history ceased with Tonti’s departure.
A predecessor even of Fort St. Louis was Fort Crevecœur—Fort of the Broken Heart—which wore its poetic name for only a few months after its construction in 1680, by La Salle, on the east shore of the Illinois River, not far below Peoria Lake. Fort Crevecœur was destroyed by mutineers during the absence of its commander, Tonti, and was not rebuilt, Fort St. Louis succeeding to its mission. The exact site to-day is a matter of dispute.
Fort Crevecœur was the fourth in La Salle’s comprehensive scheme of a chain of fortifications to extend from Quebec, the centre of French power, up the St. Lawrence, through